caveat emptor

Representations of Language. Also New Firefox Photo Features.

There is no spelling in spoken language, no punctuation. It's much simpler in that way. It occupies a natural place. How much of the rigidity of written language is an attempt to imitate the aural qualities of spoken language in a medium where they don't mean anything? Perhaps written language could be, should be freed from unnecessary ties to spoken language. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm just over-thinking things again. I tend to do that.

If you right-click (or smirk and click, if you're a Mac user) on any photo in the new version of Firefox, you have the option to place that photo across the sky. You can tile it or stretch it or just center it, but you cannot see it from the ground if you center it. It will be too small. If you Ctrl-right-click on a picture in the new Firefox (or eye-roll and click, if you're a Mac user) you can choose to step into the picture and live out the rest of your life there. I've been doing this all day with various pictures. Mostly it has been disappointing.

Don't even get me started on sign language.

Hello, friends. I trust you're well. No?

Later. Love.

This is Funny. Maybe You Just Don't Get It.

It's abstract and obtuse humor day. You cannot get here from here. Read now this list:

1. The day burns your skin. Where is that sombrero?


2. In traffic everyone sighs. We pray for the merciful sickle of death but he is blocked in by a semi and a milk truck half a mile back.


3. Dance, fools, dance. We are in the kitchen buying IKEA furniture online with the credit card you gave us to hold your tab.


4. If I honor your restraining order will you marry me?


5. "What's the hardest part?" I asked god. "All the followers," god replied, winking at the devil, who laughed. Then I woke up and they were both gone and somewhere a kazoo sounded wackily as a pie hit me in the face.


6. I was trying to have a conversation with Mark Twain, but he just sat there smiling as other people said things to me and claimed that he had said them.


7. Je ne veux pas travailler. Je ne veux pas déjeuner. Je veux seulement oublier, et puis je ne fume pas. [sigh]


8. She was so hot my watch melted. It was surreal.


9. "You have dialed the wrong number," I answered. "But I was trying to reach you," she said. "Please leave a message," I replied, and I hung up.


10. This list is over. If you didn't find it funny, then you understood it perfectly.

Hello, friends. I trust you, but only so far. It's not you, it's me.

Later. Love.

Day Zha Voo

Shower. Car. Coffee Shop. Car. Office. Conference Room. Car. Restaurant. Car. Conference Room. Office. Car. Grocery Store. Car. Bathroom. Kitchen. Chair. Car. Gym. Car. Shower. Chair. Bed. Repeat.

If you stand and blink long enough at the pile of things you want to accomplish it will change. Some things will be taken away and given to others. Some things will become irrelevant. Some things will get buried under other things. Mostly, though, the pile will just get bigger and bigger and bigger. It's almost too big to blink at.

I work better if someone else provides the willpower these days. Ask me questions and I will respond. Give me tasks that I can accomplish before I lose focus and I'll do them. Push me gently and I'll go. Otherwise I'll just move through this routine blankly and blink.

Shower. Car. Coffee Shop. Car. Office. Conference Room. Car. Restaurant. Car. Conference Room. Office. Car. Grocery Store. Car. Bathroom. Kitchen. Chair. Car. Gym. Car. Shower. Chair. Bed. Repeat.

Hello, friends.

Later. Love.

One About Music

Songs from every direction for as long as I can remember, the soundtrack of my development. I remember the hippie songs and the country songs. I remember all the songs about god, about that great and glorious day. Songs about sex and party time, panting R&B seduction and wicked naked metal pushing us together again and again. Jazz songs dancing on my shoulders, trumpets and saxophones blowing in my ears. Strange rhythmic surreal poetry pushing me past this mundane interplay of sensual input to impossible places in my mind. Music in the pew. Music in the desk. Music in the car. Music in the bed. Moist microphone pressed to my lips. Stiff steel strings cutting into my fingertips. Tensioned pedals and keys popping back up when you release them. I cannot imagine human life without music. Dancing and singing all the way down to the most primordial depths of our funky genetic soul. The first monkey man came down from the tree humming to himself, so they called him "human."

