running up the hill backwards

let's do bullet points this time:

• i posted on facebook about the skullstick and mama sunflower asked for it and picked it up within two hours. sun was less than happy about this, afterwards -- "thanks for giving a cursed thing to my mom dave"
• i have resurrected a mac (well the drive anyway, the mac itself is fucked but i might make it workable if i can find a mobo for it (unlikely!) and then a new drive.
• today i did not go to the book fair, but on the other hand i did get the joy of fixing a flat (two punctures!) and fixing-ish a kitchen faucet that would not turn off.i now know more about faucets than i used to.
• i have a lack-of-caffeine headache.
• i had a 2 hours on-and-off IM conversation w/ baid about her cervix, her pussy in general (and i'm not talking titilating convo here, i'm talking "perhaps you mistook me for a gyno") and her menstrual accessory preferrence (cups, surprisingly, not plugs or pads.)
• cleaned house. this is actually my favorite thing i have accomplished this week. the disarray was really getting to me. the living room is semi-sane now and the florida is getting there.
• got into an argument w/ a classmate last tues and as of today it is resolved. which is good; i tend to brood and i'm glad i don't need to anymore.

a plague for your dowry

xkcd's strip today brings up house of leaves by mark z danielewski. which is a genius book. nightmare-causing, take your breath away reading, for real. some of the writing is not as poetic as say harlan ellison's "speculative fiction" but it's certainly more claustrophobically horrifying. i finished this book at the bar, the day before my last conversation with the woman i thought was the love of my life. still is? i don't know. i stopped thinking about it. she's still the love of my life, but now in the past tense I guess. It's just one of those things where you associate something with what was happening -- e.g. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works II" 2nd disc is to me an incredibly erotic piece of music, just because of associations -- and House of Leaves is just a picture of a raw gaping wound. It doesn't hurt, but it reminds me that there was a tender part exposed and hurting.

So but what do you do? How do you just drop it? No one I know who's gone through hellfire and brimstone can adequately explain. And it's such a personal, subjective thing. If there's a universal that I have found in this, it's that people tend to pull back, reserve more of themselves and give less away. And that's so horrible, so very sad. But I see it time and again in my friends, and I see it in myself. The nerve numbed, you learn that you don't know what's normal anymore, so you learn to not trust yourself to keep from getting hurt. 

Sterling and I ate sushi, a while ago, and we talked about it, again. Except this time she was sober because of the pregnancy, so this time she remembered it I think. And it boils down to: I know it's not all my fault. But I feel like it is. I blame myself, even though I know it's not like that. The bitch of it is, I am sure she blames me too. Which is galling, especially considering the condescending attitude she gave me when last we spoke. Really, that's how I keep my anger going.

So yeah, this started as "look! comic link to awesome book!" and is now about me me me me. Well it's my blog so fuck you if you don't like it. Get yr own.

Enjoy this amazing and very entertaining speech by Malcom Gladwell on the lessons of happiness, self-knowlege and hidden desires inherent we can learn from spaghetti sauce:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

Here's some awesome music:

Grotus - Brown

Pogo/Faggotron - Alice

the original obscenity

d 5
a ..0
e ....4 5 000

D A 0055xx

Reading pratchett, he does go on about humanism and what humanity means. One of my favorite things he's ever said (or written) is about how all sin boils down to treating people as things. Rape, murder, theft -- they all boil down to "you're not a person, you're just another thing I can use to get what I want".

The secret is using lots of duct tape

Enjoy this discussion on the nature of reality by Phillip K. Dick: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later.

You know, there's a reason why I traded Johann Hz my trusty old Peavy amp for 60 or 70 PKD books.