I want luscious bounce and body in my revolution

The rain splishles in plipples and plooples and all that I can think about is how liberating it would be for me to have hair that bobbles as I walk. Also, it would be spectacular to have a soundtrackle.

I love pseudoalliteration almost as much as I love myself. What is it about vanity that puts people off? I'm not vain, and I go to great lengths to prove it by actively not being vain in front of other people because obviously they're all looking at me and waiting for me to bust a move (for that is indeed what I might do on the bus from time to time). So I constantly shoot other people looks to figure out what percentages of their brains are occupied by me and my dry split ends. Also, I wonder if they can hear my soundtrack. It's really good. Danny Elfman and Michael Nyman are always getting into their shenanigans while Zbigniew Preisner packs his Polish cable runner into a suitcase and ships him to the West, and Eric Serra makes really interesting sounds by hitting John Tesh over the head with a Korg.

It holds me together.

Actually though, this is what everyone else is thinking:

That guy keeps looking at me. Can I see my reflection in the bus window? Alright, I need to do this without anyone noticing that I'm doing it because that would be vain. I know, I'll act like I'm gazing at that homeless guy across the street with a look of pity on my face, and I'll use that to get a good look at my hair and forehead wrinkles. Are my ears really that big? I bet that's what he's looking at. He can't get enough of my huge elephant ears. Look at all these plastic surgery ads. I wonder why they advertise on the bus.

What does this have to do with the issues? How far would granting me gorgeous curl body and volume advance the cause of bettering the human condition? How does this seemingly trivial topic fit in with the by now famous themes of this acclaimed issue-laden blog--namely humanism, virtuosity, righteousness, seriousness, counterterrorism, war, the economy, and evil (it's all there people, check the labels)? I promise you that I will dispense with each of these items one by one and explain, in detail, what it has to do with humans and so on. I can do it while I wait for the hair serum to work.

[Intelligent debate about important things interrupted by the military-industrial complex. No you shut up, we do exist.]

So, to sum up, ending the suffering of all but the most foregone people can be accomplished with little if no effort and won't cost us more than twenty cents over the next three years. And for just fifty-nine cents more we can supersize our order and save those last few poor sods as well.

And that's how deep conditioner saved the world.

Frisbee golf

On Sunday I went out with a couple of friends to play frisbee golf. The game isn't quite as athletic as, say, ultimate frisbee, but it's also not as ridiculously unsporty as real golf.

You get three discs: a 'driver,' a 'putter,' and a medium range disc. The driver is heavy, aerodynamic, and incredibly difficult to control. The putter is the lightest, most precise disc but it has the shortest range. The goal is to get any one of your discs into a 'hole,' which is just a metal basket with chains to slow your disc down and guide it into the basket.

Keeping score is just like in golf. Also as in golf, some holes are farther away and harder to get to than others. Some are just plain ridiculous; because we were playing in the middle of a forested park, most of the 18 holes were right the middle of the trees. In one case, the hole happened to have a tree fall right on top of it, as in this photo.

Goethe and the proverbial substance

In its finality, the cul-de-sac of knowledge impresses those who've been disappointed by education as the mode and mark of social evolution. It is where, in order to learn more (that is, to drive through the proverbial living room of the proverbial house at the end of the cul-de-sac and out into the backyard and through the proverbial fence and into the darkness beyond, perhaps into a ditch or ravine of some sort where we might meet an early but satisfying proverbial death), we must peer over our shoulders at what we learned before we turned into the cul-de-sac o'proverbs after we bought 'cigarettes' at the proverbial corner store when the (proverbial) man said something kind of profound but not so much really because he was selling cigarettes at a corner store and of course every once in a while he'll say something that's not completely bereft of substance as he exhales. That sort of thing makes me feel warm inside.

That reminds me of the time when Goethe and I were camping in a totally appropriate male-bonding sort of way, making 'smores and conversation and dispensing wisdom and recyclables (and recyclable wisdom) across arcades of sparks and embers. He was sugar-high and said something like--and I am translating his medieval German--'Yo Cauliflower, monkey library Simon as scallops handbanana cheek absolute yellowcake* sportyshine leaf-faucet National Public Radio fork.' I'm paraphrasing; my medieval German isn't as superbly excellent as my English.

My memory does fail me at times, but this time I am fairly certain that what G-Tonez was trying to tell me was that we must reflect upon our past if we are to avoid living hand to mouth. To me this just sounds like an elitist assault on the decent hard-working hunter-gatherers in society, especially the ones who have amnesia. But even though he probably meant collective and mostly scientific memory--the (proverbial) shoulders upon which we stand before we can advance as a species--social memory is no exception, I think.