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Distractions Like Back in the Big War

I want to tell you, I do, all these new thoughts and ideas, new ways of seeing the same old things, but I'm overcome just at the moment with the delicate precariousness of fat raindrops around the bottom edge of the patio tables outside and the way sunlight outlines their predicament in bold white. They never fall when you're looking directly at them, though you can see plunging particles of precipitate plummeting in the periphery. Life is like this for me, though surely not only for me. Do you know what I mean? The only thing more interesting than any particular thing is any other thing, a sort of disproportionate weighting of recency and proximity in the valuation system of my attention span. I am tossed to and fro on the waves of some typhoon of whim in the Pacific of my cognition, as it were. Like my grandfather in the Navy back in World War II, riding out the storms on a mine-sweeping boat off the coast of Japan. "The big carriers break all but the biggest waves, but the little boats like ours just go up and down and up and down and you just grab a bucket to puke in and hold on to something and pray for it to be over." Whales, I've heard recently, live a long time. There may be some out there that remember my grandfather. "Skinny guy with a hook nose and a bucket? Oh yeah, I remember him," they would say, and I would toss them a tub full of microscopic krill and thank them in whale, which I would learn off the Internet before I went. The clouds are burning off and the drips around the edge of the table are falling, one by one, every time I look away, and, if not for them, I would tell you all these new thoughts and ideas, tell you how I feel about it all.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Her Name

They named their daughter Murder. In spite of this she was the sweetest girl you could hope to meet, with auburn hair and dark green eyes and an innocent smile. Everyone called her Murdy.

"Murder Charity Nelson?" her grade school teachers would read aloud on the first day of school, looking around curiously. "Do you go by Charity?" they would usually ask. "Murdy," she would respond, with a smile.

When she grew up she changed her name. She had never liked it. "Murder Penelope Nelson," she wrote on the form. It suited her better, she thought.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

The Continuing Saga of Our Protagonist

The rain dripped drippily on our protagonist as he sat forlornly in the setting. The rain symbolized something, possibly oppression or some other idea that might introduce conflict into the plot, making it sufficiently interesting to encourage continued reading. "Sigh," the protagonist sighed, sighing. In the foreground something mostly unrelated happened, adding texture to the narrative. Our protagonist felt feelings, showed them on his face, moved in ways that betrayed those feelings. How would the conflict be resolved? What was the nature of the conflict? Who was our protagonist?

Meanwhile, in another setting, the antagonist performed ominous and threatening actions. This could not bode well for the protagonist. If these actions boded in any manner at all, they certainly didn't bode well. Not well at all, their boding.

Now we meet the love interest. There is sexual tension. You, the reader, can feel the sexual tension. It's very tense. And sexual. Feel it?

The plot thickens.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

The Scientist on the Radio

The scientist on the radio doubts there is intelligent life anywhere else. Probably there is life, but he doubts there is intelligent life. He has various reasons for this, most of them having to do with science and math. "We are a lucky anomaly." He goes on to say that the sun will, without a doubt, expand and swallow the earth. It's just a matter of time. Millions and millions of years, but it will happen. And our civilization, possibly unique in the history of the universe, will wink out as though it had never been here. As I listened I was overcome with the desire to carve my initials on something permanent, but there was nothing around. Even the universe will collapse in the end. In light of this reality, if reality it is, what do you do? Invent a better fate and believe it? Embrace the fleeting cosmic coincidence in every shape it takes? Here we are, for now, intelligent life in the universe. "We were here," we scream out into the void, for no one to hear.

In my dreams, the universe goes on forever and ever, and intelligent life is everywhere, waiting to have its social calendar filled with dinner parties. In my dreams we never die and we never grow tired and we never discover everything. There is always more and more and more. None of this adds up, I know, but that's okay. In my dreams there is no math.

Hello, friends. How are you?

