Screw you guys, I'm going home!
        --Mat. 27:46

Jan 1:
HAPPY 2005, universe!!!
 

"God never gives you more than you can handle."
        -- This phrase was invented by someone who never had anything bad ever happen to him, and has been propagated by people who have never had anything bad happen to them.  "God" always "gives" people more than they can handle.
        Just look around you.
        Hey, lookit the tsunami that just gobbled up over 100,000 people.
        That wasn't more than they could handle?
 

webs of cause and effect, meaningless
        -- pass the corpse paint
 

still skeptical about the Disinformation series of books / DVDs, but they are interesting.  at least metzger seems to have his heart in the right place, and his pedigree seems good
        -- the more I find out about him, the more I think he might be sincerely trying to change the world, in a way
        -- unless, this is, of course, disinformation
 

-- Of course, one could always say that all the people killed by the tsunami were all sinners
        -- which is the shit that some "enlightened" "Christians" have been vomiting out lately.
        Sure, right, they were all "sinners," especially all the little kids who really haven't been around long enough to "sin."  Yeah, they were sinners.  That's why they were all swept out to sea or suffocated under mud.
 

magic / magick / whatever you want to call it, seems interesting as a way to force yourself to build connections between meaningless bits of data
....too bad so many of its practitioners tend to crawl up their own asses and start actually believing it works on a physical level
        -- even aleister crowley warns against this, but nobody listens to him because he uses big words and has ideas
        -- also he's got such a bad rep even among his followers
        -- he's such a baaaaaaaad boy
        -- when in fact the life he lead back then absolutely pales by comparison to the lives lead by any rock or movie star today.  it's just that he was the first guy to publicly be a hedonist and radically anti-authoritarian, and so with all his flamboyance and the way he manipulated the public's perception of him as "evil," he became a myth.  and so people actually believe uncritically his claims when in fact lots of them are jokes and hyperbole
 

-- thing on Todd Machover on tv:
        -- the guy who works for MIT and did the VALIS opera and other stuff
        -- he invents new computer instruments
-- interesting to see him, although he suffers from the whole Ivory Tower blindness that most academic musicians suffer from
                -- (that most academics suffer from, in fact)
        -- he comes at his music from the perspective of classical music, uses old classical structures, is interested in symphonies, and so on
        -- not that there's anything expressly wrong with this, just that it seems really old fashioned
        -- (for example the VALIS opera, while it's okay, seems too much like an opera, and less like something that would come from the future, or something that is made by computers-- and it should seem less like a traditional opera and more like a wall of data)
        -- so his instruments and ideas are based on this old classical model, and so they seem hopelessly out-dated by contemporary electronic music standards.  But, they're "cute."  Although people who are unfamiliar with, say, contemporary laptop musicians, would possibly be blown away by Machover's quaint "hyperinstruments"
        -- also, the software this show showed on the screen seemed so old-looking, very "early-90s PC" with big blocky graphics.  Clumsy
        -- it's electronic music for people who still think that classical music is an elite musical genre -- of course Machover is also using interactivity to bring the audience into the composing process, thus "democratizing" music.  However, the music he's "democratizing" is still classical music, and kind of 12-tone-ish, and so seems out-dated -- and so a bunch of little kids playing with "beat bugs" (interactive musical toys that do look pretty fun to play with) still just sounds like something one person could do in an evening with a laptop computer running ABLETON.  Actually, ABLETON would sound better.
        -- Kind of like the time Jim O'Rourke was talking about a visit to a music school in France, where the academics there made all these charts and wrote these programs, put them into a computer and got a bunch of chaotic tone-rows and booping, and they seemed so proud, like they were so on the edge.  And the only thing he could think of was how you've been able to do that sort of thing with cheap freeware and a laptop for years, now-- let alone all the things you can do musically if you buy professional software-- and how these guys are so out of touch it actually seems cute.  And of course none of these guys probably listened to any contemporary music.  They're all still thinking in terms of Jazz and Schönberg
 

-- Or, there's the take that the "Devil" did it somehow.  Somehow the "Devil" caused the tsunami.
        But, that brings us to another fundamental problem: everything bad is due to either the "Devil" or due to our own weakness, but all good things are due to "God."  Very Medieval.
        Unfortunately, the story tells that the Devil was created by God, who is omniscient.  Therefore, God always knew that Lucifer was gonna become a fallen angel and thus assume the role of the Devil.
        So, if the Devil caused the tsunami, okay-- but always remember to follow your train of thought back to its logical end:  God caused the Devil and being omniscient God always knew that the Devil was going to cause the tsunami and so, if God caused the Devil and the Devil caused the tsunami, ultimately God caused the tsunami.
        And then we spiral back to why a "good' "God" would do something like that to random people.
 

