kaleidoscope:
2004-11-01 - 11:32 p.m.
...a word that i knew how to spell, in grade school.
I heard tell of an article a while ago (cnn.com) about an alien transmission that was intercepted by SETI. It will of course be a while before it is decoded, and undoubtably, many more messages will need to be received before the decoding can even take place. But it would be interesting, nonetheless, if the first transmission ever received by earth was from a backwater QuickEMart, an advertisement for a version of moon boots that is exactly like the previous version, except that it has a cool swirly symbol on the ankle and costs twice as much.
walked into my bank a while ago and checked the balance on my account. three dollars, six cents. i had to follow that up with 'is that positive or negative?'. The people at the KEY Bank (TM) here like me; after all, i must've given them some 1000 dollars in fines and fees in the last year. i have applied for overdraft protection and a credit line, both of which they denied me, even though you have to pay for the extra service. but this time, with a big grin on their faces, they regrettfully informed me that they have never received a direct deposit from smoke shop i worked at. four weeks of pay that almost made it all the way to my account.
Invention#11: the velcro doll. intended as a method of stress relief only. the doll appears to be a normal happy pretty doll, fluffy and smiling, until you rip its head off. reattch the head and repeat until desired effect is reached.
In other news, chris has a warant out for his arrest. The crime, you ask? Littering. In case i haven't mentioned it before, my roommate is Mr. Environment, a modern age hippy. He heads an organization called Envirologic at RPI (his major is eniromental engineering), wherein he partakes in arranging vegan parties, sorts and seperates trash by type, and makes artwork out of materials which will not decompose. In his spare time he talks about invasive plant species, encourages the use of low-emission cars and fair trade coffee beans, and discusses the myriad of possibilities for the compost that has been cultivating in our backyard. Evidently, he put a soda bottle next to a trash can because he couldn't find a recycling bin in the subway, and didn't want to send the plastic to a landfill, whereupon he was fined 60$. And like a true modern age hippy, he was smoking too much weed in the 15 days that followed to remember to pay the fine.
Eight Steps To A Better Life (ESTABL-ish)
STEP1. analyze your gifts. i have inherited, it seems, an offshoot of my mother's schizophrenia and my father's blunted depression. a practical, often standoffish, curious mind. 103 million useless theories of how the world works. a 12-CD music collection and a 12-CD disk changer in my car, which is perpetually broken. sixty times my weight in stodgy old books collected over the years. three languages, none of which i consider myself to be fluent in.
STEP2. brainstorm a list of activities that allow you to employ these tools (they don't have to be lifelong or career behaviours). this list will be called the 'activities list'. write short stories. make poetry. code semi-morbid yet entertaining video games or short animated films. roll up another AD+D character for second edition. buy a wifebeater, root my ass into the couch, and masterbate to ice skating competitions. get a CS degree in albany, only to find out that i already have a job in the field, working for a company that's already on the up-n-up. go on a mass murdering spree, armed with a supersoaker that shoots a cheap brand of condensed liquid detergent, and a set of really sharp playing cards.
STEP3. carefully note this list of activities, and underline the ones that you view the easiest to achieve. then, consult your palm. take short lifelines into account by not planning things too far in advance. if your head line is above your heart line, maybe you should lean less on the barstool and try to pick up a chick at a library (hint: borrow a pair of glasses, leave them on a shelf in the psychology section [section B] or in some other venue of education, wander everywhere in the library picking up books and actually reading them [this shows that you have a diverse personality] and then tell the librarian [the one that looks most like a waitress, behind the desk] that you have forgotten your glasses somewhere, and think that they may be on either a high shelf, where a ladder may be of use [offer to hold the ladder for her, you dolt], or on a low shelf, , which may require lots of crawling/bending])...
STEP4. after failing to pick up a few chicks in this manner, return to your typical lifestyle of ice cream and Dorritos(TM). resume reading your palm. if, at second glance, you realize you do not have a heart line, review the list in STEP1 and note that you did not list "pick up fine chicks" as one of your gifts. in the future, it may be helpful if you are more speciffic. now, of the items on the list which are not underlined, elininate those items on your activities list which require skills that you do not naturally posses, according to your palm. on my right hand, my head line is shorter and higher than my heart line, so i should concentrate on schoolwork now, because there'll be lots of sex later in my life [*sigh of releif*]. on my left hand is a simian line, indicationg that i should check my activities list (only the non-underlined items) for thing that might involve serial killing or down syndrome. seeing neither of these, i will continue to the next step.
STEP5. use a deck of tarot or playing cards to locate your short-term future path. whatever the cards tell you to do, do something different (not neccessarily the opposite, because that's what Fate expects you to do). that way, when you become your future self, at least you can't say that you didn't try to warn your past self of the consequences. when you experience deja-vu, take notice that your future self is trying to tell you that you have been given this decision before (though the situation itself has not yet occurred), and the knowledge of your future self's knowledge should indicate to you that the decision that you are about to make is more educated than any decision you could make from a process of pure logic.
STEP6. write a list of your friends in an upside-down tree structure, placing those that you knew first at the top of the list, and branching out to the friends that they introduced you to. then, scratch out the ones that you no longer keep in touch with, and look at the resulting graph for close or interlocking associations which will indicate that there are several distinct groups that you associate with (though they may know each other). if your graph only results in one group, keeping in mind that three or more is a crowd, it may be time to look outside your nest, and meet some new people. if you see a lot of single-person groups, either try and lump a couple of them up into group activities or go to the store and buy yourself some chocolate. you deserve it, after hanging out with all those despressed wackos.
