Saturday, July 31, 2010

Sun Shines on Dog's Ass

Blame it on the fading moon.
I spend 9 hours a day working to save people time. Does that make sense? Does it add up? If you have a car that theoretically saves you time when you drive to Boston but an industry is spending millions of hours to design and manufacture cars then can you really say it saved any time? And if you drive for a living then the car hasn't saved you any time at all. In fact, it's all a complete fraud. "We're saving time." Bullshit. Total bullshit. Someone invented a noose and it'll save you time in getting to the grave. Die faster!
Believe me if you spend as much time manufacturing high tech stuff as I do then you would begin to question if there is any truth at all to its purported benefits. Basically what happened was I earned enough money to buy some tires and a six pack of beer so someone else can navigate a submarine remotely or test chemicals in the atmosphere...which will take up all of their time. What does it mean to save time? I believe I know since I spent 8 months using all my account of saved time. I figured, fuck it. Time for a withdrawal. I'm saving it and I will use it. I'm not going to die with a balance of saved time. No way. And at the time I went to Mexico I could not raise my arms above my head and walked stooped over and penniless, shitting blood for five years...so I didn't think it was smart to buy the bullshit that I worked to save someone else time.

Whatever, it's a social convention that's been swallowed like the bait you throw out to catch bass in the lake.

Speaking of death...I'm taking care of Bonnie this weekend. She is not only deaf but now she is also blind and needs drops put in her bugging eyes. I have to look at her belly when she is laying down to make sure she's still breathing. Give her mouth to mouth resuscitation when she gags.
I need some paint to decorate her Elizabethan cone. Like, color it to match her coat. I feel bad for her but I wasn't much different this last week. A full 40 hours working on a single impossible harness with a dozen breakouts and pins and connectors and strain reliefs. The stress actually broke me and the boss gave me a warning. The stress was too much and I was abandoned on the factory floor without food or water and I would come home to a 99 degree attic and pass out from exhaustion and then awake at 5am to do it again. I sort of laughed because the indignity of dying because I was wasting away under florescent lights building mystery machines was too beautiful. There was no music and no one speaks. We drag our bodies to work and home...it's almost like what we're doing is important but we actually have no idea what we're building. Some might say it is intelligent design but I call it something different. Anyway, I was deathly sick and lost the sight in one eye, it was weeping for no reason and I developed lung congestion and the pain in my neck is bad enough for me to take advantage of the bulk pain killers the company supplies because everyone there has diabetes and bad backs. This is exactly what a human life is worth...I had no idea what day it was and wandered the concrete floor in search of pins and crimpers and did not pass humans but shells of fleshy robots. So this is it, I figured there wasn't much difference between death and a lifetime of cable assembly. I mean, really. That's my excuse why I wound up in the woods with Kenny trailblazing through a forest of downed trees. I was on my moped and that meant dragging it under logs, coughing, sweating. Kenny, a punch drunk lug who looks like he fell out of the tree of hard knocks and hit every branch on the way down said I looked like a beaten man and he was right. Kenny rode his 650 Honda over branches and ended up in someone's backyard while I fell down the hill near the old age home. We sang our ode to Jackson the dwarf goat and for a second the labor and wasted time was worth it because as you know I worked at Bauer moving hockey equipment for this piano that Mr. Hawkins beat into submission. That night I ended up in Prescott Park in the grass making a video I can not post.

Anyway, this job is as physically easy as a job gets but the existence of this job is like a dagger in my heart. These products are indestructible. They are the opposite of biodegradable and we're shipping out hundreds of miles of copper. This is literally how you would treat a planet you were plundering because your ship is waiting to take you home to Jupiter in a few minutes. I wonder if Bill Gates hasn't already colonized another planet and Earth is just like a spare parts bike to the elite. Because this is how you would behave if there were no environmental consequences. It feels like we're so obsessed with preventing our extinction that we're going to cause our extinction. You got New Yorkers walking over dead homeless people. Come on, Bill, you think mankind is going to relocate to another planet? A job like this will kill me if I work at it or not. I'm inside the death factory and I can see that it's unstoppable. This relates to my opinion that the education system failed utterly but I don't want to get into that right now.

