[ November 6, 2005 ]:

Hi. So its a new year by the Celtic calender. And it promises to be an interesting year. I've asked the Goddess to remove some of my faults -- drinking and smoking (yes, even pot) -- and I'm endeavoring to walk the path that I will and must. Trying to pick up the pieces of my life. Its hard. I feel so alone. I don't know if I will ever feel love again. But I am really trying not to let it bother me. It would be so easy just to be alone in a world without people. I wouldn't even feel lonely. It is only when I am around others that I can feel the isolation around me.

[ * * * ]

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Living in the Midwest, Stockton, and Massachusetts, I never realized that cat-people and dog-people were a warring dichotomy. People owned cats and dogs. Some people would like one type of domesticated predator better than the other...but hey! That's a lifestyle choice, right? But then I moved to the Bay Area and the open-minded idealogues taught me the error in my ways: you MUST be absolutely loyal to either cats or dogs. You can't possibly like both! It is a way of life....a religion...nay! The writ of God!

So I'm writing this essay to shed some light on what it means to like cats and dogs. Dogs like conformity, running with the pack, playing loudly and wildly. Dogs hate creatures that don't want to play loudly and wildly. Like cats, for instance. Dogs are big believers in social norms and hierarchy.

Cats on the other hand enjoy moving very carefully and deliberately. They dislike loud noises and creatures without self control. Like dogs, for instance. Cats are big believers in individuality.

So obviously the owners of these species will never get along.

[ November 13, 2005 ]: weirdiosity

i decided to devote this space to the things that make me ``unique'' -- maybe ``weird'' would be a better word, but this seems to confuse people (admittedly, they're probably ``normal'' people). Calling myself ``weird'' seems to put the idea in peoples' minds that i am trying to be weird, where is this is far from the cases. i know more try to be atypical than to be typical. so i'll be presumptuous and call myself ``unique'' instead. Let's see why.

I just gave up drinking and smoking (October 10th and Smahain wer my quit dates, respectively). i am tired of being a slave. I guess in a world where I was treated somewhat kinder by society at large, maybe my natural obsessiveness wouldn't have turned into whole-blown alcoholism. But such is the way of the wind. When i was lonely and couldn't think of any better way of meeting people than going to bars (i'm still lonely, but have given up on meeting people unless they're willing to pay the first nickel), alcoholism is not unforseen consequence.

Speaking of slavery, i sold my entire collection of CDs and DVDs. Owning intellectual property? Peh! There's no part of that sentence that makes sense. But for the record, I found out that the Bardo experience has not been copywritten, so I have my copywrite attorney working on that. I suppose if I could sculp my emotions like clay, I should just be a righteous thief and steal .mp3s with impunity. But there's that small part that feels guilty. And if i've learned anything in this lifetime, if something causes you to feel guilty, its probably not worth doing.

i walked somewhere around twenty miles in Snan Fransnisco. fun fun fun. Got to visit Strawberry Hill (no...not the cheap sugary wine) in Golden Snake park. that was fun. i probably would have walked longer, but around civic center i really Really REALLY needed to pee. and of course, there was no place to do it (the library was closed, as usual...the French-style -- oohh! excuse me -- Freedom-style street toilets were closed. As usual.). What does it say about our society where we have no place to use the bathroom? Yes, we are civilized to outlaw urinating outside. But no, we're not civilized to provide public bathrooms.

i randomly use capital letters. Have you noticed? But i try to never capitalize `i'. i say we should destroy all individualism.

just heard the phrase ``i think intelligent design is here to stay''. yiy. and the ``normal'' people wonder why i don't want to strive to be like them? what is this big conflict between Christianity and science? science answers the question ``why?'' and spirituality answers the question ``how?''. Personally, being a scientist and a believer in that spiritual mumbo-jumbo, i don't see the conflict.

I like silver (the color and the metal) much better than gold.

[ November 14, 2005 ]: my last fun with KQED

Sad isn't it?