STEP7. buy a car. speciffically, a matchbox car. one that fits your personality. when you have feelings of depression, agedness, or need a new way to pick up librarians, drive your car around and make vroomvroom sounds on the counter. express to the librarian how, since you are mostly an overgroun child, that you are great with children. if anyone asks, you are even greater at making children. you may even be able to find a miniature "honk if you're horny" bumper sticker.
STEP8. quit producing the behaviours that make up your personality. you are more than alcohol, more than caffiene, more than nicotine and sex. strip away a couple of addictions, and count how many seconds you can look in the mirror, until you loose count. talk to yourself, as if you were meeting an old friend, and damn everyone who thinks you're crazy for doing so.
i figured out the other day why wide rims on cars do not look appealing to me. they remind me of anorexic girls.
Dream, Titanic2 (part1). i am between the ages of twelve and fourteen, abord a ship with many other people, headed to some "better place". in this culture, we were only allowed to keep one item (called a 'talisman') from our previous lives, which was most important to us. other than the talisman, no person has anything more than their clothes, canvas-jean blue unisex garbs, sort of like hostpital scrubs bred with ponchos. the talismans [mine was a baseball cap] remind us of the land that we have left behind, and since we use the items to identify one another, no one would ever trade items with anyone (unless it was part of a joke), and since there is no trade everyone is more or less equal, and we live more or less in peace. i look out one of the portholes in the side of the ship and see endless sky and stars. the culture is not really anti-judgemental, but has slowly become non-judgemental [prbably this had something to do with their philisophical beliefs before they started the journey in the ship] so that it is hard for my mind to even distinguish sex, without knowing what a person's talisman reveals about them, though it is not impossible. i have a sister, about the same age as myself, who is also on the ship [after waking, i had forgotten what her talisman was, but it seemed to be something stuffed-bear or flowerish [i remember that she was holding it in two hands but she could easily carry it in one], which suggests how old we were when the journey began]. there is also a friend of mine, who is older than me and black [his age, in reference to mine, was immedietly apparent, his skin colour was not], whose talisman is a pair of shoes that he carries on his shoulder, and wears on special occasions and durring mealtimes. i have asked him some questions several times over, and his responses tend toward "you didn't miss much, by not being able to remember the land that we came from", and sometimes he tries to describe to me why his shoes were so important, given that the ship is relatively warm and smooth, and there is never anything to step on. evidently, he chose the shoes because they had more of a memory behind them, of the old culture, but i forget how he said it, and i did not understand. at one time, we are walking up a squarish stairwell, when we happen upon several bits of paper. some are crumpled, and i unfold one and make a paper airplane. it did not occur to me at the time that these peices of paper [they looked like US 50$ bills] had to belong to someone, that they had to be a talisman. i took a few of them with me. at a later time we were in the cafeteria, [talking about the things that every culture talks about: 'who am i?', 'why am i here?', and 'is there any difference between my Reason and my Self?'] and a person is shouting at his friend [the tone of voice sounded alien, it was very uncommon for anyone to shout insidde the ship] about how his talisman had gone missing, and then it went quiet. he stumbled into the part of the caferteria that i was sitting in, saying something about how weak his neck was, and how it was not properly supporting his head...his right and left half seperate, and blood exploded just inside the doorway [midsagital cut]. it was as if he has already been slashed up so finely that he was still functioning until he walked into the room. i was horrified, but no one covered my eyes. no one really knew what to do. i looked out the window and saw fractal pairs of blue spheres, on the background of green spiral and wire fractals, moving like a half-mon kaleidoscope toward me. i didn't want to look away, even as the spheres flattened and became spinning sawblades, headed for me. a pair of yellow scarab-type flying bettles, moving faster than the blue spheres, [they were each a singularity] criscrossed around the blades and splattered against the window, so that i could no longer see. there was a feeling that the yellow bettles has saved me from being sliced into several bits. someone who had seen the man arguing in the next room [it may have been the man's friend] said that they had seen white threads come quickly in through one of the portholes in the ship, and while the ends of the threads stayed outside, the loops went around and through him, and then retreated back out the porthole. i am left wondering if these fractal deamons have done the culture a service, by removing a man that was not abidding by the ideals of peace, or if he was killed becuase he had lost his protection, his talisman, his Sense of Self. there is a flash later, of the man on a metal table, and i can also see that his left leg is in a couple peices [transverse cut], but the table has been raised, so that passing persons can only see as much as their height allows. Dream To Be Continued.
went to salem for halloween, to the markets and the museums. went to the hill where the wicka-dudes hang out, and looked around for something more. i borrowed $10.45 from mitch for chinese food, don't let me forget, and he bought a magic book that may be interesting when if have some time to look over his shoulder. got a lot of comments about having green skin, and how cool it looked. chinese couples taking pictures, grown men hugging me, like i was a celebrity because i was of a different colour. unsettling. now that i've removed the green and am just a white guy with a shaved head, i'm getting different sorts of looks. i think i really should be in tibet. in similar news, i should be looking for a new apartment for january, a place of my own.