I'm also resisting the urge to commit to the manufacturing because in my mind it is a choice between that and life. The memory of certain people fades with the complexity of these harnesses. I love to do things well and to do these things well means a tolerance of 3 mm over a distance of 31 ft. That will produce a professional connector array. But it also demands I treat friends and memories like the heavy baggage that is slowing down the ship. Like, I'll drag the ocean bottom when I pass this way again. Ha! I thought my priorities were right but apparently they are fucked. I wonder how family and friends can encourage such a thing. Are they really family? Are they friends?
Or is that where they put me in the hierarchy of their demands? I come right after soft toilet paper and paying the cable bill?
Well, I don't have toilet paper or a cable bill. And if the vote is for me to embrace the war against the environment, and to embrace it so fully that their memories are less important than where IEOG-J2 #22 will connect to AEIGG J1 #7 on a robotic cable harness then I've definitely misunderstood something. Or they'll forgive me when we're having a barbecue and I steal a little time to practice crimping a #18AWG D-sub AMP Reverse sex socket...because it's more important...it saves people time....

Here's a multiple choice:
Which do you want?

A:
B:generic technology

Circle your choice. You may only choose one.

You Reap What You Sow

What person said that? Five words that say a lot. You harvest exactly that which you nurtured. No more and no less. It can be applied to a simple backyard garden and, I believe, to humanity in general. We reap what we sow.

GALATIANS 6: 7-9 "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

Now, it does not guarantee moral choices. A thief can do his diligent best to prepare and if his heist is a success then he has himself to thank. And if the heist is initially successful but ultimately leads the police to his door then that is also a cause and effect issue.

We are living in a time when many people are sowing many things and reaping and raping are widespread. This is folk wisdom and it requires that you either be old with a belly full of experience or young with lots of time to ponder the effects of your causes. What are you sowing? What is our country sowing? What is the world sowing.

I spent some time writing a due diligence manuscript regarding commercial solar farms. That sounds sensible. Demonstrate that you sowed only profitable seeds. Demonstrate that you did your homework to A) avoid problems and B) show you tried to avoid problems. BP executives were asked why they ignored internal memos that called the Deepwater Horizon project "A nightmare well." That is when due diligence comes into play. You are supposed to look out for red flags like "nightmare" and take action. BP did nothing and now are paying for it. They looked like assholes at the congressional hearings because they are assholes. They are reaping what they sowed...just like they deserve the oil they can suck out of the earth when the whole thing works. It's not a miracle; it's due diligence.

Now, take a mile high view of it and map out the project implementation for mankind. It's not easy to do. Maybe the bible is a kind of due diligence written in parable form. That's possible and that will also be incorporated into my own diligence manual for humanity.

The difficult part is living while simultaneously studying the upcoming harvest. Because the act of studying what one will reap is also part of what one is sowing. The process is not done in a vacuum so I am trying to study what I will reap while not sowing anything that I think will poison the land.

But because I feel this is a task I am uniquely qualified to perform and because no one else seems to have done it, so I've got the market cornered on macro-cosmic harvest factors, I will continue to juggle the metaphysical juggling pins aflame with the petrochemical soup. And if this is a harvest that will be ultimately destructive to me then that's what I deserve to reap. It's a tidy axiom and I'd like to challenge you all to ponder it.

Here is my Sermon:

I passed a gray bunny crossing the street by the Greenleaf farm on Peverly Hill Road. It was 5:30 am and it was just me and the other early birds on the street, squirrels and bunnies. The horses on the farm were still hoping fences in their long nose dreams. A fog hovered above the field of brown and green. The trees dripped with the moisture from the evening rain. I saw the bunny grazing near a blown out flip flop across from the YMCA swimming pool. I had a moment of synchronicity with the bunny because in our own way were were reaping what we were sowing or at least sowing something intentionally. If I make it to Labrador or Guatemala then it will be from these 5 am commutes to the robot factory. That bunny was providing for himself and his family. I was nurturing my own field of dreams.

