Year: 2006

my weekend was really nice. nothing too high-stress, and lots of good times.

the best christmas present i got was the new castelvania game for xbox.
the worst christmas present i got was the death of james brown.

as a public service request, i am asking for whoever i loaned my copy of Tim Power’s trilogy Last Call, Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather to please step forward and let me know. got that trio for me, and when i went looking for them last night, i could not find them. i recall having a deep conversation with someone about it, but ff knows who. , was it you?

it is funny – my persistent memory of james brown is from the now-defunked BMW film “Beat the Devil“, which i just watched with and a week or so ago.

blame for this post.

In recent weeks, I have been doing some supplemental reading and thinking (when not plowing through Jordan’s Wheel of Time, which I finished last night) with the goal of clarifying and reinforcing my arguments on the connections between slavery and bio-anthropological behaviors (as opposed to socio-economic behaviors). Much of what I am seeking to reinforce are assertions I could not eloquently reinforce with sufficient clarity during a drunken conversation with when he was last in town.

The definition of slavery gains far more or less depth than what you will find in any dictionary definition, depending on the context of use. While, at its root, all forms of slavery involves ownership of a person by another person or entity, that is only a first-order universality I feel confident espousing. Moving past that, you have mindset of slave and slave-owner, religious and political environment which support social ethics and behavior, as well as layers of military activity, levels of technology, and history of practice.

The problem I have always had with dealing with slavery as a bio-anthropological issue is that you can only deal with it over time, universally, on that first order. To compare the slave trade of the Incas to the slave trade of the Egyptians to the slave trade of the Americas to the slave trade of the Babylonians on an even matrix is nearly impossible. All I just did was name four cultures in which slavery existed, there are probably close to a hundred more distinct times and models one could create separate taxonomies for, if not more. I realize that categorizing things based on attributes is a very Western-minded method of attacking a problem or a theory, but I do it to better draw connections on a broader scale, rather than pigeonhole each issue in context.

My aim has been to find some broadly applicable biologically based root to slavery. In Nature, many of the things which “separate” us from other high-functioning species is our myriad of complex social behaviors. On a base biological model, slavery seems to hold some pretty significant benefits up front to those in the role of a “master”, with some major flaws in the long-term implementation. If this is the case, how has it survived as a practice for so long? Part of this I want to attribute to a systemic shortsightedness of post-agrarian social constructs, but there is some archaeological evidence which suggests that slavery existed even in cultures where a hunter-gatherer model is the predominant one!

I persist in ascribing this recurring phenomena to the biological predisposition our species has towards entropy. What many would coin “human nature” I ascribe to a core of traits which are universal in potential, yet wildly differentiated in manifestation over time and population groups. Slavery continues to exist because it makes life easier NOW, so long as one is free of moral dilemmas which might lessen quality of life on a level of personal introspection. Ultimately, however, aside from the few instantiations who used slaves as a food source or a religious fuel (sometimes literally) for sacrificial rites, most slave-embracing cultures eventually cross the simple edicts of biological drives. When there are more resources going to the slave population of a given environment than the “master” population, and the gene pool is more vibrant within that slave population (due to forced and rapid reproduction, and, oftentimes, increased physical conditioning), your “master” population is, in fact, endangering itself.

Usually, the persistence of a higher slave-master population is punctuated and offset by hard forced labor and undernourishment as a form of population contrail in that slave population. This lessens the biological drive feedback, but, socially oftentimes precipitates revolt, which topples the system. More shortsightedness. I am nowhere near through enough reading yet to make anything but strong assertions, with limited data to back them. Eventually, I hope to find a more unifying phenomenological explanation which I can put forth in a more eloquent (and footnoted) manner, but, for now, I’m just plodding away on it. One more pot on my legion of mental cook fires.

‘s current line of inquiry, however, is very much in line with something I have been working on, which is tracing the cultural precedents and effects of slavery in this country. Unlike many other antiquated slavery models (Romans, Egyprians and Babylonians aside, hence their mention above), slavery of the Americas is fairly well documented. Unfortunately, because it is such a horrific and contentious issue, picking the data out of the rivers of argument and debate is rough going. Kind of like needles in fields full of haystacks.

One of the most significant cultural links between hip-hop and slavery that comes to me, at least in the US, is a byproduct not of slavery itself, but the reconstruction. While the cause-and-effect of the two is undeniable, the “separate-but-equal” doctrine was, in many ways, as culturally profound as the institution of slavery itself in this country. While there were many different crutches to take weight off the bad foot that is the moral weight of slavery, all of them had to be broken when abolition was passed into law, at least on a level of national social acceptability. Certainly, different regional social paradigms embraced or rejected the abolishment of slavery in different ways. I would argue that many of the states which still refer to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression” would laugh at my assertion that abolition at law changed social and cultural constructs and ties. I think it might have, if separate-but-equal had not been waiting in the wings.

Music, as a part of the African-American slave culture and life, is documented, both in the cultural situations transplanted slaves fount themselves in, and in the remnants of the cultures they were taken from. If, you believe, as I do, that the roots of hip-hop can be traced back through the mainstream rock environment pre-Elvis, and the roots of jazz movements, both before and after Elvis, then there are many links between hip-hop and slavery that I could point out.

