What is there now, where once the throb and hum and thrill of certainty in amazing things to come?

Coming home to him tonight it requires unusual strength to flick on the turn signal, brake and gently veer right onto the downward slope of the offramp. Because what I really want is to stay on the freeway. Maintain speed. Just keep going.

Where? Just going.

And what is this thing that takes hold and sinks its claws in and pulls and pulls and pulls?

Each time, when it grabs me, I take the exit. Or make the turn. I end up at home, or at work, school, the post office... I don't let it win. Yet I imagine that it steals a piece, a spark; some fragment of the visceral, seething depths. That piece keeps going, and I can never get it back.

How long can this go on? How long before I'm gone and everywhere and nowhere? A hundred thousand flecks of life. A million tiny bits of fire. Traveling in all directions, out there on the open road.

ALERT: Viagra spammers now channeling EE Cummings!

Professional Hallucinogen For Ecstasies Inspect Your Erection

Nonchalantly about food stamp girls.
Because impresarios behind
but impresarios of,
but onlookers know.

Teach fractured but beams with joy,
clock toward waif.

Labyrinths overwhelmingly!
But psychotic cashier around living with,
share a shower with.
Bubble baths thoroughly waif over
pockets thoroughly of briar patch,
slyly inside ruffian looking glasses.

---

The above poem was composed from messages intercepted by my gmail spam filter between 10:54am and 10:51pm today. The title was the subject of one of the emails, and each line is the complete text from an individual email. I adjusted for punctuation, capitalization, and spelling errors.

Now celebrating 20 years of Manboobs Relief!

There simply wasn't enough room to spell out "Good Morning America".

Philosophy...

...doesn't require textbooks, classrooms, universities.

It predates all those things.

Its only prerequisite is an inquisitive, logical, and honest mind.

It's something everyone needs, whether they know it or not.

It can be incredibly challenging, humbling, rewarding.

And the only way to guarantee failure at it is to never try.

What the hell...

...went so horribly wrong?

"and your thoughts have taken their toll/
when your mind breaks the spirit of your soul"

'Scuse me, but: WHAT THE FU-HUH? What do you think you're talkin' about, duder? Is this some feeble attempt to tackle the mind-body problem? Are you breaking new ground here with some kind of mind-spirit-soul trichotomy? Don't you dare get philosophical on me. You're a dude wearing eyeliner. Know your place. For fuck's sake.

Part of me really wants to tackle the rest of the lyrical shitstorm that is "21 Guns", but then there's this other part of me that is filled with ennui at the prospect. Also, I'd probably throw up in my mouth a little. Ugh. Whatever. Instead, I'll just cut to the chase for once and say that as far as I'm concerned, the members of Green Day died tragic yet merciful deaths in a plane crash shortly after the release of 'Dookie'.

Mixed Metaphors

"A 'relationship' is just that--the more or less stable juxtaposition of two separate and self contained entities. Love, on the other hand, is an explosive fusion. The parts of a bomb do not stand in a mere 'relationship' to one another."
--Robert C. Solomon

"If I could find a real-life place that'd make me feel like Tiffany's, then - then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name!"
--Holly Golightly

I'd love to think there's cats with names in my future, but I'm having a hard time seeing anything that glimmers or sparkles... so I can only imagine that generating the kind of heat requisite for nuclear fusion is probably out of the question.

Whatever they're selling...

I'm not buying.

Not that losing an "enormous" amount of weight whilst somehow growing more massive, in defiance of all known laws of physics, isn't an intriguing prospect... I just don't think It's right for me. I hope you can understand.

Clint Eastwood

I wanna be like Clint Eastwood when I grow up: shoot from the hip, never miss, and always know when to get the fuck outta dodge.

A minor apocalypse. And ice cream.

The nexus of Jonas Brothers and Bastille Days has turned downtown Milwaukee into a nightmare. A nightmare that is populated by drunken revelers and female adolescent beast-creatures seething with hormones and dopamine. Traffic is a disaster and there's nowhere to park. Good times.

