take a deep breath and count to ten

think of all the nice places that i've been, like back when i was waging peace against the visigoths i was tutored in the ancient mysteries by a wizened philosoph, learned the polyrhythm of celestial time, wait for the one to come, to get it done, finish the rhyme
but no, seriously, the advice should be to take a deep drink and count to ten. but i guess we don't always have a beer at hand. shame about that. but i feel a little better. i like how the title for the last post lined up just about right, nice unexpected bonus. i also like how i have a variety case of magic hat, but i kind of expected that to still be there after i bought it earlier today. although, who knows, i could have opened a bottle to find the label was wrong, or the beers had somehow mixed like my document. it is also not a case, really, but two twelve packs. at the end of the day, four beers, six of each, thirty bucks. not so bad. except i am still down on hefeweizen. i don't know if i'll ever warm up to wheat beer again. circus boy is a fine hefeweizen, especially for an american one, but meh. i figured i would drink 'em when i was just drinking to have a beer, not to necessarily get real into it. beats pabst by a long shot. and lager. when you consider the fact that a six pack of lager will cost more than six craft brews bought in case form, the answer is easy. i don't know why i thought it would be so tough to carry a case of beer a few blocks. totally worth it. it will be more worth it when i'm drinking other stuff from the case though. number nine of course, and one i haven't had called odd notion. it is apparently some sort of a red ale. could be good or pretty boring. i'll let you know, maybe even later in this post depending on how long i type for. the other beer is the spring seasonal, the hi.p.a. which i believe i have already reviewed in this space after buying a single. if you want to know about it but you don't want to hunt for it in the shitstorm of this blog's archives, let me just say it is an odd one, not enough hops for me, but a pleasant roasty character not typical to the style. magic hat usually fails the authentic to style test, but that is not necessarily a bad thing all the time. i've always respected them, but that is sort of waning as they get their marketing on. it is getting kind of silly, almost like they are the ben and jerry's of beer just cause they're the biggest brewer in vermont. they haven't named beers after people yet really, but a visit to the website reveals what they're up to, especially with this particular variety pack. overall, i guess if their marketing strategy means three dollar pints at jam (man i hate that word but i'd rather call the stuff jammy than hippie) shows at well-known venues, i can't bitch too much.
i'm looking forward to getting some otter creek at the festival tomorrow; haven't had that since i was in vermont. hard to believe that was three and a half years ago. the experience remains a highlight in my memories. makes me wish i had decided to spend my time pursuing activities like that instead of going to law school. i could have worked my same old job and made better use of my free time. now i have a decision between wasting a ton of money on a degree i don't really use or working a job that pays me plenty and gives me no time to spend it. i know things aren't really so simplistic, but it is just one more explanation of how i fucked up.
because now i'm sitting here, with not as much done as i had planned or hoped, but a complete inability to do anymore today. writing used to be my favorite. but i got to write sort of about things that interested me. oh yeah, also grades were not positively correlated to writing like/being a total fucking asshole. furthermore, they never ruined my fridays like this.
so i just cracked an odd notion. it is way better than i had even hoped for. awesome beer, all about the malt flavors, and a malt-centric beer has to go the extra mile to make a believer out me; hops are my main concern most of the time. the hops take a back seat, but they're definitely hanging out in there keeping it bitter. just making sure nothing gets sweet without having a whole lot crazy to say, like a great bass player who doesn't stick her neck out too much. i know this main flavor but i cannot for the life of me pin it down right now. real bready, kinda biscuit-y, a little spicy, got a little rye character going on, but not so much that i would guess they actually used rye malt. oh, yeah, this is excellent. i could happily drink like twelve of these. if you see this beer, get it. let me know what that flavor is. i feel like i tasted it the other day, but i can't remember what it was i ate/drank that contributed. is it ginger lurking in there? i dunno. good chunk of chocolate (named for color not flavor) malt going on too, more than i expected from a beer like this; it has a seemingly stout-like portion of the stuff. end result is something that could pass for a red ale on looks, but one taste and you'd know one scoop of black patent and a couple minor tweaks could have made porter of it. the color is a little deceiving, but i'll be gladly fooled by this brew any time. overall, the beer comes off as really fresh, and i hope that does not decline in shipping, but the sooner you get your hands on it the better. it is so fresh that i feel like i'm at founders and i can throw the shucks from my peanuts on my carpet. when does the band start? well, i feel better about choosing this case for purchase given this beer. as it stood it had been one beer that is good but i could do without, one beer i enjoy thoroughly but never want much of, one beer i really liked that still left me wanting something (unfairly so on my part - too much troegs nugget nectar), and one beer i knew nothing about, which turned out to be one beer i really really dig. might unseat roxy rolles as the best i've had from these guys. this is truly bitchin, a lot going on in a style that is usually a little too straightforward. people label the typical examples "good session beers" but i would way rather session on something that has a twist to it most of the time, personally. if fat tire were a kid, it would grow up to be odd notion. i love fat tire, and that is a beer that has more going on than you'd expect too, which is how it made a name for itself, but this just seems like a more realized and fulfilled iteration. the label on the odd notion includes a really small figure riding a bike. subtle dig? now i'm just reading too much into beer labels.
the cats were just wrestling, then switched to just licking each other. now they're holding still but whenever either moves they are wrestling again. they are so pretty and so little. they quit doing that a while ago and i stopped typing, but now one was hanging out in the room with me. he stayed gamely through three powerful sneezes, but he fled in absolute terror at the fourth one for some reason. they got to say hi today to the stange neighbor who lent me the carrier for straw. she is moving out, but she was really excited to see me. she wanted to know if i could help her out by keeping an ancient computer monitor in my apartment because she was worried that when she moved out they would lock her door (probably won't happen knowing the landlord). it was not a problem, and i told her as much, and so she went and got the monitor. i am thankfully not here all the time, and she realized this and said she needed my number. after a brief search for a pen, i started to recite the number. before i was even finished giving it, she suggested she could just leave the monitor in the small hall/landing area that only our apartments are on. no one but us ever really goes up there, and she was already planning on picking it up tomorrow. so after this awkward drawn out interaction, we concluded it was unnecessary. i know it isn't really a funny story, but i just kind of wanted to attempt to convey how odd the whole thing was on its own, without being there or knowing her. i do wish her all the best; she understands cats, living with them, and accepting their prettiness fairly well. but beyond that, she is a person who has lived a principled and tenacious life. i believe knowing a neighbor is not what it once was. sometimes it is difficult to pick apart projections into the past, especially the relatively short history of this particular country.
neighbor is a loaded term to anyone who has even a baseline understanding of either testament of the christian bible. i wish i knew something about how it translates in other languages. neighbor is a highly social concept and so i would imagine it varies greatly from culture to culture and hence in linguistic terms as well. get your hermeneutics on.
i am currently listening to sgt. pepper's lonely hearts club band. my feelings toward the album itself are entirely positive, but the feelings i have for one bill born are thoroughly mixed. i am pleased that he took reasonbly good (god dammit law school) care of his records, and he had decent taste, but i wish he hadn't felt the need to thoroughly label every piece of every element of whatever packaging a piece of vinyl included, along with the actual thing. i have this one from bill born, another beatles record, and something else really good i do not recall right now. if i don't have a post-revolver beatles record, i will prefer playability over all else. that strategy landed me a copy of the white album including the famous four photos, one of each one of them. without bill born's esteemed autograph, mercifully.
my current setup tends to emphasize ringo's cymbal work (a.k.a. the speakers are pretty crappy), but i'm glad to hear it. ringo's drumming in general came up in a really good interview i read earlier today (it is fine if you don't click because you have better things to do or whatever, but if you passed it up because you read the site before you clicked the link, double indemnity on you). musicians are usually marginally better than athletes when it comes to being articulate, but this was pretty impressive. the guy will have played with three really excellent this year before it is even half over. and he actually has some thoughtful things to say about music. there's a little more background info than anyone out there probably cares for, but when you get a few paragraphs in things start to get worthwhile.
well, i didn't finish this in any way last night so i didn't post it, but i have to actually work on something important now, so this is it for now. today has kicked off pretty awesome, with some 888 number calling and waking me up at 8 and a small child screaming like forty minutes later made sure i didn't get back to sleep. excellent. oh well, i'm going to a beer festival.

FUCK fuckity fuck fuck motherfuckin fucksticks

i cannot even express how pissed off i am right now. i have been able to feel my blood throb for about the last half hour. i was diligently pasting a case citation into my brief when i inadvertently stumbled on a document mine which exploded most of what i had done over the last couple hours (which was saved but wouldn't restore) throughout everything that had been there before. single words, pieces of words, halves of citations, random formatting all scattered throughout. GOD DAMNIT. seriously, what the fuck is with that. so i spent about half an hour cleaning it all up, losing god knows what. i was having so much trouble sitting down and doing productive work, and then i finally manage to do some, and then the craziest bullshit happens. i think the cig i had immediately after it happened was gone in like two minutes. i contemplated breaking into the liquor store since THEY CLOSE AT NINE and i need to guzzle a fifth. what i really want to do is go into a fine china shop or something full of fragile shit and just go to town with a baseball bat. instead i'm sitting here tearing up cardboard and typing this. i am typing SO HARD right now. at this point, i expect the baby jesus to appear before me and be like "what more do you want for a sign that you should not go to law school? you shouldn't even need a fucking sign! what are you doing here anyway?" oh, back to word for a moment, the best part about all of this is that it came about as a result of an autocorrect function. man, i am still pretty seriously pissed. i was just gonna post this but i am having connection problems. as i sit here, i just keep muttering to myself about how upset i am, even though i of all people should be perfectly aware of the extent of my pissed off-ness.

