The most powerful tools of the deceiver -- indeed the only tools of the deceiver -- are skillfully applied fragments of absolute truth.

Adulthood: A series of disappointments, growing in intensity and pain, culminating in physical death.

To my eyes, Battlestar Galactica's Gauis Baltar and Stephen King seem to bear a resemblance:

Inside your head is a kitchen. During the night, unseen agents of the emotions slink about, bringing fresh supplies. They stash stock in the cabinets, and slip ingredients into the cooler to sit in cold solitude until you come in to cook.

To feed yourself, you make a soup with this. You can only work with what has been brought in. You chop and slice and ruminate, trying to find the best way to prepare what you have. You boil and simmer, cut and cook. You wait. Tasting once, and later again, and later again, you finally decide it is done.

You make yourself a bowl and sit down to eat in the solitude of your kitchen. The flavor is complex. The richest undertones, to your surprise, sting the tongue and cause a dull persistent ache under the tongue, toward the back, where glands swell sometimes when you are sick.

At any given moment, if you were asked, you wouldn't know what to say, about whether this tastes "good." It is only what you have.

Sometimes, thinking it may help you pierce the isolation, you package it up to share with somebody else. To prepare it for the outside. You know that food is never the same when reheated, not to mention that, since you will ship it a long way, you must freeze it. And it's never the same thawed out.

So when your friend takes a spoonful into his mouth, holding it there for a moment, you watch his eyes tilt left to right and back again as he searches for a flavor, a language, some way to use his tongue to understand what you have made. But he cannot. He smiles and says, "That was interesting," and as you finish your own serving he is astonished and wants to know why you are crying. You look to his bowl and, seeing it empty, can only say, "I have nothing for you."

It is the pebble in your shoe.

The name of the person
you were just introduced to,
which you already forgot.

The moment when dawn
first began to lighten the sky,
before you even knew.

The cancer write deep in your body's code,
waiting for the right time to erupt.

The worst heartache you have ever felt,
and the warmest love you've ever had.

A fingernail cut too short.

The snow falling softly into your hair
as you walk home on a silent winter's night.

In all ways and through all occurrences,
it spoke so softly, "I am here.

"I am here, I am here, I am here."

But you were making plans.

http://brunching.com/metalortrek.html

I decided I want to watch the entire ST:TNG series in order, so I queued up Season one on Netflix.

Now I'm watching the pilot episode, Encounter at Farpoint. I haven't seen this in a very long time, probably over fifteen years. It's so strange for TNG to look old to me. It debuted during my first year of college, so the original series seems like the "old one" to me, and this sort of stuck in the "new one" slot in my brain. And yet it looks so dated now.

It's funny how my perspective on it is after all this time. The first time I saw it was when it premiered, and at the time I thought it was terrible. That's probably because I only saw part I, which was heavy with the Q premise - and heavy is the right word, because that whole testing humanity trope is done with quite a heavy hand. I think that's what I didn't like about it the first time. But you know, the second part is a bit better than I remembered - and certainly better than the first. It's not a bad little sci fi ensemble character piece.

It's funny, though, how it's full of all these little set pieces. Characters meeting characters, and awkwardly remarking on the nature of the meeting itself, as if the writer is speaking directly through them. Kind of like a bad novel during these scenes. Riker meets Data, speaks with him briefly, and then data remarks that he would give anything to be a real human. Riker does that Riker smirk (though this is a beardless Riker, so it lacks the punch it would have later), and remarks, "It's good to meet you . . . PINNOCHIO." Okay, thanks Officer Exposition, WE ALREADY GOT IT.

Also this is the one and only episode, as far as I know, in which Deanna Troi is wearing that minidress/uniform thing. They ditched it after the pilot for a more politically correct look. But you know what, it's not *that* politically incorrect. A couple of cutaway scenes where personnel are moving about in the hallways shows a male crew member in a minidress too! It's not cut the same way in the waist and hips, of course, but it's at best a very brief tunic. So I guess they weren't *that* politically incorrect after all, since they show both men and women sporting legs. I have to say, Marina Sirtis had very cute legs. Still, she has probably the worst line in the whole season. Q freezes one of the crew for the first time, and everybody flips out. And Troi feels the need to exclaim, "He's frozen!!!" Gee thanks, because the winter wind sound effect and thick deepe-freeze style frost all over him was kind of difficult to interpret.

