briefly, in paris June 8, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.add a comment
In Paris, on a school trip, I had a classmate who lost his heart, briefly, to a girl in a poster.
It was in the front of one of those chic Parisian stores, all svelte lines and sulky curves.
He went to the window and put his face against dithered lips and shouted “I love the most beautiful girl in the world!” into the summer night.
We were young.
Time went by. He married, but not the girl in the window.
I came across the photograph the other day. He had his arms around her. Her lips engulfed him, incarnadine and timeless, endlessly yearning.
secret code May 22, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.2 comments
‘__[jaded videogames artist]_____ (character) desperately tries to achieve __winning the state lottery_____ (their desire) or prevent ___[who cares, not my problem]______ (someone else’s desire), even as ___fate____ (their Nemesis) and ___the gods____ (other forces) try to prevent him from achieving that. In the end, he goes from being a ___rebel warrior____ (who he was at the story’s start) to __disillusioned destitute_____ (something different).’
You fill it in, then.
Today I picked up The Scar (China Mi[e]ville) (here’s your obligatory wikipedia link you lazy people).
The clerk looked at it, then announced he had it lying around at home.
‘like it?’ (I say, while signing off my credit)
*beat*
‘I never finished it.’
‘…oh.’ (now contemplating my signature for $11.42)
‘well, you know, it’s well-written, I just have this thing about weird names. The names were weird. I guess I’m kind of weird about fantasy like that.’
‘I swing my sword, teehee’
‘…anyway, you might like it, if you don’t mind weird names.’
Unreasonable consonant strings R’rhhzthahjzks swing your sword GO!! make me throw books back on shelves, but The Scar seems acceptable. No swords yet, which either floats your boat or does not. It’s well-written, which is cause enough to celebrate. In a world reduced to lisping mishmashes of three-letter acronyms, I grasp at poetry like water.*
Ashley Wood did the cover. I wouldn’t have guessed, although it’s an exercise in understated elegance, thereby avoiding my current and exceedingly superficial code of book cover rejection
=
10 breasts? [increment variable r by 1]
20 got swords and big oily muscles? [ditto]
30 pirates [ditto ditto]
40 space pirates [etc]
50 is twilight? [increment variable r by ∞]
60 if r > 0, terminate with extreme intolerance
I realise line 10 implies the cover contains ten breasts.
[∞∞∞∞∞]
Georgia Rule is actually pretty good, and at one hour in, really rather sad. Say whatever you want about Lohan, girl can act. The moment that shocked me most so far; Jane Fonda throwing a glass bottle into the trash holy shit she didn’t recycle! Bin confusion taken as a sign of cartharsis is, I think, a telling example of look what Vancouver’s done to me.
I don’t like how it ends.
Ѿ <— Cyrillic looks rude.
*completely untrue. I haven’t read any new poetry for years**
**only slightly untrue
***I am switching to an ALL-CARB diet in preparation for the coming apocalypse of WORLD FOOD SHORTAGE better STORE FATS NOW
xii May 12, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, onanistic bullshit, pseudo-informative bullshit.Tags: final fantasy xii
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I am staring up at the juggernaut glaciers of the Paramina Rift, a sole speck of warmth in a desert of ice. Snow scourges my face; fog scythes the booming peaks from view. Ice drowns the turbid river. I look around; all is time, everlasting. The cliffs stare us down. Move on, they say
but I am caught in the frigid beauty that spreads before me, all particles and polygons. A last tribute to a dying platform, the ephemeral dreams of a forsaken machine. Under heaven, slipping across hell, I stare down the last sullen triangle of light between the ravine walls. I hear it, an eerie sad song of the done.
The wolves are wailing. The dead come.
—
I expected to hate this game, after the horrid mishmash of adenoidal teenage angst that characterised X. (Come to think of it, if you liked X, you probably aren’t going to like XII. Prove me wrong. They are such absurdly different games.)
Which is why it took three years before I picked it up off the secondhand rack.
And then I gave something like a disturbing hundred hours of my life to Ivalice, a land that sprawls so far I haven’t even seen every single area in the game. It’s shocking how much detail went into it; it’s shocking how much love was poured into areas you won’t even see unless you start running around with the camera tilted skyward.
It’s also shocking how right the gameplay feels. Random encounters? I frigging hate random encounters. There’s nothing wrong with taking away the annoyance of screen loading and replacing it with (almost) seamless combat integration (although the weapon drawing animations could have been smoother). There’s nothing wrong about removing the need to press ATTACK. I daresay hitting attack hundreds and hundreds of times over doesn’t make me feel particularly accomplished.
Let’s not get into that; many people have said many things on the subject.
FFXII is an MMO experience without the irritation of people asking you for sex or money.