The cultural buy-in in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson until its turnover by Brown v. Board of Education almost 60 years later was key in the continued cycles of cultural isolation and exploitation which existed long after slavery was dead in the books. The cultural segregation of African-Americans, on a legally reinforced level, created a quasi-vacuum made up of groups of largely economically and educationally marginalized individuals. Across many cultural pockets, this population, who had a history of conglomerate cultural traditions as a result of the process by which they came tho this country, did what seemed natural – they made their own culture to fill the vacuum, since they were not welcome in the mainstream.

The evolution of blues to jazz took place in this quasi-cultural vacuum. The music’s content was largely made up of experiences within a segregated population in content, but, aesthetically, had a wide range of sounds, rhythms and syncopation. It existed in the vacuum until it became a desirable mainstream commodity, at which point, you have a steady stream of acquisition and, in certain cases, outright theft of methods, and sometimes even song titles or lyrics. One significant element of the blues, however, was the birth of riffs, and the regularly acceptable musical “innovation” of sampling – not necessarily in a recording format, but certainly through mimicry of musical improvisation and tunes of the day. It also allowed, for the first time in many ways, talented and creative African-Americans to have a voice in the homes and lives of a huge population that would rather know nothing about them. They might not have liked the people, but, since ragtime, the middle and upper class were devout consumers of the music.

Of course, this musical phenomena, partially as a result of its format, partially as a result of the roots of what we term today as the “music industry”, was readily co-opted to reach the demographics that thought the idea of a black man playing the trumpet and singing in their homes, even over the radio, was too heavy a cultural line to cross. Aside from Lous Jordan and the Mills Brothers, I can’t name any black R&B artists of this era who made much of a media presence. That is in direct contrast to the dozens of artists who plied their talent, only to have it consumed by the masses when it was covered by a white musician. As jazz became more mainstream, and continued to evolve, a new offshoot of the sound developed through re-innovation and conglomeration of other cultural sounds and roots. The kernel developed into the base of what today we know as rock.

Little Richard, Fats Domino, Etta James, Chuck Berry, Louis Jordan – these were the musicians who took what they had, and turned it into a new progression of music. As the separate-but-equal process finally started the road down a fiery dismantling in the 1950’s, they were the ones laying new roads of sound, and finding new words for an old voice. Despite attempted socio-political reform, the formula of co-opting a largely African-American sound, with roots in an experience alien to the majority of the consumers had already been executed, and the results were profitable. Elvis became the king of rock and roll, despite the fact that he would have had nothing to shake his hips to were it not for the largely marginalized (and, in certain cases, demonized) predecessors of the sound and style he executed.

The use of music as a form of shared experience in the face of hardship crosses all cultural boundaries. In America, however, the exploitation of music as a commodity, oftentimes by the very people who are causing the environment which created the cultural experience which spawned the music, is frightful in its success. This cycle repeated itself after the “birth” of rock and roll until the 60’s, when funk hit the scene. Ownership of music and sound, and ownership of musicians, as well as the control of the dollars the consuming population spent on that media are all very similar to the design and implementation of the framework slave traders operated with.

James Brown, The Meters, and later George Clinton and P-Funk created something that could not be co-opted or repackaged. Certainly, people tried, but the marriage of image and visual had evolved as part of showmanship. It was no longer how you sounded alone, or what you were singing about – it was the whole hog – how you dressed, what your band looked like, how you danced while you performed, all these things figured into the appreciation and consumption of music. I’m not saying that visuals had no place before this period (certainly, anyone who was ever in a marching band can argue this) but it was the first time that the image became inseparable from the music, and the culture creating and consuming that music.

I’m painting with a thick brush here – I know it. I’m just trying to get to hip hop, and, at the same time, show the precident of cultural exploitation for commercial gain which was, by the time hip hop hit the scene in the late 70’s, was largely an unbroken chain. Throughout the melange of musical movements described above, music was the heart, but lyrics were the soul. Words that found their way into commonplace use which might otherwise never be heard in the ears of many of the people who spoke them, in appreciation or imitation of the music they listened to.

Hip hop took that all on and more. When DJ Herc started the whole break-beat thing off, he was recycling an idea, but using a new twist. This process echoed back the whole of the musical traditions whose shoulders that innovation stood on. Likewise, as hip hop developed, sampling, looping, and remixing went from defining innovations at the start of a movement to a myriad of specializations within a full-blown sound.

The content of early hip hop, as well as the children which are either lumped into its core (beat boxing, djing, gangsta), or stood on their own,have many similarities in content. They speak/sing of hardship, drugs, guns, violence and bondage – using rhythms and parlance which were, like the antics of P-Funk and James Brown, not easily co-optable. In addition, the style and dance which was borne of the music were tied backwards to the musical tradition was borne from, and, uncertain cases, spawned wholly new trends and traditions (see:graf art and Hammer Pants).

Due to many of the changes since the 50’s culturally, there was now a market ready to consume the media, without having to cover everything to make it acceptable to the mainstream. While that might sound good, in reality, the majority of the artists responsible for getting hip hop off the ground were living in situations not so different from the conditions of the slaves who first brought African sounds to America. The difference, which seems apparent to me in the raps of Ice T, or Dr. Dre, is that slaves had a sense of potential salvation through the abolition of slavery. The new slavery of the ghetto, and the urban segregation widespread in major cities on the east and west coast with sizable African American populations was even more hopeless in many ways than the preceding system. The chains of urban life were invisible, while the chains of slavery were tangible. In both cases, the music addresses those chains, but hip hop met them with far more anger and violence than the roots of the music it evolved from. Worse, the new slavery of the urban ghetto pitted African-American against his neighbors – creating division and where once there had been hope for unifying action.

