what if humanity evolved enough over time, to the point that each of us would be as a lord unto himself - owning whole galaxies populated by beings who would "farm" other, "lesser" beings themselves, which in turn would have parasites, which would in turn have smaller parasites living on them - all an absurdly gigantic pyramid scheme to produce or distill some sort of energy or even diversity or novelty, whether useful, or as a form of art or even a collectible. or a battery. what if we were not just the beings at the tops of our pyramids, but only small parts of some other ultimate being's mega pyramid or polyhedron or what have you. how many individual "gods" would tell their farm animals what they're actually a part of, were the animals able to comprehend the situation to any meaningful degree? how many might concoct a story to tell their livestock, if they found such a story gave better yield, like a mental steroid, or vaccine or just a supplement? a story or even an idea that would polarize a species, or at least a sub-section of it, in just the desired manner, like the concept of good and evil, a struggle between them, god and satan, good cop vs. bad cop, the carrot and the stick?

or love.

my dad almost killed my mom

he was backing up the trailer towards a loading dock at night, and she was back there, trying to help guide him. at some point he realized he is not seeing her in either of the mirrors, and he was not sure how close he was to the concrete dock - he didnt want to hit it and damage it and the trailer. he put on the hand brake (or whatever its called in these trucks) and went to the back. his trailer was maybe 2 feet from the dock. between the two was my mom, crumpled up on the ground, crying. she told us later that when she realized she was probably gonna be crushed between the trailer and the dock, she instinctively braced her back against the dock and  made as if to stop the trailer with her hands. lucky for all of us, that was when my dad decided to put on the e-brake and check how far away from the wall he was. i think trucking is not for my mom. she means well but takes risks she shouldnt. hasnt cost her her life or limb yet, though. but i wouldnt call it a very successful go.

my parents' friends' 24 y.o. son died. i thought i remembered hearing he was into coke, but it didnt sound like he OD'd, plus i dont think he had that kind of money. when i asked what he died of, my parents said something like "he did drugs!"
is naivete = harmless stupidity?
there was talk his organs got beat to shit by all these drugs he did. it seems unjust and even hard to believe that a 24 y.o. guy would wreck his body enough to die when all these bums downtown seem to live on and on forever. i've met people who have apparently done a lot of drugs and you couldnt tell just looking at them. i havent met any meth heads, that i know, but i hear it really ages you fast. i just saw some pics of this guy that just died and he looked healthy. my parents have met him and apparently he looked fine. his parents are obviously devastated. but they put on a prayer evening for his soul, and a mass at church on sunday... i said i wouldnt have done anything - just bury him and try to forget, because he did it himself, and he did it to his family, and since it was basically an extended suicide, i'm kinda surprised they had a mass for him at church. but someone said, they are his parents after all, so it shouldnt be surprising that they would do this for their son. makes me feel really sorry for them. so they cant help their nature and do what they feel they must for their son. and he apparently couldnt help his nature either, saw it coming, landed in the hospital a few times, there was some rehab effort, but in the end he died. ridiculous. fucked up. the flesh is weak. in some more than others. it's just sad. what a waste. seems like he just couldnt be helped. natural selection seems cruel, but i guess thats how it is. his nature just worked against him in his environment, which had apparently an abundance of things lethal to him. is this selection process leading to a humanity that is "smarter", with stronger will power, and a more robust physiology? i'm sure the race will survive, but the cost of this evolution to all the individuals around the "failing" subsets...

some people scoff at being immersed in stories and say ppl should go out more and experience life for themselves.
some people say reading is where it's at, and surely watching the tube does not lead to anything good. does anybody complain saying others should sit in front of the TV and not go on the computer/intraweb so much? will they complain in the future against more immersive media?
its just a medium. but i suppose each medium is its own message too. marshall mcluhan was cool. cool like fonzi. man i'm brainwashed.
maybe not everything you see on a screen should be measured on the same scale? educational programs versus commercials? but even the edu programs - whose points of view are they representing? who prepped content for you to perceive it in just that specific way? what was their idea of what's right and wrong? did they care if they misrepresented something to some degree if they made some money off it? are they just proliferating some false ideas that they bought at an age when they didnt have the logic faculties to process these ideas as they would now? are they reinforcing ideas that were handed down to them from authoritative sources, without actually experiencing or investigating these themselves? i figure the best lies are the ones closest to the truth.
truth - an ideal. maybe truth should be viewed more relatively - an IF-THEN relationship. under some circumstances, something may be so. under other circumstances, things might be otherwise.
we need better tools to understand the world around us. and inside us. we need to be taught these in school. we need tool-making tools - for new situations. i suppose this might be taking place somewhere already. just want to show support and help spread the meme, if it's out there. it probably is.
drugs - substances that affect our bodies to effect "abnormal" functioning. heroin, pot, alcohol, coffee, tylenol... spicy food? most people probably mean illegal drugs. legality is fickle. throughout times and cultures, things have been both legal and illegal like pot, alcohol in general, gin, opium, coffee... i suppose everything used to be legal when there was no one imposing their will on others as to what they can and cant ingest. gasoline is legal and obviously necessary in our world, but there's some communities where it's also the main intoxicant. what about fasting? Sun Dancing?
people need to be truthfully informed about the risks and benefits of things. people need to be informed about social pressures. people could use help learning about their own psychology - what makes them tick. people need to re-learn to experience and judge for themselves. but also people need to be allowed to make their own decisions, learn through their own mistakes. sometimes people need to be helped, not directed and punished. well, i'm sure some people love being directed and punished, too.

