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.

maybe i should start a list of pot names i at least "kinda" like - in the spirit of positivity and such like.

i remember there was a period of time during my "honeymoon" phase of smot pokage, when i'd often say "i love weed" when on the way "up". so guess thats a fond memory associated with the word weed. i call it pot i guess because most pot smokers call it that here. and i guess i kinda like "cheeba" despite its obscureness - kinda funky that way. "whacky tobaccy" is too wordy, but colourful enough to keep it around for occasional use in one's repertoire. just looking at a list of synonims and strand names - i like "power plant" - hilarious :)

not as hilarious as falling asleep at the comp. gotta go beddy.

got some fucken flu. as in flu en za.
dont wanna smoke pot so as not to make it harder for my throat, etc to heal. is having a couple shots better for my throat? 'cause thats what i'm doing. wish alcohol were illegal and not pot. i could vapourize pot - that would not hurt my throat. as far as i understand. dont like the word "pot" all that much. but it seems least of evils: 'weed' has the connotation of "undesirable plant", when it actually is quite desirable; 'marijuana' is so stigmatised, and a bit old fashioned; 'dope' is just totally old school and dorky; 'ganja' sounds all wrong from a caucasian - i know because i have a friend who says that; 'chronic' is too negative and smacks of dorky homie-ism; 'cheeba' is just too obscure; 'hemp' - industrial or new agey; 'herb' - just dorky; 'grass' - really old fashioned; not to mention dorky :) the list just goes on and on in unrelenting dorky fashion.

whatever.

installed a new router on the computer, updated it, set it up, and got bit comet working again. downloading some audio books: golden compass, subtle knife, hp lovecraft's cthulu mythos books, interview with the vampire, tom sawyer, ender's game, some william s. burroughs, like naked lunch...

gotta go to sleep...

i'm just a whiny bitch. if i didnt whine so much, i 'd probably cease being a whiny bitch. but then i'd be some psycho that wrecks shit. and that doesnt help anyone, now does it. smot poking is frowned upon here, so i'm getting drunk, but i'm not liking it. whats making things worse is that i ran out of whiskey, so i mixed in some godawful polish potato vodka, and i'm starting to feel queasy. i'm probably gonna have a headache tomorrow. this sucks. i'm apparently not great with stress. i read a funny somewhere sometime to the effect of "being depressed is like being pissed off, but without the energy". sometimes i foray into the energy field. i probably straddle the fence most of the time. whatev. the terrible 2's havent even officially begun, and i've already had enough. this is not good. this is not right. my feet stick out of bed all night. thank you dr. seuss.
i cant keep living like this. this needs to change. i need some sorta drugs. legal, illegal, as long as it helps. its not like this all the time. but when it is it seems like it is. and when things are fine, the shit seems so distant. having a family is no walk in the park. for me, at any rate. having kids is hard work. i didnt understand that. speaking of parks - dealer from across "Crackhead Alley" is back after an extended absence. we were hoping he's been put away for a long while. so he's back, and the very next thing i notice is a cruiser with lights flashing and police tape attached to it, blocking off the exit from "Crackhead Alley" towards the park. turned out later that half the park was cordoned off. some old lady said she heard shots at night. funny coincidence with the dude coming back and the shooting.
ok, i'm falling asleep. gotta go.

i guess i should avoid blanket statements like " i hate weekends ", but there's certain things i dont like about weekends. on my 2 days off we still end up getting up early because of the kids. and there's shit to do thats piled up because we keep thinking we're gonna have time to get shit done on the weekend.
this is a post about nothing - so retarded. i'm just fucking grumpy. again. i need prozac. or some good weed. maybe both.
got a Blackberry Pearl as a hand-me-down from a guy whose place i'll sorta be taking at the new job. looks pretty cool so far. see if i can install the software for it without having the comp explode :)

a twist

patty cake, patty cake
got some hemp
lets all get baked as fast as we can
roll it, spark it, pass it 'round and see
how we'll get toasted with this great weed!
:)

while walking thru walmart today, i noticed ash-trays for sale, and i wondered - if pot was legal here, or maybe "when" its legal here, will they sell cheap bongs and grinders from china and stuff? probably. i mean, they used to sell opium in the sears catalogue.

