an artist starves

In Fall 2004 I was stoned out of my gourd watching my star wars DVD collection for the nth time when it dawned on me.

I could remix the scenes from Star Wars to make it seem that C3P0 was some kind of evil robot from whom our heroes in stormtrooper costumes were fleeing.

I ran and wrote down some ideas and gave it a name: viral criticism. The point was that a viral critic uses elements of the text being commented upon to make one's comments upon that text, i.e., using the textual elements to analyze, rhetorically, the text. It's not afar from using evidence, it's just employing the text's possibility for re-assembly to conduct the rhetorical criticism.

I was a big, fat nerdy college kid at the time trying to find some semblance of a scholarly identity. I went back to that scribble when I was sober and realized that it was mostly gibberish. That ray of light that was my epiphany didn't make it to the page. Nevertheless, the remediation of media artifacts goes strong since the popularization of video sharing sites like youtube.

It's too bad that the majority of the videos on that site are filed by their makers under 'random,' 'lol,' and 'idk i wus bored.'

I became disenchanted with the notion of viral criticism and turned to a different tack: the virus as critic. Same smell basically, except the point would be to do a line by line rhetorical criticism of the code of some virus to explicate its workings and its relationship to the digital milieu in which it operates. That being said I applied to a job at A&M outlining this to James Aune.

I never heard back from him, nor from the countless job calls I sent out in Fall/Spring 2005-2006. Ball State would end up hiring me under a much more modest statement of research and scholarship.

Blah blah blah universities are mediocrity machines, and I continue to live in poverty.

It's 55 degrees in my apartment, I'm too proud to take a job working part time stacking boxes at UPS, and continue to write as if I'm some kind of artist.

I'm no artist, but I am hungry.

a soup of aphorisms

Our knowledge is a soup. We dip our ladle into a soup of aphorism and sup from our bowl.

My mind has a configuration of motor neurons and conductance amplitudes, which comprise the 'stuff' of thinking.

The rub lies in the incidental nature of this configuration. The content of the thinking that this configuration makes possible is borrowed from our world interface, our sensorium. This means I cannot copy a discreet configuration and expect to also copy the experience or the content of thinking that this configuration makes possible.

More importantly the brain is nervous activity. We should also consider the tongue-in-cheek interpretation of that statement as well. On the whole, we as humans return to familiar habits. We must. Building a home and raising a family take time. Recording the seasons takes time. Reconciling self-identity with the world is an ongoing process. It takes time. In a purely world sense of these activities they are examples of how nervous activity, mentation, interface with the world. The rhythm of this activity shows a purpose. It is a vague purpose because perhaps not all behavior appears to be contributory. A purely world sense is my attempt to treat human activity with disregard for human perspective. The arts, letters, and sciences of the 20th century demonstrated the impossibility of removing perspective completely. It also demonstrated the potential impact that perspective has upon outcomes.

The hole and the black box are a selective membrane cheat. They are how a body captures light for either nervous activity--seeing--or producing energy--photosynthesis. The plant captures light via the pigmentation of the cells associated with photosynthesis. The hole and the black box are how a specialized extension of a nervous system uses the light energy saturating our environment. The perspective, which effects the outcome of an experiment is a result of this black box interaction between a seeing organ and how an experiment registers. Some perceptions intercept light by the edges of the hole in the black box. The edge is essential to the nature of light as a wave. Light is only light because we can perceive it. The energy that gets used in having this light intercept our seeing membrane is what creates the sensation of light. Darkness, after all, is the absence of light and of nervous activity in our seeing membrane. Sometimes excitation of these nerves causes the sensation of light which does not exist. Like the ringing of our ears, our nerves continue to work in the absence of a stimulus. These nerves have become primed by how they interface with the world.

There's an incredible flatness to this kind of thinking. If the realization of both knowing and being are essentially membrane related then that interface is the key to understanding reality as perceived and reality as received.

Is this line of thinking warranted? I'm unsure about the nature of flattening as a way to reduce everything to that metaphor. From the subatomic level to bodily existence this membrane notion holds truck.

At the subatomic level one recognizes that electrons continually pop in and out of existence in our world. What causes such a thing to occur? We could consider that electrons possess some kind of extra-dimensional velocity, which allows them to traverse a membrane separating this reality from another into which an electron from our world passed. What grants this electron the ability to pass through the membrane? I suggest that it is an imbalance between the two universes connected at the membrane. The membranes have a very different reality from our notion of physical ones. They don't exist in space. This membrane is of a very different dimension, one that strains our concept for space. Nevertheless, electrons which can occupy our space enter into that place and ours. What makes that place with perhaps a different set of physical principles a compatible place for this electron? Will we ever be able to track one single electron from our world into another? Are all electrons created equal? There's only one electron perhaps. The vast number of existent electrons in our known universe comprise the superpositions of this single electron.

intelligence

Intelligence has become a cognitive concept. The study of intelligence historically sprung from epistemology, a post-Kant Newtonian professionalization of philosophy.

Intelligence is not between our ears. It's out there in the stars, in the ocean, on the ground, in the world. Intelligence is in the interface between out and in. The basis if intelligence is in the selective membrane. This selective membrane is also a prerequisite for life. With a selective membrane an out and an in become possible, separating a cell from a soup of organic chemicals, replicating proteins bathed in the radiation of a young sun.

Our sense of consciousness is merely epiphenomenal to a network of specialized motor neurons whose connections in three dimensional space provide the conditions for memory. And our odd behaviors, our repetition, our culture, our memorializations fit a cyclical process. We return to the same over and over for the sake of our brains. Cultural activity is neuronal consolidation: it allows us to return to familiar features continually. It's the basis of our memory. We have events that continually serve as signposts to a life lived serially from start to finish.

Those are my views. The basis of intelligence is merely a selective membrane.

utter disappointment

Today is one of those days when I'm utterly disappointed in my life. I recall that I once had a future. Now it seems that I only have a present. Dreaming of a possible and brighter future was my source of hope, my source of happiness, a container for my dreams.

I still dream of a brighter future. I am utterly disappointed with my current condition. I'm becoming increasingly selfish. I am becoming increasingly jealous. I want what I don't have and I'm willing anymore to destroy friendships in the pursuit of what I don't have. In the end, all I really want is some kind of affirming presence. Right now, it's a lot of me hamming for attention, and my god an I am an obnoxious prick in the pursuit of this.

I'm done making calls after a night of drunken debauchery and requesting forgiveness from others. I don't know if I need to apologize. I probably should see it that way. I grade crappy papers. I post crappy responses. My current occupation is so utterly unfulfilling that I dread returning after a few days away. Those days away I spend spinning in my heels, drinking, and trying to charm every girl with a pulse. I repeat myself. I think I anger people as well. Sometimes my regret at angering others shouldn't be entertained. Some people just aren't worth my concern. I need to extricate myself from social situations that I feel that I'm poisoning. I cannot stand that.

I tell myself that if I had a job that kept me employed full time, I'd be happy. No, I'd just be preoccupied. If I'm lucky I'd be too preoccupied to worry about my life. In the absence of continuous obligations and duties I worry. I worry that I may never find a mate. I worry that I may never find fulfilling work. I worry that anything I write will mean nothing. I worry that I'm in a situation where I don't have as much control as I want. I worry that I'm ruining others' impressions of me. I have tested these at least. I spin things over in my head, over and over and over and over. I'm living some kind of loop of remembrance, guilt, shame, sorrow, anger, jealousy, resentment, resignation. Right now, I'm depressed at the start of a new day and my obligations to work to some measurable standard of adequacy. I'm not feeling up to it. I dislike the work that I do right now. Sometimes I accept it and the freedom that I have. Not now, no, now I hate this work.

I am fearful that my feelings will get the best of me. I am fearful that I may eventually snap. I am fearful that I am killing myself in order to find some kind of happiness. I am uncertain that I will find any happiness that is long-lasting. I think I like some people, but when I pursue those people I am fearful of their otherness. I grow disgusted at silly things. Why should I judge? What gives me that right?

I'll keep plugging away. Mentality is an affliction. Reflection is the precursor to my own disgust. To know oneself outside of time, to regard oneself according to some standard, to some measure only leads me to measure myself short nearly every time. That's the source of my affliction. I'm so damn stuck in my head. I've made strides to extricate myself from that, but I'm beginning to feel that my attempts are all false. I'm beginning to snap under the weight of so much silly returning to the same issues.

I'm about ready to give up on this life, but this isn't a cry for help. This isn't a suicide. This is me killing my social life one friendship at a time. This is me realizing that my actions can and will have lasting consequences. This is me wishing that this network of thinking neurons around which my identity sparks would disappear. John Lennon mentioned LSD leading to ego destruction. I am unsure if I could achieve such a thing, but to me it sounds like a wonderful proposition. I try, I try, I try, but I have yet to achieve freedom from my own surly self-identity.

tempted by fate

Do you press on the threads of fate?

I am unsure what these are, but I recognize my quiet entrapment in incidental matters. It's an unavoidable consequence of our thinking as means of 'fixing' time, fastening it to a context, while the rest of the world continually challenges this assumption. Certainty is our mode of reasoning. That which is certain can be done again and again, neuroconsolidation. Repetitive behaviors. We become unstuck in time culture provides us with a will have had-ness, which adds a hermeneutic sheen to our relations. We see it and lose track of the reality fragment. We are driven by our genre commitments to our own hermeneutic sheen. I already know you is what culture provides. Do people actually act according to a presumed entity that they'd wish to represent them.

Communication challenges authenticity. It is our cultural condition; we can only pray for madness as a means of escaping it. Communication is the symptom of our universe. Culture has depth, wisdom. It is bigger than us. We concede to its given-ness; we embrace the oceanic sense of being there as being there, and marvel at how a word we use hides the meaning of the object that it describes. Strange really that we fool ourselves right at that crease where word and thing collide.

