Hello, Internet. It's been a long time.

I would like to say sup. How have you been? A lot has changed since last we danced. You've grown up, all 2.0 like. I would really appreciate it if you explained what that 2.0 thing really means, though.

You've gotten louder, more demanding. You have so many friends now, and it's getting harder to hear what I'm thinking every day. I suppose we all just have to keep shouting louder and louder in order to be heard. I wish they'd turn down the music in the background, if only for a while, then we could sit down and have a talk, so I could tell you about all the cool things I've been doing with my life and we could share photos and plan events in that real world thing that may or may not exist, and then we could get tired of each other and go on a break again.

Sup, Internet, sup.

dream: night time in the mysterious city.

it’s winter. we’re in an old house on a hill, in an old city that is being rebuilt -- whole city blocks demolished, erased, wiped clean, with new ones taking their place.

the house property backs onto an escarpment, at the bottom of which is a frozen river which runs through the city. all along the escarpment, to one side of the house, several adjacent city blocks are missing. empty, removed, and soon to be replaced. looking out from a window of the house on the hill, i can see new units being moved up to the edge of the escarpment in one of the nearby lots, slotted into place one after another like tiles, only they’re huge: entire properties, with buildings, pavements, lawns, sidewalks already assembled together on ultrawide flatbeds, pushed and pulled by purpose-built “mover” trucks that look like grossly oversized big-rig/tow-truck hybrids. they’re moving quickly; the whole block’ll be assembled by morning.

but something’s wrong; the newest piece to arrive doesn’t stop in time and smashes through the property markers near the escarpment. i look closer: there is one of those big mover trucks at either end, and something’s going wrong with them. the whole thing comes to a shuddering stop, and then the rear “pushing” mover-truck lurches back the way it came. the property/building tile-piece is coming detached from the other mover, the one near the escarpment. the truck’s grappling mechanism is going haywire, jerking up and down, barely attached to the property any more. the workers swarm around the malfunctioning movers and the piece caught between them, looking from up here like panicked ants after a kid stomps their colony. with a huge tug, the rear-facing truck pulls the property completely free of the one facing the escarpment and surges forward, running over some workers, and sending those who had been standing on the attached property flying through the air as their footing is pulled out from underneath. one worker gets thrown under the grappling mechanism of the other truck, which keeps moving up and down, crushing him repeatedly against the body of the vehicle. then the whole truck abruptly drives forward, rushing headlong over the edge and down, down, crashing through the frozen surface of the river.

in a panic, some workers leap to their smaller pickup trucks and head down a narrow, treacherous dirt path to the bottom of the escarpment. but they’re driving too fast; before it gets even halfway to the bottom, the first truck loses control, flips, flies through the air, and skids across the ice. a couple of passengers stagger out, even as a second, third, then fourth truck follow suit, each more disastrously than the last, crashing into the other trucks and the survivours who crawled out of them.

not a single sound of all the chaos and carnage enters the house. an unnervingly constant silence fills my ears throughout it all.

...the next morning, the view of the accident scene is blocked by a row of buildings; the lot next to our old house has been filled. “the helicopters must have set them down there last night,” someone says...

paper airplanes

dream 2007-07-03

on a whim, i'm in the midst of some bizarre movie-script barracks. it's basic training. we've got to go through all kinds of aptitude tests and training before we can learn first aid, but the sergeant and his buddies waste no time in getting us recruits our weapons, even bringing out the high-powered scopes and rifles for us to salivate over. i ask a couple of questions, so i am thereby marked as a troublemaker; sarge doesn't plan on giving me anything but seven kinds of hell.

i come across a scrap of a report in the washroom -- something that probably should have been shredded, as it gets my blood boiling. i confront the sarge with it: me, the angry, impotent bleeding-heart. "this is disgusting, but i bet you don't even care! i'm just some worthless wimp leftie scum to you, huh?"

"yer damn right!" he bellows.

i'm done, i'm out, waste of time. what in the hell was i doing, going into the army in the first place? that stuff stopped interesting me when i was in my teens, anyway.

so out of the barracks without a backward glance, into downtown: it's night, the streets are almost empty of cars. orange halogens spill down the sides of the old stone buildings that fill this part of town. across the street, under the shifting tree-leaf shadows, i'm into the park.

now this is more like it: people in all sorts of strange carefree getup, wandering, gathering, sitting, talking... no one imposing anything on anyone else. and of course my friends are there; gordex, armourtime, the dr, sitting on the grass, look up as i pass and greet me as if it is the most natural thing in the world for me to be there. i briefly wonder if they were waiting for me, knowing i'd bounce out of there in short order, or if they even know of my brief flirtation with the military. it doesn't really matter; there's little to fear out here compared to inside those walls. halfway across the park, i can see cheese running about, with a swishing of skirts and a bouncing of curls. just doing her thing.

here is freedom, and honest adventure, at the expense of no lives, and no mindless conformity. and we have many hours 'til morning.

north york blues

long time passing

Genius Kills Self
George Ferney, lifelong “prodigy at everything he touched,” was found dead in his Lake Erie cottage this morning. Police spokespersons said that the cause of death would not be disclosed to the public at this time due to privacy concerns, but that death had been conclusively established as self-inflicted.
Since his childhood in Buffalo, NY, George Ferney has been hailed by educators, researchers, politicians, celebrities, and some of the leading minds across the world as the greatest genius the world had seen since Mozart, or perhaps ever.
Although his rise to international fame was connected strongly with his virtuosity in all the arts, since his middle adolescence Ferney's energies had focused on the cause of the environment and the ever-increasing problem of global climate change.
There have been reports of a suicide note from sources closely connected with Ferney. Details are few but all sources have indicated that Ferney had for some time been severely depressed about what he perceived as his own incompetence. According to one neighbour, the note stated that Ferney hoped that others “more adept than I will do the work that I am unqualified to do.” When asked about them, Police spokespersons provided no comment to either confirm or deny these reports.

wow… that will definitely be a movie-of-the-week, thought Theo, flaked out on a 50-year-old couch listening to a CD -- a CD! hahah --
-- when his headphones cut out and the phone started blasting what sounded like white noise by comparison.
Andrew was yacking at him over the speakerphone. Something about green piss.

