Listics

Fool to cry…  that’s some timeless shit.  No West Wing, no whitebread HMS Pinafore leggy blonde bullshit… strictly a colored girls go doot da doot Lou Reed kind of thing and the question has been asked and answered regarding how many people of any color that I know that go doot-da-doot dad doot da doot hey baby, take a walk on the wild side… and if that’s an Oscar Wilde kind of thing well God save the Queen and ain’t it great to be an Englishman on this bright and foggy day…

I’ve been feeling bound up, creatively constipated, uptight about things when I should be fearless… can I scrape it together for Nashville, can I put together a trip to Seattle, why don’t I write it down and sell it to the only bidder, I mean maybe I should just write a letter to the governor.

Yes.  That is the ticket.  A letter to the governor indeed.  He’ll be sooo glad to hear from me.  But somebody’s gotta tell him and there’s no use to sit and ponder these insignificant patterns when there’s a truth to tell.  Is there?

And how does real life differ from fanfic?

Mendicant might be a good gig.  There was the guy on Montgomery Street, usually caught me around Pine after I’d left the See’s Candy Store.  "Would you be so kind…" were the only words I ever heard him say.  Money was the object.  He didn’t want chocolate.  One assumed he was out there because there was just no work for him on the 14th floor at 315 Montgomery.  He was always clean, simply dressed, and approaching with his hand out.  The transaction was always clean and simple too.

Gray Box project.
Ham radio operator’s license.
Save world from gray goo.
Beth’s birthday lunch at Henry’s.
Lay bare the distinctive meaning of "Being" for Heidegger.
Clean up dog poop.

I’m going to Honduras and I’m afraid.  The center of my fear is probably not the international travel to a focal point of US Central American policy enforcement.  The news out of Guatemala, that we’re resuming military aid, that news doesn’t frighten me.  I’m sure that $3.4 million won’t go very far and, as I understand it, anyone with a contrary opinion to the Guatemalan government has already been killed, so they’re standing easy down there.  And Honduras isn’t the den of spys and thieves that it was in the glory days of Reagan and Negroponte.  The Nicaraguans have been pacified after all.  The Zapatistas are more a problem for Mexico and Guatemala… whoa, maybe that explains a little about the military aid. 

Indeed this trip is programmed as easy-in/easy-out, no scary travel near the Nicaraguan or Guatemalan borders, a simple celebration and a chance to meet my new daughter’s family.  The projected temperature and humidity (probably in the nineties with 100% humidity) will be uncomfortable but nothing to fear.  So why do I have this nagging anxiety?

Mayan culture was remarkably mellow compared to their twisted Aztec neighbors to the north and the strung out Incas to the south.  The only sacrificial victims appear to have been the occasional enemy warrior captured in battle.  Other than that, blood sacifice was more personal and probably not much weirder than you’d find today in an urban flat of Goth kiddies practicing body art and piercings.

So why the paranoia?   I think I may have pissed off the jaguar with my callous joking about the great Wisconsin Cat Hunt.       

I’m glad that we got that cleared up.  Who wants yesterday’s blog-post…

Today the CBO battles gnosticism.

When a year or so ago, unbidden, the young woman at the movie theater gave Beth and me the fogey-discount on our tickets I knew I had crossed a threshold.  It’s been more than a few years since that unwelcome AARP material first started showing up in the mailbox, but that was easy to dismiss as mere chronosynclastic infidibula, or whatever.

And now I discover that famous techie and world changer Taran Rampersad’s mother is younger than me.  And she’s a fine writer.  Here’s her blog.  These blogs are leveling things.  Nobody staring out of the monitor making conscious choices to dis- me with a senior discount.  I think I’ll stay indoors.

***

Looking for links on Vonnegut’s chronosynclastic infidibulum, I discover that almost everything googlable was originated by Rageboy.  No surprise, I guess, but you’d think that there would be something more directly referencing the author himself.

Three years ago, moving backwards in some 11 dimensional heart-string theoretical helical path, three years ago when madness was before him and I was Smoky’s age, Locke’s EGR letter titled Complex Adaptive Hebephrenia provided this capsule review of Kubrick’s 2024:

A bunch of monkeys kill a bunch of other monkeys after a singing slab of black basalt appears in their watering hole. Next thing you know, we’ve got space stations at LaGrange points, cosmic telephones and liquid carrots in a box. You eat them with a straw. People apparently like doing this, or perhaps they have simply become so dull through inbreeding that they no longer care. Kubrick doesn’t tell us. Also, there’s another, larger, black basalt thing on the moon now. Holy shit, it’s LOUD when it goes off! Let’s take a ride, someone says, so it’s off to Jupiter. However, before arriving, the highly intelligent but deeply boring supercomputer who has been designed by IBM to maintain the temperature at a comfortable 68 degrees Fahrenheit, goes berserk after a fit of lip reading and kills everyone aboard except for Dave Bowman, an engineer. The computer then sings Daisy, Daisy, and dies. At this point, the original script called for a detailed explanation of what a compiler actually does, but focus-group screenings convinced Kubrick that no one would get it. Instead, he has Bowman shot through a chronosynclastic infidibulum [emphasis added -fp-]into an ornate Victorian bedroom, where he ages quickly and dies. Then a giant fetus appears in the sky. Far out! The credits roll to Karen Carpenter singing We’ve Only Just Begun.

Met Wendy!  What a wonderful young woman… when we got together with Matt and Wendy yesterday all my fatherly fears of the unknown were put to rest.  They are an excellent couple, good natured, healthy, warm…  they seem right for each other. 

And now, off to city hall to tie the legal knot!