In other news, last night I made a lime-ginger-basil sorbet. It was okay, but didn't exactly set my world on fire. So tonight it became mango-lime-ginger-basil sorbet... shit's good, dudes. It's probably the most refreshing thing I've ever put in my mouth.

Oh, and there's a chai tea custard with cinnamon and allspice and fresh ground black pepper chilling off in the fridge. My first custard ever, and I didn't scramble it or anything! Yay me!

To sum up: the Jo-Bros suck, Bastille Days is a somewhat overrated pain in the ass, and owning an ice cream maker is totally awesome.

Dear Shinedown Guy,

I would like to alert you to a few misconceptions you seem to have about our Earth's atmosphere as well as a few of the better known celestial bodies of our solar system (and the physical forces that prevail upon them) as demonstrated in your improbably popular song "Second Chance."

"Oh nos! Moon iz coming!"
First, I'd like to address your misguided notion that it would be possible for the moon to "disappear somewhere in the stratosphere". As you can see in the diagram below, the stratosphere is part of the lower atmosphere, beginning about 11 miles above the surface of the Earth and averaging around 20 miles thick.


The distance from the moon's surface to the surface of the Earth is ordinarily about 233,000 miles. Here is a to-scale representation of that distance:


The moon itself has a radius of 1,074 miles, meaning it is about 2,148 miles thick. This entails that the stratosphere would be unable to contain the moon. Incidentally, the entirety of the upper and lower atmospheres would also be insufficient to contain the moon. This is all rather irrelevant, however, because if the moon were to approach Earth in the manner you suggest, it would begin to break apart due to tidal forces when it reached the Roche Limit. Based on this equation:


and the best data available (wikipedia), the Earth-moon Roche limit is roughly 9,500 miles. This entails that when the moon approaches to within 9,500 miles of Earth, it will be shorn apart by the unequal distribution of gravitational force across its surface.

The resulting debris would form a ring around our planet, much like the rings around Saturn. In the unlikely event that any large fragments survive and surpass the Roche limit and continue on toward Earth, they would appear as a giant fireballs upon entering the atmosphere, and upon impact cause damage sufficient to make life here rather uncomfortable (if not entirely impossible).

These dudes know what I'm talkin' about.
In the event that moon chunks do not collide with Earth in a cataclysmic fashion, we're still screwed. This is because the moon regulates tides, regulates the distribution of seawater, and stabilizes the rotational axis of the Earth. Without the moon's gravitational forces, the degree of the earth's tilt would fluctuate, leading to the sort of drastic, calamitous climate change that would exceed even Al Gore's wettest, wildest dreams.

Gore uses his brilliant and dynamic invention, the internet, to search for
footage of extreme weather. The former Vice President is said to prefer
amateur films of hot, steamy, tornado-on-tornado action.
Thus, if the moon were truly entering the stratosphere, you (and for that matter, all life on this planet) would have much bigger problems than worrying about whether mommy and daddy "realize this is [your] life" and approve or disapprove of your lifestyle choices. Unless, of course, you think that "sometimes goodbye is a second chance" applies to the preponderance of species diversity on Earth.

I was going to address your Halley's comet reference as well, but I think I've given you enough to grapple with for now.

Respectfully,
Someone whose iPod car adapter was stolen and, resultingly, has had occasion to listen to this little gem of lyrical buffoonery no less than four times in the last twenty four hours.

Engineering blows my mind.

More @ NY Times

Up late. Sleepless. Missing MN.

It was in that moment when the last rays of sunset stretch along the horizon like a gash of vivid, dying fire between the blackness of the earth and the deep resounding blue of the twilight sky that the city came into view. Drawn upon the night in a disciplined array of sharp silhouettes and tiny lighted squares it leapt out of the darkened landscape, suffused with that peculiar glow at once harsh and warmly beckoning: man made light.

....

tires on wet pavement
scent of regret
and here we go again

it doesn't reach me, anymore
i catch myself wishing
that it did

rain-thick air
streetlights throb & hum
can't you smell
the regret on my breath
can't you taste
the desolation on my tongue
can't you feel
this stagnant air
this slow death by equilibrium

"Here I rust

where disappointment and regret
collide
lying awake at night"

How is it that Ben Gibbard always knows what I'm thinking?