Then there's this cameo of Dr. "Bones" McCoy, where he's in this really bad age makeup to make him look a hundred-and-whatever years old. It's this total fanservice scene, a blatant little love song to the original series. It even ends on this super-sentimental note, with violins and flutes swelling and whatnot. And McCoy says, regarding the ship, "You treat her like a lady, and she'll always get you home." Okay, thanks for that little bit of wisdom from Chicken Soup for the Starship Officer's Soul, but didn't the boys back in your day self-destruct at least two of these babies?? If that's how you treat a lady, I'd hate to see what you do to a tramp!

Picard really comes off like a jerk in the pilot, being gruff with people, expressing his extreme distaste for children, etc. I had forgotten how he got softer as the series went on.

All in all, though, it's pretty entertaining.

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders
What the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of
Should you worry when the skullhead is in front of you
Or is it worse because it's always waiting where your eyes don't go?
- from "Where Your Eyes Don't Go", by They Might Be Giants

I decided to shave my head again today. I've been keeping my hair this way for about six months, although recently I let it grow to about a quarter of an inch. I was thinking of letting it grow out, but I have been inspired by some of the residents at the Zen Center, and so I shaved off my beard and mustache, and shaved my head again. No, you don't have to do this to practice Zen. And you shouldn't do it out of a desire to "look the part," because you want to avoid things purely driven by self-consciousness. But I'm really just doing it because it goes along with the philosophy, and right now I like that. It expresses where I'm at with things. I even hit an ironic point with it, where I was worried that maybe I shouldn't do it because it would *look* self-conscious to Sensei and others. And then I suddenly realized that *that* was an entirely self-conscious thought, and laughed, and just went ahead and did it.

If you have ever sheered your head with electric clippers, you probably know that the easiest part is the front sides and front top of your head, because this is what you can see in a single mirror. Thus, it is a little slower going when you get to the parts "where your eyes don't go." You kind of feel your way through it and fumble around. The first time you ever sheer the back of your own head, you will inevitably miss spots. If you don't use a double-mirror technique (put your back to the big mirror on the wall, and then use a hand mirror to look at a reflection of the reflection, and thus see the back of your own head), you might not even know it. Especially if you tend to be an impatient, hyperactive person like me and you just want to get it done and get on with your day. I remember sitting around obsessively feeling the back of my head after shaving it for the first time, back in 2000 or so, and eventually noticing the feel of tiny patches I had missed.

So that's the thing. It's an indirect process, and the faster you do it the more likely you are to get incomplete coverage. While going through this experience this morning, I made sure I slowed down when I sheered the parts where my eyes don't go. I followed the clippers with my free hand, feeling for remaining hair. I accepted that it would take time, and tried not to think about how I wanted to be finished, but just let myself be there, doing what I was doing (i.e. being "mindful" about it). And I also thought about how life is like this. Certain things like our jobs, or possibly our classes if we're students, are fairly straightforward. Of course certain things are not, like solving especially difficult problems. But, for example, doing something like paying your bills is mostly sheering where you can see. On the other hand, coming to terms with a difficult emotion is sheering the back of the head. And if it's to be done well, it must be done slowly, patiently, and with mindfulness, just like meditation. It must be done without pouring your energy into wishing you didn't have to deal with it, wishing you were somewhere or else or with someone else, or always thinking about some other situation you'd rather be in.

Take your time, be present, be calm, be mindful. Shave the back of your head.

So, the government is going to give people 40 dollar coupons toward purchasing a converter box so they can watch digital television on old sets which can't currently tune it in. They will spend about ONE BILLION DOLLARS on this. More info here:

http://www.tvsquad.com/2008/01/02/millions-of-40-tv-coupons-now-availlable-from-the-government/

Yes, the U.S. government considers it vitally important that we keep our eyes glued to the idiot box. It brings to mind a couple of old EBN videos:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=dKdjU7xfVDM (particularly about the last 60 seconds)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JKq7Qrg_NFg

Wikipedia reports 315 individual hit Christmas songs (at the time of this writing).

