A Pack of Lies! (Tragedy of the commons)

(new category: nostradamus)

Search engine marketing is a symptom of our current global-awareness/attention-plundering tragedy of the commons.

The more we struggle to make ourselves heard, the more noise we make, the more we make the rest of the world stupid and impoverish it with our noise.

We cannot read two things at once. Attention is a finite resource.

Our aggregate attention span is imploding, as the universe wakes up and realizes how stupid it is (before promptly forgetting).

The more we search online for answers, the stupider we realize we are (yes, stupider is a word).

We rely on the search engine, because we feel so stupid.

The more searches we make, the more powerful the engine becomes, and less trustworthy are the searches, because search results are a commodity, and so answers are being ranked, bought and sold by search engine marketers.

(We still can have faith in questions though. until we start Googling 'What is my question?')

We don't notice this corruption, because we don't have time. We rush to understand. We fail. Because the noise is drowning everything out, because it needs to make itself heard. The noise is trying to make sense of the noise, creating more noise. This is called a vicious cycle, or positive feedback loop, or whatever other euphemism for 'shitstorm' (which is itself a euphemism malphemism).

Attention is a finite resource.

Money, obviously, is not.

Google cannot be benign. Monopolies are eminently corruptible. Search engines rob from the poor and give to the rich.

Search engines allow spammers to traffic in your attention. As time goes on, search engines, once a democratic tool to find what you want, will completely ensure that loud voices are the ones to get heard.

There is way begin reversing the search-engine attention trap: Make attention (counted by the number of neuron firings in your brain) the only valid currency. Attention must supersede money if we are to protect our well-being. The attention-based economy is democratic and fair. The search-engine economy is a black box, susceptible to the vagaries of expedient algorithms that determine maximum gain for those who trade in search.

[I fear the future semantic web because I fear applying someone else's cognitive feedback loops to unborn generations; I'm pretty sure digital conditioning will be more effective long term than Coca cola. And yeah this is a pretty loopy post but screw you - you've read this far]

Only when we enshrine attention rights as inviolable, then those who abuse and seduce it with noise will lose ground.

Attention = love = all the prayers and blog posts of the earth = what's better than money.

[????]

One word: Metacrap

Job Titles 1998-2008

Too many!

• Student in Economics, Classics, Linguistics, Italian, Publishing, Urban Planning, Web Design
• Office Drone
  
• Humour Editor
• Local News Reporter
• Editor-in-Chief
• University Recruitment Officer
• Expat in Italy
  
• Cupcake Man
• Chateauvian: Pastry Chef and Rock Concert Promoter
  
• Teaching Assistant
• Chef, Community Soup Kitchen
  
• Pun Gent
• Would Be Community Organizer (Ha Ha)
• Campaign Volunteer
  
• Event Planner and Fundraiser
• Freelance Web Designer(eg buy this book)
  
• Copy and Technical Writer
• Amateur Bartender
  
• Copy and Online Editor
• Digital Media Director
• Web Content Manager (Advancement Division)
• Squeaky Fat Guy

Conclusion: He tried hard to outrace boredom.

Wizard of Oz

The author and his hookah, Jan. 2006

25 alternatives to calling it "The Next Great Depression"

1. The Greater Depression
2. The Megathump
3. The Plummeting
4. Global Smackdown
5. The Black Debt
6. The Beggary
7. The Crunk
8. EconoPox!
9. The Harrowing MegaSputter
10. The Intolerable Mellowing
11. Cashtration Nation
12. The Unemplosion
13. The Wayward Lurch
14. World War Wimpy
15. The InterKnot
16. Earth & Wind and Firings
17. Beetle Bailout
18. The WTF by The WTO
19. IMFucking Worried
20. The Epic Fail
21. DOW, That Hurts!
22. The EI-EI-EI OWE
23. TSX in the Shitty
24. Dustbowl II: Lust in the Dust
25. The Greedemption

Yours?

10 Ideas for NaNoWriMo

1. The Unpronounceable Murmurings of Nathaniel P GurgleFist: tracking the final syllables of a man on his deathbed who tries to communicate with his fist in his mouth. A sad tale of phonetic potential ultimately squandered.
   
