My Evil Twin?

Holy Crap!

email me direct at
(soopersecretbackwardstypingmode - engage!):

moc.eerpsgnillirht@cul

and if that don't work -

moc.liamg@cul.evets

Where you been?

Anonymous in LA

(Boy doesn't that sound like a Modern Lit title... something that Salon.com would recommend as the voice of an up & coming young author who then flames out spectacularly in a cloud of drugs and plagiaristic scandal...)

Apparently I have a doppelganger that likes to ride the bus in Los Angeles... said observer feel like kicking me a note and filling in the details?
Maybe that was the old me... a tulpa instead of a doppelganger?

As I've recently decided to move back over to this thing, I'l be backfilling it with some stuff that I recently had posted over on RupertSpace, so if'n ya'll have been following that as well... you could consider it a greatest hits... or most pretentious rants... whatever suits yr fancy.

Revisionist Theirstory

"I think, in time, he'll regret what happened"...

Said about yours truly regarding a set of circumstances,which, at the outset, all involved parties agreed that it was a condition of mutual culpability.
I've accepted these things, and have tried to rectify my contributing faults and generally move on.
(Barring the occassional relapse of guilt/despair, but that we can write off in part to a Catholic upbringing.)
As time has trudged on, however, it's come to light that the entire narrative of said circumstances is being re-framed to other parties' interests/prejudices so that I am cast as the villian. If this is necessary for the mental/emotional well being of said other parties, so be it.

Too bad I don't get the cool volcano hideout and league of jumpsuited henchmen.
But again, it takes two to tango, and three or more to create a lynch mob.

And then there's the matter of cowardice in such things where 3rd party spectators to past events are apparently unwilling to ascertain my perspective on this re-framing. So here it is anyway, in semi-cryptic elevated language which hopefully is restraining the level of general "whatthefuck"-edness this is instilling in yr humble commentator.

But, no one ever asked Frankenstein's monster for his viewpoint.
(Well, the novel did, but I was referring to the film and Karloff's protrayal of the monster as an innocent.
Lumbering, terrifying, and dangerous, but innocent nonetheless.)

Add the snide irony quotient of the circumstance:
Where a rigid belief in a forgiving redeemer apparently doesn't mean forgiveness and redemption are the repsonsibility of that believer.

Anyhoo... again, the answer comes in the form of popmuzik lyrics:

"Daddy,
What does regret mean?
Well son,
A funny thing about regret is
It's better to regret something you have done,
than to regret something you haven't done...
And when you see your mother this weekend,
be sure and tell her:
SATAN!"

Oh yah, you betcha.

Once again back, it's the incredible...

New toys for the Mac Dashboard... seeing if it works the way it says it should.

Truth And Booty

Truth & Booty
(The subjective nature of reality as an excuse to not really work when at work)


Things that have occupied my brainspace today:

Man, us talking monkeys are an interesting bunch.

There was a a link on BoingBoing (a directory of wonderful things!) a few months ago (which I'm too lazy to go and search through their archive for) that was talking about a new theory of how come us humanzes have bigger brains than our cousin primates.

Apparently, back when we were shorter, hairier, and lived near the water, we needed to have bigger brainmeats to be able to throw rocks better. I'm a little hazy on the details, but it was something like we needed all the extra meat to conceptualize distance and angle and velocity and whatnot.

So a couple of million years of unabated evolution later, we've got this amazing skill called abstraction that most other primates have little or no facility for. And we still like to try to figure out angle velocity and whatnot... don't think so? Who's the smartest person in the world?

You were thinking either Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, weren'tcha?
See what I mean? Both of them are famous for being physicists.

(I would have also accepted Nils Bohr or Schroedinger)

(And "Uhm..I dunno his name - but that frizzy haired science guy, or the one science guy in the wheelchair".)

Another Example - you ain't really reading my thoughts, but instead symbols of them... abstract representation of the electrochemical reactions in my headspace that wonsaponnatime, occurred just to figure out how far I needed to throw a rock so I could either eat or sleep safely that night.