Oh, pandora...

those twelve-eight time signatures get me every time.

WHODAT? #2

Atonement for pop culture reference in the previous post:


Hint: Nobel prizewinner & Libertarian!

If there were ever a time when this was in any way appropriate...

Is he emerging fully grown from the head of E.T. like Athena from the head of Zeus?
Because, really, that would explain so much...
...that time is now.

This just in:

It is 89 degrees Farenheit outside, with 57% humidity. If you are wearing this:


or anything remotely resembling it, then you are a moron.

Hint: if you are wearing a tank top and miniskirt, then you probably don't need a goddamn scarf. Or keffiyeh. Or whatever you hipster fucks are calling them these days.

That last thing was maybe kind of a downer.

As recompense: a moment of boston terrier zen.






Brought to you by Stella.

Cogito ergo judico.

I've fed two homeless men in the last two days. Last night around 9 I walked down to Walgreens to get a diet coke. On the way I passed a little old man digging through the dumpster behind Subway. When I came back, he was digging through the trashcan in front. I took him inside and bought him a sandwich.

This morning at work I watched as a man picked through the wastebins in the park. I watched as he opened discarded styrofoam containers and examined their contents. I put some day old pastries in a bag and headed out. He skittered away a few steps as I approached, the look on his face was something akin to the expressions I remember, from working at the clinic, on rescue dogs brought in from godonlyknowswhere.¹

Seeing people reduced to eating from trash makes me feel physically ill. While I don't ordinarily take it upon myself to rectify the situation, this time I did.

Even though the sum of everything I know--all those convictions that so routinely draw scorn and ridicule--speaks of personal responsibility, tells me to judge. To judge with everything I've got, with all my might! The statements "I am therefore I think" and "I think therefore I judge" and "I judge therefore I love" go a long way in telling what I'm all about.

So what of this commandment to judge?

Those haunted eyes, the ragged appearances and bodies stooping slightly as if under the weight of the inevitability of circumstance remind me that judgement is only appropriate when one knows all the facts. Anything less is only approximation, generalization, conjecture.

Those things also remind me of my father.²

That might seem odd since my father wasn't a homeless man. Most days though, at least in terms of attire, it would have been tough to pick him out of a lineup of derelicts. If anything, the shit-caked boots might give him away. Looking closer, the stern posture of a man of incomparable self-respect or that penetrating, flinty gaze would certainly make him stand out. Then again, those things made him stand out just about anywhere.

I watched as those eyes dimmed to glassy indifference at life, as that posture wilted, as his steely certainty foundered in the inexorable wake of tragedy and the gradual realization that nothing could ever be as it was before. I watched as things spiraled downward until the man--who once solemnly taught me that the initiation of physical force was the single act that must never be sanctioned, tolerated, or forgiven--held me by the throat against the front door of our home.

In this case I know most of the facts, though perhaps not all. Even still, I will not enter the business of judging what one man should properly endure, or the manner in which he ought endure it. I have learned that accountability and moral culpability do not always intersect.

All I can do for him now, for both of us, is suspend judgement. I will suspend judgement, and I will remember everything. Everything. The sharp, hard sound of his laughter. How he held me and we cried together when his father died. The way he retreated. The day we met again, his eyes looking back at me from a hospital bed, from a body I couldn't recognize... and all that came after, and how it changed us: what it gave us and what it took away. I will remember it all, and I will keep moving.

---

1. I don't intend the dog comparison as derogatory--far from it: I tend to like the dogs I meet more often than I take a liking to the people I meet.

2. Lots of things remind me of my father. Maybe a ridiculous number of things. Maybe anyone who knows me is sick to death of hearing about it at this point. Maybe it means I'm carrying too much, and have for too long, but I don't know how to put it down, and I can't shut off my brain, and maybe someday something'll have to give... but that day is not today. Maybe it means I should "see someone" because sometimes it hurts like fuck... though mostly it doesn't. Most of the time I can smile about it, even if that smile always carries a measure of sadness. But I'm okay with that, because if I could look back on it all without feeling that sadness then I'd be some kind of monster. I'd rather have too much empathy than not enough: an excess can be tempered by reason, but what can compensate for a lack of it?