Because of its depth and complexity. Because of our situatedness within it that standpoint which provides us with a loading program for reality; we cannot escape it. What are its intentions? I can only suspect that it is an alien entity. The language is a false consciousness. It is more genre commitment than program for living freely. We concede to its rules. How real is it? I cannot fathom this question. I only believe that which repeats itself. Does our nervous matter require this form of stimulation?

Our sense of existence is epiphenomenal, merely incidental. It is the accomplishment of a reflexive circuit of motor neurons. The logic of three dimensional space. The logic of off and on circuits. The logic of amplitude modulation. These are the things which comprise thinking--the bare matter of existence. What's missing is a world, a world that these parts call home. A world that causes these parts to spin and whirl and spin off configurations that fix meaning in that world. Strange when you lay it out to its bare essence. Is that it?

That's it. And here's the rub. Our thinking mechanism requires it. It's nature dictates the background to our reality, and its formalities. Why do the old remember their youth? What makes early formed memories more resilient? I shouldn't ask these questions willy-nilly. This has been studied. I'm lost in the ether, regarding myself as a thing and as a such.

Strange that we don't trust the media through which we know the world. Is the medium really there? Communication is a symptom of cultural activity, its politics, its social organization, its way of being. We manifest these symptoms as we negotiate our self with the dictates of a group through which we realize much of our living. We work. We marry. We join clubs. We play sports. We visit family. We are of a group. Yet we are separate of the group. We identify with ourselves, and we identify with a group. That's the wrinkle, which causes the logic to come out broken, perchance to fool us into believing fate or believing in free will. It's broken and that's how realize the logic of existence.

Reflexivity

According to the AP story, "American economists in the buzz for Nobel:"

STOCKHOLM – Research into market behavior and the psychology of decision-making could be awarded the Nobel prize for economics on Monday and improve the weak U.S. representation among this year's Nobel laureates.

Betting agency Ladbrokes says American behavioral economists Richard Thaler at the University of Chicago and Robert Shiller of Yale University are the top bets for this year's award.

I like that their first source is a betting agency who reported which economists were their biggest bets. Nobel economists being chosen by a betting agency, and an economy run through boom and bust on bets. The economists probably also relied on fMRI studies of risk behavior to base their theories. A popular tool to study risk behavior is a 4-deck choice game where the participant needs to discover and chose from the winning deck--classic betting behavior. Reflexivity at its finest.

I am not a vampire.

I am not a vampire. I am a fool.

I talk your ear off.

I can't dance.

I am not that pretty.

I am afraid to express myself. I can only act.

My act has two parts. First I meet you. Then I expend your last shred of patience.

I violate my own stage. Watch out. I'll violate yours.

Vampires are undead.

You wish I was dead.

I am a vampire

I am a vampire.

I say this because I prey on people. I prey upon emotions. I look for that soft spot and I plunge in my fangs. I stare intensely at people. I try very hard to charm women on the dance floor. I touch them oh so lightly. And they all fight back. Their friends fight back. They call me names to try to discourage me. They point out and paint features of my body as grotesque. I roll with it. After all, I'm a vampire. Vampires don't have feelings for the hurting. I prowl all night long in search of fresh blood.

Blood in this case isn't that human connective tissue specialized for transporting oxygen and nutrients to various parts of the body. No. Blood in this case is experience. I slurp up experiences. Last night I met and danced briefly with a girl who lost her boyfriend/husband in a car accident. I touched her arm where she had been sewn up. The puncture points of the staples or thread and the long slit indicate that she was splayed open to have her bone fixed probably. Her friends were like pack wolves, simultaneously nipping at my heels and corralling her away from me. They were protecting her. I was the threat. That's why I'm the vampire. I swoop in with an intense stare and a pocket full of charm and try like hell to impress. It's a lot of fun being a vampire. There is so much pain in the world. It's like a drug when I milk it and feed on it.

The hungry feast on crumbs

Crumbs.

Portions of feelings.

Slivers of sentences.

A glance.

A foot touches mine.

A long hug.

A look and a smile.

A drunken kiss.

Crumbs of hope are how these are viewed. Crumbs of opportunity. I greedily gather them up, remember them, and cook them into something large enough to sustain me. My crumb castle, meticulously constructed from so many scraps of throw-away moments in the life of another. I feast on these.

A hungry person. A person who is alone. A person who is under-worked. A person with lots of self-flagellating free time. That's me. I greedily hold onto these crumbs and wish them into a reality that alienates me from the people who drop them, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps unconsciously. They're all I have in this crushingly lonely and empty place.

All I have are crumbs. I meticulously collect what positive remarks I receive, and arrange them like a series of comic books or baseball cards. How silly and veritably nonexistent these moments in my life are. An outsider may find this whole hobby unhealthy, blown out of proportion, pointless, potentially harmful.

These crumbs are all I have. I hunger for a touch, a look, a feeling, a word. I take what crumbling memories I have of these very things and form them into a convincing picture, a set of motives, a belief in something brighter. But like a religion, it's a matter of followership that legitimizes it. I follow my crumb formed beliefs alone. The person I worship doesn't exist as I've created her from the crumbs. Showing her my crumb cake alienates her. Clutching her hungry pushes her away. My hunger is a threat. My fantasies disturb. My desires go unanswered. My hunger continues. I place my crumb cake in the trash, but I cannot take myself to toss it out for good. That place is familiar. Those events are all too real. I want to believe the way I strung the crumbs together, but its my own coherent agenda. People rarely speak across time, asynchronously. I've created my Frankenstein out of these fleeting moments that confirm my own desires, my own affections, my own infatuations.

It's time to move on. It's time to move out. It's time to get out. It's time to redefine. It's time to quit curating the crumbs. They've damaged too much. They've brought me no tangible results. I have no victories. I have left overs, the tossed-aside products of what, I'm not sure. Perhaps I mistakenly read them as positive signs. It's all I could do. Forgetting them would be sacrificing too much.

They're just crumbs.

What to do, what to do

Sometimes your life presents opportunities to spread out, to switch gears, to move on, to leave town. I find myself at one of these points.

I killed my friendships. I actually succeeded this time. Make a pass at your friend's girlfriend. It worked for me. She still won't look at me. It's funny really. I don't know what to make of it all. I suggest that the feelings are more complex than merely 'creeped out' or 'suspicious.' I won't speculate. I'll just let it die like I wanted it to earlier this year.

Now that I've killed my friendship. I'll now seek out a new life, a life outside of this circle of friends. Can this be done? Why can't it be done? It's so bloody simple in this digital world to just change one's phone, move without the assistance of your friends, and simply 'disconnect.' So bloody simple.

I guess that's the problem. Friendship is needed from a psychosocial perspective. But the one thing that required companionship--raising kids, collecting food, building shelter--the labor-intensive conjunctive tasks that punctuated human settlement in the past, are all but taken care of by technologies and services.

I can rent a truck. I can hire a mover. I can sell off my items. I can do all of this myself. It's so damn easy. I can even move when they're not around. I can get everything moved to the frontroom, and move it into a rented truck at 9 am. I'd have the truck packed by the afternoon. Then I'd just ship out, drop the key in their slot, and be gone forever.

Forever is so subjective. Forever in this case would only last as long as our lives, that could be 30 years maybe 50. That's not really forever, and I really see no need in calling it forever.

This is what I've learned. Placing all your eggs in one basket creates a weakness. If all you care about are a couple of people, when those people don't invite you, don't call back, don't answer the phone, don't answer the door, ignore your voice, ignore your presence, then your world falls apart. This dissolution of reality may only be temporary, but it is a devastating consequence. It hurts. And given the nature of how you place all your stake in these close friends it artificially creates a crisis anytime this kind of activity occurs. The simpler you're ignored, the more it hurts. You don't exist. Alternately, a verbal assault, threats of violence, and arguing in general would substantiate the connections between you and these friends. I guess I wanted to see how real this friendship was. It was real. It is real. And I have a choice about whether or not I want to repair this friendship, if it's even broken.

I've apologized. I've spoken my mind. Hell, I shared my infatuations with my friend first. He may have been building a case to support his suspicions, and I helped to confirm those suspicions. That's all I have done. And now I have a choice to just walk away, every moment I stay away I confirm an absent answer to the current status of our friendship. Hell, for the first three weeks I pretended like I didn't know what I did, and I did not know what I did. Now that I do, my own suspicions about what I did were confirmed. That's all.

Strange how when you force a new meaning on a friendship it requires violence. Forcing meaning requires a violent force, be it symbolic or physical. In this case, touching a body was the physical violence. Saying that I 'want to make a connection' is the symbolic component. Looking at these from afar, they're pretty weak.

How weak can it be? It's in the absence of unambiguous meaning that we fill in with suspicions and anxieties. It's a fun exercise really. I find destroying or at least testing boundaries demonstrates how this process works. Funny that I find some activities a violation of my space, and my friends don't see this. Now that I repaid the favor in some way, they're the ones who are upset. It's a futile exercise if what is more important is the relationship.

There's no need to say goodbye. There's no need to even apologize any more. There's no need to address what occurred. There's no need to talk about it. I'd rather leave that moment in our collective past some kind of redacted document. Its contours can and should be remembered like a drunken party or a sedated surgery. An absent presence is felt but it cannot be remembered. I'll leave it at that.

Herein lies the rub. Yes, there is a wrinkle in my plan. I may run into these people. I could still be cordial. Why would I then keep them from knowing where I live? It's a strange situation. Yes, there's no need to leave them out of my life. I just need to move away. That's all I need to do, move away. So simple. I don't have to disconnect my phone or hide my address. I'll just leave, move out, reestablish myself in some other part of the city. That's a simple procedure. That's a simple exercise in getting some aspect of my life back. I'd rather not know my neighbors. I'd rather not know with whom I share my walls. At least I'd rather not care what goes on behind their walls and they the same for me.