FFXII is running around a vast and mostly-beautiful world, free to do almost whatever you will, set against a story that, though it has its faults, is subtle (until the soul destroying end) and far more studied than any of the tripe and trite plots I have been coming across in the JRPG world recently.
A recap of FF plots so far:
FFVI (it worked for me) FFVII (awesome! game plot that actually uses the medium to its true potential — a story you could not have told through film or book) FFX (TRASH)
I couldn’t finish FFX because it was downright puerile. The US voice acting was atrocious beyond belief, a matter not helped by the atrocious dialogue.
If anything, FFXII draws a lot from
a) Star Wars (the Jawa in XII made me rather cross, come to think of it)
b) A Song of Ice and Fire (George R R Martin)
Basch is blond, bearded, has a twin (who is kind of evil) and is called the Kingslayer. I need say no more, to those of you who understand both worlds.
According to various sources, Basch was meant to be the protagonist of XII, a decision that would no doubt have radically improved the game; having a spectator as your main character is a conceit that I find interesting, but one that didn’t work for XII as well as it should have. The other characters of XII are so much more complex than your two gratituous teenagers (no doubt thrown in just for the sake of demographics) that I put them all in my main party. It felt odd, having to see my ‘main’ character in towns, when he spent no time with me outside of them.
The director, Yasumi Matsuno, left halfway through development, and it leaves a bitter taste in one’s mouth, especially for anyone who’s ever seen creative daring shackled by bureaucratic fear. It explains the strange sense of lacking that permeates this beautiful, beautiful game; it explains why the end run of the game lacks any coherence to preceding events. Through the journey, I smell bureaucracy’s evil stamp; it leaves a bitter taste.
I can only give FFXII a 9.5, even though it has probably ruined any other FF game for me, since gambits will probably never return (and I see they have added a completely pointless loading screen to the FFXIII combat, because people are… I don’t know, something. Afraid of change, perhaps). And I give the ghost of the game a 10, what we might have received if Matsuno had been allowed to bring his masterpiece to complete fr uition; instead we are left with Achilles, heel undipped and mortal.
don’t pour that on the dog April 21, 2009
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.add a comment
I have been pigging out on bontan ame, also known as Botan Candy (you google dis t’ing) — it’s good for your health, if you have some sort of blood sugar deficiency. Apparently this used to be made of millet (still tastes like it is), but no longer. All things fall from grace in the eyes of those who wait.
Random snippets from around the office:
‘hey, don’t pour [that can of coke zero] on the dog’
‘oh no’
‘don’t say ’oh no’ and then start pouring’
Random snippets from my life:
‘yeah, I dunno, I kinda wanna go back to school.’
‘do what?’
‘dunno, figure out what I want to do’
’shouldn’t you figure out what you want to do before you take two years off your income?’
‘ah, yeah’
Tsst, sensible people. I considered doing something about my joke-calibre tertiary education (art school is a joke, BA or no BA), in which I wrote a total of three papers — a shockingly sparse 10000 words. All you have to do is make vaguely-coherent gestures at laissez-faire sentence structure, and sort of spell your name right.
Who dreams of scrapping steady income for campus hijinks in the middle of an economic hellturn? Is a major lack of challenge enough to make any man turn career quisling? Jobs, jobs are vampires. I just googled [a job is a vampire] and got this: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vampire%20job kinda NSFW unless you have 30 inch monitors and 72 pt text, in which case you deserve what you will get.
Speaking of which, Twilight– really?
the black swan of nanowrimo October 14, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, pseudo-informative bullshit, things that are not quite things we know.1 comment so far
The Canadian government finally returned the money it owed me from the time I spent being unemployed last year, so I decided to blow some of it on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s idiosyncratic Black Swan.
Very briefly, Taleb is an iconoclast ex-quant (and full time wag) who does things like buy options geared towards the inevitability of economic disaster, accepting constant losses while waiting for crashes to send his option values skyrocketing.
Commonsense dictates we go for small, constant gains when we invest, yet opens us up to getting screwed by unpredictable economic failure. For Taleb, the world has been shaped by these acts of random chance, acts that have a minute chance of occurring and carry huge impact, acts that we claim are inevitable after the fact and yet never plan for.
We carry on with life because some things are completely out of our ability to predict. You can’t bank on what they’ll be, you can only bank on the probability that they will happen. Hot from Taleb comes a moniker for events of this ilk: black swans. I won’t get into the details, because far better minds have written more informative material on him. Eristics aside, his viewpoint radiates some uncommon sense. Sometimes it’s refreshing to hear someone say, “I don’t know.”
