I can’t leave the library, I don’t have this track on my Nomad only in my laptop, and I think if I stop listening to it, I’ll die… I don’t have any way or any tool with me to get the track into my Nomad… I don’t think I can ever leave the library again…

—

So I was all gonna sit around outside and have me a think but somebody fucking turned the heat off, it’s freezing in Chicago! Good thing I brought my hoodie, but I’m not gonna sit outside anymore.

Jesus, this is pathetic:

I don’t have a single excuse now, I’m just not working. I’m not even “wandering.” I’m just standing here explicitly not working.

so close and yet so far

life, kidsssss

—

…
 …
  …

  if ( freud_was_right )
    return ( back_to_womb_b4_ctrl_algo );

/*
/* 2.29.76
/* This is the main loop
/* I don”t have time to document it fully now,
/* will fuck with it later.
*/

/*
/* 5.24.04
/* Still haven”t fucked with it, damn,
/* steems stable, though.
*/

  while ( 1 ) {
    all_hangups[++pain_index] = new_hangup = try_fail_gethurt( (void *) all_you_have );
    if ( focus_on ( &new_hangup ) == oops_kill_self )
      exit ( banal_note_key ( new_hangup ) );
    else
      sleep ( not_enough );
  }
}

/*
/* This next function takes care of victories,
/* it”s not yet clear that this is needed,
/* will implement if we end up needing this case.
*/

int i_won( struct life_experience *mylife ) {
  log_and_punt ( “int i_won(): Implement me!” );
}

  …
 …
…

post-mortem:

walked six miles, mostly carrying boxes, love your hate, trust no-one, spend your cash on booze-o-hol, saw too many people to wave to and one thing not understood, wanted to hit things, didn’t pay the fucking surcharge, got my flight info, ate pseudo-mexican , didn’t violate someone’s line, talked about theses, didn’t care about theses, found out about leading discussion on friday, decided to kill someone, couldn’t get up the balls to kill someone, drank instead, there is no such thing as a pina colada slurpee in this neighborhood to add booze-o-hol to, will have a pina slurpee plus ciclon once landed in new zion

i am trying so fucking hard

fuck . you . all

things I learned today:

– guitars are a pain in the ass to ship
– I really hate having to make lists
– there are some big things I haven’t thought through
– it’s hot and smelly in Chicago
– my feet don’t want to be bare
– I eat more than my girlfriend thinks
– boxes cost more than I thought
– life’s a bummer when you’re a hummer

I think I slept in a fscked up position… my neck is really stiff.

—

Rumsfeld’s Sovereignty Shell Game
Rumsfeld Bans Cameras
Diplomatic Immunity for 130,000
Banning The Vote
Combat Boots in Sunni Abu Hanifa

—

So, Lovelock is finally suggesting that in the face of an accelerating global crisis, nuclear may be an important technology. If society is going to start ramping up nuclear again, maybe governments and utilities will finally transcend the impossibly loaded political climate surrounding new nuclear technologies and implement the safer, more sustainable nuclear technologies that have been invented in the many intervening decades since digital watches and pocket calculators turned up.

Accelerator-driven waste-transmuting fast breeder or subcritical fast spectrum reactors like the Galena reactor, both of which produce very little long-lived radioactive waste and moderate coolant temperature by simple intervention-free convection, rather than needing moving parts and human monitors for control systems, are infinitely “greener” than traditional LWR/HWR/GMR designs.

But probably not, since it costs slightly more. We’ll end up with the same old Three Mile Island and Chernobyl designs and piles and piles of spent rods that will have to be buried at Yucca Mountain… and we’ll continue to have to mine uranium at an alarming rate (which produces an incredible amount of pollution in and of itself) rather than exploiting Pu239 created by breeding. Oh well, that would suit the Department of Homeland Security just fine, I suppose, even though the concentrations of Pu240 and Pu241 in the resulting fissionable material would make it unsuitable for weapons use.

God, the world is fscked up.

—

I stayed up until 4.00 in the morning, but I didn’t do any more work on, nor did I finish, the paper I was working on. Now, of course, I regret it. Fsck.

I wonder if the dead person is any of the rotten faculty or staffers that I used to want to kill. Maybe that über-bitch police officer on the first floor that jumped J.J.? I can hope…

Pre-empting the Bill of Rights

—

I had typed all this shit here to make another entry, but I realize I didn’t mean any of it anyway. I don’t know what I’m gonna do tonight. Finish my paper, probably. That sucks rocks.

The sister is coming to visit on the 8th and is gonna fly to SLC w/me on the 11th. Kool.