"Your music was so loud." That's what my friend said when I went out with his girlfriend and she wanted to hang out in my apartment for a bit. I played some music and we shared a few beers. Normally, he says that my music doesn't bother him. Then it did. I suspect that he cannot trust me. I suspect that he cannot trust his girlfriend. Her ability to compartmentalize to cordon her behavior to select people should raise suspicion. She won't give him all of her. In one year they will have been common-law married. Eight years is all it takes. She knows this, and she's trying hard to break out of his orbit and do something with her life. I don't blame her. Surely, I did something to disrupt her own sense of where I stand in her orbit of relations. She won't look at me. Well she will, but she doesn't initiate an interaction with eye contact. She also won't tell me "no." Why can't she say "no?" It's a monosyllabic word that is probably one of the first words that I learned. Hell, we all learned this word probably first. "No" is such an important word. I touch her, and she can say "no." I make her feel uncomfortable, and she can say "no." If she wants me to not do something all she has to do is say "no." That's so bloody simple. I know "no." I respond to "no." I won't resent her "no." Yet she won't say "no." Hell, he won't say "no" either. "No" must cause discomfort. It's odd, yes. I made her feel uncomfortable.

Discomfort can be an odd sensation. I suggest that her discomfort stems from a reevaluation of our relationship. I may have shattered some of her trust. I wasn't the only one flirting. Damn it, I know this to be true. I crossed some line that never was mentioned. She trusted me. Perhaps she doesn't trust me anymore. That's fine. I'd rather be too complex to predict and control. That's my new joke. "Baby, I'm so complex that I'm confused."

I like booze damn it. I love booze. I can almost drink a full bottle of vodka. What kind of achievement is that? I guess part of it is a Chinasky aesthetic. Chinasky is Charles Bukowski's own persona in his novels. He boozes, writes, submits his work, occasionally makes money from his work, and shares his earnings via booze with his drinking friends. These friends are a motley crew of drunks. He of course has a rough-around-the-edges lady. Hell, I have no drinking friends. I drink and stare at a computer screen, cheer on movies, and play video games. I hardly write. I need to do that more. I need to diary less and create more. I suppose this is a fitting proxy for my writing. I'll grant it that. I do try to tailor this shit as best I can.

To summarize, all that I have done in wishing away my friends and their encroaching lives is to push back. I finally pushed too hard. I hardly think that I destroyed anything permanently, but now is a good time for me to make a strong decision. I win if I move out. They get more space. I get my sanity back at least temporarily. I'll probably go crazy once again. Paranoia and delusions are my nest material. I'll prick my finger on something sharp in my nest soon enough. Until then all I can do is make the first move.

When you let it out

When you let everyone know how you feel you realize just how little others share with you their feelings.

When you tell your friend about your infatuations, your jealousies, and claim these as the source of your odd behavior you receive something different.

You get the dossier. His dossier on you. He's been counting and keeping track of all the things you've done. He listens from afar. He fills in the blanks. He confirms that he's just as jealous and or scared of losing something as you. But he won't tell you that. This is another part of this perceptual shell game where we try to match behavior to intention. I've revealed where I'm hiding my pea, why didn't he?

He wanted to win the game. I let him win. These kinds of odd shows of force over who's perceptive scheme wins out is all that we're fighting about. He has an ally, and for that he has more to lose. I don't. I've lost some trust and some closeness. I've perhaps lost the one and only source of a woman's compliments, the one and only person who would tell me whether or not I looked good, the only person who gave me any direction in how to dress and what to do. Currently all of that is on hold. She won't make eye contact with me.

I don't call that a silent victory. She's mad at me. My only victory in this sense is knowing that I can have an effect on another person. It's not like she didn't have a similar effect upon me. I waited and waited for a compliment that would confirm my fantasy world, my infatuation. When she told me that she loved me and described it as an inevitable conclusion I heard all that I needed to hear. I paired that with a hint at revenge sex from a night several months prior, and considered my chances good.

But my advances were received with strange behavior. She didn't tell me that I made her uncomfortable, and I didn't want to do that anyway. I just wanted to act out my feelings. I apparently touched her, something I didn't remember doing. My friend told me this. He was receiving his information from her. She never said a word that I recall, which would have indicated that she felt uncomfortable or that she didn't want me doing what I did.

It's all so odd. When you have a few friends at the center of your life, any change you make gets placed in relation with these people. Every move unseats a previous orbit. Every action entails some consequence.

And now I sit alone, not wanting to lash out in hate like I did before. Nevertheless, I sit alone once again. Once again I am all alone. The pitter patter of feet overhead, I sit alone and listen. I live vicariously through this movement of feet, the muffled voices, and I wish that my world could be full enough to push all that sound out.

I let everyone know where I stand, and I'm met with a confirmation that they've done similar work without me. They have their dossiers ready to read me a list of offenses against them and against their girlfriends. I stand against my own regret, looking back upon what I did, not even knowing all that I did. But it all surfaces the same whether I'm drunk or whether I'm just getting started. Some call liquor a social lubricant. It forces the truth out in messy ways. The truth passes through this drunken sieve and comes out messy and scatters about the place. You're still left to divine it, to sort through the mess, and make sense of it. A fist would be clearer message one may think. It's not.

So I sit alone, and this is the key concern. I live alone. I hardly work. I hardly live. I hardly experience. I hardly breathe. I hardly eat. I hardly try. I take what little scraps of hope, what tidbits of love, what crumbs of sense, and I make that into my life. It's not a noble profession. It's not a livable situation. It's not a reality that others will confirm or feel comfortable living within. I sit alone. I wish alone. I writhe about alone, wishing to be with another. I've yet to find someone that I'd put within the center of my life. I sit alone out of habit. I would have to learn how to sit with others. And I have none that will sit with me, that will be patient, that will push back when I lash out, that will tell me that my raves and rants aren't all that real or true or that tough. I need someone to dispel my magic, to bring me back to a world of drink cups, toasters, and television. Living on some precipice alone isn't an artful direction nor is it a wise choice for how to be in the world.

I walk along a path alone. I seek out the fantasy world that I've built for myself. I seek out a life alone because a life with others would puncture my little bubble of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Perhaps I need that. I do need it. Some day, I tell myself. Some day I will reach out my hand and touch another hand. I will feel the warmth. I will find a home.

Africa

I don't like using the term "African Americans" because it has a certain objectivity to it that perturbs me. I don't like relating to a person thought of as a representative of some large amorphous group who historically were brought to the United States as slaves and are now living freely in various states of life success thought from the perspective of an economy and taxes.

The term African American carries with it the baggage of colonialism. African comes to most of White America through the museum and that colonial sensibility that rendered the heritage of another in museum artifacts to be viewed by a discerning public as a way of being 'cultured.'

My how that word has transmogrified over the last century. It went from the halls of academe and the circles of blue bloods to the everyday talk of human uniqueness and difference.

That's the problem I have with using the term "African Americans." I'd rather not relate to someone as a group of people recognized in census sheets, a bubble to darken with graphite or ink. A selection. A false choice. We choose how we can identify ourselves but our bodies speak a fundamental truth of how one perceives your presence. Friend or foe?

The economy of youtube

The youtube economy, from my craven and over-sexualized perspective, runs on the male gaze. A male-gaze economy powers youtube posts and posters. The comment and rate function of youtube provide a digital-substantial datum, which becomes the machine's way to establish your popularity.

That's the point. Popularity is an abstract concept. It should be. I want to be surprised when I find myself drawn to a personality and I share that preoccupation with others, many many others. The machine has turned this into a likert-type intensity scale representing popularity. The youtubers recognize this and they'll post things just to race the popularity bar. Looking at the number of times one's video is viewed, viewer comments, and current rating comprise popularity. Youtubers also recognizing the ways to 'hack' popularity, and women from adolescence through adulthood show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, mouth, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. In high definition it takes on a measure of tactility. One poster to a website I frequent recommends watching a video of a girl that she posted in 1080, which is a measure of screen resolution. Screen resolution is how many dots of a light responsive medium per inch cover the screen. In the olden days these were standardized via scan lines. Enterprising girls go for high definition video recorders in order to amplify their presence, and they show some skin, some leg, some cleavage, dancing or lip-syncing prowess, mouth, braces, eyeballs, ears, hair, clothing, shapes, sounds. Most of this is done to copyrighted music produced by a conglomerate of media and marketing companies looking to create a credible platform upon which they can populate a series of products.

A Miley Cyrus product represents a global operation of marketing and machine-made products, transported, and sold to the market comprised mostly of young girls who are enchanted by her. Billions of dollars are expended upon the image pursued in owning the product. This filters through your youtube screen as the prospect of 'making it' via one's youtube video posts motivate the content of the videos. "I have something to show you. I want to show you my presence before you and how 'cool' or 'good' at something I can be. And I want you to rate me on my performance or some little miscellaneous detail that you approved of. I'll do almost anything for your positivity."

I reiterate that a male-gaze economy powers youtube. Through it images become currency. The diversity and character of this gaze is represented in the diversity of videos, which exist currently on youtube. Granted that the sheer mass of any media content in an information based society is already accounted for, we can study this. By addressing the mass of information we read it like tea leaves for poignant signs through which we cast our lot.

Over and over and over again in a self-reflexive world where cameras become mirrors onto the public nature of our everyday lives. Communication, the great leveler, flattens our image qua data to that of a celebrity, and we achieve parity with the famous in an online world. This parity is only an information access accomplishment but it is a powerful motivator for racing fame. Because racing fame is a generator built into the sites that we frequent and the ways that we've conceded to relating to one another.

The biology we no longer pursue

We no longer study biology. We consider the information content of life and, like diligent librarians, we categorize and locate life in space and time. In understanding life we only add information to the world that becomes the interface point with that life for the majority of us. We ignore the life around us.

