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 (nobody)...and 55 guests Last 5 registered Oplandisks nothingstar N_loop yipe foxtrotromeo Browse members... |
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lol |
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is everything alright there mate? |
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i'm figuring a bold, italic lol for page eight then you can fade back in on page nine with a italic lol. |
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anyways, yes, this is just me swapping to disk. read it or not, as usual. really, i think you lot would be thrilled, as this is draining all my righting juice like a wrightning wod and i'm not spamming up anything but my own ramble thread. i am dealing with things in my life that need to be handled and that's been sucking down so much of my energy that the writing backlog has continued and i've left the infrastructure alone until i can clear life stuff out. my mistake was going to sleep instead of writing the new weasel scripting immediately; now i must juggle more adamently |
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you seriously think someone is reading? |
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the idea that someone is reading is sort of like one of the different tips you can put on those baker blasters that squirt frosting in patterns. it's useful dexterious practice and so i've been keeping it up. the idea that someone is actually reading is a different thing entirely. |
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notions are really an old thing i've always done; something many people probably do. now it has a proper name to make it vague in a more targeted manner, and it has consequently become more targeted. notions typically occur A) out of the blue, or B) when i'm arguing with myself. B) is more interesting, because i've started get nuanced answers, sometimes. i got: (don't) do it to something i was arguing with myself about doing or not. a distinct sense of the don't being in parenthesees. quieter than the latter half. my subconscious mind noticing me circing an argument and screaming out a summed-up average through a lens i am capable of understanding. having it be a floating point instead of a boolean makes the book-keeping more complicated, but it's for the best of reasons and i'm going to allow it |
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i got to thinking about minecraft today. it speaks to the primal layers of the mind, i think. starting off in the jungle, building a crude shelter, getting enough infrastructure going that you start to range. then you start to explore and make routes up in your mind; they become automatic and you forget about them. eventually entire routes are subsumed by your expanding infrastructure; some diamond furnace in the basement you built from internet plans six months ago and when a creeper detonates you can't remember how to fix it. at this point, you have completed the full stage act of a primitive man gradually becoming conscious, having begun to lose track of the automatic structures you've built to allow you to expand and range further. auto-bread machines and levi jeans. snapchat, requires gold, sapphire (for screen), and red flakes for circuits |
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then i stopped thinking about minecraft, because i was starting to have to pee. i'm in a park i know well and obviously this gets quite strategic. notions have begun using GPS weasel like a puppet at times. sometimes i'll get sass when planning my route, but it's selective and generally correct. the non-linear feedback potential between notions and weasels is perplexing and promising and worrying |
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i think practice is essential to anything. praxis, from deus ex. makes perfect. to be the sort of person who can catch a penny rolling off the edge of the counter when the cashier drops it, well, you need a lot of general experience coordinating the timing and movement of your hand, arm, back and so on. there is a feedback loop: where is my arm? move these muscles. where is my arm now? move these muscles... it needs real-world action to be tuned and precise. you'll move where you intend to move more easily, and eventually begin re-shaping how you intend to move as well. calibration, then inverse kinematics. years ago i tried some guided blamstrain meditation thing: relax your finger, then your next finger. walking through all the body parts. breaking my concentration when it's all "right buttock" and i think about sampling it later. but, anyways, simmering every part down, one by one. later i thought: oh, a systems check / calibration. there's a lot more in there than that, but the metaphor works well enough |
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so you know how is all: doont. dant. dadoont dahnanana and there's that watery noise snare at dahanana? last night it was rainy, and i was driving to this, and suddenly i tuned into some outside noise: what is that? well, i'm hitting a small river crossing the road every time that watery snare hits, it seems, and i have no idea how this happened, but i like it it continues and i'm thinking: this road is new, and curious, really. they have the usual drunk bumps on the double line, but also sparse blue warning bumps in the middle of the lane, reminding to keep in their lane, left tires in locked groove, to the road. it also has slices cut into it; a track of lines that cut shortest path in between the curves but not quite; go open circuit a bit. i could never figure those out, but now i know what they are for: drainage. some humans laser scanned the hill and then a man and a computer sat down and came up with something that would puzzle me for many a late night drive |
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algorithmically designing a track so the rhythms fit the computer-generated road structures when the algorithm is run in the wild. elbowrhythmic patchwerk |