buddy came around with his elise today - nice :)
phx says she saw ppl rubber-necking as they passed. he asked me if i wanted to take it for a drive, but somehow i didnt feel like it was the right time or something, so i turned the offer down. hope it comes around again - preferably when "the time is right" :)

phew - almost forgot to make my positive entry of the day - well, it is the next day but i havent gone to sleep yet, so that should be ok.
there's several i can think of - the morning started with remembering that its friday - so that was cool - and i'd slept-in like a mofo - so that was cool too. listening to the dopecast - sans dope - that was chill. bla bla, work crap - then sampling some "juicy fruit" was cool, brought back a taste i havent had in years. realizing that a lot of work stuff was done already was cool.
getting everything together to work on the jetta was a relief in itself - before even starting any work. hearing that a friend is pursuing happiness over the mammon was cool, even if it does mean that i wont be really working for him for any length of time like we thought - but it might not even turn out that way. and now the crimpins tree is sitting neatly in 4 boxes, ready to be shipped off to my 'rents' garage - so thats a win. ok - my's ready to hit the hays :)

the time leading up to the holidays was dreadful, the holidays themselves werent much better, and i'm back to the grind. hitting another low point on new year's day, i was thinking about a fellow blogger's advice to just force myself into a positive mindset, think happy thoughts, *make* it happen. but i just couldnt/wouldnt - didnt happen, i wondered if i was simply more comfortable because more familiar with the depressed metal state or something. but i'm not really depressed most of the time, i dont think... either way, fast-forward to to my shower today, and i suddenly felt that i wasnt really down, and felt almost... positive or something. and then i remembered trying to feel happier when i wasnt, and thought that its so much easier to do when ur not totally down. and then i remembered my ex's "therapy" as advised by her doctor once - put little red stickers at various places around the house and places you look, and every time you see one of those - think a happy thought - a way to get the mind in the habit of thinking and feeling happy. so i decided to finally try it too - i put one little penguin sticker on the coffee maker, and one above the comp screen - that way my earliest moments of the day should get the positive vibe going. and i thought to make a new years' resolution - even though a few days late - i'm going to try to post at least one positive thought on the blog every day.
so - ...
man, my happiness kinda fizzled there. think happy, or positive. its friday tomorrow! thats kinda good. hmm.
this is depressing - i get brought down so easily. i get to smoke up and listen to the dopecast's 100th episode tomorrow morning..? well, that, the fact that its friday, and the fact i made this resolution should count for something. we'll see tomorrow.

its been eons since i last posted here.
i was lying on the bed, because i just felt too tired and bleah to sort thru the excess of shirts in our closet. phx and boogie came too, and we all started drifting off to sleep. and then one of our neighbours started pressure-washing the concrete pad in front of his place. and phx said: "that guy doesnt do anything but smoke pot and pressure-wash his sidewalk".
that slowly got some thoughts in me rolling. i wondered how active he would be if he didnt smoke pot. but then i remembered that i tended to get onto doing stuff i normally didnt feel like doing, after having a toke. so maybe it worked like that for this guy too. or maybe i'm just different.
then i started wondering why that would be - why something like that would affect me in that way. sometimes having a slight consistent pain or being sick just got me on working at what had to be done. all these things seem to just take some kind of edge off for me, and i dont terribly mind getting onto doing something i'd normally not want to do. how does that work?
then i started thinking that maybe our brains have a couple different centers that work independently towards their own goals, but what the body ultimately does is either some kind of average of the different agendas that these brain centers are pushing, or these stimuli get all submitted to some kind of editor, which then decides what to do out of all these choices. but maybe something happens during the editor's development that skewes his tendencies one way or another.
or maybe the process is more automated than that, and the brain centers simply submit a request together with some kind of a priority value, and then its not so much a conscious "choice", but rather a kind of an average or a sum total i mentioned earlier. and either because of nurture or nature, or a combination of both, some centers tend to output higher priority values than others.
likely it would be a combination of approaches - for simpler things, the process would be automated, and we'd be only dimly aware of it. for processes with which "conscious" mucking might jeopardize the body - the process would be completely automated and we'd not be aware of it at all. so what processes are we conscious of? is it the ones that deal with the outside world? unless they're boring, then they'd get demoted to the automated department, and awareness would be rerouted from it to more "interesting" things. awareness... attention? conscious attention. what is consciousness? being able to operate with ideas? whats an idea? something which can be described to a degree with language? hmm, phx just told boogie that i'm the next ernest hummingbird :)
but i think awareness, which is probably the same thing as consciousness, is possible without language. language just institutionalizes awareness. you can operate with ideas without language to a limited degree. but to do that you need memory. awareness probably doesnt exist if all ur doing is reacting to stimuli as they come. but if u can compare an experience to a previous experience...
this "comparing" might happen at an even deeper level of automation in the form of the evolutionary process: a mutation that gives an advantage to an organism when dealing with a situation as compared to its peers will give the organism better chances of survival and procreation. over time this type of organism should become the norm. its kind of like learning, but for a species. hardwired biological memory.
but when individual members of the species can learn to deal with situations in a better way, that catapults the learning process for the species hugely. then the members of the species learn to share this knowledge, so that mistakes dont have to be made over and over again, but the learning process can be picked up and continued by the next individual. add parallel processing by sharing information between many individuals at once and testing many new paths of progress from that point, and the species becomes a supercomputer. too bad we often think of ourselves as completely separate individuals and dont feel that connection to everybody else.