Later, on the way home from work at 3 pm, I passed the YMCA pool and swerved around a bloody mass of gray fur on the double yellow line. Kids were jumping off the diving board, the streets were filled with cars, the horses were standing on crooked knees under the shade of a maple tree. I passed the roadkill fast so I couldn't be sure it was the same bunny or even if it was a bunny at all. The messy lump was the same color but some cats have that color coat. There was no way to tell as I turned the corner and rolled into Portsmouth to ponder these messages. I feel like I've found a trail of breadcrumbs that leads through the universe.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Jackson, Jackson


Oh, Trish Blankenship, you ruled my beat off dreams of 1988 with your pink panty fantasies, and not these punch clock nightmares. Your cheerleader hair smelled like lilacs in 1980 when the moon was full and the grass was high and the lightning bugs flew softly across the York meadow. Where are you now my love? My beauty. My damp thigh lover? Bring me home to your sweaty memory.
Drove 1974 vespa ciao over downed trees in distant forests with no florescent lights. You say that it is irresponsible to lose your job over the tight fabrication of meadowland madness but I say that scorpion bowl wisdom. "my cat has claws" "You have many talents" "House" "674391" is the madness and what you don't see is the culmination of the haunted house that is our sweaty town.

The Florescent lights have sucked my soul through my lungs and now I'm sweating my heart through my forehead. bring peace to the lovers of the land. the scorpion bowl is the depth of jackson's heart and his sweaty love is the end of all of our persuasion.

JAckson jackson, where did your goat go?
jackson jackson, where did your goat go?

he jumped the fence, and he crossed the field
he jumped the fence and he crossed the field.

Jackson, Jackson,. where did your goat go?
jackson, jackson, where did your goat go?

he crossed the field and he
he climbed the mountain
he crossed the field and he climbed the mountain.

I listened to the video and it wasn't bad. I'm not sure what is hard about a I/ii/IV/V progression except I was under the influence of scorpion and did not explain it.
D / e minor/ G / A7

where did your goat go?
it's a prayer for a goat.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Open Letter to BLM







I'm writing to ask that the Bureau of Land Management prohibit hard rock mining in the Bristol Bay region.
No rational land use plan can include destructive mining. The mining process is only the beginning of a long path of pollution those minerals will take through the lives on the people who use them. The excuse seems to be the ends (technological development) justifies the means (mining and refining of minerals.) We posses highly advanced technology and have more knowledge of our natural habitat than ever before but there is strong evidence we are more divorced than ever from our own habitat. Children have less awareness and concrete knowledge of their habitat. We lack experience and love for the land and that is blatantly dangerous. The majority of adults live in urban areas and they take some solace that wild places still exist. Remove those wild places and we will become drones manufacturing our own demise, praying for the next invention to keep our pale corpses alive to watch the next sporting event in high definition.
One animal to be harmed by copper mine.


Bristol Bay:



Copper Mine:


America's energy addiction is not a consensus decision but rather an elitist edict that has been passively adopted. I'm strongly in favor of development of technology as long as it does not radically alter the habitat of other creatures. If you can harvest copper and gold from the earth without destroying it then you'll be the first in history to do so. If you can't make that promise then start taking responsibility for the land and stop obeying silver-tongued lobbyists. Pretend you have to live next to the gold mine. Then decide what to do with the land.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Saturday Night's All Right For Fighting


Herman Hesse writes about two worlds in his book Demian. One world is the world of convention, controlled by media and hormones, the other world is the one that is generated by resisting hormones and the media. Here's my buddy trying to resist one or the other at the saloon named after the street where old friends meet the pavement and mopeds roll through stop lights with cops on their tail.
It's a daily battle to fight these worlds, the raging war between convention and instinct. I lose it on most days and stumble past the central little league field with open wounds. We are all manufacturers. We manufacturer things, ideas or junk piled under the carpets of our minds. This junk is piling up and the excuse is that one day the technology will make the junk obsolete, one day the junk will devour the junk. And our manufacturing dreams will become a Jetson's reality. I manufacture words that are recycled trash from the stuffed animals we trail behind us from childhood. I'm like my Buddy, holding my hand up in defense against the attack of the scotch from 12 years ago.