This rather anthrocentric observation is based on research from extended conversations with other primates taught American Sign Language - reproduced here for your edification:

{transcript of a conversation between primatologist Dr. L Grebovnic and Koko, a 13 year old mountain gorilla who has been signing ASL for 5 years}

Dr. Grebovnic: (signing) Koko, many people believe that the current state of world affairs extends directly from an oversimplified reduction of the fundamental tenet of dualism, i.e. that existence can be reduced to the binary relation of good/evil - spirit/body - right/left etc. Since there is no room for variance in such a simplistic worldview, understanding breaks down when an individual is presented with a viewpoint that would ostensibly fall into the opposing side of the dualistic divide -

Koko: (signing) Koko love kittykat

Dr. Grebovnic: (after taking notes, continues signing) Yes, Koko, the kitty is very nice... Now, opposing this viewpoint, we have the idea of "gross materialism" which at it's core states that there is nothing more to existence than what is perceived by our senses, and anything else is in a sense a form of delusion, if not outright pathology... but, again, applying such an oversimplified view point to existence would indicate that if we define an entity simply by it's material representation... say that if a man had no legs, or your kitty had no legs, then it would not be a kitty, but something less. AS you can see, this would lead to numerous moral issues... but the materialist would argue that since the idea of "morals" is non-material it is in and of itself a non-argument.

Koko: (pauses... then signing) Koko love apples. Koko love Kittykat. Kittykat apples.

Koko then went on to dictate a dissertation titled "Kittykat Apples", discussing in extensive detail that all cats are indeed apples which are made of meat. The materialists see this as an irrefutable confirmation of their position.

So anyway... here we are with this amazing ability to think abstractly... or, more succinctly - the ability to lie to ourselves. After all - abstraction is (in some sense) making something up that ain't in front of you, ain't it? And look at all the fun it causes in the world...

Like Gawd.

We're primates, right?
(For those of you who would prefer to think of us as separate from the other monkeys on the planet, the exit is over there, and please make sure to pick up a comment card on your way out.)
The aforementioned whole lotta evolution behind us has hardwired some behaviors into us... such as the need to have some sort of authority structure in our social order.

To put it simply, here's a mashup of Howard The Duck (the best comic book ever written) and George Orwell:
"All hairless talking apes are created equal, but some are more equal than others."
Looking at Xianity (interchangably called fishtians as well throughout the course of this rant), we see the ultimate expression of this.

Okay, to ratchet it back a bit for those of us out there who fall asleep watching Animal Planet...
Almost all of the higher apes who live in social structures (Gorillas, Chimpanzees) where there's an Alpha Male who rules over the whole tribe.
Yeah, I know the bonobos don't have this, but since they also engage in recreational sex a lot more than our society... the analogy I'm going for here is better served by the Gorillas and Chimps. On yer bike then.

So where was I? Alpha Males... right.

Okay then... in Gorillas, this male who winds up on top is called "The Silver Back" as the authority position seems to trigger some sort of pigmentation change (or maybe it's that combined with relative age) ... and said ape's entire back becomes covered with silver hair. So let's look at good ol human society... leaders are often times the older members of the tribe... with what? Yup grey hair.
(I know I know - that's more often to a loss of pigmentation as aging occurs, and that there is no direct correllation between postitions of authority and hair pigments change in humans... it's called poetic license.)
And then here in Murrika, we have one ape to rule them all (and in the case of the current administration try to bind them), our (usually) democratically elected president.

If you look back through human history ~ more often then not... you'll see the same kind of thing once a society gets under way - there's typically some sort of power sturcture set up with an older male at the top... or a younger male who tries like hell to stay in that position until he's an older male.

So... being that we've got this amazing thing called abstraction... and we're also observant little monkeys,
(thankfully hardwired in when our super-distant forebears were scurrying around in the bushes trying to avoid being et up by dinosaurs)
we start noticing the world around us... and out of this power of abstraction, we try to come up with solutions to why things happen that we can't make happen. Lightning & Thunder for instance. Well... what else are we going to do but apply a known model to an unknown situation:

"Rain... Light in Sky...WOOO! Loud Roaring Noise! Roar sound like leader of tribe when he mad... must be a Bigger Leader of Bigger Tribe! To make Roar that Loud Him Must Be BIggest Leader of ALL! Why all the water though?"

And thus, out of fear and cold water, God Was Born.

{For all you Goddess worshippers out there... I'm more preferential to worship the idea of the mysteries of regeneration and the creation of life... but I'm applying a satirical eye to existing society here. Sorry. Though... think how different the world would be if everyone went around with little "Venus of Willendorfs" on their necks instead of the most heinous torture device ever invented. Church would be a whole lot more fun too!}

John Lennon figured this out when he went through Primal Scream Therapy before recording "Plastic Ono Band" but most folks just get hung up on the mommy issues there.

Which kinda leads into my next riff about abstraction... thinking about boinkin. Send the kids outta the room, cuz it's time to talk about the nasty.

