A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

-Wittgenstein

Sleepless...

It is late. Too late. much, much too late. 

my perfect time.

Us night owls are an odd bunch. I think my night owl nature might stem from my deeply ingrained tendency to procrastinate. I put off going to bed at night, and I put off getting up in the morning. Invariably this causes sleep deprivation, which, if pushed, can yield a somewhat hallucinatory state.

For an insomniac, everything is a hallucination. Nothing's quite real. There's something about the rhythm of sleeping, waking, sleeping, and waking, that gives one a sense of the linearity of TIME. When you don't sleep, the rhythm is lost. And soon, all sense of meaning of TIME is lost. The ancients thought in terms of cycles. The sun rises and sets. So does the moon. The tides go in and out. The seasons repeat in sequence.

Man sleeps. Wakes. Then sleeps again, then wakes again.

The state of mind, or rather the state of 'perception', induced by the onset of prolonged insomnia is similar to that induced by opiates. The hard edges of the world are softened. Everything...recedes. An uneasy euphoria settles like a grey mist, enveloping the world, blurring what once appeared to be clear cut boundaries between self and other, form and emptiness. The mind...slows.

The world becomes a dream where nothing is real and nothing matters, insofar as everything is real and everything matters. Paradoxes are commonplace and taken for granted. Contradiction infuses everything...no problems.

Then the second wind blows in. The body's desperate attempt to stay alive, to keep functioning by opening the adrenaline floodgates. 

But in TIME, The body declares war on the opiate. And at last,

we succumb.

and drift back into the ancient rhythm of movement between worlds. The world behind closed eyes, behind thought, behind perception. And then,

WAKE

Simplicity

A collection of links, a series of associations.

An ode to simplicity.

The art of good writing: simplicity, clarity, elegance " and stop. - Michael Williams, Review

Simplicity - William Zinsser

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell

On Political Speech Writing - Phil Collins, BBC Arts and Ideas PodCast

This is one of the cardinal virtues of good writing. Simplicity. If you must speak, speak plainly.

The Magician's Son

This is the first story the Internet ever told me. I was 13 years old. That means I've been tooting around a copy in one format or another for 13 years. I've managed to save it all this time. It's not available online anymore, search for it and you don't find anything. Not a trace. I never met the author. Even the web server that hosted the original site is long gone. 13 years is a long time in internet years. It fascinates me that this is, in a sense, an internet 'relic'. I wonder if the internet is still around in 100 years if there will be 'digital archiologists' uncovering old data from the out time. I like to think of the story as an artifact, long since disappeared from the vast information sea, except tha I saved a copy. I loved this story, i still do. I hope you like it too. It's about MAGIC



The Magician's Son

A long time ago there lived a Great Magician. The Magician had a wonderful power that made absolutely everything full of love and beautiful to look upon. There was no such thing as pain or unhappiness in the Great Magician's realm.

At the Magician's side walked his son, whom he loved dearly. The boy was very beautiful and loved his father with all his heart. The Magician and his son did everything together, and there was nothing that they hid from one another. The son was in every way his father's equal -- except, of course, that he was the son and his father the father.

One day a strange and fascinating idea came to the mind of the Magician's son. He decided to make a special and wonderful gift for his father. It would be a surprise, and unlike any gift ever before given. To make the gift he would, of course, have to use his father's power, since his father's power was the only power there was anywhere. They'd always shared this power fully - yet for the making of his special gift, the boy thought he'd "borrow" a tiny corner of it, without his father's knowledge. This way the gift could be a surprise.

And so the gift was made - made in no more time than it took to think the thought of making it, which was no time at all since there was no such thing as time in those days.

And the gift? What exactly was this special thing the Great Magician's son made for him? Well, it was a feeling actually, a feeling the boy took upon himself to experience in his father's presence. The feeling was one of sadness, of hurt, of not having enough.

This was certainly a strange sort of gift for a loving son to give his father! No one had ever experienced such a feeling before, nor even heard of it. It was a thing entirely new - which I suppose was part of its appeal. But there was more to it than that. The boy had the idea that if his father saw him suffering, he would feel badly too, and want to comfort him with a special kind of love; he thought that if his father saw him in need of something, he would do his best to give it to him. In a way, this was indeed a wonderful idea for a gift. It was meant as a sort of game, you see. The boy would pretend he was hurting and in need and so on, and his father would go along with the make-believe and give him what he wanted.

But there turned out to be a serious problem with this gift. The problem was that the boy really wasn't hurting or in need. He was perfectly happy and had all there was to have. To make the gift be believable at all, he had to hide this truth from himself and really believe he was hurting and unhappy. This is where his father's power came in. For a stripped-down version of this power enabled him to see whatever he wanted to see and believe it real.

