Just a reminder to the folks who would prefer to have armed guards patrolling schools rather than limit access to or ban AR-15s and similar weapons:
Those armed guards would be protecting kids from other people who don’t want to limit access to or ban AR-15s and similar weapons.
You guys can talk about mental illness all day long; at the end of that long, tedious day, you guys are on the same side of the gun issue as every mass shooter in recent history.
I am not saying “every gun enthusiast is a mass shooter.”
I *am* saying “every mass shooter is a gun enthusiast.”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a gun enthusiast, but you guys need to acknowledge this:
Politically, the crazy bastards shooting up schools, concerts, etc. etc. etc. are on *your* side of the political aisle.
And when you guys try to pretend that “liberals” are somehow at fault for mass shootings, you aren’t acknowledging reality.
To repeat: all gun enthusiasts are not mass shooters. But all mass shooters *are* gun enthusiasts.
No pacifist anti-gun “liberal” ever shot up a school, or a concert, or anything like that.
The problem is on *your* side of the political aisle.
The fact that *you guys* want easy access to guns makes it easier for crazy bastards to get guns and kill people with those guns.
You don’t want to kill people? Awesome!
You’re not a violent criminal? Great!
If you’re neither of those things, you shouldn’t have a problem with gun regulation.
If you *do* have a problem with gun regulation, even if you are not a violent criminal who wants to kill people, YOU ARE MAKING IT EASIER FOR VIOLENT CRIMINALS TO GET GUNS AND KILL PEOPLE.
School security guards are becoming more and more necessary because of *your* political views, not because of mine.
You guys are big on “personal responsibility,” correct?
If so, take responsibility for the crazy bastards in *your* group.
Stop blaming “liberals” for problems in *your* group.
So, in my most recent blog post, I sort of obliquely discussed the philosophy of materialism.
I would have to do more research to confirm this, but the type of “materialism” I was referring to in that post most resembles dialectical materialism, but I am not confident that I would necessarily agree with everything in that particular philosophy.
In fact, what I am talking about might better be described as physicalism rather than materialism. I am honestly not sure.
At any rate, what I was (and am) talking about is the idea that everything in the universe is explainable through “material” or “physical” terms. And yes, that includes all types of “spiritual” and/or “supernatural” experiences.
My use of “quotation marks” there should not be misconstrued as reductive. I am not trying to delegitimize anyone’s subjective experiences, nor am I trying to say that things like religion and “spirituality” are useless.
On the contrary, I think both of those things can have an enormously positive effect on people at the individual level, and as long as religious people don’t try to force any of their views on other people, and as long as those views don’t oppress anyone within the religious group in any way, I have no problem whatsoever with anyone’s religious views.
Religion (and membership in any other sort of ideologically-based group) provides its adherents with a sense of community, a common set of values and beliefs, and so on. To repeat, I think that membership in such groups can have an enormously positive effect on people at the individual level. And heck, it can have an enormously positive effect at the group level, also…
Have you ever heard anyone say (or have you ever said), “I want to feel like I am part of something bigger than myself”?
That feeling, I would venture, is one that is common across all religious and/or ideologically-based groups. It’s also, I would venture, a feeling that is common to all (or at least most) human beings. The desire to feel connected to something or someone outside of and separate to one’s own physical self.
I certainly have this desire. And I have come to realize that my relatively recent (like in the past few years, I mean) attraction to various strains of materialism is a product of that desire.
This may not be immediately apparent — it wasn’t immediately apparent to me, at least — based on that last post I wrote. Someone could easily read that post as “human beings are just physical things, thoughts and emotions are just the result of physical processes, nothing means anything, we’re all gonna die” and not see anything more than that. That’s my fault; actually after publishing that post I remembered that I didn’t post it last July because it might be interpreted like that, and I didn’t quite know how to articulate how and why I didn’t intend for it to be interpreted that way.
I am not sure I can articulate it now, but I am gonna try:
I think it goes back to a phase I went through a decade or more ago when I was fascinated with transcendentalism, specifically its attempts to integrate/appropriate various spiritual traditions into one philosophy. This led me to Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, though only in a philosophical/intellectual sort of way. I never converted to anything — in “the anthropological sense,” I remain a Southern Baptist — but philosophically (and more importantly, politically), I have very little in common with most Southern Baptists, beyond “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Anyways, I have personal views and beliefs that prevent me from being able to honestly say that I adhere to 100% to any of the various philosophies and/or religions I have listed so far. I don’t quite “belong” in any of those groups.
That’s not me trying to prove I am special, or that the objections I have to various aspects of these philosophies and/or religions make me “unique” or something. I am just relating to you, the reader, that I don’t feel especially “connected” to any ideologically based group… although I am certainly “more connected” to some than I am to others.
So, what’s a person to do, once he (or she) has explored various philosophies, gone by various labels (I used to tell people I was a “Taoist,” for example), and subsequently found that he (or she) doesn’t quite “belong” in any of them completely?
Especially when this person acknowledges fully that he (or she) *wants* to belong to a group, because as mentioned above, group membership can have an enormously positive effect on one’s life?
Should he or she start (or join) a group of philosophical misfits, whose only reason for belonging to the group is that they don’t belong in any other group? Sure, one *could* do that…
Or, one could attempt to do what I am attempting to do, though I admittedly am not doing a very good job of explaining what I am trying to do: put every philosophy and every religion under one umbrella.
I wish I were able to articulate it better than that, but alas, I’m not. Let me try again:
The desire to feel connected to something larger than oneself can be satisfied (or perhaps “realized”) without even bothering to join any group. (And yes, I borrowed this idea from someone else.)
You *already are* part of something larger than yourself. You are part of the whole of humanity. You are a member of a species that inhabits the planet Earth, which is part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, which is part of the universe… which may be only one of many universes.
You are part of that. The process that produced lil’ ol’ you began around 13.8 billion years ago. It will keep going a looooooong time after you’re gone. After I’m gone; after everyone currently living is gone.
At any rate, that’s what sits at the heart of my own personal attraction to materialism: the desire to feel “connected.”
Does that make *any* sense whatsoever? Honest question.
*and what it can’t describe yet will probably be described at some point in the future, assuming humanity doesn’t destroy itself first.
Hi there.
If you’ve read my blog at all, like pretty much any post, you already know that my approach to blogging is haphazard at best.