Two quotes to fork from...

One from the Greatest Living Short Story Author, Harlan Ellison:
"Love ain't nothin' but sex mis-spelled."

Which segues into a good observation by one Frederick Durst of Miami, Florida:
"I did it all for the Nookie!"

So let's look at the facts again... sex is for the procreation of the species. Really, that's it. Just so you can find a (willing) partner and make more little yous. Or more specifically - so your DNA can bind with their DNA and make yet another variation on the common theme you share, being a talking hairless ape.
Evolution has again given us a neat little incentive package here for sexual reproduction in the form of the wunnerful, wunnerful orgasm. And you wimmenz got the better end of the deal... multiple orgasms! I guess it could be seen as a payoff for all the pain that childbirth can cause. DNA makes sure you want to keep on keepin' it on by making sure that for a while after you attempt to do so
(keep the DNA flowin, that is)
you feel the best you ever have. So what do we monkeys do with this?

Again, abstraction fires up and we come up with all sorts of crazy stuff about rubbing body parts together to exchange genetic materials. We think about it, talk about it, sing about it, write about it, paint about it, dream about it, figure out various ways to improve it, simulate it, make games out of it, blame it for problems, say it's what makes life worth living, confuse it with death and just generally associate almost everything we do in some form or another with it. Just so that - from a cosmic view point - little tiny chains of 4 amino acids can get rearranged all the time.

And jumping back a bit - we even have our abstractions form more abstractions on top of our abstractions about it:

"Gaaawd-uh Says-uh That-uh (INSERT NAME OF SOCIALLY UNACCEPTABLE SEXUAL PRACTICE HERE) is A SIN-NUH!"
(said like all crazy TV evangelists when they're on that blood and thunder riff.)

One would think that if the great big Alpha Male Domesticated Primate In The Sky didn't want people makin' whoopie except in specific ways, He woulda wired us to have horrible things happen if we tried... like body parts exploding when inserted incorrectly, or having pieces that fit in one specific way or summink. Of course, it could be argued that originally, this wasnt necessary, as:

"Animals, being innocent, do not engage in perversion. That is to say, recreational or homosexual sexual practices."
(This was actually said to me by an acquaintance of the fishtian persuasion - nice application of the abstraction "innocence" right there...)

Uhm... nope - sorry. Dolphins and The aforementioned bonobo chimpanzees have been observed to engage in both types of non-reproductive activity.

But wouldn't this undermine the whole abstraction argument? Since it might be implied previously that any type of sexual activity that wasn't purely for propagation of the species is somehow the result of this astraction crap you keep ranting about, Steve?

Well, yes and no. Look at it this way. You scratch a dog's belly, it enjoys it. You rub yer cat's back, it starts purring. It's now being muttered in some scientific circles that critters who ain't domesticated primates like us, may have some sort of analog to our very own emotional states. So wouldn't it follow that perhaps they also got lucky enough to have the "feel good when I put this there" wiring? Since the aforementioned examples are both mammalian (though only one is an ape-cousin), mebbe they were lucky enough to get the same nooknook wiring we got.

And what I was meaning before ain't that non-reproductive sex is a result of our ability to abstractificate... it's all the other stuff we do in the name of the Voltron-like forming of the beast with multiple backs.

Okay... so let's all take a cold shower (some of you might even get to do this together - lucky you!) and then we'll talk about abstraction + sex some more... more succinctly - riff offa Mr. Ellison's comment above.

Okay - so... sex. Erm... and Love. Well, here we got a case of abstraction making a mountain outta a molehill. Again, when you take the super long view, all it's really about is making sure that yer genentic code gets passed on down the line... much like a cosmic-scale version of the game telephone, since the information keeps getting manipulated with every iteration of the process. Whatever monkey started the "call" way back in the day sure ain't gonna recognize the message if he were around to "hear" it.
So what do us talking monkeys do with it? Since part of bios (bbwahhaaa get it?) is to make sure that we attempt to make more little us's, and at the same time - try to stick around so that the little versions of us can eventually grow into bigger versions of not-quite-us... We make the making and training of said little us's into this situation that defines us... (see above laundry list of all the things that we do for/about/because of sex, and then think about it in more "socially acceptable" terms) i.e..

Love.

The greeks defined 3 or 4 kinds of love... the love between friends, the love of family, erotic love, and love for your fellow man...
(I say three or four cuz we've all heard the stories about them greeks... so the last two here could be one and the same in some circumstances...)
and we've pretty much followed this model ever since.