just finished listening to 1984 by george orwell - fucking depressing. the last 1/3 of the book is just the dude's ordeal - i felt like i was just being pounded by it over the head, just wanted to get thru it, one part nearly put tears in my eyes. i would say the book is interesting up to the point when he is taken. after that i would advise to use whatever substance or technique to detach oneself from one's feelings to continue. maybe i'm just a pussy. i get down easily. i dont wanna work. i dont wanna do anything. nothing productive. its cold out there. fucking benzino is still not talking - i stopped talking to him too. but its tense. that sucks. all i wanna do is to get stoned. or do whatever that captures my attention without requiring me to do anything. movies. stories. tripping. reading. my head seems to be hurting often now. my psoriasis is flaring like its going out of fashion. i hate christmas. when i first heard someone uttering this phrase i was outraged. now i'm a full convert. the only thing one can count on is change. i dont know how phx is putting up with me.

feeling pretty shitty lately. i dont think that gingko shit is good for me. sometimes it makes me feel a bit dizzy, slow and stupid - kinda like a stone, but without the pleasure. i should read up on it and probably quit it. maybe my moods have been rubbing off at work, because benzino has been having some hardcore hissy fits. i can tell he's pissed off, but he just wont talk. i think he's been hanging out with girls way too much. i think he said most of his friends are girls - no benefits tho. i donno.
totally losing grip on the work situation. benzino is now de facto running the site, and i'm the helper. except i'm also like a consultant. i like that part of it. i could chalk most of it up to seasonal affective disorder or something, and the recent cold temperatures. the closing in of christmas. the crappy situation on my account. the unfinished side jobs, people calling about new ones. i dont wanna do anything but listen to my stories and watch movies. and boogie. she's so cute. but sometimes she drives us up the wall. most often me.
i just wanna be a spectator for a while. an extended while. get stoned and enjoy. go to sleep when i burn out.
looks like i'm actually gonna have to read some books. count zero and monalisa overdrive are apparently not available in audio format. it might look weird for people to see me there, just sitting at the site. maybe if i went and read it on my coffee breaks at the starbucks...
pattern recognition was really cool. now i just started listening to virtual light, but its somehow different. i think i should do some kinda course that would improve my information extraction from spoken word. i really wanted to use the word 'aural' though... :)
that and speed reading. if i could speed up my reading speed, maybe reading books would be a more plausible activity for my tight schedule. as i perceive it.
i should go. my parents are waiting for me. i said i could install an outside outlet for their christmas lights. this is gonna be interesting.

thx for the birthday wishes toi! ;)

yeah, my birthday was a nice surprise, although it almost wasnt a surprise because i started to pick up too many little suspicious bits. but i like to be surprised so i usually let my surprisers do what they set out to do :) and it was fun! put on some tunage i like, started pounding back the brewskies, talked about some cool shizznit wit' da peeps, had a toke, went to the bar, had 2 rounds of tequila and a round of goddam 151 - that shit is just vile. and some more beers. then we drove thru mcdix and pigged out on greasy-ass food to coat our guts in grease so less alco-ma-hol would get absorbed, as well as having some of it absorbed into the bun, and diluted it all with the pop - think i had root beer... i like root beer :) only possibly second to sarsaparrilla :)
next morning / mid-day was... delicate, but didnt get to do any heaveage, which is always a deffinite bonus:) just watched the world cup final, and by the time the italians won, i was ready to be happy with them :)
good times were had by all:) except for the bit when Tara freaked out a bit after toking a bit too much and almost losing her eyesight and hearing for a few minutes. hehe - or like the last time she forgot she'd been eating black liquorice and then freaked out when she noticed her tongue was black - wish i'd been there :D