And if you haven’t, i.e. if this is the first of my I don’t even know how many posts you’ve taken a gander at, well, you’re about to find that out.
Here is what is happening right now:
My brain is sending bioelectric impulses to my spinal cord, which provides a pathway through the muscles of my arms to my fingers.
These impulses compel my fingers to strike the keys on my keyboard.
The muscles in my hands and fingers have been trained by decades of interaction with QWERTY-arranged keyboards so that it is not strictly necessary for me to look at the keyboard while I am typing.
Most of that last sentence was typed without looking. I did have to fix a couple typos, but I did so without looking for the “backspace” button. And I did involuntarily glance at the keyboard a couple or three times, despite making a concerted effort not to.
Why? Because my eyes have become accustomed to glancing down at the keyboard.
That is to say, the muscles that control my eye movements have become accustomed thusly.
But back to the keyboard: after my fingertips strike the keys, the mechanism under each key sends a signal through my computer, and for every letter I type (and for every punctuation mark I type), the corresponding character appears on my screen.
When I click “save draft” (as I just did a few seconds ago), what I have typed is recorded onto a hard drive connected to the WordPress server, the exact location of which is unknown to me.
After I finish and publish this blog post, and you (whoever you are) read it, your computer, tablet, or smartphone will have sent a message the WordPress server requesting to access it, and the WordPress server will have replied by sending your device the data saved in the file on their server.
Forgive me if any of that is “off,” with regard to exact terms.
My point is that “blogging,” from the impulses that prompt my fingers to strike the keys on my keyboard to the light being focused by your eyes’ lenses (and the corrective lenses you may or may not have sitting in front of your eyes) on the retinas at the back of your eyes, to your brain interpreting the signals sent through your optic nerves (the awkward plurals here being a result of most humans having two eyes) to you having any sort of emotional reaction (from bored indifference to anger) to what you are reading is an entirely physical process.
Do I understand every detail of this process well enough to explain it? Unfortunately, no. Much to my chagrin, I do not in fact know everything.
I am quite limited in what I know. What I know is a result of what I have studied and what I have been taught, and the subjects I chose to focus on were largely a result of my environment and my own personal set of genes.
Which one of those two things (environment and genetics) played the bigger role is up for debate. And that’s a debate for a more knowledgeable person to comment on; my point in mentioning those two things is that they are both quite physical. Genes are actual physical things, I mean, and the environment one grows up in acts upon a person in an entirely physical way.
This includes the things that are said to one as a child. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a pretty positive environment (I have no complaints, really); I just want to state that before I continue.
Things that are said, like things that are typed, originate in the brain. The difference is that the muscles involved in speaking are a different set of muscles than the ones involved in typing. And also, of course, things that are said out loud are heard when sound waves strike the eardrums, and so on and so forth.
None of this is magical. None of this requires any sort of magical explanation.
At one point in human history, before far more intelligent and intuitive persons than I figured all of this stuff out, we believed things like this were magical.
They’re not magical.
My fingers striking the keyboard is not magical.
Your retinas sending images to your brain is not magical.
Your brain interpreting those images is not magical.
The emotions you feel or don’t feel are not magical.
Emotion. What a thing, huh? Despite all high-minded attempts to suppress them, they still dictate to us (to a degree) what we do or don’t do in any given situation.
But what are emotions?
They are neurochemical responses to external stimuli. And/or the result of our brains over- or under-producing this or that chemical, or various glands over- or under-producing this or that chemical, or the result of any number of physical occurrences within the body.
People who live with chronic pain, for example, may be more likely to suffer from depression than other people. And what causes any sort of pain? Either an external physical force (like getting punched in the face) or an internal malfunction of some bodily system.
Pain is a physical thing. And on the flipside, so is pleasure.
What is pleasure? At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s a response to external stimuli. Etc.
It isn’t magical, any more than anything else is. It can certainly seem to be magical, but it’s the result of physical processes, just like everything else.
It’s unfortunate that I am not knowledgeable enough to explain all of these processes in detail. But if you’re reading this, you presumably have access to the internet, and you can look all this stuff up for yourself.
Thinking of yourself as a material thing, as an object that has been acted upon innumerable times, as an object that acts upon other objects, as an object that consists of various systems that interact with each other, etc. has its advantages. It allows you to look at yourself and your actions in a much more, well, for lack of a better term, non-magical way. That is to say, you can begin to understand why you do the things you do, and you can control those things to a much larger extent.
Don’t get me wrong: you’re still going to lose control of yourself sometimes. Sometimes you’re going to do things you regret. Sometimes you’re going to say things you wish you hadn’t said.
But instead of blaming some irrational thing like “the devil” or else just throwing your hands up and saying “well, that’s just the way I am,” you can take steps to correct yourself and prevent the same thing from happening again. Or at least reduce the probability of it happening again.
That’s not to say that “rational” is always preferable to “irrational.”
Have you ever been in love? You don’t have to tell me or anyone else, but have you?
Doesn’t it feel good to be in love with someone? Doesn’t it feel amazing to become emotionally attached to another person, someone who seems perfect in every single way, even though it’s objectively quite easy for a disinterested outsider to point out that person’s many flaws?
Doesn’t it piss you off when somebody points out your love’s flaws?
In a world of billions of people, there’s a pretty significant chance that there’s somebody else in the world that is even more physically attractive than your love (like to you personally, I mean), but here’s the thing:
Being physically close to another human being, especially one you find sexually attractive, causes neurochemicals to be released in your brain (oxytocin, for one) that cause you to feel attachment to that person.
That’s an oversimplification, to say the least. If you find that or anything else interesting, I hope you’ll look into those things more.
At any rate, you are a physical being. You act and react entirely in the physical world.
Is there anything beyond the physical world we live in?
If so, what would it consist of?
Would it have to consist of anything?
Can you even conceive of something that consists of nothing (physically speaking) without employing a physical process in your brain?
Let me remind you that reading this and thinking about what I have written is an entirely physical process.
One thing most people never spend much time thinking about is how the language we use shapes our reality.
I’m not gonna go into a whole “thing” about that, and I want to say first that I am not philosophically opposed to profanity or vulgarity, or fart jokes or dick jokes or anything like that (I’m quite the opposite, actually)…
But does anyone ever stop to think about how “for mature audiences” now means, basically, “this show is full of fart jokes and dick jokes”?