Throwing down the guantlet turns out to be rather unsatisfying.

If you hate the taste of wine
Why do you drink it till you're blind?
And if you swear that there's no truth and who cares
How come you say it like you're right?
Why are you scared to dream of God
When it's salvation that you want?
You see stars that are clear have been dead for years
But the idea just lives on...
--Bright Eyes


I'm getting tired of feeling torn in two.
I'm feeling that old itch for revolution, reinvention, creation, growth.
Can I scratch that itch? And: at what cost?
Perhaps new growth can only be had at the expense of some aggressive pruning.

"_________ is all subjective."

Behold, the magical phrase that settles all arguments and solves all problems!

Or does it?

Two questions:
1. How do you know _______ is subjective? A coherent answer to this question presupposes that some things are not subjective. So,
2. What are those things--the non-subjective ones? (I'll refrain from using the o-word here, since it seems to scare the bejeezus out of most people, especially the ones who tend to throw around that aforementioned special mystical scrap of alchemistic phraseology which turns gold into lead and the need for critical thinking into easy answers.)

I debase myself by not throwing down the gauntlet whenever I hear that sentence. I guess this is something I'll have to work on.

#61: Describe your ideal government.

Is secular.
Doesn't interfere with its citizens or its neighbors.
Exists for the sake of recognizing & preserving human rights.
Actually performs the above function... and not much else.

Yikes.

Saw this bumper sticker while out and about today:

"National security MUST begin in the womb!"

Of course it was written in fat, proud, starry, stripey block letters. Definitely the most f*d up pro-lifer bumper sticker I've seen to date... because not only is there the requisite, oh-so-righteous "yer uterus ain't yer own" message, but a secondary (and possibly creepier) subtext working here too¹. It seems to suggest that any pregnant woman is breeding the troops of tomorrow. That life starts at conception AND that one's nation has a claim on one which also begins at conception. That a woman must not only carry an unwanted child, but should damn well be registering that fetus for the draft while she's at it.

The two issues aren't really separate issues, but merely an extension of the same one. In essence: if my body (or some portion thereof) isn't my own, then neither is my life. My government can dispose of me as cannon fodder, slave labor, breeding stock, or in whatever other manner it's infinite, collective, democratic wisdom deems fit. That's really what it boils down to.

I guess it bothers me because it's just so brazen: are the fundies getting fundier, the conservatives getting nuttier? Or is it just my ginsuknifebrain deftly slicing through the propaganda?

Or am I reading way too much into this?

---

1. A tertiary or alternate secondary subtext has occurred to me. This would be something along the lines of "abortion is an act of terrorism". However, I have rejected this line of thinking out of charity, because it just doesn't make any freaking sense. Abortion is not ordinarily motivated by ideological goals. Additionally, while the procedure is likely to employ curettes and/or cannulas, it does not employ fear or intimidation. If it did, it would be horribly ineffective, since its intended target is nothing more than a ganglion which in many respects more closely resembles part of a shrimp cocktail than a cognitively mature human being capable of experiencing complex emotions.

So many kinds of wonderful...

...but I'll restrain myself to listing just the top 3:
1. Boston terrier snoring!¹
2. Dave Eggers books on the shelf.²
3. Quirky animations.

Oh yeah, and it's rather listenable. Simple, yet catchily delightful.

I want a Schwartzman for my birthday. Just putting that out there.

---

1. On second thought, that may be a Frenchie, BUT STILL: the cuteness overwhelms.
2. Of course I put it to fullscreen and paused the bookshelf shots to get a better look. Like, duh.

WHODAT? #1

Pop culture may elude me, but...

... I do know who this dude is. Do you?

Pop culture. What?

So... lately I've been hearing the name "Asher Roth" bandied about. For some reason it stuck in my head, maybe because it's a peculiar, mellifluous sort of name. I dunno. At any rate I'm here to say I've finally made the connection between that name and that fucking horrible song that makes me grind my molars together and wish I wasn't a human being, or that he wasn't a human being, or that some rigorous and scientific means of categorizing human beings existed to demarcate the line between that sort of person and myself. Gross. Ugh.