With such a rich history of material to mine, why, oh why, does every damn subscription music service that retail stores and restaurants subscribe to, insist on playing basically only these two:

- "Wonderful Christmastime," by Paul McCartney
- "Last Christmas," by Wham (and I just can't bring myself to add the terminal exclamation mark which technically completes the name of this band).

From the moment Wonderful Christmastime starts up, with that overdone, annoying echoey synth riff, I just want to punch the nearest person right in the face.

And somehow George Michael manages to put that little extra passionate lilt on the word "special" every time it appears in "Last Christmas" - which at best guess is about five thousand.

These are about the worst two pop Christmas hits I have ever heard, and somehow they have been written down in stone as the only two of importance here in the twenty-first century.

Why? If I could find the answer to this, I could market anything to anybody.

Just got back from An Event Apart (web design conference) here in Chicago, and it was great. I'm inspired. And I'm trusting my design/creative side more and more. I really want to shift from just doing tech layout and control layer logic, to doing straight-up design.

I've been noodling around all night doing fun stuff in Photoshop. Check out this cool profile pic I came up with (which looks better on facebook where I didn't have to chop it off - also it clashes badly with my LJ theme here, so it's worth seeing a larger, uncropped version in its own space):

So you may or may not be familiar with the latest Internet fad/meme, but it's a YouTube movie of . . . well . . . you just have to see it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA&mode=related&search=

Check out the various "remixes" and parodies. They're hilarious. I jumped on the bandwagon and did a response of my own:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDCi6oGyPCw

I so funny.

A few weeks ago I was watching TV late at night. We have this independent station in Chicago that calls itself "MeTV", and it's kind of like Nick at Night. I surfed into an episode of The Honeymooners. Ralph, for some reason, was trying to catalog his good and bad qualities in a kind of personality audit, apparently to improve himself. Ralph asked Norton to list his bad qualities on a piece of paper, and Ralph was then reading them aloud. The first one was, "Doesn't speak French." This, to me, was hilarious, especially with the delivery that Gleason put on it, by turns confused (apparently because of Norton's bad handwriting), bewildered by the comment, and then angry right after reading it. Somehow the style of that bit seemed really contemporary to me, like a kind of game you would see in a current Chicago improv show.

This led me to want to start watching the show more, and as I was battling a bout of insomnia last night I did just that. What follows are a few observations through my "retroscope", about The Honeymooners.

( Read more... )

Just a reminder . . .

I'm reading as part of the Twilight Tales (http://www.twilighttales.com) series, at the Red Lion Pub in Chicago, tomorrow night. The show starts at 7:30pm, and I'm one of two featured readers (standard for this show).

I'll be reading two short stories, "Please Somebody Believe This," and "After the Storm." Both of them are done in something of a classic spec fic (sci fi/fantasy) style. I hope you can join me!

The Red Lion is at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue. The show has a cover charge of four dollars.

I'll be a featured reader on Monday, October 16th at Twilight Tales (http://www.twilighttales.com), a reading series here in Chicago, held every Monday night at the Red Lion Pub. The show starts at 7:30pm. I'll be reading two short stories, "Please Somebody Believe This," and "After the Storm." Both are sort of old school sci fi / fantasy with a bit of a classic sf touch in the narrative voice. I hope you'll come out and listen! The Red Lion is at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue. The show has a cover charge of four bucks.

This morning began as a lovely, perfect fall day. It was nice and cool, in the 60s, but sunny. Songs and poems tend to laud the joyous occurrence of clear skies, but I like the sky the way it was this morning; cloudy, but in that fluffy cottony way.


I admire the accidentally hip fashion stylings of the character Charlie, from the FX show It's always Sunny in Philadelphia (I will also never forget the image of Charlie dressed in a nazi officer's uniform and casually eating a banana). I am copping some of his style and liking it, as today I left the house wearing a thrift store sportcoat over a hooded sweatshirt. I love that look.

I am ashamed to admit that I really like those stuttering techno string pads in the new Justin Timberlake single.