Well, this seemed sensible enough, but there was still a serious problem. For his father's power had never been intended to deny what really was and replace it with something else. Misused in this fashion, it simply plunged the boy into a magical dream. And although the dream allowed him to believe he was suffering and in need, it did nothing to change the reality of the world and his own actual happiness. He could go around all he liked believing he was miserable, but who else was going to believe it? Who else could even know about it, since the whole thing was just a dream? How could a dream be shared?

Still, the Great Magician was no fool. The moment his son's strange gift was offered, he knew something odd was going on. He could not see within the dream and know what was happening there, but he knew that something was and that it was making his son think himself unhappy. And though he would never think of forcing his son to wake up and quit believing his childish fantasies, he was hardly powerless. So what he did was this: At the very moment his son's gift was offered, he sent into the dream his love, a memory of himself and the world as they really were.

Instantly the son awoke, as was his father's intention.

Yet, in a tiny portion of the boy's mind, the dream lingered on. Although the decision to put aside the dream had been made, a fascination with it yet remained and had to run its course. Because within the dream itself the Magician's gift of love had not been accepted. Rather it had been seen as an insult, an illusion, a thing to be totally denied. For at the core of the dream was the boy's desire to please his father with a very special gift; and his father had not even acknowledged the gift, as far as he could tell - much less shown any appreciation for it. The fact that the Magician was unable to see any part of the gift, it being wholly a dream, never even occurred to the boy. How could the unreality of a dream be perceived from inside the dream itself?

So the son, seeing no sign of appreciation from his father, tried all the harder to shove the gift down his throat. He made the dream more and more solid and violent in an effort to have it be seen and accepted. This, of course, only made matters worse. Feeling himself betrayed by his father's denial of the wonderful gift, he became filled with anger and resentment. The Great Magician seemed now to haunt his son's dream as a cruel and terrible enemy, threatening awful punishment for his rebellion.

Trapped in the fabric of his own dream, the boy was terrified. Yet though he blamed his father for his fear, he feared even more to attack the Great Magician directly - though deep inside, in some obscure corner of his mind, he believed this to be exactly what he had already done by stealing his father's magic and falling into a dream. And deeper still, even more obscure and hidden, was the terrifying belief that he had somehow actually killed the Great Magician's real son and replaced him with a vile and evil impostor -- himself.

This was not a thought anyone would choose to look upon, however; so the boy buried his fear and guilt beneath a wall of rage. And he vented this rage by peopling his dream with others like himself, and conjuring up a world of things to have and want and fight over. From the figures of his dream he stole what he wanted, to meet the imagined needs unmet by his father. With some he joined in temporary friendship, with others he joined in battle. And through it all he imagined himself as special and different from all the rest. And he blamed them for the misery and guilt he now felt, saying that they in their greed were the cause, and not he. And more and more there dwelt, deep within his heart, a terrible feeling of aloneness; for he believed that all who existed were his enemy.

Such was the dream of the Great Magician's son. And horrible as it was, the boy cherished it passionately, claiming it a thing of beauty and wonder. For the world he had made was his world and not his father's, and in his mind it was a good one. True, it was a world filled with failure, cruelty, suffering and betrayal. But it also contained loftier things, like victory and all-consuming passions. And there was pleasure and gentleness, and love of a very special kind. These wonderful things could not be found in his father's world, but only in his own. His was a fine world, and a far more interesting one. He, the son, was as good a magician as his father ever was! For had he not made this wonderful world all on his own?

Well, no, not actually, since it was his father's borrowed power he had used to make it with.

All right, maybe he'd conveniently forgotten about that. But still, the original purpose of the world - the experience of pain and loss and imperfection - was his and his alone. The Great Magician could never have conceived of such things, much less brought them into being. The dream was his, and there was no way he was going to give it up! And anyway, the Magician hated him and would punish him terribly if he ever tried to go back. And the hatred was mutual, of course. For his wonderful gift - now twisted and altered beyond recognition, even by himself - remained unacknowledged, unappreciated, unloved. So screw the Old Man. Who needed him anyway?

Yet into this dream, at the very moment of its inception, the Great Magician had placed his own wonderful gift: the memory of love, and of the only world that could ever be real. And the gift had been instantly accepted, the decision to return home made. Yet because of his pride, his fear, his anger, his pain, the boy had to go about this return in his own special way. In the instant of its birth, the entire dream had been played out in every detail, like a complex design in a great tapestry. In that one instant, every step of his return was taken, its place unchangeable in the overall pattern.