2. A man and a giant squid play chess underwater at SeaWorld. Man falls in love with squid. Squid demurs. Man pokes squid with a bobby pin and squid explodes in a passionate inky death. Nah too slapstick.
   
3. An anal-retentive druid comes home from work one day to a giant smelly outhouse stench in the druid guild hall and so he invents monotheism to piss off his colleagues.
4. A Root Beer Float for Ramses II: The Egyptian Pharaoh builds a time machine and travels to 1964 Salt Lake City where he runs a soda bar and embraces Mormonism. When the ghost of El Ron Rubbard (L Ron Hubbard's GalactoMexican nemesis) comes to him in a dream Ramses realizes that the time machine is not enough -- he must travel to the centremost planet of the galaxy, and co-write the deepest commandment of the universe and purge existence of all its thetans (Also, Get Behind Me Thetan!)
   
5. Kurt Vonnegut is raised from the dead when all the Earth's alarm clocks go off at once during a public reading by Matt Damon of Cat's Cradle. Zombie Vonnegut has X-ray vision and feasts on the skulls of Bush era Republicans. He can still draw pictures of sphincters but in his incomprehensible zombie drawl he has difficulty finding an art agent.
6. Go Bjork, Young Man: A photojournalist in Iceland is obsessed with Bjork. The nations newspapers pitch in and pay for his therapy (hey that's just a cheap shot at Bjork)
   
7. Emus for Tootie: The Facts of Life musical hits New Zealand, and it has trouble attracting an audience. Until Peter Jackson saves the day by taking the reins and introducing a loveable cast of hairy footed women who go to boarding school and wear frumpy clothing. Andy Serkis as Tootie.
   
8. The Strange Dreams of One Iris Groovethorne: a day by day listing of Iris Groovethorne's incredible dreams. Oh just you blanche at the dreaming!
   
9. Eleven cats live a life a feline frivolity in a sewer main somewhere in downtown West Palm Beach. Until one day a twelfth cat falls down a trapdoor from street and claims to be an escapee of Donald Trump's $125-million mansion renovation where even the cats are put to work and they are forced to give up their feline independence. The cats confront Trump's construction crews and assault them with an ingenious series of Ernest-Goes-to-Camp style forest-guerilla assaults, A must read for cat lovers and home improvement buffs as well as forest gorillas. Jim Varney's corpse appears in the final chapter and is mined for its poetic symbolism.
10. Tread Lightly, Dr. Jung: Carl Jung wakes up one morning and discovers he has been transformed into a giant insect archetype. Sigmund Freud tries to swat him with a couch, among other trials. Eastern Europe is thrown into fits of sniggering. Not for Westerners.
    

What are the alternatives

What are we, drawn into ourselves by chiseled time. Sketched into stone by self sustaining repetition aka conditioning, sometimes conscious and sometimes, I dunno, deep, unknowable, maybe geothermally leaked, carved into an impressive pattern, our body bed, space for the universe inside his image, supporting Niagara Falls effluvia through the persistence of a rivulet [tilt]

Overly deep, the madmen creep under the waves, poking never a head above, they drown without oxygen where there is no love.

Of awesome powers plenty, men to admire too few, he said "that's why I worship nature, but won't shake hands with you."

In fifteen minutes of not doing it only one reason stands reasonable enough: to kiss the missus, yes -- that's a good alternative to spewing this stuff.

How I Prevented Nuclear Holocaust

(my random act of kindness)

I was searching my hair for lice, with a comb. On the edge of the comb was a sticky note, with the words "Jihad is Wrong ~Jimmy Carter". I immediately dialed Jimmy Carter's number in Washington and told him he misplaced his sticky note. He said thanks and could I Fedex it over? I said yes and did just that, and as Carter wrote later in his memoirs, he gave the sticky note to its intended recipient, the Ayatolllah Khomeini. Since that time Iran has launched no nuclear weapons, and if our world leaders keep using 3M sticky notes, they probably never will. That's how I made the world a safer place (and no longer have head lice).