Will our collective ecological genocide lead to some rosy fucking rainbow world where the genocide will be justified? I do not think so. Definitely not. That's fucking ridiculous and if you believe such a thing then I'd like to cross reference your lack of soul to your stock holdings in Apple. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. But I'm an easy target, living in my van miserably lurching from one dead end to another. I'm the bogeyman your first grade teacher warned you about so you can justify your plastic Wii cheerleading accessories. The sky isn't falling. Of course it isn't. Steve Jobs would never lie to YOU. That would be...unforgivable...awful...insane. How could that ever happen? No, a rich dude you never met will sell you shit in a basket and you'll eat it up but a kid who played whiffle ball with you from the Elwyn Ave Lincoln Gang big wheel days is a dirtbag. Ok. Choose your friends by their crisp obscurity and your enemies by their hippie vans.

I'm not crucified by your values, I'm living outside the realm of Steve Jobs and it turns out that collateral damage has my van in between the crosshairs. They can't coexist. The wolf and the iphone. They can't live together because the copper mines and plastic factories all add up to a school system full of future electronic engineers and assemblers. Why even have school? Why learn about god? Fuck it. God is in the robots we design to take out our garbage. This nation of devout fishermen and farmers are now south korean piece workers and latin meat packers sucking kidney stones from the balls of bull moose. This is the age of darkness that is full of light from some manufactured source shining on our cleverness in huge warehouses where we slice knee caps off cows for our herd of sheep dogs or robotic men and women in sweaty warehouses cleverly pinning copper to power conductors to god knows what, probably the bomber that will destroy my house. So clever! so smart that we elect monsters to run our country and then stare at tubes of light and drink and complain in vapid obesity. Convention is a grand success. Pay no attention to the man in the van, the glitch in the system, the obscure anomaly, the turd in the pool water. Your world is safe and I'll defend mine with manufactured words shot into the darkness of a parade of the clumsy innocent, the feckless fools, the stumbling maniacs whose laughter is a hollow cry that leads them to the asylum for the wicked.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Nestle...killer...murderer...devourer of cultures

here's a sample from an article that no one reads that details the encroachment of Nestle into Brazil...


"Sure, NestlĂ© will profit if it hooks Amazonian children on Baby Ruths, and new jobs will be created—just as new jobs are created when more people become addicted to cocaine or heroin—but all this will come at the cost of ill health and significant increases in the ecological costs of producing food, all in a place that could produce most of its food locally."



What is going to become of us?

Power Chord Jungle Emperor


Old before his time. Gray hair. Seated on his thrown, scarred shins from bike brake pedals slamming and carving new wounds in the flesh. Knees knocked from falling from great heights, plummeting as though shot from the sky by hunters of the doomed with his tattered magic rug unfurled beneath him. Sneakers with lacquer and paint and sawdust and every kind of fluid used to cover wood and metal. The goat shepherd walks with a limp and has a belly full of scorpion bowls and shellfish but he's a triumph of engineering, a jeep restored from a war that is never content without bombs blowing up nearby, forever rolling on three flat tires looking for a fight in the worst way, looking up "Trouble" in the phone book and crank calling him at two in the morning. He shows up like a thunderstorm when you forgot to close your windows and attracts lightning, like Miles Davis juggling blue notes in the hazy St. Louis Night.
He's a canary trapped in a coal mine and we're burning feathers for to find his weakness, jabbing at his broken knees. We'll miss him when we're gone.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Jackson

I played so much Lionel Richie on the piano today that I blended all his songs together into a song about Jackson the pygmy goat who hails from Nottingham and has a prince for an owner. I was belting it out even without the aid of vodka trying to mix a bit of Tom Waits with Elton John on the rocks...
"Don't tear down my fence
Jackson, you shit BBs on the lawn
dry hay is your desert
you drink water from a silver goblet
aflame with the Lee Speedway demons
run along you pygmy goat
and don't come home without a pony
I'll put wings on you and together
we'll fly back to Mexico or to Labrador
where it's cold at night
and the humidity freezes on the tent flaps
you'll keep me warm, you
pygmy dwarf with the bearded butt."

