Conceit

Is a word that means pride, hubris, or an idea of your own. I can't help but feel like that's deliberate.

I've been talking a lot lately, speaking the English I've come to lament (it even makes you capitalize itself). And Sapir-Whorf and this and morality as causality and vice versa (what if we're all tiny blasphemies alive in the mind of God?) and on and on and on. Twixt that and the future, I need a new hobby. I'm beginning to bore myself, so I can't imagine what it's like for the rest of you.

...

I told someone what I was afraid of yesterday, and I was honest, and I thought about it, and I said myself. So that's it. I've been afraid of myself lately. Better fear than hate.

Holidays

Not so much blogging, lately. Less and less, as the year dragged on, in fact. Which is fine-I've been busy. I have a life outside this blog, you know.

I have had work of all sorts, friends to make and lose and wave goodbye/hello to. I've moved, lots of ways. I have been in love, and isn't that something.

I've been well, but I've been busy. You understand. So for the holidays, for the sudden surge in family and friends and the torrent of Days to Pay Attention to. Thanksgiving (good, this year) and Xmas, Cthulhumas and Zmas, New Year's Even New Year's Day, Perihelion(11AM January 3rd) and my birthday, coming. Happy holidays, all of you.

Relatives

Several, in quick succession. So that's good-it is! And there's been rather a lot of fugue lately, so that's part of my absence. Whoops.

Nothing to be done about it. But I have been busy, don't doubt, like Josh and his Zeppelin. Hours in a tube, feeling field effects heat my blood, shift and push my tissues. Magnets, loud fucking magnets. Jesus, that's weird.

Saw a church today called Jesus Pursuit. Sounds vaguely...predatory? Like they're hunting Jesus through a jungle, or something. The least dangerous game. Also, put off some Mormons at the door recently with what I'd call a very cogent agnosticism. Yes, I'm an agnostic, rather than an atheist. Our motto's We Don't Know, and We Don't Care.

ANYWAY...

So it's been odd, full and weary and cold. But good, don't get me wrong. And this is great today, thrilling.

Futures

I think a lot about what makes people happy, and what doesn't. When I say "people", I'm extrapolating my own limited experience onto the tiny sliver of self that the Rest of You make available, so I would be the first to admit that my guesses are just that and that any and all of the things that I "think" and "express" should and do and will have "fucking" "quotes" "around" "all" "of" "them". 

Caveats aside-what makes people happy? What makes me happy? 

Other people, my usual answer, and the relationships that they provide/obtain. But time goes on, that answer gets more and more pat, and I'm questioning it. I think that the Rest of You are great, don't get me wrong. And good, objective, scientific studies suggest that the people who are consistently happiest are the ones that have the most/best interpersonal relationships. I get that, I'm subscribing to it. 

Time comes, though, and I think about unhappiness, and what prompts it. From my own experience, I feel like I have to pay attention to the places I interfere with those relationships, where I get in the way of my own being happy. Where I try to make the world what I want it to be, when I have expectations of outcomes and manipulate those relationships....that's where I interfere in my own happiness. Again, this is what I've been going on for a while now, and I'll tell you, it's been going OK. Better than before this particular worldview, let me tell you. More and more, as I get older and further up my own ass...I think about causality. 

Hang in there, I'm gonna try and tie this all together. 

CAUSALITY, the way everything happens. If/then or time or Newtonian Physics or Laplace's Demon or what-the-fuck-ever...we're all walking around with a reasonable metaphorical representation of how the world works. The moon draws up the sea because of the similarity of their natures, the choler rises in my body likewise and makes me angry and violent. The inverse square law defines the gravitational relationships between bodies of various masses. Rain comes when we propitiate Ishtar, my bike breaks down because I didn't propitiate Wheel-Woman. The big bang started the universe expanding, which led to gasses cooling and coalescing into stars, which further fused light elements into more complex heavier ones, initially through normal fusion processes then eventually in supernovae that seeded the Milky Way galaxy with the necessary diversity of elements to give rise to complex organic chemistry, then life, then sentience, then language and so on. God punishes sinners, lifts up the righteous. Karma's gonna get you, bad or good. We all have bloody thoughts, and lose control. Men are one way, women another. The spice must flow. 

One thing leads to another, the world of cause and effect. What my previous paragraph was getting at, and the thing that resonates and sticks with me, is that none of us agree on any of it. Everyone walks around with different models of the universe, each of them just as valid as any other. Language gives us tools to cooperate and seemingly agree, but ultimately my blue is not your blue, my giraffes are not yours. I don't interact with the "real" world, I interact with a model of the world that I taint and twist with the story I tell about it.  We're all telling different stories, all just stories that tell themselves.  And while I feel like a good and rational Transhumanist, a skeptic and a scientist and empirically interested...I have to tell you, my narrative can't adequately describe the Rest of You. 

I believe in Free Will, capitals and everything.  If I can imagine or understand or describe anything (I can, I've checked) then so can the Rest of You. I think people are engines of infinite risk, machines for making surprises. Marvelous and magical as this is, it's also a horror. 

