dannyman.toldme.com

Some of our most loyal customers at the shop are the human pigeons who are passing a point in life where a master circuit breaker has been reset. They are scratching along, starting to hop, with a mind toward testing out their wings. While they are poor tippers, I really like these pigeons, because I identify with them. I myself found some salvation while frequenting a coffee shop in California, and at the moment, I’m starting to hop around, dizzied by the navigable opportunities, at the moment interviewing with a company which may find me leaping into the air to return to California!

He told me he’d found a bag of weed, just sitting there. What fortune! He figured he could probably get $5 by selling it to somebody. After carrying this bag for a little while, he got rid of it. He figured that this would be just the time to find himself in the middle of a misunderstanding with the cops, who would find him in possession of an illegal substance in which he had no interest.

That he was more inclined to sell than to smoke, makes me think that this baggie presented itself to him, not as a test but more of a demonstrative reminder. It was entirely his doing that a nickel of pot should be viewed as one thing, and not the other. Of course, now he has an even clearer view: that found herb is just trouble.

In a previous life, he’d have just smoked it, perhaps sharing his good fortune with a friend. In this life, he wouldn’t do such a thing because he is aware of a personal limitation. This limitation can be painful in a culture where pretty girls are found at bars and a happy trip in a bag can be just plain found to offer itself to you. The whole point to Recovery, in which he is presently engaged, is to make sense of this limitation.

We all have limitations. There are things we can never do. He can never drink alcohol again, because he knows that it will conspire against him to serve its own thirst. The pain of this self-imposed prohibition, the burden of this limitation, is a price paid for enlightenment. He may be limited in a way that others of us are not, but he is also enlightened in a way that others of us are not. How many of us can point out the mortal personal danger in some activity that others regard as mostly harmless?

Hell, I might have smoked it, but then I have yet to endure the gnashing cataclysm of a full-on substance abuse. (Though I sometimes flirt with and on occasion even reach my hand up the skirt of such catastrophes.) I have not consummated any relationship with substance abuse because I tend towards the impotence of uncertainty in the brilliant light of abundantly diverse possibilities. I am frequently reluctant to commit myself to any lifestyle that wishes to consume me.

He has paid a great price for his enlightenment, and he will continue to pay with his sobriety. This is how we become enlightened, and subsequently wise, instead of merely “educated” – by suffering and rejoicing in the direct experience. Addiction and sobriety are both great examples of something that can be alternately painful and exhilarating. Sobriety offers the pain of limitation with the exhilaration of knowing that you’ll be alive and consciously in control of yourself such that you can more directly realize the oft-obscured kick we can get from living with ourselves and amongst our others. Sobriety is that tingle you get when you step away from the ledge with a grin at what a great deal you’ve struck by declining the world’s offer of the final death experience of suicide.

/danny

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It’s been a pleasant holiday weekend. Beth threw a party on the third, and I invited folks. Raad, my friend who grew up in Baghdad, came, as did my friend Tunji, who will never shake his tricky Nigerian accent. Elizabeth, who grew up in Chicago but has a foreign travel bug, also showed up, as did Milly, my prodigal young roommate, and we spent most of the night in conversation with Dervis, a Turkish physicist who lives upstairs from Beth. We talked about nerdy intellectual stuff, like national histories, how the system works, lifestyle choices and international political relationships. Elizabeth and Raad, both music aficionados, took some time out to talk about this shared interest. Raad shared with us some pictures he had taken of the artwork that he is working on at home, which was exciting and groovy. As the party wound down, Dervis invited us upstairs to his funky little pad, and played some of his musical compositions for us. Creativity was thus revealed, and shared, among like-minded strangers from across the globe. Not a bad night in America.

Tunji walked home, he lives nearby. Raad dropped Milly off at our apartment, while I opted to walk Elizabeth home, not far away. The next day Elizabeth and her roommate opted to host a get-together. The international cast, minus Milly, reassembled to eat meat and drink. The fireworks started and we marched off in search of a view, and found ourselves atop a parking garage with some tail-gating townies. It was another groovy night.

Then, slightly hung over, I was at work at 6:30 Saturday morning, to open with the Owner’s Wife, who shares her husband’s view that I am a dangerous, free-thinking radical, hell-bent on the destruction of their enterprise. She possessed a remarkably impressive amount of vitriol for me that day, which added to the slight hangover, and the complete lack of downtown business on a holiday weekend, to ruffle my chi. I made it through the shift by responding to her negative energy with my trademark, good-natured non-chalance. Despite all the flak I’m perfectly capable of doing a great job, for the time being. I’m likely to bail and move to Chicago when the apartment lease, and the special deal I have on it, ends in August. I’m not serving enough customers or making as much money as a barista as I would like. I can probably get a good gig serving Chicago-style pizza with a good break on Chicago-style rent by living with my Chicago-stylin’ Mom.