I can't remember how the music went but it was inspired.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Telephone

Stop callin’, stop callin’,
I don’t wanna think anymore!
I left my hand and my heart on the dance floor.
Stop callin’, stop callin’,
I don’t wanna talk anymore!
I left my hand and my heart on the dance floor.





Heard this song recently and thought it was a parody of something, like a joke, but it's actually modern dance music. The lyrics are as shallow as a waterless urinal.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Creative Eclipse



The inspiration tank is as dry as my moped on the way to New Castle and coasting to a stop on the causeway where the cops once chased me down. I pedaled to Fort Stark and then rode home with gas from the weed wacker. That made sense to me. That was within my realm of understanding. That corresponded to my worldview.

But my robot cable harness bench work has broken me of my self loathing. And self loathing inspired me to write. What am I? A crimper. I crimp wire. Creativity is as remote to the life cycle of a robot's internal wiring as a Haitian whore is to fresh flowers after a sweaty gangbang. And because a well crimped wire, a wire that satisfies military specs, can not be achieved in the dreamy Oggy world that once bubbled forth like oil from the Gulf of Mexico, I have little to say.

I do want to punish myself a bit for actually being flat broke and playing tennis for too long. Funny, I saw Martin at the supermarket today (He was bagging groceries and smiling) and he asked me where I've been. At a bench crimping wire. Not playing tennis, not writing, not listening to Abbey Road, not reading Glass Bead Game. Yes, those are the acts of a child and writing about them is the act of an juvenile bragging about his elongated childhood. That part I already knew and had been reminded of it often by just about everyone. The greater purpose of my independent research is loathsome and an unquestionable mistake. Last night I was talking to a girl in a summer dress and as she sipped her beer and scanned the crowd for someone to take her out of my orbit I explained that "It's like watching a fan and if you really concentrate you can slow down the fan and focus on each individual blade...while in motion. Or bike spokes. You can slow them all down so you can see it for what it is. That's what I'm doing with humanity and civilization. I'm slowing down the speeding bullet of progress so I can examine it and analyze it and break it down to the component parts."

I work with twenty people who are very content not pondering the mysteries of the universe. They are content with watching a speeding fan without focusing on each blade. The fan was spinning before they came into the picture and it will spin after they leave with hunched back and hacking coughs and gout and diabetes into the dirty New England overcoat with a granite top hat. Sing your dirges softly lest you wake the dead.

The Don Quixote role stopped being funny when I'm walking my out of gas 1974 Vespa Ciao through New Castle to get to my volunteer job at Fort Stark. The deeper problems are the lack of production, this nonsense of chasing fantasies. I watched Young Abe Lincoln from 1939 and realized my Thoreau script was 70 years out of date, written for light amusement with a $100,000 budget. This isn't realistic in Hollywood but there I was in Santa Monica knocking on Robert Redford's production company door like a madman. If it works then everyone is proud. If I end up shitting blood in an abandoned van at the beach then you get a despicable blog.

There are changes on the horizon and I've been considering offers to live in the mountains of Colorado, track the Arctic Wolf down, make a beanbag toss tournament game documentary, move to Spain to study for a guitar performance Master's degree, or continue to crimp wire and weave copper and insulation into a modern pine needle basket, like engineers artistic contribution to indigenous handicrafts. I need the money to feed myself and to buy a motorcycle.