The difference this time around was the success of the artists leading to the establishment of their own corner within the industry. While, to a certain extent, this fueled some of the violence which punctuated much of hip hop’s history, the establishment of independently produced labels, and the circumvention of the major media outlets for success allowed hip hop to exist and flourish longer than it might have before being co-opted by those media outlets. That certainly has happened, to a lesser and greater extent nationally and internationally, but there is an instantly recognizable difference between post-production imitation hip hop made for pop consumption, and the real deal, whose roots are tied to the experiences which provide the lyrics.

Right, so, my lunch hour is totally gone, and I’ve wandered all over the place. The short version is I can see tons of connections, both evolutionary, and from a perspective of content and sound, between slavery and hip hop. I admit readily that my knowledge of hip hop not as deep as some of the people I assume will be reading this, and that my strength of understanding lies far more in movements and ideas than specific applications and artists. That being said, I don’t think that what I wrote above was a waste. In fact, it makes me want to know more. I could definitely keep going on more concrete links, but I feel like I don’t have quite enough info to make whatever I could say about the ties between the traditions which have manifested in hip hop and the culture it spanned, and slavery, which lies at the roots of the musical traditions which brought hip hop into being as meaningful as some of the connections I can see between the other elements I expounded upon.

Anywho, I hope y’all have a nice holiday, whatever it is you celebrate.

In the long ago, bought the domain Snowninja.com for posting pictures and plans for ski trips, which I used to go on and cook. I even made a neato logo for it:

I just got a call and an e-mail from someone in Colorado who is looking to open up a business, and wants to buy the domain name.

Now, this doesn’t sound like a multinational firm or anything, but, how high you think I should push this guy? I am not emotionally attached to the domain, but I have thought about doing something with it eventually.

I was thinking the 150$ range. Anyone with any other thoughts?

there is finally a little bite to the air. about freakin time. it is supposed to be friggin 50 on sunday. bastard nature.

my migraine is gone, and it seems like 10,000 lbs have been lifted from my shoulders. i am having dinner tonight, then traveling upstate, returning early am sunday to move someone, then collapsing into protoplasm.

EDIT:Question 12 is iffy, as per ‘s insights, so guess any number ya want! My apologies for thinking my eighth grade history teacher knew all the facts, simply because he was Titanic obsessed.

first off, happy birthday to .

in the last 48 hours i have:

  • Battled and lost to a migraine
  • Upgraded my server and most of its parts, both software and hardware.
  • Shuffled half a terabyte of personal information across four hard drives
  • Slept six hours
  • Canceled on a client and a dear friend, both of which I have to make up.
  • Completely migrated my settings to my new pc, which is the most ostentatious thing I have ever owned
  • Billed about 3k in business, booked six upcoming jobs. Now I just need to settle my invoices for December so I can get all my taxes filed before I go to Mexico. That shouldn’t be too tough, right?

the last conscious memory i have of the shirt i am wearing today was from a few years ago at a friend’s wedding, when i was still with richelle. said friend now has a daughter, who is a couple years old. when i pulled my head out of the sink a few minutes ago and looked in the mirror, i was suddenly back in a cramped bathroom in the back of a delectable party hall in long island city, and i had to be sure to get some good pictures of the skyline. what a fuckin head-trip. i know i have probably worn this shirt a dozen, if not two dozen times since then, but i will be dammned if i can remember a single one of those times.

my head feels like an overripe melon, and i have too much to do, and not enough time to do it in. how is everyone else’s week going?

a not-so-funny person on im, who is forever after me about how i looked better with short hair, suggested that my migraines came from the roots of my hair pulling on my brain. the longer my hair, the more pulls, so if i cut my hair, it would cure me. if i thought so, i’d look like daddy warbucks tonight. it has been many moons since i cut my hair. any of you wise guys (and gals) think its time for me to shear the locks? i like having long hair, mostly because i don’t have to go to the barber, which i hate doing.

So the recap.
I busted 52k in time for nano to be over, which included a major sprint of marathon proportions into the wee hours of the 30th, with a polish off at the end.
i am really excited about what i created, but when i went back to start working on it, i felt like an architect who missed the last three weeks of construction on their building. the roots are there, but i ended up ripping about 20k out of the thing to rework. without nano looming, i know i will not work anywhere near as quick on this as ui did with the deadline looming, but i want to keep on it.

i went up to my dad’s farm on Thursday. what was not mentioned to my brother and i until after we had left was the fact that the furnace up there has been red-tagged (condemned, to those of you who could give two shits about home heating). it has a crack in the heating assembly which is putting CO into the main output. this means that you could easily die sleeping in the house. so, we slept with the thermostat set to 55 (so the pipes wouldn’t freeze) and two windows open on each floor. i kept waking up convinced that the CO alarm was going off, but it never did.

just so you have a clear picture of environmental variables, friday’s weather was so bad that neither my dad or brother went out hunting. 20-30mph winds, rain, sleet, etc. etc. saturday was frigid, with slightly less percipitation, and lighter winds (10-15mph) but it was about 10 degrees colder. by sunday, i was cold. i don’t generally get cold unless i am sick.

