Seh-TAR-knee-on

Fact

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:28:01 GMT

Being embarrassed about the aesthetics of the previous 3 decades is so 1990s.

Highly Recommended

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:11:11 GMT

Listen to this! It's interesting.

Tender Run

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:13:24 GMT

I was picking up Vail at a park in a turquoise Cadillac to go get some chicken tenders and BBQ sauce; I ordered ahead and worried that the tenders were getting cold.

I was singing "Eye-m een Ah-merrr-ee-kah, Eye-m een Am-MERR-ee-kah!" as I scanned the park for Brian's hair.

The Real Proposition

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 05:30:20 GMT

The utter incredulity of arguments like 'Intelligent Design', 'The Redefining of Marriage' and 'Life at Conception' cannot be parsed to something even remotely sensical without their context.

Perhaps because there's no obvious equivalence of 'Know Thyself' on the stone tablets of Moses. Perhaps it's a manifestation of the steady shallowing of self-analysis. Whatever the cause, there is a deep sense of disconnect that one finds whenever someone presses upon the deep basis of these arguments.

Why, of all the things that could be argued, are these the chosen battlegrounds?

They found their moral sense on some of the purest subjectivities:

"I just can't imagine that I came from animals, that it all just happened randomly."
"There's just something not right about one man loving another man."
"I see that little beating heart and the baby-like face and I know, I just know, that it's a person."

"There is something just *wrong* about all that." The convictions are felt as strong by some as the conviction against pedophilia is felt by many.

The temptation here is to imagine that these innate moral feelings form the foundation of the arguments; the debate then falls into a futile battle against some vague notion of subjectivity versus objectivity, some unanswerable, unfathomable, and irreconcilable difference of the interlocutors.

What is the context? These debates emerge at the end of a massive social upheaval, the sequelae of the Great Depression. A spirit of hard-work, frugality, and self-sacrifice was poured into a post-war re-birth of the American economy; a surge of irresistibly naive rebellion, social experimentation, and creativity emerged in the grand wake of the revival. Inextricably bound to this Depressed order-out-of-necessity was something we have at the moments of greatest peril and tribulation—a sense of something greater, of something spiritual.

As the surge rose to its peak and the cup runneth over, the spirit lost focus, direction. Ever-present, it diverged into a countless sea of beliefs with a countless number of purposes. The boom generation practically "fell in" to their success without the spirit; they took it for granted and let it atrophy. The cocaine lines runneth over, the dotcoms runneth over, the housing market runneth over, the SUVs runneth over. The older (now near-gone) generation knew, all too well, that such success—and the order that forged it—were incredibly fragile.

The three arguments represent some of the main battlegrounds that have been chosen, on a deep unknowing level, by those who carry the torch of the "unified spiritual tidal wave" that once described the United States. The battlegrounds have been chosen neither for the soundness of their argument nor for their spiritual significance. They have been chosen because they can convince many on a gut-level; they all represent culturally new ideas that contradict the some of the oldest and most common senses of the old, vibrant order.

The arguments only incidentally relate to the portions of humanity they disrespect. The old-God torch-bearers must maintain the debates because, without them, they have no clear ground on which to battle.

At their heart, both sides of the debate ask, foolishly, stubbornly, pointedly "How do we find our unified sense of common purpose?" That's a very good question.

Obama has tapped into this question. His campaign's "Hope" took on an ambiguity that called back to our past order without directly confronting their stubbornly attached moral feelings; his Hope saddled the line between secular and spiritual.

So how will that Hope unfold in practice? It would appear in its development as an "American" sense of common purpose with an all-encompassing sense of non-religious spirituality. It would be a "Secular American Spirituality."

Secular humanism (perhaps the prototype of this spirituality), like a Hummer, can only run for a few miles before it runs out of the moral steam—the dregs of a God—on which it drives. On what absurdity, what leap of faith, does it base itself? Obama says, "Hope," and I deeply want to believe him.