booze, sun, and philosophy

ok, so it was gonna be "booze, drugs, and philosophy", but the druggiest it got was tylenol extra strength. oh, and there was pot.
went camping this may long weekend, same bat-place as last year, but in my fuzzy recollections there was a lake, not a river. well, this year it was a river :)
the boyz improved on their last year's hot tub design, and instead of digging a hole in the ground and lining it with a tarp they just bought a ginormous inflatamable pool. and used a bigger pipe to make the heating coil with. but only one pump. there was some fancy hydraulics in the plans, but i dont rem why it ultimately wouldnt work, or what the hell it was to actually do in the first place, although it kinda looked like they wanted to suck the water directly out of the river thru these pipes instead of using buckets. or actually just big coolers, or bins of some sort.
by evening the thing got hot enough that it was still comfortable when it started to rain. when it started getting colder somebody brought a tarp and we just pulled it over ourselves and the pool. it was awrite :)
oh the fond memories - passing the bottle of vodka around, followed by the chaser cup... being slammed into the pool from behind and hurting some chix legs with my jaw. i think nothing happened to me because i was so drunk :) and i got back at the dork that pushed me in by dragging him into the pool when he got near enough :)
nobody got my new favourite joke of "whats blue and doesnt fit anymore?" though... :(
and nobody liked my tunage, like "rubber bullets", by 10cc apparently.
oh well.
had some cool wondrous moments. i hatched a theory on my buddy that sounded something like "a high incidence of stupid but good looking chix in a society may be advantageous to said society by way of lowering the average level of sexual frustration and aggression of intelligent but aggressive males, thereby promoting cooperation as opposed to competition." sounds chauvinistic, but it was funny at the time :)
then i really got to wunderin', and started wondering why the earth's magnetic polarity keeps shifting and even reversing. i believe that the earth's overall polarity is the sum effect of the polarities of all the magnetic particles in earth, but my questions was: what makes all those particles face the way they face? what about other planets' magnetic fields - are they aligned with ours? or is every body independent? i guess i should look for the answers online...
another thunk i had was "why are there so many relatively small rocks in the world?" when big earthquakes happen, do they make the bedrock brake into all these small crumbs? or are there first huge rocks and then the elements break them down over eons? i start feeling impatient when i consider that to be the case. that would just take too long.

the company christmas party was too much of a blast. i think i have to figure out how many shots to allow myself per night. also, what fucked me over, or what contributed to fucking me over, was the fact they ran out of tequila and so i switched over to vodka. stick to one type of alcohol tommy! would 10 shots be a good limit? i'm lucky i've got good friends and a great fiancee. they took care of me when i've obviously had enough, got me a cab, put me in it, somehow found out where i live and told him, as well as got him not to fuck me over. you hear stories about asshole cabbies all the time, i even know this girl who was almost raped by one. maybe i just cashed in some good karma that night, who knows. the dude didnt even fuss when i had to get him to do an emergency pull over so i could toss me cookies. maybe 7 shots would be a better limit. phx took really good care of me, and deffinitely tried, even when my conscious self wasnt there anymore, just the primal sub-conscious. i've heard about people lapsing in and out of consciousness after severe physical trauma, reverting to their mother toungue, but even my mom, when in the emergency ward when she had that concussion, was able to sorta communicate in english. i thought i would always be able to, no matter what. and it didnt even take a concussion to prove that theory wrong. the lights were on, but there was nobody home, so i guess the home automation system had to take care of things. so 7 shots sounds like a good number. and NO pot when drinking heavy! that was just stupid. actually, that was probably what ultimately did me in! my drinking do's and don'ts learning curve is pretty horizontal... :(

is marijuana prohibition any different than the old alcohol prohibition?

