Security: the restriction of information
2003-07-23 - 12:16 a.m.
oh, if i was in power [the world would go to shyte]. another interesting change i would make to the government is to add an amount of practical realism. the government should be run by a solid constitution , founded on precise instead of general laws, so we�d need no trials unless some new part of the technology changed our culture and we were forced to adapt new laws accordingly. the people that ran the government would also have to be practical, firm in their beliefs and free of physical damage o the brain, so they could make and argue for split-second decisions that would effect the entire nation. these leaders would be selected not from the upperclass drug addicts, but the common people, the homies spittin� their lungs out on the streets, and the techies bustin� their asses to rewire a building. the low/mid-class labourers would own the government (but individually, only for a year or so for their term), because it is the people that have [recently] had to labour for their food and family that will make the government what i want it to be. honest and effective, and not intrusive at all. oh yes, and information would be free. if i was in power.
i seem to be completely in reality now, though i still have a tendency to �fill in the gaps� even when there aren�t gaps there. example to follow. when approaching a half-obscurred sign that said �*twork *raming�, i translated it to �network assramming� just because i was in an information technology sort of mood. see also, see july21 (just to prove that it�s not just my eyes, or at least, it�s also my ears). also, i�ve been talking to myself farr too much to be healthy. daydreaming that i�m in a slightly different situation, that people are in slighty diffent places, saying things that set me up to say �cool� responses. for no reason at all, i�ve convinced myself that this is what normal people think about when they sleep.
July23. dropped off Mike�s SAAB at a scrapyard in Albany. a moment of silence please. on the way out of the yard (which Mitch and I poked around in for a bitsie) we say a couple BMWs sitting around, and i�ve since called the owner, who has offered to give me three near-complete BMWs with interchangeable parts with the one i have, for 2000$. one of them still runs, his babygirl, but he�s got too many other cars to take care of, so she�s up for adoption (though only for sale to people that inquire specifically, as i did).
July22. new employees commin� in on the train. Jamie (also 20 years old) is back from having-a-baby sabbatical (which is to say, not very sabbatical-like at all), Kristi was transferred to another store, Rick and something-that-began-with-a-�D� have started training. Karren, Tim, Sharon, and I are still around for the time being.
picked up a hitchhiker, 60+ years old, his car had broken down a while back and was walking across troy to get back to his house so he could call tripple-A. nearly ran him over as i went back and forth on the issue of whether i should stop or not, and when my car stalled just a little ways ahead of him (largely due to my indecision), i figured it was a sign that i should. chatted for a bitsie, and dropped him off on Hoosick street, and he slipped me a ten dollar bill for gas afterward, which of course i attempted to give back to him, and then realized that he had a reason for giving it to me, that it would make him feel better to have given it to me, so i took it. also, i realized (after just getting out of a 9.5hour shift) that he was paying me for more than an hour worth of work, and thinking about it that way helped me to establish a value to the money. Of course, Mitch lectured me for a long time about not picking up hitchhikers in NY, and he�s probably right, but i�m not sure how long it would�ve taken the man to get to his house otherwise, if he even would�ve.
tonight, i am getting very little sleep, and not, for once, due to playing computer games or reading a book, though both things will be attempted. Mike#2, is over, and the wall is making a profuse amount of noise, and i�ll watch myself pick up toppled aliens in my room and stand them back up, only to see them fall over again. 0.5 richter. i just find it funny, and I�ll jokingly mention it to chris tomorrow morning, but he won�t look too amused.
July21. the rumours are true, i have been reunited with the god-forsaken-internet*. I did a mission impossible through the attic to get the cable across, so we could split the cable connection with our neighbours (see below, June16). little rubber tiger flashlight and the CAT-V in my mouth, i�m surprised i didn�t have a hairball afterwards.
Definition: plant. the new-age word for factory/sweatshop, where one wastes time in order that s/he may furnish her/himself with the necessities of life, and by doing so, can show up to work another day.
Alternative Definition: a symbolic representation of life.
July20. you wake up in a gas station, behind the counter. you�ve been pressing buttons on instinct and you�re not sure how long it�s been since you were last conscious. pull your hat a little more over your eyes and roll them over in their sockets, just five more minutes, mum. you hear the sound of complaining at two-o-clock, the sound of a disgruntled customer at one, and you realize that the two sounds are the same, except that one has a deeper pitch, and seems to be coming from the complainer�s wife. �did you even hear what he was saying to you?� you look down at your hands and mouth and realize that you�ve torn the receipt out of the register, and were going over it for the second time�*blank look*�maybe they weren�t complaining about the price. you tilt your head a little to the right and look to see if you have a line of customers, but chances are you do, so you look back at the machines (gasoline and lotto) too see if anyone�s stealing anything from you. �heell-oh, are you in there? he was say-ing that it doesn�t matter which side of the counter you�re on, if you have something to do with those titties hangin� all over the place, you�re going to hell!� she half-shouts, with a dramatic wave toward the Penthouse magazines, annual edition. you just smile and nod, and say okay, yea, sure�because if you make a bloody mess out of the situation, or say that hell doesn�t exist, you loose your job. and you realize as you wake up more, you�d rather wake up to this job than wake up inside a cardboard box on the street.