But I'm not so hopeful. My heart has moved only from "deeply pessimistic" to "pessimistic." Hope, by itself, still stands on the spindly and precarious legs of the secular. It is only a bridge to a harder rock.*

An atheist spouts the untested theory of a society based on some imagined "rational morality" despite the obvious example of the economic crisis: the collapse of a system founded, to its core, on the closest thing humans can get to rational behavior—fear and greed. Without regulation, a rational system always moves toward a multitude of mutual defections. With regulation, we are nevertheless doomed by the inability of the rule-maker to keep up with the dynamic nature of game.

The system needs a the socio-political equivalent of "good sportsmanship." We still must find a common, uniting absurdity more robust than Hope and less rigid than God.

Or perhaps—instead—that elusive Secular American Spirituality is purely and only "Hope," a cycle of absurd speculative bubbles that imagine "it can only go up" until, of course, it doesn't (again).

*Yet I too cried, deeply, for it had been so long since I had seen a bridge.

?

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:56:27 GMT

Yay!

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:59:03 GMT

Living in the Future

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:26:09 GMT

I have felt for quite a few months now as if I am living in the future.

It is perhaps the warning bells I finally hear ringing about which learned in high school. Rising food prices, gas prices, slowly declining economies, and ever-increasing climactic extremes...corresponding with my purchase of a pocket-sized globally connected computer that has brightly colored and ever-shifting buttons.

This is very much the future I imagine myself to have imagined in junior high; memory is too fickle a thing for me to actually know. It is so far neither as brightly-colored nor as catastrophic as I had envisioned; still, I remember Mr. Irwin saying to us, "There are two ways to transport lots of goods: trains and trucks. Trains are more efficient, so we use trucks," and thinking to myself, "We'll probably go for ethanol first because it's the most convenient and terrible option."

I really didn't think this prophetically, so why is it that it feels as if things are proceeding exactly as I had imagined?

I can say without question, however, that those high school lectures got me thinking about man and his relationship to nature on it's most basic level. Those thoughts moved into architecture, then art, then philosophy, and then back to the science. Now I find myself thinking most often upon how to create a new psychology for the much more grounded yet interconnected future...one that avoids conflict and embraces contradiction as peacefully as it acquiesces to the downhill slope.

I like to think that petroleum has given us the energetic opportunity to deeply examine our social structure such that we can give rights and freedoms to those who had never had them. I like to think that we've spent a lot of time pondering a way to develop an entirely new means of affirming our grand cooperative commitment to one another. These voices are so quiet in the rush of progress that we imagine they'll never be heard worldwide. I hope they will.

But really, I'm not so optimistic; the leash of survival, in all likelihood, will pull us tight and choke the liberty, equality, and fraternity from our bones.

I guess I can't say for sure, though; without the energy, it will be much more difficult to wield the weapons of mass control. It really depends upon the durability of these ideas as the infrastructure which allowed them begins to crumble. It seems so impossible when I walk down the street. Then again, I thought I'd never even see the word "Green" used to sell a product. I never thought I'd see a non-white-male with a chance to become president. And as superficial as those changes may be, it's definitely not something I imagined in my lifetime.

Continued Articulation of Bear Culture and Its Foundations

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:28:44 GMT

I watched about ten different guys at beer bust drool over a short, pudgy (let's face it, on the edge of obesity), blond, slightly red-faced guy with big teeth. I wasn't drooling but I definitely found him attractive.

I lazily pondered those events at work today while I talked with my work buds about female attractiveness and thought upon how embedded my life is in a completely alternate aesthetic reality. How did we come to this place, where suddenly being obese and hairy became the essential qualities of attractiveness?

I've thought upon the question since I first gazed upon a bearded neckline and felt my testicles tingle in my hypercolor shorts. "WTF?" I thought (paraphrased, of course; in those days, we didn't have acronyms unless we were nurses, bureaucrats, or doctors).