My screen is shattered but hell you need me

Never been so unrestrained and yet focused, never has this weight vanished so blessedly, never have I been so free to be so me. The blog was awaiting my sigh; I was never pompous about the need for purity. I boycotted for the first time, on strike to guarantee my lifeline, twisting in an hourglass until I found the time.

We observe and ape wild seductive methods, untrue expedients that succeed at blurry distance, we are consigned to blunt objects, brute conclusions, frozen resolute regretful obtrusions.

I won't rhyme just cuz I'm able, but pair sound and sense deliberately, so that the rhythm doesn't run off with the brain, a syllabic concatenation as runaway train.

***

[I dance sometimes in the early morning, don't mind me if I do. I will wake you up, my buttercup, and make you breakfast too.]

Twenty five minutes and I'm gone

(killing time -- I missed it)

Limits get results, a hurdle before me artificially coaxes creativity, squeezing blood from oblivion, inspiring netizens to dig within. But if I'm remembered for one thing, bronzed on a pin and shouted about at parties for a game where winning didn't matter, was anti-matter, where I was thick of skin, that's when I dissolve grudges and begin:

There are lights above the muck, and I get shivers in my spine, even from the firetrucks

A toast then, to the marathon men, I was one of them, I ran, broke all my bones; I spent my very best years raising funds over telephone. What then, did I get? A slap on the back and five percent bonus on my paycheque.

But I'm fine with fruit, cave slaving, my shiny bag of loot. (I have a saxophone in my laptop bag, and there are online forums too for how to play the flute).

What boredom! We are constantly at war. No wonder how we snore. For if all the world agreed, there would be anarchy. Hands in the air? Me! me! Buddha won't let me be, until he humbles me (They penalize who's first in line to extinguish all their greed).

Whither

Broken silence is regretful
When absence is the thing I've lacked
But generalizations, I find too stressful
That's how I earn my 'Man in Black'

I don't thrive on exposition
not so much secrecy as I'm too tired
The only thing I can't remember is
what life was like before the wire.

Watching the chili

I miss you, PM

More than [The size and shape of a nuclear plant cooling tower.]

But now the Internet won't leave me alone.

I would explain more [the above parentheses] but
digits are my job and spitting syllables becomes the enemy, totally foreign to
reveal my mind when my only breath is to
enjoy emptiness, embrace blank slates and
skip along with contentment upon
encountering my harried fellow
citizens in the shopping mall.

Admiring my empire from inside a bottle of ketchup

O, rude people, sad citizens, drowning in your thick-necked wizardry and donkey-minded back-and-forthery--will there be a peaceful moment for my clucking to cash your quickness? Hep, young lackeys! Untether my goats. I am hastened toward doom if no wench can cut through ear crusts and mend her wayward belching. If I sneeze in your face, and your brain is beslimed, your guts unsteady, then inhale that wet whisky and redouble yourself all the more!

Yech. I am agog, filled with brine. I rain these invectives for a reason, yet you quiver as toads under a shepherd's boot. Do you choose life, or loathing? Parcels of piffle, or proof and providence? Alliteration, or agony? All the more I impel you and yet you crumple in your daily quagmire. A martyr's death I'll choose before lurching under your bloodfisted baron's capricious yoke.

What there? An unassuming Olympiad? Call my mile-long trains and plunder them for a feast. Oh bottler, a million buckets of creamed soda! A tyrant's end to the unworthy! A joyous clanging amid the cock's drudgerous crow! A re-boinking of all redundancy and extra melting under the warm watery sun!!!

Things are rather flonk

Flonkishness abounds. There are many reasons. Copious like grains of sand. I was prappish, I was dunglish, but now all is frisia and butterscones, glashnoo and punabbly.

We wonder why it took so long for this vortex of meanderglow. But patience, like a feather grack, floats in far flung crevices.

Is there a brighter boygan? Is there a likelier mass of marzifleck—in oceans of under the riverbed? I know not.