Later. Love.

Jazz Life

Baggy khaki chinos, hands in pockets, and a tank top undershirt. Brown leather shoes, scuffed and scraped, have seen better days. Tan socks with all the elastic blown rumpled down low. Third day tousled bedroom hair and whiskers of black and grey, scattered red. Bleary-eyed shuffling down the sidewalk, muttering about fortunes misplaced. Where have they gotten off to? Sweat at the top of the back of your neck says the muggy late morning will become a sweltering afternoon. Better seek shelter. Better watch where you're going. Weren't there cigarettes last night? Have they all gone up in smoke? Mumbling, not looking, off the curb and into and across the street. Smell of coffee from some open shop door. Light traffic in the warming city routine, the threat of lunchtime pedestrians looming on the clock hands high overhead in the church tower. Birds pass through building walls, though surely not. It's a play of light and hangover eyes, red and throbbing. Somewhere a car horn blares far away, a distant rage swallowed by the urban vacuum. She wasn't there this morning. They were separated in the night. Enough spare change for coffee and then maybe you'll try to remember where it all went wrong. Might be hot rains in the evening, sizzling and steaming in another night. This is jazz life, my friend. This is where the saxophone kicks in.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Tips for Becoming Better than You Are

Whenever you go to a new dentist you should always, just once, bite them so hard that it draws blood. Maintain fierce eye contact as he/she winces in shock and pain and don't disengage right away. Bite down harder for an instant just before you release. This establishes an important precedent for the remainder of your relationship with the dentist. They will respect you. Trust me. It works. Do it.

When it comes to great, real-life advice like this, I'm full of it. Here's another one:

Next time you go in for a haircut, take a fine-tip sharpie and write "666" very small just behind your ear. No stylist wants to risk pissing off the antichrist. Be warned, however, that there is a better than average chance that your stylist might be the actual antichrist, in which case he/she will not be amused. Try to discover this during small talk before they begin, or maybe ask the shampoo assistant. No way is the shampoo assistant the antichrist.

You're welcome.

Hello, friends. Good luck with all the advice.

Later. Love.

Old Salt

I was going to write a sailor story, but I don't know sailor jargon. I know that ropes are called "lines". "Tack" means something (if that's how you spell it). I assume there is some special name for different kinds of wind and rain and waves. Probably there is a technical name for the loneliness of seeing nothing but water as far as you can see, for the fear of never making it home again. I would assume, though I'm only guessing, that there is a reticence to come in to shore after so many days or weeks or months alone. When your boat capsizes and you are inside it, there is probably a term for that little shrinking space of air between the surface of the water and the bottom of the boat above. Sailing is my passion, boats and water and such, though I've never done it. When you're out there on the waves, sitting on that part of the boat near the front, whatever it's called, and you hear the creaking of that other thing and the flapping of the sails against those poles that hold them up, you feel completely at peace, I assume. You'd have to try it, to live this sailing life, to really understand what I mean. There's nothing else like it in the world, as far as I know.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well. Well?

Later. Love.

It's Beeping

I don't want to alarm anyone. I mean, I'm sure everything's fine. It's just that, well, it's beeping. It's beeping and this little light is flashing. It's probably nothing to be concerned about, you know, but, I don't know, it just makes me a little nervous for some reason.

When the little purple man came out of the ship a few months ago and asked me to hold it for him until he came back, I thought, "Sure. No big deal. It's small. I'll just keep it in my pocket." And I did. And everything was cool.

But now it's beeping. And this little light is flashing. I looked for a button to push or something (not that I'd be brave/stupid enough to push it, mind you), but there's nothing. It's just smooth with this one little light on it. And now it's flashing. And beeping.

Again, I'm sure it's fine. Still, I was wondering: Could you hold it for a while?