I’ve been pretty pleased since moving back to the morning shift. I get along with my regular cafe co-worker very well, and when I get home in the evening, even after a nap, I find myself awake and interested and getting things done … poetry, revising prose, some programming, transcribing journals. There’s the eight hours a day when I serve my employer, followed by a few more hours when I’m in the right mode to serve my own interests. Yum!

And days off rock, as well. I got three this week, thanks to the holiday. On Sunday, I was hanging out in the south lounge of the Illini Union, doing precisely nothing, and Dervis ran into me. He had been hoping to play the piano they have there, but was too shy to interrupt the peaceful-looking slumber in which one of the guests there was engaged. So, we ended up talking, and talking, and talking, about crazy ideas … physics, math, biology, identity, genetics, whatever. He joined me for an evening coffee at Za’s – they have splendid brewed coffee, which they serve by scooping a single-serving of beans, into the grinder, into a filter, which is then conveyed via hot water, into a mug. Damn! We talked more, on and on. I walked with him back to his lab, where he was going to get some work done. It was on my way home.

The only great wrinkle in that whole thing was that Za’s did not have their tiramisu available. This wonderful, wonderful bit of manna, that goes so well with their coffee, and deep conversations. I settled for a blueberry muffin.

One point Dervis made, among several, was that Champaign-Urbana, especially during the summer, is especially conducive to thinking, to meditation, to pursuing one’s intellectual interests. It is one thing to have the University, but it is another thing for there to be nothing going on … quiet solitude, for one to be alone with the World, and one’s thoughts. And that is what I’ve been tuning into, with pleasing success, lately.

Today I had to work early again. It was no effort at all. The only wrinkle was that the Cafe Manager came by and told us that he had finally met more flak than he could stand from the Owner, and that he would be walking out on us, as soon as some manifestation of the Owner showed up. He was sorry to go, sorry to leave us, and we were sorry to see him go, because he’s a sweet, mild-mannered guy, who helped temper our relationships with the owners. We’ve lost that buffer, which means the Owner’s Wife will probably be around more to fill out the schedule, and ruffle my chi. We’ll see how well I can keep my cool. We’ll see if the owners will start to re-evaluate things with an eye toward removing the negative energy that has been driving a succession of employees away. We’ll see what lies ahead.

/danny

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An undated entry from a notebook, probably made in the Spring of 2002.

Are humans a trans-species “transitional form”?

A trans-species “transitional form” is a species that exists for a short time, before it is ultimately replaced by a longer-lived derivative of itself that is better-suited to the world in which it finds itself.

We’ve been around 200,000 years, and still seem ambivalent about our hair.

This is not a very long time, in genetic evolution, based on our reproductive life-spans. This ambivalence about hair implies that perhaps the next species we evolve in to will feel more comfortable in its own skin.

Maybe we are the transitional form between primate ancestors and our post-human progenitors, who conduct natural selection through genetic engineering and memetic competition.

What is the appropriate next step for a species as remarkable as homo homo sapiens? What challenges do we face? I think because we move so fast, that our progenitors will be able to keep up with themselves. I’m not sure how …

And we evolve from post-human in to proto-humanity not without a good amount of ambivalence about the outcome of our half-conscious engineering efforts.

Proto-humanity being a tricky term, where their humanity will be different from our humanity, but the first humanity, proto, that they can really accept as humanity.

We are mostly cautious of the memes we push today. Genetic engineering … what will our hyper-intelligent, post-human grandchildren make of the reason for being?

Maybe they will be able to build the philosophy and social structure necessary to conduct humanity with success in the world we are cooking for them.

If they believe in a God, He will have created these post-humans by our hands, our minds, our consciousness and conscientiousness.

We who give birth to this new species, will be seen as the instruments through which His will acted to create them.

Or if there is no God, no divine plan, to what end will they exist? Will their minds bring us about to a self-realized Nirvana of non-existence, or will existence be their God? The striving for ever “improved” being? By what metric will these Engineerists evaluate improvement?

By what metric can a contemporary human evaluate improvement? What are us non-Theists living for?

The ironic triumph of Humanism comes in the post-human age.

/danny

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Lately, particular events have brought to mind novels that I’ve previously read. Some of these are pretty old, and a few are even obscure. Even if I want a piece of media that is new, I tend to prefer the less-expensive used version. Amazon.com and bn.com both offer to hook you up with a used version, but they charge a uniform $4.00 to ship an item. YUCK! If I find a used item for $1, it’ll cost me five times that much to possess it! No.