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when i play back memories in my head, the processes is akin to being so adept at making macaroni-glue art that i have become able to create smoothly-moving stop-motion movies in my mind with macaroni metaphors. my inner macaroni artist watches what my subconscious is able to do with subliminal macaroni and then works very hard to memorize which macaronis are used, and how hard. then whenever i remember something, i make a macaroni picture of the macaroni picture i made of what my previous macaroni pictures have flown intogeter toecreate. it's comforting to know that i perceive through my senses (a step removed from everything) and that before i can make sense of my senses, their output has to be transformed into macaroni, computer cole's law, metaphors, weasels, and helium. then i'm seeing it filtered through aldous's heuristic spam filter... and, finally, when i play it back in memory later.... i'm seeing all of the previous paragraph being paraphrased in macaroni, and i realize i should move away from video camera metaphors. my mind can be camera-like, but it's not raw video. anything i can consciouslly access from the recording has been translated through a zillion layers of |
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anyways, i'm terribly behind on all the things, because i spend so much time exercising. i feel doomed, but also sharp. sharp as a tack. i'm triple-noting this in my brain so i keep it up when things explode tomorrow or this weekend or whatever. because they will. like a tack |
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a buffer is important in driving. the amount of space you leave in between yourself and the next car. enough time to react, but not so much other cars whip in and cut you off. balancing those two on the highway at rush hour is a pretty advanced thing, really, involving lots of experience in what you're gonna get coming and when. reading the twitches of other cars and watching through the windshield of the car ahead of you. then, yes, here's music, and i'm eyeing the slow car. i'm dropping off to build a huge buffer because i want to let the car magnificently coast down this ginourmous hill. the end of it slopes up and slows you down perfectly for a curve; do it right and you're easily three quarters of a mile without pressing a pedal. so yes, use the music to time the size of the gap you need and when to let the car begin doing the solar sail thing until you hit approximately 20% of the speed of light |
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bikes were giving me grief on the hiking trails today. it's mostly my fault for going when i knew the park would be busy, but they did a lot to make it worse. i listen/watch for bikes and get out of their way. no problem. but when you take five minutes to huff up behind me, slowly creeping, forcing me to watch you instead of where i am stepping, i begin to get rather annoyed. then when you finally pass me, and you conk out at a trail marker and rest until i'm a thousand feet ahead, and do the same shit over again, i begin to get really annoyed. then you're also yelling at your other bike buddies and so when i hear an aaaughdammit i don't bother to suppress the audible guffaw rushing to escape my gut. then i'm walking very fast, faster than you can bike. you conk out again. debate with bike buddy about a hill i have nicknamed The Heart Attack. you loudly and masculinely debate that it might be fun to "bonk" down that shit, yo. then i'm no longer annoyed. i am full of giggling rabbits. i take off down the hill as your geezer biker butts are arguing about the hill in the rhythm of a horse galloping, roughly 180bpm. my sunglasses want to fly off, so i take them in my hand to defuse the issue. if they'd tried to chase me, i'm sure they would have lost. so, yes, i have no problem with bikes, but if they become a pain in the ass, i can always outwalk them |
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stirring up synchronicities is definitely where the art meets the science. doing everyday things like pressing the microwave buttons in time, walking across the room in time, opening the microwave in time, all day. because i love doing it, really. but then come the moments: i'm doing all that and i'm on a roll. everything's syncing up on my end, my movements and microwaving the bag of meat i dumped onto a grease-proof paper plate (or, well, three, because they're not that grease-proof). i'm riffing on other people slamming doors and chatting along with all this. not with any intent; i've learned that can get out of hand quickly. just casually, like the microwave. boom, microwave door. boom, neighbor door. boom, some guy goes JDKdfdFD really loud to his buddy in the hall. boom, i lay a colossal, resonant fart in the perfectly placed void between their exchange. boom, silence. boom, microwave beeps. lunch is ready |
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i guess if i had to TLDR this whole mess of a thread, i'd say: rhythm is a strange machine that will reliably deliver a stream of charming absurdity to your life if you treat it right |
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at times i feel like the pied piper. i don't even like pies. i like acceleration. those bursts of acceleration that drag the blood to the back of the brain, as hunter s. thompson said. in the groove, mashed back into my seat, my analysis machinery kicked in a day or two ago and said: parts of you feel like you're cumming. the blood in the back of your skull; that's a real thing. how are you breathing? how can you take a bit of this home, like a doggie bag from the chinese joint? but then the moment was over. i'll have to wait for another one to look at how i'm breathing. first time i caught it all, it was gone by the time i tuned into my breathing layer. all sorts of things happen to me when i'm feeling the music and flooring it, with crying being the most common. also yelling, essentially what passes for a yee-haw from someone who definitely isn't a good-old boy it is very cathartic and cleansing. studying why is rewarding. |