YOU'RE a prescriptive easement

just can't seem to get it right. spent all weekend trying to write a brief with no success, but a promise to get at it today. as soon as i finished my reading. then i read for the next seven hours, and no, i'm not writing it at this point. i will need to accomplish a lot by saturday to feel alright about going to a beer festival. some things just can't be helped i guess. the michigan brewers guild had their winter beer festival at old kent park. such a better name than fifth-third; numbered entities should not be able to hold naming rights to sports. it only leads to strange connotations when at all translated to any given sport. anyway, i bet no one reading who lives nearby actually went. i realize y'all (not marked, sweet) have lives, but c'mon (marked, weak) a beer festival is a thing to get to. expect a detailed report on the one here sometime next week.
after the beer festival, back 40 played a cd release party at founders, and i know some people made it to that. hoping for a recording. the point is, i missed what was potentially the day of the year back home. who knows, something could have always gone wrong, but that combination is tough to deny. i am not so spiteful to wish i could say the weather had been shitty and new founders sucks, but in any event the weather was nice and the sound in the new space is vastly preferable. i am sure both events facilitated good times for a wide variety of people, and it is good to know things like that still go on. all this serves my notion that gun rue is not a terrible place to be from, regardless of what anyone says. it feels strange to write about things i wasn't doing, but it is comforting to know they still sound appealing.
also, i was not doing a whole lot interesting during that time. as noted, i was mostly throwing myself at what amounted to a whole wall comprised of writer's blocks. i did, however watch blazin' saddles. this is one of those movies that virtually everyone i know thinks is hilarious. if you haven't seen it, i cannot express the level of priority it should immediately take. presumably, most people have seen it, so watch it again. dude punches out a horse. what more do you want? mel brooks talking for about an hour? because my dvd totally had that, labeled as an interview. no questions are included, and many things seem like they could never be the answer to any sane question. he just runs his mouth while the movie plays with no sound. he says plenty of interesting things, including how they had two horses on the set who were trained to fake a fall when an unseen fish line tugs at their leg. for the animal concerned, this is precisely what they used in the horse punching scene.
you realize what this means: if horses know how to sell a fell, we could easily have horse pro wrestling. they'd call it h.w.c., purportedly heavy weight championship (competitors must conveniently weigh literally as much as an average horse), but really just horse wrestling championship. the whole thing wouldn't hit stride until wwe buys it out and integrates it so the horses wrestle against people. get your tickets, kids seats just five bucks. saturday, Saturday, SATURDAY. and yes, at the delta plex.
see, i would have missed that too. at least i watched blazin' saddles. i also managed to go someplace i hadn't been before, which is ridiculously easy for me to do still. odd little space, teahouse/restaurant (fusion? i think i'm guessing/extrapolating) with a little bar in it. went with my sister and chilled out on a friday afternoon, overall something to make me happy about living here. the place happens to be named bubble house, which brings me to something else i didn't do. medeski martin and wood played a few days ago at penn. no one mentioned this to me before it happened, but no less than three separate people told me in the next couple days after the show. guess i should have checked the tour dates. one last thing i managed to not do on saturday was see wilco. sold out way before i even knew it was going to happen. the only solution is to buy tickets for anything i see online, pay some stupid surcharge, and get spam forever telling me about every single fucking band at their mediocre venue. i definitely would have known if wilco played the state theater in detroit, or if mmw played at the house of blues in cleveland.
well, this was the post that was supposed to be for yesterday but i couldn't post it due to connectivity problems. i figured i would post it when i got to school in the morning. and then i looked and the last couple paragraphs were gone. apparently the last time the thing auto-saved was while i agonized over the spelling of "cleveland", eventually resorting to quick research. yeah, i totally had it wrong. but how often have i needed to spell cleveland? not too often, that is how much.
anyway, i think the other stuff was mostly about law school. something about how contextualization is generally lacking. law reviews skewed my notion of law school, etc.. ubiquitous puns in law review titles, blah blah, my con law prof is awesome. something along those lines. maybe something about how absolutely fucked i am. we probably did not lose anything the record is worse off without.
this gets us to today, which really doesn't offer a whole lot more. i'm still freaking out about my brief. today featured a full-on large scale second guessing of my approach to the issue that controls the entirety of my argument. have i misinterpreted my prof's comments? will she be up front if i have? will she tell me what it is she wants? time will tell. the only upshot is that i get to give myself the rest of the night off, which is only an upshot tonight, and regret fodder for tomorrow.
my school email inbox is enough to induce a panic attack on its own (except the one about the ABA and LSD, but that wasn't near as interesting as it sounded). most recent arrivals note the upcoming financial aid and work study deadlines, along with a host of comments from my writing prof answering INANE questions other people have asked. i am so confused about how these people could be better off than i am, if this is what they are asking. they're so proactive that they have asked about minutia before i've settled the most important question. and yet, i could answer their questions. i want to scream. also, i failed in class today. i could not figure out what my prof was asking me; i first asked him to repeat the question and then had to concede i just could not answer because i had no idea what he wanted. through a couple flukes i got asked about a case i read like three weeks ago. i understood what the case said, but his wording was just bizarre. well, whatever. just frustrating, especially considering i had put extra preparation into the next few cases, the ones i thought i might be asked to talk about. i could have talked ad naseum about anything else he asked anyone else, but no, it couldn't be simple. so it goes.
apparently something blew up in eastown today. i am glad i was not back home getting evacuated. i probably would have been at work, i guess. if i was home, i wager i would have been either sleeping or too sketched out to open the door to talk to whoever comes to tell people to evacuate. i seem to remember this would not have been the first time.
instead, the most important thing of my day was finding out about this. i suspect i'm late in the game like everything else, but on the off chance that someone has not seen this, it is worth checking out. i have an awful lot of things to say about it, but i will spare you all for now. i'm just glad it manages to be provocative and inviting. so tempted to go on and on... the only disappointment is that as far as i've covered, they have not included the site itself on the list. i'll pass on lampooning it for now. all i can think about is fair use and parody. the upshot is that we listened to none other than the 2 live crew in intellectual property the other day. this was one of the worthwhile things that disappeared from yesterday's inchoate post. in fact, my prof listened to this particular track with none other than ruth bader-ginsberg, for whom he was clerking when the case came down. parody roy orbison, will you? i guess so. acuff-rose was a party in the case, and i kept hearing that tweedy tune in my mind.
i recall noting that this 2 live crew track included no cusses. and the opinion footnoted a definition of rap music. classic. the best is probably that the official title of the case includes "AKA luke skyywalker".
i have likewise been going somewhat old school with music this evening. broke out the cd book, one of the strangest out there, but some things i don't mind hearing. tonight has featured the kottonmouth kings and iron maiden. yup. i don't regret any of that. the cd collection stopped growing several years ago now, and the end result has been that i own much more of the music i currently enjoy on vinyl. bargains galore. but it is nice to go back and play some things i haven't heard in a while. no, i do not own any 2 live crew of my own. but my birthday is coming up...
right now we are talking about the lorax. i cannot believe how many people in this class have never heard of it. the biggest upshot is that i found this and it has gotten me through most of the pointless discussion. man, people just like to hear themselves talk. the worst part is we are more or less in an extended discussion of utilitarianism, framed as an alternative to making moral judgments. of course, this is a fiction - "knowing" what is good for people inheres countless value choices. the monetary worth assigned to things works the same way. alright, i'm going to try and pay attention...