It got me wondering that there has to be a better way. I envisioned this better way in my head, rapped up an LIS friend about it. Today at a brick-based local used book store, I asked how they procured old books they didn’t have, and the lady referred me to abebooks.com.

“A – B – E – BOOKS dot com.”

“A – B – E … Abe, as in Lincoln?”

“ABE, as in `Advanced Book Exchange’.”

“Alright, thank you so much!”

Our reluctant occupation of Iraq, and the resistance that is naturally forming, as a result, brings to mind Steinbeck’s _The Moon is Down_ which tells about the uncomfortable relationship between a fictional town and its military occupiers, with great sympathy towards all the characters involved. I’d like to read it again, and possibly share any good excerpts that I find. Anyway, I found a copy online, for $1, with $2.75 shipping. So, for less than the cost of shipping through the Big Evil Mind-Control Corporation with its decaying user experience, I was able to kick in a little bit of support to the little guy. Yay!

Then I went and grabbed _Speedology_ off of Amazon.com. Even with my $10 gift certificate, it cost me five bucks. Oh well. It ought to be worth it. “Speed” himself is a little guy, and his content is so new and weird that used is not yet a super-viable option.

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I should maintain backups, but I typed cp .tplate 0306.html where I should have typed cp .tplate 0307.html and had a few moments of disappointment in myself before Angel searched his browser’s cache, and I was able to restore last month’s log entries. I offered to PayPal him some lunch money but he’s a good creature who doesn’t want rewards for helping a friend who types too fast and presses the Enter key before he’s thought it all through.

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While I have lately eschewed consumerism, and the whole high-fructose corn syrup cut with endless stupid commercials junkfood culture, I do enjoy the recent innovation of Vanilla Coke. It reminds me of root beer floats. A nice sugary snack from the Evil Megacorp, a twelve-ounce can providing 14% of my USRDA of sugary carbohydrate. Yay.

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I heard the first version of what is perceived to be President Bush’s re-election “stump speech” on the radio this morning and it goes something like this:

“The terrorists declared War on us, so we declared War on them back. Twice! In Afghanistan and in Iraq.”

“I inherited a recession, and already it is getting better. I cut taxes to make things even better!”

Unfortunately, I think many Americans will buy the simple logic that it makes sense to attack Muslim countries when Muslim wackos attack us. Be that as it may, Afghanistan is a neglected mess that is just begging to be brought up by a smart Democrat to haunt President Bush, and Iraq sounds like it is ready to stew and fester and get worse as it is neglected and left to underfunded and ignored efforts at reconstruction. I really hope the Iraqis can mostly pull it out of the fire themselves, but plenty are going to get angry, and cause increasingly photogenic scenes of violence starring American troops, and it will start to look like Vietnam, and proud Americans who might otherwise support war will become angry at the profiteering civilian good ol’ boy network responsible for the flag-draped coffins.

Which connects neatly to that “out of touch with reality” thing that licked Bush I: the economy, stupid! It is already getting better? I myself have left the dot-com wasteland to kick it in Middle America, and it sure doesn’t feel like things are getting “better” out here. Unemployment remains high, wages remain low, and back in the middle class, 401ks remain shriveled. Health care keeps getting worse, and the schools are chafing under more and more standards while their funding gets cut. Things are already getting better? Things are doing what they can not to burst apart at the seams!

There are plenty of us disposed to view the White House as filled with a pack of sanctimonious lunatics hell-bent on making as much personal gain as they can at the expense of our welfare and our liberty. The federal budget is loaded with silly pork-barrel programs that our children and grand-children get to pay for, and we don’t even get an economic bubble to enjoy in the process. A smart Democrat will point out how we alienate the world by rejecting global treaties like the Kyoto Protocol, the prohibition on landmines (OUR military needs something as barbaric as landmines?!) the Convention on the Rights of the Child. And then there’s all the international stuff we like to hold up because when it comes to controlling human populations we dare not let any of our federal money touch abortion … perhaps that is a wedge that can be driven between the lunatic fringe of the right and the more moderate, reasonable American who may find the thought of denying family planning aid to people in unimaginable poverty as even more abhorrent than the possibility that a Hindu might have an abortion.

A smart Democrat … well, maybe not a smart Democrat, so much, for Al Gore is a very intelligent person, but a savvy Democrat …

Here’s to wishful thinking! I just had to rant a little, you know, for the blood.

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“Peculiar,” said Tirin. “I never thought before . . .”

Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark.

“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.”

“Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned.

“In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.