After 15 years of deliberation on the question, "Why are bearz attractivez?" I have come to circle around these conclusions:

Reaction - Bear culture arose primarily as the aesthetic manifestation of a reaction against the perceived 'femininity' of the dominant gay culture. 'Femininity' was defined loosely by such terms: catty, bitchy, gossipy, needy, slutty, high-strung, deceptive, effeminate, lazy, queeny, etc. The 'masculine' mystique was absurdly added as an aesthetic choice which promoted the precise opposite of these 'feminine' characteristics, and was taken to signify: Solitary, quiet, reserved, self-sufficient, simple, honest, relaxed, masculine, hard-working, butch, etc. Based on this grouping of traits, I would argue further that bear culture is founded on truly misogynistic principles. This grouping also leads to the secondary foundation...
Search for authenticity/commitment - As both a reaction and as a grouping of traits, the bear aesthetic signified a best possible avenue to find loving and commited relationships due to artificial association of stable, "masculine" concepts with a specific body type and attitude. This isn't any thing special, really; I suspect that most fetishes are developed as costly signals a potential partner must 'pay' in order to be involved. "You cannot be involved with me unless you're into [insert here: music/having a job/buying me nice things/romantic dinners/weightlifting/camping/wrestling/watersports/leather/BDSM/spit play/bondage/David Lynch movies/bear drag/etc.]." You're expenditure of energy and time in [X] is a commitment to my needs. Beardom, like all fetishes, is a marriage-proxy; fetishes preserve commitment by directing a potential partner's activity, signifying resource (e.g., money, time, energy), and/or embedding the relationship within a community.
Assimilation - Although all fetishes are marriage-proxies, bear culture founds itself on essentially archaic heterosexual principles of gender, sexuality, and relationship. Masculine archetypes manifest in bear culture are entirely re-hashed from heterosexual masculine mythologies: bikers, workmen, rednecks, military, police, etc.—have a common streak of representing stability; the lives of these archetypes are percieved to involve a kind of grounded, unchanging discipline and belief system, making them perfect for stable and long-lasting relationships.

The arbitrary foundations of the bear aesthetic have little to do with the reality in which they are embedded; because beardom requires no real energy, time, or money investment, it had only one factor required to maintain sturdy relationships in its earliest manifestations: community. As soon as it began to spread and gain acceptance, it's desired goal began to destroy itself.

A gay man attracted to bears always finds his sexual/emotional bliss in the figurative submission to one or many of the heterosexual archetypes.

A 'top' fulfills the heterosexual role by 'playing the part,' dressing and acting as a heterosexual male, even imagining himself as somehow disgusted with homosexual acts; yet he must submit to his desire and transgress his heterosexual aesthetic.

A 'bottom,' similarly, remains entirely homosexual, yet must submit to the archetype and the bottom's deferred sexual self-disgust.

The sexual act becomes a theatrical/ceremonial presentation of the bottom and the top working through their heterosexual self-disgust to achieve pleasure. They communicate this disgust by through play objectification, denegration and abuse their 'partner in crime.'

"You like that, fucker? I'm gonna fuck your hole, you fucker."
"Hell yeah, pump my ass. Use my ass."

Even individuals who don't directly partake in costume or direct verbal abuse retain a silent psychological affinity with this process; bear culture (and many other sexual attitudes/behaviors), by nature, involves working through the difficulty of self-disgust.

In whole, bear culture represents one converging and non-intentional (aesthetic) attempt of homosexuals to develop new forms of social relationship by working against the culturally pervasive heterosexual model. Bear culture will collapse on itself with the end of self-disgust, the breakdown of heterosexuality (and homosexuality), and the continued re-defining of relationships.

Puppet Dance!

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:19:40 GMT

Spring Springing

Sat, 31 May 2008 07:44:36 GMT

It's lovely.

I ate with MoBro this eve at my place. God I love the giant window in my apartment.

I've got a cold? allergy? thing that's keeping me out of commission. Hopefully one more night of good sleep and it will depart.

