30Mar / 2010

Sorry, what?

First, before I forget: is the Nissan Cube a good car or is someone playing a joke on hipsters? We test drove one on Saturday and it seemed okay, but it also seemed as if there were a premium being paid for extra design and coolness, sort of like with the MacBook.

Which I also have, of course, and like.

We decided to wait a while and think about it. Chances are I’ll get a van, which would be larger, and yet cheaper.

I have a year or so with my current car, a Mazda 2, I figured. Then this morning the clutch and transmission got very weird all of a sudden, so maybe not a whole year. I’ll be happy if I can drive home, goddamn it.

I hate cars. At least the ones I can afford.

Two guys came into our house this morning and installed a very large television set. This is apparently connected to the guys who came to our house last week and installed a satellite dish on our roof.

Listen: I remember when dad could go to the store and come home with a box, and take a television set out of the box, and plug it in and you were done. You got maybe 3-4 channels, (not over 1000) and sometimes you had to stand there moving the antenna around while someone on the sofa said, “a little more, no, a little more, no, hang on, it was better before, move it back, no the other way,” but that was it. You didn’t have to communicate with a fucking satellite. You didn’t have to have a guy come to the house because he could navigate twenty different fucking menus. You didn’t have to go back to the store to get a different cable to attach your DVD player because there were no DVD players.

And so on.

When I left for work, my wife was watching a show about weather in Germany.

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29Mar / 2010

How to justify your existence

First, get some DNA of the person who invented Daylight Savings Time. Or, not the person who invented it, but the person responsible for propogating it.

Someone is always responsible. If you cannot find them, ask your wife, she’s good at that sort of thing.

Hair or fingernail clippings will suffice. Sew them into a voodoo doll and follow normal voodoo procedures. Cause daylight savings time, man. Seriously.

Then go for a walk while it’s still dark, along the creek. It is five AM, not four AM despite what your phone says. Apparently you forgot the clock on your phone when you were resetting clocks yesterday.

Go walk in the dark. Are you walking? Is it dark? By the time you get to the bridge where you turn right to follow the bike path along the creek, you’re already wondering why you felt it necessary to justify your existence in the first place. A calmer voice in your head is beginning to tell you it’s not necessary. That existence is not something that requires justification.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS VOICE. If you want to justify your existence, ignore this voice even though it sounds reasonable.

Christ, it’s dark.

And yet, people are still driving around. Austrians are crazy.

Look who’s talking.

At least they’re not out walking around.

Keep walking until you think of a justification. Spring might work. Does spring justify your existence? Frog eggs? Or a journal full of words? Or the steadiness you can give a child dealing with rapid change? Can you teach someone something, like how to ride a bike or that finger snapping/bottle-cap shooting thing, or throat singing?

If you can teach throat singing, please mail me. I’ve tried to teach myself in the car but I keep passing out, which is dangerous when you’re driving.

There must be some way to justify your existence. Maybe you’re not thinking hard enough.

Maybe you just need a cup of coffee. A little caffeine and all these justifications will pop into your head.

Go back to the house and make some coffee.

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24Mar / 2010

Something something tortoise something

The tortoise wants out so bad you can taste it. She was scurrying about when I got up at 4.40 to feed the cats (was gotten up). Caught her in the middle of hte kitchen floor when I turned on the lights, like a cockroach. Now she’s running laps, her claws scratching the tiles sound like a wheezing businessman running laps in a deserted Y.

She never gives up. I reiterate, I know. She is one of the lucky ones. We all are. Thanks to a long – infinitely long, or at least immeasurably long series of highly unlikely occurrences, we are here. In all likelihood we shouldn’t be. According to the laws of probability. But we are. Because we were lucky. We call it lucky. We here at the tip of the long tail. Because luck got us here, we believe in it. We worship it every week in line for our lottery tickets. We have ceremonies and riguals to guarantee it, like baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

When the tortoise runs her circles, though, something else is going through her mind. Science. She is thinking about science. Through her millions of years of evolution she has learned to make her luck. She doesn’t sit in a shady spot, or in a sunbeam wishing for it. She, usually (unless she is resting or digesting, or fucking her rock (she might not be female, in fact)) walks the perimeters of her existence, seeking an exit. The exit will not come to her, it has to be found. She has to go to it. And she is seeking, not trying to work magic. Because she knows that this amazing series of accidents that is our universe will at some point create a situation she can seize to get what she wants. A door will be left open, a section of fence will fall over, a plant will grow bushy enough to support her weight, and she will climb out.

And although highly unlikely, these possibilities are less unlikely at the perimeter than at the safe center. A tortoise does not believe in fairy godmothers. It believes in pellets of food, lettuce, a water dish, a little house, daytime and night time, hot and cold, hiding and seeking, marching the perimeter, finding a hole and climbing out. It believes in what it has observed and experienced, not in what it wants.

Tortoises invented science, science defined as observing without prejudice and using what is real and what works. Tortoises don’t disbelieve in God but they don’t pray either.

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19Mar / 2010

Escatology

Escatology: Theological doctrine concerned with the world ending in shit.

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11Mar / 2010

Sometimes you are the hammer

And sometimes you are the anvil.

Sometimes you are the anvil, and sometimes you are the coyote.

Sometimes you are the coyote, and sometimes you are the roadrunner.

Sometimes you are the roadrunner, and sometimes you are the highway.

Sometimes you are the highway, and sometimes you are the bus.

Sometimes you are the bus, and sometimes you are the husky kid shouting crazy shit in the back seat so that everyone holds their pee from Omaha, Nebraska all the way to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Sometimes you are the crazy man, and sometimes you are the psychiatrist.

Sometimes you are the psychiatrist, and sometimes you are the asylum.