I’m reminded of the Time article (this one made it to Time’s 85 year anniversary compendium) on Deep Blue, the chess computer that beat Kasparov:
What is Deep Blue’s secret? Grand master Yasser Seirawan put it most succinctly: “The machine has no fear.” He did not just mean the obvious, that silicon cannot quake. He meant something deeper: because of its fantastic capacity to see all possible combinations some distance into the future, the machine, once it determines that its own position is safe, can take the kind of attacking chances no human would. The omniscient have no fear.
In Game 1, Blue took what grand master Robert Byrne called “crazy chances.” On-site expert commentators labeled one move “insane.” It wasn’t. It was exactly right.
Here’s what happened. Late in the game, Blue’s king was under savage attack by Kasparov. Any human player under such assault by a world champion would be staring at his own king trying to figure out how to get away. Instead, Blue ignored the threat and quite nonchalantly went hunting for lowly pawns at the other end of the board. In fact, at the point of maximum peril, Blue expended two moves–many have died giving Kasparov even one–to snap one pawn. It was as if, at Gettysburg, General Meade had sent his soldiers out for a bit of apple picking moments before Pickett’s charge because he had calculated that they could get back to their positions with a half-second to spare.
In humans, that is called sangfroid. And if you don’t have any sang, you can be very froid. But then again if Meade had known absolutely–by calculating the precise trajectories of all the bullets and all the bayonets and all the cannons in Pickett’s division–the time of arrival of the enemy, he could indeed, without fear, have ordered his men to pick apples.
Which is exactly what Deep Blue did. It had calculated every possible combination of Kasparov’s available moves and determined with absolute certainty that it could return from its pawn-picking expedition and destroy Kasparov exactly one move before Kasparov could destroy it. Which it did.
Kasparov himself said that with Deep Blue, quantity had become quality.
Taleb repudiates the power of human inference; the computer is incapable of it. Sometimes you have to overthrow human frailty to succeed. Is that good, or bad?
Everyone’s iPhone is Wikipedia-enabled. The showboat of knowledge sails on, leaving us only the lifeline of connective insight.
November is coming up, and that means NaNoWriMo is here again. I have been putting this off for far too long now, and I’m fed up with being unproductive, so here goes: 50000 words for the month of November, the amount that mutates novella into novel. I did not know that Brave New World contains a mere 50000 words of blazing beauty.
1,666⅔ words per day, for thirty days. If you don’t make the effort, you never get the chance to be a black swan.
That, combined with spending enough time on my guitar to not screw up someone’s wedding ceremony, is going to be a hell of a lot of doing. But when people are doing this, what excuse do I have? Let’s go learn from failure.
Apparently it takes a minimum of 10000 hours to become world-class at anything, so I’d better get cracking.
I had a clump of songs in major keys on my playlist zoning together whilst I was writing this; all background noise, until a minor key popped out and my focus was jerked right there.
Our random lives boil down to self-imposed decisions. Unpredictability may be the new god, but it doesn’t mean we can’t choose which dice he throws.
“I’ve spent a lot of energy and many years trying to learn a very few basic things, which may turn out to be mostly crude opinions anyway. There’s so little in the world we can be sure of, and maybe it’s the lack, that flaw or deficiency, if you will, that drives our strongest compulsions.”
- Ben Fountain
cat shit prolix beauty October 4, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
If everything in our heads were laid out in the open, would the world be a better place? Nobody would be able to inveigle or obfuscate. Yeah, people will always come up with creative ways to take advantage of others, but surely the opportunity for them to do so would be drastically reduced.
Even if the entire concept makes me shudder, I can’t help thinking it would be more beneficial than not, since if that were how the world worked we wouldn’t have any hangups about being open. We would just be. And there would be nothing wrong with being.
I’m drunk on Shirley Temples, and intoxicated by proxy.
My cat used to take the most epic shits when she was younger and not so well. It was a smell like nothing on god’s earth, it was a smell that smelled worse than the vestibule outside the toilets at work, it was one fucking hell of a fucking smell. One day the worm turned; I found solid, scentless slag in her litter box and what was I? Imbued with joy. If we can find beauty in a cat taking a shit, who’s to say we shouldn’t be finding beauty in everything?
I do not often weep, but I wept when I first viewed a certain scene from American Beauty. A plastic bag floats over the dust on nothing but wind, transfigured into more than it never dreamt of being. That was cinema as cinema only sometimes dreams of being, of elevating the jejune to genius. Some genius set that scene up with transcendentally beautiful cleverness because they understood both beauty and cleverness, set it to music machinated to score a tender and lingering tristesse, and I said why not, and let them take the tears from me.
Nothing to do with anything in particular, everything to do with everything in general.