sitar hero

i get a huge kick out of that concept. it emerged from a great discussion question posed by my sister: what would you put in your own personal version of guitar hero? our consideration inevitably turned to the beatles, and i lobbied for 'while my guitar gently weeps', but she wrinkled her nose and announced that she would pass on george harrison's stuff. thinking about george a little more, i made the crack about sitar hero. i don't really know what the mechanics would be like; i don't think i've ever seen someone play a sitar, and i know i haven't, despite a couple of consecutive birthday/christmas requests in my misguided youth. i doubt any company is marketing a sitar starter kit through big box stores. perhaps a little too niche. mechanics aside, i also couldn't come up with a big roster for a theoretical game. the small percentage of beatles tunes where george does it, gabby lala playing with les claypool, and the india's greatest hits cd (i wish it was called that, it was like indian masters vol. IV or something, came with a pouch of some black gram lentil dish i ate at work once) are pretty much the limits of my sitar experience. suggestions welcome.
over the weekend i went to delaware (wikipedia pages for states are always great). ostensibly the trip was a beer run, but we wound up traversing the whole state, which sounds impressive, but is not so much when you consider the whole thing is like 100 miles long. in fact, most of the experience was somewhat less than impressive, but it was still pretty cool. i guess my midwest background gears me to expect new states to be notably different in some way. actually the whole terrain reminded me of michigan, if a little more marshy in some spots. mostly the whole place seemed dull and kind of depressing, although i didn't really stop in to check out wilmington or dover. our original destination was supposed to yield discounted alcohol and a chain location of a restaurant called "cluck you". these were to be found in newark, which is militantly pronounced new ark, like some sequel to the noah narrative, to distinguish it from a certain city in the area with the same spelling. anyway, newark is the home of the university of delaware. i am pretty sure i am grateful i did not for any reason choose to attend that school at any point; the town left some things to be desired. i figured the local booze shop would be pretty decent, having a college community to serve. this was not the case. i was so unimpressed by the selection and pricing that i got nothing. also, the alleged cluck you seemed to have vanished. but there was another wing place sharing the parking lot with the liquor store, so we ate there. it was really a pretty nice day if a little chilly, and the driver at some point suggested we just go all the way to the beach.
and so we did, and i got to see plenty of delaware in daylight, although that faded far before we reached our destination. we traversed a strange bridge; i think the wikipedia page calls it the only of its kind. it was a suspension bridge, but instead of having the work on either side, there was just one structure in between the two directions of the highway. its lighting gave it an even more surreal appearance on the drive back. i was in the front seat the whole time, manning the radio. because population is fairly dense in this part of the country, the dial seemed much more saturated than back home, but it still has roughly the same percentage of unlistenable garbage. however, i eventually went painstakingly through the frequencies, finally arriving at 107.9. and it was fantastic. some sort of a community radio station. when we were listening, an elderly man enthusiastically deejayed an assortment of ancient rhythm and blues records, mostly from the early fifties. mostly songs and performers i could not claim to be familiar with, although the music was undeniably an early evolution of so much i have listened to. the deejay's enjoyment of the music was incredibly well conveyed, so much so that i think he could have talked me into appreciating the music if i wasn't already.
as the station began to fade depending on where we wound up stopped in traffic, i noticed a sign proclaiming a prodigiously large liquor store approaching in approximately half a mile. this stop yielded much more fruit than the last. after much perusing and some difficult decisions, i came away with a twelve pack of sierra nevada pale and a six of troeg's nugget nectar for a little over twenty bucks. can't beat that with a stick in my book. i don't need to preach the timeless virtues of sierra nevada pale to anyone here. the nugget nectar, though, demands additional exposition. this is a fantastic beer. i wish i had bought more of it than i did; as i have not had great luck locating it in the city. it proclaims itself to be an imperial amber ale, but at something ludicrous like 93 or so IBUs the malt bill means a little less. i can still detect more and different sweetness on the finish than with even the most aggressive double ipa, but the hops are still what does the talking in this one. beautiful pour and head retention, the lace lingers like the pleasure of consumption itself. the commercial description itself even uses the word 'heady' to describe the hop blend. not a whole lot more need be said.
the beer quest continued, however, as the beach for which we headed was rehoboth beach, home of dogfish head. actually *a* home of dogfish head. although i didn't realize it on the way down, the rehoboth beach location is just an alehouse, in fact one of three in the region. the brewery is somewhere else in the state, and does not have a pub attached. the one i went to is where the distillery is, but it was too late in the day to get to check it out. this was the most initially unsettling microbrewing experience i have ever had. the place was packed out, not in a cozy way, but rather uncomfortable. a lot of money in there. lots of dressed-up food that probably cost a lot more than it should. smelling seafood might always make me think that though. it was damn near impossible to get a beer; the bar didn't have a service area or anything and the bartenders were really busy. the maitre d kept asking us to move one way or another. we weren't trying to be in the way, but in the way was the only way to be. i was about ready to say screw it when my buddy caught the bartender's eye. a fresh draught of ninety minute hit the spot like no other. as it turned out, there was a whole upstairs to the place. it was much more microbrewery appropriate. chilled out, spacious, a couple families, couple guys shooting pool, much quieter. we enjoyed our pints and played a little lord of the rings pinball. i totally won an extra play. then four of the most obnoxious people i have ever had the displeasure to hear disrupted the atmosphere. we finished what little beer we had left and called it good.
then we walked through the rest of the town to the beach. there probably wasn't a whole lot to the town; we were definitely on the main drag. the whole layout and content made me think that this is precisely what saugatuck or grand haven would be if they were on the atlantic instead of lake michigan. lots of nifty-gifty shops, all the perfunctory beach-town type things, few antiques places, lots of restaurants, seasonally empty hotels on the horizon. it was quiet enough that i could hear the ocean getting a louder little by little as we approached. i had never actually managed to see the ocean before, and although it was dark out, i really felt like i accomplished something. it felt good to hear the waves and gaze over the shadowed expanse. we agreed that something endemic to humans makes them like to be near the water.
i wandered away a little bit and stared at the waves slamming into and away from a small jetty. i looked up at the sky, so much clearer than it is with all the light pollution in the city, and i saw a perfect gibbous. some things were incredibly visible and i thought about people navigating the vast sea with only the stars as a guide. i thought about the turn-of-the-sixteenth-century dutch colonists who landed at modern-day lewes, just one town over. theoretically they could have actually arrived right where i stood. i turned around and looked back at the town and reflected that if some benighted seafaring people landed here now they would have to immediately assign some significance to the pizza franchise that somehow occupied each of the two corners where the road to the beach broadened and looped. i thought about american history and its procession over four hundred years and then looked back up at the sky and then turned back to the waves. it felt good to remember how small i am.
i had occasion to revisit that feeling to a lesser degree and in a different way as i took a long walk through the city the other day. i already knew i was in for some walking; i had to make it to my somewhat inconvenient vet to purchase outrageously priced scientifically formulated cat food. however, i did not plan on the subway not running. for some reason i have yet to discover, it was not. the lady in the booth advised me to take the bus. at this point i realized why there had been massive crowds next to the bus stops back above ground. fuck that noise, i thought. so i just walked. i like to do that. it was kind of cold, though, and it snowed a little as my journey progressed. but i saw so many people doing so many different things, and so many businesses of so many kinds in such varying states that i remembered what i like about the city. the city is people, and so am i. from allegedly unoccupied husks of buildings to magnificent homes cannibalizing first floors as garages to venerable specialty stores to a kfc sign promoting their new roasted warp (that's what it said) to hopeful new bars to starkly differing schools, to all the different people i saw at all these different places in between, i felt somehow connected and intrigued.
all of this in turn led me to consider law school in a new way. i realized that at root, the process is an ontological campaign to restrict and otherwise taint my being in the world. it demands a mechanical monofocus, eschewing organic experience and consideration. it is designed to foreclose possibilities and impose a fascist way of being. meaningful engagement is discouraged. but i have to hold myself accountable too. all of this opportunity for reflection and with possibility effervescing around me, yet all i do is find a new way to articulate and explain my distaste for my present circumstances. at least i can say i made it to delaware?

steam punk?