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"emotion" is a complex thing, but i think it makes intuitive sense to say that some people are "more emotional" than others. on top of that you have "emotional control." old men that used to be loud and angry young men can remain precisely the same inside and simply get very good at keeping it to themselves instead of acting out. i am an extremely emotional person. when i get mad, i get really mad, and so it became very important for me to learn how to not get mad, and how to handle it when i fail and get mad. i have also endured anguish that borders on physical pain and had me punching myself in the head after four weeks. thinking about drinking bleach. i don't want to die, i just can't take the pain. i lay down and had a serious think about it. all the reasons, do it or don't. well, it'd really hurt, but i was hurting worse. then on to the usual, friends and family i'd hurt along with myself. that didn't move me too much. part of why i was in such a pit at the time was terrible messed-up shit in my family. then i thought of one of my art projects. it could have been the SK-1, or some bit of cardboard. what i'd come to recognize as the notion-layer said to me: if you die, none of that will get done. it is yours, and no one else can finish it. that annoyed the ever-loving piss out of me. i decided that, well, fuck it, if i'm going down i may as well finish a few. i got out of bed and began to work on whatever it was. i was still a mess, but that was when i began to get better on a fundamental level. that pit is always there, like booze, but i've learned ways around it, because it ate me down until nothing was left but a deep and strong desire to create. |
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so i'm off for a drive after that heavy stuff, and it's eating at me: i've covered this before. i could just be confusing it with a time i've told a friend about it, but no, darn it, did i cover that on xlt? in my own thread already? this is the point where having my conscious monologue cached to disk would work a lot better if i'd repaired that index mechanism the moment the whim hit me. but, no, i wussed out and now it's starting to be a mess. like my own mind. like all the stuff i have in backlog. like . i don't want to try and go create a . also deeply cutting through my life is this one about the nature of "randomness": In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. randomness is in the eye of the beholder. there is really no such thing as randomness; it is a concept we have invented, just like the number three. you can find three of something in nature, but that's not the same thing as an abstract symbol that represents access to a complex set of metaphors known as counting. trying to "randomly" wire the neural net does not mean it has no preconceptions about how to play, it simply means that you don't know what those preconceptions are. |
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out for a drive, i had on totems flare, and growl's garden really got to me at 65mph. slow down to stop for a light, gun it at the banger end as clark signs his tracks, and i'm sobbing. it's a very sad song, really. part of the driving is escaping the pressure, freedom, and all, but the catharsis is something deeper. stuff gets to me, it really does. music has always felt like a sort of pressure-release valve. nine inch nails got me through high school. it's only now that i'm really questioning that and studying it, though. i feel like it's very important to go out at 4am when i have the highway to myself and truly let go for a bit. all the horrible stuff bothering me, cry it out. i have to credit mushrooms with this, at the root. dredging through my own past and finding buried pain and trauma. crying for what seemed like hours. then the notion-layer said: alright, enough being sad, time to be happy. and then i cried just as hard because i was happy. it was a firehose approach, though, and in daily life it's best to mete this out in a deliberate fashion. it is, quite simply, like taking a shit. after crying all the terrible things, i feel like i've just taken a huge dump. lighter. i can gen on with life. i regularly experience moments of joy that some people probably only hit upon when their first child is born, but the price for that is moments of pain that are just as sharp. like weeds in the garden, i always have to keep pulling them out. then rainbow voodoo came on and i was crying because i was happy, and also yelling. i won't describe my driving on the advice of legal weasel. then i pulled into a gas station and got myself together so i wouldn't be a sobbing wreck when i went in to buy cigarettes. |
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the explosion timer is getting pretty bad. counting down to single digits. i really gotta defuse dat bomb. finish some of my general life backlog before it eats me alive. it dawned on me that reading all through this in a linear manner to make the index will make a fine bootstrap mechanism for me to resume this later. i can let this spiral go and have a thread to tug it back into action later. i haven't ever written myself a path back into any of these streaks, and i really hope it works, because that could be a massively effective mechanism. so, i'm going to trust in that, for the sake of science as well as my own behind. gonna sign off for a bit and muddle through a bit shit |