Friggin amazing. I pledge $250 to KQED on September and its only November when the planar solidified dead tree pulp begins pouring into my mail box with the message: "Please renew your membership". I thought you'd be nice enough to check the $250 as a membership contribution, but to paraphrase Groucho Marx (or was it Karl Marx? one of those Marx brothers anyway): ``I wouldn't want to be part of a club that would charge membership dues I could afford.'' I was planning on listening to KQED until next Fall pledge drive, at which time the condescension afforded your listeners on the part of your trained monkeys begging for donations would have alerted me that semi-intelligent talk radio was no longer a privilege I paid for. I don't give money to agencies soliciting for money -- whether the street beggar who is "just looking for money for coffee" or to multi-million dollar radio stations who will use my funds to mail more marked-up dead tree pulp and fund an EVEN MORE successful pledge drive next year. But this recent occurrence is enough to convince me not to listen to KQED willingly any time from this moment forward. If this is a clerical error on your part, I'm sorry, but I'm still not listening. Maybe I should print this out and mail it to you quarterly as an effort to inform you that listeners who are responsible adults don't like to be begged and begged and begged and guilted and begged for money. But I don't babysit adults. And if I can ask anything from you, its to treat your listeners like adults that don't need babysitting and not remind them every three seconds of their monetary obligations that listening to your radio station brings.

P.S. Perhaps you can hire some trained telepaths to broadcast your message continuously into the subconscious of your listeners? That should get some more pledges.

[ November 24, 2005 ]: Happy Snakesgiving!

So there's a few things I wanted to recount before they slipped out of my well-oiled mind. First, lemme tell about my experience at the Ferry Building in SF about a week ago (the night of Friday the 18th):

I was going to eat with my friend....uh, Unagi...or something. And, due to the brilliance of San Francisco not having any public restrooms, we stopped at the Ferry Building to empty our bladders following the BART trip. I finished first and was waiting outside the restroom for, uh, Unagi. This guy started staring at me intently. Not knowing what else to do, I stared back. Finally, to break the tension or what not, I said, ``How's it going?''

He responded with, ``Are they paying you well?''

To this day, I don't know who they are, and preparing for a weird (even for me) experience, I chuckled and said no. Then he got close to me, so that our noses were less than six inches of touching and said, ``I can't do it here...too many people, too many witnesses. But if I ever find you alone, I will kill you.'' Then, just as Lee emerged from the bathroom, he quickly walked off. I wish there was more to tell, but that's the story. He didn't look especially strange -- about my age, decent clothes, decent haircut, didn't stink of alcohol or his own sweat or pot, and his voice was dead calm the whole time. Do these things really only happen to me?

Anyway, on to the next story, I was telling this Unagi girl (whatever her real name is) about the fate of my would-be wedding ring to my ex-fiance. Like much of my stuff, I left it with my ex. And I guess I should explain ahead of time that this ring was a genuine work of art, with a matching price tag of over three grand (far more than a student like me could afford at the time...or now, for that matter). And I was talking with my mom about what to do with this ring [dramatization]:

Me: I should probably do something dramatic with it....like casting it into the ocean.

Mom: No, don't do that...if you don't want to sell it, you should give it to me. I'd wear it.

Me: Don't you think it would be a little weird to get a wedding ring from your son....that costs more than the wedding ring that your husband -- my dad -- gave you?

Mom: No. Not at all.

Okay, maybe that wasn't much of a story either. But I still think its weird.

Man, all this recounting stuff is hard work. And I thought 'blogging was supposed to be light-hearted fun fun fun. Okay, maybe just one occurance of fun. I need real-time internet 'blogging in my brain. That would save some time. But, on the other hand, I think I'd rather live in neolithic times than have pop-up ads piped directly into my headspace. Actually, come to think of it, I'd rather live in neolithic times than ever see an ad again. Can be arranged?