with no significant period of warmth to recharge my batter, and significant sleep dep (i pulled 12.5 hours between thurs-sun), i think my body finally started giving up on me. by about 9:30 last night, i looked like the skexie that dies in the first few minutes of The Dark Crystal

despite that, it was not a horrible time away from time. though i am definitely tired, i am a little less tightly wound than i was when i left. i have about a half a billion things to do today though, which i am curious to see if i can accomplish.

unholy humor of the day
ganked from

good thanksgiving, busy fun, exhausting weekend. good food, good drinks, some gastrointestinal adventure, some role-playing adventure, and a severe lack of sleep. the giants broke my heart.

i just broke 35k for NaNo. even if i miss the mark, i’ve done some really neat work, built a world, and i get to keep that, regardless if i break 50k or not.
the scary thing is that i was anticipating 60-75k for this story, and i don’t see it working out that way. went to dig up the rock poking out of the front yard of my brain, and unearthed the tip of a boulder.

in other news, i am getting a new computer, and a screaming video card, as a result of a dell deals raffle thing that i won quite unexpectedly on friday. my new processor has more cache than the first pc i ever used had on its hard drive. the world is quite a tangle.

i am out of town thursday-sunday. i plan on polishing and outlining past the kernel of what was born via NaNo.

i have a lot to do.

collegehumor.com has a really funny series they started recently about the washed up gang from street fighter. highly recommend it if you haven’t already seen it.

i just busted 20k for NaNo. i know that seems like i am way behind, but i have several dedicated writing days in the near future, and i finished the hard third of my story. now i get down to some real writing, with dialouge and shit ::shudder::

i seem to average about 4k on a decent day. only need 7-8 of those to be gold. that, or i need a couple of fucking stellar days. i am beginning to think i might be able to do this!

what i cannot fathom is this:
alcohol is supposed to be a germ-killing substance.
if you are sick, you are clearly full of germs, which are ailing your immune system.
if you drink a lot of alcohol, the germs should all die, freeing up your immune system to do important things, like watch the price is right or something.
i’m about 50/50 with this theory thus far.
must be the goddamn ginger ale ruining the process. isin’t that supposed to be something you drink when you are sick too? wtf?!

good weekend. la casa de , , and is warmed. i need pictures of the luchadore trifecta asap. i’m about 4k behind on NaNo from where i wanted to be at this point, but i think i can make it up. also, family guy/american dad were totally amusing last night. can anyone peg what movie they were ripping off in american dad when francene and steve were “breaking up”? i immediately recognized it was lifted from somewhere else visually, but can’t place it! the stewie/airplane antics were pretty chuckalarious. it was good to see kool-aid man back in action.

enough from me. hope everyone has as short a week as i do, which is to say, i have to figure out how to shoe-horn 40 hours into three days.

emergen-c, take me away!

I broke 10k for NaNo last night. I am way out ahead of where I was when I did this two years ago. That being said, I am muy disheartened.
When I was trying to describe my displeasure last night, I put it this way:
I sat down to write the The Hobbit, and am, instead, writing the Silmarion Silmarillion (thanks Bria).

Because I don’t have proprietary authorship rights to the world in which the story I had planned to tell takes place, I have to put it in my own world. No problem, says me – until I start writing. Then I realize that unless I make some pale rip-off world, nothing will make sense. So, I bring the story back down to bones, and start at the beginning – where does it take place? From there, I set to building a world, which led to writing a history, and figuring out a divinity somewhere along the way. Now I am 10k+ into a fairy-tale genesis, and I’ve just gotten to the close of the second age! I need another age under my belt, for sure, to set things up.

This is frustrating mostly because it is some of the best hook-writing I’ve done in years. The way my little scribbled notes have become full-blown worlds is really enervating, and the story I will have to re-work what I am writing – I think, and either abandon what I have written thus far, or find ways to work it into the book in snippets. My main story is still mostly unwritten, and I have no way of getting at it yet, until I finish up what I am working towards. Also, this world, as I am writing it, is becoming its own thing. It steals from plots and storied I have used in the past, or planed out and never used, but as they are being blended together, it is becoming a new thing.

Basically, I think I was right when I said that there was no way this story was happening in less than 70k, with 20k of that probably being just padding and back story that I can cut – or not.

Argh.

My point is, I haven’t played with enough Lego lately. I did some of that Saturday night. I wish I had taken a picture of it.

  • Saw The Departed last night, was blown away by the performance. I still think the Hong Kong version was way tighter, but I think Scorsese did an admirable job of translating a Hong Kong gangster flick to a very believable Boston setting.
  • Just under 5k on NaNo. My brain thinks this is 10%, but my story seems to agree with my initial estimates that 50k is not going to get the job done.
  • Got NWN2 installed and patched. I am impressed with it. I can’t wait to play the game a little, and then dive into the toolset.
  • Been working too much, playing too little. not going upstate this weekend.
  • My goal is to be halfway or better by the end of the week next week. We’ll see how that holds.

Since I’ve been content searching for ptfonline.org, and the weather is finally turning Novemberish, so y’all are getting a cold queez today.

so i was up until 2:30 working on my mom’s laptop, after watching nightmare before xmas 3d, and wandering around creation downtown in search of pie that was never had.

what a way to start NaNoWriMo. my ambition to available energy ratio is not looking so hot. scary.