I mean, yeah, I get it, people don’t want their kids to pick up nasty language and start using it, and they want shows that have nasty language to be labeled, and “for mature audiences” is (I guess) as good a way as any to label shows like that…
But what effect does labeling a show full of fart jokes and dick jokes as “for mature audiences” have on adults that watch the show? Probably nothing major, but on the other hand, does it give shows labeled as “mature” a sort of authority that they wouldn’t have otherwise?
Take South Park, for example. It’s a cartoon, chock full to the brim with fart jokes, dick jokes, and all sorts of offensive humor… and somehow it’s become a running political commentary that many people take at least semi-seriously.
The “politics” of the show are not actually informed by anything other than what a couple rich white dudes from Colorado think about various items in the news, things that usually involve the concerns of non-white (or non-rich) people.
The most recent episode, in the first 6 minutes or so, mocks anyone who acknowledges that Christopher Columbus was a murderous slave trader, as well as anyone who wants to remove any monuments to the Confederacy, or for that matter rename any building or street or anything else named after a historical figure with ties to the slave trade.
The episode before that mocked white working class people being put out of work by changes in the economy. That’s been a running gag (“They took are jebs”) for a while now on the show, and yes, I laughed at it, and even used it in online conversations regarding immigration…
Please understand that I am not advocating censorship, nor am I calling for a boycott of South Park, or anything like that. I am just making observations. Last time I checked, I was still allowed to do that. 🙂
But it’s interesting to me that as Trey Parker and Matt Stone became more successful over the years (hell, decades now), South Park became more and more political, until every single episode became its own absurdist, highly skewed take on whatever those two assholes happened to see on Reddit the week before.
Did becoming successful make them more political? Or did becoming political make them more successful?
It’s probably both. But who knows?
What I do know (well, I am about 99% sure of this) is that somewhere on the internet right now (somewhere else, I mean), someone is complaining about how South Park nowadays is looking less like the funny, irreverent, absurdist dick joke-fest the show once was, and it’s looking more and more like your standard run-of-the mill red-piller alt-right self-congratulatory tribute to the status quo.
That someone is probably pointing out that South Park’s politics are poorly informed, that it skews the points of view of non-white, non-rich people beyond recognition and relegates their legitimate concerns to mere annoyances to be mocked and/or ignored…
And I would be willing to bet you one US dollar that wherever that’s happening, there’s a (probably white, probably male, probably middle-class or above) person responding to those accusations by telling that someone complaining about South Park that they “need to grow up.”
Of course that’s speculation. I’m not going to pore over South Park discussion threads to find examples. Lord knows I’ve seen plenty already. Not just about South Park, but about anything anyone anywhere has the audacity to be offended by.
Haven’t you? Sure you have:
A: “[offensive comment/joke].”
B: “Hey, that’s offensive. You shouldn’t say [offensive thing], because [detailed, well-thought out explanation].”
A: “OMG you seriously need to grow up!”
[etc.]
You’ve never seen conversations like that?
Really? You must be new to the internet. Welcome! 😉
Somewhere along the way, the idea came into the internet’s collective unconscious that “not being offended by anything” is equivalent to “being a grown-up.”
That fart jokes and dick jokes and other offensive things are something only “mature” adults laugh at, and that anyone who doesn’t laugh, or (gasp!) has the inclination to say “that’s not funny” is just a whiny crybaby who needs to put on his big boy britches and grow up already.
I wonder where this notion came from? 🙂
To be clear, in my opinion, fart jokes are hilarious. Dick jokes? Also hilarious. I rue the day that I don’t laugh at a well-timed burst of flatulence. I anticipate laughing at fart jokes and dick jokes for the remainder of my life, however long that turns out to be.
But is that because I am “mature”?
If so, I’ve been “mature” since I was about 3 or 4.
Hello all. As you may or may not be aware, I wrote a novel. I began writing it in I believe 2014, and I finally finished and published it in June of 2016.
That is to say, I “self-published” it in June of 2016. And I do mean “self-published”: beyond a few words of encouragement from a friend or two who indulged me after I asked them to read an early chapter or two, I had approximately zero input from any other person while writing, editing, or formatting it.
Although to be fair, I did do quite a bit of Google-ing about how to format a novel for Kindle. And I may have asked friends for help regarding the HTML necessary for said formatting (I honestly don’t remember); nonetheless the actual formatting was done entirely by me.
That’s why the indents in the Kindle version are uneven, matter of fact. Anyone who is familiar at all with HTML probably knows that web browsers (and the Kindle app) do not recognize spaces or tabs at the beginning of paragraphs. You can literally hit the space bar a hundred times before you start typing a paragraph in an HTML document, and the browser (or Kindle app) will not recognize it. The same goes for the “tab” key.
So, in short, when I got ready to transfer the 200+ page document from OpenOffice Writer to Kindle, every paragraph indent in the entire novel disappeared. Which was kinda discouraging.
And even though every professionally-formatted Kindle book I own has regular indents (i.e. “indents that are all the same size/length”), and even though I scoured the internet for tips on how to achieve said regular indents, the best I was able to do was to manually insert the HTML code for a space five times in a row in front of each paragraph. (FYI the code is an ampersand [&] followed by “nbsp” followed by a semicolon [;]. I would just type the code out here in my WordPress blog text editor, but it would just appear as a space when I publish this post.)
At any rate, I copy/pasted that bit of HTML code (times 5) in front of every single paragraph in the entire novel. Or at least I attempted to; there may be a paragraph or two I missed. I will undoubtedly find out as I periodically work on this post, or perhaps series of posts.
I intend to read and comment on each of the novel’s 25 chapters. But I am getting ahead of myself:
I assumed that forcing 5 spaces to appear at the beginning of each paragraph would result in even indents. And it did, at first, when the text of the novel was left-aligned. The indents looked great, but the right margin was choppy and uneven.
And while that’s fine for a blog post in my opinion (no indents here, either), for my one genuine attempt at literary glory (if such a thing still exists) I wanted it to look as nice and presentable as possible.
So I changed the alignment to full justification. I.e. the left and right margins line up evenly with the edge of the page/screen. The thing about full justification is that it stretches (or compresses) text to make it fit the margins. Which means, spaces are no longer uniform size.
Which means, my manually-coded indents ended up being anything but uniform. Some appear more or less “regular,” others are much longer than they should be.
It was at this point that I decided that between a choppy, uneven right margin on every page and wonky indents, wonky indents were the lesser of two evils.