Oil Prices

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:45:51 GMT

After reading this: Oil execs go before Congress

I commute to work by car 9 miles a day. (18 round trip)

I estimate an expenditure of about $160/month. It would be higher except that I actually have one of the smallest, non-hybrid cars available on the market in 1998. Why? In part because my father and I both knew that the prices would rise again.

This seems like about a $40 increase per month from last year.

Adjusted for inflation, it hasn't changed all that drastically in the past four years. Chart

As of 5/12/08, premium gas prices in the UK were $8.28, $9.52 in the Netherlands. Table

I have never been bothered in any way by the prices I pay for gas. I wish they were higher.

Whenever someone complains about gas prices, I throw up a little. I'm baffled when people point fingers at Oil companies. Do they realize what a fucking useless approach that is?

If anything, I would prefer that the price be hiked far enough to scare people into buying smaller cars, into demanding high-quality accessible forms of mass transit, and pushing harder sooner and faster for supplemental renewable energy.

I'm economically ignorant here (hannibalvail, mai_neh help me out here?), but I have a hunch that the current economic strength of some of the smaller countries with high gas prices has to do with the fact that their infrastructure has been developed in such a way to avoid the influence of gas prices on their economic stability, where they've taken at least some consideration into the idea of declining global economic growth. They're taking the necessary steps to adjust their economic models "sky's the limit" toward "earth's the limit."

Then again, they're all starting their own space programs.

Limerence 300, Lawson 1

Tue, 13 May 2008 07:26:29 GMT

I have defeated Limerence!

I have actually stopped a crush in its tracks. To be fair, it hadn't progressed that far, but it's still not something I've ever been able to do.

It's like I have super powers or something!

Yay!

To paraphrase buzzcock:

"These are not the droids you are totally crushing on. You can go about your business."

Fleebus, Prince of Krunt

Tue, 13 May 2008 05:58:45 GMT

Linkage

Sun, 11 May 2008 18:54:04 GMT

Well, I've e-mailed this to two people and keep thinking of new people that would like it.

Isabella Rossallini's 'Green Porno'

(via jwz)

Limerence

Fri, 09 May 2008 02:06:05 GMT

I really can't say I get crushes any more. Limerence describes it better. It drives me nuts.

There's something to be said for the immediacy of the sensation, the giddy, hormonal storm it brews up in the body the re-affirms, in some way, that you're alive. But beyond that, I see no redeeming value. Some properties of a limerent interaction for me, semi-linearly, are described here:

Conquer/Surrender - It takes a kind of inhuman detachment for me to restrain myself from pursuing the limerent object; yet if she asks me for anything, I am entirely unable to say no. Is there a paradox in these emotions: The desire to conquer the limerent object (it literally comes as a will to control her, usually to manipulate her to do my bidding) and yet utterly submit to her in the actuality of her presence? I find the objectification consciously repugnant and yet I continue to uncontrollably objectify. Attempts to fight the objectification can only be solved by attempting to objectify myself. This, invariably, only enhances the effect of #2, #3, and #4.

Inauthenticity - The conflicted state of being limerent strikes me as "not being myself." I am incapable, then, of "being myself" for the limerent object and must therefore "re-fabricate" the "being myself" state as accurately as possible. This leads to the self-consciousness required for both #3 & #4.

Second-guessing - All actions and words are carefully examined to ensure that they agree with a consistently vague but constantly updated sense of the limerent object's likes and dislikes. This, with #2, results in awkwardness and inappropriate comments.

When it is beyond my control to make something agreable, my mind enters a looping, self-reinforcing concern with how I might potentially mitigate the damage of the uncontrollable non-agreability. This concern emerges, in short time, as a substantial self-loathing and a heightened sense of the limerent object's subsequent unattainability.

Self-sabotage - When the feeling of unattainability is entirely developed, I begin to read almost nothing but "utter disinterest" from the limerent object. This promotes a new mode of behavior in which I abandon the personality described in #2 for a kind of "scorched earth," "non-self" personality that ranges from "hard-to-get" into "impossible-to-get." The personality is simultaneously driven by a desire to protect my feelings but also to portray a lack of neurotic overzealousness. Although I semi-consciously profess hopelessness in my actions, I am nevertheless hoping that the expression of hopelessness will somehow curry renewed favor from the limerent object.