depression season has apparently started

one step forward, two steps back

my little girl's very first compound curse :)

i forget what i was doing, but i was at the dining table, phx was at the laptop, and LB was in the hallway - from where we heard her say "I can't get off my fucking shit sock!"
we're like "whaat?" to which LB repeated the aforementioned obscenity. it was shocking, and we wanted to laugh, kinda, but i dont think we did. phx helped LB get her sock off, and we figured we really gotta curb my, er, our cursing again.
which brings me to asking again - what's wrong with cursing? what happened, somewhere along the line, that has made some words "Bad"? this seems to have occurred in most human cultures - but why? like - what the fuck?

what a strange fetish - science fiction - science-based fiction. watchin the animatrix, i couldnt help but notice how it made me feel. i only had time to be forced to notice it when i went to the washroom to take a leak. i felt like things were possible, a coolness. the only thing i can think of that took me to a place like that before science fiction, was probably "kung-fu movies", ok - "martial arts movies", like "Enter the Dragon". (i am NOT putting the period inside the quotation marks. or the parentheses. or the brackets. the parentheses and brackets usually are contained within a sentence, and therefore will not contain the period, but rather the period will follow them, concluding the sentence, goddammit.) (the exception being the "aside" parentheses, containing a whole sentence, or several, that might be a commentary rather than part of the story - hence the parentheses - and so the sentences behave "normally", but these "asides" are demarcated by the parentheses. whether the period should be inside the parentheses or outside, should not be a rigid rule, but rather be dictated by whether or not the parenthesized content was itself a whole, a unit - um, i think i'm typing out my ass and so should check this out on wikipedia before opening my big keyboard.

um, i found in wikipedia that i had no idea of what i was talking about. in american english there is a convention or standard of having the period at the end of a sentence always inside the quotation marks, if there is a quotation at the end of the sentence, regardless of whether the period was actually included in the original of what was quoted. unless we're talking scientific or technical writing - then no. ( hehe, awesome sentence.) this rule was developed as a result of the need to protect the small and fragile pieces of type like the period and the comma behind the bigger and stronger quotation marks in the printing press.
and apparently the british convention is to use logical quotation.
and all this time i thought it was about parentheses - silly me :)
but i did find out that the british dont say "period" but rather "full stop", which in turn dispells some of my confusion about some of what the dopefiend says.
apparently "full stop" is sometimes used in canada, but i havent noticed. yet another word fallen victim to americanization here. right after chesterfield.

back to the main body, omitting parentheses and all, for now - martial arts movies and many sci-fi movies have made me feel like maybe more in life is possible than i've been led to believe. i wonder if anybody's done a study on what kind of class of people, what kind of personality trait is necessary to go for this sort of entertainment. what causes some people to be completely enthralled by this sort of communication, as opposed to ppl who love wwe wrestling.

what is it that makes us geeks?

a piece by one of my fave talkers set to some awesome art

sitting outside a starbucks

an obviously homeless and very fucked up looking guy is making his way up the sidewalk with a slow, shuffling walk. he's holding a can of turpentine. he stops to pour some more into a small rag he's holding in his other hand. takes a few more steps, the turpentine dripping from his hand. he then stops to inhale deeply from his rag a few times. turns around and walks into the starbucks. maybe for some paper napkins? stumbles out in a minute and slowly continues on up the hill.

this 60-something persian concierge was getting flack from a 30-ish resident who'd just gotten in the front door for not going outside and telling people waiting for the bus to not stand in front of the entrance. but the people were standing in front of the entrance because thats where there was some cover from the rain. the concierge got more and more agitated. started speaking louder and louder, with increasingly bad english, culminating in saying "Fuck You!" to the resident a couple times.

it got to the concierge's supervisor that i witnessed that incident, so i kinda confirmed it for him, somehow trying to save the old guy, but he still got the axe. he told me he used to be a fighter plane mechanic back home. i thought he sounded a bit bitter about his "career change".

i saw the old guy back at the concierge desk at that building the other day :)

2 guys put on balaclavas in the garage of a 2-tower apartment building. they make their way up the stairs to the ground floor. they enter the management office, get out their mace and demand all the money the ladies in the office have. the ladies answer they put all the money they get from residents into the safe through a slot, but they dont have the key. the manager has the key, but he's not at the building. so the boys try to pull out the safe, but cant. the lady in the leasing office right next door saw what was happening through the partly glass wall, dialed 911, and as she yelled into the phone "help! we're being robbed!" the would be robbers bolted out of there. i bet she dialed 911 and the operator went "police, fire, or ambulance?" and the lady just lost her nerve...