Why didn’t I just hire someone to format it for me, you may be wondering?
Because I was broke. As in flat. As in “Jesus Christ I hope at least a few people buy this godforsaken thing so I can afford to buy cat food this week.” I was between jobs when I did the majority of the writing, and I forestalled actively looking for steady employment while I was finishing it.
Suffice it to say I eventually had to secure other methods of procuring cat food and other necessities, and I eventually did. But on the topic of going broke while writing a novel, despite the fact that they may share articles on Facebook about how J.K. Rowling went broke and “got on the dole” (the UK equivalent of food stamps) while she was writing the first Harry Potter book, I am going to go ahead and let you know that your friends and family are not going to be impressed when you decide to sacrifice financial security for a vanity project that may or may not pay off. To be clear I am not saying I wouldn’t act the same way toward a mostly unemployed friend or family member spending hours a day on a novel or something similar; to be clear I probably would advise such a person to get over themselves and get a job.
Nonetheless, I got my novel finished before I got one. And I formatted it the best I could under the circumstances. And it isn’t perfectly formatted, but it’s formatted as well as it’s ever going to be formatted, at least on Kindle.
Why don’t I hire someone to format it for me now, now that I am once again employed and no longer destitute?
Because kiss my ass, that’s why. For good or ill, I did every damn bit of the work on that novel by myself (including the cover photo and design), and I have no interest in sacrificing that accomplishment for cosmetic purposes.
At any rate, I wrote a novel. And despite the fact that sales have been abysmal so far, and despite the fact that only one human being on the entire planet has actually read the novel and told me what he thought about it, it’s a novel I am proud of.
It’s chock full of references that may or may not be obvious, depending on the reader. No doubt there are parts I consider to be “clever” or something that readers may consider to be hackneyed, hokey, or worse. Especially considering that certain parts of the novel were intentionally hackneyed and hokey, given that the narrator is himself a failed fiction author who quotes his own work from time to time.
At any rate, seeing as how this initial foray into hardcore navel-gazing is already over 1000 words long, I will end it here and let this post stand as an intro to the series of posts that will (eventually) follow. As much as I would enjoy critiquing my own work for another hour or so, or for that matter all damn day long, I have an actual paying job I need to get to.
But I will leave you with one factoid, regarding the somewhat cryptic dedication at the front of the book. That is to say, I will “decrypt” it for you. Here is the dedication:
For H.F.
And for K.T.
“H.F.” refers to “Horselover Fat,” the fictionalized protagonist of a novel called “VALIS” by Philip K. Dick. “Fictionalized” because Horselover Fat and Philip K. Dick are more or less the same person.
“K.T.” refers to “Kilgore Trout,” a fictional, recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels.
The protagonist/narrator of my novel was inspired by those two fictional characters, and the tendency of my novel’s protagonist/narrator to go off on tangents about bizarre sci-fi stories with ham-fisted cultural/political references was more or less ripped off from Kurt Vonnegut’s tendency to do the same thing with “Kilgore Trout” stories in his novels.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, or so they say.
At any rate, have an awesome day, and thanks for reading.
The summer after my 10th grade year, when I was 16, I went on a trip to England with my grandma, her sister, her sister’s grandson, my grandma’s cousin (about my grandma’s age), and my grandma’s cousin’s grandson.
The traveling party was, basically, three teenage boys and their grandmothers.
We went on a bus tour around the south of England. It started in London, then went around to various touristy spots, then circled back to London. All in all the tour lasted around two weeks, and it was a lot of fun.
We went to Stonehenge on the tour. I remember thinking that it looked a lot bigger on TV.
There were New Agehippies there, like meditating in a circle or something. Which I guess was cool.
The other people on the tour were mostly other Americans. One older fellow, probably 80, maybe, approached me and asked if I knew how they got those big stones on top of the other ones.
“No,” I replied.
“Helicopters,” the old man said. His name was Blake.
I stood there kinda dumbfounded for a second before realizing that Blake was cracking a joke.
“I’ll be danged,” I may have said. “I never thought about that possibility.” I may not have said that at all, but at any rate I laughed and went along with the joke.
A few minutes later, I watched as Blake tried the joke on my cousin D____, the grandson of my grandma’s cousin. That makes D____ my third cousin? I honestly don’t know.
D____ didn’t quite get the joke, I don’t think. His reaction was different than mine, at any rate. He replied in more of a “humoring the old person” sort of way, as opposed to a “ha ha, that’s funny” sort of way.
“You sure are a nice young man,” Blake said to D____. “If you’re ever up around the Great Lakes, drop in.”
“I sure will,” D____ replied. “Thanks for the invitation.”
“And if you’re ever in the Rocky Mountains,” Blake continued, “fall off.”
Do you recognize that fellow? That’s Alex Rogan, the hero of the 1980s sci-fi/adventure film “The Last Starfighter,” a film I am a pretty big fan of, mostly for sentimental-type reasons.
Actually, that might be Beta, the android sent to replace Alex while Alex was off in space, fighting the Ko-Dan Armada. Beta looks just like Alex, and his purpose was to cover up the fact that Alex was gone, so his family wouldn’t miss him.
It’s Lance Guest, I know that much.
If I hadn’t told you what film that screenshot was from, would you have known? I’m sure some of you would have… but honestly if I hadn’t been the person who took the screenshot, I’m not sure I would know, despite having watched “The Last Starfighter” about a hundred times growing up, and even after watching it again recently.
Now, if somebody had shown me a picture of a Gunstar, the type of spaceship Alex ends up flying around in, or of Grig, the lizard-y alien guy who pilots Alex’s Gunstar, or even a picture of Alex in his Starfighter uniform, I would probably have recognized it instantly.
But just going on that shot up there, no, I’m not sure I would recognize it.
***
Why must I spell it out for you?
All of the images you see
Are just a tiny part of me.
The images I see of you
Are just a fraction of what’s true.
***
I remember sitting with you under an umbrella. It was drizzling rain. We were sitting on the curb in front of that one convenience store on the opposite side of the block from Lotteria. We were drunk, as we often were.
You died nearly a decade ago.
***
I don’t remember the last novel I read. Which novel it was, I mean. I’ve started a couple in the past several months, but I haven’t had the attention span to finish them.