Another musical curiosity, but much hipper than J. Timberlake, is Yat-Kha, a rock band featuring Tuvan Throat Singing. You must hear their cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart Again.

I recently got accepted to the Second City Conservatory, an advanced Improv training program. They are somewhat selective about who gets in, and it's a program you have to audition for. The audition was tough in its stripped-down, simple, brutal brevity, and I was certain I had no chance. I was shocked to receive the letter of acceptance, particularly after not even making callbacks at another improv audition several weeks ago. I am honored to be in this program, and very excited about getting back into improv.

As regular readers know, I started bowling 2 or 3 times a week (2 games each visit) right at the beginning of August. My intention was to have regular practice so I could get decent at the game.

It is more than a month later. I have produced a couple of scores much higher than I ever have before (162 being the highest, with an unprecedented triple strike), but my game is still wildly inconsistent, and my average score seems to hover around the same place it did when I started.

Also as my regular readers know, an otherwise kind old man wandered over to talk to me last week and ask me, after watching my game for a bit, "Is this your first time bowling?"

As of today, the low end of my game is still in the 90s - woefully embarrassing. I was talking to a coworker about how I've been practicing lately, but my game is still totally inconsistent, and that my scores the past month have gone everywhere from 90 to 160. He looked astonished for a moment, and then said, with an extremely sober face, "Yeah, 90 is not good."

Then I did the lunch bowling later and got 105 and 91 or something. I *still* roll gutters an astonishing amount of the time.

Maybe it's time to give up.

My obsession with bowling continues. I think about it involuntarily sometimes throughout the day, musing over technique and strategy. If too many days go by without a couple of games, I get kind of antsy.

One frame is a microcosm of the entire bowling endeavor, and maybe of life itself. One slight nudge in the wrong direction and your ball slides over oil and into the gutter. But when you're hot you're hot, and it's amazing how accurate you can be. Back and forth, from sloppy to tight, and you don't always know why. If you hit a bad streak, sometimes it becomes a self-perpetuating problem because you can't help but think too much about your technique, which kills your game completely. Because of this, I often find the first game of the day is my best. Then I start making a few mistakes, and the snowball effect kicks in.

Today I rolled a "career" high, at 162. That was my first game. I rolled two more after that and barely broke a hundred on each. By the end of the last game my approach was totally screwed up and I couldn't seem to fix it. I was somehow ending up with my left hand on my left leg at the end of the throw, which is just wrong wrong wrong. I was stepping weird too, like a quick little skip. No matter how much I thought, clear your mind and just roll like you were, I couldn't seem to stop this instantly-obtained habits.

And probably the next day I play, I won't throw like that at all. How odd.

In that first game I rolled, I think, my first triple strike. I'm going to focus on that the rest of the day.

I've been going bowling over my lunch break two to three times a week for about the past five weeks. I play two games each time (they go really fast when I'm the only bowler in my lane). I wasn't going bowling enough after work hours to get very good, and I decided I'd like to be good at the game, so I wanted to get a lot of practice in.

Recently my game took a sudden jump up about 30 points in average score, and then last week and this week dipped back again to abysmal levels. I'm talking 80s and 90s. Bleahg. Now an average score of 120/130 is nothing to crow about, but it was a personal best for me and it felt good. But somehow I got right back to my old crappy average score from before I was practicing.

Well today I was next to these three men who looked like they were maybe in their 60s. They were really, really good. A couple of them were just rolling strike after strike. They were fun to watch too, joking around and carrying on with each other. Then one of them came over and said to me, "You're leaning forward too much. You should keep your shoulders straight." I was really pleased he was friendly enough to offer some advice, and was excited that a bowling veteran wanted to share a tip. I thought, if retirement is this laid back and fun, I can deal with it. Screw our youth-obsessed culture. Old men are cool.

I tried keeping my shoulders straight and started rolling gutters.

I went back to doing what more or less felt right, and I got back into a groove. I rolled a 126 the second game, and I was all happy that my score was back up.

The same helpful old guy comes over while I'm putting my street shoes back on and stuff, and he says, like he's being friendly, "Is this your first time bowling?"

Screw old people.