It’s not too often that I get the feeling I can say absolutely anything I want to someone. This has absolutely nothing to do with establishing bonds of friendship; it’s more like a detached celebration of banter. Bantering is a fine art. Some people wear self-confidence in such a manner that I pretty much know nothing I say is going to bring them down; some people, I think, like banter because they either understand it as a game, or because in a way it’s a form of acceptance, or acknowledgement.
I don’t know that banter necessarily brings me closer to people; it’s more a mental gambit where all the players are intent on playing at being dicktrees to each other. The trick, I guess, is to get away with pretending to be as much of an asshole as you can without actually being an asshole. (If you’re not just pretending to be an asshole, it’s not banter, it’s war.)
Banter is possibly only good in small, measured doses. I’m not sure how good it is for the soul.
Last night we were meant to be going to a colleague’s leaving dance. There have been far too many of these things lately. Let’s not get into that, it’s depressing as hell. We got to the venue and discovered that bouncers are dicktrees. You can’t even banter with them! Who knew! I didn’t care for the seamy glimpses I caught through their steamy windows, so!
Under the glass forest canopy we were reduced to …what? Animals, quailing from the rain. My animal friends and I went for crepes instead and talked about bullshit like existentialism.
I am high as hell on sugar.
I slept at 4 and woke at 9.30; morning comes too quickly these days. I lay indolent beneath cotton sheets and stared at a spiral of hair on my pillow, and played with the focus of my eyes. We have the latent power to do all this trippy shit we don’t usually bother thinking about. It’s as trippy as thinking about what it really means that light is just a wave (or a particle, yeah), or trying to imagine an eighth colour.
I popped different parts of the hair formation in and out of focus and then I realised; there’s the summation of my life at present. I can’t hold it all in focus all at once. Something must give.
A cat rolls into the hollows of my back. She seems happy. I seem happy. Beauty is the visual punch of a cat’s rosetted coat; beauty is the warmth of her sleek back, smooth against bare skin. Beauty is realising I’m only two minutes late for lunch.
Now here we are, sitting in the food court at the mall.
To my left I keep hearing snippets of the most boring conversation in the world. It makes me wince. I don’t think I need to describe it to you; we’ve all had our share of banal conversations. Perhaps all conversations start off as boring because they are rooted in the concrete; of this too, I’m often guilty.
Mired in concrete, people are unified only by the same interests; if you don’t have commonality you’re regally fucked. Comparatively, a shared interest in abstraction is often enough to make topics cohere.
There’s an art to triggering viewpoints from other people, and it’s not always easy. Bringing a conversation round to an abstract bent usually requires some self-sacrifice on the part of the contributors. Concretions are safe, solid things that only exist and are; abstractions are often personal and revealing. We’re not talking facts anymore, we’re talking opinions. Those start wars, you know. Maybe we should just bring it all back to banter.
Onward, to duty. Tick tocks the clock, tick, tick tock, the lamp greens the light, and I go.
Now here we are in the time of rain, out in the open and from under the forest, and I ask you — what would you say the chances were of two raindrops hitting you in both eyes both at once? Here I am, in the lift, having a throwaway conversation with two strangers about how it’s the worst thing when the rain catches you naked and umbrellaless and lost, and then I realise my umbrella was with me all along, that it was always there.
at bay September 30, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit, things that are not quite things we know.add a comment
Home is how I keep the outside world at bay. My doors are almost never all the way open, save to a minute group of people who don’t have to read this to know who they are.
One of those people was over at my place this weekend; I’ve known her since we were 9, and hadn’t seen her for a couple of years. It’s a rare thing, being around someone who knows you for all that you are and accepts you in your entirety. I savour the novelty of not having to be a novelty.
It’s funny how you can not really talk to someone for intervals of months and years, and never need to; yet when you come together again, it’s all you do.
She arrived at noon on Friday; I did hardly any work from 12 onward:
a) I was ahead of schedule
b) so fuck it. see a)
c) we were having an extended conversation about life, the universe and everything
d) this conversation ran from 1.45 pm to 1.45 am in the morning
e) she lost her voice.
f) all of it.
It takes a different perspective to put your life into perspective. From her viewpoint my workplace was a haven of cushiness. I think it’s all too easy to assume that everyone has the right to a job that’s at least 60% enjoyable. Meaning: we all bitch too much about shit. At least we’re not working 8-2. Yet.
Sunday, it was Sunday. She was gone. I was standing on the peninsular Vancouver shore, filming my friends filming my germphobic friend crawling through hypodermic sand. One of them used to be a pornographer. They’re making a zombie movie, or something. I was there for the humanity of watching people around them watch them.