the offshoot of a hurricane hit the gas station today, but i didn�t catch it�s name or license plate. we lost power a couple times, regained it seconds afterward. and i just sighed as i remembered myself, as if in the future, saying something about today being �the day of reckoning, the day of judgement�. entertainment through religious banter.
these last couple weeks have been nothing but a shopping list of memory tasks. i�m getting better a it, but am still noticeably flaky when asked to remember something specific. memory is like juggling, an acquired skill, that i have yet to learn more than the basics of. it�s just not the sort of algorithmic memorization i�m used to. the memory of tools, if you will. it�s just datums�three chocolate, two mint chip, one black sweet cherry�two red, three blue, one yellow�how much change was given and when�who pumped how much gasoline�what kind of cigarettes a particular customer buys every other day, and how much one pack costs after tax�faces. datums last for a second and then die. i used to think that this sort of memory was �useless� because it�s easily lost, and doomed to be forgotten, and completely specific. but they are very useful when they�re available at just the right time, and thusly do they serve there purpose through their existence, though it be a short and otherwise meaningless one. and maybe the human race is just a tiny sting on the pinky finger of something much, much larger.
Revelation: odd or dangerous noises come in pairs.
June18-20. there�s a couple days missing in here, i just thought i�d put this in to keep the backwards-chronological system straight. these days were lost, one of which was probably spent sleeping, but somewhere in there i was in a bad mood and cleaned raw sewage out of the bottom of trash cans which have Never been cleaned. helped me feel a little better, because i know my job will never get any worse.
June17. power failure at the movie theature, going to see Terminator3. on our way back home (a complicated navigation because Hoosick street has been closed for construction, just like every other part of this town) we found another movie theature, which cost a-dollar-fifty less to see the same movie. duct tape on one section of seats, but once you got into the movie, you forgot you were in a shitty building. got back home, just now, at 11:30, and i feel really really bad about my anti-punctuality. Becca was gonna call at nine, and i just didn�t work out the swatch-ticks well at all.
June16. met the guys next-door, Andy and Jesse, both look like new-age hippies. Andy is a comp-sci major at RPI, and will help us get the internet connection up. have yet to meet girls next-door-downstairs, but will meet the girl downstairs (who lives with her boyfriend) a couple days after today, for a brief minute in passing.
MADD (mothers against drunk driving) called today, my day off. they wanted to know if i wanted a subscription to Time magazine, so they could raise money. i asked what the money would be used for, and she sad it�d be used to fund programs at schools (in which they scare children into thinking one of their classmates has dies in a car accident) or is spent calling all the people in a given area and talking to them about how drunk driving is bad. i know it�s bad. that�s why i don�t do it. the people that do it know it�s bad too (maybe that�s why they do it?). so i asked the most simple question�why raise money for a program with calls when you could be getting the mission of the program done by simply talking to me now. cut out the friggin� Time magazine, just get straight to what you�re trying to do (even though it�s not very effective). the service lady responded by saying that she was just employed to make money for the organization, just doing her job. practicality and creative solutions foiled by American business mentality yet again. this reminds me of the conversation Mitch and i had about the service revolution of America. it seems that over the years, we�ve been redesigning our culture and our job market into service-related industries�we don�t think of things in terms of what needs to be done, but how much it costs to do something for someone else. the worst part about this is the drastic unbalance of service professions to labourers. councilors and psychologists, veterinarians, writers, musician, tv stars�many of these jobs are extraneous and only the result of a change in values in our culture (for some reason everyone has this really bizarre notion of being healthy, and it friggs with everyone at least a little, but it creates lots of service jobs (designed to make us healthier while keeping us in a constant state of thinking that we aren�t healthy enough), so it�s okay, right?) little Johnny has a goal, he just wants to be an astronaut. who are you to tell him he has to be a janitor, or a farmer, just because that�s what the economy needs? and after all, it�s your kid, and why should your kid have to do *that* kind of work, regardless of whether he actually has ambitions in life? we don�t make stuff anymore, there is no industrial industry. we either make our stuff in other countries through international business, or trade for it, or leave it for the illegal aliens. and that�s the real clincher�an increasing number of the labour force is not even a part of this country. if they were all to be deported or if the borders were to really be closed, we�d crumble. we are an empire, and empires are built by slaves.
June15. we have these slips at work people have to sign when they use a credit card to pay for things. Guy came in today, bought a pack of cigarettes, and left his number on the back �call me�. course, i had gone to do something else, and one of the other employees picked it up and asked me about it�laughed my ass off. you know you�re in NY when. i confronted the customer about it a couple days after he came in, �i just wanted to say, i had a reason for not calling you�i�m just not gay� *shrugg*. he responded with something to the effect of �yea, i wasn�t really sure, but i figured it was worth a shot.� went into the cooler and laughed my ass off.