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

A Science Post: What Happened to the Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs evolved into clouds. Big fat slow Apatosaurus clouds. Violent Tyrannosaurus rex storm clouds. Little wispy Pterosaur clouds. They just got thinner and lighter and floatier and wafted up into the sky. They rain over the Earth to this day. Some of them solidified back into animals over the years. We call them birds. Most of them can still fly up with their brothers, but a few have fallen to Earth, never to fly again. Penguins and ostriches and emus will never roam the skies again. Anyway, that's what happened to the dinosaurs. In case you were wondering. SCIENCE!

Hello, friends. I hope you're well. Are you?

Later. Love.

Life on other planets. Everything is best sometimes.

Clouds like cattle, fattening and greying in the humid air, shuffle east in front of the sun, herded by a wind strong but not steady. Green leaves tremble below in the gusty indecision, pulsing alive when the light of day spills down through the shifting gaps. Lying in the soft but needly grass watching the changes overhead like slow frames of a passing film reel, I am overcome with the feeling that we all need different things. One plant's heaven is another man's hell. She is suffocated in his safe, happy place. He bristles anxiously at the exposure of her perfect, free, flowing day. One wants to settle here and one needs to move on. We are living proof, all of us, that there is life on other planets. There is only life on other planets. No two people share the same world. Meanwhile the ants crawl over my toes, plotting optimistically to remove the obstacle of my foot. A turkey buzzard passes in front of the sun, throwing my world into fleeting darkness. The clouds see none of this, stopping for a minute to graze on warming vapors rising from below while the wind is distracted. I know everything is best, just not for everyone at the same time.

Hello, friends. How are you today?

Later. Love.

Just Tweets Today (From Twitter) (I Know. I Know.)

Didn't sleep well last night, and I have meetings this morning, so I'm not feeling inspired. Instead of the amazing things I usually post, therefore, I'm copping out and posting a bunch of my tweets from the last couple of weeks. If you follow me on Twitter, you've already seen them. Sorry.

• Susan lied & said she could have a taco. So I brought her a taco. Then her nurse got mad at me. Then I got mad. Susan, however, got a taco.


• I don't know what the Final Four is, but it sounds ominous, like the horsemen of the apocalypse or something.


• Are you scatter-brained? Do you ever sit at the table and look for your fork only to realize that it was on top of your head the whole time?


• Before I achieved enlightenment I was a total retard. Now I'm enlightened as hell. It rocks hard, y'all. You don't even know.


• Once you reach enlightenment you don't care about all this crap any more. You have more enlightened crap to think about. Deep shit.


• God was laid off last week. "God was a great employee, but god just worked in such mysterious ways," said his former manager, Kevin.


• He still uses the word queer when he finds something unusual. I find this strange, especially since he's gay, but I guess it makes him happy


• During autism awareness month we're supposed to be more aware of autistic people so that, one day, autistic people can return the favor.


• Did lady GaGa write that song that goes, "Scott Scott Bo Bot Banana Fana Fo Fot Fee Fi Fo Mot Scott"? It sounds kinda like one of hers.


• Lady GaGa doesn't want to be friends. Sorry.


• Salesmen are sitting at the table beside me. They're discussing accounts and products. I wish they were in pencil so I could erase them.


• I ran the Necronomicon through a Spell Checker and it underlined three misspelled words and one incantation that would destroy the world.


• It took a while, but here's a triple entendre: Jimmy Carter was too sane & timid for the job. He should have grown nuts.


• "Double entendre" only means "double meaning". It doesn't mean anything else.


• Okay, it's in the dictionary. That was a just a trick. Did you know, however, that the word "gullible" really isn't in the thesaurus?


• They made some sort of breakthrough at the Large Hardon Collider. High energy particle collisions give physicists a hadron.


• Scientists made it official: The brain is formally classified as vestigial. YES WE CAN!


• I never bought a dress and went to a dance with a boy. We were too poor for that. Plus I'm a dude.


• What they don't tell you in love stories is that people aren't numbers. You can't add one and one and get two. It's always just one and one


• If I can only accomplish two things today I want to learn to count.