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i suppose there is something in confessing my sins. there's something very catholic about the brutal-but-honest moral inventory. my mum had a catholic high school in the bronx and everything i've heard told me the nuns there were complete dicks. my father had a mum who thought boys should go to church as a social development thing and a father who had nothing but contempt for churches. so my grandparents compromised: grandpa shopped around, toured all the town parishes, and picked the one he found most tolerable. that was where my dad was dragged. when my sister and i were... i dunno, ten and eight? my father said: church is there if you want it. it's entirely your decision, though. i said no thanks; my sister stuck with it through confirmation. my parents reliably drove her there like soccer practice but did little to interfere with her autonomy. some parents are terrible; mine weren't. just have their issues along with everyone else. but there was a certain level of respect for the decisions of a budding mind that i am eternally grateful for. today i fucked up. it happens; i'm human. i was going to make a left out of a lot and i was fussing with the food i'd just bought and wasn't looking thoroughly. caused some poor chap to jam on the brakes, hard. felt terrible about it. he tailgated me for miles. followed me after numerous turns down sidestreets. he has my sympathy. it was entirely my fault. normally i'd get angry with that sort of behavior, but i feel like i might have done the same in his shoes. the only thing is i know it didn't make him feel any better. never makes me feel any better... but, hey, i fucked up. god bless. that was a "dick move" on my part and i have the utmost respect for your anger, mang. |
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i always felt there was something about catholicism, in the stopped-clock-tells-the-right-time-twice-a-day sense. the padre in the privacy booth. privacy wasn't even a thing when that started. relieve yourself, like taking a dump. i don't like putting a priest in charge of that, but there's something about the whole system that makes intuitive sense to me. |
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you want a real trip? epigentic psychology. how patterns of human behavior can ripple backwards through a family tree like the frozen progress of a state machine. patterns that alternate back and forth between generations. other patterns that move in a three-waltz and skip a generation. how your mum's reaction to her dad causes her to unconcsiously fight certain patterns in herself and unintentionally pass them along to you vicariously. genetics is massively important. it's the hardware you're built on. but software layer; the lamarckian clusterfuck. i went through a phase in my pre-teens where i would compulsively yank out my eyelashes and touch them to the top of my upper lip. the skin there is super-sensitive; building circuits years later i'd use the same spot to see if the op-amps on the filter i'd just built were getting too hot (miswired). the end of my eyelash folicule felt cool and pleasant. deeply. i knew it was bad news and the reason i quit is because i recognized the value of eyelashes; my parents prodding had nothing to do with it. i stopped because it was a bad habit, and i knew it. years later, i caught my father in his office doing the exact same thing. he'd lifted it off me. my father does this thing with the cartilidge in his ear that makes a crisp snapping noise. i remember pressing him: how do you do that? show me. c'mon. c'mon his response: no, i'm not going to tell you. because you won't be able to stop. genetics plus learned patterns. |
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it is the worst part of fate, really. i've had a good relationship with my sister past the pre-teen bickering, but as of late i've spotted her sporting some of my mom's worst habits. trying to point it out to her is just as tough as it would be trying to point that sort of shit out to myself; fuck off etc. goddamit. i've spent years brutally tearing myself down, seeking out patterns -- epigenetic and genetic alike -- becoming aware and taking control. but, you can't foist that on someone else. all i can do is be gentle about it and wait for her to come around on this or that. patience is one of my weakest aspects |
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my father was in san francisco in 1967. right at the crux of it all. he visited ken kesey's ranch before it got shut down. people would kill to have lived in that place at that time! i must confess, though, i'm annoyed at him: i feel like he doesn't appreciate what he's had. he told me how he'd seen how the kesey gang had "painted the trees psychedelic" and the whole tone of his dialog was as if he were speaking of syd barrett. he is of the opinion that ken kesey was a great writer until he got deep into psychedelics. he did acid a few times and then he got a tablet that was meth or something very un-lysergic. a seriously bad trip, whatever it was, and he quit drugs forever. at that point, his life as an adventurer was over and he was overcome with the burning urge to have some kids. he's told me this, in so many words. it is both depressing and inspiring at once: he pushed it as far as he was able, then he tapped out and decided to spawn some crazy nutters to take it a bit further. |
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that metaphor that was nagging at my consciousness? it's a multi-part thing. three or six things at once. that's why good metaphors nag at you: it feels more significant than any individual reason you can rationalize out, and that's because it's multiple things at once. obviously, ken kesey's magic school bus is one part of it. next, when i was about four, in pre-school, i spontaneously decided that the whole class of kids and their minders really, really needed to go outside and paint on the windows with soapy water. somehow i managed to sort out an unorthodox, unplanned recess. i got everyone in the place outdoors and painting on the windows with soap. not bad for someone that age. more than that, pretty strongly weird. it was a massive success. everyone had a great time. then the arch-matriarch of the joint (who was familiar with my nonsense already) took me aside after it was over: now you have to clean the windows. i was four. i threw a shitfit: "everyone else helped make the mess!" i shot off. again, pretty solid logic for four, but she had me cornered. she said: "but it was your idea." and so we have the next meaning: i have a lot of wonderful things in me, leadership sort of things, but it will never live up to its potential without a lot of brutal work that falls on my shoulders alone. everyone else just gets to enjoy it, but i really have to work. the full analogy was: "saying i am broken is like saying a school bus is broken because it doesn't work underwater." then i remembered how my parents took me to a gypsy for a reading (for the lulz) when i was six months old. she said i'd be "part fish, and all-american boy." well, there's the underwater thing again. i'm also an exceptionally strong swimmer. |