I mean, yeah there are subsets of each of these: from afar, unrequited, etc etc. But it still comes down to you either wanna

hang with them,
be nice to them,
protect them,
or boink them.

Think about that flutter you get in yer heart when you see a pretty someone... or maybe that flutter occurs elsewheres.
(tee hee)
Or how when you hear about good news or bad news affecting someone you care about, you actually feel a physcial reaction. Abstracted representations of the instincitual urges to share DNA with them; or an additional layer of abstraction in your relationship with them and have some sort of emotional/psychological committment to their well-being.

And all that boiling up out of the electrochemical stew that makes you you.

Let's riff on the more diverse versions of lerv fer a moment...

One that's been fascinating of late is the stylee called by the poets "Love Unrequited".
The one thing everyone learned in high school, The Crush.

You know someone... and you try to know as much about them as possible.
Your every waking hour is spent to some degree or another consumed by thoughts of them.
(It could be said that Love is a flesh eating virus.)
And yet for all you know, they don't even know you exist.
Is this wrong?
Nah. Not really.
Is this healthy?
Well, except for those few instances where said love festers, goes septic, becomes obsession, and those people turn into stalkers, I would think it's all part of being human. True, it can be painful for the unrequiter, and awkward for the unrequitee... but still, at least you know that the capacity for such emotions (and abstractions) exist, and therefore yer not some sort of sociopathic monster where people are only victims to be destroyed or tools to be used.

And hoo - boy is that one ever an abstraction.
After all how often are these formed on someone that maybe you have a limited (if any interaction) with? So which one are you ACTUALLY crushing on? The one that exists in reality outside of yer head/heart? Or the one that's inside?
Perhaps "crushing" on someone could be a variation of what Tim Leary called "confusing the map with the territory"?
But on the flipside - let's say that it's someone you come in contact with fairly frequently... and "the crushing" still happens.

{Henh... "the crushing" like when all horror movies were gerund titles of some sort or another... Mad Magazine even had the "novelization" of one called (wait for it) "The Gerunding".}

Ahh... lit geek humor.

Anyway - so you know them, you hang out with them, and you gots a jones for them. It burns in ya like something you ain't felt in a while... everytime yer around em... it gnaws at you and makes you feel all squidgy in places yer bathing suit covers. You lie awake at night, engaging in mental or meatspace mastubatory exercises involving said person... building up a further layer of abstraction as to what "the act" might actually be like with them. But again, I ask you... which one are you really crushing on? Is it the map, or the Territory?

Really - who knows? Sometimes - these things can develop into something else, say if yer braqve enough to actually make an overture to the object of said crush, and it's reciprocated... and then grows into a relationship. But it ain't all happyjoylovelove once that hurdle has been cleared. This introduces the issue of the reality trying to measure up to the myth. Like said before - abstraction can also be called "lying to yerself". And if say you try to persevere through the constant friction of the myth conflicting with reality
(lateral thinking side note - for a great example of this in the realm of TV Westerns, watch Deadwood - a TV show that actually gets "HOW THE WEST WAS WON" closer to the probable truth.)
and wind up married - what happens if/when things reach that point of falling apart?

Then we get into another adventure in abstraction... the gradual death of the entity "Meyou/youme" and the resurrection of the creature "memyselfI".

That's probably best left for another rant.

So... grdually veering back onto topic, look at how much we get ourselves twisted up because of four little letters applied to a big bunch of nebulous things that we share across the gulf between each other.
Thanks to a brain function that originally (it is theorized) formed to allow us to throw rocks better, we can now see someone, develop this entire world where they and we have this wonderful, meaningful, fulfilling relationship together, spawn, raise wonderful offspring that carry your genes into the future be it dark or bright, and then die together happy and content... And by the same token, it can all come crashing down the minute they ask you:"You want fries with that?"

Awright - I've blathered enough... time to define the title? Okay sure...

Truth. An abstraction... but since abstractions are all thats in yer brainspace, that ain't so bad I would think.
Booty. A reality... except when you can't get a date. Then it's the biggest abstraction of them all.

My Tiny Kingdom of Dust and Ashes

Man ain't been in here in a while....

Yes it's true.
I'm weird.

Weird in ways that destroy normal people's minds.

SO weird in fact that I live in a hyperbaric chamber filled with the gases from my home planet, because if I were to step out of it and into the polluted miasma that passes for atmosphere on this world, I would explode like deep sea fish brought up too quickly.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories about me... but never published them for fear he'd be locked up.