“I think I have AIDS,” my friend said, throwing his weight from foot to foot, shuddering the beach detritus from his skin. In his youth he was fed a diet of rice saturated with orange pop. Why any grandmother would do that to her grandchild, I don’t know.
I watched the watchers. You can surround yourself with all the people in the world and still not understand what it means to be known; to never know what people know about themselves, to only know that people will never know what you know about yourself. Sometimes we need to be known; sometimes we don’t.
Holding a camera that wasn’t mine, I pushed the trigger again, again. I stopped carrying my own camera around a while ago. It was too tempting to turn life into a series of beautiful, bastardised pictures that show everything and say nothing. Or show nothing and say everything. Either way. The camera is broken, anyway, or I am. I could never make it say what I wanted it to say, that in a picture of a hazy sky was a certain feeling I had about the world that day.
Nighttime. I lie umber and mellow on yielding cushions and think about that very small cluster of people that I hardly ever think about. I don’t need to. Some doors are always open to some people, even through this veiled impermanence called life. We don’t write, or call, or look, and yet our lives are always open to each other.
Sometimes you only ever need to know that you can choose not to be alone.
I’m only lying here, tossing out cheap phrases like “you can choose not to be alone” and murmuring to you that Google only knows two other people who chose to say “you can choose not to be alone”, that not till now did Google choose to know anyone who chose to say “you can choose to not be alone”, and now you are here, and I am gone.
synaesthesia September 20, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in pseudo-informative bullshit, things that are not quite things we know.3 comments
You’re a subtitle in my head.
You might have heard of the oddity known as synaesthesia, the merging of two or more senses. Some synaesthetes see colours when they hear sounds. I see you talking in monochrome text. The colour/sound association is such an archetype of the condition that I hadn’t realised what I experience is classifiably synaesthetic (not least because it seems prosaic to me compared to someone who tastes lemon when they hear ‘k’).
Well, I’ve finally found someone else who sees everything they hear in text.
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/acronick/entry/how_do_you/
…which is top Google search for ‘when I hear people speaking I see subtitles’.
The trigger for this query stemmed from a joke my colleagues were running in the kitchen at work; they were getting passersby to ‘help them work out a code problem’ by saying it out loud and having them write down (there was a bit more to this) p, 3, n, 1 and 5. Most people get it after completing the word; some canny individuals get it after writing the p3.
“‘Penis’?” I said the moment I heard the sequence, and didn’t understand their surprise. I didn’t get why the joke would possibly work on anyone until I remembered that most people get direct aural input from speech. It wasn’t until late high school that I realised that having subtitles in your head isn’t a universal experience.
I know there are plenty of other people who are quite capable of converting the letters; but for me the association between sound and text is inexorable. I will see letters/numbers in print somewhere in my head. Usually in Arial, Helvetica or Times New Roman, white floating on a black field.
Perhaps another way of explaining it is that most people read by converting text to sound; for them reading is double the effort of listening. For me it’s the exact opposite.
There are some odd aspects to all this, like how it’s really hard for me to make out song lyrics (I’m fine with the actual pitches, just not with the speech aspect — most of the time the words don’t even exist to me), or how I used to have the worst trouble in school spelling the simplest words out loud. ‘C-A-T’ is a struggle. Breaking a word into letter sounds is an alien concept. Soldier is [soldier]. Cat is [cat]. It is what it is. Every word is visual gestalt, an indivisible conglomerate.
I have heard Japanese is processed similarly by fluent readers. Not because the characters are pictures – very few have any remaining pictorial root – but because of their necessary visual chunkiness.
I read by processing huge chunks of text rather than going word by word. I don’t remember ever not knowing how to read, so maybe this oddness is a function of that.
I had the most horrible time maintaining concentration in classes because extended amounts of speech are unbearably arduous for me to process while maintaining focus (too slow. Being impatient doesn’t help). I have to focus pretty hard on conversations to figure out what people are saying, especially if they have accents or are speaking softly.
I can’t play games with very slow text output, either. It’s unbearably frustrating to have to wait for word/sentence/paragraph chunks to drip onto my screen. It’s like having a conversation with someone who spells every single word to you instead of saying it. Somebody tell me how t-h-i-s i-s a-t a-l-l t-o-l-e-r-a-b-l-e.
Often I pronounce words the way they’re spelled (eg, salmon), which has led to my having gotten a lot of stick over the years. I’m still filled with a child-like pride when I remember how to pronounce a word that is phonetically counterintuitive. If I hear foreign words, I have to know their spelling system or it’s almost impossible for me to remember the words I’m learning. I ask people to spell out confusing names for me so that I can chunk the letters into meaningful units and then remember their appearances.