One of the things that makes us unhappy is when that sense of how gets broken, when it becomes useless in the face of that (falsely) empirical world of the senses...that seems to be upsetting, is my observation. Narratives can be upset on purpose when we try to control each other, when we interfere deliberately in each other's causality. Lord knows that happens all the time. But it can also fall apart in the face of the impossible, since the impossible is only what we cannot imagine to be true. Think of all the people you know who have lousy imaginations. Think of all of their impossibles. Think of your own. And mine. 

Grapples

Hug-apples, crapples. Woe and fruit and riding and writing.

...

I am, as some of you know, an able and ambitious hallucinogenicist. I have loads of experience doing  lots of things that are (theoretically) bad for you, and I have come through, unscathed, every time. I take no small pride in this, and I have been to and fro in my head, out in the world.

I am better for it. Lots of ways. 

...

I can only do what I can understand, what I can imagine. The world is bounded by the legos-of-the-mind I have access to, and the more I have, the more I make. Tripping's given me lots of legos, offered me more and more punctuated moments to make myself anew. The experience of it, the vivid schizophrenia, the world turned up. I realized on my last birthday that there was a point when I could consume information-music, TV, what have you-and have no idea whether it was good. I lost my taste, my critical eye. Completely.

That's handy, that is. Moments like that are worth having with yourself.

And it is grueling, the hours of unstoppable force. It's that metaphor I'm relying on now, the riding-it-out. Because once in there's no out, there's nothing to be done but endure it no matter how it wears and wrecks and wracks (and it's been fucking puissant, once or twice). That's what this is, what now is like. Grueling, and to be endured. I'd like to think that I'll be better for it.

Ache

I save my tears. I have a lot, tonight.

Breath

I have little enough of my own, lately. Taken every which way-thieves-in-the-night, don't you know. So it pains me to spare some for the Rest of You.

But I am compelled. Transfixed. Mesmerized. Eponymed.

I've been paying a lot of attention to the birds, having a lot of conversations with myself. The one's a metaphor for the other, the outside speaking to the inside by having the inside use the outside as its trope. More nonsense.  But it has been useful to me, to my conversations.

I have a lot of conversations.

I like "reify" and "narrative" and "pataphor" and "actuality" and "Uruguay*" and "philosophy of personality". I like the illusion, and the legend, and Melpomene. I like my flaws and my bigotries and my defects of character. I like my foes. I like my strangers (there's a reason they call them that) and my dying acquaintances. I love my friends, so many of them now.

I like you. Whoever you are. Well done.







*for the pampas.

Qoordinates

Have shifted, people and places and cats (which are people...and places, now that I think about it. Fucking words) all living differently. It's been a minute, and today I explored and saw, and decided to write about it. Where I live, I mean.

We've moved from the Whiteaker neighborhood, which was a delightfully hip and shaggy place up in the center of town, to a new place and new neighborhood (Westmoreland...W) which is bourgeois and polished and sort-of unfriendly. But it's also green and lush, and comfortable. The cats are having the times of their lives, and so am I. Close to the bike path and right against the creek, which is surprisingly pretty and full of life for a man-made drainage ditch. Goes to show...

There's a heron lives nearby-I see him again I'll give him a name. There's a stand of trees down the path I've named the Hobo Copse, since it's where they congregate and a pun. There's a 24 hour convenience store, there's a grocery store. There's west 11th, if I need some pavement or ugly. There's a dishwasher and a microwave and a clean smooth oven and washer/dryer robots and venetian blinds (stupid!) and a patio. There's a tanning room, where I'll burn my flesh with radiation to be dark in the winter.

It's good. I'm good, and well, and glad. You're reading this, it's likely you should know.

Entborg

Is my favorite new word. It makes me happy like I can't describe.

I'm happy like I can't describe.

Haemolymph

That terrible peal you heard in your bandwidth was me howling my way back into the electric noosphere after two weeks of absence. Terrible it was, like losing a limb.

I'm only kidding a little.

Smoking Pol Pot

Not the most topical of titles, but I just heard it and it rang out so delightful I'm sharing.

Sigh...

I'm just not feeling it today, wore myself ragged and sad today. Dave described to me once how chewing on things bored him, made him tired of himself. It's gems like that make the rest of you worthwhile.

I am so tired of myself right now.

And there's not a good reason, or there's nothing to be done. I'm wise enough to know when I'm not being rational or sensible, when I'm just Ripley grinding the wheels. I'll wait it out, and be happy tomorrow, or Sunday, or on the moon.

What's the only way to be sure? They tried and failed? Are you a god? Nerdy shibboleths, all of them. Shibboleth like shoggoths, things that should not be. And blind albino penguins, beneath the surface of the earth.

I've responded to spam from various angles lately, not least of which my mother. Aphorisms she sent me, culled down and distilled from the electric noosphere. Not my bag, but data contributing to my Mom Simulation, so...valuable. I sent her back the following, with the same aim in mind. Add it to your Aaron.

There's lots of kinds of smart, there's only one kind of stupid. 

I'm not in charge. 