The deceiving part is a picture like this does not give you an idea of the microscopic nature of crimping. That's the attractive part of the job, excellence is measured under a microscope and also from high above. It all has to work perfectly. The terminal below is something called a ferrule pin and can be as small as the "I" on your keyboard, which means the wire is as small as the little horizontal dash above the "P" key. I can tell by looking at it that it's 1.5-2 mm long. I use wire that is stripped to 3 mm and fits in a ferrule that I can only pick up with a magnifying glass. And the length of the harness can only be 1 inch too long, but can not be 1mm too short.
I guess it's like the modern tree of life with infinite relays and twists and joints and connectors. A metaphor of the inter connectivity of all humans... There are good crimps and bad crimps. And a good crimp can only be done with the correct tools and with focus. Is that the lesson everyone was trying to teach me? Consider it learned and let's move on. In the meantime, I invite you to read some of my posts from last year. We're approaching the 2nd anniversary of the blog and the earlier work was amusing. Or read some of the more relevant posts from other sites. Like the glaciers that are melting. Big deal? The fresh water they supply is what irrigates the land that feeds most of Asia. How did that song go? "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Henry, Dear Henry." I'll modernize it..."The glacier's are melting, Dear Liza, Dear Liza, the glacier's are melting, dear Liza, the glaciers."
"Well fix it, Dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry, well fix it, Dear Henry, dear Henry fix it."
"By riding your bicycle, you fat fucking American, by riding your bicycle, you fat disgusting fuck."
The lyrics need some work...

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Earwig + Oatmeal


4am - scavenging for breakfast so I can get to work making Robot components. Trip on piano in the haze. I play it all the time and am consciously aware of how learning to play The Entertainer is an insane act when it takes this much work. But I don't care. It's like learning to speak Mayan...and then moving to France.
4:14 - All out of cereal and milk. All out of bananas. No food at all. An old rotten apple. Vodka. Ramen noodles?
4:30- almost going to be late for work. I find some old oatmeal I bought at the halfway house in Laconia in November. That'll work. Just add to boiling water. Simple!
4:40 - Brush teeth and wince when I look at myself in the mirror. More gray hair than brown. Teeth yellowing. Take three aspirin and hope the pain in my back goes away.
4:50- Did I forget the oatmeal. Shit! Run to the stove. Well, it's done, at least. Pour it into the bowl. Add brown sugar and maple syrup. Then more maple syrup. Then some more until it is a little bit of oatmeal in a soup of maple syrup. Fuck it. I'll be dead by afternoon.
4:51 - After a few spoons of oat and syrup I spot a twig in the bowl. I spoon it out and realize it is a dead earwig.

4:53 - determine that since I boiled the hell out of the oatmeal and that I'm dying and since people are starving in Haiti I decide to just eat the oatmeal after flipping the boiled earwig outside.
4:58 - Hi Ho Hi Ho it's off to work I go!

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Cristy's Beach Pizza

Jimmy giving an improvised guest pizza review of Cristy's Pizza in Hampton Beach, NH.
This is as authentic as you can get. The pizza and the humid air and sunset over the nuclear power plant and kids in wading pools and teens walking in short shorts on the boardwalk was the old Hampton. Friends waving in pick up trucks and ice cream dripping down hot hands. drinking dirty martinis on wet plastic chairs, arguing drunkenly over the theory of time travel. This is July in New Hampshire, mullets waving on motorcycle heads, cops decked out and stereos blasting the newest song I'll resent.

Seabrook

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Willin to plagiarize

I thought Old Crow Medicine Show had recorded a pretty nifty tune called Wagon Wheel. I sing it once in a while. Maybe the chorus written by Bob Dylan.




Then I hear a random tune off my ipod from the Byrds untitled cd and it's called Willin' originally by Little Feat, who originally came from Zappa's band. Here's the Byrds version which is slightly mellower than the original. Gene Parsons sounds like he's singing through a portal to the late 1960s. Amazing voice that has hints of Townes Van Zandt.