Oh peppered pillows of pink, inside the undermount sink! Floating clockwise down a stainless steel drain, mixed up with macadamia and sprinkled by rain. Opium poppy powder pizza-pie piledrivers are often discussed, picked apart and proferred but in mid-July we sing instead the snappish chart toppers. Do I wheeze when sun rays are like lanterns of shiny hair? I don't think so, I just don't care.

As for blondie, she and me are in the middle of our history, no time to write, when we use up all the light admiring the light.

Love in the Diner (04/07)

I had a strange experience today
After a 30km bike ride to the Beaches
and back in the spitting wind,
I finally made a break at Bathurst and College
at the College St Diner which
serves excellent pancakes although it has been known
to charge 50 cents a packet for strawberry jam.

In my recent streak of sheer psychic excitement
I've concluded I must be having a telepathic effect on total strangers
so wrapped up am I in this, this thing for which I have too much respect to name
that steam is pouring out my ears and infecting others

anyway it must have been a sign when
just after I ordered the 'Can't Talk, Eating' hungry-man special
four goodlooking philosophers (definitely not Toronto natives) - one woman, three men -
well coiffed, toned, erudite and inquisitive
sat down next to me and proceeded
to hold forth on
LOVE
'what love is' one of them asked
and that hooked me
and what's the difference between love and being in love
and whether love is an overused word
how it means whatever it wants to mean to whomever wants to use it
how the word means nothing at all, really
and how words generally do that.

I couldn't believe my ears
these philosophers
thirtysomething professorial types
the kind who can breezily discern semantics over brunch
the four most intelligent people on the planet, really
having this analytical argument
about the meaning of love
in which
my universe hung in the balance
they were talking about me
everything seems to be about me lately
- I deserve a healthy shake, I know -
I would have banged my sugar shaker on the table
to get their attention
saying 'hey folks, love is war and
you're looking at one of the foot soldiers!'
but I'm trying to give up sugar
in favour of healthier smoothie-type things
and so I kept silent
and they kept mocking me
four feet away

but the coincidence was too precious so
resourceful as I am I
asked the waitress for a pen
so I could jot this down for later
that was my revenge for
them talking about me and my war
ie me writing about them
so I unfolded my bike map of toronto
with the entire city depicted
(I use that map to figure out how to get around)
and wrote all over it but now it's ruined as
in scribbling in all of this
my words filled in all of lake ontario and half of the downtown west end.

(i know I must be preoccupied these days
but there are sensible ways to deal with it and there are crazy ones for
instance
on the way out of the diner
thinking about what it all meant
I accidentally walked right smack into the
women's bathroom
I guess I was looking for you
luckily no one screamed
but boy was I red.)

Built to last

Oh big boy, long at the beginning and thin in the end, mend yourself, send yourself a note, what it was she wrote.

Aggrandize, release, contemplate, celebrate, scrivel in disappearing ink what everyone thinks. The columnists, calumnists, trysts in the mist, the abcess, the cyst.

2 wheels good, 4 wheels bad

(written in 2007, posted today)

I got hit by a car, for the third time, while on my bike and I’ve got say it’s begun to upset me.

What upsets me most is how much I deserved it. A blow to my pride.

I realize I’m a tempting target, resplendent in my plastic helmet, legs pumping like a comely gazelle, just asking to be gunned down by the nearest metal death machine. I realize that bicycles have no place on the road, and that if a 15-tonne truck fails to see me it is completely my fault. Under the ‘survival of the fittest’ (not athletically fit, but 'he who possesses the most body armour' principle) there is no getting around blaming the victim.

Of course if bicycles dare to enter mixed traffic, they are vehicles under the Highway Traffic Act. Since the Highway Traffic Act was designed by motorists, for motorists, what this means is that bikes are actually cars. They are not, in fact, bikes. What a coup!

While upwardly mobile types may see this as promotion, I fear it is a misclassification. Unfortunately there is something called reality, which makes life and driving very inconvenient. The Highway Traffic Act is right: bikes are no different from a cement mixer, which is why I guess this last driver who hit me got confused; he thought I was one of his buddies and just wanted to give me a friendly tap. In a similar exercise in reality: when I put my bike helmet in the fridge, it actually becomes a watermelon, so it should come as no surprise if my girlfriend eats my helmet while I’m in the ICU recovering from latest cement-mixer love tap. Once again, it’s completely my fault.