***
There was a barber shop a couple blocks away from my fraternity house in Fayetteville, years ago. I had happened to mention, among a group of fellows hanging out at the house, that I needed to get a haircut. Or quite possibly someone mentioned to me that I needed to get a haircut. At any rate the subject of haircuts came up.
A frat brother suggested I go to “Crazy Eric” to get a haircut. “Crazy Eric” was the barber at the aforementioned barber shop. Crazy Eric talked everyone’s ear off, I was told, and he had some pretty interesting ideas about the government, conspiracies, and things like that.
So I went. Crazy Eric’s barber shop doubled as sort of an antique shop, I think. There were all sorts of old antique-y things in there. Crazy Eric’s wife also worked there.
I got my hair cut by Crazy Eric several times. I tried to get him started on conspiracy theories the first couple of times, but he never really bit. He actually didn’t talk much at all while cutting my hair, which was kind of a disappointment.
So as I mentioned the other day, I am currently “on vacation” from my job. I didn’t actually go anywhere on vacation, I am just taking a few days off.
I am currently sitting in P.J.’s Coffee on the square in El Dorado, Arkansas. I just had a chicken fried steak, two hard-fried eggs, hash browns, a biscuit, and coffee for breakfast, from Johnny B.’s Grill just a couple blocks from here. It was fantastic.
I paid $2.48 for a 20 oz Dr. Pepper here at P.J.’s. “Good Lord” is exactly what I said when the woman rang it up.
“We do coffee here,” was her reply. Something along those lines, ha ha.
I sat in one of the comfy chairs and tried to get on the free WiFi, but the WiFi is apparently down today. I didn’t bother asking about it; I just activated my phone’s WiFi hotspot feature, put on my headphones, and started this up:
Yes, in the world of electronica and popular music in general, this particular video may be old hat by now. The Field has put out a newer album than this (“The Follower”) and anyways I hope he puts out another one soon. But in the meantime, his older stuff is still amazingly good, in my opinion.
There’s no point to this blog post, in case you were wondering. I am just typing whatever comes into my head.
“Philosophy” is pretty much my default category, in case you were wondering. I don’t exactly have any one idea or whatever that “informs” my outlook on life; it’s more of a mishmash of various things I have picked up over the years, from anything from religious and philosophical texts to novels I’ve read to movies I’ve seen (“Blade Runner” possibly being a bigger influence than, say, “Tao Te Ching,” for example, with “White Noise” by Don DeLillo out-influencing both of them) to Saturday morning cartoons (ask me about The Smurfs some time) to song lyrics to poetry to…
You get the idea, hopefully.
It looks like it might rain today. I hope it doesn’t; I am going to be on foot most of the day. When I’m not sitting in a comfy chair somewhere.
As I have mentioned, my current job requires me to do a lot of typing. And I am usually sitting when I type. I do the “standing desk” thing sometimes, but not as often as I should. I always get up and go for a walk after an hour or two of typing, but apparently I have not been getting up enough lately.
Pardon me if this is inappropriate to share, but I have developed what is apparently a “pressure sore” (a.k.a. a “bed sore”) on my ass, apparently from sitting too long in one position on hard surfaces. The chair at my normal work desk is an unpadded wooden chair, and my desk in my bedroom is one designed to be used while sitting on the floor.
To be fair, this pressure sore (no, it has not ruptured or anything) was first noticed by me after a long session of sitting at my work desk while “on vacation” watching TV on Hulu. I tend to shift my weight around as sort of a nervous habit while I am working, but I don’t necessarily do that while marathon watching “The X-Files” or “Rick And Morty” or “Twin Peaks” or “Peep Show” or what have you.
At any rate, yes, sitting in one position for too long on a hard surface can cause problems.
Hence my seeking comfy chairs today. 🙂
And yes, it’s disgusting of me to write about something like that. But that sort of illustrates (sort of) another aspect of my own “philosophy”: I find it’s best to be open and honest about most things, even unpleasant stuff like having a sore ass.
But I don’t share everything. Believe it or not. At least not publicly.
Sun’s coming out… wait, nope, covered by dark clouds again. I really hope it doesn’t rain today.
My academic advisor from college has told me many times that I should write every day. And I guess I have been writing most every weekday for the past… eight months? Writing for my job, of course, not writing on this blog, or fiction…
The main difference between writing for my job and writing blog posts and fiction and stuff is a pretty significant one: I make money writing for my job. I don’t make doodley-squat writing on this blog or writing fiction. At least not yet.
I don’t really expect to, actually. Make money from “creative writing.”
So why do it?
Good question.
I guess it acts as sort of a release valve for the constant internal dialogue going on in my brain. I guess.
I honestly don’t know why I like writing stuff like this. I guess I just do.
Etc. etc. etc. Blah blah blah.
I kinda have to pee. I think I will do that, then head on over to the liberry.
Thanks for reading.
***
So here I am at the liberry…
I had thought about writing a blog post about chess today, having something of a swollen head regarding that game, after finally beating a buddy from high school yesterday at online chess, following approximately 1,684 losses in a row to him…
Well, it hasn’t been that many, but he usually beats me. And I finally won again yesterday. I have beaten him I think… three times? Maybe four?
(Maybe two?)
We’ve been playing off and on for a couple years now. Plus, I like to play random people online.
It’s a hell of a game, I have to say. There are tons of openings and defenses and attacks and things that all have specific names… but I have to confess that I don’t know more than an opening or two by name.
Chess.com, at least when you play in desktop mode, shows the name of the opening you or your opponent is using, as well as defenses or whatever (you don’t see this if you play on a smartphone, at least not on my smartphone), and anyways here is the opening I used in my most recent victory against my buddy from high school:
After reviewing the game on my phone just now, this isn’t exactly the opening game we played… it must have been some variation on it. I played as white, my buddy played as black, and he moved his kingside knight to f6 on his third move, as opposed to moving his kingside bishop to c5 like the guy does in the video, as you can see:
You’ll note that I drew over my friend’s username. There’s a reason for that:
While I am confident my friend would give literally less than half of a proverbial crap if I shared his chess.com username here, well, it isn’t my place to go sharing stuff here on my blog (or anywhere else online) about people other than myself.
Note that I didn’t draw over his rating, which is significantly higher than mine.
At any rate, stuff like that (the discrepancy between the video and the game screenshot) is why trying to study chess openings and defenses and things and memorize the names of all of them basically confuses the hell out of me. So I don’t really spend much time doing it, although I do scan Wikipedia articles about various openings that have cool names like “Giuoco Pianissimo” or something.