Everyone gets to do whatever they want. 

My bones are made of iron, my heart is made of gold. 

Nothing's as wasteful as righteousness.

I lead a charmed life. 

Do you want to be happy, or do you want to be right? 

I don't subscribe to that model of causality. 

Everyone thinks they're right, pretty much all the time. 

I can't be killed. (I love being able to say this, it's like a riddle. Can't disprove it, dead people can't be wrong. All they can be is dead) 

Nothing in my life ever got better because I got angry at it. 

Everyone's a coward about something. I decided to be afraid of being afraid. It never helps, I make theworst decisions, and most of the time being afraid of something ends up being worse than the thing I'm actually afraid of. 

I'm still a coward, don't get me wrong. 

Most people are doing an impression of what they think a person is. 

Stab 'em till they're happy, shiv 'em till they grin.

Stabbed myself in the big toe today, the right one. Deep-to the bone. Had it coming, I did.

I've moved, we've moved. Places and objects and fucking dust in my lungs and my eyes and everywhere, everywhere. New digs and vistas, the cats won't shut up about it. New fears and demands, so many full plates to spin.

...

I can't tell if I'm happy yet. I'll have to acquire and accumulate. I want more data. 

Nostalgia and Atoms

No taste for either, though I respect the necessity of atoms (for now).

I've been tearing through my closets, the dusty strata of my past here. I haven't moved in nine years, and at the time I moved in here I was living out of a couple of suitcases. I've accumulated so much matter, so many objects. Fucking atoms.

And some of them, many of them have value. Lots are crap, don't get me wrong, and I've gotten much more ruthless in defining "crap". But there were papers and pictures and leftover relics. The aftermath of me and mine, things I hadn't thought of in a long time.

Burn it all.

Everyone forgets the Articles of Confederation.

AND we're good. Place to live, cats and friends and laundry. It's the little triumphs.

There were a lot of you (really, lots) who came forward for me and mine. Thank you. I love you dearly.

Declarations

I've reached the point where I feel the need to be informative, and as here offers me the broadest spectrum, I'm going to sing out for a moment. I'll try to be clear and communicative, but it's hardly my forte. Bear with me, I'm taut and fraught and stressed.

David and I are moving. We just don't know to where.

Not having moved in some time, we have been beating the bushes and looking the best we can. We've both been uncommonly set here though (almost 5 years here for him, 9 for me) and I certainly don't feel as though I have the sensibilities or the skills that would make this a painless experience. So as of right now, we're moving by the First of Sept Ember, but it's still a mystery as to where.

This isn't good, I know. Still, I've gotten sort of used to gaming it out, running complex simulations of potential futures in my head. I have a worst case scenario, and it's not bad. We can shove all of our things somewhere (several options here) and couch surf until something opens up. While not an optimal plan, it is clearly viable, thanks to the generous and thoughtful society of People I Know. Practically, we should be fine.

The primary stumbling blocks are the cats, two. One black, one grey. While many (lots, to my surprise) of my friends are willing to kennel me and/or Dave, the cats are a more complicated issue, both for keeping while we float and for moving in general. So while this is informative, it's also solicitous. If you're well positioned to cat-sit for a week (or perhaps more), drop me a line. If you'd like to host either Aaron or David in the event of our regrettable homelessness(we're good company), drop me a line. 

Wish us luck.

Sulfur

Angst, angst and pathos. Bathos too, but not today. I've been scurrying and scrambling, and while I have nothing to fear, I am, for the first time in a minute...I'm afraid.

It's not what you think.

Philodox

I've started editing Wikipedia. Like crossing the Rubicon, there's no going back. Not that there was in the first place, really.

...

Froyo today, heat today. And relatives, recently. I have very (very). Very little in common with the rest of my family. But I love them dearly, these strange people I know for biological reasons. And they're not boring, none of them. That's rare, and I'll enjoy it regardless of our respective memeplexes and their subscriptions.

Gamist, Narrativist, or Simulationist?

 No pussy-footing around. Pick a fucking side already. My trichotomies are false, too.

It was a good day on the internet today, lots of beautiful. Like this, and this, and this. Sorry ahead of time for the redundancies.

Flair

Coronal Mass Ejections today. Four of them. Keep watching the skies, and hold on to your genes.

Nature's Ninjas

As I produce new meat-world content, I do a certain amount of market research. Studying the reactions I get, the popularity of my memes. Some things do better than others.

Lately, let's make raccoons smarter. We can do this. It'd be easy. Raccoons breed yearly, produce 2-5 offspring, reach sexual maturity within a year. Give me 5 years, maybe 30 breeding pairs of raccoons, 10-12 staff...I think I could produce a breed of markedly more intelligent raccoon. Then, let 'em loose.

Put them in cities, all over. Let them coordinate their less enlightened brethren. Make them tools-knives, lockpicks, lighters, guns. Plastics doped with raccoon pheromones, sized for tiny hands. See where it goes.

It can be a pilot program-crows, cats, rats. Lots of urban symbiotes ripe for uplift. Let's get started-we need an understudy species.