Why doesn't biology pursue this?

Nature was ground zero. It's battered remains remind us of the viral relationship neural reflexivity has upon the world. It steps out of the rhythm of life by removing itself from its co-present relationship to it. In doing so it achieves the primal relationship a virus has with the world. The virus seeks opportunities. Like a genetic pirate it seizes the genes of other forms of life in order to have it produce copies of itself. How simple is that? That's a fundamental relationship between a life lived on the outside of a world considered as undifferentiated soup once it had achieved a membrane to separate itself. On the outside. In becoming an 'other' one achieves the fundamental cleavage from which unitary consciousness springs. Difference is the datum. From that everything grows. We achieve scale.

Scale

Scale is the interface point between the individual and the crowd through media.

Media first and foremost scales the voice. Media then pioneered tele-presence. I'm reading what our current iteration of the web is doing to the individual. So far the individual is being tossed aside for the self as the sum of an interest profile. Yet, we're still dealing with scale.

Media, thought broadly, is the apparatus through which the individual and notions of scale operate. Presence once required the voice, the image, or merely the ideas of the individual. Through media it achieved this.

Cleavage is the orientation of our desire. We seek to breach the gap. One way of accomplishing this is through the media technologies that we use and the ways that we use them.

Mobile devices are the first glimpse at how neatly this desire to breach distance and to achieve an audience is accomplished. It's a concession. We concede to relating to the mass through ourselves as data, ultimately. The reality principle of the medium is the way that medium is built and how that informs the nature of its use and its product.

Scale in the information economy is in the depth of the data profile and the meta-data tag that labels it. Scale is traversing this depth, which conquers distance and time. By coming to presence bodily and with an intact history the media we use accomplish scaling through the elements of familiarity.

I already know you. That's the point of culture.

Streams of our time, our attention, our life passes through a medium. It always has.

The technologies and attitudes that prop up these media should be our concern. It is us after all. I already know you.

Techno-philosophy

I love, hate, leave, and return to Internet based video games, well one. It's a massively multi-player on-line role-playing game (MMORPG) known as World of Warcraft. I knew a group of mostly men who played, so I returned to play with them 3 nights a week, we form the 'guild' called 'Descent.'

I have yet to come to terms with what it means, and I've found my own love-hate relationship to be somewhat schizophrenic. Yet, the complexity of our character does produce some contradictions. Right now, I use my struggle with game mechanics as an opportunity to talk about how I interface with it. I posted the following to their guild forums. A post I made earlier 'e-friendship' was what got this blog rolling again back in November.

Meet Robo-Pfeiffer (Pfeiffer is the name of the character I play. A shadowpriest that I named Pfeiffer):

During our hard-mode attempts in Ulduar we picked up a shaman/hunter with some kind of Russian name. He recommend one of his friends, so we picked him up. That guy was Annesh. Once I actually beat Annesh on the meters. I had the unfair advantage of gear. He was a 10-man geared raider. He was also lagging worse than a satellite feed from Afghanistan. I remember seeing him with his character pointing the opposite way during a VOA25 run prior to entering Ulduar. "Poor guy," I thought. "Maybe I'll share with him my advice," I thought. How naive I was.

Then we took on the Iron Council. Annesh raped me like an altar boy. He was a priest after all. Melk sent me a private message and shared with me his log sharing on the forums about my performance versus that of Annesh. There, with my pants down, was every damn spell I had cast, when I had cast it, and when and if I clipped dots, plus my up-time. I felt a bit foolish. The managers were poring over my work, and I was the focus of their ad-hoc performance review. I learned the importance of mini-maxing, and the equal importance of hacking meters via maintaining a rune-empowered shadow-word pain on each of the Council's Russian sounding, metal members. I also learned that Iamdrunk was a cheap and dirty motherfucker who had absolutely no respect for any man. That's another story.

I threw out Squinky's macro and went back to manual weaving. Manual weaving has its benefits, and I got better at dot maintenance, finding ways to cheat meters, and maybe once or twice more I repaid the favor by playing the priest to Annesh's altar boy.

Once or twice.

I quit the game, and upon coming back I went for the minimax strategy by leveling JC. Now with Mixology and 3 runed Dragon's Eyes I was squeezing out as much extra dps as I could. That wasn't enough. My DPS still lacked. With 4 pieces of sanctified tier 10 I was still putting up mediocre DPS. This time Phrawd had to pull me into a different channel to tell me that on one attempt of heroic 10 man Sindragosa I had posted a meager 1k dps. Yeah, that was bad. I was playing it conservative and was once again caught with my pants down.

I took another look at my DPS, my dot up-time, my spell rotation, and realized something very important. The rhythm of dot maintenance doesn't play a song. It's a flow chart of choices that must be made in real-time and coordinated with fight mechanics, phase changes, the big picture. I have rhythm. I used to breakdance to Thriller when I was 6. My brother and I would choreograph breakdance moves to the synthesizer songs on Van Halen 1984 like one of us was Turbo, the other Special K. That was back when Michael was still black and before his nose became an impressionist drawing. Now he's dead, and buried with him are my brother's and my dreams of breakdancing fame.

I recently gave up. I tried a half a dozen recommended add-ons for tracking dots. None of them felt right. So I returned to Squinky's post for 3.3 macros.

Here is the behemoth that he created.

/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=target/6 devouring plague, vampiric touch, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, vampiric touch, mind flay, devouring plague, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, vampiric touch, mind flay, mind flay, mind blast, mind flay, mind flay
/cast shadowfiend
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

After I do my initial preparation and cast Shadow Word: Pain I turn to spamming the button for this macro.

Voila.

I did it. Top 3 on Blood Princes.

I feel like a cheat, a loser, a dead beat. I succumbed to the machine by programming my way around its clunky interface of lag times, dot maintenance, phase changes, etc.

I went out to the bar(s) tonight. I had a few drinks, alone. Most of my friends are married or working on establish it via common-law. I was drinking that cheap PBR, listening to Guided By Voices, and watching the Pac Man game play out. There it was again, only in a different form. I was witnessing machine control, voltage control, impedance application, turned into buttons, and knobs for controlling a raster scanned yellow, circular avatar to eat pellets and avoid ghosts. Beer after beer I sat alone and watched that same sequence play out on the table arcade. Pac-man is a finite play field with finite choices that one must make. Thrown in are objects which represent either objectives, bonus points, special conditions, or perils to avoid. While the perils zoom around according to their own algorithm, the operator of Pac-man finds his/her own algorithm and settles into it. The operator establishes a series of implicit boolean statements concerning "if this condition then this action." "Should I eat the cherry jumping around, or will I get trapped between two ghosts?"

I saw a rather illuminating documentary a few years ago: "King of Kong." A man with an apparent OCD and an extremely wide alturistic streak bought the arcade version of Donkey Kong and spent months perfecting his play until he had virtual muscle memory to be able to push the game until it spit its data onto the play field. Among my peers that was called 'flipping the game.' It was the digital counterpart to bumping the pinball game to direct the flow of your circular metal avatar. Putting the game on the ropes was the point. It was the ultimate challenger, and you'd muster all of your attention and patience in mastering the sequence of jumps you'd have to make to achieve the high score. Whether or not you used strategies outside of the game, like bumping the table, didn't matter because what showed of your progress on the screen next to your initials was all that mattered. That mattered outside of the game environment more than the game itself anyway. Games of my dawning consciousness were of that ilk. They were complex, yet finite. Their economics were simple. They established a scrolling complex set of choices thrust at the avatar, which became increasingly complex until the player's avatar had expended its last life. The balance in a game like this was to keep the player's attention and interest long enough to justify their quarter spent while ensuring that the increasing toughness of the game would keep quarters entering at a rate that couldn't be overshot by the extended play time of the virtuosos, the Anneshes of that game environment. The ingenious or the obsessive-compulsive ratmen who would find ways to play Defender for 7 hours straight were the stuff of legend among the gamers in the early 1980s. They gained notoriety as masters of their game. The news of course would lampoon them as the dupes of the gaming industry that only wanted their quarters or use their obsessive habits as the moral panic that this technology signified to the parents.

Why did I go here? I'm not a virtuoso violinist, but I see the connection clearer and clearer. The Paganinis of our time have 97% dot uptime on multiple targets. Their wow logs are the stuff of legend. I find the engineer who deconstructs this ingenuity into a spell cast sequence that establishes the best results, and I adopt it. It's a single button. I was good at beating Asteroids as a kid by spinning and mashing the 'shoot' button as fast as I could. Cockroach reflexes, that was my claim to fame. I've caught many a falling glass, potted plant, by way of those reflexes. I can mash Squinky's macro as fast as can be registered. I'm playing the game better now because I can play through his macro, his spell sequence, his decision tree for maximum DPS. I mash the number 4 button like a boss, and voila. It's like Annesh was never here to challenge me, but what it does do is reduce my play to gear and gear alone when comparing my play to that of another who relies on this macro. Yes, it takes some of the fun and mystery out of the game. Hell, it alienates me from the class mechanics that those slot-machine minded programmers gave to shadowpriests. But as long as my pointer finger doesn't fall off from repeated whackings of number 4, expect me to put up numbers worthy of my gear. I've found a way to maximize dps. I'm robo-pfieffer. Insult me. I will not cry. Punch me. I will not bruise. Ignore me. My blinking lights will not change. I am the lie that you think is my own ability to play the game. I'll keep hacking meters for the sake of performance measures. That's the point anyway. I just regret that I couldn't do it by my own ingenuity. I am the outcome of my choice to use this macro. I am robo-pfieffer.

Beep.

Beep.

Notes on Big Body

Big Body is society, its infrastructure, the habits of mind, and the broad strokes of human action that define its ebb and its flow.