Which is what my dang comprooter said the game was. I couldn’t get the game to come back up on my computer, and I got tired of messing with it.
“Giuoco Pianissimo” is actually a variation of “Giuoco Piano,” I guess, and (I also guess) the particular game my friend and I was a variation of a variation, because every variation on Wikipedia shows black moving the kingside bishop to c5 on the third move…
And long story short, this is why I don’t even try to memorize the names of chess openings and whatnot.
Moving on… let’s listen to some more of The Field, shall we? Awesome…
Listen to that with headphones, not quite as loudly as possible, a few notches under “as loud as you can stand it.” Let it play in the background of whatever you’re doing.
Here’s an interview I watched/listened to the other day with The Field/Axel Willner:
He talks about how the human brain fills in the gaps, sometimes, when it expects to hear something, and how his music actually probably sounds different to different people because their brains fill in the gaps differently.
I love this dude’s stuff, at any rate.
Moving on…
I have actually recorded some low-fi electronica myself, if you can believe it. I say “low-fi” because I used a free drum machine app, inexpensive recording software, and a USB headset microphone to record it. Check it out:
“Sensory D” and “Chago” are both members of an imaginary band called Meander Kittens that is essentially me dicking around at home with guitars and whatnot. Sensory D is a rapper and producer, and Chago is a singer/songwriter.
They’re both actually me, of course.
Here’s a song Chago did a few years back:
The Chinese characters on the video mean “error” or “mistake,” and if you use their single-syllable Korean pronunciation (excluding the definition that often precedes Hanja readings [“Hanja” being the Korean term for “Chinese characters”]), they are pronounced, roughly, “cha-go.”
“Chago” means “mistake,” is what you should take away from this. Chago leaves mistakes in his recordings, partially because he thinks they add sort of a human element to them, partially because he’s flipping lazy.
Here’s Sensory D’s debut EP:
The video pic/”album cover” features every “instrument” used in the recording.
Meander Kittens have released quite a few recordings as a band on YouTube as well. The band members (all of whom are actually me, 99 percent of the time) tend to rotate, and so does the instrumentation.
Meander Kittens like to include at least one “cover” song on each of their albums and EPs, but they don’t always do so. Quality tends to vary on these “covers.” Sometimes they try to play covers as accurately as possible; sometimes they don’t.
Here’s an example of when they don’t:
Just in case you’re not familiar with the original version of this song, here it is:
The name “Meander Kittens” was made up by me many years ago, when I lived in Fayetteville, AR with a roommate, who also would probably give less than half of a proverbial crap if I gave his name here, but I’m not gonna.
We didn’t have a TV, and we had a computer in the apartment (it was his computer), but we didn’t have an internet connection. So, to amuse ourselves, we started creating fake album covers for fake bands using Microsoft Paint. “Meander Kittens” was one I came up with.
Here’s a song we recorded on his computer all those years ago, with fake album covers we both made as the video:
I’m playing guitar, bass, “drums” (beating on the computer desk with my bare hands), and singing, and he came in later and added extra vocals. The song sucks without his contribution, in my opinion.
Anyways, I am about typed out. It’s still kinda overcast outside, but I think I am gonna go grab a bite to eat somewhere.
Probly gonna try to find an umbrella first. Don’t want my laptop to get soaked.
I left my umbrella at home because Accuweather claimed it wasn’t going to rain today in El Dorado.
Time will tell, I guess.
***
It is now 3:13 p.m., and it hasn’t rained yet.
I spent most of the day just sort of walking around. Believe you me, I needed the exercise. When you sit still so long you get a bed sore on you your ass, you gotta get up and move around some.
That route is from P.J.’s to La Villa and back, along with a short stretch where I walked the opposite way down NW Ave, thinking I was going to go bowling over at El Dorado lanes.
Luckily, I checked online. It was a little after 1 at the time, and I found out El Dorado Lanes doesn’t open until 4. So I guess it’s good I checked.
I turned around and walked the other way, up to the mostly empty mall.
So I haven’t updated my blog page in a while. You, Dear Readers (all three of you), will have to forgive me: I have a job which requires me to be on my computer typing most every weekday (a job I love and hope to keep a while), so after a long day of typing for my job, I simply don’t have the energy or gumption or wherewithal or whatever you want to call it to sit down and type even more.
My last few blog posts have been done after work (i.e. after devoting the biggest part of my quite limited brain power to doing the best job I can for the company I work for), and they came out even more haphazard and sloppy than these posts usually do.
I am on vacation from work at the moment, and since I am more or less in the routine of getting up, showering, eating some breakfast, then sitting down at my computer and typing, well, now seems to be the perfect time to write a new blog post.
Especially since something happened last week that I would like to write about.
I’m not one of those people who just flat-out abhors celebrity culture (q.v. this post from last year), but I’m not really all that into it, either.
Nonetheless, every now and again, I suppose I get a little emotionally attached to certain celebrities, sometimes without even realizing it… until they go and do something stupid, like asphyxiating themselves in a hotel bathroom or something.
Yes, you’ve figured it out: this is one of those “this is how Chris Cornell‘s suicide makes me feel” blog posts.
I’ve read a few of those, and the ones I read were really well done.
But this isn’t going to be like most of those. I didn’t know Chris Cornell personally, I don’t have any stories about “The Seattle Scene,” and I no longer harbor any delusions about “grunge” music being anything other than a fad, one where MTV helped a couple hundred mediocre nothing shit bands get famous by riding the coattails of the handful of “grunge” bands that were actually making music worth listening to.
Sorry if that upsets anyone. If I might digress, there’s a reason I don’t have a “music” section on this blog: the act of listening to and enjoying music is an intensely personal and subjective experience. I have often opined (at least to friends and on social media) that there are actually only two (2) genres of music. Those two genres are:
1. Music I Like
and
2. Music I Don’t Like.
And the “I” here is me, and it’s you, and it’s your significant other (if you have one), and it’s everyone you know.
For example, I can’t explain to you why actual literal tears have actually literally streamed down my cheeks at around the 4:30 mark of this song right here. I can’t.
There aren’t any lyrics. It doesn’t remind me of anything in particular. But something about the way the sounds are arranged makes my brain release a flood of neurochemicals that cause actual literal tears to actually literally well up in my actual literal eyes.