My sarcasm rends souls, my cynicism cleaves hope in two, my snideness makes your underwear feel too tight.

And my weirdness spreads like a fungus across your mind.
Soon you shall know the depths of weird.
Or you won't.
My time has come.
Or it hasn't.

Either way I can't be bothered.

Those Were The Days? (The treachery of memory and the creeping dread Of Nostalgia)

Dictionary.com has several definitions of Nostalgia... one that stands out is:

"A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past."

While another that runs a close second is:

"A wistful or excessively sentimental sometimes abnormal yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition."

So we shall take this as our springboard...

Let's look at society at large... right now in music - there's a resurgence of "80's sounds" on the somewhat jagged edge of the music scene... I bleev it was called Electroclash or somesuch by the hipsters... I just noticed that the big fat analogue synth sounds that were so cool back in the early 80's were suddenly popping up again. Now this is cool as I've always harbored a secret love for out-of-sync oscillators fighting for dominance of a waveform (that's sorta how synth's work dontchaknow) but is this forward motion for culture?

And then there's our current shift towards conservativism politically.
I can't remember where I read it, but someone once said that conservatism looked towards the past for strategies of dealing with the present and/or future. To me this seems to be an inherently bad idea... since if those strategies worked back then... how come we're still not using them?

But on a less general scale... talking about nostalgia in the personal sense.

Think back to a wonderful time from your past. Say...oh, 10 years or more back. Try and remember it as clearly as possible...Got it? Now quick, write it down exactly as you recall it.
Now, if you're lucky enough to still be in touch with people (other than family) from that time in your life... contact one of them... and bring up that time. See how much your memory corresponds to what they remember.

Go ahead I'll wait...

Okay - so probably about 60 ~ 75% of it you and that person both agreed on as indisputable rememberances of what happened, right?

So then. What about that other 40 ~ 25% ? How do you account for the variance there?

That's the nostalgia... IMHO.

So let's twist this little footpath a little further...

Say there's a person in the past... one that's gotta lotta fond memories wrapped up around them... And you somehow reconnect with them...

So here you are, a different person than you were 10 years ago... and yer trying to re-establish contact with this person, where your entire frame of reference is built on data that is at best, 10 years old.

Awkward to say the least.

So... how does the person you are "now" talk to the "now" version of that person, even though both of you are working from the "then" versions of each other? DO the same reference points still work? Are shared private jokes still valid? Mutual memories still fresh and pristine in one another's mind?
Hopeless Romanticism aside... Is there that much in common?
Are there embers of whatever fire sparked the friendship/romance/relationship still smouldering?
Would it be worth fanning them? Or perhaps applying just enough of a breeze to let the embers grow into a different sort of fire?
Or has there been such a radical change in you and/or them that while the thought of maintaining contact is nice... the stark reality of it is that who you were then ain't who you are now?



Our cultural signposts of movies books and music all make it sound like picking up where you left off is an easy thing... and that all the time inm between will seem to have been as naught or some such poetic folderoll... seems to me the truth of the matter is far more difficult. After all, once you get past teh polite comments about each other's current positions in life... what do you talk about?

Fat Guys Named John

I dunno how many people out there have ever had philosophy... but there was this thingh that was brought up in an intro to philosophy book I was reading - the Platonic Ideal... something about how in a cave at the center of the universe exists this cave which has the perfect form of everything... like there is the platonic ideal of a "chair" and so forth.
So at sort-of cross purposes to this is the archetype as popularized by Jung and also in the works of Joseph Campbell.
Interestingly enough - archetypes and sterotypes often seem to get confused in popular thinking... So anyway... where this is leading to:

It's been my experience that comic book shops, seeing as they are gathering places of a certain subcultural type here in Murrika, have their own archetypes of those who work in said stores...

You've got the surly owner who used to love comics, and decided that that would be a great way to earn aliving, but has since become so cynical and embittered with the buisiness side of things that he holds any and all who still love the medium and the culture in severe disdain.

Then you've the got the skinny sorta spastic guy who is usually typified by either having very strange hair, facial or coiffure... this is the guy who can engage you in a three hourlong conversation about whether Wolverine could kick BAtman's ass and do so with the same passion and intensity as a well paid trial lawyer.

And finally you've got the fat sarcastic guy (usually named John) as exemplified by the character on the Simpsons (even though he isn't named John, he's the perfect example of this type of guy).