June14. the following are ideas on how to make my gas station superior to all others in the history of gas stationing. *crumplecrumple*
June13 (Sunday). buying shtuff in the morning that i really don�t need. ten bucks at the dollar store on carthings and spices. network pieces and groceries that i already have an abundance of. alarm clock. clothes and an Atari at Goodwill. enter Tim#4 (who normally works at another Stewart�s Shoppe). he�s just here for the day, but he gave me the name of a funeral home to contakt for a job in the industry of death. Broke a coffee pot by picking it up (the handle broke off) and melted some ice cream simultanously one a single customer�s order. Put the melted ice cream into a cup, called it my �chocolate munster mistake� and bought it as a shake, cleaned up the mess and dealt. Smiled a little, just because I have a tendency to do things like that when bad stuff happens, and there�s not too much at stake. I laugh at/for the people that would have cried. Talked about how goddamned cool maine is with one lady while we had a slump in customers later that night, and it was good to remember home.
June12. went to a one-month employee checkup orientation thing, gas station on 2nd and 112th. moved into my new apartment with Chris, the vegetarian. Shifted down into third gear, coming into town.
June11. Double D�j� Vu, but a little fuzzy. had a pre-vision of me in the same room of Mitch�s apartment, Whinnie-the-Pooh-like pillow (but outside the vision, it�s really the lion king), food in a stack next to the bed, and thinking about how i�m being forced to share with a rodent that lives in Mitch�s ceiling, �
at work, the lotto machine jammed and died several times, and i struggled to fix it but still have yet to refeed the paper properly. damn machines.
Definition: Jerry-Rig. a construct resembling something built German-esque (specifically, by a German stuck in a hole). I put the muffler on my car today, in the rain, with my right shoulder in a gutter. Except that it really isn�t the muffler I needed, and doesn�t have the right type of attachment to fit onto my car. so I bent a universal hangar into a loop, and put it into the rubber gasket (from the original hangar) and it seems to be holding.
Revelation: mathematical-logical thought is the only realm in which 1/2 of 2 is exactly equal to 1.
June7. tim is 39 years old. i found this hard to believe because he acts like a great deal of my peers, and seems about as mature as a late teenager, but insists he has the wisdom of many ages. 318 boxes of cigarettes were delivered to hoosick street this week. at 30 cartons per box, 20 packs per carton, 20 cigarettes per pack, and 350 BTUs per cigarette�no wonder it�s been so damn hot in this area lately.
June5. other than someone running into the side of the gas station with his truck (drunk)work was pretty much business as usual today.
proprioception does not exist. and when i say that it doesn�t exist, i mean that in the same sense that i say everything doesn�t exist, and in saying that i mean that another convention overlaps it and still describes it fully, in this case, the convention of behaviourism. how is it that a person �knows� where their hand is, in the dark? the layman might suggest that it�s because the muscles oscillate at a certain frequency per myofibril strand, and the brain uses those frequencies of firing to analyze how hard a muscle is working, and then analyzes the integrity of the muscle, to find a reasonable location for the hand to be. but as much as we�d like to think otherwise, neurons are unidirectional, and that does not allow for muscular output. and if this were to be the case, the brain would have to be analyzing the locations of every minute contortion of the body every moment and doing massive trig on the sidelines (which would bring us into the parietals of the cortex), and besides, it wouldn�t fit with the concept that we are clearly vision-based critters. the cerebellum then, may instead be a specific type of learning center, one specialized in pain/stimulation. to better explain it, the cerebellum may be a center for corpuscle activity, analyzing simply where a nerve is in reference to the trunk that it is part of (a network address, if you will), that puts together inputs, such as a papercut, to tell us where it was that we were damaged (and simultaneously, what branch of neurons). the behaviourism comes in after the structure has been identified as such, and expands the theory. it may be found that a person who closes their eyes can try to touch their fingertips while their eyes are closed uses the sensations in their skin, in their shoulders and hands primarily, to guide their movements, based on previous experiences with movements. so it happens that while driving a car, swinging a sword, or playing a piano, the practice that we put into something, and the amount of learning gained from each slightly different iteration of the practice, results in a better knowledge and �feel� of the location and boundaries of objects, our physical extremities included. then again, there are gravitational fields, but in order to get a good sense of the existence of proprioception, one would first have to stabilize the head entirely, because the concha is designed to detect changes in momentum such as this.
*god-forsaken-internet: this term is given to the internet after my personal realization that big business owns the primary internet. all of the hardware of the internet, everything that keeps it going, is property of persons who do not care about your freedom, expressions, or lack of information. it�s all just data to them�occasionally it�s copyrighted** data.
**copyright: a system of selling things to people who have stolen/pirated them from you legitimately, when you want them to use something of yours, but are not sure how to properly market it.
***Henceforth, Mike#1 will refer to Mitch�s roommate, and Mike#2 will refer to my roommate�s boyfriend.
BTU: British Thermal Unit. the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water at its maximum density [which occurs at a temperature of 39.1 degrees Fahrenheit (�F) ] by 1�F. also known as the temperature difference between 59�F and 60�F. an odd little unit, because the British don�t use Fahrenheit anymore.