-- I am trapped in a head, and even though I feel infinite, I am still just a physical thing, a few pounds of tightly wrapped cells that pulse and shift within a chamber like some gigantic gray slime-mold in a cavern beneath the Earth.  Pass the corpse paint.
 

Virgin Music in SPACE
Virgin Galactic:
        richard branson wants to develop his own space transportation industry
        $80,000 a flight
        over time, the price will go down, though.  Such is the magic of capitalism
        sign me up
        -- maybe Richard Branson will be the saviour of humanity?
 

and of course then there's the proposed Japanese space hotel
 

Leviathan's blaring out of the speakers right now and I so feel like feasting on the still-beating hearts of my enemies.
        Pass the corpse paint.

And then there's the argument that the tsunami wasn't caused by God at all, but a slippage of tectonic plates.  Which is fine and dandy, but when it comes out of someone's mouth who's framing this "slippage" argument as a theological explanation, that's not so good:
        So, there is a God who's all-knowing and wise and good, who can do everything and knows everything and sets everything into motion, but God didn't cause the tsunami, it's just that some plates slipped.  Therefore, God is a good God.
        However, the plates were also created by God, aligned in a specific pattern by God, and thus would eventually slip.
        Therefore, God set up a slow-motion Goldberg device that would eventually cause a tsunami.
        And, God being omniscient, etc, knew when this would be, and God being omnipotent, could have stopped it.  But didn't.
        It's kind of like the Devil argument, but reformed, slightly, in the guise of science.
 

Theory is outstripping reality.  The trick is to make theory real:
        Nanotubes, tightly wound carbon fibres that are unbreakable, only a molecule thick, that could be used to strengthen buildings so buildings really will last for hundreds of thousands of years
        Nanotubes in computer chips, acting like little unbreakable switches, used to perform calculations better and faster than silicon
        Spintronics:  changing the spin / position of individual electrons, using the atoms themselves as a means to perform calculations.  much faster than even nanotube chips.  and much, much more permanent
        Black Hole Computing.  Seems that if you put matter into black hole, stuff does indeed come out, and this stuff is: information.  The idea that nothing escapes a black hole is actually a myth.  So if you send stuff into the singularity, a certain type of pulsing radiation escapes.  And these pulses can be modulated by the substance you send into the singularity
        Faster than light travel: might be possible.  We just don't have enough energy.  Yet.
 

Then there's the one that the tsunami was all a lesson to the living.  This, however, hardly seems like something a good God would do: kill a whole bunch of innocent people so a bunch of others would learn a lesson.  This seems sloppy and inefficient.  And, kind of crazy, and not all that "good."
        In fact, the logic of this one resembles the logic in the movie Signs where aliens invade the Earth, take away who knows how many millions (if not billions) of people to who knows what kind of horrible fate, all as a lesson for one priest who's lost his faith.  God sends "signs" to show the priest that everything has meaning and that everything is connected.  And thus, the priest regains his faith.  But only after maybe a third of the Earth's population has perished.  This, again, seems like sloppy, bullshit reasoning.
        -- I want no part in an religion that sacrifices thousands of innocents as a "lesson" for the rest of the world.
 

My mind wanders.  Wondering what would happen if I was in a store, and I looked through a newspaper and I found pictures of you there, dead.  This would never happen, but my mind wanders.  Wondering what would happen if I was walking down the street and I saw you with that other guy.  This could happen and my heart begins to race.
        (pass the corpse paint)

-- then there's the whole "They're all with god now" line which is simply a bunch of empty-headed rationalization.
        -- the tent to Heaven and so they're all happy
        -- bullshit, simplistic, ignorant, naive bullshit
 

WHEN DEALING WITH "WIZARDS", "WARLOCKS", "DARK WITCHES", "MAGICIANS" (everybody knows somebody like this nowadays):
-- crowley's little joke:  his gauge of pretension
        -- he liked saying that his name is pronounced like the word "CROW", like the bird, not with a hard OW sound
        -- and he liked saying that its CROWley if you think I'm holy, but crOWley if you want to treat me foully
        -- and, right there, by gauging the reactions of people to this little maxim, he knows who the sycophants are, right there he knows how many pretentious idiots he's surrounded by
        -- thus, all the pretentious people call him CROWley because it's somehow more "magickal", and "holy" -- and then he knows that those are the people who won't think for themselves, the dupes and robots who follow orders
        -- and so the CROWley people are the true idiots he can manipulate and abuse.
 