Some of these things happened since last Thursday, some didn’t. Pick whatever suits you.

  • Decided to do NaNoWriMo
  • Spent 20 minutes mopping water out of a live server room.
  • Helped a stranded friend move for over 12 hours.
  • Redid a website ground up
  • Went to a kick ass halloween party with gads of cool folks
  • Started documentation/development of my new NWN2 module
  • Ripped out someone’s guts, put them on my head, and did the “Queen of France” dance
  • Met with a weak-willed consultant, whose tek-fu was weaker than Keanau’s kung-fu
  • Read two books, one book away from reading almost everything Brian Lumley has ever written
  • Chugged a half-liter of jack and ginger
  • Specced out a new laptop. Looked into pricing for liquification of current rig to offset costs.
  • Waited 40 minutes for pizza. Had to sit and watch as the pies I ordered were repeatedly pilfered for other drunks waiting for pizza in smaller increments.
  • Watched Monster House and The Fastest Indian. Cannot recommend Indianenough
  • Scared people, wandered around the east village blind.
  • Spent a whole day snacking/ eating, and no time cooking.
  • Looked into buying a new mattress, decided to wait until next year.
  • Applied for an engineering grant, and a business model patent

I’m tired, but good tired.

i just applied for two jobs with Dow Jones.
ups: great salary, neat position
downs: it is in princeton, nj, i will never see the sun again.

we shall see.

this morning in a last minute cab ride to work (i was late because i was tired because i baked eight pies last night) i got a cabbie who spoke little/no english, which is not uncommon in my ‘hood. what was weird was that, though he was brazillian, he spoke flawless castellian spanish. this meant that i understood him pretty well, and we got to chatting. it basically turned into an english 101 lesson. he want s to learn to speak better, and write in english. to that end, he asked me to tutor him! i don’t think i am totally qualified but he seemed to like me, and having a friend who is a cabbie couldn’t be the worst thing in the world (though i did just get my zipcar membership in the mail, who knows).

i am mostly impressed that i was able to speak enough to be understood. my knowledge of spanish is so book-based. i am not a strong speaker (though i have a decent accent), but i have pretty good comprehension. i suck a dialectical spanish though.

it will be interesting to see where that goes.

tonight i am meeting with a bloke who is supposed to undertake a huge software project, which i may or may not be project managing. what seemed enterprising on the front end has turned into a slow downward spiral of decreasingly impressive e-mails. i think he is probably a douchebag with enough talk to fool a user, but not enough tech to talk shop.

i hope it doesn’t go as badly as i think.

monday night, the giants won, and i was there to enjoy it with a whole mess of online peeps. thanks for the great times all.

friday i am helping a friend move, saturday is a b-day thing in the day, halloween party by night. sunday, i think i will expire.

we shall see.

the IT department at work just blocked just about everything i use online except gmail and feedhole, network-wide. instead of increasing available bandwidth to meet growing demand (which they have not done since the mid-90’s), they are cutting anything and everything that they see as “non-business related”. this will, obviously, address the fact that they are trying to pipe ten tons of shit through a two ton pipe, but only for a little while. i refuse to vpn back into my own lan to do my day-to-day shit, particularly since I assume it is only a matter of time before they catch on to that, and kill my access to that too. i also am not going to make enough noise to change this internally without getting fired. they get enough blood outta me that they aren’t getting tears too. i am officially looking for another job. and by another job, i mean at a new place, not just a new job within this institution. my alternative is buying a goddamn sprint wireless PCMCIA modem for my laptop, which i may do anyhow.

i had a bad nights sleep last night. i tried to get to sleep fighting brainstorming an idea for NaNoWriMo next month, and ended up dreaming a fantastic plot. when i woke up at 4am, i was literally excited by what i had dreamed. i told myself i should write it all down, but, instead, i just tried committing it all to memory by running though it all again. i know, if i can remember the start of it, i can get the whole story back, but i can’t remember a damn thing about it for the life of me.

i’ve been trying since 4am to remember dammit.

anyhow, here is a queez for you. notable quoteables.


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monday morning i woke up to a loud black woman screaming out of her cab and sitting on the horn for over five minutes.

tuesday morning, i woke up to my alarm, and proceeded to spill a half-full glass of red wine all over myself waving for the snooze bar. i do not recommend this as a way to start the day.

this morning, i woke up and immediately vomited, like, forty or so seconds after my eyes opened. a byproduct, i believe, of partaking in white castle before my hike home last night. i do not think it was the jamacian patties i had earlier in the night, as any bugs in them would have been rendered harmlessly sterile and inebriated by the whiskey bath i gave them. and before, reader dear, you give me crap about ungentlemanly drinking behavior on a tuesday night, i defy anyone who claims they were able to make it through the mets game last night without some sort of chemical interaction to dull the pain.

do you know how hard it is to find the word ‘gurgitate‘ in a dictionary? i know ingurgitate is the reverse of regurgitate, but gurgitate by itself is also usable (but far from rolling off the lips). apparently since the competitive eating fatties have made the word gurgitator synonymous with competitive eater, the word has increased in frequency of use, but many people think the root verb was plain made up. this fascinates me, the taxonomy of language, and how some words can become completely obscured in a relatively short period of time, despite the fact that they have roots in words that were commonplace for years.

the point of this missive is that i do not recommend the reverse ingurgitation of white castle. it makes workdays taste like sour pickle burps.