There’s only one word I’ve ever had serious trouble with, and it’s bizarre. It looks ’wrong’ no matter how I look at it. I have no idea why. I know how to spell it, but I don’t know how to spell it. It doesn’t exist as a natural [word unit]; it gives me a queasy feeling. Sometimes, if I concentrate hard enough, words start to look like text patterns rather than ‘words’; that’s how bizarre looks to me.
I don’t have eidetic memory, but I do have good general visual memory.
This isn’t exactly the same condition that the blogger linked above does; she can’t hear voices, pitches or accents in her head, but those aren’t an issue for me. I have a decent grasp of scansion in text and have no problems with music. Just speech. I often have trouble recognising voices. No, my hearing is neither damaged nor abnormal.
Is it useful? It’s not great that I have trouble with lexical-auditory functions, but I process text very easily; it’s just the way I’m wired. Hell, I don’t know any better.
See what I’m saying?
I glossed over the mainstays of synaesthesia because I didn’t want to tarry too far beyond my personal experience with it. Here are some links for additional pursuit:
http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/ <- a fascinating representation of the most commonly-known type of synaesthesia (or synesthesia if you must). Check out the flash demonstration at http://otherthings.com/uw/syn/flash/syn25.html. I definitely don’t experience that. Also, it seems as though his synaesthesia doesn’t involve letters as text but as flashes of colour sensation.
specific ambition; a long foot September 11, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.1 comment so far
I had a friend who always told me she envied me for loving what I was doing;
I loved it no less and no more than she did; she could never see the amount of willpower it took me to actually get anything done.
Hell is being lazy and ambitious. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to curb some of my inherent laziness. Someone told me once to constantly surround myself with people who were willing to give me a good kick up the ass from time to time. It’s funny, because that’s how I ended up where I am today. Encircled by ass-kickers. Not by design, but because I lucked out in terms of finding good friends.
If it’s obvious that everyone must suck at something they’ve only just started doing, why then are people so willing to claim false competence? Why not assume we all have at least 99% more to learn? Even if you are latently gifted at something, chances are you’re going to get much better at it.
People keep selling themselves short by settling, or maybe just not caring. Coasting is as seductive as any opiate.
Perhaps the problem is that good is such a subjective quality. Are we good only when we stand next to the least capable of people? Should we not compare ourselves to the best of the best, and strive to surpass them? Why not? You got hubris, might as well flip it into something worthwhile.
Mind you, when you have a lot of general ambition but struggle with specific ambitions, things get frustrating. Maybe that’s the problem; people don’t ever find something they want to do. Maybe people don’t find something because they don’t care to look. Or maybe they just don’t realise there’s something out there worth looking for. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter.
Probably the latter.
I am guilty of all this, and of lacking focus. Independence is learning the fine art of kicking yourself in the ass.
Stephen says:
hmm, well i think you should probably start with some goals that aren’t that concrete, like getting ___ done
start by doing some things that’ll increase your capacity to get other shit done, so you can take advantage of the snowball effect
Candice; says:
i want to own a planet
not a big one like jupiter, i think
just a little one. this one’s pretty good.
Stephen says:
then eat it?
Candice; says:
yeah.
Stephen says:
that’s pretty good!
Candice; says:
thanks
Stephen says:
i hear pluto’s crunchy, if that counts as a planet
wind, growth, bus August 14, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit, things that are not quite things we know, verbiage clusterfuck.add a comment
We (in this place, at this time) live in a time and place where being considered liberal and open-minded has become a tenet to aspire to. Yeah, it would be nice if people would actually stop talking about being open-minded and just fucking be open-minded. Or just stump up some integrity and stop wasting my time. It’s taxing, dealing with some miasmic melange of the two; viz: ”I’m open-minded, but only about things I’m not narrow-minded about.”
I’d rather hear the words people aren’t saying when they say something they don’t really want to say. Maybe we just don’t always want to hear the truth even when it’s something we should hear. Well shit, you run, you hide, you lose your life. You could get hit by a bus. Keep staring into the sun; don’t flinch, don’t look away.
Spit and shake. I see you never; we can be professional about our mutual disregard. Let’s be polite. Let’s be honest. Is it more polite to be honest, or dishonest?
Sometimes I want to stand before the wind and hear what the wind shouts back.
What two people say to each other doesn’t necessarily make sense. It’s like a matching game; sometimes we learn to speak in pulses, with fluency. You keep stumbling along, keep guessing, and one day strike the right notes. It’s all about congruency; hit counterpoint and unfurl the patchwork harmonies of the heart. The beats aren’t always what you thought they were. Better adapt before the melody breaks. You know it’s going to end someday. Better make the most of it.
Earlier this week I was walking for the sake of feeling the ground beneath my feet; across the street a man sobbed and wailed, a cadenza of rage that split the heavy black sky. I don’t know what the wind told him.