Well, I'm no expert, but these songs are very similar in chord progression, lyrics, instrumentation and everything. The key is G. Chord Progression of verses is a classic descending bassline G, D/F#, Eminor, C, D

The chorus is A minor, C, G. Then walk the G, A ,B to the next C chord. Eminor, C, D.

The "Willin" part is a gospel half cadence IV-I. C-G.

It just goes to show you that the Byrds covered Dylan tunes and then covered a Little Feat tune which was later stolen by Dylan but never recorded so Old Crow Medicine Show took it and finished it and recorded it and it's a good tune. Maybe that just proves when good musicians steal from each other you still get good music.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Seized

I got excited when I went to visit a naughty webpage and found this greeting from the D.O.J.
They sound serious. It's mostly for show since there are hundreds of these sites and no way to close them all down. How else are the sudanese going to get money for hosting banner ads?

Every single piece of digital media is available if you own a computer. It's not really free since maintaining a computer is expensive but Universal and Paramount don't get as big a cut as they'd like. I wonder if Comcast is technically an accomplice to the crime if they provide the service. They say it's illegal but they charge you for performing an illegal act. They make money when you commit a crime. Do they split their profits? Ethically, Comcast can show a movie to you if you pay for on demand. But if you use comcast internet to just take the movie and watch it on demand then you've also paid Comcast but now you have the movie, just like you have the movie if you pay for on demand. Am I splitting hairs? Is this legalese? What's an analogy? A drug dealer selling drugs as long as you agree not to use them? You can watch a movie on youtube with no problem because youtube has an agreement with the copyright holder to show it. But if you download the same movie and watch it on your computer (off youtube) then you have committed a crime. You could technically watch the movie on youtube in one window (legally) and have the same movie playing next to it in another window (illegally). I know we can go back to kindergarten when they taught us not to steal, but they also taught us to share and if someone wants to share a granny gang bang video with me then what's so wrong about that? It's sharing! Not stealing! Ok, my legal skills are exhausted.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Glass Bead Game...adapted*

"He hoped to arrange and sum up all the knowledge of his time, symmetrically and synoptically, around a central idea. That is precisely what the Glass Bead Game does: pursue the encyclopedic idea...not just a juxtaposition of the fields of knowledge and research, but an interrelationship, an organic denominator."

He was alone in this pursuit, which was universally loathed and considered a philosophical perversion. His efforts were thwarted at every step though at times he felt he had found this organic denominator (which was quixotically related to his own quest) and had cause to celebrate. With no one to share his findings he turned to debauchery, whoring, drinking, drugs, depression and lastly a lonely death in a urine scented cabin. His notes were illegible and were cremated with his emaciated body. And those closest to him nodded proudly that they had foreseen this self-destructive end, had attempted to guide the disturbed philosopher to a path of life insurance premiums and regular weed whacking, but had ultimately failed to add another obedient drone to the mob of 7 billion waiting to fill their car up with gas. Instead of contributing to the holistic understanding of man, his life became an exhibit in favor of conformity.

*apologies to Hermann Hesse

wet flue gas desulfurization technology

"Using wet flue gas desulfurization technology—a “scrubber” system—the project is expected to capture at least 80 percent of the mercury in the coal and reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 90 percent. By law the project must be operating no later than July 2013. The Clean Air Project will supplement more than $50 million in previous investments at Merrimack Station to reduce particulate emissions and nitrogen oxides."


How much more complicated are our lives going to become? For me, this is all heading in the wrong direction. It's getting insanely complicated to maintain a lifestyle that isn't destroying everything. It's like we're already living on the moon. I guess we're really determined to dominate or destroy our environment. It's one or the other. Maybe both. The idea of harmony is like a joke now. Thoreau will probably be classified as a terrorist one day. This paradigm is very hard for me to accept even if I can understand the philosophical underpinnings of it. At some point I start to question if it is just reckless Americans being reckless Americans and wonder if it is actually diabolical inventors securing their wealth at the cost of our health. You know? It wouldn't be the first time that's happened. Look at asbestos.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Independence Day

