so we're finally back from a 3 week crazy trip mostly to spain. it was deffinitely packed: on the way to spain we had a half a day layover in london so we blitzed thru some of it. then got a hotel, waited an hour and 15 minutes for a pizza delivery. fucken retarded. the worst thing about london is how un-fucken-believable expensive it is - things cost at the very least twice as much as they do here, and from there there is no ceiling. 80 pounds for a cab from london gatwick to downtown london - PLUS like 7 pounds i think to be able to drive into the london core. thats like over $170. i could probably go to fucken seattle for that. and the retarded pay-per-minute internet machine at the airport just blocked gmail, so i could only check my hotmail account. but once ur in london i guess there's things to see. but it was still just crazy.
then to spain. people smoking everywhere. well, in london too. stupid designated smoking areas that the smoke simply drifted out of - completely retarded. man, am i on a negative trip eh? :)
in spain and portugal - the road and highway signage was "inadequate" - often there was no signs, and when they were there, they were tiny and right at the turn u need to take. and confusing as hell - a huge sign above a highway that ur on, with up to 10 different highway signs and 2 cities - all going in ur direction - all these highways on one road? plus they've been changing their highway denomination system, so even the maps wer just piss poor, and even the newest ones werent well updated. they've been on this change for a couple years! the spanish just dont give a shit. often rude customer servie. half the stores were closed for vacation. 90% bathrooms had no toilet paper - especially annoying for girls. timers on lights in all public areas, sothe light would turn of like 3 times while ur taking a shit. everything in public areas was sticky - in england too - i guess they just wipe stuff down semi-anually. kitchens in bars etc close at like 2 or 3 pm or something - so u might be able to get a cold sandwich only. but the coffee was great - espeially in portugal - strong and delicious. but they dont even fuck around with brewing the stuff - they just do espresso, with steamed milk if u want coffee with milk - which eliminates the need for big coffee cups. but - no coffee to go other than starbucks - which tasted like piss compared to the 1 Euro coffee u could get at any bar - which, at an average of 2 bars per city block, makes a shitload of bars. and the starbucks sizes are all messed up too - theres no tall, grande and venti, there small, medium and large - and the small is tiny, the medium is like a tall, and the large is like a grande - there is no venti. and it costs 1.5 times as much as here. forget about burger king and mcdonalds - they cost maybe twice as much as here. thats why there's precious few of them there.
of the cool stuff: i got to spend some time with my 81 year old gramma, who, when asked how old she is says she just flips the digits and says she's 18 - she's hilarious :) got to hear her sing some old folklore and military songs, got to hear some wartime stories, and some stories from her lomg and hard life. grampa is still a mistery - he wont explain why he left for like 40 years, where and when he was born, what he did before and during the war, and recently he added more questions to the mix revealing that in the 50's he went to portugal and the canary islands. must have been while his wife was trying to feed her 3 daughters with no money and a broken wrist in the city. we're starting to figure he was a spy. he is quite intelligent.
ok - time to take a shower and back to dusty old construction. i'll continue this later ;)
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
i'm tired and feel like puking. i want to shut off the wants of the world around me. i want my way. pot or alcohol dont deal with the problems that make me feel like this, but they can ease the symptoms so soothingly...
i always forget that i probably only need a few minutes with a distraction, not focusing so much on my disomfort, and i'm much better :)
thats my theory on how pot and alcohol do their magic - they "dilute" the chemicals in the brain that let me think, making me a little less efficient, because less focused, and/or perhaps its the screening process - thoughts which are not driven by a high priority impulse are not weeded out as efficiently anymore - i get distracted, derailed from an obsessive train of thought. the priority loses its priority. tension dissipates. the realisation seeps thru that life can be beautiful.