I remember this feeling intensely as a part of daily life in high school with crushes. I am now fortunately only subject to it in a very limited form under rare and somewhat unusual circumstances.

To remove the dichotomy of #2, I can say simply that I want the limerent object to enter a relationship of trust with me in which we submit to one another.

Limerence is no doubt the "spark" for a lot of relationships; in such cases, the process progresses to #2 and, through mutual work, leads to a relationship. However, limerence is basically limited to a variable number of sexual or other "trust-producing" encounters (which may differ for the individuals involved). At this point, the "authentic" selves that were utterly fabricated in #2 reveal themselves with similar but slightly different modes of reaction, often leading to confusion and disatisfaction. On rare occassions, the authentic selves find they like each other just fine, and the relationship successfully exits a mutually limerent state without dissolution.

Limerence is so frustrating for me because it inhibits the normal development of friendship or even relationship with the limerent object. I feel that the limerent object is not inherently objectified; rather, it is a product of my mind pre-analyzing the relationship before it has chance to develop. That is, I demand the mutual trust in #1 because I already assume the necessity of its existence. The rest of the process is awkard and involuntary realization of the lack of developed trust.

This confusion may represent a cross-wiring of mate selection systems. Attractive is a personal measure of "mate-worthiness" based mostly on the value of the offspring they will produce, whereas "trust" is of value for late-stage rearing strategies. Finding someone very attractive can be felt without feeling limerence simply because one can desire only the reproductive offspring without their rearing expertise. Similarly, a somewhat attractive person may be attractive in a non-limerent way for her trustworthiness. Limerence seems to be triggered by strong physical attractiveness combined with an overdeveloped sense that the person "can be trusted." Given that attractiveness usually provides a person with increased access to mates, it might explain why the feeling is so intense; an attractive, trustworthy person is a rare find...the limerent object is simply "too good to be true."

Questions:
Does limerence emerge preferentially for individuals considered to have "wide appeal"?

Is limerence correlated with depressive personalities given the similarities of "looped thinking" on specific sets of topics?

Is limerence a exclusively a product of underdeveloped relationship and coping skills?

Potential strategies for avoiding limerence seem to be:

Examining the feelings of trust one feels for an individual in contrast to other individuals of similar acquaintance.

Meditation to counteract looped thinking processes of #3 and #4.

Other?

Vent the Guilt

Sat, 03 May 2008 20:43:41 GMT

I really shouldn't read about peak oil or socialist philosophers. They make me uncontrollably anxious.

Yesterday at work, the thought of slicing deep into my index finger suddenly popped into my brain with such force that it felt as if I had actually cut it; I could literally feel the adrenaline dump into my bloodstream. It was the first hypochondriac moment I've had in quite a long while.

It's not so much about losing all our stuff. It's all about the potential loss of communication, of my ability to interact with the world. It's the terror of knowing that, in crisis, I'd be the first one thrown to the wolves. It makes me aware of my life as a delicate cloud sitting on a pile of toil, on chains of supply with which "I can't be bothered." It's not a guilt I have for being there, but a selfish terror that, some day, through some means, the zombies will rise up from underneath my feet and pull me in and tear me limb from limb.

What am I thinking? Of course that really is guilt. Peak Oil is my asteroid from the heavens, my Homosexual Agenda, my deadly virus, my witch, my communist, my terrorist. Every American has at least one, and this is mine. It's the error of my ways. The thought of it is utterly paralyzing.

Zizek on Democracy Now!:
"But going seriously, no, of course, I am—my god, it’s stupid to say—for Barack and so on. But I see a tragedy here, because like let’s say he wins. What will he do? The tragedy of today’s left is what? It’s always the same story. Lula in Brazil, Mandela even. The good guy wins, we are enthusiastic, then you have around two years usually of period of grace, and then you have really to decide—do you play with global capitalism, or do you want to mess with it?"