Clearly, helmets do not belong in the fridge, and cyclists do not belong on the road. We must not allow a light, convenient mode of traffic to infest the asphalt, omitting to pollute and omitting to destroy the expensive right of way. Bicycles are too fast for downtown traffic, which according to longstanding traditions ought to function at a crawl. Have you ever seen a cyclist zip through a completely unnecessary traffic signal downtown, as though he had figured out a better way to navigate the road? Not to sit at an intersection and wait for a traffic light - what a horrendous level of efficiency! It’s as though with cyclists, the millions we spend on traffic signals would be completely redundant. This is a mockery! Not to mention we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year repairing our roadways so that cars and trucks may continue to revert them to rubble. Why, my bike’s failure to destroy the roads threatens to put thousands of construction crews out of work. Why should our politicians divert workers to build subways when they can clean up after automobile wreckage? (Enough nonsense - cars can’t drive on subway tracks, not until we invent special wheels for them.)

Of course, a car goes fast. Much faster than a bike. Yet somehow, lots of cars put together don’t go so fast. When you put 1.5 million cars in Toronto – they go very very slow. The more of them there are, the slower they go? How is this possible; I must be bad at math! Yet I’ve seen it every time downtown: the slower they go, the faster my bike goes in comparison.

But who cares about that anyway, because driving in a car makes you feel free! Free to travel across the country, stopping at every fast-food monopoly at the government-allocated rest stops along the way. Free to pay thousands in mandatory insurance fees, free to line up at the gas pump, free to be fleeced by your mechanic. So free! Free to go wherever you want to go, as long as there are roads, and as long as you don’t mind being surrounded by thousands of cars, all exercising their freedom to commute 90km a day from the suburbs – free to give up any alternative to your car! You’re an individual, so don’t bother to share space on the subway. So free! So many millions of motorists, all exercising their freedom in exactly the same way on an identical stretch of road! Freedom to do what you want - that’s what makes the Highway Traffic Act and the hundreds of rules you need to learn to obtain your license so great!

But yes, there is traffic! Solution? Build more roads, so more cars can rocket around to more places! Will the traffic come to the new roads too? I’ve got a hunch it won’t. Somehow, drivers will stop crowding the roads if we keep paving the city and turn all available urban land over to cars! I’m bad at math, so who cares about logic too!

Will we ever give up cars? Likely not. For this involves heeding another feature of reality, namely history. It was actually the League of American Wheelmen, a cycling interest group, who got American roads paved over, before there were cars everywhere, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Thankfully we have managed to forget this. We don’t want motorists to feel guilty about dispossessing someone else’s territory, pretending it was theirs all along, and then lay waste to it – those pesky Indians make us feel guilty enough for stuff like that.

And so a few of us are sacrificed each year, in the name of tunnel vision, denial and a complete lack of common sense. So be it. I managed to survive my last three love taps, but when my number comes up, I’ll fly gleefully off the handles toward the tough but fair arms of that fateful telephone pole. It’s tough love from that cement-mixer, I guess, because it’s love.

I did it!

I deactivated my Facebook.

Friendship has meaning again.

We'll see how long I last.

To/from us

We tumbled head over shoulder, face down on the sidewalk, end over end, jacket on the pavement, quite literally on the way to the movies, metaphorically much more. Open doors, evaporating clouds, hearing music never known because our hearts are turned up loud.

We got a little left tonight, we stroll along the lake, we won that right, your day off today after all, and I see your eyes are made of light.

My job's making music out of music. I mix it up to make it right. Now you've meta-musician, skip the sounds and wave to the waves, each song a ripple stitched together, interlinked as levers, free, no cost except what we couldn't save.

On the wall is the picture of the shadow of the kiss in the sand, and the stereo plays the eternal band, it's Mick and Keith and Bowie and the Cult and sweet soul sister, your little hand is in my hand.