***

saw a video of a bike thief being tackled by 3 plain clothes security guys the other day. it felt so good. i wanted them to hurt him. bad. i hope they did. couldnt see - the camera looked too high up...

homie-cide

yet another brothel suite in another expensive downtown highrise. 2 asian guys enter just after midnight. about 15 minutes later the guys are back out with some laptops, this time hoodies up. a few minutes after they leave the building, police arrive. apparently the killing of the guy that was looking after the girls was quite noisy...

was it planned? simply a rip-off of an already illegal operation? thought no one would go to the police with it? was it to get the laptops, possibly containing the name of someone who really didnt wanna leave a trail? was it to get names of ppl for blackmail purposes? or was it just heat of the moment, hence hoodies on way out only? ... and laptops because they were repeat customers? or just thought theft wasnt gonna be as big a problem if they were caught?

things you hear at these expensive appartment buildings...

concierge: see that guy? he works for (local phone company). he keeps going to the brothel suite here all the time...
me: there's a brothel suite here???????
concierge: yeah, you didnt know? yeah, its a different girl every week. poor girls, they get a new customer like every half hour.

*note: i saw this guy show up at a different appartment building the other day. he's not a technician, in case anyone's wondering. i wonder if he spends most of his money on this.

***

maintenance guy: yeah, so we were doing fire alarm testing in all the suites at (1st brothel suite building), and we go in this one suite, and there's machine guns and ammo on the table in the living room. turns out there's some east indian guys passed out in the bedroom. we left right away and called the cops.
me: yeah i was working there once, and these 2 cops show up gesturing to the concierge to open the door, then asking to be let up to whatever floor. 30 seconds later 2 more cops show up. 30 seconds later 2 more - with shotguns! and then a paddy wagon parks just at the corner. found out later that it was just some domestic dispute between someone's girlfriend and mom, but now i know the reason for the overkill.

***

bike patrolman to concierge: there was this bum that kept hanging out in this parkade, and i kept telling him to leave, and he kept coming back, so i finally called the cops. so this big cop shows up, i take him to where the bum is. the cop said he's seen the bum before, and then just tells me to beat it. so i rode away just around the first corner, but stopped just to see what was going on, and the cop started to beat the shit out of the bum, and the bum was just squealing like a little girl...

***

maintenance guy: this lady came down to the front desk asking if we'd seen her husband. apparently he'd go for a bike ride every morning, then come back and go to work, but he never came back from his bike ride that morning. so we checked to make sure he'd gotten his bike out of the storage, and he just never came back. not long after we heard someone was hanging from a tree not far away. i went to see and yeah, that was the guy - he just hung himself. i told the concierge to help his wife with anything she might need...

move over Jefferson Starship...

the above is the result of a tag by the mez. the picture wasnt like that actually, i used picnik to put it all together and alter the original picture. i was amazed how the band name and the picture totally fit together, and the album name was somewhat related, too!
for now I TAG Shenry.
i have to see who else i still can tag, so bear with me.

but here's how you do it:

1. Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2. Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use photoshop, the gimp or similar to put it all together.

5. Post it to your blog with this text in the “caption” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

was i right, once upon a time, when i thought it would be cruel to thrust a child into this life i seem to hate so often? maybe they should have a test to verify that one is ready to have a child, and then 2, and so on. maybe they do. i guess it wouldnt turn out too cruel if the child ends up dealing with it all quite well. it's been a while since i first heard terence mckenna utter the phrase "culture is not your friend". but it's been seeping in slowly. its hard to practice thinking and verifying for myself while immersed in it all. but my mind and body are my own. "dont knock it until you try it" is redneck wisdom. i'm gonna have a fucking headache tomorrow morning again. i should substitute alcohol with pot completely.

finished listening to "Prey" by Michael Crichton. awesome, but quite a bit of a thriller. almost too much for me at times. times that i didnt need the additional "stress" of a thriller. but i totally recommend it.

following the link from a recent post by meznor, phx and i just started the hundred push ups training program, and tomorrow we're starting the two hundred situps training program - so exciting! :D