I think Zizek is kinda dreamy. I love it when he says, "blah blah blah, you know, and blah blah blah"
---
I was listening to a radio show on Jerry Springer's surprisingly authentic political career. He remembers coming by boat to NYC, fleeing the Holocaust, everyone staring at the Statue of Liberty. His mother says to him, "Some day, it will mean everything."

"The Statue of Liberty means everything. We take it for granted today. We take it for granted. Remember the Statue of Liberty stands for what America is. We as Democrats have to remind ourselves and remind the country the great principles we stand for. This is a place of protection. This is not a country of bullies. We are not an empire. We are the light. We are the Statue of Liberty."

I don't really believe this, and when Obama (or any politician) talks about America so upliftingly, I want to believe...but I really can't and don't. I see this country as a shoddy governmental experiment organized by nutjobs using bad philosophy kept floating and rising this long only by the potential for growth, the exploitation and murder of different ethnic groups, and the hopeful wishful idea that this system "will and must work." I look around at my fellow Americans and I become (mostly) horrified. I see the gnawing hunger of desperation, of hope only to keep raping. I fear that their and my own daily denials will bury me. I know that any political force, no matter how full of happy promise, cannot stifle 300 million lifetimes of absurd and misdirected hungers; addiction doesn't respond well to coercion of any sort.

The desire to stop has to come from within. It can't be, as we have all been taught, a healthy restraint; it must become an actual desire to live entirely differently, to willingly confront the contradiction of the Other, the Void, the Real. Things like our failing healthcare system and our most recent absurd move towards corn fuel are just symptoms of a deeply fucked national psychology that hasn't changed much in 300 years.

And isn't all this "Green" just another diet soda and another decaf coffee to make us, ultimately, even more obese and more strung out?

The fundamental confusion: That the "light," as Springer puts it, is any different from "the empire." They are, in fact, the same thing, separated from one another only as a means to rationalize an inherently destructive system of government.

I hate to break it to you, Jerry, but Darth Vader was right.

Japanese Anatomical Illustrations

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:54:18 GMT

Illustration Library

Pink Tentacle article, which explains more

thanks, doctorellisdee!

Response to a post

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:51:48 GMT

From ink_ling, found here.

The notion that homosexuality is "genetic" establishes itself so strongly in this transient and silly argument (The labels will be further used in my discussion to symbolize the section of the argument to which they refer):

Side A: Homosexuality is immoral because either (a) the bible (or take your pick) says its an immoral practice or (b) my heterosexual sense of what is natural does not include homosexuality. Using these established ethical standpoints we conclude further that, because (c) it's not genetic, a person has choice over their behavior and chooses to be either immoral or what is naturally and biblically moral.

Side B: Homosexuality is moral because (d) it's genetic. (e) Because it's genetic, it's natural. (f) Anything natural is morally OK because (implictly and optionally, g) GOD made all natural things.

Side B doesn't really deal with a because it's tough to argue against the such a widely accepted set of rules that many homosexuals, even when they've completely opened the closet, can't leave behind. Instead it uses d to contradict c and, through this, changes the definitions established by a and b to include homosexuality via e. a is weakly attacked with the implicit and undiscussed element g.

In future arguments, g will be dropped for it's blurriness and f will be subverted to say "Natural things can be mistakes and should be fixed through gene therapy and abortion." We'll have to establish "equal-opportunity birthing" and have parents give "valid" reasons for aborting their fetus.

At this point, I see this argument as more of a cartoonish sub-fight between religion and science, pawns being the abortion vs. choice argument (e.g., religious rights of the human soul vs. secular rights of woman) and, in this case, God's word vs. the scientific proof of "genes" fighting over the definition of "natural."