Margaret Atwood
_The Dispossessed_

It is interesting, to me, that Moon is a pronoun, but not earth.

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For a long time, I have included random fortunes on my main index page in the style of the classic Unix “fortune” command. I present you, here, with a slightly more legible version of my fortunes file. Note that the file is formatted with an 80-column, fixed-width Unix terminal in mind. Deal.

Fortunes that begin with a string like <whoops> or <ChromeLi> are excerpts from IRC sessions.

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Last night I had a dream that I was visiting a hospital. It was a very nice hospital with velvet drapes and wood panelling and carpeting. I think I might have been visiting Uncle Bill, who was content in the place. It wasn’t a nursing home, but more of a place for people to feel good. There were lots of cats walking around the place. They were all remarkably friendly and wanted to be pet and each one had its own exotic look. I think at some point I also dreamed of a Danger Hiptop that vibrated and made a purring noise when one pet it.

I don’t often remember my dreams, but I’m glad I remembered this one because it was so groovy. And it featured cats, which Geoff would certainly approve of.

I also recall thinking to myself that since people are allergic to cats, there must be a whole seperate wing of the hospital devoid of cats.

I think I also recalled this quote from my fortunes file:

Someday, I would like to design a concept house which is heated entirely by live cats.

/lw

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Your web site is becoming a useability nightmare, which is discouraging given that this has traditionally one of your core strengths.

I have a gift certificate. I try to buy something with it. I order a used item, I go through all this stuff, and it says NO YOU CAN’T BUY A USED ITEM WITH A GIFT CERTIFICATE. Why not? Hasn’t someone given you $10 to send to a third party?

Okay, so a few days later I want to see your price on color sidekick. You don’t have them. Pity. Ah, but I could afford a heavily-discounted hiptop carrier! Okay, let’s put that in.

And it says “your gift certificate wont cover it” which is interesting because the item is $8 and the GC is $10. How much IS shipping? It won’t tell me HOW MUCH my order costs, just that it needs a credit card, and submitting my credit card is the ONLY navigational option.

Okay … well, let’s do that, and there are items in my cart from WAY BACK, like the used item I tried to purchase the other day. The only option is to confirm my thirty dollar order. Where do I say no? There is what LOOKS LIKE a navigation bar on the top of the screen, but it doesn’t do anything, not even clicking on “Amazon.com” to start over.

So, I go in to my web browser and TYPE Amazon.com to get to the point where I can clear out my shopping cart to just the item I want, proceed to check-out, and you STILL want $3 shipping for a little piece of neoprene. After all this hassle? FORGET IT! I could stuff that thing in a padded envelope and smack an 80 cents stamp on it and send it USPS, but you can’t, because you’re designed to extort money out of your previously-loyal customers.

Please fix your user experience.

Thanks,
-danny

I try to be very laid-back about most things, but I guess I take customer service really personal now, huh? And it is all the more frustrating to be thwarted by Amazon.com because for a long time they distinguished themselves by being pretty clueful and user-friendly.

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I decided to really really really clean out my e-mail inbox, purging anything I can. So I’m running across little ideas for things I should try and right about, and interesting links, and there is this wonderful post archived on Keith’s web site with this beautiful reflection from Anne:

From what I have observed from my male friends, though, this is exactly the climate required to learn Linux. Without a full and happy lovelife or distraction of soft lips and a reason to kiss them, there is enough room to grasp the intricacies and nuances of such a fine operating system.

It has already begun to happen. As I walk down the street I am not thinking of emptiness, kising, nathan or any other previous SO’s, I am thinking of penguins, rm -rf / and lilo.

I am already convinced that linux will dull the pain better than heroin.

I am reminded that in my youth, during times of family strife, it was suggested that one of the reasons I spent so much time playing with my computer was because it helped isolate me from the unpleasantries swirling around me. Being a geek was an anti-social reflex; I’ve always been such a nice boy, but for a long time I vented my Id on computer networks.

Since the layoffs and that wonderful little trip all over the world, I sense that frustration and a lot of the negative emotional energy is just not useful, so I tend to let it go. Every time I find things that upset me, I figure out a way to explain to myself why I shouldn’t be upset. Legitimate grievances with The Way Things Are are left as a big karmic to-do wall against which to I can formulate frustration in to little bits of positive action.

Or something. We’ll see how it goes.

You know, where computers used to be my escape from a troubling family situation, now it serves as a creative outlet for my surplus of time when I have the energy to interact and refine ideas, but I don’t know of an appropriate audience, so I work out in this little room here, and maybe if someone passes by and notices something and can provide feedback, that is all well and wonderful. But, I’m not waiting for them, because talking to the wall here is cathartic enough.

For the time being.

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