just got to thunking, is all. i dont think its very different, except perhaps for the length of duration. also got to thunking that if "fighting" the prohibition doesnt seem to be doing much good right now, then probably if things simply continue developing in terms of cannabis' popularity, there will be no one to prosecute in a generation, because the majority of the north american population will be smoking at home and with friends by then. just hope marc emery doesnt have to wait that long...

i feel like a bit of a loser getting on my blog just to bitch, but i guess i need some sort of outlet.
just everything sucks. too much to do, not enough money and time to do it, and it all sucks anyways. i cant just think positive, i get into these fucking downers. feels like an uphill battle. maybe its late and i've been working late most evenings, and its winter so theres a lot less sunlight, and its cold, and all my clothes are dirty, and the appartment i keep referring to as a fucken pit, and my car is just overloaded with shit, and i keep hauling stuff to and from it numerous times a day, and i cant just slow down and do one thing at a time because i'm getting married and have a child on the way, and i dont wanna drink to relax because i'll feel like shit tomorrow, an dont wanna smoke pot or do acid because phoenix is gonna get upset, and besides, i have a feeling it would just get me into a downer tomorrow or the next day, i havent even done my taxes for last year, let alone this one, and my mom's computer is a pile of shit that i just dont have enough knowledge to deal with, but she wants the goddam pix from spain burned onto a cd, and my car needs a coolant flush, and the fucken side job just wont go away, but its my way to a decent engagement ring, and probably wedding bands, and i'll have to get an appartment or townhouse soon, and theres too much garbage and filth all around me and i dont have the time or energy to deal with it. fucken showering is a goddamn chore now - i used to love showering! i guess i'll have to jus try and somehow engrain in myself positive thinking. dont get down about shit - just deal with it. easy to say - brilliant idea from the shower by the way - but for some reason i just keep getting these downers every now and then. fuck. well, i think i feel a bit better, but also somewhat ashamed for being such a loser and blogging about my stupid shit so people can read it. what am i really trying for tho? if overpopulation doesnt kill us - well, it wouldnt be overpopulation itself, just die of lack of resources of some sort, or a resource war, or we'll over-toxify the planet, or nuke the place...
and here i was - getting all giddy about listening to terence mckenna talk about marshal mcluhan and his clever ideas about language, writing, printing, reading and media - instead of digging in for the fucken apocalypse. my shoulders hurt from all this typing. fuck it.

20 random things

i've just been informed that i'm a little shit-fucker. and that i'm mean.
who do u think said it? :)
whoever it was, they said they dont like me anymore and i didnt get to write ahead of time that they were gonna throw a paper ball at me :(
i dont think i'm mean. i mean, i have the potential to be, but i dont think i ever really am anymore.
but anywho, here's 20 somewhat random things...

1. vodka used to be my hard liquor of choice, but i think i like gibson's whiskey better now.

2. i used to say that given the choice between dropping alcohol or pot from my life, i'd say i would drop alcohol without hesitation.

i was just informed i bought the barbed wire of toilet papers :)

3. after screwing around in college for a year and a half and then just sitting at my parents home for a year i finally went to a technical institute for 2 years just to get some kinda profession, to have something to make a living from while i figure out just what i'd like to study. that was 5 years ago and i still dont know what and where to study. i have too many interests - just like 10 years ago.

4. my last big purchase was the tv i guess, but the last REAL big one was the trip to spain.

5. my brother is in azerbaijan right now, getting ready to get married to a girl he met and "dated" online for about a year or so, whom he hadnt met in person until a few weeks ago. they wanna have one wedding in azerbaijan and one in poland - which is gonna be my next big expense. too bad i wont be able to catch the one in azerbaijan tho.

6. i used to have a beverage can and bottle collection - i dont know how many hundreds of each i had anymore. i sold most of them for what turned out to be pennies, but kept the more interesting stuff at my parents place.

7. i now live like 8 or 9 time zones away from where i was born. my brother is now directly on the other side of the planet from me.

8. i've owned a dodge omni, then an oldsmobile toronado, now i drive a talon, and i also have another dodge omni now :)

9. i'm starting to dislike snowboarding more and more - the hills are still focused on skiers, and so the flat stretches just kill me. plus the ridiculous prices, the fog, flurries and other visibility impediments, icy slopes, too many people, blah blah blah...

10. i've started to suspect my grandfather might have been something of a spy. just dont know for whom.