But even though the boy's decision to set aside the dream had been made, and indeed the entire path to his awakening been walked through to the very end, still was he free to decide when he would recognize that this was so. He was free to replay the dream as often as he liked, savoring it, pondering it, hating it, loving it, pretending he didn't already know what was going to happen next. He invented a new and wondrous device to embody this reluctance to recognize the acceptance of his own decision to awaken. The device pushed away the inevitable moment of reconciliation and kept it separate from the reality of now; it put distance between the steps of his chosen path, making the way seem long and difficult. It was now easy to pretend the path lost or forgotten, or one not in agreement with his own true desire. He called this new invention "time", and calls it that to this day. For yes, the boy is dreaming still.

Yet is this reluctance, this unwillingness, balanced in his mind. It is balanced by the certainty of his eventual wakening, by the anticipation of the moment when he makes the final decision to renounce the dream and all its effects forever. The anticipation of this moment, a moment which has already occurred beyond time and apart from it, is the source of all the joy and peace he experiences while yet within the dream. For the dream itself contains neither peace nor joy, but only sensation, the thrill of victory, and the satisfaction of desire. Peace and joy must come from outside the dream -- from, in fact, the sure knowledge of the dream's final passing.

And so the son dreams on. . . .

Love and Money

If you walk down the street in downtown Calgary you can almost smell the money. This is boom town; black suits and white cowboy hats, big trucks and long limosines, cell phones and starbucks, laptops and leather shoes. A young proffesional type walking swiftly, talking on his blackberry, stepping over a bum who looks up at him as he passes without a glance or a second thought, dirty rough hands half raise a partly crumbled Tim Horton's cup.

At the bus stop, no suits. Courderoy dreadlocks eyes glance at me from behind oversized headphones. A young woman sits in the bus shelter, one hand on a baby carriage, watching a couple across the street walking close, hand in hand. 

On the bus, crowded, elderly lady sits with bag on seat next to her. Middle aged man with leather jacket standing next to me, glancing furtively at her. She notice's, but doesn't let it show, doesn't move or look or smile or say hello. Middle aged man with leather jacket next to me gets off the bus. The elderly lady looks at my shoes, she doesn't move.

So much opportunity, so much fear. So much for these lines that glance and skew...

Books that have changed the way I write

Five great books

Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, by Ken Kessey

Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller

The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Not that you give a shit, but these books are all works of sublime beauty. And if there were any justice in the world, you and everyone else would have read them already by now. But hey, maybe that's part of their magic. Nobody cares. (Or maybe you do care and maybe you have read them, in which case I'm a horse's ass)

No generation wants to make a world where Van Gogh's fate is repeated. We just can't help it.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but moderately. The great class, they who affect our imagination, the men and women who could not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas - they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar. -RWE

You tired old blog. We thought you were the future, but we didn't know facebook was waiting to eat you alive.

Motivation has elluded me. If ever I had a muse, it has deserted me these past weeks. I mean, I had an idea, sort of. But then, as the idea grew, it changed. It morphed from this train of thought to that train of thought, from one angle to another and then another. Before long I just got frustrated with the whole damn thing. And now I have a deadline staring me in the face.

But maybe it's not so bad. Deadlines can do wonderful things. Of course sometimes they do vicious things.

So here's the deal. I'm writing an essay about what it's like to play music and make absolutely no money at it; or worse, make a couple bucks at it. When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I'm a musician. My JOB is cooking for a deli, and being a student takes up most of my time. But I think of myself as a musician. The thing is, I never make any money at it, so a little  part of me feels like really I don't count as a musician so I should stop telling people that it's what I do. I mean, I don't do it for a living. If anything, music eats up my living. I spend all this time playing in a band and busking out on the streets or down in the subways. I was busking just recently and this guy told me to get a job. I couldn't fucking believe it. I have a job. It's a shitty job to be sure, kitchen work's like that. But the way he said it it felt like he was telling me to shut the fuck up cause no one wants to hear it; go get a job so we don't have to listen to you anymore. 

In busking, like everything, there's good stuff and then there's crap. I like to think that I'm usually in the former group, but you know, sometimes I wonder.

Ah screw it.

Just watch Trudeau

37 years ago today, Then Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau handled one of the best PM interviews ever caught on tape. Think what you will of the man or his politics, you have to admit: the man had balls.

You can watch this famous interview Here.

feed your head some Canadian History, youtube style. (well, CBC style in this case).

Taking the 'personal' out of computers.

Old RMS himself, aka St. IGNUcious of the Free Software Movement.