• It's not serial killing when you kill them all at the same time.


• The Chinese have a lot of proverbs. Most of them are very hard to understand (unless you speak Chinese).


• There were no tables along the wall or window at my coffee shop this morning. I'm sitting out in the middle of the room. I feel naked.


• Acrostic composition relies on surreptitiously tenable initial characters.


• I look forward to an approaching time of life on which I can eventually look back with nostalgia.


• Dear Fiscal Conservatives: Money is imaginary. We only pretend it matters.


• If you value being an original thinker, it should follow that you aren't surprised or offended when people disagree.


• I went to a high school for comedians. Class clown was like Valedictorian. No one danced at our prom. We all just stood in the punch line.


• Last night I had a nightmare that I was a member of Lady Gaga's entourage. I looked completely ridiculous in all that leather.


• I've learned the seventeen secrets to being less-than-average. I will share them with you for a thousand dollars.


• They should call them Ulterior Motivational Speakers.


• We're more than 8 hours into this 24 hour day already. Carpe diem, people. Quit fucking around. It will be tomorrow in less than 16 hours.


• Corey Feldman calls up Canadian singer Corey Hart, asks if he wants to hang out.


• Dear Corey Haim: Don't ever invite addiction into your house, you silly boy. It renders you powerless.


• Corey Feldman feels great disturbance in the CoreyForce, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.


• I think I'm going to start shopping where the non-consumers shop. I hear they have a great selection, though they're a little pricey.


• To avoid sexual harassment accusations, when women enter my office I always say, "I want you to know that I don't find you attractive."


• Full of the best intentions I rush into the fire, but I am made of wax, I am a candle. The soul is willing.


• Did you hear that Sting is releasing a cover of the N.W.A song "Fuck tha Police"? Yeah, neither did I.


• This trend of zombie-ifying famous books is getting out of hand:


• What to Expect When You're Expecting Zombies? Really?
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Zombies? Really?
• Microsoft Excel for Dumb Zombies? Really?
• I'm OK, You're a Zombie? Really?
• The Purpose Driven Zombie? Really?
• One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Zombie? Really?
• Being and Nothingness and Zombies? Really?
• Elements of Style and Zombies? Really?

Hello, friends. I trust you're well. Are you?

Later. Love.

This Section Left Intentionally Blank

There's something to be said for wordlessness, for the eloquence of saying nothing at all when the time is right. Some people are masterful with silence. They know how long to linger in quiet. They know how softly or loudly to speak again when the silence has run its course. I envy that. When I look back over my life and remember all those missed opportunities to say nothing, I envy quiet people. "What is the secret to silence?" you ask them, but they do not reply.

In writing there is no pause for effect, no empty space. "This section left intentionally blank," some technical writers will interject, but it isn't really blank, right? It says, "This section left intentionally blank." It's like saying, "Pause" in the middle of a poetry reading. No one does that. You just... pause. You lapse into quiet. You take a breath. Maybe you look up from the page at the listeners for dramatic effect. Then you begin again. In writing you cannot do this. I may put a pause right here. [Breathe] [Glance around] But I cannot make you wait. You have things to do, people to see. You have no time for such nonsense.

The last thing she said to him was nothing. She looked at him for a moment, lingering not an instant too long, and then she turned and walked away. Given everything, he considered it a kindness, the most merciful thing she could have said. He wanted to have it printed on a canvas and hung over his mantle. "Her Last Words," he would call it, and he would drink wine and stare at the firelight flickering across its blankness for lonely evenings for the rest of his life.

Hello, friends.

Later. Love.