[ November 25, 2005 ]:

I was talking to [ Beatrix Kiddo ] last night when my phone started getting really hot. I hang up out of fear and find half the buttons no longer work. The results?: a long story...summed up in some emails:

I called T-Mobile to cancel...and they offered me an "upgrade" (well, essentially a worse phone without an actual keyboard) for ONLY $52 and i ONLY had to sign for another 24 months! So I'll ONLY be cell-less for 1-9 business days. Hey, wait a minute! That means I'll have to be confined to my house for yet (ONLY?) another day on phone related matters! Ah, the wonders of technology...

Sorry for the dripping positivism of these emails. I'm just really tired of literally and figuratively paying for other people's mistakes.

[ Bill? ]

On 11/25/05, [ Bill? ] wrote:

Hello,

I was talking on my cell phone when the thing started getting really hot in my hand and melted, essentially literally. Well, it doesn't look melted but half the buttons no longer work, making it useless. I contacted T-Mobile and the vendor, but neither they nor the manufacture will cover the phone, since it is over a year old. In any case, I am unsubscribing from T-mobile as I don't have the money this month to buy a phone. In theory, the SBC people are coming tommorow (Sat. 26th of Nov.) -- we'll see. I'm sure it will be a good use of 13 hours of my day waiting unpaid for them in any case. But I won't have long distance on my land-line. So consider phoneless regarding outgoing calls. And, for the moment, phoneless regarding incoming calls as well.

Sucks to be me,

[ Bill? ]

So whatever happened with your phone?

[ November 27, 2005 ]: fire walk with me

Since I was changing my drinking status on Gothic Personals, I decided to go ahead and write a little rant:

now is it "fire: walk with me" or is it "fire-walk with me"? because the way its written, you can read it either way. damn you mr. lynch! and while i'm damning people, let me take this opportunity to damn all you bastards -- the males for teaching me that even the pathetic webs of lies they would betray if the act of fornication or power was involved. and the ladies for going along with it. if i have to hear one more girl whine how true love is dead, maybe i'll make a feature-length film: "why the world sucks."...starring everyone. because seriously, have you taken a look around lately? the veneer has peeled back so bad that anyone that can't see the zeitgeist is pretty willful about it. anyway, play your pathetic games of power and genetic propagation. pretend you're in love, if you think you know what that is. but when you are dead and you see your own lies reflected back at you, do not cry to me for your failed idiocies. time to be a ghost

[ November 28, 2005 ]:

wow...the longer i'm in college the more impressed i am by the college graduate. while our math and science skills might rival the russian high school graduate, we have not learned:

• how to flush a toilet
• how to push chairs in after using them
• how to pick up after ourselves
• that the paper recycling bin is not for cans or bottles

[ * * * ]

Okay, so 'bout that copywritten sctuff...

I recently decided and am in the process of getting rid of all (well, probably in real life almost all) of my copywritten sctuff. ``Why?'' you may ask. Well, here's the story. As you know if you've been reading my blogs carefully...which you probably haven't....but still...its kinda my eternal resolution that if something makes me feel guilty, its probably not worth doing. So even though I've been against the whole idea of copyright for years -- after all, if we can own information, what next? ``Please stop thinking that thought, sir! That is an unauthorized thought.'' No, seriously, please stop thinking that thought. Yeah. And for the record, all the thoughts in my head ARE copywritten. So if I catch anyone else thinking them....WELLL....

But moving right along, I am very against the idea of not being able to move or use information that you have access to. Just as a side note, did you know that playing DVDs on linux is essentially illegal? Gimme a break. I wouldn't want to be exposed to any media by any ``artist'' that really believe that their users couldn't download their songs, couldn't give copies to friends, couldn't record in a bunch of different media, couldn't remix...i just wouldn't want to have anything to do with that sort of, IMHO, control freak. That being said, I guess the record industry (well, the RIAA and the MPAA) have drilled it into my head enough that I am so hurting the poor starving artist by taking away their less-than-ten percent profits on a $20 CD. I guess if I could just say, ``Hey guilt, go away'' and act from a purely pragmatic point of view, I would pirate with impunity as such supports my anti-copyright point of view. But I don't want to do anything with even a shred of guilt. Unless I can get up in front of a Grande Jruy (well, a normal Jury) and say with impunity, ``Yeah, I downloaded music because I don't believe you can own information and I'm proud to stand up against a law based on greed and false concepts''. But the fact is, I do feel guilty.

