Published on Sat, 2006-05-20 10:56

No Idea How I Got Home

Thanks to all and sundry who came out for me and the Slarz's birthday. A good time was allegedly had by all. The final chapter remains a mistery to me, but that's kind of fun. Considering that I woke up at 3pm, I figure it must have gone on for some time. Flashes in my minds eye of sunrise, but I couldn't tell you the details.

One thing I do remember is Julia Henning's Momster, Claire Henning, gave me some really spot on advice about life. Unexpectedly, it reinforced my wild bohemian values.

And it appears I lost my cellphone... and my iPod Shuffle. Posessions are fleeting.

Tags:

General

Published on Fri, 2006-05-19 12:18

It Changed Everything

You know my politics, and my reactions to 9/11 and whatnot. Those on the other side of the divide rarely pass on the opportunity to make hay out of it, the fear, the sense of mission, danger, the role of the righteous victim. It's not unusual to see people justify all sorts of crackpot politics and authoritarian excess by bleating about how that day "changed everything."

It did, in a lot of ways, but for some reason only the Right has the right to talk about how they were affected. That's crap. It's on all of us. Like the other day taking the F train up over Smith and 9th, I looked into Manhattan and there was a thick low cloud obscuring the Empire State building, looked like the billowing smoke of yesteryear. So of course I wondered if something terrible had happened, what shape the next wave of awful would take.

90 seconds later the wind moved the clouds along and the moment passed, but that's the reality we all live in. Even those of us without paranoid authoritarian fantasies.

Tags:

politics

Published on Wed, 2006-05-17 13:14

Scratching Your Itch

(Music to go with this)

In my dayjob land of open-source development, we talk about "scratching your itch" sometimes. It's the thing that tends to drive really innovative creations, and it comes from people who have the skills to speak the machine-language who want to get something done for their own purposes.

This is how bad-ass shit happens, because there's passion involved. It's not a job. You don't watch the clock while you scratch your itch. You scrach and scrach until either you get worn out and quit, or else the itch don't need no scratchin' no more. Or maybe you're a millionare or whatever and you move on to other things.

This is what people talk about when they compare open-source to poetry, to art, to those whacky "creative" pursuits that the B-schoolers secretly scorn and envy. It's apt. Not all poetry is socially useful, nor is most open-source code, but when you hit a real vein it shakes things up. It's how you get rapid advancement, frame breaking, watershed achevements. It's also how you can waste a lot of time.

I haven't done this in a while, in any arena. No art. No tech. No real itch-scratching at all. You might say that instead of scratching my itch I've been using various creams, salves, herbal tinctures and prescription forumulas to keep those sort of symptoms at bay. Maybe I'm straining the metaphor a bit too far here, but there are lots of ways to numb yourself, and I think mainline society encourages this to some degree. Law and Order, 24/7. Go along to get along. Hump day! The weekend is your kingdom.

Well, fuck all that noise. Life is your kingdom, it's the adventure of your lifetime. Kick out the jams and all that. And I found out that my back-tax bill for this year isn't so bad -- me vs. the IRS, an epic struggle -- so I'm bully for the summer, yes.

This is the summer of scratching the itch, of brewing biodiesel and grinding my own mustard, of moonshine and long-form writing. It's a summer for home-media and bonfires, a time to dig down and push. It's time to try out those other ways of living, because this half-square compromise crap just isn't cutting it for me.

Anyway, stay tuned. I'll let you know how it goes.

Tags:

KoneZone

Published on Wed, 2006-05-17 11:22