i was unaware that this was in any way a recognized genre, but a friend of mine lent it to me and noted that it was set in a steam punk universe. i admitted that this meant nothing to me, and the best explanation i could get was well, it is like cyber-punk, but with everything powered by steam. after a bit more description, i remembered watching steam boy, a good film by whoever did spirited away (an even better movie). basically, the idea is to imagine a world where requisite progress has taken place over the last couple hundred years, except electricity has not been harnessed. anyway, the book is called perdido street station, by some jackass who thought it would be cool to call himself china mieville (the first e has an accent over it). the picture inside the jacket does a lot to support the jackass epithet, and the guy who is lending me the book said he would not have purchased it had he seen the dude's photo. it isn't exactly judging a book by its cover, i guess. regardless, i am reading it, and after a slow start things have gotten more interesting. the guy kind of writes like a would-be intellectual who is constantly consulting a thesaurus (and now he is already repeating his obscure words, seventy-odd pages in). the story is gradually becoming more compelling though. if it winds up being really good or really bad i'll let you know. if it turns out to be mediocre, then probably i will not write about it.
i went to a talk at school today. a talk given by an alum who succeeded in his dream of being a sports agent. the vast majority of sports agents are lawyers; most sports require you to be a member of the bar to act as an agent for players in the big league (aka the only way to make money at it). i don't really think i would be a good sports agent, or that i would even want to be one, but i was really curious about what he had to say. the point for me was not that he was a sports agent, so i was pleased that the nuts and bolts of his job didn't dominate what he had to say, although that was sort of interesting too. he mentioned that his job requires him to know a little about a lot of law specialties: people get married and divorce, some 6'6" 330 lb. men want to design home products, sometimes a sense of entitlement leads to crime. the speaker himself was along the lines i imagined. kind of a chach, friendly personality, easy laugh, given to cliches, perhaps not the most successful student of all time. but he was articulate, so much so that he got me to understand why i had shown up, beyond mere curiosity. he was doing something he really wanted to do, and his law degree made it possible, and he does not sit behind a desk at some big firm writing memos and kissing partners' asses. he also brought my problem into sharp relief, even though i think i may have understood it on occasion. he was clear, if you want to have a non-traditional career related to law, you can have it. but you need a vision. you have to know what you want. when you know what you want, you can focus on bringing it about. every effort towards bringing about the exact thing you desire is either a step to making it happen directly or a lesson in how to actually get closer to making it manifest. i know it sounds kind of cheesy and motivational, and he admitted as much, but i really believe it. when a person knows what they want and makes that wish known, the desire is infinitely more likely to be realized. my problem is simply that i do not know what i want. and i knew that going into law school. i should have been able to see that going to professional school knowing only that i did not want to use it for the ends most people would not be real conducive to figuring it out. the experience is different from undergraduate in a lot of ways, but profoundly so in that you really need to know what you want to do when you show up; you can't figure it out in the process, because the process must be guided by that desire. the whole thing is only one year less than undergraduate work, but damned if you don't need to be way more on top of the ball from the get go. on the other hand, i guess i should cut myself some slack. i thought i knew what i wanted when i showed up, and it just didn't take long for me to realize that what i thought i wanted was either not what i thought it was or was simply an untenable desire. on further consideration, maybe those desires aren't entirely untenable, but perhaps i just don't want them bad enough to make them possible. that, and some of my research indicates that a couple of my interests are exclusively served by going to one of the magic fourteen schools at the top of the heap for no other reason than they have been around long enough to build a reputation and draw fat funding. i guess what i'm trying to say is that i have to make a serious decision, and that is probably my least favorite thing to do in the whole world.
aside from all that, my loans have finally gone through. i was pretty excited. i went home from school and got right down to work. thought maybe i'd go to the bar or something. around an hour ago, when i was wrapping things up, i was hit with the sudden realization that today was not just the day that major league pitchers and catchers report. no, school had mercifully failed to beat me over the head with the fact that today is a day of significance in this country. i might have seen things in passing, but my brain was certainly not preoccupied. before i called anyone, though (for the best, i guess), i realized that everyone i would have called is probably busy. i am left feeling more frustrated than lonely. it reminds me of remembering the liquor store (even when not state run) is closed from christmas eve through the 26th after it is too late. the good news is that i can still get booze today, so i am probably going to crack a (shitty) beer (i was going to ask someone who is undoubtedly otherwise occupied to drive to the beer distributor - i ain't carrying a case anywhere anymore tonight) and read this weird book and play some records. things could always be much, much worse. i could be a homeless. and still have to be a law student.
man, one more thing though. here is how today fucked me over again this year. the other night i actually poked around on facebook, mostly out of boredom, partly to look for somebody. i was overwhelmed by the percentage of profile pictures that were either wedding photos or pics of their newborns. a couple were just pictures of the girl's hand with a rock on the right finger. this could be skewed by my background, but still. anyway, i wanted to go on and on about it the next time i posted here. but now i feel like if i do that today, it just seems like i'm bitter and alone, which isn't the case; people identifying themselves in that way bothers me every day of the year. damn you, culture! i guess this self-conscious tirade is amounting to something just as bad. well, whatever. i'm not going to worry about it.
don't forget to vote! we're gonna settle this question once and for all, because there can be no greater authority than a plurality of people who visit this blog.

so much for value in education

i want to know why the FUCK i am sitting here in class listening to assholes kick around the same old arguments about commodification of the body. and doing a bad job. guess how much i am learning? one thing, and i already knew it: i hate law school and these mediocre motherfuckers in it. they are so goddamned smug it makes me want to spit. do they really believe they are the originators of these arguments? probably, and that is the sad part. and what does this discussion get any of us. can we not think about these issues on our own time? i spent hours preparing for this class yesterday. guess how much it is paying off. this class from the prof who threatened to make it through three assignments today. it isn't that i don't care about the debate about whether people should be able to sell their organs or other parts of their body, it is that i don't see the point in getting involved with a discussion with these people. if there was a good answer to the question, we wouldn't be talking about it. and yet i am surrounded by dozens of people who are pretty sure they have cornered the market on the correct perspective. and good god are they pleased with themselves about it. yeah, i'm pretty unhappy right now.

all embedded in ice

the city is coated in a surreal half inch of ice. it is really something else. recipe: snow all day, sleet briefly in afternoon, rain for an hour or two in the evening, and finish with a temperature drop. this may have been the most dangerous walk i've ever taken. at one point i slid helplessly toward the road where the sidewalk listed strongly. i tried to walk up to a more even part of the sidewalk, but there was simply not enough traction. i had to lean on a car and make it to the next planter to get back to level ground. i almost fell three or so times. the sensation was not unlike walking on an actual frozen lake: shoes are useless. mostly, it made me wish i was on a real lake with skates, playing hockey. or perhaps stumbling on a canal that freezes once every couple years in the netherlands, preparing to watch a race.
more than anything, the experience put dylan's isis in my head. some of the best imagery i've ever heard: we came to the pyramids, all embedded in ice. overall, one of his premier pieces in my book, judicious use of the fiddle that permeates the whole album, which i am currently enjoying. i had to earn this one, though; couldn't find the fucker for more than ten minutes. i have enough records to demand better organization. one of these days, sure that will happen. add it to the list. on the other hand, it is almost that much more rewarding to hear it when i had to put a little effort in. it's always nice when you know exactly what it is you want to hear and then you get to hear it. music has that level of personal satisfaction nothing else i know of is capable of achieving. something about it is so permanent despite the fleeting timing of the average piece. i still remember her partly feigning partly forgetting, asking me to describe it. some lyrics, some paraphrase, watching her smile grow. it didn't matter whose story it was, just that it was a story i was telling with passion and enthusiasm.
so i had that conference today. the best part about it was when i left i ran into my buddy, who set me up with my all time favorite question: how'd it go? we all know it went alright, dude's car got a little dinged up. i tried really hard to be decent, but i knew i was acting strange. the whole thing just made me so nervous, and i was so angry at her tone that my own tone was one i can affect when i so choose, one mirroring my perception of the way she approached me. not ostensibly unprofessional, yet judgmental and presuming. i nailed her on a couple things, but more importantly i got the information i needed. let me know your vision that i may regurgitate. it was the set 'em up and knock 'em down process i imagined it to be, but i learned from the knockdown. what she characterized as my misunderstandings was confirmed by various classmates as a fairly accurate if not verbatim understanding. ah well, saves her time, generalize a criticism and apply where possibly appropriate. i can't imagine anyone having attended all the classes coming in with what she expected from me. not unless there is some alternative listserve i do not receive.
whatever, flip the record, place the needle, let it ride.
when i was at the worst bar ever the other day, i let myself out for a smoke at one point. such activity rarely goes uninterrupted on cecil b, and this was no exception. the first gentleman who approached me wondered if i would be interested in taking a music survey. why not? i'm perfectly happy to skew your results, sir. the survey was not so much about music in general as it was concerned with christian hip hop, something i know little about. trying to remember what he asked, i can remember questions about my general demographic, from age to income, the general kind of stuff. he asked me how many christian hip hop record labels i could name, and that was not something i could answer with any substance. he also wanted to know how much i spend on cds. that was just as tough to answer; i haven't bought one in a while. the best part was when he showed me his label's logo, which i pretty much liked. royal flow records was the name, stylized crown design. i wondered about including some latin on part of the crest, and our minds met for the only time in the conversation. he really liked the idea, it was something he had contemplated and perhaps argued in favor of with someone else. he seemed pleased at any rate. upon the conclusion of this exchange, another man immediately approached me after witnessing my willingness to cooperate with someone holding a clipboard and a pen. this second man wanted to register me to vote, so i did. he cautioned me regarding my refusal to affiliate myself with a party, explaining it would prohibit my participation in the primaries. if a place wants me to pledge allegiance to have a say in such things, they can kiss my ass. i dislike qualifying as a specifically analyzed demographic, which is easy to avoid as a white male, and i wasn't about to hand over my privilege for this. no worries, it was his job to get people to register, and register i did. i got my confirmation phone call today. apparently this man was working for some community organization, which i do not find surprising. the confirmation had some questions beyond what i had expected, though. they wanted to know if i had my taxes taken care of. they offered to do them for free. they wanted to know if i needed my car fixed, because they would do that for free too. also, did i know anyone whose home had recently been foreclosed upon? because they would willingly assist with that too. sounds like a real top-notch organization. did i want to be a member? no. it is free, though, why not? well, it is a community organization, and i honestly don't feel embedded enough in the community to enjoy these kinds of services. whatever help i might need, there are others who need it more. mostly i'm happy to hear that some body that got people to register to vote also happened to offer assistance with the needs of the average person. very comforting, but i really wondered how it worked on the ground level. more power to them, i guess.
my sister kindly invited me to watch some of the westminster kennel club dog show at her place this evening. dog shows are a good time. the astounding variety of the dogs, the stilted uniformity of the handlers, the striking resemblance of some dogs to their handlers. one of the things that really strikes me about the whole affair is the tradition. they are on something like the 132nd year of this thing. many things in america cannot or will not reach that status, or if they do they are subject to significantly more variation than this event. on the other hand, the club seems to allow more breeds to compete every year, somewhat related to the number of registrations of certain styles. while i was watching it, for some subconscious reason, i had a horrid blink 182 song with altered lyrics running through my mind. i eschewed warped tour for dog show: "i fell in love with the girl at the dog show". there were no women at the dog show i contemplated falling in love with, however. in the immortal words of soren kierkegaard, this we cannot reflect upon.