Paper writing is this bizarre art form wherein you can’t ever conceive of the entirety of what you’re doing at any given moment along the way; you always feel as though you’re juggling several burgeoning piles of shit just at the periphery of your consciousness and you intuitively type at a ridiculous pace just trying to get some of it preserved before it all falls into a worthless mess on the floor around you.

Then, when you’re done, you look at what you wrote and say, “That’s not at all what I thought I would write, but it’s sort of in the same vein and I can probably fix it up enough to use it.”

Then you have a shot and you look out the window and wonder.

Jesus, I gotta stop going to bed at 5.30 in the morning, you’d think I was out of school already or somepine. Fucka whateva I gonna get me sum whskeeeee.

I’m all hung up on camera gear again I’m selling most of this shite on eBay because I’m getting more experienced with the lens lines for Canon and have decided tentatively that me gear oughtta be: Sigma 12-24mm EX f/4.5-5.6, Sigma 28-70mm EX f/2.8, Sigma 70-200mm EX f/2.8, Tokina 24-200mm AT-X f/3.5-5.6 (for walkarounds, already got). I had the 28-70mm EX but sold the bastard earlier this year. Now I regret it. Ohwell, I’ll grabbit again. Yeah, I like the Sigma shit. So sue me!

I taped up my belt again so now I can wear it without bleeding onto the pavement thanks to my metal allergy… at least until the tape wears off. I’m getting good taping metal bits off when I have the patience. Only problem is that while the tape is new every time I move the tape crinkles and it sounds like I’m wearing a diaper or something. Heh… I’ll shite my Pampers for you!

F’n bog roll world… Blah. I had this whole other paragraph that I wanted to get out of me, but now I forget what it was so it must have got out of me already. I’ll just say: I dig nature.

Henry Rollins + Flag = Goodness.

This is good.

Like Nina Hagen says on the Goethe-Institut films: Punk’s Not Dead.

—

Aqueous, I am missing talking to your ass.

American culture is a strange, repressive, embarrased one.

And me, I am fond of chemicals. Given a chance, I will dissolve myself completely. Synthetic poison, I am your boy.

I’ve been the fool too many times to ever go out on a limb first again. Life is stupid.

Huzzah!

—

I know what I want!

I want to spend the whole fucking evening, the next eight hours, watching Northern Exposure (with ads) and drinking a 24-pack of Cornoa Light.

Yes, Corona Light. Shut the fuck up!

And don’t call me a hypocrite, either!

I mean, life is complicated, like me!

It’s a Saturday evening at the Regenstein, kids. It feels wierd to be alone and to be looking forward to a night alone and a remainder-of-the-weekend alone, but everyone on campus is doing the same thing right about now: working on all the papers they still have to finish for Academic 2003-04.

I’ve talked out my ass in this paper for a good twelve pages and run out of things to say (and things that I know off the top of my fscking head). So I started finding data and sources and all that jazz that I was dreading — I hadn’t had much luck earlier. But tonight I’m just clever enough to have rephrased one of the Google searches I was using and suddenly all kinds of great data has jumped out at me from the last couple of years. So now I’ve just got to get some maps and dig something useful out of the dumpster that is spatial theory in sociology. I don’t know whether it’s going to add up to a long enough paper for my purposes, though. A thorough and readable case study or policy paper typically needs to run 25-35, not 17-if-you’re-lucky. Not to mention that this paper is somewhat late, so “more impressive rather than less” would have been nice. Oh well.

I’m not thrilled. I’m not dejected. I’m hardly fscking here at all. Somewhere deep, deep inside me is the urge to rent a whole bunch of DVDs, buy a twelve-pack, and climb into my I-House womb, but of course I won’t. I don’t know if I’ll get much more done on this paper today, though.

I’m freezing fscking cold in this library.

Life, in general, is a pretty boring, infantile, lonely state of affairs without too much payoff in the end. Ennui.

Long History of US Torture Manuals
Abu Ghraib: They Gray Zone
International Committee of the Red Cross Report
Amnesty Report on Human Rights in Iraq

—

At the Reg again. Things are happening too quickly and I am tense and sad. Having come here in the rain, I also smell like a wet dog. The rain is pretty nice, it makes me wish I was sitting by an open window drinking coffee and reading a novel, not sitting in a cold library working on a paper.

It looks like I’m leaving on the eleventh. I gotta pack my shit up and get it sent to storage.

The world is no place for a kid like me.

“Honk if you also woke up feeling like shit!”

“Honk if you’re secretly laughing at this poor fool who has no more inventiveness in him than to post to his blog after waking up feeling like shit!”

“That’s okay, he knows you’re collectively plotting against him anyway. He knows the whole world hates him and that’s okay because he hates the whole world.”