Oh wait, I was supposed to be moving along. Okay. So I really wanted to hear a certain Roy Orbison song after watching a David Lynch movie (don't know the connection there). Of course you couldn't get it for free. Legally. So I fired up Ye Olde P2P Client and within five minutes had the song. Of course, as much as I wanted to hear the song (and love the song...thank you Roy!) I couldn't help the guilty feeling. Since Mr. Orbison is dead, I don't really know who I could be hurting. I don't know what Roy Orbison's attitude would be about having his copywritten material illegally on my computer. Or on a burnt CD from a friend. Or what not. But there was the vague feeling that though I was philsophically on sound grounds, i might vaguely somehow be contributing to some sort of behavior that might merit the guilty feeling (yeah, i know, its a good thing i wasn't raised Catholic). And so I got to thinking....

Should I delete this song and never illegally download again? What about all the other songs I illegally have? Should I delete them?

I decided philosophically that I was to avoid feeling guilty, that would be the soundest ground. Then I started to think...

What about all those CDs and DVDs with their big shiny copyright labels on them? If I only own ``legal'' copies (not my definition) aren't I essentially advocating the copyright law and bowing down to it in some way? Aren't I effectively agreeing to it?

Then I started getting really pissed. Forcing me between Scylla and Charybdis^* is a good way of getting me to renounce things. So I did. I gave away all my CDs and DVDs. Well, sold. I'll continue to make use of web material, copyright or not. But I won't download it. As far as I'm concerned, if I click on something and you want to charge me with a crime...its your system that's broken, not mine.

So if anyone wants to join me in my rediculous boycott of copywritten media, please chime up. Or, if you believe in copyrights, and have gotten this far, please contribute $10 as that is the cost of viewing this copywritten webpage. Hey, you're a capitalist! You should support your beliefs! Obviously if you've gotten this far then the page must have entertained you...say $10 worth? Or, alternatively, you're just one of those greedy people that say they're a capitalist because it sounds better than saying, ``I'm greedy.''

And so, in conclusion: public domain all the way, baby!

[ December 3, 2005 ]:

So how's that phone that T-mobile sent you working out? Funny you should ask. Esepcially since the applicable 'you' would actually be me. So to start off on a positive note, so I can quickly descend into negativitiy, my new Samsung T309 works pretty damn well. No real QWERTY keypad, as promised. But other than that, a nice phone.

But how did I come to get this phone? Funny you should ask. And the answer is that I had to go through a little slice of Hell because of two pieces of mis-information.

When T-Mobile persuaded me to upgrade my phone instead of cancelling my service (I still have mixed thoughts on whether or not I should have canceled after all), I was told: ``The UPS tracking number is the phone number.'' My thoughts at the time were kinda like, Okay, wow, that seems almost too easy. I guess it is a unique number though and maybe they have some special arrangement with UPS.

So I check the UPS site everyday for this tracking number, and it always says INVALID TRACKING NUMBER. Okay...they said it would get to me in 1-9 business days, so they probably haven't shipped it yet. So Thursday, I was quite surprised when I returned after a coupla hours working at the library I had one of those yellow-and-brown slips on my door. ::sigh:: And the tracking and info numbers have nothing to do with my phone number.