that'll be enough of that shit

elvis said that once. the phrase has broad applications, but the instance i know of where he used it was particularly appropriate and compelling: he had just fired a handgun into the screen of a television. it was because robert goulet was on the television, and elvis did not care for robert goulet. i guess here i am referring to that last post (wish i had the balls to say it was in regards to law school; i can think of nothing i would rather metaphorically spray gunfire at for trespassing on the screen of my life), which got a little out of hand. i won't say it won't happen again, because it is fun to type for a long time while drunk and marvel at the relative paucity of errors. i thought about going back and whittling things down today, but it just didn't seem like a worthwhile proposition. it is what it is. leave it there for the record of the interwebs. that was actually the impetus behind those two little posts below it too. i just kind of thought they were worth jotting down and this seemed like as good a place as any for that.
the pressures of the supposed educational process sometimes require a dramatic refocusing of ones thoughts to things more trivial. forces colluded to generate such a feeling for me yesterday. unfortunately, these reprieves are necessarily temporary. band-aid solutions for a viral malady. nothing could bring that fact into sharper relief than my looming conference regarding my brief. it will happen in about thirteen hours, and i am not looking forward to it. i am really trying to bite the bullet and just jump through whatever hoops this prof has dreamed up, but she keeps moving them. also, her commenting fills me with unbridled rage. the tone is the worst, but oftentimes the content is also unclear. i mean, i get what she is saying, but implementation remains a mystery. the biggest reason i dread our meeting tomorrow is that the things i want to ask the most are as spiteful to her as she is to me. the best case scenario is that i couch my questions in respectful inquiries that invite discrete responses. rather than ask her why she keeps telling us to follow examples and that conflict with things she has specifically said, i'll just ask which way is the "right" one. the bad news is that this is mostly what i did last time, and her response is almost invariably a nails-on-chalkboard nervous laugh with the admonition that this is something i will have to work out for myself. all that does is get us back to square one, where i will do what i thought was right, and if she so chooses, it will be right, but more likely she will decide that it is wrong. the arbitrary nature of her response highlights my concern that i am not being taught to write in a legal context, but rather engaged in some sick attempt at imitation of her own horrendously obscured vision. i tried my best to see her advice with eyes unclouded by hate (i think that is from princess mononoke, i like the phrase), but she makes it pretty tough. i literally scream responses when i read what she writes. the form invites reply; almost all she writes is designed as a condescending question. perhaps i will review the results of our one-on-one in this very space tomorrow. i just hate that two adult people who detest each other (i do believe she doesn't like me, personally, and i know how i feel about her) have to go through some charade with no worthwhile results, but i hate more that the charade has a power dynamic featuring me on the low end.
this instance in particular has pushed me back into a state of having extreme difficulty with everything about law school because i can only think about where it is all headed. and mostly i think that where it is headed is not someplace i even want to go, but i don't know how or where to get off and what i will do then. it is like the time i got on the wrong subway and wound up in chinatown. at least that resolved itself well and quickly and only divested me of the price of an additional token while leaving a long since faded bruise on my ego. the point is, when i get like this i spend too much time dicking around and daydreaming about other things i could be doing with my life. today it was graphic data representation. i love that shit, especially when there's a map involved. the downside is that i spent today studying that murder map i've talked about before. not exactly uplifting. the friends i sit next to said i should probably not spend so much time analyzing it, as it was bound to leave me feeling less than inspired. well, it didn't really bring me down, since when you have personal issues that seem important it is more difficult to get worked up about the myriad depressing things in the larger world. or at least that is how it works for me. so i was really no worse off, and i thought about this cool job my sister had analyzing census data. i think i could get down with that. dekkinga, maybe we can work something out and get a map making operation going. wait, why would you want to do something other than you do now? maybe we could do business maps for your job, tell them what microbrews they should get based on distribution in the area any individual store occupies. distribution of booze is a bitch. if i have to be a lawyer maybe i can write distribution contracts and agreements for booze.
we actually just did a case about booze distribution, and it was one of the cases i could actually get into. it came out of michigan law and made it to the supreme court; granholm was one of the prominently featured parties. the problem was whether they could have a law where in-state wineries could ship directly to consumers but out-of-state wineries had to go through the normal distribution process. the problem with the normal wholesaling scheme is that it is prohibitively expensive for smaller operations, which make up a rapidly expanding percentage of american wineries. the majority held that the law was unconstitutional because it functioned as a protectionist measure favoring in-state commerce, which is a violation of congress' power to regulate interstate commerce. the dissent focused on the twenty first amendment, which not only repealed prohibition but seemed to provide a constitutional basis for states having ultimate authority to regulate booze in and coming into their state. fascinating, i know. trust me, it is a hell of a lot better than most of the stuff i get to read.
mostly, what i read makes me wish i had majored in history. there is a lot to know, and i care about a decent chunk of it. going back to get a bachelor's in history would be pretty silly though. don't think it would do a whole lot for the job prospects. but who knows, museums, a place to work? whatever, i'm pretty sure that no matter what i do i am never going to get a decent job. there just aren't enough to go around; every opening attracts dozens of people who have gone to great lengths to be everything that employer wants. most of them probably lie on their resumes. what other blatant dishonesty gets christened with its own more innocent-sounding name? "padding" indeed. this is not something i will ever do. i don't know how large of a role ethics play in that, but i feel like if someone is going to hire me, i want them to hire me for me, and if that isn't good enough, i guess i'll just keep on not having a decent job ever. i want to say that sooner or later people always get found out, but i know that is not true. that asshole from fema sure got his when katrina hit though. i think most people don't get confronted like that though, because experience requirements that engender a lot of bullshit on resumes are based on the perceived necessity of the requirements in the first place. by and large, i think they are irrelevant. a reasonably competent person can probably operate in a lot of fields without having done the exact same fucking thing for five years someplace else or whatever. all this talk had gotten me back to worrying about summer employment. fuck.