It’s happening as I type this.
This particular song may very well do nothing whatsoever for you. You may even be put off by it. This may actually literally be the worst thing you have actually literally ever heard.
That’s OK. I’m sorry if you don’t like it. I wish I could explain to you why I like it (and the album it’s from) so much… but I can’t.
I just do. It randomly popped up on YouTube one day while I was listening to The Field while working, and since “Fuck Buttons” sounded interesting, I listened to it. And I found that I liked it bunches and bunches.
If you’re one of those “that ain’t real music, that’s just a buncha comprooter noises” people, well, I used to be one of you. All I can say is that there’s lots of really cool comprooter noises out there that you haven’t heard, and you’re the only person missing out because of your, well… snobbery.
And sure, my characterization of most “grunge” bands being “mediocre nothing shit bands riding the coattails of a handful of good bands” or whatever I said also counts as “snobbery.” But it’s a slightly different sort of snobbery: I listened to those bands, I became obsessed with those bands, I bought CDs by those bands, I even learned how to halfway play a few songs by those bands on my guitar. I’m not just dismissing those bands outright; I am intimately familiar with the music those bands produced… and quite frankly I don’t like much of it any more.
You’ll notice I’m not naming any bands here. There’s a reason for that, and it should be obvious, but just in case it isn’t, here’s the reason:
Just because I, Michael Nathan Walker, don’t like this or that band anymore, that doesn’t mean that anyone else is “wrong” for still liking them. It just means that I don’t like them anymore.
That’s all.
That’s it.
The vast majority of “grunge” bands have shifted from “genre” 1:
“Music I Like”
to “genre” 2:
“Music I Don’t Like”
in my own personal brain. That’s all it means; it means precisely nothing else.
So relax, please.
But let me get back on track. Or, actually, let me rewind 20+ years to the mid-1990s, when “grunge” was in its heyday.
This was before I even owned a CD player, I am almost certain. I am almost certain that I ordered three cassette tapes from either Columbia House or BMG, and that they all three arrived in the mailbox on the same day, in the same package. The three tapes were “Nevermind” by Nirvana, “In Utero,” also by Nirvana…
And, you guessed it: “Superunknown” by the band Chris Cornell was most associated with, the band that made him famous, Soundgarden.
I had heard two songs from “Superunknown” on MTV, “Spoonman” and “Black Hole Sun.” And I liked both of those songs, “Black Hole Sun” especially.
I will now share a still shot from that video, just so there will be a Chris Cornell-associated pic that appears as a preview for this post. Hopefully, at least… I am not very good at coding, and I have no idea how to set the preview image for these blog posts. It seems like the one closest to the top of whichever post is what appears, even if the pic is from another post. Heck, once I re-shared a post on Facebook, and it showed a friend who commented on the post’s avatar in the preview. So I don’t know if this is going to appear correctly, but here’s hoping:
There’s a link to the “Black Hole Sun” video just above the pic, in case you missed it. Click on the purplish “Black Hole Sun” text up there.
As you are undoubtedly aware, there are tons of videos on YouTube that are just images of album covers with the entire album in one big track. I was actually going to try and link full album videos to the titles of the three “grunge” albums I got on cassette, but I couldn’t find one for “Nevermind.” “Bigger name” acts like Nirvana (or at least the record companies that control all the rights to their stuff) often have people working for them that take videos like that down, and anyways I couldn’t find a full-album “Nevermind” video on YouTube, so I didn’t bother looking for “In Utero” or “Superunknown.” As you may already know, I just linked to the Wikpedia pages for each album.
But while I was looking, I found this video. It’s a video of a guy playing guitar along with every song on “Nevermind.” And if you want to learn how to play every song on “Nevermind,” maybe you should check it out.
If not… nevermind. 🙂
As is usually the case on these posts, I have yet again gone off track a bit. So let me back up:
When I got my first copy of “Superunknown,” well… other than “Spoonman” and “Black Hole Sun,” well…
The majority of the album fell squarely into Genre #2. I.e. I didn’t like it.
It was too complex. The songs were in weird tunings. There were weird time signatures. Etc. I was learning to play the guitar at the time (I am still learning, BTW)…
And there weren’t any songs on it that I could play. Or even wrap my head around how to go about start playing. Or even appreciate, really.
If that dude that played all of “Nevermind” made a video where he played all of “Superunknown,” even just the rhythm parts, I would be impressed, to say the least.
The point is, I didn’t like “Superunknown” the first time I heard it. I was a weird kid, one who prided himself on liking weird things… and it was too weird for me.
That changed over the years, though. It was an album I kept coming back to. I am pretty sure I also had a CD copy of it at some point. The more I listened to it, the more I was able to hear how those weird time signatures and weird tunings and weird vocals worked together, and maybe as long as a decade after I first heard it, it became one of my favorite albums.
To get back to being a music snob vis-Ã -vis “grunge” bands I used to like, and for that matter a whole slew of other bands I used to like when I was a teenager, “Superunknown” is still just as kick-ass and amazing now as it was the day it was released. It’s a high-water mark of ’90s guitar rock, all sub-genres included.
The album is simply amazing, from beginning to end. But now we’re getting back into subjective territory. I may as well tell you blue is the best color and then get pissed off when you disagree.
So I am going to stop with that sort of thing, and get back to the real reason I am writing this: to record for all the internet to read how Chris Cornell’s suicide affected me personally.
I found out the morning after it happened, before I started working. A Facebook friend shared a story about it.
It didn’t really bug me at first. I posted several Soundgarden songs on Facebook and Twitter, and I listened to all of “Superunknown” while I was working.
And it messed with me a little then, I guess. Chris Cornell’s lyrics were always sort of bleak, borderline nihilistic, etc., but there always seemed to be a hint of irony to them, sort of like “yeah, the world’s gonna end, bad stuff is going to happen…”
I don’t quite know how to articulate what I mean.
Let’s take “Black Hole Sun.” The song’s refrain goes
“Black hole sun, won’t you come
And wash away the rain
Black hole sun, won’t you come
Won’t you come?”
The chorus is basically expressing the hope that the sun will collapse into a black hole and bring the world to an end. But look at the video, with all the funny faces! It was all in fun, it seemed like. I mean, people joke about that sort of thing a lot. Surely you saw these bumper stickers last year in the run-up to the election:
I mean sure, there are probably a few people sporting bumper stickers or t-shirts or whatever with that slogan on them that actually literally want a giant meteor to actually literally destroy the Earth…
But most people don’t, I would venture.
