Politics: Fuck Yeah, We’re All Crazy

This was a post, but it was very long and pointless. If you’re still interested, I made it into a page.  A very long page.

I also figure if I put it off the main page, it will minimize the loonies who love political rants.

It’s here.

Food Porn

The friendly garden vegetable fairy dropped by while I was gone.  The garden must really be going nuts this year.  I got a pretty good haul of chiles, bell peppers, tomatoes, sweet corn, and (inexplicably) cucumbers.  Normally I am not a fan of cukes, but these guys are small enough and crisp enough I decided to like them.

I used the ingredients to form this dish:

It’s a Turkish style dish.  The tomatoes came in handy.  I browned garlic in some olive oil and then added chopped basil, half of a bell pepper (also chopped), three sliced mushrooms, and two dried and chopped chile piquins.  I let that simmer down while I started some broth boiling to make a pilaf out of bulgar wheat and flax seed.  Once the pilaf was more or less done, I added some coarsely chopped tomatoes and one can of some decent quality chunked white tuna to the other pan.  Once I got some fluid cooking out, I added a pinch of cumin and turmeric, as well as a little salt and pepper.  After I dished the pilaf, I squeezed a touch of juice out a touch of lemon into the stew, and then emptied a can of decent grade white tuna into it.  I gave it a good stir and then plated it with slices of the cucumber in a mint infused red wine vinegar I made last winter.

I dusted it over with some red onion and a little feta.  I honestly would think twice about using that much feta next time.  It was pretty good, though.

I really think women only date me because they dig my cooking and I give them an excuse to eat bacon.

Potholes

The Black Canyon Formation, or the Ute Canyon Formation as it’s called locally, is a precambrian basement rock underlaying most of Colorado, Utah, and the northern end of New Mexico. The latest petrological mythology puts the rocks at around 1.8 billion years for the schist and granites and 1.6, 1.4, and 1.2 b.y.a for the intrusive pegmatites and so forth. The rocks are believed to have formed the old Yavapai Craton, the other, some would say less civilized, half of what would eventually form North America.

I’m not saying you Laurentians back East where the politicians and the population density run me off don’t have a nice craton, you certainly do. But the coolest thing to happen over there was the Alleghenies and even those only spawned one good writer, who never hit his stride until he did a summer as a ranger over in Arches National Park and climbed the La Sals.

Yavapai is still its own animal. It faults when it wants to and rotates as it feels the need. The Rio Grande Rift, where a lot of the country’s animal feed originates, is a product of the lower bout of what has been called the Colorado Plateau pulling the land apart. Beautiful country, there.

The Northern end, where I spend most of my time, pushes like a fist into the rest of the Western US geology. You can see the leading edge of the large black rocks broaching from the ground near my house.

The drive is enjoyable, provided a vehicle suitable for enjoying a day like today is available.

The rest of the day was more or less good. I probably should have been doing that hydrology homework. The old Scout did its job. It didn’t get us there fast, but definitely got us there in style. The old man pumping gas at the Glade Park store waved and lit up like someone who probably had an old Scout story or two. Most old men out this way do. We took the cutoff and then made the right immediately before the second cattle guard.

The water was cool, maybe fifty degrees. I won’t lie, the first plunge was heaven. The next was a little more intimidating.

I can haz fortitude?

The formation is susceptible to boring and ribboning by flowing water. These holes are probably twenty to thirty feet deep. Unless you hit somewhere the falling and swirling water has not transported the silica and magnesium et al on downstream. The water is also impossible to see into because the sun can’t cut into the gorge. The best thing to do is get two solid steps and leap out and hope you don’t catch the jagged edge on the other side. But if you don’t jump far enough, you won’t clear the cliff on your own side. Their called the Potholes. It stands to reason that jumping into the middle of them would be tricky. So you jump blind into the cold water. It’s all kind of a gamble. The only sort of hydrology I really like.

Heaven

If time, outside of space, is just a tool to codify our perceptions into past and future, and if our perceptions, as our minds fail, lose their external reference, is it possible that as you die and your brain loses its fuel, that you spend all of perceived eternity in euphoria?