sunshine snowstorm

well, not quite, but it a few flakes floated down on me during some bright daylight today. if nothing else, a thought-provoking contrast, somehow more rarefied than seeing the rain coming down on a sunny day. it did not serve as a springboard to anything deeper or more meaningful. i was in front of the laundromat on the phone, and it mostly represented a magnetic distraction from the conversation at hand, which itself oscillated between the heartfelt and the inane. the real distraction in that setting is the people watching though. every time i do laundry, i bring a book, but i am beginning to suspect that it mostly feeds the illusion that i am otherwise absorbed and not constantly analyzing the happenings and interactions around me. one of my favorite things to do while i stand out front is hold the door for people. on the one hand, it is a nice thing to do, but i am fascinated by the reactions it gets, from the expectantly entitled to the unnecessarily grateful. today while i was doing this a couple kids went in with whomever i held the door for, and the kids seemed to get the biggest kick out of it. one little girl really wanted to hang out; she kept pressing her face to the inside of the glass and waving at me while i stayed outside for a while, and then, much to her mothers chagrin, came to stand on the porch and show me her dora the explorer gloves. kids are something else man, but i always run into a few when i'm doing laundry, usually a few with some questions. the best, and i may have typed this back when it happened, was the two little brothers who were convinced i worked at trader joe's. at least i assume they were convinced, because they remained unconvinced of the opposite despite my unwavering position that no, in fact i did not work there.
but come on, have i really done nothing but laundry since i posted last? thankfully, no, although the detailed description of the week's activities is typically law school laden. had a chunk of a brief draft due, and that sucked up some hours, as many obsessing and planning as actually typing. no fun at all. and this week i will have my conference with the prof to talk about it. i tried to do it the way she wants, but past experience has consistently proven that doing things the way she has advised inevitably leads to the most criticism. every time we "learn" how to do something, the next class we have is dedicated to telling us we did it wrong, and fraught with contradictory instructions about how things should actually look. the sad part is that the more i go through it, the more i realize that she is not so much teaching us to write in a way consistent with legal practice as she is teaching us (after requisite setting us up to knock us down) how she, personally, would write the assignment. i'm sure her formulation is acceptable, but i resent being graded on imitation over function. also, the persecution of the passive voice serves to make writing more boring, not more clear. if you're so stupid that you can't handle passive voice, go fuck yourself, and give me your gavel and robe. i'm miles of experience and credibility from a courtroom, but the fact that judges serve as a justification for the inanity of legal writing fills me with derision for them. the only good news about all this is that review conferences are preempting class tomorrow morning, so i get to stay up late and write this and then sleep in.
los gatos are running around and making crazy noises. i do not know what they want. probably food. unfortunately, i've recently discovered that if i put food out when they agitate for it, one of them always eats too much too fast and pukes some of it up, which is no fun for anyone. the other day i learned that shakespere invented the word puked. pretty far out. in fact, there was a fairly cool list of like eight or so words and phrases that the bard imparted to the language that today seem pretty indispensable. however, the list was on cracked.com, and i refuse to link them, cause most of their shit is pretty weak. on the other hand, what is the harm in linking one list? just know that i do not endorse this site. this is one of the rare instances where one of their arbitrarily numbered lists is rooted more in opinion than fact. also, it turns out this was actually a list of ten, and i really think people should read it, and the direct link satisfies the inherent laziness of any internet denizen. i feel like i'm twice as likely to click hypertext (not marked, appropriately enough) and get somewhere than i am to take the painless step of opening a new tab and doing a quick google (wonder how long before that one doesn't get marked) for whatever it was. easy, quick, reliable, but yet somehow not the instant gratification that makes the web the wonder it is today.
on friday i spent some time and too much money at two bars i know. one of them is my least favorite bar i am familiar with, and the other is maybe my favorite bar, perhaps because i am most familiar with it, along with its proximity, pricing, and lax (read: nonexistent to the point of still putting ashtrays out for everyone) enforcement of the city's smoking ban. for my least favorite bar that i know, i am resolved to never ever ever go back again, even though i managed to not pay for one of my beers (least they could do after they charged me five dollars for a blue moon that was just as flat and skunky as the rest of the tap). as close as it is to school, there is another bar on campus that is a little cheaper, has a way better tap, and doesn't constantly play music that makes me think i'm back at work at the plasma place. as for my preferred dive, the mill creek tavern, i decided i should stop by their web page more often to determine the odd dates where they have music that doesn't completely blow, and perhaps arrive before they start overcharging for cover. it was worth it this time though. not only was it my buddy's birthday, but the bands were a contrast to the dull grind metal and off-key punk bands eligible for rhythmic welfare they typically feature at the establishment. one band sounded a lot like primus; bass heavy in the mix at the wheel of a sonic bus with psychedelic keyboard renderings to add a unique flavor. another one sounded like a proggy jam outfit guided by bjork's twin's vocal stylings. the third band was the best of the bunch and was somewhere between these two idioms. on the downside, i'm pretty sure it was a four-piece that billed itself as sea trio. was that seriously the hippest thing you could come up with? we have four people and call ourselves a trio? in any event, they were thoroughly decent, but the primus-inspired band was probably the most fun to see in my book. i'm not really sure what any of them were called; i knew the four names on the bill, but i missed one band and at least two of the three i saw never announced themselves. two of the names were pretty quality though, voodoo economics (bueller? anyone?) and bear is driving, which i imagine was inspired from a clerks animated series episode. if you are unfamiliar, well, i wish i could tell you how to avail yourself, because the reference is the most pure stroke of genius in the whole series. i thought about trying to describe how it goes down, but it really isn't nearly as funny unless you see it. the only way i know how to see it is stealing the dvds from an old roommate, but netflix might work too. for some reason, netflix is the top ad link for valentine's day on my internet service login page, closely followed by 'find a new job'. i love it when internet advertising makes little to no sense. the other ones are all related to flowers. the only good news is that no specific link to heart shaped jewelry made it.
i had a brief conversation with one of my neighbors the other day; one of the strangest exchanges i have ever been party too. this was the nice lady who lent me the carrier to take straw to the doctor (damn cat couldn't even get himself some insurance, we're going to canada). let me preface this by saying i have only knocked on her door once, when i was borrowing the carrier, and i have never come close to going all kramer and just bursting in or anything. so i'm coming up the stairs to my door, probably loud as hell, with my thick-soled shoes and heavy gait, and i hear "hello? hello?" and she says my name, so i'm like "hello?". odd, but makes enough sense. then she starts apologizing profusely, and i confusedly reply that it's okay, whatever it may be. she pleads with me not to come in, apologizing agian and explaining that i should refrain from entering because she is extremely exhausted from packing to move. i try and assure her that this is alright, not mentioning the fact that i had no intention of entering, kind of like the other hundred-odd times i've come home. i do not have anything profound to say about the exchange, nor do i find any metaphorical significance in the event, but i still think it was one of the strangest conversations i have ever had, and for some reason i have felt a need to share it since it happened. now i have.
jack just jumped on me and the keyboard, and somehow opened outlook express and almost made it some sort of a default, which it probably already is, considering a cat jumping on a keyboard caused it to launch. i should have let the cat's contributions to that memo draft i turned in stay in. the conference would have been a bit more interesting: so, why did you include this long string of the letter b? well, not only did it sponsor today's sesame street, which taught me more than you ever will, and my cat thought it was a really valuable and persuasive contribution. you don't think the judge will be convinced? well, just wait 'til he sees my cat. this is the prettiest, littlest cat of all time, you see. i really don't think the opposition will be able to respond or recover from this devastating illumination of the evidence. the analysis is really top-notch.
the other day i was thinking about how to best improve my situation in regards to the institution that has somehow become my nemesis (higher education? you don't remember me? we used to party and get along so well!) and i made a list of habits/vices in an attempt to gauge their effect. one that made it on that i don't usually think about was sodium. man, i cannot get by without something crunchy and salty when i'm trying to really get down to business working on something. but then i thought about it a little more and checked some shit out, and damn, for someone who never ever picks up a salt shaker, i have way too much intake of that shit. i probably can't let go, but i find it odd how that habit plays a role in my activity and finances. with that reflection in mind, i went to the grocery store making sure i at least didn't get potato chips, because sodium is bad enough without fat. so i went with pretzels, even though they bring me back to the days where my schedule was wake up at noon, eat a peanut butter sandwich and read a book, go to work, eat nothing and smoke at least seven cigarettes during an hour's worth of break time, go home, eat pretzels, drink four dollar deuces of steel reserve until i couldn't read, and try and find my missing cat by wandering around drunk and meowing. all that aside, i have discovered the best form of pretzel. they come in an astounding variety of what is essentially the same thing: extruded dough in a strange shape covered in salt. how much can the shape matter? a lot. the experience of eating anything is related to how compact the item is, especially true for something crunchy. the best pretzel shape is... the whieel. closely related in compactness to the mini or tiny twist, these are circles with five spokes, and something about them is far superior to the little twists, my previous preference. man, this is a long meditation on pretzels. am i so white that i revert to seinfeld-style humor at certain junctures? could be. in fact, the packaging of the wheel pretzels offers an unnecessarily lengthy meditation on dippers versus non-dippers of pretzels and the application of the instant pretzel incarnation to that activity. no dipping here, but just as engaged. whatever. i've got some new dip, and i'm gettin' whippets. i've got a new hip, and i'm gettin' rickets?
enough of that silliness. getting down to some serious business, i'm playing abbey road. i'm on side two right now, and in the middle of some deeply-felt personal conflict. i fancy myself a john man, and in fact when i put on the record i looked at the sleeve and recalled a detailed discussion of the appearance of each member of the band that i hijacked to obsess over how fucking cool john looks, and how that would make sense because of how cool he actually is. the point here is that i'm on side two, the paul side, and damn am i a sucker for it. abbey road is immaculate, but side one is all john, but not the best of john. the other side is really probably as good as paul gets, but it is just so together. i know it is paul's show for this part of the album and i feel like it is somehow not as credible, but i just love it. the diversity, the flow, that mini rock opera attempt. i think that is what really does it; paul takes the implicit and shoves it in your face, being like so, this is what is up, i don't care if you dig it because it hangs together on its own. and of course he couldn't give it its own light (viz. wings) but these guys could do the rest for him.
speaking of wings, they're bollocksing it up all over the place, typical of them to lose to two of the worst teams in the league, but today against the ducks was unforgivable, if not that than at least unspeakably frustrating. SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW. sorry. hockey and all, i know you all care a lot about that. to those non-sporting types, i say that the need for a meaningless distraction has become unavoidable and downright indispensable in these times. we all like to think that we have some value-less proxy we can use as a silo for so many emotions we have no opportunity to express in fullness within the friendly confines of our daily dealings, but i find sport to be a vast and welcome repository for these things. a lot of us like the underdog (pleasantly unmarked, curious about the etymology, ironically willing to bet on history rooted in actual dog fights), but forget the giants, city beat united in the manchester derby today. no championship of any kind was involved, but i really wish there was a way to measure how many people gave a fuck about this regular season premiership contest between two historical rivals compared to those who watched the super bowl with a vested interest the other week. the beautiful game has global appeal. i would also like to know how much money changed hands for each event. a few people probably garnered some good cash in both cases. i would almost be willing to bet that on the bookie's level today was more of a shock than a week ago. tough to say though, i am no odds maker, although that is an occupation i would be interested in learning more about.
odds makers are also still projecting hillary for this year's overall election. goes to show you what they know. data over instinct, every time. who knows how it will shake down in the end? not me. although i almost wish it was. i think it would be pretty cool to be involved with that sort of thing, whether i was the boy changing the numbers on some big board display, or the shady character making the books, or a politics addict sweating over the larger meaning while still maintaining a rigorous gambling habit. i find economics more intriguing by the day, but there ain't no economics like black-market economics 'cuz black-market economics don't stop? no, they're the best because they are more tapped into the real people with day-to-day worries and cares and addictions. they offer a more accurate and meaningful portrait of the populace. i wonder how much academic study is devoted to those sorts of things. maybe not enough. maybe that is my niche. maybe not. maybe i need to grab another undergraduate degree. maybe that would be a waste of money. maybe i'd learn twice as much at half the price. i can't say for sure, but i bet there is a way to bet on it. i hope so anyway.
these days are still troublesome to me, and occasionally i deal with it better than other times. i guess that is a fairly vacuous (whoa, spelling) statement; mostly the story of everyone's life given a minimum of introspection. for me, i was not dealing real well this past week. too much drinking to cope, which is sad. drinking should be a celebration and communal and rewarding, not a psychological mechanism. so skews the supremacy of "schooling". i felt pretty good about it at the time, however. the good man at the restaurant and beer provider across the street sent someone to procure my omnipresent order of two pbr forties. a young man who looked exactly like someone i knew in the sense that i knew who they were in terms of what they did, but not as a human being, was talking to the guy running the show about some pamphlets he had. i was casually observing the dude, but became a little more intrigued when the man behind the counter smiled and accepted the stack of proffered booklets. turned out they were issues of some sort of poetic compilation. when my beers arrived, the man/manager enthusiastically informed me i was free to take one, free of charge (i don't think anyone was paying, but he was happy to tell me i could have it). i took it home with the beer, and decided to try and pair them in experience as they held together in acquisition. worked out rather well. the booklet was something called the idiom. i found it to be rather engaging and the content to be surprisingly by-and-large worthwhile. i immediately thought of my preferred originator of grotesque parody, who produces work in keeping with but notably superior to things of this nature. actually, a lot of the content was in the same league, a lot better than i expected it to be, with an excellent variety and some strikingly compelling imagery. a few heavy hitters in the tangible paper product. however, the progenitor of some content was named as this blog, which contains an inordinate amount of drivel compared with the publication i received. this mostly serves the notion that whoever is editing knows what they are up to, and i find that comforting. many contributors have credentials beyond 'some people i know let me post poems i wrote on their semi-obscure generic blog location'. all this being said, i feel that the above-mentioned originator wouldn't be out of place in something like this, and need only follow previous linkage to find his place in it all should he so desire. it would be good to see, because i was pretty sure that the poetry that flooded my mental space after drinking copious amounts of cheap beer and reading the more base offerings constituted a comparable product. this was something i could do, but even if i could do it as adequately as some of the more amateurish participants, i wouldn't have the feeling and conviction they do. bravo, i say. even if i think you are shitty at what you do, at least you love doing it so much that you seek to identify yourself as someone who does these sorts of things. if you do these things well, and come from outside the established milieu, you should be justly embraced. c'mon peter, didn't you always used to say you wished you could be published in a rag serving as backup toilet paper in the dingy bars of central jersey? i could have sworn that was your catchphrase. but i hope people do check this out. a digestible regional phenomenon, if nothing else.
in fact, because i don't think much of my readership, vast and diverse though you may be (yeah, right), cannot acquire the fairly respectable physical product, i would like to relate a couple of things. no, i am not going to get written permission about it. stepping on the little guy, that is how i roll. until it becomes my job to defend them in copyright litigation, anyway. at this point, i think these folks would probably be satisfied that i link some shit from the post at least. so, people may have already heard of this first thing, but i hadn't, and i think it is pretty cool. this guy daniel zimmerman invented a poetry form called isotopes (i feel like i've seen the text for the link elsewhere; i could be wrong). the way it works is that you start with a word square, a four by four grid of letters that make words if you read it left to right and up to down, like this (except lined up way better so as you can actually see the words)
TIME
IDOL
DENS
EASE
the dude plugs them into this anagram server to get lines to make poems out of. pretty nifty. the guy's listing in the rag is pretty legitimate; i guess one can still make a name for oneself as a poet of sorts after a fashion these days. i find that comforting.
the other thing from this publication i wanted to highlight was a well-told story. in fact, i'm just going to reproduce it here, word for word, because i can and i feel like it. the dude shows up in the publication as HeMightBeWalter, which is probably what he uses on that blog i referred to earlier, but you can check him out in depth here, and this is what he wrote that made it in, with my own interjections in the brackets:
I feel the need to warn you all. Warn you about a crazy new fab [sic, i think he meant fad, so much for me giving props to the editor] sweeping the greater Ocean Count area. Pube Jointing. Iknow what you are thing, so stop it. This is Serious!!!