11. my last name has 13 letters. only one of them is a vowel.
hehe, just kidding :)

12. i still have a little plush-ish doggie that i got when i was a baby, but to which i became much more attached when my real dog died. i named it "bacek" (little shepherd) after the real dog.

13. my real dog died because he got really sick from getting a cold from being tied up outside in the cold and somewhat wet, because i walked my brother with him to the bus stop, and when i got back home i realized i lost my key and couldnt find it, and then it was time for me to go to school, so a neighbour offered to keep my dog in her yard, spotted me the bus change and some paper and a pen. it was winter and snow was on the ground. i found the key later that year, after my dog died.

14. i have stupid regrets that come back to haunt me every now and then. i used to be really bothered by this pretty silly one about having inadvertently burned part of my brother's kids magazine centerfold cutout toy thingy. still kinda bugs me. these things used to get pretty bad, and it seems like they finally started triggering something like a tourette's response when these regrets get a bit overwhelming - my head might twitch to the side, or i might say something like "fuck off!", "stupid fuck", "asshole" etc. but i'm happy to say its subsided considerably.

15. i am more nervous about running into the guy who used to be my friend and with whom my ex gf of almost 3 years started getting involved when she was still with me, and to whom she's now engaged, than about running into her, and i think it is because i'm more physically intimidated by him than her.

16. i can make waves with my belly like, um... a belly dancer :)

17. no matter how interesting i find something, as soon as it becomes something i have to do, or something of importance, i tend to get apprehensive about it and go and get occupied with something else, usually something completely useless and unproductive.

18. i'm kinda afraid i may be a coward. i dont think i've ever made an important decision in my life - fate just sorta seems to have put me into situations and places, and all i had to do was just to take the opportunity, not even that - just go with the flow, play the role. i guess being passive like this is quite conducive to determinism. which might just be the actual, true state of things.

19. the only actual important "decision" that i can think of having made is deciding that god probably doesnt exist. but i still havent told my family. i dont know how i ever will.

20. i started this feeling somewhat positive, but finish feeling pretty down, and i think the decline started with the story about my dog.

time to get groceries.

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

some sweet-ass sites out there. i surfed instead of getting onto the comp problem and happened upon http://fusionanomaly.net/networks.html
fusionanomaly seems like a wicked web of pages about a great variety of subjects, with many hyperlinked words, pictures, etc that refer you to pages on the subject of the hyperlinked (i hope i'm using the appropriate word here) word/pic/whatev that u clicked on that took u there. i may not be explaining it very well, so just go there and check it out for urself.
in the process of writing this wee entry i actually started working on the comp problem. my friend's HD is fooked - first i figured out that the floppy drive wasnt working b/c the ribbon cable was plugged into it with the wrong connector - i was supposed to use the one with the few wires in the middle twisted around, not the straight-thru. so the maxtor HD utility said it fixed whatev was wrong but each time i tried to start the comp i got the same prob. and every time it would find a prob and say it fixed it and every time it wouldnt boot up. so the HD is toast. now i'm checking my HD. i have 3 HD's on my comp - the maxtor one is the one that failed - whichever time in a row. the short test of the maxtor utility prog detects a problem, the full on one doesnt. plus my chip recently started overheating sometimes. right now i got my gf's fan sitting in front of the comp, i took the housing walls off, and the beeping stopped. my bro told me to just raise the warning temperature in BIOS to like 60 C. its at 56 right now i believe. he says he's got his chip running at 80 C. i donno - its not really solving the prob. when i have time i'm gonna have to give that comp a good dusting. talked to my buddy's gf yesterday and she swears by her mac. e-mac i believe. never got a virus. her comp crashed once in the last year and change. all she had to do was to turn it off and back on. never happened again. its quiet. takes up no space. looks cool. got it for a grand and they threw in the printer. it came with speakers - she just recommends maybe getting a base speaker. i rarely use my comp speakers - if anything i use the headphones. she uses firefox mozilla so she never gets popups. got some email prog that brings in emails from 5 diff email accts she's got out there. i'm gonna go over to her place soon and check it out for myslef. i think it would be worth it - save on all the hassle, AND have a cool looking comp :)
realistically, i use (or used to use) my comp to strictly check email, surf the net, do my banking, download songs, some anime, but not much, play music. i dont really have the time to play games. no patience to learn to play very involved ones. sometimes i rem with nostalgia the duke nukem, doom, warcraft II, starcraft, myst but dont even have time to play those again. so if i get a mac and have the time one day, i'm sure i can play those oldies thru a win emulator or whatever they use.
but we'll see.
man, i noticed that sometimes i can bog down a bit into chat typing mode with my abbrev's... :D