Big Body is merely a concept for all the concrete, rebar, plumbing, wires, and other sundry elements that comprise a functioning society's substantive framework. It is the Big Body for it is both the body, the meat, the substance of societal workings and it is the projection for the individual. As the house is a projective body for the family dwelling within it, Big Body serves as the dwelling space for society.

I came upon this idea in my many drives to and from school. I saw a building that I called the last remaining bit of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project built in St. Louis in the 1960s. That was a failed experiment in housing African Americans. Its residents took advantage of the space, ripping out all that was worth something and scrapping it. The density of the project also led many an enterprising resident to prey upon the more hapless residents. It was demolished after its brief tenure. It was a failed social experiment. The idea came from the stripping of the housing projects infrastructure, its plumbing, for scrap, which gave me the idea for Big Body. Big Body is merely a concept, an idea, a focal point for attending to the ways that people use their body not as labor per se but as product to be sold. People sell blood. People sell eggs. People sell sperm. People sell hair. People sell plasma. And people donate their bodies to science and to medicine for use in others. Science has rendered the body a site for consumption. And so the big buildings also present themselves as bodies to be harvested as well to the enterprising who see not a dwelling but an opportunity to seize.

That's all fine and dandy but to make this idea sing, to make it work conceptually one has to flesh it out analytically. I see Big Body as an evolving work. The past 200 years have seen the city become the focal point for dense dwelling. As such it became the problem of density that must be solved. Waste removal, water, heating, electricity, basic safety, health codes, and the like were ways of solving the problems that come with dense dwelling. So many bodies huddled into orderly spaces is an accomplishment of the modern city. Out of this, Big Body takes shape. As we've entered the 20th century, electricity and the telephone emerge. In its train follow radio and television. The next wave is the Internet and the continual remediation of past forms of communication through digital channels and the many companies seeking to set its standards. Taken as a whole we are witnessing the emergence of a true nervous system for Big Body. The epochal shifts in the evolution of Big Body also focus on shifts in individual relations between the little, personal bodies and our understanding of them plus how our little, personal bodies relate to others. The pathologies of our times perhaps find a connection within the changes and developments of Big Body. This is a work in progress.

I like the idea of Big Body. It has a certain sci-fi flair to it much like Big Brother. Big Body is merely the substance of our relations. The brief past echo and the built future upon which our bodies will interface. The life giving water that we drink passes first through Big Body. Our waste is carted away, distributed, and treated through Big Body. Features of our universal rights as humans, the things taken for granted, are the substance of Big Body as well. Recently, access to the World Wide Web was added to the United Nation's list of basic human rights. That is an outcome of human activity, human retooling, human remediation of Big Body. Most of what we write, see, read, and share pass through the copper cables laid at the beginning of the 20th century and maintained through this century. Big Body is our relation to the most intimate space and the most public space. People eat, shit, drink, sleep, and weep in and upon the surfaces of Big Body. Some prefer to do it behind a door. Others do it among others. How each of us navigates these realms, adds significance or none to them, and how individuals must contend with the uses to which Big Body is put but their little bodies among the constant traffic of humans punctuates psychology and its many pathologies. Paruresis, psychogenic urinary retention, is but one example of how contending with Big Body as a little body crops up. The public excretion avoidant and its opposite, the person who leaves shit in the toilet and on its walls or urinates in inappropriate places comprise the ways that Big Body affords opportunities for pathologies and socially inappropriate behaviors to emerge.

Notes on Big Body run much the way of how technology pundits describe standards and innovation. Big Body is the built environment. Into it we are born. The residue of our time spent among it is left in the names scratched into pavement, spray point on the walls. These isolated vignettes are but one way that the built environment is repurposed. These may provide fodder for the glass half full crowd. For the glass half empty crowd the built environment is a reality with which we must contend. Ultimately, this built environment is a limiting condition for the full and flowering potential of human expression. We see this in the ways that copper wire limits communication. We see this in the ways that our desire for cars congests cities. We see this in the ways our time gets wasted in traffic and in transit to and from locations. We also see this in the ways that telework enables us to avoid this, but also avoid most of the human relations that once punctuated our lives. The litany of pros and cons is not dissimilar to the usual techno-pundits' laundry list. To differentiate Big Body from the pack is to hone in on the interface and the pathologies it produces. Big Body is about finding ways to reconcile individuality with socialilty, to fulfill the needs of individuals both bodily and mentally while fulfilling the basic needs of a functioning and efficient dense-living social organism. The television images of cities from the 1960s through the 1980s plays out in my mind as I try to see Big Body. Koyaanisqatsi comes to mind. There the metaphor of the small, the electronic, the body, and society all came together. Circuit boards and cities find similarities. Traffic and circulatory systems find similarities. Also, the hubris that succeeding in bringing so much human potential together spins out in the end to remind us that no matter how much we can project progress and futurity upon the modern city as a trope we have not left the little fishing village, the little pastoral community behind. The thousands of years we spent following animal herds as opportunistic hunters is the in-built obsolescence of human social behavior that must be relegated to the Id in our Victorian blueprint for modern society. That's it.

Big Body is how past, present, and futurity coalesce in the built and lived-upon framework of society. While one could read this from that art-house flick. Big Body merely puts some academic dressing upon it.

These are my notes upon Big body. More to come I hope.

I am the apparatus

I am an extension of the apparatus. I am its business end, its interface, its worn, sometimes warm, sometimes wet functional protuberance. I am where the proverbial rubber of the apparatus' ideology meets the functional road of the masses. I am its mover. I am its shaker. I am its giver and its taker. My body gives it life. My behavior gives it substance. My pain gives it conviction. My screams give it voice. My death gives it immorality. It can be a flag but its meaning, its symbolism, its utter significance for every teary eyed follower is written in my blood, which I willing gave to close the circular argument in which it caught me. It moved me. I move into the path of destruction for the sake of it. My body is memorialized in it. It flaps in the breeze. That's my spirit haunting it.

I am a the moral significance of the machine. I operate it. It moves me. I move it. I feed it my time, my money, my gas. And it provides me a projection upon which the most whimsical of fantasies take shape. Conquering the space and time between point A and point B is not travel. No sir. That's freedom. I will protect it with my life for it is an extension of my citizenship in a free country. It is my badge of privilege. It is my extensible reality. It is my best side. I move forth in the world showing it. If I dent it, it becomes my shame. I paint my politics on it in so many adhesive messages. This machine allows me a public space for my own personal graffiti, and so I project. I tell the world that I'm proudly atheist. I tell the world to be forewarned that I'm, in fact, transporting precious cargo, my child. I proclaim to the world that my choice of brand is as important as my choice of political party. I let the world know that this machine is, in fact, one of many that I own. Yes, through this machine I present to you my fitness as a mate, my fitness as a citizen, my role as a member in our society. I am free in this machine, yet every turn I take requires close observance to speed limits, lights that indicate when I must stop, and directions that indicate where I must go. Where am I going? Why is it so far away? A conspiracy emerges, but the conspiracy is deep structure to a cleavage that I chose upon participating in the world that was made for and justifies the use of these machines. They are articulations, sentences, functions, a grammar of functionality through which I speak freedom, I speak common sense, I affirm the reality of the society that this car underpins and makes sensible and common. I am complicit in it by recognizing it as a reality to which I must contend.

"That man ain't right in the head." My step father used to say. He was commenting on a man who lived in a motel and who walked everywhere he needed to go. He was a university professor who had sworn off the niceties. He was a man perhaps with a phobia of automobiles. He was a man who had lost his wife in an automobile-related accident. None can fault him for his reaction. He had to do it to not forget his wife. Yet others, on the inside of their cars looking out upon him, couldn't help but notice that unlike us in our cars, he was no longer anonymous. He wasn't hiding behind the tint of windows or shade. He wasn't hiding behind a half ton of metal carefully designed and marketed to my demographic. No, he was using his own two feet, strapped into sandals, to go to an fro like a Jesus or a Gandhi. but he was just that loony fixture in that small town where he walked. "It's best to remain anonymous," seemed to be one of the messages that car ownership provides. No longer a Jesus or a Gandhi, this man walked the town, his message warped by the sensibilities in the ultraviolet filter of car windshields that passed him by. Each framed the faces that peered out while they framed the light of the world that came within. A strange moving world picture, and we continually find ways to affix a screen to our apparatus for the sake of being its audience.

Why are we afraid to be close, to confront, to put up with relative strangers? We are all human are we not? Why do we love the image projected from a satellite in space of an actor who plays a person that he or she is not while we live mere feet from people from whom we are worlds apart? I stand, sit, sleep, eat, shit, cry, masturbate, dream, fantasize, scream, fight, write, and moan alone a mere 20 to 30 feet from people I hardly know. I am white. They are black. I am alone. They have each other. We are human yet our ideas, our sensibilities, our values can be so far apart due to the choices we made, the actions we chose, the lives we chose to lead. Yet we still eat, sleep, shit, cry, piss, die mere feet from each other. Concrete and brick are all it takes to erect a psychic barrier between ourselves. Our music choices, our television viewing habits, our eating habits all help define our lifestyle and our identity yet we don't share this with each other. Even the windows the provide light to come in are blocked up to disallow the bored or curious neighbor from peering in. And so we remain in our homes. They are our boxes, our velvet-lined cases, where we store our personal menagerie of me-things. An "I" that lives separately from my body resides there. Fire, floods, and burglary remind us of this. We continue to invest in the object qua fetish. We collect some mindlessly while most collect dust.

Notes on a dark comedy

Man molests child. Man goes to prison and suffers abuse from inmates. Man goes to in-house counseling services.

As man serves out his sentence child goes through her own counseling and coping. Child explores the dark side of adolescence. Child becomes a teen, and begins to explore her own sexuality. Teen cuts herself. Teen does drugs. Teen realizes that after man who molested her, she hasn't allowed to let anyone touch her psychically.