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this is one of those things i've wrote fragments of all-over like but now i'll gather them more properly. summer 2009, i procured an illegal early leak of totems flare off of this chap we'll call "the internet." i've largely hung up on water pipes these days, but i was listening to that album after quite a few bubbles and i was really loving it. i wrote to clark on myspace: "oh, gosh, i love this... yeah, it's an early leak, sorry, and, uhhh, what are the lyrics to rainbow voodoo?" like the button on my AC unit says, "constant fan." cough. he kindly replied; typed up the lyrics for me. i asked if i could post them on watmm, and he replied, "oh, go on then :)" i'm sure i'd heard the phrase before but it was the first i'd really noticed it. then i noticed it again in sean of the dead, at the end, when he's going out to be sean in the shed. his girl says it. i got what clark meant from the context he used the expression in, but only when i heard it in that movie a month or three later did i really get the flavor of it. there's a lot of reasons i remember that day. i was driving up to see my boyfriend -- named daniel -- whom i hadn't seen for a couple weeks, and i was stoked. my car at the time had a beefy stereo with shitty speakers and broken AC. highway driving in the summer meant i could have breathable air or music that wasn't a clippy, distorted mess, but not both. totems flare sounded fantastic through that clipping. clark gets so much shit for that sound, but there, take that. it's the only thing my old honda could handle on the highway in the summer. related: i switched on an EQ preset "bass boost" in my phone's media settings, and it has changed my life. it turns lights seen in the rear-view mirror into buzzing form constants, like you get with powder on a speaker cone at tuned frequencies. it also noticibly ruins clark albums. part of why the album gets me so worked up is all this attached to it. |
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i just had the most amazing experience. i had on the backstreet boys track i've . it's a good singing track, and i started to sing to it. i was really getting into it, so i put on El Camino by The Black Keys next. El Camino is a great singing album, suited to my range, etc. the choruses are universally easy to sing while the verses are really difficult. this has always fascinated me; it's clearly deliberate on some level. tonight, though, i was nailing the verses. when i slipped out of the groove, it was usually because i was too busy saying to myself: holy crap, did that just come out of me? that sort of mama cass wall-shaking kind of singing that i've never quite managed like i did tonight. i always skip tracks on El Camino. lonely boy, wow, wat? just letting it go along. gold on the ceiling, experimenting with, uh, falsetto, i think it's called? quiet vs. loud singing, with the quiet falsetto being much easier to hit the high notes with. little black submarine, mama cass comes out of me and i am gobsmacked. i let a few songs i don't like singing pass by to give my voice a rest and then skip to Stop Stop. it's the toughest of the bunch for me. out of my range at points. i'm tuning around to the balls of resonant vibration inside me for various frequencies and i figure this is what people mean when they refer to feeling like they're outside of themselves when they sing. looking at the body like it's an image on a screen and tuning it to different resonances. tuning... which, by the way, felt a lot like tuning an oscillator. i'm not practiced at it enough to jump across the scale and land on the right rock in the pond. |
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singing is like piano, to me. i lash out and hit the keys and it's about where i want, but vague. like i have oven mitts on. gradually, i moved up to winter gloves and then thin leather gloves... wham, mash, and now it's more or less where i want instead of just in the neighborhood. i give up on Stop Stop and skip back to Gold on the Ceiling, and start fussing with vibrato -- another thing that, well, i know what i want, i just had trouble singing it. skip back to Lonely Boy and i more or less have it down. yeah, ok, vibrato, a song and a half, there. i interrupt myself with giggles after spontaneously doing a paul-macca-does-little-richard "woo!" i try to do it again deliberately, but, no, i think it just has to come out on its own. so much of it felt like it was coming out on its own, and that trying to fuss with the low-level guts of it actually sent it off the rails. keep a focus on what's coming out of yourself rather than how you're making it. adjusting my pitch when i landed wrong, i felt that sense of parallelism i've felt with driving. previously, adjusting my pitch would yank me out of the rhythmic groove, and by the time i was on key, i was off time with the track. now i seem to be able to do both at once. |