EDIT:iwas apparently overly grouchy/complainy about the knicks after the mets lost. my apologies to and if i was over the top, or ruined your enjoyment of that game, which the knicks apaprently won! , you get no apologies, since you retained a half bottle of JW Red.

This is going to be one of those posts.

Friday the Thirteenth always makes me think about anthropology. It makes me wonder how a bunch of hairless apes managed to scrape together a star-chart that guided a belief across the years that occasional patterns occurring in the iterations of that chart are bad news. After reading this article about our effect on the world, I am inclined to believe George Carlin’s take on the Earth wanting plastic.

Eight years ago, I was out of college, trying to find my way. I had some very concrete goals, but a lot of complications and roadblocks towards achieving them. I was living in a house designed and built by Frank Loyd Wright in Westchester. I bought my first car that I owned outright. I wanted to be a dad, and thought I was on a pretty good route towards the accomplishment of that path. I got a job as a network admin at my then significant other’s workplace. Who would have known how it all would have turned out? I thought I knew. This was the first point after taking my life in my own hands that I learned life is never what you want it to be, no matter how bad you want it to be something. The willow survives the storm because it can bend.

Seven yeas ago, I was living in an apartment in Yonkers, in the building now lives in. I was living in what was once the living room of , and her erstwhile donut-crazed roommate, who would find herself pregnant within months. I was working as a consultant. I was on the road a lot. I was trying to bridge the gap between a world I had chosen for myself, which was denied, and a world which was calling to me, which, ultimately, I denied. Who is to say which was the wise decision?

Six years ago, I was living in a great apartment in Woodlawn, having a grand old time. In less than a month from this date five years ago, I would get into a car accident which would ruin my financial prospects for years to come, and largely ruin the quality of my life in may ways. I was between worlds a lot, and still kicking around the country. I started talking to my family again for the first time in years. I got a new job, which got me more money, and had me commuting into NYC. It was a world of fresh horizons. I bought a new Chevy Cavalier, which my brother now owns.

Five years ago, my world was a totally different creature than it was a year before that. I still had the apartment, and the job, but more-or-less everything else was fucked. This was the October that I burned myself fire breathing. One of my close friends and co-workers had died, and I was still wrestling with that, among all my other demons. It was this week, five years ago, that I was tasked with cleaning up his files and wiping his computer. By my birthday in this year, I would accumulate over 34,000$ in debt. That was not student loans – no deferrals or tax write off there. I have since paid it off, which is what I consider to be one of my greatest accomplishments to date.

Four years ago, I was doing research for an in-depth character profile of a vampire I wanted to play in an online RPG. I have retained the notes about this character as a possible novel. I was living in Mount Vernon, NY, in the childhood home of E.B. White. My then-fiancée and I were undergoing the first stress fractures in our relationship since she moved up from Texas a few months prior. I remember that Halloween being one of the coldest Halloweens I ever went out on. That October was one of the hardest months I have ever had in a relationship, while still trying to keep a relationship together. Ironically, things would not fall apart for two years, give or take a few months.

Three years ago it was a Monday, Columbus day. I didn’t have the day off. I did a queez about famous phrases. I was living in a slum apartment in Yonkers by the river, right up the street from where my sister used to go to school. We wound up living there after moving out of Mount Vernon rapidly and expensively. I bought my first Tempur-Pedic bed, which is the most money I have ever spent on furniture, ever. The rent was cheap, and I thought the place was pretty cool. This was before my then-fiancée got followed home by some local people who tailed her to work, and tried to run her off the road. That would happen in a few months, followed by another rapid and horribly expensive move to Spanish Harlem.

Two years ago, I was having a generally shitty time of things. I was getting over being really sick. My now ex-fiancée had split with a lot of heartbreak, some gut wrenching, and more than a little misdirection. I was in a bad way, not just financially. I was sleeping on a futon, as she kept the aforementioned bed. Halloween of this year, would move himself, and his too much stuff up from the greater Atlanta area. Now, ironically, he is looking towards moving to Florida. I was listening to too much Tom Waits. Within three months, I would leave my position as a full time web app developer to come to my current job.

Last year I was talking to the internet, and set up my newly-acquired dual 20-inch monitors. Now, I am considering liquefying my entire rig for an uber-laptop. I had moved to Washington Heights, living with an old college roommate and his (now) wife. The apartment isn’t grand, but it is spacious. It is an easy commute for me to work. I spent this weekend at the wedding of one of L.’s longtime friends and co-workers.

Today I am getting over a really bad migraine, which has more or less incapped me for the last two days. Over the summer, L. moved in with me, but it doesn’t seem like we are going to keep living together. I have reached a comfortable plateau at work, but one which I must be careful of. I still don’t have a car, and am glad for it. I have probably tripled my outlines and ideas for stories and books since the beginning of this time line, even to the point of having clusters of thousands of words of some of them. As some would describe success, I have a lot of it. As some would describe failure, I have a lot of that too. Balance is still the holy grail of my existence.