Discuss

I’m considering, what with all this new personal free time, learning a martial art. Emphasis on the art. I already know how to beat someone’s ass, break their arm, kill them, etc. People are fragile and it usually comes down to a 50/20/20/10 split of motivation, experience, aerobic fitness, and overall distemper in a fight.

I want to pursue the art and the spiritual aspect. I don’t want to be violent or hurt anyone. Walking along a quiet circle somewhere around the Hong Kong City Park, I saw people of all ages practicing Tai Chi. Most of them were pretty good (that shit is harder than it looks), but this one very old man in particular was on a whole other plane. He had such control and poise. Every movement of every muscle in his entire body was planned and executed flawlessly in the morning sunlight surrounded by koi ponds and city sprawl. Only in creatures nigh unto death have I seen an animal become more beautiful. The Mainland Asian martial arts seem to be more religion than violence.

Discuss

The Western Arts, the vicious Krav Maga, the destruction centered Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, the banal and suburbanly ridiculous MMA, all lack that aspect. There is an MMA gym near my house. The white, thirty something men struggling in vain to purchase some sort of notability in their brutally banal existence train there. Most of them own late model Harleys that they love with the sick affection half living and mostly empty men give to the amusement machines they associate with–boats, motorcycles, enormous televisions. Their toys, both the shiny metallic machines and the shiny metallic women, are unnaturally new and fresh looking, with expensive accessories festooned about their structure.

Discuss

The end of one of the Four Letters:

But we are also both lost forever to one another. We too proud souls, the souls who will not surrender and will not fail, we are joined together by all the currents of fate, but not by time. We two proud souls, the sort that fight on and get damaged and torn, will always have a temporary home with each other, but never a permanent rest. We are lost. You are forever lost from me and lost to your children and your life and your home. And I am lost to you forever, though I plan to drop by every so often.

I am lost to you for this life of living out of hotels or living out under the stars and finding what the earth has hidden. While you are lost to life itself, I am lost and gone forever, out here wandering the all day lonesome.

Out on these fields of heaven.

Discuss

Book Idea

No, I’m not writing this book, but it went in my notebook as a “Fucking awesome as shit book idea.”  I may have been drunk.

Ok, so most people know about the web-bot project.  It was started as a way to predict, in the very short term, fluctuations in individual stocks, the Spyders.  This is kind of cool.  But the web-bot is bigger than that.  It browses more or less the whole internet and finds keywords that are repeated in significant numbers.  I won’t go into the painfully tedious math involved in that sort of thing.

So, this is the idea for the book:

Setting:  Near future, urbanized environment (except for one stretch out in the country)

Characters: Protagonist, a hacker type with a following of pathetic loser hacker types. A bunch of pathetic loser hacker types.

Plot: There is a huge version of the web-bot that the government uses (openly) for limited precognitive uses.  Probably to fight terrorism/communism/etc.  The hacker guy decides to gather up his following with the purpose of fucking with the government.  So they all get together and start posting or blogging or twittering or whatever a ton of pointless stuff with the words “dead president.”  Of course, they do it enough to light off the Spyders.  Then the president is assassinated.  This causes concern.  Then they decide to try something else.  “Riot in LA.”  Then a riot happens.  The hackers are hunted by NSA (probably wouldn’t use the NSA) types in a nationwide, public search.  They are terrorists, now.  They begin to utilize the system to say things like “hacker escapes.”  It works.  At some point, they realize they have control over human events.  They have to decide whether or not to profit from it, which would continue the sociological status quo of the learned few exploiting the masses (possible religion analogs), or if they want to direct human events toward more altruistic goals, which would result in constant poverty.

I’m not sure how it would end. It would be tempting to cliffhang it.

And more interesting (this was not in the notebook, I just thought of it), how would this effect something like determination and causative networking?  Ok, so if you had the ability to make these decisions that control the events of humanity, you would have to either say something like, “hacker starts people’s revolution” or “everyone agrees to hacker’s terms.”  In which case, the unfolding events would force you into the action you had yourself fomented.  I need to develop that idea more.

I think people do that everyday.  End up forced by the currents of events to live with their own decisions, but in what case can you say they brought it on themselves and how in control of it were they?  Does decision making itself rob you of some power to make decisions?