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After Gold on the Ceilings got me onto vibrato, Little Black Submarines drifted by, and then on Stop Stop for the second time, i found myself playing with beat frequencies between my own voice and the guy singing. never in my life have i been able to do that, and it felt very casual and natural. just like tuning an oscillator on a synth. not thinking about how to execute things, just thinking about what i want to execute. this is that i'm after. i started singing and completely expected what i used to get: enthusiastic but cringe-worthy. the spirit is there but i'm best locked away so noone can hear. instead i felt precision, agility, and a sense of broad focus on the big picture rather than getting lost in all the mechanisms. dancing, doing everything in time to a beat. it's soaked into my breathing on some levels, and i found it uncannily natural to twist and contort things inside myself. i've been studying breathing, too. i have a relationship with lots of muscles down there i didn't really know, previously. between deep breathing and hours of hiking/dancing, i have lung capacity i've never had before. more exciting is lung... well, dexterity? fine-grained, quick 'n' responsive control of everything. deeply tearing into mental automation, re-factoring my own mental structures. fixing things simply because they seem to need fixing. then out of nowhere, i can really, really sing. i cried about it. so lovely. so much makes sense that i never saw before: i could feel my voice warm up just like my muscles do after fifteen minutes of hiking. i spotted loads of bad habits and potential fixes. the whole thing bootstrapped and dialed itself in, after a mere forty-five minutes. i have a long way to go on jumping around the scale rather than moving in thirds, but 45 minutes a day should have me better on that in... i dunno, a week or three. yep, feeling smug tonight |
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also noteworthy: i smoked a cigarette or two, but i was otherwise sober. i can't even say "oh, it's because i was stoned," because i wasn't. it was all me |
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oh, yes, on the mama cass / gobsmacked tip -- i meant to mention a word i mentioned for some reason: cobfounded. it's a portmantaeux of gobsmacked and confounded. i have been cobfounding myself a hell of a lot, recently |
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feeling far less smug today. i'm behind on work, behind on sending invoices for work, bad at juggling my expenses, and now it has very real potential to cascade and i may have to couch surf or sleep in my car unless bank transfers happen faster than they usually do. and it is no one's fault but mine. fuck. at least i can sing |
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i fell into the pit again for a few hours, yesterday. so weighed down by all the crap going on that i was lying in bed like a blob creature. i dragged myself out for exercise and such despite being in a foul mood, and if i hadn't it would have been far worse. it's the end of the month and i botched multiple deadlines involving moving money around and i was in shit creek. before i continue, i'll note it's gone 180 today, and i've more or less put out all the fires. getting to that is what's interesting. anyways, i've spent a lot of time depressed. mostly in high school, a bit in college, a real bad stretch after that, the next five years were wonderful. 2013-14 it was real bad because my wonderful life imploded and i was completely unprepared. i spent a lot of time in bed dredging through everything mercilessly. i have always felt there's a functional aspect to depression. you are willing to tear through all sorts of things you deeply believe and set them on fire, and if something is holding you back, this can eliminate it. the first negative is obvious: it sucks balls. it's absolute shit. the secong negative only becomes apparent after it's too late: you are equally likely to set fire to all sorts of wonderful things in addition to roadblocks. in a word, it leads to self-destructive behavior. self-destructive behavior can spiral and make the whole thing worse. my moment was, i believe, early 2014. it was before i even had to sell all my gear off, and i'm really glad, because i might not have made it without that. that forms the lowest level of my reaction to depression: that point comes back to me, and i say: this day sucks, but future ones will not. this does not get me out of bed, but it keeps things from getting properly dark. |
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the second layer of reaction is to get up. get out of bed. get moving. i know from experience that getting myself moving (instead of stewing) is the hardest and most important step to getting out of the pit. it's been a while since i've had the trouble with that, that i did yesterday. once you're in there a bit, past trauma begins to bubble up. i really miss my synths. they were like pets to me. i love my laptop like most people love a dog. a sort of genuine fondness that can even go oxytocin release. the synths were so much deeper. focused in a way a computer isn't, and very strong personalities. it was worse than putting a dog down. it was like i was one of those people with 47 cats and the house is a warzone of feline wreckage and the county comes and takes them all away. i was not taking care of shit properly... it was 47 cats bad, but it was bad. this does not mean the trauma of losing my pets was any less real. i've been through this with myself before: it's over. it sucks, but if you work hard, you can buy a few back eventually. don't dwell on it, because that won't get them back. get up, because working on your life might. but then i've messed a bunch of stuff in my life up, and i feel crushed by the weight of untangling the mess i've made for myself. at this point, i try bribery. i write a few little things in my head to post to twitter. i was at the gas station and the song on the megacom sang: "all my exes live in texas; and that's why i hang my hat in tennessee." solid giggle before i went back to feeling sour. so i'm hacking the lyrics in my mind, in bed, and this is the only bit of respite i've had all day: "all my execess lives in taxes?" no, that's too confusing. "all my excess is taxed in texas." yes, there we are. "and that's why i hang my headquarters in the irish sea." but after i'd tuned up the lyricism i didn't feel like getting up to post it. i am going to go do that now. |