Teen contacts man in prison. Man in prison is grateful that he has a pen pal. Teen doesn't reveal her identity nor how she tracked down her molester. Man is free and meets up with teen. Teen strap attacks man. Man's prison experience accustoms him to being sodomized.

Teen's strap-on dildo contains a plastic softener substance known to mimic certain hormones. Man begins growing breasts. Now a woman, the teen suffers a double mastectomy from breast cancer. Woman has no tits. Man has them. Man takes it in his butt, woman delivers him this using her cheap strap-on with the plastic softener known to mimic certain hormones. Man's body continues on its confused existence. Man then contracts prostate cancer. Destitute and dying, the woman accompanies him. As he lays dying, she reveals her true identity. The man views this as his penance. Man is buried with the woman's strap-on. Now middle aged and sexually militant, the widowed woman who married her sex-offender tries to start over. She cannot.

Woman who lost her innocence to a child molester. Woman her lost her tits to cancer. Woman who lost her husband to cancer becomes a killer. She begins hunting down the executives for industries that produce carcinogenic chemicals. She establishes herself as a dominatrix with a very select clientele. She plays the submissive role in order to get some of the high-powered execs into her home. Her tit-less body allows her to play the child role. She relives her violent past. She turns on each of the executives that she's lured in and rapes them with a special strap-on, one that causes serious internal injuries resulting in the bleeding death of each executive that she lures to her home.

The psychosexual relationship to nature

Slavoj Zizek has made hay out of the environmentalism movement. He calls it the dominant ideology of our time. He likens our views concerning the ill consequences of not respecting the environment to the fall from grace contained in the genesis narrative. He uses mobilizes religious imagery to support his claim that ideological analysis is the proper way to frame environmentalism in popular discourse. Let's think of an alternative.

I see it as a sexual relationship. I see a psychosexual connection between our activities in relation to nature and nature's own actions upon our body. We are natural organisms. Nature passes through our bodies, and our range of psychosexual behaviors focus on these passage ways. The mouth, the anus, the penis, the vagina, all connect us to natural concerns such as rhythm, pollution, and cleanliness.

If our connection to nature has a pyschosexual profile then the dominant trope is sadomasochism. We're either inflicting pain and hurt upon nature or it's visiting that same pain upon us. An endless cycle of give and take occurs. Nature negates our comfort, and we oppose this negation through the construction of microenvironments. Boats, cars, planes, our homes are all microenvironments through which we attempt to keep some things out. We attempt to live upon the earth on our terms. Only occasionally do we have to endure the discomfort and dangers of extreme cold and heat. We almost always have a microenvironment to which we can retreat.

We fuck the environment and get fucked by the environment.

a place to write

I just need a place to write. I need a place where I can legitimize my connection to things, the world, people. I suppose other activities exist, which help solidify this connection. I chose writing, or writing chose me.

Some activities, when deeply engaged in them, reveal the secret of invention. Kairos is a word that notes how events are gauged from the vantage point of the not-so-distant future. The occurrence of events and the actions, which set these events in motion, are incidental. Yes, we may gauge an effect in our actions upon our immediate world. The world also pushes back in its casual revealing before us. This idea is nothing new, and I'm certainly not sure why I'm rehashing it in a lighter format.

I need a place to aim. I need a place where I can focus my energies into a workable semblance of creativity. I hang my ideas on words, in their arrangement, their spoken cadence, the meaningfulness for me. What is it that may bring another to read my words are unknown to me. Even if they find intrinsic appeal, it's a foreign experience.

I generally hate me. I am always directing scorn at my appearance. So much have I done this that I wish myself invisible in social settings, by erasing my body from its own native sociality. This has the effect of mystifying my own secretions and excretions. In wishing me gone, I've come to view the parts of myself that I cannot wish away as pathologies. They confirm my fundamental lack of control.

I ache for a deep friendship. Two bodies touching, trusting one another. Yet I cannot accept my own body. This complicates relationships because my pathology spills over into a general grouchiness. I vacillate between closeness and distance. I become irritable. I burn with desire, then I burn with hate. I am a ball of tightly wound emotions. I stand alone. I walk alone. I eat alone. I remain ethical and moral in my vacuum. With nothing to test me, nothing to tease me, nothing to tempt me, nothing to please me I remain inert, a dusty relic of my flourishing humanity, my hygge, my happiness and comfort among others. I eat alone. I wash my own dishes and my own clothes. I pick up after myself alone. With no one to complain and no one to complain to I do what I please when I please. I have utter freedom and no wills to oppose, no human laws to break by living alone. I like being alone. I enjoy its confirming absence. Some embrace the oneness of it all. I embrace the none-ness.

Why construct a religion, a daily routine out of identity with the none? That would be peeling back the onion. I don't think many want to get deep with themselves or contemplate the things and the nothings they echo in song. I sit alone, not wholly understanding of my religion nor am I much of a good follower. I'd be the first to erect the laws and the first to break them. I dig deep, and still I cannot embrace the meaninglessness of life. I cannot necessarily accept the tranquility of life's maddening unraveling of my own beliefs. Over time, we lose this battle and then we die. It's a strange way of bringing the nothing into one's life. My grim reaper, my harbinger of the encroaching chaos that will envelop all of us in the end is in my harboring this fugitive called nothingness. It's the outlaw in this story, and while I feed it it pays no kind favor back. It's motives are incidental, and I better watch my step around it. It will destroy me in the end. All I can do is to lean how to avoid getting caught in its tango. It's a dance I will never win.

I'm thinking of a woman I know who is perfectly unattainable and also unavoidable. My throat is tight from anxiety, longing, and stress about her familiarity. I fear judgment. I fear the evaluative stare of others. It's character is hidden within the datum of interaction mostly cobbled into the nonverbal actions. The body once again reveals its hand in this dance between things. We are all things, and I place such undo emphasis on significance. But my poetry is just a distraction, window dressing for the real identity, the thing-ness and otherness of one another and of oneself. This thing-ness promotes an awareness of a there-ness without offering an explanation for existence. I am somewhere in a room. Shame shoots through it like a ray of light, and from this light cast upon my presence I extract meaning. I cannot explain myself. I just am, and for that alone I am ashamed.

looking up the winners

The winners are the people that completed their degrees. I'm one of the losers. I looked up one of the winners today. She works in Denver. She does statistical modeling for some company called Corona. I'm sure she lives comfortably in the city with the purported best dating scene for 20-35 year-old singles. I wouldn't know much about dating scenes, although my last date was when I lived in that area. Muncie, Indiana was certainly not a place to find a lady or even to settle down. As I've noted before, a brown aura hung over that town. I'm still stained.

My aura is dead. It fizzled out. As I've said, I'm one of the losers, and I live eternally in the penumbra of my past failures. I cannot come to terms with my quitting, nor could I come to terms with my finishing either. I was in between. Now I barely get by, and it has its romantic or exciting moments. Mostly though I find myself cooking up deranged fantasies and living by them. I find reasons to remain alone. I find reasons to alienate my few friends. My cat moans endlessly, and I continue to ignore her. That's my life. I scribble into this little diario on occasion but have nothing truly life-changing to say. Here was my recent insight.

People laugh at my jokes for reasons unknown to me. I make the jokes for reasons that are known to me, but their appeal for others is unknown to me. I accept that they are a mystery to me and the in-between I bridge with a joke is a mystery. I'm giving up my jokes. I'm in a sour mood and I sorely want a life make-over. I want to get serious, get a job, and move the fuck out of this place. I don't care where I go. I just want to head somewhere else. I need to mix up my life, and acquiring a job would help me do so. I've used this excuse before. I told myself in November that I had some writing plans. I've written 0 sentences in completion of those plans. Six months in and I've nothing to show for this year--another wash in the sand, another fragmented kelp frond cast into the surf, pocked with cigarette filters, drowned in the echoes of last night's party. Why do I write? Why do I propose? I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. Even my half-sister's hopes for my employment have gone unanswered. Nothing. I haven't talked to her since she came into town and treated me to a brunch at Casa Gallardo. That was a pleasant moment. Now I stand here, no prospects, and a cryptic message that went unanswered. "My boss wants you to do something." Then I called her back on the wrong day and she never returned the call. I know what her boss wants me to do, get my shit out of her inbox.

I look up the winners because I'm not one of them. They're the context for my own sorry text, a tear drop serves as my period. A frown functions as a quotation. A moan fills in for the vowels and a sob for the consonants. I stand around wondering why every time that I get this way nobody wants to entertain it. They just tell me to suck it up and shut the fuck up. I want to stab a fucker in the heart for trying to tell me how to live my life. I live it how I please, and I've resigned to living alone because I refused to have any affinity with the dupes and the sleepwalking wounded that surround me. I'm not sleeping. I'm well awake and scared shitless like a mouse in a sticky trap.

I write myself in circles and seek out those who write what I wish I could do for myself. I sit down with any project and lose all interest in the doing. There's a measure of anxiety that accompanies the act of writing for an audience, be it a teacher or a panel of experts on a topic. I'm a phony. I'm a fake. I'm speaking into the air. Is there anyone there that understands my snowflake unique bullshit tripe of a message? I wished that girl in the audience did. Man, she was so beautiful to perceive. Her friend, a panel member, was a bit rough at the edges, and asked me the time. I guess that was her attempt at having me behold her. I beheld her mind. She was all rough otherwise, but like a busted up looking tin can, the contents remained glistening and nutritive. She had ideas, not botulism. She's gone now too. I'm certain that she has her PhD and either lives stateside or moved back to that country that her accent revealed as something Eastern European.

All things are 'no' things. They are overdetermined by their 'not this'-ness. I'm a 'no' thing to any other thing. Things are things. That's the only symmetry a thing shares with another, the logic of naming. The thing will always buffet any attempt for the word, the logos to shape it. All the logos and the thing can do in concert is to motivate my own attitudes concerning the thing, its moral character, its consequential nature.

the gun

The gun leads to an ad hoc re-evaluation of life. A man can shoot someone for robbing his home, his car, his self. Regardless of the value of the items this man has in his car, his house, or on his person, with a gun he decides that these things are worth more than the robber. He discharges his firearm into the robber rendering him a lifeless thing.