AMERICAN IDOL:
I was talking with a friend a while ago about "reality" tv and he didn't really get-- with all the really abysmal "reality shows" out there like Amazing Race and The Surreal Life-- why American Idol is the most hated because American Idol is a talent contest and not just a bunch of people enduring a bunch of pointless bullshit for a prize.
        I said it's because American Idol isn't really about talent at all because the winners are actually just robots, people who sing and perform in the exact same, bland way, and who take orders.  Real artists will never come out of American Idol because there's no room in the show for individuality and vision and, hence, the creation of anything meaningful.  American Idol is just a televised audition for people looking for marketable commodities, the new Spice Girls, essentially.  Or people to place into boy bands.  And so all they really want is glamour vacuity.  And even people like Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard are, while proficient, essentially bland-- and, because they don't fit the current beauty paradigm, even they have been marginalized.
        And then I had the "privilege" of watching an episode of American Idol a few days ago.  I haven't watched the show in a really long time, and it was on because I was randomly channel flipping.
        And there was this guy who was "singing," and he was utterly talentless.  He couldn't sing and he couldn't dance-- he was awful.
        And, he was unspeakably arrogant.
        However, the three judges treated him like shit, which simply inflamed his arrogance.  They all put him down, but then he made the mistake of standing up for himself.
        This prompted Simon Cowell to off him $50,000 if he could get a #1 single in the next six months.  And then Tweedle-Washedup and Tweedle-Whocares (aka Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson) both, under their breaths said they'd give him $100,000.
        This enflamed the kid even more and eventually he stormed off the stage, swearing.  He started yelling that Simon offered him $100,000 and that he'd collect it.  He looked into the camera and said if there were any record execs watching, he'd split the $100,000.
        Then a condescending voiceover came on, mocking the kid because in the heat of his rage he'd said Simon offered him $100,000 instead of $50,000.  Then they played the clip where Simon offered him the cash and Paula and Randy quietly made their offers.  As if somehow this showed the kid as being an idiot, when actually the clip reinforced the fact that together the three of them offered him $250,000.
        Also, while Simon Cowell was offering his $50,000 Paula leaned towards Randy and muttered something like "but what about William?"  Meaning, of course, William Hung who has easily been the most successful American Idol performer, very elegantly revealing the bare lie behind the show.
        Anyway, all-in-all, it was the most disgusting display of purposeless cruelty and mindless arrogance I've seen on tv in a long time.  Yes, the kid was talentless, but Paula Abdul, you're a hasbeen who's barely remembered for some forgettable songs; Randy Jackson, so you were a the V.P of A&R for Columbia Records and the Senior V.P. of A&R at MCA-- all this means is you and your corporate greed are part of the reason the recording industry is currently in trouble, you're responsible for promoting reams of disposable, talentless crap, and overpaying your "stars," thus keeping the price of cds at a criminal level, thus encouraging music piracy; and Simon Cowell, you're responsible for bringing shitty fashion bands like The Spice Girls into the foreground.  This is also nothing to be proud of and, frankly a kind of talentlessness.  You three know nothing about music-- unless it's bland, predicable, and pathetic.
        And that's why people who hate reality tv really hate American Idol.
        But that's just my opinion.  What do I know?
        Pass the corpse paint.
 

-- Then there's the old standby, the one everyone always falls back on when all avenues have been exhausted:
        "The ways of God are not for us to understand, but rest assured God loves us all in His own way"
        Which pretty much amounts to giving up.  You've hit a wall and really you don't know what to think.  The options are too scary, so you fall back on a platitude.
        The options:
        -- there is no God
        -- there is a God, but God is so alien you could never hope to relate to it, and therefore saying God is "good" and that God "loves" anything really isn't an issue because "good" and "love" are just things we invented and have no actual bearing on anything Divine-- this is kind of a variant on the "ways of God are not for us to understand" argument, but hardly as simplistically comforting
        -- there is a God but this God a cruel, random God who enjoys treating us like a little kid pulling wings off flies, or a cat batting around prey
        -- or God simply doesn't care.
 

HOUSE:
        It's good to see this on tv.  Not because it's yet another one-hour medical show-- Christ knows there's enough of those littering the bandwidth.
        It's the character of House himself.
        And not just the character because angry cynics with hearts of gold are nothing unusual on tv, but because of what he says-- over and over and over-- the idea behind House:
        People lie.
        And not just guilty people-- everybody lies-- all the time.  People make shit up-- sometimes to cover their asses, but mostly just because people are habitual liars.
        The idea that nobody tells the truth.  Ever.  Just because they lie.  That's it, the end.
        Without reason or provocation, people just lie.  And they do it perpetually.  They simply do it because they do, with no reason or motive in mind.
        And it's not because of differing perspectives, not because different people see things different ways, and so they believe that what they're saying is the objective truth.  No.  That's not what House implies.  House implies that people just lie.  They are aware of some version of what they refer to as "the truth," they just never, ever, disclose it.  Because they just lie-- all the time-- for no reason.
        Maybe implies "implies" is being too gentle.
        House doesn't imply this, it states it as a matter of course.  On a daily level, everyone you talk to is going to be blatantly lying to you for no reason at all, just because that's what people do.
        People are liars and so can't be trusted.
        It's something I've believed for a long, long time, but have never really had the guts to look at people, even my close friends, when they say something patently absurd and exaggerated, or even just something banal and simple, and say:  "You expect me to believe that ridiculous, transparent lie?"  Because doing this tends to shorten friendships (especially with those you know are actual, bona fide habitual liars, not just casual liars) and sometimes friends (even lying ones) are in short supply around here.
        So it's nice to see this idea-- the idea that people always lie-- on American tv.  It's a dangerous idea because it attacks all sides, equally.  It's a leveler.
        And it's refreshing to see this-- especially now-- coming from a culture that believes it has a surplus of "truth."
 

