keywords 12:40

the past. ghosts. memory. history. internal struggles with a practical heart and meandering mind. hope tempered by disappointment. mornings. notebooks. rain. robots. myself. myself. my self. engineers. local food. leaves. feathers. hats. coffee. the end of oil. growing up. money woes. parents. siblings. unrequited everything. music. music. music. art. websites. clients. exes. prisons. publishing. birch trees. eavesdropping. dreams. fire. yoga. envy. masks. books. books books. generosity. lovemaking. forgiveness. hope. understanding. being selfish. resentment. guilt. dogs. cast iron. pet-names. breathing. teeth-brushing. taking off my shoes. wool. faith. losing things. magazines. fashion. stationery. phonecalls. talking. anxiety. driving. hiking. photographs. history. memory. ghosts. the future.

(none) 17:26

echoplex days 10:42

Thom Yorke + Flea = (eyes closed, head bobbing)



in other news:

 these kids are awesome. Catch them Wednesday night at eBar in Guelph.

this blog 00:11

this entry is a kind of interim report/page marker/interruption to cynovation as a project.

the blog, in general, as a form of contemporary narration is a funny thing. it's ethereal (having no tactile or real-world production), crude (because it lacks or has no need for the elegance of literary tradition), and miscellaneous. In short: I'm a fan.

I have, however, noticed something about my own blog.

When I rebooted it earlier this year I had intended it to be an apostrophe to a pair of cities to which I was a relative newcomer. I wanted to have some small voice in this medium to express the way in which a modern exmetropolitan, not-so-densely populated region fed the kind of cynicism that brands my generation (Gen X, but just barely) in general, and my own life in particular.

Cynicism is rarely an honest gambit. It's a gloss. It's a veneer. It's a shroud we cast over ourselves to keep off the cold. The more I practised it, the more I began to feel as though I was wearing a borrowed garment. It fits just fine, but it isn't mine.

That's not to say I haven't got a healthy amount of ironic distaste for the state of affairs in the world at large. But as I mull over and compose a thought or a point or a musing, I've made an effort (perhaps subconsciously) to keep it honest.

Not just honest, but open. Open to the point where things get personal. I've mentioned this before. I don't know if I'm my to accomplishing what I set out to do a few months back, but as I make a 'go' of it I find that there's a narrative emerging. It might be that the act of writing (or my formal education) causes me to focus on narrative structure; either way, I could argue that one is emerging.

So, can the blog hold its own as a literary form? Maybe.

Thoughts?

oh dear oh dear oh dear 12:56

...Cassie's going to tease me so bad over this celebrity crush.

Rightly so.



British. Blonde. Beat beat beat.

#iwishiwasarobot 01:14

...because then I'd be a better person.

We're marvelous machines, really. Not only is the capacity and capability of the human body still being pushed and re-imagined, but our bodies are part of an amazing cycle that, perhaps by design and perhaps by serendipity, continually reinvents bodies and adapts them to new and unexpected situations.

There are some who suggest we cheat death. Which is probably a big mistake. Death is an essential part of why, for a few billion years, this planet and its biosphere have managed to work.  Not without immense suffering and turmoil, of course, but these things are the rule. The history of life on Earth is one of conflict and struggle, interrupted by only brief periods of relative tranquility and calm.

This was going to be a blog about me as a robot. While I am a machine, I'm no robot. I don't really have a hard-and-fast definition of a robot, but of course I'm thinking of a synthetic life form, made to specifications to be better, faster, stronger, smarter, and live longer than this old meat-bag I currently call home.

I like my meat-bag. More than I used to, anyways. I'm even fond of some of its design flaws - because they force me to be smarter just to get through the week. Others though, are just obnoxious.

Take, for instance, the mood.

I have lots of them. You probably do too.  I'm usually content to shrug them off as occupational hazards germane to the trade of writing... except that they're not really hazardous to me. Not immediately, at any rate, and not in the same way as they are to the people around me in their various capacities.

A confession: I'm a moody prick.

A select few have had the cojones to point this out to me. I'm glad of that, but I'm also glad that not everybody's doing it because that at least means I'm not a moody prick all the time (or that they're too polite to say so, which is just as good).  And yeah, moodiness is an obnoxious trait. But I kind of need it.

To a writer, mood is the harmony that makes voice more than mere words. It's probably the most difficult part of narrative structure to talk about (which is why it disappeared from literary studies half a century ago) and maybe the most essential.

Essential.
Of essence.

The essence of moods, of death too, is the transition. Death destroys and from it the parts become something new. Moods swing, and in the motion of moods we see the irrational become the rational, the revolting become beautiful, the prick become the prince (I mean Hamlet, not me). And vice versa. Can't have one without the other.