And maybe Chris Cornell really didn’t want the whole world to end. I actually doubt that. I won’t get into dissecting lyrics or anything, do your own research. Start with “Superunknown.” You owe it to yourself.
I just mean… I mean…
I didn’t expect him to actually be suicidal, is what I mean. And it came as a bit of a shock to me.
I taught ESL for a couple years, several years back, in a small city just outside of Seoul, South Korea called Gimpo or sometimes “Kimpo,” depending on who you’re talking to. The reason the G and the K are pretty much interchangeable there has to do with how the Korean language is written, and let’s just leave it at that.
(Also, “Kimpo Airport” is mentioned several times on the classic T.V. series M*A*S*H, and I think Hawkeye and the gang actually go there at least a couple times. But I digress.)
At any rate, when I lived in Gimpo, I would often go out with friends to Noraebangs (“norae” means “singing” and bang [pronounced “bahng”] means “room”) to drink beer and sing.
It’s fun, don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.
And for a decent amount of the time I lived in Gimpo, I was seeing a young Korean woman I was pretty much crazy about.
And I sang “Nothing Compares 2 U” to her at least once or twice. I could pretty much nail the whole song, except for the “all the flowers that you planted, mama” part.
And long story short, she died pretty much the same way Chris Cornell did.
And I don’t want to write about this anymore.
Thanks for reading.
Here’s Norah Jones (someone whose music has helped me sleep many a night in the intervening years, incidentally) singing “Black Hole Sun.” Enjoy.
So anyways, a while back, a Facebook friend suggested that I take a personality test.
Actually that’s not quite true…
My friend made the observation that I tended to make arguments based on feelings rather than purely on thinking, and that was reflective of my personality type, or something to that effect.
Admittedly — despite assurance from my friend that there was no reason to — I took a bit of umbrage at the observation. In retrospect that reaction may have been proof that my friend’s observation had some merit: this “umbrage” — my own “feelings” regarding my friend’s observation — prompted me to ask my friend where I might take a personality test to determine whether I actually have the personality type — the “Feelings” part, at least — that my friend claimed.
So my friend provided a link (I will find it later and add it; right now I am thumb typing in Gmail and I have a crap signal), and I took a short quiz, asking how I would behave in certain situations, what I think about this or that, etc. etc. etc., blah blah blah.
There are 4 main categories on this personality scale, and each category is split into 2 parts. For clarity’s sake — it may not be clear now, but it will be in a minute — I will list the 4 categories and their 2 parts.
Category 1 is whether a person is Introverted (I) or Extroverted  (E).
Category 2 is whether a person relies on Sensing (S) or iNtuition (N).
Category 3 (the one that made me needlessly take temporary umbrage) is between Thinking (T) and Feeling (F), and
Category 4 is between Judging (J) and Perceiving (P).
(Regrettably, I am not knowledgeable enough on this subject to go into any more detail on these categories. Search for “Briggs Myers Personality Types” for more detailed info.)
At any rate, I took the test. I answered each question as honestly as I could — including ones that asked about “feelings” — and this was my result:
From the four categories, this test determined that my personality type is
INTP:
I — Introverted
N — iNtuition
T — Thinking
P — Perceiving
My friend (who is ENTP) pointed out that my overall score on the “T/F” section was pretty close to 50%. Nonetheless, for no good reason whatsoever, I felt somewhat vindicated that “T” popped up in my quiz results over “F”.
The INTP personality description was pretty on-point, for the most part, and seeing as how the website listed “Albert Einstein” among the most famous INTPs from history, well, I can’t deny that I liked my test results.
Something else kinda stood out: INTP personalities are (I think) the most rare of the 16 types on the scale. Something like 3% of the population has the INTP type, I think I read.
Long story short, a couple weeks ago, after I took daytime cold medicine at night and couldn’t go to sleep, I got up and played around online, looking for entertainment.
I ended up taking the personality quiz again. And bear this in mind:
The first time I took the quiz was in the middle of a work day. My brain was geared up for thinking, acting rationally, doing what’s best for the company I work for, etc. And remember, I got “INTP” with the “T” just beating the “F”.
The second time I took the quiz (a couple months after the first time), my nose was running, I had a fever, I was loopy from cold medicine, and it was about 3 in the morning.
Long story short, this second time, the results were a little different. This time around, I got “INFP”, or
I — Introverted
N — iNtuition
F — Feeling
P — Perceiving
as my result. And again, the “T/F” section was pretty close to 50%. The other categories — like the first time I took the quiz — were all skewed heavily to one side.
So, based on these two tests, the “I” part is a definite yes, the “N” part is a definite yes, and the “P” part is a definite yes. The variable is “T/F”.
The description of the INFP personality type was also pretty on-point, vis-a-vis yours truly. There was only one thing I took issue with:
INFPs, according to the website that had the quiz and whatnot, always see the good in people. They believe that all people are good at heart, and so on and so forth.
I do not — do *not* — believe that. I believe that some people are just basically rotten. I believe — actually, I know — that some people wake up in the morning looking for a way to screw people over. I know that a great many people in the world screw people over every day that goes by and feel absolutely wonderful about it.
There are, in fact, terrible, terrible people in the world, people who absolutely salivate over the suffering of other people. People who thrive on that suffering, people who are even motivated by it.
But at the same time, I recognize that these people *must* have something fundamentally wrong with them. It may be something genetic that makes them be awful, maybe they’ve been hurt before and are now taking it out on others…
And etc. etc. etc. blah blah blah.
It isn’t exactly that I “see the good” in “bad” people…
It’s more like I pity them.
And I guess if you get right down to it, the difference there is merely semantics.
Again, though, something stood out about the INFP personality type as well:
It’s also pretty rare. 4% of the population, I think the website said. And the most famous INFP from history (which how they determined this is even more of a mystery than how they determined Einstein was INTP)?
Shakespeare. As in William.
And no, I ain’t no Shakespeare. But with my liberal arts background, and my abilities with verse and whatnot (I can iambic pentameter with the best of em), well, I am closer to Billy Shakes than I am to Allie E. any day of the week.
Either way, I’m somewhere in between two of the most uncommon personality types, INTP and INFP.
And I have to say… looking back on my nearly 37 years…