BOB:  I don't want to die alone.
HEATHER:  Don't worry, you've got me.
BOB:  It's funny when you're young.
HEATHER:  Yeah.  It's all such a game.
BOB:  Heartbreak, relationships.  It's all so ephemeral.  Meaningless.  Stylized ritual that doesn't reflect anything real.  Like Archie comics.
HEATHER:  Yeah.  You get a crush and you think you've fallen in love.  It doesn't work out and you get over it.
BOB:  That's because you're young and it never really meant much, anyway.  You just tell yourself it does.  But the fact that you get over it, that you move on, that shows that it was really meaningless.
HEATHER:  When you're young, there's a division between romance and "real" friends.  The romantic part is just a game of attraction.  But you can't understand this.  You tell yourself that he or she's the one, but really you're just in the grip of serotonin, hormones, and shallow reflexive mammalian behaviour.  And, because of this, you don't understand who your real friends are.  Because you make a division between the people you're chasing for sexual needs and your real friends.
BOB:  There's a strange inversion.  Even though sex is a display of ultimate trust and vulnerability.  Your boyfriend or your girlfriend becomes the person with whom you share this ultimate
"gift" and yet that person isn't as important as the "real" friends you just talk to.  And so there's a confusion.
HEATHER:  But you don't notice it.  You chase after idiots and you don't notice what's in front of you because what's in front of you doesn't match any of your existing standards of perfection.  Any of the false ideals you generate.
BOB:  You don't realize that the people you talk to, your "friends," are the ones you know at a deeper, more intimate level than the ones you're after because they raise your blood pressure.
HEATHER:  And so you're confused and oblivious, and you don't know what you want.  And, even if you do, emotions and melodrama are a thrilling game.
BOB:  But then later the stakes get raised.  It stops being so ephemeral.  Even though it still looks the same from the outside.
HEATHER:  The real feelings begin to kick in.  The real loneliness, the real isolation, the real drive to find someone significant.
BOB:  But then, in a way, even if you do find someone, by then it's a case of too little too late.  Because now you're cynical, and paranoid, and tired.  And you don't even really trust your "friends" any more, you don't even feel a connection to them any more, let alone your "lovers."
HEATHER:  I don't want to die alone.
BOB:  Don't worry, you've got me.
 

-- oh yeah, and lots of the people killed in the tsunami were muslims
-- so it's "our" "good" "god" punishing "them" and "their" "bad" "god"
        -- i forgot about that classic line of reasoning
 

And all this stuff about God in relation to the tsunami is also only worth mentioning because right now there's this religious upswing because there's a holy war on-- and if you don't think what the USA is doing is a holy war, look again-- and everyone (in Canada too) seems to think that God is on their side, and that they worship a just God and a good God and, etc.  And so, now that that tsunami hit there are all these news spots and magazine articles asking where was God during the disaster? how could God let so many innocent people be killed? and so on.  And now the "experts" are tying themselves in knots trying to put some sort of positive, happy-God spin on this whole mess.
 

        Is the glass half empty, or is the glass half full?
        The real answer is:
        FUCK YOU, GLASS!
        FUCK YOU!
        FUCK YOU!!
        FUCK YOU!!!
 

I want to lose myself.  I can't lose myself.  Pass the corpse paint.
 

-- And of course all this "where was God?" crap would be a non-issue if people hadn't caught the disaster in real time video.  If it just happened and there were some newspaper clippings and tv crews there after the fact, nobody would really care.  This is because we're extensions of the tv now-- and so only if it happens on tv, and a gazillion miles away, and CNN is there, do we feel anything, or even notice.
        Pass the corpse paint.
 

[Oh well.  At least I've still got my health.
Oh... yeah... right....]
 

MORE SLOGANS:

Pass the corpse paint.
 

Next:  Never again....
 

Epilogue 73t.
Epilogue 73r.
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