Give me the valley and the mountain top;
there's no one on the plateau anyway,
no one
but the robots.

I wish I were a robot... 14:17

...'cause then I wouldn't have these:





...as on-the-fence as I am about season 2 of Flight of the Conchords, I do love this track.

et vous?

dream me a dream 13:54

I've been having some strange dreams of late.

I haven't made up my mind on dreams yet. I feel like there is some kind of eerie significance to them. Some people I know say that dreams can be clairvoyant, others subscribe to the philosophy that our dreams are a process of random neuron-firing that affects our unconscious sensory cortexes and in turn we form these random images and sensations into a narrative.

Why can't it be both, I ask you?

Okay, so: my dreams are pretty close approximations of these...

- 1 -

- 2 -

... doesn't seem all that random. huh.

headio 08:50

Monday.

I woke up with this in my head. I figure a little funk in the morning isn't a bad way to start the day. If you see me dancing down the sidewalk, feel free to join in. Nothing like an old fashioned street-dance.

n't 11:37

I've been encountering a lot of resistance lately. For various things, from various people, for various reasons there seems to be a lot of negativity out there.

That's not to say there isn't a time and a place for the word "no". Some things can't or shouldn't be done; others won't work no matter how hard you try. As much as I abhor the notion of fate, in some instances we're bound to fail.

So effing what? is my question to you.

One of my favourite things to say is "...not with that attitude" whenever someone says they can't accomplish something before they've given it a shot. If you can think of all the reasons why a thing can't be done before you've learned what the possibilities are then, well, you might avoid one failure but you're missing the millions of opportunities that come from improvising a solution.

I consider myself part of the try-and-fail camp. I fail lots. I'm good at it. I'm sure I'll fail far more, for years to come. In fact, I pretty much always aim too high and expect too much. But I'm seldom disappointed because I understand the value of failure. I fail to understand the value in not trying.

Here's a list of words I also fail to understand:

no
not
can't
won't
don't
shouldn't
impossible
unfeasible
ridiculous
absurd
unimaginable
forget it
unable
foolish
unattainable

Just for the record, I sort of stop listening when one of those words appears in every sentence of a conversation.

distance and time (absence II) 23:05

Apparently space and distance aren't one and the same. Well, sort of. Distance is a quality of space, and it's probably how we most often think about space: space is something between objects. The space between two things is a distance.

Distant stars.
Distant memories.
You're so distant right now.

Distance suggests a position in space relative to another. These positions are not necessarily fixed, mind you, but if there's a distance perceived then it's safe to say that the objects in question are separated by space (and possibly more). I guess I could be talking about particles, but I'm not. I'm talking about us. So, the space between objects, is really the space between subjects. Ahhhh....

There's a theory out there that distance is equivalent to a period of time (D=cT). Intuitively (read: subjectively) I know that's true. It takes time to cross a distance. It takes me 40 minutes to walk to work, 10 on the bus, and about 7 by car. And yet, it's the same distance. The difference, of course, is velocity. If I move faster, I arrive earlier, pretty reliably.

So, what about impassable (or impassible) distances? Those literal and figurative gulfs in space-time that keep us apart, like borders, traffic jams, bad cell reception, or an utter lack of empathy. How do we reconcile distance-time with the barricades of our own making and unmaking? What keeps us from each other isn't space. Is it?

I suggested to the people involved with TEDx Waterloo that communication technology not only makes the world smaller, it also compresses time. We fit more in because space isn't the kind of barrier it once was. We can do all kinds of things remotely because information moves so quickly.

And yet, I feel like my cell phone and twitter and facebook are no surrogates for the presence of another person. As there's less and less time, there is more and more distance... but that would mean there is more space.... which actually kind of makes sense. We've invented virtual space (yet another opportunity for distance and absence) where time is negligible because our commtech gets closer and closer to light-speed.

The faster we talk, the further we get from each other.
I think I'd rather go the distance.

my first fashion show 00:53

folly 10:12

I've been hearing the phrase "everything happens for a reason" a lot lately. For almost a year now, actually; and I just want to clear something up.

Even if a thing happens for a reason (cause=effect), there's not a reason for everything that happens. I mean, there is in the sense that nothing happens without a cause to set it in motion, but the word "reason" implies an order or predestination for a thing to happen.

Case in point: the Titanic. It sank. For good reason. You might say (and some do) that the sinking of the largest ship built to that point was a lesson in humility for human ambition.

I think those people were thinking of this Lady

Whose ambition sent a whole cast of characters to early graves.

There was a reason for all that, though: it was because somebody wrote it that way. It actually is predestined. The Titanic, in hindsight, may have seemed like it was a shoddily made thing, but the circumstances of its fate are great examples of the kind of random convergence that makes life what it is.