A year ago I was in Mexico playing music at a cafe. Today I'm sweating through the sheets in New England. What does it all mean? I'm convinced Americans are gasoline junkies. Gasoline and food. It's an addictive society and we're all supposed to walk the fine line of responsible abuse. Most of the younger crowd in Mexico did speed in one form or another. I did not but the heat and small food budget made me lose weight so everyone thought I was a wasted crank fiend. (Ranting about Hannah Montana being the anti-Christ didn't help.) And when I defended myself (sounding like a true junkie) they wondered why I wasn't doing speed. I couldn't win either way. And everyone drank beer after beer. I'm a contrary person because if the mob is doing it then I'm suspicious (since the media controls the mob and Rupert Murdoch controls the media...)
I arrive at decisions slower than anyone I've met except the deranged schizophrenics I met on the street in Santa Cruz. I'm slow because if you habitually examine a choice from all angles then it multiplies all the angles until you've got more angles than time. But it's important, I think, to study the options. Lately, I'm thinking about finding a farm in South America and becoming a pack animal. Portsmouth is becoming this overrun concrete jungle before my eyes. It's not changing by consensus, but by an invisible public opinion or deference to progress. No one really knows how we have two gigantic convention halls back to back where there used to be a supermarket. I can't remember what was at the Marriot location. I really can't even though there was a day when the Market Street Extension didn't exist. We used to drive to Newington on Maplewood Ave. There was no other way.

Consequences. People who do remarkable things (good or bad) proceed bravely and radically, without fear of consequence. If you want to control the fate of man, make news, then you have to put all the sails up, throw all the dead weight overboard and go. The process of refining silicon into solar panels is the result of recklessness. In this case, the recklessness paid off. In other situations like the Hudson River, the Meadowlands of New Jersey, the Gulf of Mexico, it didn't pay off. Recklessness sort of requires you ignore any environmental consequences. The end (solar power) is justified by the means (processing silicon with unpredictable results)

That's what America means to me today. Recklessness in the face of an unforgiving environment. I know that I was born under a lucky star when I have no worries about an animal carrying me off in the night. When was the last time a bobcat walked around Boston?

Yes, the native Americans had come to terms with their habitat but did they have wireless internet? No. And that invention was the latest in a series of reckless achievements for America. It's safe to say that nothing is going to change that because there will always be an excuse to experiment and go forth recklessly into the unknown. Maybe we will cause the next ice age by melting the ice caps and thus lowering the temperature of the earth. And that will be a good excuse to investigate arctic lifestyles. Can I grow tomatoes in the snow? How can we live better considering the circumstances. That's the driving question Americans have asked for 240 years. For the first time in history the government/church not only didn't hinder the inventor, but they encouraged his efforts. How comfortably can we live? It turns out we can live very comfortably and it also turns out that living comfortably is totally isolated from living well. Maybe you are comfortable and maybe you are living well but the two aren't related. Yes, Sony and IBM will tell you they are permanently connected but that's just their marketing team talking. I suspect that comparatively there are still the same number of reasons to be happy or unhappy as there were in 800 B.C.
This is our time and so we think we've got it so much better than the 800 B.C. folks. But I promise you they were thinking the same thing about people who lived in 3000 B.C.
"Man, can you believe people lived without fire?"
"No, I can't. It must've sucked."

Did it suck? No way. It was their time and they were probably proud of the leather bags they made. The ruins in Egypt are proof those folks were proud to be alive. A dog has almost no memory. You take a dog into the woods and the animal thinks it's never going to return to the house. Is it suddenly miserable?

So, this is our time, our time in America. Wires cross the sky to carry information and that's just the beginning. Yes, we are a reckless people and will leap before we do a safety check. I think that's how things are accomplished. Looked at from high above the earth we probably look like we're ungoverned, unruly and dangerously independent, which is exactly what we wanted back in 1776. We were the rogue nation at one time and it worked out pretty good. Maybe we should take a lesson from ourselves and let other countries alone.
Happy independence day.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.