i wonder if everybody is downer-driven. things have to be at the very least bi-polar - we must be motivated by bad things to avoid those bad things, and by good things to seek more of those good things. pretty blind process. i think we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to free will. the brain is just a convenient mutation of the nervous system. a complication of it, a turbo-charger on an engine inevitably bound for self-destruction. we'll just get there faster. we're a pest colony thats just too greedy for its own good. we keep inventing ways of taking more. and the less there is to take, the more aggressive it'll get. a healthy degree of aggresion in the individual will be more and more often the ticket. i wonder if society will wind tighter and tighter, the more docile portion of the population continuously being fucked out of existence. the ratio of competition versus co-operation will keep growing... but on the other hand, i wonder if we're actually heading in completely the opposite direction. the solitary, ultra-aggressive alpha-male is every now and then beaten by one who has a different trait, or set of traits to make up for his somewhat more mediocre aggression - smarts of some sort, charisma, pheromones, killer smile - whatever it is that makes other people like him. he harnesses the power of many "lesser" individuals - he's the politician. i guess there has to be some kinda balance between the push and the pull, the stick and the carrot - kiss babies, kill the competition. but nothing is static. things keep moving around and changing - until a new way of being for a system is found. all the different ways that people on earth can and have lived circumscribe the limits of how the human can live, as limited by the environment. and we have an impact on our environment - like any self-respecting life form would :)
but even that environment has limits on how much it can be changed, and although we can probably reach this limit - i dont think we would survive it. Terence McKenna pulled out from somewhere this theory that the earth is like some sort of embryo or otherwise a somewhat alive in a fringy sense "organism", and part of its "growing" or "becoming" (conscious or not) was the ocurrence of life-supporting if not outright life-spawning conditions, where all the life that has sprouted up since, is but a subsystem, not unlike all the friendly bacteria we have living inside our bodies, doing whatever it is they do, with the end result of us functioning well. its symbiosis at best. u lose some of them or have an imbalance - u might get diarrhea for a bit. but one of you survives, while their population is decimated. or maybe this is not nearly the end of the road yet. maybe all the flora and fauna is but the base of a huge pyramid-like support system for us... so we can make something really worthwhile and produce and network enough electronics and gather enough data, until we have wrought an "artificial" super-intelligence out of the earth's minerals. we've been messing around with what the earth is made of forever - working the earth, farming, mining, refining, building, shaping - that was just practice. we're starting to get better at it, so we can do finer work with it, until we build the earth a brain out of itself, out of its minerals. we might not recognize it for what it is until its too late. look at the internet. are we just blindly performing our function? here we are, thinking we're the shizznit. in the meantime we're a horde of blind slaves pushing huge rocks around, not realising we're being made to build a pyramid.
time for beddy - its 12:48
i always forget that i probably only need a few minutes with a distraction, not focusing so much on my disomfort, and i'm much better :)
thats my theory on how pot and alcohol do their magic - they "dilute" the chemicals in the brain that let me think, making me a little less efficient, because less focused, and/or perhaps its the screening process - thoughts which are not driven by a high priority impulse are not weeded out as efficiently anymore - i get distracted, derailed from an obsessive train of thought. the priority loses its priority. tension dissipates. the realisation seeps thru that life can be beautiful.
i wonder if everybody is downer-driven. things have to be at the very least bi-polar - we must be motivated by bad things to avoid those bad things, and by good things to seek more of those good things. pretty blind process. i think we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to free will. the brain is just a convenient mutation of the nervous system. a complication of it, a turbo-charger on an engine inevitably bound for self-destruction. we'll just get there faster. we're a pest colony thats just too greedy for its own good. we keep inventing ways of taking more. and the less there is to take, the more aggressive it'll get. a healthy degree of aggresion in the individual will be more and more often the ticket. i wonder if society will wind tighter and tighter, the more docile portion of the population continuously being fucked out of existence. the ratio of competition versus co-operation will keep growing... but on the other hand, i wonder if we're actually heading in completely the opposite direction. the solitary, ultra-aggressive alpha-male is every now and then beaten by one who has a different trait, or set of traits to make up for his somewhat more mediocre aggression - smarts of some sort, charisma, pheromones, killer smile - whatever it is that makes other people like him. he harnesses the power of many "lesser" individuals - he's the politician. i guess there has to be some kinda balance between the push and the pull, the stick and the carrot - kiss babies, kill the competition. but nothing is static. things keep moving around and changing - until a new way of being for a system is found. all the different ways that people on earth can and have lived circumscribe the limits of how the human can live, as limited by the environment. and we have an impact on our environment - like any self-respecting life form would :)
but even that environment has limits on how much it can be changed, and although we can probably reach this limit - i dont think we would survive it. Terence McKenna pulled out from somewhere this theory that the earth is like some sort of embryo or otherwise a somewhat alive in a fringy sense "organism", and part of its "growing" or "becoming" (conscious or not) was the ocurrence of life-supporting if not outright life-spawning conditions, where all the life that has sprouted up since, is but a subsystem, not unlike all the friendly bacteria we have living inside our bodies, doing whatever it is they do, with the end result of us functioning well. its symbiosis at best. u lose some of them or have an imbalance - u might get diarrhea for a bit. but one of you survives, while their population is decimated. or maybe this is not nearly the end of the road yet. maybe all the flora and fauna is but the base of a huge pyramid-like support system for us... so we can make something really worthwhile and produce and network enough electronics and gather enough data, until we have wrought an "artificial" super-intelligence out of the earth's minerals. we've been messing around with what the earth is made of forever - working the earth, farming, mining, refining, building, shaping - that was just practice. we're starting to get better at it, so we can do finer work with it, until we build the earth a brain out of itself, out of its minerals. we might not recognize it for what it is until its too late. look at the internet. are we just blindly performing our function? here we are, thinking we're the shizznit. in the meantime we're a horde of blind slaves pushing huge rocks around, not realising we're being made to build a pyramid.
time for beddy - its 12:48
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