This is not really a full synopsis, but it was a listing of the bigger points that came to mind as I was going through all this. What I find interesting, is that despite overcoming setbacks, some of them rather significant, I don’t really know how much ground I have gained. That has to change.

That’s right gang. The ever popular alpha queezes are back. Today’s answer letter is ‘E’. That means that all the answers start with the answer letter.

my great aunt died on friday.the funeral is in chicago, so i am not going.

i went out to the farm for the weekend and didn’t take any pictures.

did some archery, some wood working, some leather working, and a whole bunch of tech shit. oh the merit badges i coulda gotten.

i have to reformat my sister’s laptop later this week when i get it, and fix my brother’s laptop.

very full week this week, with a two day upgrade in the midst of the first part of the busy season!

how was everyone else’s weekend?

EDIT: i’ve been babbling about the fall of the roman empire for a long time. someone at the NYT agrees.

In my poll yesterday, I asked some pretty nebulous questions about satisfaction with life. I personally don’t believe one can be happy with life, but one can find happiness within it. Life is about conflict. While some people enjoy challenges and conflicts, they can’t enjoy it all the time. I am trying to find the wall between challenge and satisfaction. Some trends emerged yesterday which were good food for thought.

There is a varying amount of knowledge amongst anyone who might be reading this about my family, and how it has affected my path in life, and continues to up to today. It is fairly significant in my outlook on just about, well, everything. Why I am an eternal devil’s advocate, why I am full of useless knowledge, why I have no faith in a divine presence, and why I have no intention of having biological kids, despite my love of children, and my hopes for a family….


I’m one of five. My parents are both still alive, though neither of them are in particularly great shape for the age they are. I am the eldest of three siblings. I have a younger sister and brother, in that order. My mother lost two, one between my sister and brother, and one after my brother. My dad is one of seven. Both of his parents were one of double digits. I don’t know if it was the religious prohibition on preventative measures, or whether both my parents wanted a big family that made them keep going. I’ve got to say, I have no idea how my world would be different had they not struck out when they did.

My sister and I have always had an odd relationship. When she was brought home from the hospital, I refused to call her by her given name, instead referring to her as ZhzaZhza (which was also the name of a recently deceased great aunt who I never met, or spoke to directly, something which caused something of a stir amongst my family). I refused to the point of punishment to call her by any other name, so, ZhzaZhza became one of my sister’s nicknames. I was, as I recall, a protective and helpful older brother for the majority of our earliest years. There are two years between my sister and I.

Christine was born a little early, but nothing medically dangerous for the times. She as born hale and hearty, and aside from not having hair for a while, she was a pretty normal infant. She slept a lot, and very soundly. She walked late, and talked late, but neither of these things were late enough to set off any alarms, or seemed out of place.

On Holy Saturday (that is the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, for all the non xtians), when she was four years old, my sister had her first of many Tonic-clonic seizures. My grandmother (my dad’s mom) who was a nurse in WWI and WWII thought my sister was choking on a jellybean. When she went into the clonic phase of the seizure, my grandmother lost it. My sister spent that Easter in the hospital.

This began a very long road for my family, myself in part. My sister from the age of 4-8 had an average of 6 seizures a week. That seems crazy, but consider that is an average. For the first year, she averaged double digits a day. Her worst day, she had 32. The best way I’ve ever had a neurologist try and explain that impact was this: “Imagine being TKO’d by Mike Tyson. That is what one of these seizures does do you. Now imagine you are five.”

Luckily, we were in a time and place in history where there was some neuropharmacological advances could help. However, many of the drugs my sister was on in the first few years had side effects. Lots of them. All her hair fell out, and grew back whispy, and a different color. She had tooth, vision, liver, and joint problems. Her sense of balance, ability to learn, retain information, and do most of the things a little kid spends much of her time doing were affected. Until she was 8, my sister effectively aged at a half-rate. Part of this was due to the seizures she continued to have, part of it was due to side effects of incredible levels of chemicals to treat the seizures floating around in the body of a developing child.

By the time my sister started having her issues, my younger brother had been born. His infancy, amongst all the infancies of my siblings, was the hardest. He was two months preemie, and born with a pretty bad viral infection, which was passed down to him through my mother, who had been on bed rest since her sixth month. He spent several weeks in an incubator, and really didn’t get well until he was about a year old.

How does all this relate to me? Well, for starters, as the oldest, responsibility was put on me from a pretty early age. There were plenty of times where it was my job to mind my brother while my mother dealt with my sister’s seizures. For the few years my sister and I went to school together, I always had to look out for her, or be around in case something happened while she was in school. I went to the library with my mom to research medical stuff. Sometimes I helped her find books, sometimes I kept my siblings occupied.

The librarians would let me into the adult stacks from a pretty early age, mostly because they knew I whouldn’t screw around like most of the kids my age would have. This helped me later in life, when I had read pretty much everything in the house. I learned to understand some of the terms my mom was researching through her conversations with research librarians, and, later, phone calls with medical research libraries and facilities. Her ability to deal with people, both on a personal and intellectual level is something I half inherited, half learned from her. She also taught me how to be a bitch. I learned to listen to doctors, but question them, despite the fact that they don’t like to be questioned. I learned to look at the details of a statement so hard that you can find the parts where that statement were not 100% fact, and find something in that part. I learned to think about stuff most kids didn’t really deal with until way older. I don’t know how my brother remembers all those years – he and I have always been so different, both in attitudes as well as memories. I should ask him some time.