Storylines

When the knife plunged - with an impact that radiated out from the page and up your arms and into your brain - deep into his upper back and, pushing through skin and muscle, into the protagonist's spasming heart, you realized with violent suddenness that you weren't reading the sort of book you assumed you were reading. No trick, this tragedy. His heart burst and his life spilled into a crimson pool around the feet of your imagination and he was dead forever, as really dead as fictional characters can be. You almost closed the book, then. You saw the hundred or more pages left in your right hand, and you almost closed the book, recognizing that these pages would not contain the ending you had expected. You felt betrayed, almost. You felt distraught and frantic. You turned the page, however, and discovered another story hiding inside the one you thought you were reading. The seeds of it were there, you realized in the end, from the very beginning, capillaries and thin veins unnoticed before traced from the extremities of the story to its heart at the surprise climax. And when your right hand closed the back cover on this dark horse resolution, you knew that there was no other way. He had to die in his time. We all do.

It has always struck me as a mistake, though I know some may disagree, to expect some particular happiness. Make your plans if you must. Do what you must, what you will. Then, look for the happiness in whatever shapes it takes when it finally arrives. And if it never arrives, look for the happiness in that too. We all survive until the end of our story. You can count on it. Let's enjoy the unfolding of the plot.

A new story sits unopened, like a threat. Danger. With a trembling left hand you open the front cover.

Hello, friends. How's your story developing?

Later. Love.

The Creator

"What is it?" he asked her.

"It's a universe," she said distractedly, staring into the tiny shimmering thing.

"What's a universe?"

"It's a self-sustaining system of interaction, an exercise in arrangements of energy and matter." She picked it up from the small table in the middle of the cluttered studio and held it up close to his face in the palm of her hand.

"I didn't understand any of that," he replied, looking with quickly dissipating interest at the sparkly whatever.

"This is what I do," she said, turning from him and placing the universe back on the table. "It's my hobby, though I'd love to do it for a living. I have a few in galleries."

"Do they do anything?"

"It's art," she shrugged. "It doesn't have to do anything. It makes people happy."

He grunted in reply. He didn't get it.

"Some of them have life," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"Life. Like us. Some of them have little people living in them."

"Little people?"

"Yep," she said, bending to look closely into one. "I wish I could see them. Talk to them."

"You can't see them?"

"No. They're much too small."

"So," he wrinkled his brow at her, a condescending gesture she hated, "how do you know there are people?"

"Because," she smiled, "I made the universe. I created the laws that govern it. I initialized all the variables. I just know. It's what I do."

"But you've never seen or heard them?"

"No."

"So you don't really know that they're in there."

"Sure I do," she replied softly and distantly, entranced by the tiny creation in front of her. "I believe in my skill. I believe in them. It's a faith thing."

Hello, friends. I trust you're well. Are you?

Later. Love.

What He Remembers About Her

She pronounces "clothes" and "close" the same way. This was one of the first things he noticed about her. He noticed her breasts, then her eyes, then he noticed that she pronounces "clothes" and "close" the same way. He was always noticing little things like that about her, being an observant guy. For the few weeks they were together he noticed many things. She often swayed subtly to imaginary music when she thought no one was looking. She pronounced "tree" with a "ch" sound, like "chree". She turned her head to the right during sex if she was enjoying it. She couldn't force herself to look directly for more than a second or two at someone who didn't interest her, because eye contact was intense and sensual for her. Her gaze always took something from you, always left something with you. She mouthed the words along with the movies she watched over and over again. She smiled higher on the left side than on the right. When you hurt her she would flare red with anger and raise her hand slightly, as though to hit you, but then she would wilt and cry and collapse into you, demanding consolation from her assailant. He remembered this as the strangest thing about her, and wondered where she learned it.

When someone hurts you badly, does something very cruel that murders your relationship forever, you might want to take back from them everything they ever knew about you. You might want them to forget intimate details and personal experiences. You might feel appalled to know that they carry you around in their hearts and minds. You might want to take it all away from them. But you cannot. Their life is theirs for as long as they live, for better or for worse.

Every now and again he remembered the smell of her close. He remembered every time her head turned to the right. He remembered when she stopped looking directly at him for more than a second or two. "Chree," he would whisper under his breath. It always made him smile. And sigh.

Hello, friends. How are you?

Later. Love.