The event that followed [sic again, c'mon people] are all true. The names and locations have been change to protect the innocent.

While attending a small get together at John and Jade's apartment, Samantha had found that she had run out of cigarettes [jesus, learn tense!]. She began trying to "Bum a smoke" from one of the many smokers in attendance. After many a failed attempt, her friend Arthur made mention of an abandoned pack of Camel Menthol Lights on a bookcase. One shake assured her that the pack was empty, but Arthur, under further inspection, found that is [it? this is not tricky people] was in fact not completely empty.

When Arthur opened the pack of cigarettes, he found only two things inside, both resembling cigarettes. Then, Arthur did a double take, realizing that one of the was not exactly a cigarette. More like a "Marijuana cigarette". He pulled it out of the pack. Everyone was excited, especially Samantha, who only expected the pack to be empty [you couldn't write anything better than a regurgitation of previous prose that was already the moral equivalent of beige?]. But something just wasn't right. After a light squeeze, Arthur decided it wasn't the right consistancy [yup, they published that misspelling] that it should be. Something was inside the tightly twisted up paper, but it was not "The Chronic".

To everyones [yeah, no possessive apostrophe] dismay (and to somes [again, this is just sloppy and not artsy] disbelief), Arthur began to rip open the "Joint". As he had suspected, what was inside was not green and fluffy, rather dark brown and curly. He had found hair of the Pubic [make sure to capitalize that] variety. They had been Pube Jointed. Someone had likely shaved their most private of areas and saved the clippings, in hopes of playing the cruelest of practical jokes on some unsuspecting party goers.

This is very serious. It could happen to anyone. Your parents. Your little sister. The guy at the supermarket who cuts your sandwich meats [on further reflection, this is the most likely victim]. It could even happen to you [dude should have bolded and all-capsed that]. Please, before you get "High" inspect your "Doobies". Or else you may wind up smoking on someones Pubies.

So that was the story they included in the publication. It is not a bad or unfunny story to hear, and it could have been told worse. mostly, i am glad that the story is from jersey. i don't really have a lot of first-hand experience with that state, but here, in order to qualify as a resident of the city, i have to make fun of it. if you don't make fun of it, they think you are from there, and will tell you to go back. i am not from there, and i do not want to go there. so i will post this funny story from someone who is from there and felt it necessary to relate an amusing anecdote. whoever he is, he made me laugh, and i hope you appreciated it too. you know what doesn't make me laugh? knocking over all of my peanuts and a bunch of books. this is, of course, what just happened. that is correct, it happened. this contrasts to the notion that it was something that i did or an event in which i was the prime mover. no, nothing like it. this was an unfortunate event tat happened to me wherein i am an innocent.
as always, context is key. right now, i am enjoying a microcosm of that truism. playing an 87 phish show compressed to 128 kbps mp3 (mp3 not marked, kbps is). if i was listening to a show of this quality on a cassette tape no one would complain, in fact, it would probably considered fairly correct. but the fact that i acquired it via download implies that a lossless transfer exists. regardless, it is a fine historical artifact available here. man were they ever a different band then than they were 11 or 12 years later when they would play sets of five or six songs, the majority extending over fifteen minutes. i'm just happy that casual browsing allowed me to acquire some 92 to 94 material (look for 92 st. mike's); truly the golden era of a band that was always trying to hit stride and never knew when it did. that is the strongest parallel between them and the dead, no matter what the savants impugn. all i'm saying is that quinn the eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna wanna dose (gonna and wanna are cool with spell check). phish at hunt's or nectar's makes me think about the back forty at billy's. that band will probably never go anywhere, owing to the members' day jobs more than their musical abilities, but somehow they've outgrown the confines and context i appreciated the most. i think i kind of understand those vermont dickheads who think they have a monopoly on appreciation of a band. back forty at billy's is something i miss as much as having a car and bottle deposits; i can't care anymore but there is a permanent place in my heart for the way i imagine things were, regardless of how addled i willfully render my recollections. what do you know about set break? eleven one oh six, that's all i can tell you if you weren't there.
as long as we're on the topic of nuanced jam band aficionado-ship, i would like to make a confession: i have been listening to and appreciating one of the few dead tunes i have sworn allegiance against. el paso. it is an easy and simple tune, nothing too far from mexicali blues or more accurately me and my uncle, neither of which i've actively crusaded against, although i do have some beef with mexicali. the point is, anyone who knows dead right now is thinking i have lost it. that may be the case. this is like saying victim or the crime was a good song. and hey man, it actually was when brent got in on it big time. so yeah, i've even exceeded the bounds of settled good taste according to deadheads (not marked - sweet!). one time, bobby sang the opening lyric as "patience runs out on the bunny" instead of junkie. the more you know...
i wish i could tel you this post was brought to you by the letter k and the number four, but all i have is the the letters pbr and the phrase 'elevated prime did edit her'. take what you can get sometimes, you know? jij ken? alright, i think i've had enough if you haven't. getting plenty of extreme at this juncture, willing to call it scooters, vacation, fall, and a night at that.