Perhaps the spectators standing by were looking for the same, perhaps we were just waiting for something to happen and lurch us along, all of us overwhelmed by our own rhythm. Maybe we were waiting for a conductor, waiting for a baton-wave to unify. Warbling along, meandering along, looking for someone to syncopate the breaks in our souls, singing hello, hello, I loved you, goodbye.
On a different day, on a different coast, I opened up my mouth. Lungs filled with fragments, I flew emotion into the wind. The wind shrieked back; she took my words and twisted them and turned them into words I never knew were there.
There I was, and here I am.
Autumn was coming. Autumn was coming, sweeping last remnants of summer away, sweeping us into the dark. It was never about the getting; it was about the giving-up.
Night crackled, white sparks flared, blazing storefronts shuttered into sleep. The bus came battering down the road, hurtling, honking, reeking metal bolts and limits breaking, crashing forward with a great steel groan. I smelled the sharp acrid rage of it. I smelled it coming. A foot from losing skin and cartilage and life, I stood there and let the wind shred my face. And I didn’t bat an eye.
love in the time of gonorrhoea July 18, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in farcical review bullshit, things that are not quite things we know.add a comment
Everybody is reading that book about the pickup artist, Neil Strauss.
More than a mack textbook, it is a memoir, a study of the ins and outs of the social condition. The man who wrote it wrote also for the New York Times. Make of that what you will.
The book’s prevailing mantra is: Attraction is not a choice, and you and I and we can have everyone via hamfisted palmistry, spoon bending and ESP.
It’s not too hard to see why people buy into the mystique. We pretend to be a collection of on/off switches, unanalogue, discrete.
What a beautiful conceit, that you can reduce seduction into a set of techniques that will guarantee you entry into anyone in the world. Are we waves and tremors, or sticks and holes? There is nothing absolute about being human, about neocortical impulses that feed our hearts to head.
There is nothing human in the objectification of an adversary; the gaudy prizes of bars and clubs are just ticks on a list, 8s, 9s, 10s, 11s. The more you play the game, the more you realise the game means nothing. Strauss has no small dose of pity and revulsion for the creepers trapped in their own webs, not least himself. These are some of the unhappiest men you’ll meet.
Isn’t it strange, that certain truisms apply to all fields? Those who blindly follow preset routes rarely achieve greatness; he who only learns by rote never grasps the whole.
Seduction, one supposes, is all very well. Then comes a point where one thinks hard and long of love, in the time of gonorrhoea.
Not much has changed since we sat in school and wondered why some lead, and others follow. We make our way through life and find the game never changes; we want what we are denied.
To those who believe we can bypass the random variance of the human heart, note this and note it well: in the end, the only woman who stole Strauss’s heart was the one he could not snare with strings of theory. He played the game. She played him better.
Along Burrard after dinner, I watched a girl pose for a man, silhouetted by the splash of fountain spray. He said something that made her laugh; in the binary light of the camera, his smile seemed real. He blushed, or the red focus stung his skin. I didn’t know.
It’s for all of us to turn things over and around. The oldest friend comes out with the newest things; maybe we’re too fast to fix an image in our heads. Now I understand Cubism as never before; I see Picasso struggling, presented with the problem of presenting all sides all at once.
Irrational people do rational things, rational people do irrational things. All people are unknown quantities, now and forever.
Sitting in the semi-dark, bathed in the soft penumbra of the screen, I close the game and shut my eyes. I chase the awkward beauty that exists when we race toward a goal, unscripted, unfettered, unaware.
space: a cat, in a box July 17, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.add a comment
The way we dress the spaces we choose to inhabit says all we need to say about ourselves, in less time than it takes to take off our shoes.
What’s in your box? I keep a rug, a chair, a few cushions. It starts to feel crowded. I like it like a hollow shell.
Space, it’s relative; 12 Brazilian students crammed themselves into a one bed flat before they got booted out and I came. I can’t fathom this tub being large enough for two. 535 square feet for 12 people; that’s 45 square feet per person. I stand 5ft 1 and take up 535 square feet of living space. It seems a reasonable amount to me. I say that I don’t feel a need to have more space than this, but perhaps one day I will. In the style of Schrodinger I vacillate; yes or no, yes or no, and who can tell until the moment comes?
On a plane, someone takes up 200 dollars’ worth of your 600 dollar seat, and suddenly inches are a matter of insufferable magnitude.
Back to personal space; you’re not paying me any rent, so here’s an eviction notice.
My landlord drops in from New Zealand to take a look at my apartment. He’s thinking about finding a job in Vancouver. Either I find a new flat or I bring down the entire Vancouver VFX industry.