What it is is nothing less than our own need to make it make sense.

The Titanic sank because, due to cost-saving initiatives, its bulkheads were built too low to keep water from filling the hull.

Bumblebees can fly because they beat their wings really, really fast (it's science).

Lady Macbeth is a fictional character and not a fair nor an accurate comparison to any real person for any reason.

Reason is something we have at our disposal, to assign as we choose to things that happen. Or not.
I don't always need to make sense of things. I usually like to learn from experience, but honestly: I've seen so many things that make no sense whatever that I wonder if reason is really the best tool for being at peace with life when things don't go the way we want. Or even when they do. Maybe especially when they do.

wildtech 08:55

so, yesterday Dicovery--the organization we love to love for bringing the majesty of creation to us in 1080p--release it's list of the Top 10 Transgenic Animals.

It's kind of weird and not at all unlike Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel Oryx & Crake, which constructs a not-too-distant future that has commercialized genetically engineered animals and commodified genes to the point where the world her characters call home is one almost entirely man-made. I think that sucks. We're not very good at design as it is, why would we want to mess with the indifferent perfection of the natural world?

What caught my attention was the first image in the series:

eerie, at best.

...and not just because I work for a company called Pink Elephant, but because this "animal" is the literalisation of a beautiful metaphorical expression that has no equivalent in the material realm.

Should we, just because we can, make flights of fancy real? What do we gain but a tragic novelty? What do we lose but the infinite possibility of the unrealised?

heart, grow fonder 09:11

absent minded.
absentee ballots.
conspicuously absent.

I awoke today thinking about absence: that which is not present. Missing.  But, absence also implies that whatever or whomever is elsewhere should be here.

Here = where you are.

Absence, I propose, is something we create out of a sense of loss. It's emotional peekaboo. We open ourselves to an expected presence and are disappointed. We notice absence for its vacuum. It is the recognition of that which is not here.

So what happens when that which is not here asserts a presence? Maybe it's not a substantial presence, maybe it's passive, but when everyone in the room feels the same absence, does it become a spectre of sorts? And is there anything there?

Ghosts.
Dark Matter.
The past.

There are a great many things that we define by their conspicuous absence. Like my readers, for instance. Something that I believe these things have in common is the quality of an imagined presence, which possesses its own set of rules for existence. There are some permanently absent things, and things whose absences end, but I think that absence is totally dependent on the time in which it is perceived. In a linear model, a thing which is absent will always be absent from that given moment, even if it becomes present at a later time. I'm not sure how this would work in a non-linear temporal model, but it would probably be needlessly confusing with things being both present and absent at the same time.

I think also that presence is more complex than we know in our daily lives. How present are you when you eat breakfast? How present are you when you travel to work or school? How present are you when you have a conversation with someone you see nearly every day? How present are you when you stare off into space? What does it mean to be present in your own life?

Are you present, or are you your own ghost, merely haunting the place where you're supposed to be?

not sad 00:38

earlier this year I posted about Wilco, and how they're sad. They're no longer sad. Merely Malancholy.

here's proof:

go go gadget gomyo 22:45

Tonight at the KW Symphony (Centre in the Square), I had the privilege of seeing Karen Gomyo, conducted by Edwin Outwater - who's also brilliant. For your enjoyment, here's a video of Gomyo from earlier this year...



thanks also to my stellar company.

anything to wear 11:34

Today is a big day for Cassie. The Miss Oktoberfest Gala is tonight. Our employer has purchased a table at the event and I get to attend. I'll sneak in my camera and post some photos (since I know that Cassie doesn't read this blog) to give you an idea of how Cassie became Miss O for 2009.

I'm sadly understocked in the gala attire department, so last night Emeri and I went to Winners. Yep, Winners. I haven't been in a Winners in years, but I must say if you're willing to invest a little time, you can find some pretty decent clothing at half-decent prices.

Here's what I got:

BCBG wool pants (biege) $59.99
Mexx Merino wool sweatervest (purple) $39.99
Ben Sherman Jeremy St. fit Oxford shirt (white) $29.99
Penguin Munsingwear skinny tie (awesome) $16.99
Guess Belt (brown) $19.99
Penguin Munsingwear fedora (grey) $19.99

... and that's not all.

I also got two Donald Trump ties (which are, I hate to admit, rather nice) and a dressy scarf.

I went in for a dress shirt or two, and came out with nearly $300 in last season's (or the one before) men's fashions. It took about 90 minutes (most of which was spent at the tie rack), 3 forays into the fitting room, and the admission that since I've lost nearly 12kgs in the last month, I really need some new threads.  You know, for work.

Also: I didn't get an interview with the Walrus. But I still love them.