M&J Discuss Anticipation

(March 31, 2007)


M: So you met her?
J: Not yet
M: What are you going to do?
J: Repaint my walls. Buy new clothes, get a face lift, the usual.
M: But you don’t have to change, you’re good enough.
J: Oh but good enough isn’t good enough for me.
M: For me or for her?
J: For her for me.
M: What does she want?
J: I don’t know but I’m afraid.
M: That's not right.
J: Oh but it is.

...

M: Facebook makes all my friends look so small
J: We were special once.
M: I never understood, don’t fill in all those likes and dislikes.

...

J: Generalized anxiety or somesuch.

...

J: I’m spotting flaws in Bob Dylan’s vocal delivery.
M: You are intolerable.
J: What is the point? I get jarred every time I go up North.
M: Aren’t you tired of nothing making sense?
J: I still believe I can fight the world.
M: You’re a fook
J: God bless the fools. They refuse to accept reality.
M: I said fook, not fool.
J: Whatever.
M: I think so often a word spoken at the right time could change a person’s life.
J: At my 100th birthday, I’m going to get up and make a three hour speech. I will have every single guest stand up and I will say something nice about each of them,
M; Why don’t you just wash everyone’s feet?
J: That would take too long.
M: More than three hours?
J: Never mind. I’ve had it to here being where love’s a small word.
M: Neil Diamond?
J: Yep

July 24, 2005

(prequel to as-yet nonexistent brunch blog)

What: Brunch

Where: 10:40am Cafe Luna, Dovercourt and Argyle, Toronto

Who: PT [that's me], KF, DT, SB, MG.

Resolutions passed:

• brunch
  
• conversation
  

Notable fashions: PT's Guess jeans and green shirt bearing 'checks accepted' slogan. DT's homemade earrings, KF's hat (father has a really big head).

MG reports attempt at 'lost key' ploy to pick up cute waitress at Hooters, but does not succeed. Embroiled in own deceit, he is forced to discuss whereabouts of phantom non-keys with manager, as waitress was nonplussed. MG to return for 3rd Hooters outing in less than a month after otherwise lifelong Hooters boycott.

Party Announced: "Theme Thursday", July 28. Normally "Waffle Wednesdays" but to conform to alliterative nomenclatural procedures this will be "Theme Thursday, colon, waffles." Possibility of chicken and waffles or other savoury, non-Belgian recipes. Unfortunately MV (third Chateau Nice housemate, sidelined with ovaries) cannot attend. 'Moon waffles' proposed to celebrate the anniversarial achievement of that great astronaut and dessert aficionado, Neil Armstrong.

SB relates near-brush with megastardom, demonstrating scanning equipment for Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible 3. Unfortch SB does not get to demo scanner and meet the megastar.

Out of nowhere PT proclaims high-speed mag-lev trains needed across Canada, a project for national unity. Airplanes (those white elephants of the sky) do not suffice.

MG to visit Germany for World Cup and then wants to stay for Oktoberfest. Thinks it impractical to stay away that long. PT suggests he bone up on German and then be key Canadian player in the beer fest, influencing international events with linguistic fluency.

Talk of Masonry, conspiracy theory, secret handshakes, pirates, and gold buried in Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Botched attempt by PT to take cellphone photo of Masonic symbol etched above restroom toilet.

MG is reading a book about psychic American troops training to explode goats' hearts with staring tactics. Incredulity around the table.

Final bill: $101.90 plus tip = $120

Saddest Music

1. I Can't Forget You - Cracker
2. Funny How Time Slips Away - Al Green
3. Catch - The Cure
4. Tom Traubert's Blues - Tom Waits
5. Not Dark Yet - Bob Dylan
6. Hung My Head - Johnny Cash
7. Emozioni - Lucio Battisti (Italian)
8. Hotel Supramonte - Fabrizio de Andre (Italian)
9. Zero Chance - Soundgarden
10. The Day John Kennedy Died - Lou Reed
11. I'll Believe in Anything - Wolf Parade
12. Autumn's Here - Hawksley Workman
13. Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead
14. Mother - John Lennon
15. Bad - U2
16. Fiddlers Green - The Tragically Hip
17. Oh! Sweet Nuthin' - The Velvet Underground

What's yours?