The problem is that memory does fail, and social memory is no exception. One might say that, because of the sheer noise involved in the laying down of memories on a social scale, it is impossible to nuance them with those subtle (and essential) features that temper the imagination and tame the reflexes. Indeed some social memories occupy such an inflamed corner in our collective mind that even accessing those memories tends to lead to wildly impulsive, base, even animal responses. Case in point: September 11, 2001. Despite it not being the first nor the worst event of its kind, our self-proclaimed keepers of the social memory (journalists, politicians) have wrapped us so tightly and rigidly in the inflamed axons of its memory that to move one way or another, to reach into our pockets for nuance, becomes impossible at least as part of the mainstream discourse.

Whenever I use words such as 'mainstream' and 'discourse' I know that I've gone too far and need to shut up.

* I would like to stay off the no-fly list, please, because I have places to go from time to time.

Are you racist?

Nobody who's not an anti-racist, don't not raise your hand!

Did you pass?

Haatem 1, Racism 0

Seriously guys. Enough with the racism. Hate is for lamerz.

Writing the hell out of racism

I am one of those people who think that words can change the world, especially words that are made of electricity and that are written by encouragable energy-balls who have over-mastered the use of the gamepad and the exclamation mark.

August 6 through 12 is International Blog Against Racism Week. What you need to do is:

1. Get yourself a blog.
2. Write something in your blog about racism for a week.
3. Sit back and watch racism get pwned.
4. Smile because you totally did it!!!!!!!! LOLOLOL

Emotional meteorology

Warning: This post contains brain violence and emotional nudity. Also, it is ridiculous.

Last night, I was taking a mercury bath and had a thought, maybe. I don't remember. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I knew how to talk good about my feelings. Like, I want to be able to go from feeling a feeling, to noticing that I am feeling it, to figuring out what feeling it is, to deciding whether or not I like feeling the feeling, to being able to make the words with my brain that would stick to the feeling and make it so that when someone asks me what I'm feeling I can say something that makes sense like, 'hungry' or, 'my heart hurts because I missed the Golden Girls on the TV box.'

That was a bad example. I should come up with a point before bringing forth the examples.

See, I wish I knew how to make points. They told me in school that it was like whittling an arrowhead from a piece of obsidian. Not a big clumpy piece like one you would find buried in a river bed but the nice flat smooth pieces you find in cowboy skeletons that were once part of the circle of life on ocean floors 50 hundred million years ago.* Case in point: I was having a conversation on (in?) the subway and a dude came up to me and told me to get to the point. It was none of his business, so I was like, 'why don't you get to the point?' Really. I wasn't talking to him or to anyone in that car so it was none of any of their businesses. I was having a great conversation nevertheless. Mobile phones don't work in (on?) the subway.

So I gave him the old Garrison Keillor, 'No, no, it's a different story, about a pontoon boat.' And then my studio audience laughed. With me, not at me. 'Ha ha' and not 'hee hee,' as it were.

So to get back to what I was talking about before: some people have what those same people like to call 'emotional intelligence.' As far as I can tell, it's like the force, except it is missing some forcey things the most lamentable of which are levitation and deadly (but peace-loving) skill with a hybrid light saber.

Sometimes I wish I were able to identify the things that I know I must be feeling and to describe them in the same way that I can describe other things that I like such as juice. (Oh my gosh have you had it? It's delicious.) People who have this emotional intelligence feature are ever-aware of their own emotional climate--and they can sense the emotional meteorology of others.

Even though it sounds like a load of goat cud, I wanted to raise my 'emotional IQ,' as it were. One of my good friends claims that he is one of these feeling Jedis. Let's call him 'Linda.' I thought that, since I've been calling him by a girl's name, this might have something to do with why he's so good at keeping in touch with himself. (Don't even.)

So for two weeks, he called me 'Janet' at my request. We would go out for sushi, and I'd say, 'Hey Linda, pass the wasabi.' Then he'd say, 'Janet, I think you're being passive aggressive.'

'Can you shut up and grab me that white tuna** from the conveyor belt? You always get the good seat you bastard, where you get to see what's coming upstream while I have to keep asking you to feed me like a fessacchione. Ooh, wait, is that a $4.00 plate? Forget it. By the way, that's active aggression, right? How'm I doing? Good?'

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish I had wider shoulders so that I could wear a double-breasted pea coat without people thinking that Manute Bol had an albino midget son with a homeostasis problem.

* Note: this is not true at all.
** My second favorite variety of sushi in the world, after eel kabayaki nigiri.