Sometimes you are the asylum, and sometimes you are the world.

Sometimes you are the world, and sometimes you are an idea of the world.

Sometimes you are an idea of the world, and sometimes you are a chai latte.

Sometimes you are a chai latte, and sometimes you are a girl standing in line thinking about how good a chai latte is going to taste.

Sometimes you are a girl standing in line thinking about how good a chai latte is going to taste, and sometimes you’re a guy standing in line thinking about how good the girl looks.

Sometimes you’re a guy standing in line, and sometimes you’re another guy standing in line, picking the first guy’s pocket.

Sometimes you’re the pickpocket, and sometimes you’re the wallet.

Sometimes you’re the wallet, and sometimes you’re the money.

Sometimes you’re the money, and sometimes you’re the drink.

Sometimes you’re the drink, and sometimes you’re the bartender.

Sometimes you’re the bartender, and sometimes you’re a rabbi, a priest, and Lindsey Lohan.

Sometimes you’re a rabbi, a priest and Lindsey Lohan, and sometimes you’re a chicken.

Sometimes you’re the chicken, and sometimes you’re the road.

Sometimes you’re the road, and sometimes you’re the chariot.

Sometimes you’re the chariot, and sometimes you’re the horse.

Sometimes you’re the horse shoe, and sometimes you’re the nail.

Sometimes you’re the nail, and sometimes you’re the hammer.

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25Feb / 2010

Well, whatever, never mind

They lay there on the flat rooftop in their yoga pants on their yoga mats. The slaughter had begun down in the streets, but they were too high up to hear the screams.

There are two sorts of people, she said, Here we are, now entertain us people, and here we are now, entertain us people.

There are two sorts of people, he said, people who dislocate their hips, and people who don’t.

There are two sorts of people, she said. People who are allergic to gluten, and people who are not allergic to gluten.

There are two sorts of people, he said. People who can do the Tree pose, and people who can’t.

He meant it as a self-deprecating joke, because a few minutes earlier he had looked like a guy… like a guy jumping around on one foot with his hands in the air.

They went on like this for a while.

There are four sorts of people, she said: a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, a libido.

Oh, look at the time, she said. She pointed towards a big digital clock on a bank across the street. The clock was on fire, with flames six feet high. It told no time.

I should be getting home to my husband, she said.

Me too, he said. To my husbandry, I mean.

Yeah, yeah, she said.

The slaughter was all the fault of the Make a Wish Foundation. A sick little kid had wished to be the last person alive on Earth, so they were working on it.

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18Feb / 2010

I, want to rock and roll, all night

This guy is feeling blocked. Like, he’ll lie awake at night, or be woken up in the middle of the night by cats, and have all these great ideas, so great, he thinks, that he’s sure to remember them in the morning, which he doesn’t of course, and when he sits down to actually produce something, well that’s the problem, he never actually sits down to produce anything. But then someone says, that’s odd, if someone were to tell me to write something about specific topic X, I would be totally stuck, yet you, told the same thing, bubble with ten different ideas, or a hundred different ones. And the guy thinks, maybe so.

And then the guy’s wife calls him at lunch and says he’s lucky he’s not at home because she’s in a murderous state as she just cleaned out the refrigerator, which was supposed to be his domain, she decided, apparently, okay he grants her that, and some bagels he did a while back that in the end turned out way better than he thought they were going to turn out while he was making them, deformed little imps yet, the next day, more bagelesque than anything he’s baked to date and which, yet, didn’t all get eaten, to the great delight of mold spores in the kitchen atmosphere.

And this reminds him of one of those late-night thoughts he had!

All it takes is a trigger! The ideas really were so great he’d remember them. He just needed something to trigger it. They might all be filed away in the folds of his cerebrum somewhere.

What was I talking about.

Oh, yeah: this guy I was talking about remembers he was thinking about the origins of life on our planet. And the nature of life. On this and other planets.

Say life comes from somewhere else, not here. They even found a meteorite with organic traces on it. From which all life on Earth evolved. Into all these different things we know of. Plus stuff in the oceans we can’t even imagine. Plus stuff under the forest floor, and in my kid’s forgotten lunchbox, and elsewhere.

Like in the frozen seas of some distant planet. Or worms waving their fannies (U.S. usage) around the rim of some undersea volcano.

All that from one little meteorite? He thinks not.

Maybe we had one meteorite for the mammals, one for the fish, one for the lizards and birds, et cetera.

And one for the Most Ancient Ones, Cthulhu and stuff.

Forms of life upon which merely to gaze would drive one mad and stuff.

Maybe, at one time, these slimy guys were all over the place, with their own institutions, theme parks, everything, just slimy versions of them. Stuff that wouldn’t show up in the fossil record.

Slime mold – that’s bacteria, right? Something along those lines, which under the right conditions organizes into a larger creature that can move around yadda yadda. So imagine, at one time, an Earth where conditions were really right, and they were these big Cthulhu things all over. And then something changed so they reorganized back into harmless slime molds and fungi and bacteria and viruses and shit BUT ARE STILL SENTIENT.

There’s that mile-wide, 10,000 year-old mushroom in Michigan (i.e. the Humungus Fungus, google it). There are these balls of stuff forming in the Mediterranean.

There is his refrigerator, and his breadbox: Cthulhu. It’s not just fungus, it’s digits of an Ancient One. Watching and waiting. Think about that next time your cheese goes bad. It’s just Cthulhu taking back his/her/their world, one thing at a time.

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Metamorphosism

Category Archives: Das Gehirn

Sorry, what?

How to justify your existence

Something something tortoise something

Escatology

Sometimes you are the hammer

Well, whatever, never mind

I, want to rock and roll, all night