Circular, I know.

Brothers

A while back, Clea did a nice piece on big brother types.

“Hey buddy, you got a minute?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“OK, I’m still blowing fuses.”

“The blinkers?”

“Yeah.”

“But not bulbs?”

“No.”

“Ok, did you change the thermal flasher?”

“Yeah, it took me a minute to find it.”

“Huh.”

“It’s blinking really slow on the right side.”

“And you don’t smell burning or anything?”

“No. And it’s only on that side.”

“Ok, go back to the tail light.”

Rustling.

“Ok.”

“Pull the bulb out.”

“Ok.”

“See how fast it blinks now.”

“It’s blinking just fine, now.”

“Ok, you have a short somewhere between the flasher and then end of the line, there. Do you see any hanging wires, or is the light socket rusty?”

“No, it looks Ok.”

“OK, well, somewhere between the bulb and the ground you have a small short. Can you shine a light up under the quarter panel and see anything? Wires, or scraped up insulation?”

“No.”

“You’ll have to chase the wires, it’s sort of a pain.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Reach up and find the wires. One will go down into the main set of wires that runs all the way to the dash, and then there might be one that runs away from the socket and goes somewhere else. It would be that one. They used to wire the whole rear end your car in series, so that wire has to go somewhere.”

“Yeah. Ok. It runs over to the side to the little marker light.”

“I bet that’s it, pull the bulb out.”

“Got it.”

“Try your blinkers.”

“Real strong. Awesome, man. That was it. What does that mean?”

“It means the marker light socket is bad. Just leave the bulb out of it until you can get a new one and you’ll be running legal again.”

“Cool man, thanks a lot, want to come by later?”

“If you feed me.”

“Sounds good little brother. Later.”

“Later.”

Goodbyes and Other Assorted Love Songs

When the sun comes up tomorrow, I know this night’s decision’s will weigh heavy upon my aching mind. But some turkeys are wild and need free ranging land to subjugate.

Indeed.

I miss you. You know who you are, I miss your breath and you breathing. Your smile and you smiling. You are without peer and forever matchless. Time and distance are the same thing. I think I tried to explain it to you one cool night and you didn’t quite get what I was getting at. I don’t blame you. It was a complicated subject for one so drunk to discuss. In the end, it all comes down to missing you. You have pretty eyes, and an easy conversation. Sometimes that conversation is words over drinks, sometimes it’s looks over breakfast, but others it was in sacred sweaty congress of all that I claim human in myself. More than any other you can claim to know me.

We are beings in flux, so you may say you know me better than any other. Because you do. I am not the one that married a long tall blond years ago, or the one that sweat and bled and died (a little) on the gilded plains of Illium. You can never know that person, but you can hear his words when I talk. You can see his thoughts when I play my instrument. Or when I stare far away and try to talk about it and not talk about it. I told you more than I ever told another. It ached and bled to tell you. But you should know. You should know that I have not always been a good person.

But you also see through my bullshit. You could see through my hardened set jaw stoicism. You saw through the random passionately held opinions I made up on the spot. My indisguisable shade of twilight.

You left yourself all around me. Long blond hairs and an ache at your parting.

We knew it was just for this summer.

But what a summer.

I am lazy

But this information needs to get out there.

‘Cosmopolitan’ Institute Completes Decades-Long Study On How To Please Your Man

Conversation

“This next week will suck, but the week after you leave will fucking suck hard.”

“It makes me really happy to hear you say that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it makes it easier on me to know you’re miserable, too.”

“You are the most self aware person I have ever known.”

Choke on it

And so begins the descent of this formerly respectable bloggish sort of thing into disreputable drunken stupor. So great a thing it once was, but now the snow lies upon the bouts of the Bookcliffs, and the various tramps lay viscous upon my mind. Good thing their nature allows them to slide off easy and more or less inconsequential.

And I miss a woman. A real woman. She has a real ass. She lacks technological anatomical “improvement.” Too bad it won’t work out. Unfortunate that these currents, the underlying wash and swash of living that people mistake for fate, cleaves us asunder. I can’t help but feel the universe is letting me down.

I will be honest.

Being drunk is a little awesome.