Webworked cells, cloistered windows. This is living, ant-style. A foot of wall, that’s all that spares me the indignity of shared rooming. I value my personal space enough to fight you for it, in a cage surrounded by half a million strangers.
You come into my parlour and you’re that much closer to me, threading through the cloistered chambers of my heart. You come into my closet and leave yellow leaking down the side of my lavatory bowl — what should we call that?
My landlord leaves. I slip on new shoes and teeter to the door. And I, five inches taller, pause.
At my height, I don’t see the dust on the top of my refrigerator, nor on the tops of doorways.
At 6ft 2 my landlord sees things I should have cleaned, had I realised space exists outside of my band of sight.
My cat, who inhabits my flat at 0ft 9, looks up and sees the dust that lies beneath.
It’s all relative, like with those Brazilians. They sat on a crate with wings for a few hours, then piled their mattresses into an even smaller box. You gotta envy that kind of gumption. You gotta wonder where they went. I gotta wonder where you’d go.
Writhing down wormholes, surfing past singularities, breaking time and space to get to where we want to be. Space, she’s a hard lover. I loved once but would not stay; continents always drift away.
Don’t, don’t think of that; today is here, today is now, skimming the sweet salt susurrus of sea, snow peaks slumbering by your sail, six knots in a lazy haze.
Wind rises, earth turns, sun sleeps. A speck on a speck in a deep blue sky, I stare hard at the night. The stars are smaller than I can see; summer fades to fall debris.
Kiss me before flying, baby. I’ll see you on the other side.
the gleaner July 17, 2008
Posted by eatnorthamerica in onanistic bullshit.add a comment
Uglyskins was like patchwork, stitched together from a hundred different types of skin.
I craned my neck to get a better look at him through the letterboxed window. The orderly fumbled with the key to the grimy door.
“All yours, sir,” he said, eyeing the neat cut of my coat and shoes, sleek against the pitted concrete floor. He stood aside.
I went through the doorway, and the door shut behind me. I looked at the man within. The unforgiving fluorescent light winked on and off and on again.
He had come to the stained soft walls of the cell nameless and silent, and he lay on the unyielding cot, arms and legs stiff in the restraints at his sides. His hands were balled into tense fists; they quivered occasionally, in perfect harmony with the tic of his pale blue eyes. I could not tell his age through the ruin that was his face. He was stitched together from a hundred different beings; I could not tell how many of them were human.
“I’m Doctor Sands,” I said, swallowing, and walked towards him. “What’s your name?”
Closer, he looked like nothing that should have walked on two legs, or four, or eight. The stitches were tighter around his eyes and mouth, but it made them none the prettier. His eyelashes were gone. It was impossible to tell how he might have looked in one skin.
The blue eyes kept blinking. His mouth was slack.
“I’m here to help,” I said, lowering my voice. “Tell me what happened to you.”
Last year, fresh out of my internship, I had seen a man who bathed himself in acid to rid himself of the invisible ants that crept endlessly over his skin. I had thought, for the first time, that a man should have the right to his death.
I had seen men who had performed arson upon themselves, men who had pared their flesh from bone, but I had never seen anything as hideous as him.
Perhaps it was the guilt that made me reach out and put my hand on his. Perhaps it was the warmth of my hand, and my pity, that snapped his livid gaze to mine.
“I ate them all,” he said. “I ate the girl in the red hood, her wolf, the swan boys, the girl with the goose, that giant man. The snow white girl, the rose red child. All of them playing their parts for centuries. Saying the same words over and again. I set them free.”
I turned the names over in my head. For a moment they seemed familiar, and then the feeling was gone.
“Why this?” I asked, and I touched the threads that ran through his hide.
“Someone must remember,” he said. He shook his head, and whimpered, and shook.
I caught sight of a dark mass on the underside of his shoulder, pushing his arm up from the cot.
Something clumped and ugly sprouted from his skin, breaking through a film of blood and pus. It was hard to see in the cell, but in the wavering light it shuddered and parted, like a clot of feathers.
years later December 10, 2007
Posted by eatnorthamerica in things that are not quite things we know.3 comments
years ago, you were rattling down the railway with possibly one of the most beautiful people on the planet and the way the sun hit their face through the dust-smeared window told you, told you that all the proportional possibility of golden curves and judicious symmetry sat quivering on the gently-fraying seat before you; there it was, an ineffable display of human construction.
and then years later you met them again and realised that years later makes a difference, because time, time has a tendency to pass.
it’s exactly what facebook’s doing right now; throwing up pictures of people you never saw after the day you walked out of the gates of school, and maybe making you realise you never knew how old you really were until you saw how old everyone else really was.
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