AbZorba the Priest

(clear throat, now preach)

Dryness delivers forest fires. Sustained silence breeds bursting. Bottlenecked threat blows through. Half-eaten hearts, eerie, humans, ever less human, more or less omniscient contempt. I'd cancel next season's episodes but there's news to pre-empt:

I am in love, it's good, was out of use, this sprawling blog, this lyrical noose, metaphysically ominous, abstruse, why not clot it? Ah not to let loose, lips tighten with a love bite, yet I am, mirrored, jammed, like all of us, doomed to write.

So stand, be counted. But count on nothing. Don't understand, instruct. Anticipate everything and you won't know bad luck.

My guitar's in storage after my house burned down; I've been living like a tourist, knackered from knocking and choking on Chinatown. That song I was writing? Kinda cobwebbed. Call Betty, shake that tambourine, it's after Xmas now, we're left with shriveled tangerines.

How I shovelled and shovelled, just to see the road. I've seen too many shovels forshadowing this ode. By Jove, I need the lash, everyone in mouse-shot licks lips, clicks trash.

But I disappoint myself. This excuse is balderdash.

You work, right? You have a life. This virtual truth subsides, those legends in your mind, you are like Babe Ruth, a benevolent John Booth, want to help build Yankee Stadium? God, I never have the time. If I let me off the hook, if I don't write another book, I blame Playstation, Arcadium, tedium, tribulation, the trials of the medium.

Oh go get em, giddy up, I'm rusty yeah so cut me slack; I'm serving this up, so swallow it up, I sugared it up with a bottle of catchup—and the tender bits are around the corner.

Throat clear

Beaten up and broken sided, long ago you were divided. He said I miss my wire act, my fruitful lack, rug patch and sad sack. Oh we didn't realize it did we, that everything would be read, the long tail roll call, by no one at all, this long holler into an empty drum, full of it, tossed by it, plucking its whiny thrum. So "the ants have megaphones" and their opinions are clones, rushing water on my eyes has got me stoned. Auditory hallucinogenic psychosis too long at the screen and the threat so long as you're sitting is deep-vein thrombosis.

I'm Not Racist When You're Already Dead

Top ten peoples of antiquity I despise:

1. Phoenicians - apparently the first civilization to create the bireme. And the last civilization to discover deodorant! They became the Carthaginians, who were sacked by the Romans, aka my peeps. They spoke Punic. Or should it be P.U.nic. Famous for inventing the alphabet, and I glory in using their invention against them.
2. Visigoths - led by Alaric I, they sacked Rome - aka my peeps - in 410 AD. It still hurts, like they sacked me at 4:10 am Tuesday morning.
3. Cimbri - threatened my peeps around the 2nd century BC. I scoff at their Jutlandian origins.

Rounding out the top 10, minus justifications and unreadable Wikipedia links (besides it should be obvious):

4. Dravidians
5. Mycenaeans
6. Nubians
7. Amakelites (real sore spot there)
8. Beothuk
9. Gazpatcho
10. Minestrone

Ok, those last two are more soup than people. Nevertheless!

5 ways to tell he doesn't like your turtleneck

(Cosmo, look out)

1) 'He' is your boss and you try to suck up by working late and he just says "You're fired for wearing that turtleneck."
2) You're sitting in a bus shelter and a crow flies at your face and pecks your forehead. Just then you get a text message asking you to buy a new turtleneck.
3) His favourite game is Words that Rhyme with Things I Hate and his answers are always "Thor Gerbil Heck" or "Yore Werble Schmeck."
4) He enters a pet store and cuts the neck off one of the turtles, and as he's arrested he says it's all your fault. You refuse to visit him in jail and he's partially relieved.
5) He successfully removes you from the endangered species list.