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the fundamental block i laid myself up with is that the money will not get to the thing in time and the thing will be overdrawn, and this means fees, and this is almost as terrible as bees. a bee got in my car today, and i got out very fast. it's a good thing bees can't drive, or i might have been yellowjacked. i suspect they get particularly agressive in late summer because they know they're going to die soon and they're pretty pissed about it. that, or the food sources are so picked over that a hamburger is as tempting as a glass of lemonaide. anyways, the fees were bad enough, but with the end of the month, i have loads more coming. this could mean more overdraft fees, and also late fees. worst of all, when the place i'm staying bills me... well, if that bounces, fuck. this is the end of the world and that's where it went into bullshit. it is not the end of the world. hell, it's not even like you don't have the money. it's just huge fucking mess and it will be over once you deal with it. fuck the fucking fees. then i went out and got cigarettes and gas. if you leave the gas out of it, that was a $45 pack of cigarettes. i knew this clear as a bell as i bought them, because, well, fuck it. sometimes you have to burn perfectly good money on the Altar of Chaos. i am working on my internal issues very diligently and this bit of my life has gone to shit meanwhile. the consequences are real ($200 in fees sounds about right at the end of this) but i already have the infrastructure in place to make them little more than a bump in the highway. this turned the fees from bees into minutae, and with the emotional pressure gone, well, i could get back to dealing with the mess. i'm still waiting for the gears to churn and see how much i've lost on botching it, but it's more of a casual people-watching vibe as opposed to tensing up like i'm about to be in a trainwreck. |
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re: ~ superstition-class lucky lighter was running low on fluid again, today. as discussed, the policy was to purchase a new, identicial lucky lighter, ideally from the same store -- or the closest i could get without driving all over town. reasonable attitude for the sake of resource management. i bought a new, identical lighter at the same store, but forgot to toss the old one on the way out. i was going for a hike next, and i thought, oh: i can bury it in the woods! that seems appropriate; it's something a daft magick ritual would have you very seriously do anyways. the core of it is to put some conscious groundwork in, and that's what makes the machine work. i'm walking onto the trail and i decide: no, that's too complex. it will wear me down doing it every time. besides, it has fluid in it, and i don't want to leave it in a park full of burninatable things. i decide i'll just throw it out in the trash can after my hike, and it can come along for a nice little outing before being put out to pasture. then i forgot about it for the rest of the hike, rambling to myself in my head about rhythm and breathing (next post). until i was in the exact same spot i was in when i decided to throw it out in the trash -- then, it came out of hiding and tore into my path like a rabbit. i threw it in the trash can. |
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walking, i realized i was doing an 2-bar loop. one, two, three, four. one, two, three, four. inhale and exhale roughly with the bars. studying breathing, i've had trouble not interfering. i always do. i start to feel my heart thumping and i'm aware of whether i start the inhale on the a heart contraction or a heart release. at this point, i have trouble not paying attention to it, and i can actually feel my heart skip a beat. like, no, wrong. clearly. but then i'm stressing that i did it wrong and i do it again. i remembered the first time i had my heart skip a beat (and i noticed). i was lying in bed, unable to sleep, and heard my heart pulsing in my ear. then it skipped a beat. i didn't like it. it freaked me out. then it did it again. doctors eventually told me i had inherited cardiac arrhythmia, the PVC variant. today, i am actually pretty sure my arrhythmia -- largely gone since i got in shape -- is a software problem. i caused it myself by breathing improperly without understanding that was the root of it, and it took hold as a feedback loop that doctors later diagnosed as a physical ailment. perhaps it is, perhaps it's not. anyways, when i'm hiking, i can ignore my heart and look at breathing with less distraction. my feet are going in rhythm. one, two, three, four. i realize, this is my way in: counting with the beat. it's so deep in my brain from music. it's very easy to focus on it, and not get myself distracted. my feet do it naturally. aaron funk described his obsession with counting. also how he can enjoy 4/4 music, but -- for some reason -- has trouble writing it himself. well, my answer is that rhythm is crucial to having the trains of thought stay on the rails, and that's he likes to count. i didn't do that, but i had other similar foibles as a child. so has just about everyone i've ever dated, by the way. |
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with enough hiking, and my feet to distract me from my heart rate, i can glue a deeply-implemented structure -- counting a two-bar loop -- into breathing. eventually i will breathe in sync with the loop and it will be as natural as walking with it already is. then i can lie down in bed and count as i breathe and this will allow me to observe heart rate effects without losing my marbles and breathing incorrectly. i should note it's not exactly one bar in, one bar out. it feels a bit lopsided. i'll need more hiking to sort out how far, but i'm of prodigy's track "one love (edit)" off music for the jilted generation. circa 2008, i smoked some herb after abstaining for a good few weeks and i had one of the few moments of spontaneous, primal synaesthesia that i've had: i saw the aaayaaa loop as a loop with a gradient of red to blue and back. tilted offside, like a lissajous pattern. i realized: that's