Like Tuesdays with Morrie, only you’ll wear pointed hoods and Jesus will love you. IF you make a TWO-pronged irony-funny, if the Jews die again because you’ve hung them on the cross simply because they were already there once and it was evil then so it will be a worse evil now, is it still funny?

Are you there, God? It’s me, fucking Margaret.

—

Q: How do you know when you’re not respecting yourself?

A: You don’t. You don’t even know what fucking time it is. Take a pill.

—

don’t sell defective condoms to high school kids for fun and profit
just give the shy ones your business instead

—

Hate is everything.
To suffer is to beautify; to beautify is to exploit; to exploit is to rape.
To cause suffering is to beautify; to beautify is to exploit; to exploit is to rape.
To prevent suffering is to beautify; to beautify is to exploit; to exploit is to rape.
God is to Kill, Kill, Kill.

Sometimes in my blogs I write things of such beauty that they’re utterly perfect. Only I can’t leave them here because they terrify me. It’s almost an unbearable loss. But of course these things haven’t disappeared altogether; they still live somewhere inside me.

Hate is the most beautiful thing known to man — so beautiful that, in fact, as is the case with the sun itself, one can’t look at it directly without somehow injuring oneself. And so, everyone does his best not to see it. Even when perceived peripherally, though, every person can sense something of its majesty, of its baroque unity, its focus, its mercury-and-platinum will.

Hate is the heaviest of industries, littered across the continuum without bound, steely, smooth, and perfect in the sunlight, ready for the smiles of six billion children.

—

Forever at heart, I am four years old.
Forever at heart, I am throwing a tantrum and vomiting on the shoes of my elders.

Just went downstairs to the I-House basement to get my laundry out of the dryer. There’s some Christfest on the laundry room television. You know, piano music and a long shot of endless ocean waves on a sunny day filling the screen, along with a voiceover by a very white sounding male saying:

“Lord, where there is despair, let me sow hope. Your contributions of $XYZ million dollars are today allowing us to broadcast across the Middle East in countries where the United States has a presence. Thanks to the millions given by our viewers, the men, women, and children of Afghanistan and Iraq can hear the same breathtaking message of hope and the love of Christ that Americans enjoy every day… because there is no greater gift than the love of Christ… no greater gift than hope.”

I dunno, dude. Think maybe those millions could create more hope if they were spent on food? How about reconstruction, or even medical care for the men, women, and children of Afghanistan and Iraq? If I was an unemployed, homeless, hungry Muslim man sitting in the rubble of Kabul right now watching millions of American dollars being poured into giving me “the love of Christ” on the American army post television set, I’d be ready to flip someone a finger.

So I’m walking home from the Regenstein library and I meet a panhandler on 57th who gives me a very average-ish pitch at best.

“I’m in a good mood,” I say, reaching into my pocket, “so you can have whatever I’ve got.”

“I guess beggars can’t be choosers, then,” he says, in a snide voice.

I pause for a moment, grinning.

“If I wasn’t in such a good mood,” I say, “I would turn around right now and not give you a thing. But here you go anyway.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, obviously contrite, “I thank you and may God bless you.”

I smile and continue down the street, bemused at the guy’s bravado. Not twenty steps later, however, on the same fucking block, I suddenly run into another panhandler. I don’t see this one at first because he’s like two-foot-six and as thin as a match, and dirty enough to blend into the darkness almost completely.

“Sir,” he says in that all-too-familiar tone, “I’m homeless and I need two dollars to get on the El and get back to my momma’s house.”

“I’m sorry,” I say to him, “I just gave everything I had to that guy over there.”

“You say what?!” he says, going ballistic and coming right up to my back, “I been standing here all fucking night working this corner and you gonna give your pennies to some two-bit…”

Two panhandlers in one block, and both are gonna give me shit? And it’s gonna cost me seventy-five cents in change?

“Huh!” I say, turning around and looking at him with my head tilted.

“Oh, you kind of a big dude, for a white boy, ain’tcha?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say without moving.

He turns without saying a thing — no apology, no departing greeting, nothing — and walks away. These guys are rapidly losing my business.

—

I hate God because he lied to me about his existing.

—

In stark contrast to these idiots walking the streets, some of the I-House staff are pretty cool. Deborah and this one night guy in particular. I hadn’t seen him in a while and when I came back tonight, he was like, “Hey, man! Long time no see! How’s life? What you been up to?”

“You know,” I said, trying to sound tired, “work. That’s all.”

“Well ain’t shit else do to,” he responds with a smile on his face, “you know how it is, either you workin’ or you dead.”

To a guy that just spent all day in the Regenstein library working, that sounds like the voice of a friend.