"That's it! I have had it with these muthafuckin' scorpions on these muthafuckin' planes!"

First report! Here in Toronto!

News flash! 2nd incident!

Samuel Jackson must be scratching his chin right now.

Still reading?

Interestingly enough, the first scorpion attack came at the same time as some real news: the ongoing Iraqi trials of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants continued ... but all charges against Saddam Hussein have been dropped. At first glance, that makes sense, right? I mean, he'd just been killed (in a manner that more resembled the kind of brutality that he was put on trial for in the first place). But this means that there will be no further investigation into his many atrocities, many of which occurred with Washington's blessing.



In essence, Saddam Hussein was tried and executed for one -- just one -- of his crimes. Never mind that many of the others he committed were while he was America's supposed bastion of secularism against the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Never mind that there will no longer be any need for investigation into the details of these other crimes. That kind of investigation would turn up some interesting facts about the nature of his relationship with the United States, which remained friendly even while he was committing what Bush, Blair, et al. are only decades later calling genocide. It was only after he invaded another oil-rich ally of the United States that he suddenly became the bad guy.

We tried to use Osama bin Laden against the Russians, and he turned on us. ps. does anyone even remember him?
We tried to use Saddam Hussein against the Iranians, and he turned on us, too. But don't worry. He was conveniently killed before our tacit approval of his horrifying brutality could be properly investigated.
We got away with it. Again.

Videotape (new Radiohead song)

The above video was shot at the Bonnaroo festival this past summer. I've downloaded some recent Radiohead concert bootlegs (because I'm a terrible, terrible pirate), and the new songs they've been playing are fantastic -- "Videotape" just happens to be my personal favourite. I don't know when their new album will be out (apparently sometime this year), but when it hits... yes! By all indications it will be stunning. Definitely something good to look forward to this year.

EDIT: Okay, I found another video, this one from Madison Square Gardens, and the audio on it is quite good (the crappy in-camera sound was replaced by a good bootleg sound recording from the same concert).



ps. I am beginning to realize how awesome Thom Yorke is.

and the future has become the present

Andrew stopped and took a look at the contents of his toilet bowl. His hand reached for the lever and just rested on it.
Wow. My piss is green.
He withdrew his hand. Theo would flip out when he saw this.

Catherine wasn't quite sure whether she was coming or going. About all she could hold onto right now was the undeniable fact that she had done the impossible this past month. She caressed the bump of the RFID behind her left ear. My get-out-of-jail-free chip. I should call it that in front of Alex! Ha! She'd been told she'd be well-compensated, and this was certainly a welcome reward.

David and Diane were divorced. They hadn't spoken since the end of the legal proceedings. That had been forty-one years ago. And yet even at this late day, if one cared to look, it would be apparent that they were of a certain kind. Of course, no one still alive had ever met both of them.

David wrote policy. David wrote history. David wrote the Truth.

Diane wrote what she knew. Diane wrote what she saw. Diane wrote Lies.

For example, last week she penned a piece that contained this gem:

There had been mass riots ten years earlier, when the truth about 9/11 came out (the old, uncapitalized kind of truth). As a footnote to this world-shaking revelation, approximately half the inmates in every asylum across the Western world stuck their hands up like third-graders about to pee their pants and screamed "See?! I was right! Let me out!"
Long-suffering Kennedy enthusiasts tentatively started to look up, presumably thinking that maybe they'd get the next bit of good news.
They're still waiting, though.

She read it through once and then promptly burned it.

i get my vitamin c like the astronauts!

drive-by posting

and all I need is just to hear a song I know

The sound of an accordion floated along the subway platform. A few loud chords grabbed my attention, though I usually associate these chords with organ and electric guitar. The unseen accordionist launched into Jimmy Cliff's "The Harder They Come".
See, this is the kind of thing that sets me to wondering about the feasibility of impromptu in-public song-and-dance routines (whose chorus line was studiously ignoring each other up until that moment). I was grooving. I caught a lone fifty-something woman whistling along cheerfully, belying how uptight she had appeared to me at first glance. Ah! Music can give us common ground -- I identified with this woman (who, because she was as white as I, might as well have been from Mars) and all thanks to one of the most famous cultural exports of Jamaica, accordionized of course. See? Our ethnicity and cultural indoctrination didn't matter a bit!
A distant rumble was making itself increasingly apparent, when Jimmy Cliff abruptly metamorphosed into Neil Diamond playing "Sweet Caroline" on a cheap accordion. Wow. But then the train pulled in with an eardrum-shattering rumble and a howl of tortured brakes. I enjoyed every second of it.

myths

fictions that can yet hold truths
used to convince self (private myths) or others (mass myths)
> likelihood of gradation between private and mass
use of myths not necessarily conscious
the range of possible messages, explicit or implicit, of a myth/group of myths, is virtually infinite, and therefore mass myths can be used by essentially all individual people as well as societies (peoples, religions, nations, "sub-cultures", towns/cities, et cetera)
> different groups can employ the same myth to different (even opposed) social ends
though often fantastic in initial appearance, myths are rooted in the world as it is perceived by their author(s)

this may need to get edited a bit down the road.

looking out the balcony window on a rainday

[ceci n'est pas une photo.]
[dudes, this isn't a photo.]