subtitle (unrelated)

an unflattering tale of raw humanity

maxim

specialization means we know more and understand less

you say you want a revolution...

i think i'll take number nine (beatles or magic hat) instead of whatever was going on yesterday. instead of going for some super bowl festivities (oops) i decided to go to what was billed as a talk at this place. i didn't think it was going to take all that long; figured i would go and walk over to the party for the second half of the game. the event was a prominent figure from an organization called copwatch L.A.. i guess a few western cities have groups like this, the idea is that they keep an eye on what the cops do and how they treat people and document their unfair actions. sounds pretty cool on face, and i was really interested because it had occurred to me while i was doing legal observing that the cops do a lot of shitty things outside of protests. i also just kind of wanted to see what the place was like and who showed up and how things went down; my nature is to observe a happening as much as to attend. well, i had plenty of time to gauge, as the speaker didn't make it until like almost forty five minutes past when things were allegedly going to get rolling. the room was alright, long and narrow, with quite a commendable library for an organization of that stripe. mostly the sort of things one would expect, left-leaning literature, a well-stocked pamphlet rack, but lots of real books and a surprising variety of fiction and non-documentary films. i killed a lot of time browsing a deleuze book i hadn't encountered before, sort of a chance to expound on anti-oedipus. most of the people who showed up were white and looked like most of the social justice people i've encountered. presumably to break down the power structure of presentation, the seats were rearranged into a large semi-circle for things to actually start going down. for whatever reason, we went all the way around introducing ourselves and describing what we were affiliated with/why we were at the thing, which mostly proved to be an opportunity for people to drop names and spew acronyms. the end result of the setup was that a lot of people talked a lot about their personal views and experiences, which i did not find to be real illuminating or helpful, as much of the talk had some self-congratulatory tone. not as much of that as there was rhetoric though; an awful lot of generalization and what i guess could be called term-dropping (fill-in-the-blank/industrial complex, including "non-profit/industrial complex"). the talk quickly turned to a prolonged discussion/argument of gentrification, which was not really what i showed up to listen to, but one of the more articulate and thoughtful participants drew a respectable connection which devolved into some pretty rude and pointless crap. overall, there were some bright spots, but the "dialog" was mostly dominated by a lot of unsupported claims everyone wanted to believe and no one wanted to provide evidence for. i don't doubt the things people said, but i would really appreciate documentation. which is what i thought things would be a little more concerned with. only about half an hour of what turned out to be a nearly three hour ordeal really dealt with the ins and outs of what the copwatch group did. a good chunk of the people spent a lot of the time looking bored and uncomfortable, and a few people spoke more than was necessary. overall, it was kind of depressing. how these people intend to get the world to agree with them and fundamentally change surprise while they can't act right in a group of thirty-odd bodies supposedly gathered for a common concern is beyond me. suffice to say that i did not leave feeling real inspired. i had kind of hoped that the whole thing would make for some better blogging material, but the more i go on the more i realize that i couldn't even glean a whole ton for that purpose. ah well, you don't know if you don't go. hey, i got out on the weekend. i guess going to a super bowl thing would have counted too, though. gone are the days of reserved seats at the bar proper on said sunday, with requisite breaks for private truly super bowl celebrations.
on the other hand, i did make it out on saturday as well. way out, in fact, about an hour's train ride to the northern burbs. i brewed some with a classmate and her husband, some really good people, and there's a lot to be said for that. got to hang out with some dogs, too, another bonus. i really enjoy riding on trains, but this particular route was one i didn't need to see twice. i don't know if parts of the area are really that shitty, or if whatever is next to the railway is bound to take a dive for some reason, but the view was mostly a downer. however, there was some surprising changes along the way: a forested area would suddenly pop up, or xeroxed undersized family homes would yield to hospital-esque apartments or palatial estates. when i finally got where i was headed, the whole town came off as a little bizarre because it was very old and yet distinctively a suburb. back home, certain areas are of comparable age, but they spent a large portion of their history in a distinct format of farmland, whereas this had always been a respectably sized suburb, albeit also couched among what had traditionally been agricultural enterprise. brewing itself came back like riding a bike, even more simple than i had remembered, but i didn't really get to do a whole lot. the dude goes all-grain, and we had a scare with the runoff, but a tactic i've long espoused proved to solve whatever the problem was: just let it sit and see if it fixes itself. it did. in the intervening time, i was introduced to venture brothers, an occasional adult swim feature. it was quite strange and satisfyingly amusing. they fed me some solid food as well, the dude has some respectable cooking chops. in fact, chops is what he made, and some solid mashed potatoes, all rosemary and garlic. those kitchen aid mixers are capable of some badass shit. they lent me a book to read on the way back on the train in the dark, freakonomics, which i was glad to finally get a crack at. i blazed through it with the quickness, closed up within twelve hours of lending. anyone who was gonna read it probably has, so i don't have to tell you to. some of the arguments i felt were better than others, and i was really surprised at how intuitive the whole thing seemed to me, given the out-there connotation the authors try to give the theories. maybe i missed my calling. wait, i definitely did, i just don't know what it was supposed to be. not pop economics, even if i knew where they were going and what the argument was going to be a decent portion of the time.
so i tried to make the most of the weekend for once, and it had its ups and downs, but i was back to business today. in the middle of one of my classes, my buddy who sits next to me straight up started to lose his shit. i don't know how he wound up there, but he was tickled by the notion of bacon salt. as was i, as was i. i feel like someone i know mentioned the product to someone else recently, so i'm not claiming first discovery, but if the rest of y'all (not marked! also, i discovered that spell check does not mark irregardless. what gives?) have not been alerted, let this serve. it really is sort of outrageous. check out the blog, with links to a disturbing variety of cocktails calling for the product. on the other hand, the bacon chocolate turned out pretty good; better than it sounded at least. i don't know if everything should taste like bacon, but it is pretty amusing to read the thoughts of those who do think so.
the other strange product of the day is a nicotine vaporizer. a guy i know at school was pretty psyched to get his, and has been making liberal use of it inside buildings whenever he has the opportunity. no one has said anything yet, as there is no smell and the whole apparatus sort of resembles a pen. the way it works is that there is a nicotine solution, and the head is enough to vaporize the liquid, so you still sort of feel like you're inhaling smoke, but it is not as hot, and also there is no tar, leading to a somewhat less satisfying feeling. but the nicotine is all there, i guess. they're big in europe and parts of asia where smoking is popular but recently strictly regulated. at any rate, the dude i know has been getting away with it with no hassle thus far. i mean, what are people going to say, anyway? there is no odor, and so nobody even really notices. indoors, there is no visible vapor upon exhale, and a trivial amount results from the puff, but it quickly dissipates and like i said, no one can smell it, because it is more or less steam. i don't think i will be quickly converted, but i guess it works for this guy, who was one of the biggest chain smokers i have ever met in my life. however, he is also the sort of person who gets such a big kick out of being able to get his nicotine in a semi-smoked format in areas where tobacco use is prohibited. on the one hand, i wanna be like more power to him, but on the other hand, it is one of those strange and perplexing features of our present era.
well, originally this post was going to have a whole lot more about that meeting at lava and what power means and how it functions in society, but i think this is for the best. i guess the point after much deliberation was going to be that tearing down structures of power inevitably creates a vacuum which is in turn filled by one person or another, and that is why the change people envision is pretty unlikely. history bears witness alongside the microcosm of a roomful of "progressive" folks. go ahead and tell me i'm looking for an excuse to legitimize structures that favor me, and i will tell you that those structures intrinsically favor me to agree but also require me to compromise the culture i envision. power makes rules, and people are more or less left to decide whether they will legitimate power by accepting the rules and ascending via being co-opted or attempt to replace those structures with something else that will inevitably lead to it's own injustices. i am left wanting an historical contradiction, and nothing leaps to my mind. i am loathe to capitulate to nature and genetics, but there is some compelling evidence to suggest a large part of the way people act is predetermined to some degree, and that means there will always be someone to take advantage of a vacuum. at this point i would like to willfully misinterpret that to envision someone sexually abusing a vacuum cleaner. i'll leave you all with that.