friggin' simon posford rules. his "music name" (check out the eloquence! not) is hallucinogen. i wonder if he uses psychedelics, or if its just a clever name. and if he does then what, how much, how often, when, with what intent, how. a lot of stuff is "fun", but i'm kinda shying away from simply frivolous use of "stuff". i dont know that many smot pokers who speak of pot addiction. i guess it depends what u consider an addiction. luckily the stuff doesnt kill, but for me, very frequent use has started to encroach on my life in ways i hadn't thought it would, or even could. i did hear about the adverse effect on memory. but didnt realize it could unbalance my moods. when i wasnt smoking that is. when i found what i like about it, i couldnt believe more ppl didnt smoke it. when coming up, it was relaxing as hell, a bit euphoric, my worries were put in perspective, i didnt mind doing my chores, the amazing ideas and trains of thought that occured to me while doing some mechanical, thoughtless activity like driving home in traffic or showering - really cool ideas and realisations. plus, everything seemed so much cooler - going for a walk was awesome! but shortly after, when it leveled off, i'd start feeling tired and sleepy - so that was not a good thing in the middle of the day. and my memory just wasnt as good even when i was completely down. and adversities really brought me down - thats just nasty. me and a friend both really like pot, but we both think we do it too much and it occurred to us that it would be really cool to bring it to the same level as our alcohol use. we'd drink like once in a blue moon. smoking once in a blue moon like that would mean that we'd still be able to enjoy all the good things that pot brought to our lives, without its negative effects. ppl should be more educated about the "stuff" available out there. alcohol was prohibited in north america for a while too. it came back. it has a good side and a negative one. i'd still vote for the legalisation of marijuana - but coupled with EDUCATION.
i havent yet seen any negative effects of mushrooms or acid. i wonder if its because i havent done it enough times to get the full picture. it took 3 years to come to my conclusion about pot. then there's also the factor of everyone being different. i work with a guy who has one shot of alcohol or a beer, and he turns red right away and gets buzzed. thats quite a low tolerance. cheap for him to get drunk tho - when he does drink. i'm like that with pot. a friend dubbed me a "one toke wonder". i wonder if it would have sounded better if he stuck with the original expression of "one hit wonder" :) either way - to me the song "smoke two joints" is just unreal. but i know there are ppl like that.
i'm just raaaambling... :)
so back to simon posford = hallucinogen. some really cool trax. i love his style. what he does is magic. one of his more recent trax includes a sample from what seems like an interview with some 60's acid advocate:
"There is an area of the mind which can be called unsane, beyond sanity. And yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity." i think the dude later goes on to say that acid helps to bring us close to the unsanity region. but that kinda sounds like quite dated pop-psychology talk. what is sanity?

anywho - a few hours have passed, i went to dictionary.com for a good deffinition of sanity - that window is still frozen - no sanity deffinition. but i managed to get my own comp running- for some reason my old installation of windows now works, so thats kinda cool for the moment. about the sanity circle - i guess more or less what i was trying to get at was that ppl seem to like paraphrases - i suppose its a way to try and understand something unknown. when u deal with the unknown further, u come to know it for its own unique qualities.
paraphrases and cryptic sayings. something about these being key factors in the success of Jesus, Confucius, Shakespeare, etc. but the sanity thing - i dont know - i think the word "sane" has its roots in the meaning "healthy" - its just that it now is used of mental health. we say that someone who is mentally healthy is normal. normal as in conforms to the "norm" - what seems to be thecase for most ppl. but evolution is a history of change, of taking the risk to deviate from the norm. ppl who are insane are just ppl who are different than the norm in the mental health department. for now - the norm is the way to go - works in favor of millions of ppl surviving. but as genetic mutations, different ideas and different environments keep throwing up "different" models, or variations on the "norm", one day we might see that a certain "model" of human seems to be better and is becoming the new norm. or environmental pressures change in favor of a till-then minority - the norm will get forced out of existence and the new norm will fill the void. there - what a nutshell! :D
ok - i'm going :)