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Bondi Beach, Sydney, NSW c. 2002

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Random thoughts? General comments? Toss them on the pile!

Nov 28, 2007

Reining in my thought processes has been a little difficult lately so I'm just going to dive right into paradox and expound on ineffability. I've been chasing my own tail to find a place to start tonight and keep identifying new layers of meta-meaning that could suffice as the main theme only to find yet another layer on top encompassing and at the same time circumscribed by the swirling mass below. In the past, I've polished and polished before even beginning to write, and of course throughout the process as well. Tonight I am instead intentionally biting off more than I can chew and attempting to catalogue uncertainty and general non-definition, both for its own sake and for the sake of maybe answering a few questions. At the very least, I think it will be critical to make a few structural adjustments to my own mutable framework.

Jan 20, 2007

Hi, my name is James and I'm an amouraholic. If Choose-Your-Poison Anonymous wasn't just a front for cultlike religious indoctrination (get 'em while they're weak and afraid), I'd say we all need to join up for this one. Yes, we're all addicted to love. I'm not talking about real love. I'm talking about the Disney-endorphin-fantasy brand. I'm talking about the kind that's still all pretty in the package before the buyer's remorse sets in; the sixth gear test drive before the sticker shock; the Bali bliss sans open-wound leper; the Barrier-Reef narcosis, hold the bends. You know what I mean: the fairy before it becomes a tale.

Aug 08, 2006

It's time to print a few retractions (revisions, at least). Not too long ago, I was a little afraid of living in the future. Lately I've seen that in quite a different light. I also had some choice words to say about SMS, but now I realize that I was just using it for the wrong things.

Mar 28, 2006

It's been a little too long since I've called people out on their bullshit. Well, some specific people I have, but not specific others; and not general classes of bullshit. On tonight's menu: continued cell phone abuse, airplane abuse, and cowardly relationship abuse.

Mar 28, 2006

There is only one kind of memory we can still believe: the kind recorded by our sense of smell. All the rest can be artificial, deceptive, diaphanous to near invisibility, or fleetingly transient. Sadly it has nothing to do with the way we're wired; it's purely a matter of technology. Incidentally, I wonder how much longer memory month is going to last, and if it will ever go to sudden death.

Mar 20, 2006

I used to think that solving a jigsaw puzzle was a good metaphor for learning and experience. It's very hard to attach new concepts to our partially-trained brains if we don't have a few edge pieces laid out or some gaps waiting to be filled with new nubs. I don't like that metaphor anymore. Jigsaws are so two-dimensional, so rigid, so finite. There are so many ways to assimilate new pieces - they can't possibly be destined to fit into some pre-defined order. The same piece can totally change shape from the first time we pick it up to the next time we try to attach some new experience to it. Learning is a such an interconnected, nebulous, woven, five-dimensional, omni-directional process that the best we can do is focus on compartmental knowledge and dubious causality to try to understand how it works. It's snowing in San Francisco. Did a butterfly flap its wings in New York?

Mar 07, 2006

I'm such a sap. Rarely, maybe twice a year, I get the motivation to sort through the vast collection of dead tree pulp I've accumulated in neat piles on my desk and in my file drawer. This time I've had a new impetus: I bought a safe, mostly for the fire-proof aspect of it. By now I have enough of a collection of paper that I could start to have problems if it disappeared. Not to mention the amount of data I've accumulated that needs a good place for the DVDs it's on.

Dec 15, 2005

I love Mean Girls. I love the movie and I love catty, backstabbing, fingernail-clawing bitches. Well, I loved the movie right up until the middle of the 16th chapter, when Rachel McAdams gets hit by a school bus. Oops, was that a spoiler? That was the point at which my Netflix DVD was scratched and was horribly unplayable. Coincidentally, it was also the point at which the movie started to suck. I wish I hadn't had them send me a replacement copy and I could have stayed in awe of its pure and layered perfection.

Aug 12, 2005

I thoroughly devoured Clublife yesterday and I'm pretty well blown away. I admit that I was sucked in by the probably typical gleeful Schadenfreude that has drawn so many others into it: hearing stories about Guidos and B&T trash getting tossed on their asses by their societal and physical superiors. I also admit that I arrived at the party rather late, so it's a good thing his standing guest list is still open. I found the link through memepool, which doesn't generally lead to anything intellectually stimulating, but this time they struck gold.

Aug 12, 2005

I'm a pretty complacent person, especially at five in the morning. That is in the general case. This has been no ordinary run-of-the-mill couple of weeks, though. I tried go to bed early tonight and was foiled this time not by my chronic insomnia but the shrill clatter of the worst four-dollar phone in the ignominious history of corded tone-dialed phones. I fell back to sleep cranky and irritable, amazingly managing to break the insomniac cycle for at least a few days, but in such a tweaked state even dreams reflect the darker misanthropic undercurrents of my overinflated hyperintellectual egotism. If you're acutely sensitive to extreme concentrations of vitriol, or you aren't quite ready to be exposed to my dark and dangerous underbelly, perhaps it's best to move along now.

Aug 10, 2005

Neela recently announced her blog, coincidentally as I've just rekindled my love affair with San Francisco. Oh, she's a fickle mistress. I only half-heartedly believe that because I've only ever been her houseguest that I don't get to see her when she's not on her best behavior. New York City - the other great love of my life - I get to see her at her best, but sadly I also get the full picture. I get to see her at her sickening worst.

Aug 09, 2005

I've just learned a few hours ago how to play my favorite Live song, The Distance. I usually don't develop favorite songs from the lyrics - it's almost always all about the melody, progression, and harmony. Hell, half the time I don't even know the right words to a song until I look at the lyric sheet! Having spent so much time staring at this song, though, I guess I got conditioned into a certain path of late-night meditation. Why is it that we have so much clarity lying awake in the darkness, yet it scatters like blackbirds when the lights come up?

Feb 14, 2005

No, this isn't about some hallmark holiday. It's about a completely different commercial farce entirely. I shake my head at you, Mr. King.

Jan 29, 2005

God damn it's good to have a photographic memory; I couldn't have a better image branded onto my mind's retina right now. Something about prolonged lack of sleep dilates that pupil to the point where it's like a little Irish Catholic high school girl in Jamaica at noon: drunk, impressionable, and very likely to get burnt.

Jan 24, 2005

Nothing worse than an empty journal staring back at you. And by you, I mean me. Anyway. Obviously it's late.

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