The argument must really get back to a and b, which continues to oppress a variety of human populations through its implicit acceptance. There is an alternate route I've explored through Evolutionary Psychology in which I looked at the research and considered researching the notion that the stability of homosexual population implies a real evolutionary function that homosexuality fills in society, similar to the proposed "grandmothering effect." The problem with this approach is that it still relies on a modified form of f, namely that "Anything natural in human behavior was important for human communities and child-rearing and may still serve a value today." Given that religion can also be shown to have an evolutionary advantage for communities, this ground gets pretty shaky and, if anything, just tosses the moral question up into the air and lets people decide whatever they want. Then again, that's pretty much always the case.

I personally tend to think that homosexuality is caused by a variety of genetic and environmental factors. I worry it's genetic enough, however, that it could be selected out by parental choice in the near future. So I stick pretty close, in my consideration, to arguing against a and b; I want to know gays under the age of 30 when I'm 70.

That said, I also tend to avoid the emergent post-modern "spectrum" approach to sexuality. I see it as a "hetero-normative" invasion or "gentrification" of homosexuality as a means of destroying it, culturally. I don't think it's yet time to make that switch, nor am I convinced that it's the case. I see what I would call a "bias" created by the desire to understand humanity in egalitarian terms: perfectly equipotential upon birth for any cultural, sexual, or other behavior. I appreciate the reasons for wanting to imagine humanity this way, but I think it de-values human diversity inadvertently.

As much as I distrust sexual labels and recognize the potential for a homo-hetero "gray area," I've also seen hints that there may actually be pseudo-quantum regions of sexual behavior determined by specific hormonal, binary switches. In other words, that most people fall into a homo lot or a hetero lot, and the exceptions float in somewhere in between the sexually binary soup.

If there are exceptions, why not just accept the sexuality as a continuity? Because it threatens to break-up vital communities among homosexual populations before they've had a chance to establish universal acceptance. I want to be able to walk down the street with a big pin that says "Man for Men" before I give up my gay bars and my pride events and all those places where I directly meet and interact with other self-defined "homosexuals" and "queers" and "bears" and etc.

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:41:58 GMT

I'm in love with Daniel Johnston tonight.

Daniel Johnston - Despair Came Knocking

Daniel Johnston - Rocket Ship

Daniel Johnston - God

Daniel Johnston - Love Defined

Dollar's Weak.

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 07:28:22 GMT

Huh. A new five dollar bill. And we haven't even finished with our exciting state quarters!

Oh, and the UK? They just confirmed the most cool fucking currency ever.

SPD

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 05:22:45 GMT

I took the day off.

I made myself good coffee.

I learned to play Go!

I had Ethiopian with some of my favorite people.

My day was lovely, but it sounds like a lot of people around me are struggling with emotional, physical and personal stuff, both acute and chronic.

I hope everyone's okay.

Hang in there! Spring's almost here! Spring is wonderful!

My first ever post about sports

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:39:22 GMT

I think there should be a sports team called the "[city] WASPS." Their mascot, "Marty," would run around trying to tack pieces of paper onto the backs of the opposing team members that said "99. YOU SUCK!"

To you and you and you

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:34:40 GMT

I sure do like reading you all. Thanks for sharing.

L,

A

Les Montagnes

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:18:34 GMT

Brad and mom went skiing for the weekend. I joined them on Saturday, their break day, for drinks and dinner.

I think I was 12 the last time I visited a ski area. It's been so long that the experience felt new. It's also the first time I've made the drive myself.

It's so nice to be an adult and be aware of the way in which mountains emerge, to have a sense of geologic time, of history, biology, and a developed sense of natural aesthetic. Mountains, which I had always taken for granted, were suddenly really amazing.

Glenn Branca's 5th Symphony fit the drive utterly perfectly, beautifully.

I felt the altitude, especially as I descended toward Denver; it was like my body was somehow "decompressing."

I should really go skiing or something, living in Colorado and all.

Soup 08

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:31:20 GMT

Real good. One of the best yet. One of those grounding experiences that keeps me going for the rest of the year.

Holidays are so much better when they're homemade.