But what is his now lifeless body worth? Was he a smoker? Maybe his lungs would make good donor material. What was his blood type? He's a veritable trove of organs and tissue up for grabs. Better put him on ice gunslinger, you've made yourself a killing on the body part black market.

requiem for an avatar

I don't think I knew you Zorn, but goodbye.

I had a similar set of reasons behind bowing out of raiding/playing WoW. To be honest, the time I spent playing is now spent aimlessly "dicking around." Sure, I've used plenty of the 7-11 raid time during the week to do work, write ideas down, paint house, party like a rock star, snort blow, blow money, make money, smoke pot, cook food, drink beer, hang with buds, do shots, stare at chicks, dodge bullets, read comments under the yahoo news blurbs, debate Zionism, entertain conspiracies, discuss algorithms of oppression, apply for jobs, retool resume, stare at CV, ponder the future, consider suicide, fantasize about chicks I was too chickenshit to ask on dates, deliver one-liners, take naps, grade papers, enter class, discuss class, write jokes, do HITs on Mturk, lose my ability to do HITs on Mturk, blog, date girls, date myself, play flash games, dominate the world in Civ1, lean against the wall, weep, sweep, mop, do push-ups, ride my bike, walk to the liquor store, wave at my neighbors, act discrete, force people logging in here to be my audience, forcing others to be my audience, screaming, singing, fantasizing, dancing alone, jerking off, etc.

The game has it's own justifiable structure: time killed in game amounts to some tangible, albeit digital, gain. You gain faction, you gain gold, you earn gear, you learn fights, you overcome challenges. Man, if only my life had a progress bar at the bottom of my retinal HUD. Alas, it does not. A stack of read books surely doesn't have that same sense of 'leveling' that the game environment creates.

So I sit on the outside looking in. I sit on the sidelines cheering you on. I visit newegg and piece together comps. like I go to wowhead and experiment with talent builds.

I justify playing like I justify not playing--neither really stacks up. Hell, I'm not sure a wife, kids, family, or security clearance and 'burn after reading' instructions would justify not entertaining the idea of playing this game forever. Maybe losing my arms playing with rocket fuel would...

The game can be fun, the kids are all right, socializing under the cloak of an avatar is intoxicating, earning reputation is cool; yes, it gets old. I called the sustenance of this game like eating marshmallow Peeps--oh so sweet but leaving you empty. I take that back. I think the game invites you to the challenge and once you've met the majority of the challenges the mystique fades--for some anyway. You bide your time, a new patch comes out, and you start all over with new or retooled talents, new dungeons, new factions, new gear, new challenges. To see the endless repetition in this game as a reason to quit invites a similar critique of one's life, career, and obligations to family, friends, flock, or country. None of them end, and a lot of the rituals we engage in to fulfill our duties to friends, family, coworkers, bosses, country are repetitive, endlessly repetitive.

So we drink, drug, shoot silhouettes, shoot up, drop out, fight, fuck, scream, sing, play guitar, drums, or rub one out.

I had a mystical experience once on pot. I witnessed the death of family and pets and mourned them all. I cried, rocked back and forth, and sang along to the Pavement CD that I had put on before turning the lights out. For a long time thereafter my life had significance, my actions had purpose. Instead of dicking around and hating on myself I told myself I could do anything. I turned my D in Trig. to an A in analytic geometry. I aced every exam. I went to college and aced all of that crap. I learned a lot, found permanence in molecular bonds, and mistook it for more mysticism.

Then I had another mystical experience, once again fueled by pot. I got high and saw an ST Voyager episode, Deadlock, and once again decided that school was the wrong idea. I wanted to be a writer. I had this huge sci-fidea. When I approached my advisor to discuss next year's courses I told her that I was done going to school here. Of course this lead to a huge intervention on the part of my family. I conceded and finished my degree, and I'm still paying off my loans. Some of the people who motivated me are dead now. I never honored my grandfather's wish to dance with the bride at my wedding. I never married.

That was my last mystical experience. I was 19. Now I'm 33 and the reality principle's peristaltic undulations move me along.

Contacting the Ombuds Office

I've decided that elements of my current employer fall within the range of labor violations, so I contacted the University Ombudsman's office.

I teach a class with 12 students. I grade their assignments within a reasonable time frame.

The next class I receive has 18 students. Two drop the class. I grade the 16 remaining students' assignments under greater time constraints.

This simple comparison is an example of the impact that manipulating the classroom size has upon my workload. A class with 4 more students than 12 is 33% larger, and the class of 16 provides no more financial compensation than the class of 12. I'm paid by the contract. Class size isn't indicated in the contract, just its course number, title, and the dates that it will be in session. Class size isn't a condition of the contract; my behavior is. I sign the contract digitally as recognition that I will adhere to the standards of conduct, which inhere to the contract. Sticky situation.

I have choices about how I conduct the class of 16 to maintain the same workload. To do so will be at the student's expense. The University of Phoenix charges undergraduate students pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Business and Management through the Online campus $530 per credit hour plus an $85 fee for access to books and the library. Since the course I teach fulfills three credit hours, a student pays $1675 to the University to earn three credits toward the fulfillment of a degree; that is, if they pass the course. A class of 16 nets the University $26,800. Of that, the University pays me less than one thousand dollars. The university overwhelmingly gains in this transaction.

But I add value. I'm the non-machine counterpart who operates as the cog. I'm the spinning wheel, the algorithm, the force-relation mechanism, the contraption. I'm the obstacle course, which the student must pass for educational credit. The University grades the cost of individual credit hours, using a scale that increases with each successive degree. A Bachelor's degree costs more per credit hour than the Associate's degree. The value inherent in the University's model is the level of the degree. The value is in the outcome. The value I add to this outcome stems from the unpredictability that I add to it. I have a choice that isn't merely governed by a feedback mechanism or how I choose to use the University's feedback feature. I have a choice irrespective of the structure of the class on how to discuss the content of the class. Unpredictability in a structured environment is its operational character. The value of unpredictability lies in the depth that it brings to the flattened, serially reproduced content of the course.

I get paid regardless of what I add to the course, within reason. My contract requires me to conduct myself professionally in the classroom. How the University monitors my adherence to this contract is reflected in the minimums of post count and weekly activity. The algorithms that track this also search my posts for text strings flagged as 'questionable content' in order to track my conduct.

Alas, what's missing is that the credits, credit hours, and the final degree are what contains the value. The diploma is the official document, which opens doors, grants raises, and expands the value of the employee. Businesses set this value through their practices of awarding those with a higher degree accordingly. Students seek this value by pursuing a degree. The University sets up shop, gets accreditation, and hires me to teach a course. My course is just a stop on the journey to the student-worker's degree and diploma. But I'm the real content. The diploma is a symbol, a synecdoche of what I provided for the student. I graded the student's papers. I graded the student's tests. I provided the student with reinforcement, guidance, and an expert voice in the discussion of organizational communication. I'm the value in the education. I don't grant the student the raise though; the diploma does.

Socio economic status

The census is in, and my neighbor informs me that the average household income in my area is under $18 thousand. That's a meager sum of money when I see the Denalis, the Suburbans, the Monte Carlos, the Impalas all tricked out, and shining in the shade of my tree-lined street. Maybe these guys deal drugs. They sit on their porch all day and occasionally scream at each other.

Another day in the 'hood.

I made $8 thousand last year. I supplemented that income with approximately $1500 through a short-lived job helping my neighbor on his drug abuse study, selling items on e-bay, and interest on my money market account. I have something the thugs on my block don't have, money in the bank. I have something the thugs on my block don't have, academic credentials. I have something that the thugs on my block don't have, a job.

I am employed within an academic simulacrum, the University of Phoenix. I teach, I type, I grade, I send, I receive--a purely mechanical existence mediated by a text-based forum filled with topics apropos of organizational communication. It's a fitting metaphor for our lives, our fears, our politics, our aspirations, our rhetoric--business. I'm in the business of adding some theory and metatheory to the debate, occasionally losing my students, and sometimes perhaps giving them hope and positive regard. I've measured it. Positive regard takes up about 3 kilobytes of data, which takes around 2 seconds to get sent through my terminal, busted into packets of information, spread through the ether, reassembled on the other end, and saved onto this classroom space--this digital bureaucracy, this information-age sweat shop for the un-esteemed faculty. I hold on to the belief that I'm touching lives. I just stand in the way of these students and a few more degree hours on their way to a diploma. The diploma is paper. The ceremonies are real. I am real.

I can bet one thing. Each and every one of my students makes more money than I do. I made more money than I do now when I worked weekends at Debbie's Meat Emporium. I qualify for food stamps. I qualify for state aid. I qualify for a good job. I qualify for the city's weatherization program. I make well under $12,000. I also qualify for a better job--a job that I don't want.

Here I am. I like that I stand, one foot in poverty, one foot in some airy concept that is supposed to signal a bridge to a successful future, one that pays well. I've gone the distance. I've learned the rules of the game. When given the sandbox to create at my whim, I walked away. I've had this conversation a thousand times, and I suppose that I will have this conversation a thousand more times until I don't feel that tinge of irony. I like this idea that I'm an eligible bachelor, yet I continue to play 'hard to get.' I'll close for now. I'm unsure what I'm doing anyway.

Raping to know

Her parents showed a mixture of surprise and disgust. Their eyes burned with an overwhelming desire to know whether or not she was still a virgin, whether or not I had fucked their 'baby.'