Waiting for the furniture to sell

Bodacious cutlass cuddles crowd pesky moray eels. Fashion fish fisticuffs gurgle to crescendo, raucous rallentando when your legs begin to go. Eek on mean streets, drag snow to sidewalks, talk hours to your mother on a walk around the block. He who was toned? Thrown in the clink. Outlaw maverick dries fruit inside a sink. Vishnu drank in shame, inside outside, that's how he earned his fame. Now it's Meebo and twitter, everyone too busy to hire a babysitter. The Mexicans are mild, Plaxico drove them wild. I'm from New England so I'm like a whining child. Oh you bugbears, sellers beware, hooking plastic drums to the tips of your hair - please learn to share. Now what to do with Friday nights? Explore alleyways with flashlights, place bets on fistfights, check my skin for parasites, awake my inner luddite.

Another Extremely Blurry Post

Don't have much time so here it is:

1. Spicy Korean foods could easily power our most advanced starships. But it takes gastronomical ambition.
2. Environmental degradation fouls my mood. I'd sign up for the nearest reforestation project 'cept the signup sheet itself draws my tears.
   
3. A loud gong to announce the arrival of each email would never rival the popularity of that Guitar Hero game.
4. You need not whisper in my presence: my iPod trackpad is rotated clockwise to the max.
   
5. The devil fixes me a proscribed alcool, and I'll drink it. The devil digs me a pothole, I fall in it. But if the devil urges me to bet against the New England Patriots, I will consider hiring myself a new deceiver.
6. Ever think about why wooly mammoths got stuck frozen in ice? They must have had extremely inept interns.
7. If the Internet is shaped like a trash heap, and you are a scavenging crow, then this blog post is like a grey spoon located strategically above a rotting piece of dog meat, which prevents you from consuming the dog meat, caught as you are in the dull grey spoon's upside-down reflection and so you throw away your chopsticks and give up all hope of climbing aboard the starships fuelled by Korean food. You silly goof - learn to appreciate your culture!
   
8. I was taller once. Then I realized all my shoes were at a 90-degree angle.
9. With all our online distractions, productivity has flatlined. The imminent solution: feet keyboards, to double our 'qwerty' output. The great intellectual of future ages will be the Surfer-Man.
10. Comments on this blog will reach an all-time high, if and only if I discover how to make the comment box smell like my Joop aftershave. Then if you write 'This post stinks' I know you are lying.
11. Ever used a drinking straw as an explosive device? Neither have I. But dammit, there I go, handing al-Qaeda another brilliant idea.
12. I was going to write a post about all the birds I've never heard about, complete with links of sites I've never visited, but that would be self-defeating. I'll stick to my detailed archive of ideas nobody ever thought of coded in text with the same colour of my blog template background. Don't believe me? Check this out: Dreidels should be given the vote

More paranoia on the Internet (2005)

You think, I write, imperfect compatibility, we meet and clasp and take a piece of us with us, hold on fast. Margaret Atwood I don’t know you, don't make me think I do. Seduced by her type, she’s just my type, I like her profile, diction and spelling, I like what you write; I like to think I think like you. Drunk on like but afraid of life, imagine my surprise when I saw you with my own eyes, like Vader without his mask, couldn’t scan you with my screen; the world too real to compete with reels, wizard behind curtains reflecting better halves, scaffolding construction and façade, sacred superficie on Sunday promenade, everything is marketing and everything else is bad. Skeletons in my memory cache, trying to quit smoking but addicted to my attention patch. Self-interested philosophy as means to an end, is desire willed to existence what makes light bend? The rules aren’t straight, the planet a sphere, the longest line is a circle and every fact is a veneer. Hey bubba don’t trouble my blessed bubble with your public citizenry or democracy – leave me my fragmented mind, my splintered legions ripe for tyranny, now back to work and curiosity dulled by pomp and verbosity, info-spam-mail from CIALIS, cynical, semi-conscious, half-interested, cancelling engagements, flaccid, yawning, lukewarm.

Happy new year

Total sweet largishness divides a fence, has ten thousand thickets swarming sweetly in a breeze. Over and over, fields of crows and a telephone wire of plovers lounging and niggling termites from a telephone pole. Halftime heroics, lowlife nogoodniks nuzzle each other as lovers in a laneway curse and give their drugs away. Oh we walk well! Oh just down by the bend, each means something to an end, halftime, Miller time, time for fender bender, horse gallop Grendil, it's a self-looping never-ender.