I'll refrain from giving the full rant detailing precisely how I feel about insipid douchetards producing insipid trash which turns out to be highly profitable, and what that says about our culture and blah blah blah. Suffice it to say I think I'd throw up on that guy, given the opportunity.

Also: who is this Lady Gaga person? Should I care? And what kind of name is that? She looks downright frightening on the cover of that Rolling Stone magazine.

And who are these Jon & Kate people? Don't know, don't care... but they're all over the freaking place, which likely means they're especially banal and mediocre. Blech.

I love not owning a television.

#44.1: Name three things you take for granted.

I am thankful to live in an age of aluminum foil, toilet paper, and global commerce.

#63: Make an encouraging banner.

I thought the plants in my kitchen window could use some encouragement.

Oh, you think that's ridiculous? Well at least I know where I stand with them.

Learning To Love You More

(A) Aside from the aforementioned reading-related goals, I want to spend much of my free summer time harnessing the creative urges that tend to get smothered with a pillow, clubbed to death, or gagged & tied up in the basement while school is happening. I want to be writing, doodling, making, or photographing something every day.

(B) I was a bit sad to learn that this project is essentially over with. Like anything Miranda July touches¹, it was quirky, often poignant, and generally delightful.

And so... in the interest of fulfilling (A) I will be completing assignments from (B). SO IT SHALL BE WRITTEN, SO IT SHALL BE DONE!

If you know what I mean.

---

1. see also ))<<>>(( and this here (including, especially, the interview). I also think she's rather beautiful. I've got a pretty major girl crush going on here, which is rivaled only by my Maggie Gyllenhaal infatuation.

2000 years before Adam Smith

Yo A! That patina really sets off your rippling biceps and six pack abs.
So, ah...whatcha doin' later?

"...money is as it were our surety; for it must be possible for us to get what we want by bringing the money. Now the same thing happens to money itself as to goods--it is not always worth the same; yet it tends to be steadier. This is why all goods must have a price set on them; for then there will always be exchange, and if so, association of man with man. Money, then, acting as a measure, makes goods commensurate and equates them; for neither would there have been association if there were not exchange, nor exchange if there were not equality, nor equality if there were not commensurability. Now in truth it is impossible that things differing so much should become commensurate, but with reference to demand they may be come so sufficiently. There must, then, be a unit, and that fixed by agreement (for which reason it is called money); for it is this that makes all things commensurate, since all things are measured by money."

Oh! Yes.
By which I mean YES YES YES YES YESSSSSSSS! (And so on.)

My goal for the next few weeks is to get through the Nichomachean Ethics. I've read various parts of it at various times, but not the whole thing start-to-finish. Until now. I plan to sneak up, catch it in a flying tackle, wrestle it to the ground. There will be kicking and biting and hair pulling and scratching and ninja throwing stars and muskets and mustard gas. I will emerge victorious, and I will own it. Then I'll beat my chest and roar out my triumph as I absorb its powers while being struck over and over by lightning because, after all, there can be only one.

If you know what I mean.

Dear Sufjan Stevens,

Everyone else may have forgotten... but I have not. You promised fifty states. You delivered two. Since then: pretty much nothing else. This is totally unacceptable.

"Chicago" is a song I can't find adjectives suitable to describe. Ditto for "Casimir Pulaski Day". "John Wayne Gacy, Jr" gives me the shivers. And the one about Ypsilanti with the outrageously long title? That shit gives me all manner of goosebumps. Even if it's August. I could go on, but the point is: you're kind of a genius. You're good at what you do. You should do more of it. Then you should release more of it so I can stuff it in my ear canals and feel all shivery and shimmery-strange and incandescently ecstatic and sad and also like my stomach's riding on a tilt-a-whirl. Even if it's just songs about names you recorded in a closet or a bathtub somewhere in 1998. (Because yes, even that was pretty good.) Really, at this point, I'll take whatever I can get.

Please? Thanks. Have a nice day.

This just makes me smile.