I go online and check on the package. Yep. They tried to deliver it and will try to do so Friday. Hmmm...I'm not going to be home most of the day (and they didn't put a time-slot down when they plan on delivering it....grrrr....). I see there's an option where I can pick it up the same day at the Richmond facility in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. So I choose this option. The first webpage says someone is going to call me within an hour (this is at 15:18, btw...the facility closes at 18:00). The final -- confirmed -- webpage doesn't say anything about this. It just says that its at the Richmond facility.

Okay, I don't have a car. I don't really believe in destroying the environment -- call me one of those ``bleeding heart'' liberals. Can't seem to find any public transportation to UPS Facility, Nowhereville. So I'm on foot. If I'm going to make the 18:00 closing time, I don't know if I can wait around the whole hour waiting for a phone call that I don't really know if its going to come. So I call the UPS main office and explain my situation. They tell me I need to wait for the call. I then explain that I don't know if I wait until 16:18 that I don't know if I'll be able to make it to the UPS facility before 18:00. So comes piece of misinformation #2: ``If you're picking up a package, they stay open later''. Okay, excellent. That's a relief.

So I wait. And wait. And wait. At 16:25 or so I call the number indicated for the Richmond facility. Well, it turns out to be just another number for the main office. After a ten minute or so call with holds ending in a lost connection, I call back and find out: ``Oh, they tried to call but your phone was busy''. Yiy. The two minutes I was on phone to UPS the first time, UPS calls. Go figure. But my package is there.

So I literally run out the door with a map and tracking information. Run to BART, get off at Richmond BART at about 17:0something, which is about 5 miles away from UPS according to maps.google.com. And after getting my bearings, I run down 23rd Street. I run down San Pablo until it loses its sidewalks. The whole time its raining cats and dogs...well, not literally. Well, maybe literally just so Anne can get a laugh. But suffice it to say, at this point my socks soaked through my nearly waterproof boots. And the less said about the soaking status of the rest of my body, the better. After running a bit in black through the rain the wrong way down the non-sidewalked San Pablo, I decide that its too dangerous even for me unless I really do want to die. So I start walking at a normal pace, getting splashed by oncoming traffic and avoid getting hit. I get to the UPS facility at 18:15 -- okay, I'm 15 minutes late, but surely they stay open late for package pick-ups like I was told, right? Wrong! Its a big lie. I walked all the way in the rain (my shoes and trenchcoat are STILL wet, 2 days later) for nothing. And do these people that effectively lied to me have to pay? No, not at all. Suffer the consumer...

But the next day, I happened to get off work early and Lee got ahold of me and was nice enough to drive me to Bumfuck, Nowhere to get my package. Thank you, Eel!

And so, to summarize, don't ask me why I avoid having things delivered to my apartment, or you will get a URL link to this page. And if you have any whiney questions, you can direct them to the UPS customer service representative.

* So copywritten its not even funny

[ January 4, 2006 ]:

I also met with my sponsor recently, and so I'm slowly starting on making my list for my 4th step. Oy! I fear it will be a long list.

Here's a little thing I wrote today after getting all depressed about being single:

[ January 27, 2006 ]

Happy Unvalentine's Day, motherfucker!!! - 28

[ April 14, 2006 ]:

I really have to write a real entry one of these days. Probably make a new webpage. I moved to the Mission...having fun there. Lotsa other stuff too. But for now, here are some vows I took for last night's full moon :

• I will meditate whenever I can
• I will concentrate on my breath whenever I can
• I will buy as little as possible. I will pay back my student loans as quickly as possible.
• I will love and cherish the companionship of Lilly
• After Lilly's passing, I may become a ascetic renunciate if such seems wisdom at the time
• I will discontinue drinking coffeee on Samhain 2006. I will drink tea once a day (at most) afterwards and, when doing so, simply drink tea
• I will not masterbate to pornography or seek to look at pronography after Samhain 2006
• I will give up fish on Samhain 2006, being the last meat I consume. I will give up dairy and other animal foods as soon as practical thereafter.
• I will never again buy leather
• I will not mourn my lonliness

So shall it be.