I contacted her parents after I threw her in the pool without recognizing the depth. She caught her fall with her right foot and sprained her ankle. I drove her to an urgent care clinic where they submitted her foot to x-ray, wrapped it in cloth, and gave her a small quantity of pain medicine. She was young enough to be covered under her parent's health insurance, so I let them know what happened.

When her parents arrived, her eyes welled up and she stretched her arms out to receive their parental guardianship. Smart girl. I sat in the chair, kept my distance, and prepared for their rage. The father didn't swing. The mother did. I took my glasses off and let her hit me. The father grabbed her, and then grabbed me by the throat. I kept my cool. He wasn't choking me. I didn't give them a story. There was no need. I'd let the girl's story be the official one. I live alone. I'm an adult. I don't mind one bit how her parents think of me. The girl is the one who will have to live for at least another 5 years under their rule. I didn't envy her position. Since she was their 'baby' I knew she had an advantage and ability to set their mind at ease.

Still the parents insisted on knowing whether or not we had had sex. This was our first clandestine date. We checked into a hotel room in her town. We brought our swimming suits and took advantage of the hotel's recreational options. It was a hot day, and we had the pool almost exclusively to ourselves. I made the mistake of goofing around in the pool with her, and didn't pay attention to the depth when I tossed her in. I made a mistake, and I felt sorry for hurting her. I did what I could to redress this mistake. She told them we had not done anything. She was telling the truth. Her parents, her mother especially, was suspicious. Her father wanted to leave the story at her word, but he yielded to his wife's demands. The father scooped his daughter into her arms and took her behind a closed door as a nurse came in with a rape kit tucked under her arm.

A rape kit consists of a light, a speculum, rubber gloves, and some treated swabs. The swabs are to grab any residual semen in the vaginal cavity--a procedural formality, that place where medical practice and police evidence gathering meet. This was a state-standard rape kit. The speculum, light, and rubber gloves are where the medical practitioner looks for signs of vaginal trauma, signs of the fleshy friction of sex, and, in this case, the ripped hymen.

The nurse had never done one of these exploratory exercises. The police were on their way--also a formality. I sat in a room, alone, behind a locked door. I looked at an informational poster showing a cross section of the human body to highlight the digestive system. The nurse in her clumsy first attempt at collecting evidence in the parents' legal case against me, busted the girl's hymen. She didn't recognize it, and unintentionally grabbed it with her index finger.

Fitting.

I'm sure this hurt the girl. The first time always does. It's a combination of trauma and pleasure, of strange feelings and an attempt to reconcile them with previous experiences. I understood the feelings. I'm a veteran so to speak. She was green. I was prepared to go slow or not go at all. I didn't really care whether or not we did have sex. I could appreciate her presence and having an effect on her emotions by words alone. That was more exhilarating than the hydraulic pumping action of insemination--a mere formality of procreation. I was biding my time, preparing her for this moment; I was prepared to enjoy it just as much as her. Keeping my selfish motives in check would ripen the fruit of our first time, and I was patient, infinitely patient. I like the responsibility. I like building trust on a foundation of strangeness and suspicion. I like building confidence on a foundation of anxiety.

I shattered all of this when I tossed her into the shallow end of the pool. That's fine by me. She can have her childhood back. I don't want it. I sat in the locked room, staring at the exposed insides of this reference body highlighting the digestive system. It spoke truth by its presence. The girl's parents required her to sit quietly as the nurse examined her for signs of sexual activity. The nurse probed her anus, destroying a little bit of her innocence and pride. Her parents greedily watched, perhaps mildly aroused by their vantage point. They were aroused by being company to their daughter's body being rendered into evidence. Her daughter's body spoke a truth filtered through medical procedure they could trust. Instead of punishing her, spanking her, grounding her, they submitted her to a vivisection, a live autopsy of her sexual life. She couldn't keep that secret from her parents. They reveled in this moment of truth taking.

I sat in the locked room, felt a mild pressure on my bladder, and pondered that my body was also not my own. Incarceration was imminent, a formality. I was preparing myself. I was ready to keep quiet. The girl was humiliated by her parents and the fumbling medical examination by the green-stick nurse. Her body was all the evidence they needed. I didn't need to speak. My logos would not match her corpus. It's her body; she can have it back from me. Unfortunate for her that she had to submit to her parent's state-sponsored exploration of her body for knowledge, for evidence. That was her punishment. She lost her virginity to a nurse fumbling for facts. I was careful and considerate. I didn't want her facts, just her time. And I was more than happy to share with her the benefit of my time, my experience, my knowledge. I had no interest in forcing more from her than she wanted to offer. That's hardly a gift. I'm just not interested in domination. That's hardly a case in my defense. I'll remain mute. I'll let my body speak in its presence alone. I'm quite selfish and self-interested. I don't want my story to mix with hers or with the medical examination's body of evidence.

Thanks to modern warfare

Thanks to modern warfare hate is rational and killing is calculated.

Thanks to modern warfare that video game I played endlessly as a kid has prepared me to pilot one of many killing machines in a multi-billion dollar weapons platform.

Thanks to modern warfare our generals remain in an air-conditioned command room in Florida directing the actions on a theater of war thousands of miles away.

Thanks to modern warfare everyone can own a pair of night-vision binoculars.

Thanks to modern warfare the military is the only self-affirming, life-long occupation someone can enjoy that remains democratically available to all. That is, if they don't ask and you don't tell.

Thanks to modern warfare I have an excuse for killing my wife, neighbors, or strangers using techniques I learned in advanced weapons training.

Thanks to modern warfare combat is no longer the number one cause of death among enlisted soldiers; it's suicide.

Thanks to modern warfare the propaganda machine uses peace time to frame all major issues as warfare so it can recycle copy and be ready for the next major conflict.

Thanks to modern warfare nearly every member of Congress has a military contractor interest in his or her district.

Thanks to modern warfare the Humvee is a status symbol.

Thanks to modern warfare being a killer is cool.

Thanks to modern warfare love is a sissy emotion marked by irrational behavior and unclear thinking.

Thanks to modern warfare being a killer is an employable occupation.

Thanks to modern warfare government contractors operate as mercenaries, do the bidding of the U.S. military, and overwhelmingly skew war casualty statistics.

Thanks to modern warfare political careers begin with military service, which serves the politician's true-blood ethos.

Thanks to modern warfare we are perfecting urban military search and suppression maneuvers to root out phantom enemies in civilian populations.

Thanks to modern warfare presidents can guarantee themselves a second term by simply reminding the population that it's at war.

Thanks to modern warfare we no longer live in a free society yet cite that very thing as the reason we go to war and spout jingoist slogans in support of war, troops, and the president while justifying the violent suppression of dissent.

Thanks to modern warfare we have something described as an "American way of life," which we will starve of funding in favor of buying more weapons to defend it.

Thanks to modern warfare anything that matters gets framed using war strategy and terminology.

Thanks to modern warfare traumatic brain injuries are on the rise.

Thanks to modern warfare large numbers of college-bound students under the GI bill will have learned how to kill before taking a course in ethics.

Thanks to modern warfare ratings are up.

How do you tell your best friend you're in love with his girlfriend?

You don't. You take comfort in the thought that this, like every other romantic infatuation that you've had, is ephemeral.

If she hadn't started working out and shoehorned herself into those tight jeans last night I wouldn't have even begun thinking about her. It's just an ass, and all I'm seeing of it is merely outlines. I've summed this up so many times, but I'll do it again.

Attraction, especially male attraction, is overwhelmingly visual. We can reduce this type of attraction to geometry, symmetry, curvature. Certain shapes draw our attention. The curvature of breasts or the line created by their cleavage can draw us. The eyes, nose, ears, and mouth and their distance from each other. The shape of an ass and how it projects from the profile of the body. The clever jean manufacturers are to blame for my current commandment-breaking coveting of my neighbor's wife. I've hated her before and that feeling was just as real as this one. This is what I tell myself to break myself from the idea of fucking her. This thought also leads me to a stark realization that my moods and my emotions are so existentially exterior to their objects. I can turn my love of someone off and on like a light, and either emotional state disavows the existence of the other. This feeling is so complete. I hate this about me. But I love her so much right now.

She was a siren last night, and she was caught at a sausage fest. Two friends stopped by my neighbor's place, and she was embroiled in a tiff with her usual weekend companion. After a salvo of text-messages, she removed herself from that situation and settled into a good drunk. That's when she became a bit of a flirt. She wanted me to join her on a late night beer run. I asked her to do a quick sobriety test. I didn't want her to drive, but the thought of going somewhere alone with her enticed me considerably. Her boyfriend, the guy to whom I address my rent checks, drove us, and we all decided to go. We took the sausage fest on the road.

Nothing came of the night except some very latent sexual sparks, and a disruption in my usual masturbation routine as I couldn't remove her from my mind or my constant attention. As much as these situations make me feel very much alive and well, I've constructed a Byzantine bureaucracy of emotions, thought, and behavior that force a consistency onto my being from which I can never stray. That's why I sit at home. That's why I rarely go out. That's why I rarely flirt. That's why I find any and all reason to avoid relationships. That's why I think that any woman with more than one close friend is a political threat and a liability. I dare not share with someone who will publish my inner demons, my inner feelings, my motivations, my desires to her friendship circle. I am alienated by the sentences people speak and write about me. I am utterly alienated by the grammatical function of the third person. I will not be a 'he.' In order to accomplish this, I must remove myself from the topic of discussion. I will prove to anyone that the idea of them is more important to me than their person. It's so goddamn alienating. I'm in love with the network of neurons that activate when I see my neighbor's common-law wife in a pair of tight jeans, not her. She just makes them activate.

Bring me the researchers in white lab coats. Keep my cage clean, my water fresh, and my food full and I'll happily submit to your electronic manipulation of my mind. At least then I'd feel that someone has some modicum of control over my mind other than this projected mind guard who watches my every move and adjudicates the proper self-inflicted punishment. Damn those tight jeans to their own private hell.