My parents were given a choice fairly early in my sister’s treatment (through Long Island Jewish Children’s Hospital): institutionalize the sick kid, and try to save your marriage and your other two kids. To date, my sister has never had a formal diagnosis for what she went through.

My parents chose to ignore that advice. My mother spent a lot of time researching alternative therapies and treatments, and there were a lot of odd repercussions of that. Part of the communal family byproduct is that things that were done for my sister were done for all of us. Part of this was to keep a sense of equality amongst siblings, another part, I am sure, was to keep my parents a little more sane. There was a whole year where the only protein we ate was from chicken, eggs, and fish. There was another year where we didn’t have any citrus products in the house. My sister’s medication was a constant in the day-to-day routine, as were the restrictions on lifestyle.

I didn’t have a lot of friends as a kid, largely due to two factors: I went to a Catholic school a few towns over, which meant that most of the people I could be friends with were a drive away, and my parents were not big on having people over, because transportation was not always a given if my sister was having trouble. That, coupled with the fact that I was a weird kid, more comfortable having conversations with adults, despite my natural childish tendencies, made me sort of a loner. That simply reinforced the bookishness and retreatism in me. My mom didn’t work, but my dad worked twice as hard to make up for this. I didn’t realize until I was much older that part of his workaholism was an escape, as well as a byproduct of his ambitions.

When my sister hit her early teens (and the hormones that come along with that) she started a frightening new path down her road of disability. Previously only mentally restricted (which touches on behavior in many pertinent ways) she started down the road of emotional disability. Her teenage rages were almost as difficult as her teenage depressions. With the onset of hormonal cycles, the seizures started becoming far less frequent. However, the onset of full on emotional issues to offset that benefit was staggering.

When my mother returned to working (I was about 10 at the time), there began a period in my life where a whole new batch of outside influences found their way into the day-to-day. My parents sought the employ of aides (or babysitters) to stymie the hours between school letting out, and my mother getting home from work (usually 3-6). The first of these aides, a woman named Melissa, was an unwed single mother giving her child up for adoption. The second was the aunt of a classmate of my brother, a southern black woman by the name of Suzy Copeland. The last aide, Bob Bradley, was a man who was a part-timer at my sister’s school (Westchester School for Special Children).

At this point, I was about 12, and my father was a full blown recluse in his work. He would come home for dinner around 7, having left the house by 5am, and often had volunteer or other duties after work. He has been a volunteer fireman almost 30 years, and tried his hand in local government, as well as a few local fund raising efforts and church programs. Bob’s introduction to the family was the first thing that ever made my dad pause – mostly because of his relationship with my mother.

What I can definitively say is that my mother was emotionally cheating on my father with Bob. There were many times that they would linger talking in the kitchen, my mother having come home early, and Bob pretty much leaving my sister to my brother and I. I think the final showdown was one night when my father came home late, and Bob was still there chatting with my mom, and had finished the last half of the last six-pack in the house. It seems odd that a beer might be the wakeup call to my dad, but he realized then that he had invited a fox into the hen house. Bob’s employ with out family ended shortly thereafter, though his relationship with my mother persists to this day.

Shortly after Bob’s departure was when things hit my worst with my sister. Her hormones coming into their own caused all the physical changes of adolescence, with none of the limited intellectual or emotional advancements adolescents have to temper that change. My sister became violent. She became incoherent at times. She, to this day, has a very egocentric outlook on life, and had little in the way of social jurisprudence or guilt to inhibit what many would consider to be homicidal or dangerous behavior. After the third time my brother and I had to wrestle her into a restraining hold for several hours while my parents went off for a Saturday matinée (this last time involved a knife, and a few flesh wounds) my parents acquiesced to the inevitable. The in-home therapy my sister was getting, and the behavoralist who spent many Sunday afternoons setting up the rules and methods by which the family was to exist by were not enough. My sister had to be institutionalized.

This happened in stages over a couple of years. Ultimately, my sister ended up in a group home, which was followed by six years at an institution called The Devereux Foundation. Since then she has lived in a group home staffed/populated by people affiliated with Devereux.

When I was 18, I signed papers which made me the legal guardian of my sister if anything were ever to happen to my parents. This responsibility was not shouldered lightly, but has left me with a path in life which is somewhat contrary to the one I probably would have lived had I not had the obligation. You can’t bugger off and become a wandering miscreant if you will ultimately assume responsibility for someone else’s life. Financial planning, life planning, geography – all of these things have had a place in my long-term realities, even though for many years, I didn’t believe in long-term realities. I think more than a little bit of my flack with life comes from some of this, and the fact that while my brother has the ability (and the proved capacity) to do what he wants as he wants to, it has always been a fight that I have lost when I asserted my own will over the course of my life, running contrary to the long-term obligations my family has affected in me. Aside from a period of a few years when I was not on speaking terms with them (during which, the legal obligations I bowed to were never heavier), they have always been a well-padded manacle at my ankle.


There are days, like yesterday, when I am not sure how I feel about all of it. If the three aspects of life I was polling about are the pizza pie, my family is the pie plate, and my friends are the oven.

I have a lot more to write about this, but I am definitely out of steam. Maybe another day.

I hope I don’t end up with too many bubbles in my crust.

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