breathing. it's got to be. that's the man in the track going aaayaa. this leads us to what i've realized: at the core, my brain forms a shitload of neural connections every day. it's like lightning that i have to earth properly, or it will burn me up. getting ahead of the tide is tough, because each day all sorts of junk flies into my brain, and i will remember it more or less forever. science has proposed autism stems from an overwired brain -- neural connections that are too dense. i've thought about this a zillion times before. smart people get depressed because they think of loads of horrible crap that never occurs to dumb people. it led to a dismal thought: there is a structural limit to human intelligence. being too smart leads to emotional problems and suicide prunes the genes. now i realize: no, it's tough, but you can get ahead of the curve. the winning formula is: rhythm, engineering, and smoking weed. i love this, because it's about all i ever wanted to do in the first place. |
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i have an overwired brain, but so do many others. i am not unique. rhythm is the (programming) language of consciousness, and paradigm is the compiler. if you can read the previous sentence and understand it, you should now have a functioning binary on your system. but this is like saying, "you now have awk installed on your unix box." it does nothing unless you use it, and using it is complex and deep. after a few years, though, you begin to forget you're even using it. you think in modules of complex awk phrases that you've done a thousand times instead of the individual bits of syntax. when someone asks: how did you do that? it's like someone asking you "how did you just use the UHHH vowel sound when you were speaking, just there?" answer is: i learned to speak when i was young, i got good at it, and now i don't have to think about it anymore. explaining how it works to someone is hopeless. you have to walk the path, so to speak. it's as puzzling to others as i'm sure the nuances of spoken english are to dogs. but, bless them, they never stop trying to figure it out |
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metaphor is the (programming) language of consciousness; paradigm is the compiler. if you understand this, you should now have a functioning binary on your system (of a compiler). typing about rhythm so much made it take over the metaphor for metaphor. metaphorest. metafive. didn't like him much |
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re: ~ cheeky-class metaphor i realized i've done this before, on yugo, in what is tantamount to a little burp of all that's been coming out of me now. backwards in time. here: |
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re: ~ metametaphor i realized this has been done before, and it goes: "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." it hit me either before or after sascha was yelling "turn your code / into law" -- i can't recall precisely. yes, i've clarified what crowley was getting at and translated it into a metaphor only software engineers will understand. back to feeling smug. i much prefer it over depressed |
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i was thinking a great band name would be: simbal monkey cymbal monkey symbol monkey simple monkey simian monkey that's a four-bird stone. pretty dank |
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with a simbal monkey problem |
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i've had all sorts of problems today. all up and down the . today, driving: first, a bee gets into my car. it's a good thing i was parked or i might have left that tangle in a stretcher. tonight, driving: i have seen a deer, a cat, a fox, and then a goddamn coyote. i looked at the coyote... like, shit, is that a coyote? for real? the coyote looked back at me... like, "yes sir, i am." then he looked away and resumed walking down the side of the road. i looked back at the road and resumed driving. the encounter with the deer was, as usual, more than a tad frightening. both the fox and the cat were almost off the road by the time i saw them. alright, now summer is ending, because that's the only thing that makes sense to me. it's the end of the summer. i'm waiting for it to start raining bats at this point and i'm done driving for tonight |
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other things were off. i was re-listening to sacscha yelling, sturm und drang, neu und fremd, my god let's be friends. or something... but, yes, anarchy. i killed the king of deceit. yes, that would be myself. magnificently. this is all over their lyrics, and i never noticed. when i said NIN i should have added KMFDM and a few others. now i see a surprising depth in the lyrics. i might be imagining it, but it's still lovely. i decide to examine MDFMK's album "MDFMK" next. i fish my googlefone out of my pocket. it is a disaster. i try to add the album to the queue so juke joint can keep jezebellin' but my fone misinterprets and puts on NOW, well, now. blowing away the playlist i've been building for a week. well, yes, that get the fone shit over with NOW, but it's not what i wanted. like i've said: when i get mad, i get . i screamed, "FUCK YOU GOOGLE" at the top of my lungs, right into its stupid gorilla glass. some part of me hopes they're listening to me for "tuning purposes" and an actual human hears that. i spent ages on the thing. found a stock fone and a carrier that would accept a phone without crapware. then i blew in an aftermarket firmware. for a media player, i tried the dozen on the android store from the first 50 that were free, not spyware, and didn't look like a clown designed it. the best of the lot is still shit. i want to write a proper one some weekend and release it for free, so google will never make a dime from it. twenty-percent time? how about a hundred percent? work for myself. or perhaps valve software. i think i could tolerate that. gabe, if you're reading, write me a letter |
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