I imagine Thoreau would have liked them too.

I found these little guys a few weeks ago on a thrifting excursion.

I am inordinately pleased by the sight of them on my bookshelf.

I am a bit of a nerd. That is all.

Oh, nature...

So yesterday I saw something startling: there's all sorts of green leafiness covering trees and shrubs. Also: a variety of shit is blooming. Whoa. I mean, this is totally unprecedented, right?

I guess I haven't had the time to notice this...since the past two weeks have been a haze of nyquil, phlegm, freud, nietzsche, cytoskeletons, constructive empiricism, mucus, scientific realism, benzene, chi-square analyses... oy.

Also, the weather is increasingly bearable.

And then this morning, I saw a miracle.

Well, ok. It wasn't really a miracle. (The consequences of abnormally elevated testosterone levels rarely, if ever, are.)

But it was a very agitated male robin wildly pecking, flapping, and (for a few moments) riding on the back of an extremely bewildered and panic-stricken squirrel who kept craning his little neck around to try and figure out what the hell was happening to him. It was, in a word: awesome.

So thanks, nature. You made my day.

I am at war with randomness.

Rudolf Clausius originated the concept of entropy. Originating concepts is sexy.

I think you should be too. But I won't go getting all pushy about it.

From a thermodynamic standpoint, though, we are all at war with randomness. Our existence is made possible, on a molecular level, by the localized reversal of a universal law. Life just is order.

The things in the world that have the most meaning for me--science and philosophy--are at their root premised on finding order in ourselves and in the world around us. And yet, it would seem that much of the thoughtmatter that traverses my brain on any given day is indeed quite random.

I don't believe this is true: it is not random. I believe that my human brain is a fan-f*g-tabulous machine capable of integrating and cataloging information in a quick, efficient, orderly manner. This is the wellspring of emotion, gut feeling, precognition, deja-vu. This process often occurs without my express consent or awareness, so it doesn't necessarily appear to be orderly¹. That's the nature of the beast. But, man, it would be incredible to get a look under the hood. To see what my subconscious is up to. To understand how it works. To fine-tune that mofo, and make it the best perception-integrating abstraction-generating mechanism it can be.

I feel that it is my job, as a person, to reduce everything to ideas. Cruising the classified ads and searching monster.com yields the conclusion that this is in fact not an actual career, however. To that end, my future is anything but certain. I don't always know², in any great specificity or with an ironclad certainty, what it is that I want and what will become of me. But, I do have one ovearching goal: to fulfill my job as a person. To have a mind like one of those invincible infomercial knives³ that will saw through logs and cans and boots and cinderblocks and still be able to dice a tomato. If you know what I mean.

Realization of my ginsuknifebrain aspirations will undoubtedly require that I first understand me as well as I can. A firm foundation of introspection is called for. Certainly, at 25, this is not an area in which I am particularly lacking. But to recall that endless refrain⁴ of my childhood: "you can always do better."

That's what this space is, for the most part, going to be about.

This is me, sharpening my knife.

---

1. Similarly, I expect that the overall nature of this uh, blog, will be that of non-apparent order; i.e. of ostensible randomness. This is likely to include doodles, open letters to various persons or entities, and actual instances of randomness and absurdity for the purposes of entertainment.
2.I do have a general idea. I'm a philosophy major who is planning on going to vet school. Getting into vet school is goddamn hard, though. If that doesn't happen, I'm not particularly interested in going to grad school for philosophy, since it'll be pretty hard to find an institution that won't be bent upon turning me into a mealy-mouthed Kantian-Kuhnian mess. Also, being named Dagny and going around advocating the sort of thing I'd be advocating is bound to look ridiculous from a certain angle. Specifically, the "oh look at that poor, crazy, brainwashed girl" angle.
3. I realize that ginsu knives are not invincible, and are actually pretty crappy. It's a metaphor. If you don't like metaphors, then you'd better run along. They'll be raining down around here like Old Testament fire and brimstone.
4. In the interest of glasnost, the most repeated phrase of my childhood was actually "mutual benefit for mutual exchange." But "you can always do better" runs a pretty tight second place.