You may be interested in Richard Stallman's article on the future of the so-called 'personal' computer. Careful who you allow to take over control of the industries you don't think about all that often but upon which you almost certainly rely. This is especially significant to students, as Microsoft products continue to gain a stronghold (or maybe a stranglehold) in Education. Check it out. maybe it'll make you think twice about how great MS Office 2007 is.

Can you trust your computer???????

The anger and the fury

I'm reading again. Melville, The Whale. Moby Dick. I picked it up again this afternoon. It was lying on top of a pile of books in our half-moved-into new apartment, it's old green cover faded with the dust that has worked its way in. My father used to read this very book to me as a child, this very copy I now hold in my hands. I flip open to near the end, the last few chapters, and before I know it over three hours have passed and I'm still sitting on the floor reading, completely enveloped. I'm supposed to be getting work done, homework. But here I am, reading this old tome from my childhood and not tackling the mountain of text assigned to me. But I can't stop, it's the part near the very end where they are in final pursuit. The suspense, though I've read this story a thousand times before, is palpable, thick. Addictive.

Revenge, a madness not to be considered lightly...

I turn the page and a passage leaps out of the story and grabs me. Intertextual signifigance presses my conscious sub/un/conscious awareness of meaning in a postmodern vice grip. The words squeeeeeze. I read:

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." --Chapter 41

Memories of music flow from the past...
We may chase down our enemies, even bring them to their knees.
We can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.

As I close the book the voice in my head that is at once me and not me asks me:
What would Captian Picard do? WWCPD?





for a klondike bar?




oh the madness of the times, everything a tribute to the schitzophrenic thouroughly unwittingly wittingly postmodern...yet altogether, Human......condition.

workin man midight...or sleepless is snoozetown

Hello dear reader, you must be really looking to kill time if you clicked your way over this page o' the web. I'm going to warn you, here and now. A lot of what follows will likely be trite, incoherent, stupid, preachy, insensitive, and ignorant or worse. There will be bad grammer, and bad speeling And for all of this I will not apologize because you, dear reader, have been given this altogether fair warning.

so, i guess if you're still reading then you don't care, or maybe you do. Or your on your way to the back button. I don't know. And, for the moment at least, eye dont car.



alright now that that's out of the way, let's get down to it. Let me tell you a story...




Once upon a time

There lived a man who was known by many names in his long, long lifetime. His Father came from the melting of the great ice that made the world, but he is long dead. Long before the making of our world. The names of his brother's were Villi and Ve, but they too are long dead. He's the oldest one left alive. Call him Wednesday.


Wednesday was hanging out under the world tree one day, lazing around at the , day-dreaming. He had been wandering out and about when he came across a sign that declared in big bold ridiculous lettering bordering on the royally extravagant that read:

PRIVATE PROPERTY OF HIS LARGENESS, KING YMIR.

Wednesday read the sign and puzzled at its meaning. He had never seen anything like it before. Then he saw the tree. It was nearly as tall as he could see with ample shade. "Just the place for a nap" he thought to himself. The grass looked soft and inviting, so he strolled over, laid down, and strettttttched out his limbs with a yawn. Soon he was halfway to dreamland, comfortable and content.

When along came a weird old man holding a bucket full of water. The old man hobbled up to the base of the tree was and without any warning at all emptied the bucket all over the hapless
Wednesday who, now soaked, proceeded to curse loudly.

"What the Fuck man!? What the hell are you doin! For fucks sakes you can't just fuckin up and do that shit you son of a bitch! FUCK!!!(remember, fair warning).

"I am Mimir. I am the gardener. And you are trespassing.






-------stay tuned! we'll be back after this incredibly long break. dunt hoald yer brethe.

The soulless salesman.

I approach the Southpark car dealership, a place I've passed many times walking along Whyte ave without a second thought, with mixed feelings. I feel uncomfortable with the knowledge that I am here with the express purpose in mind of wasting someone else's time. I'm here to act as though I want to buy a new vehicle, or at least test drive one. I am acting in the theatrical sense because really I don't want to buy a car, let alone test drive one. I actually dislike the idea of buying new cars, I feel that we are far too concerned with self-image in society these days and I can't help having the little nagging voice in my head whisper to me as I eye the machines out in the lot, "all is vanity".

A man approaches, "Hey there, can I help you find something?"

With effort, I suppress my desire to back out at the last minute and say "no thanks, just looking" and walk away, or confess my true motives and the nature of this task put before me by a university writing class. Instead I hear myself say, "Yeah, I'm in the market for a new vehicle. I'm thinking maybe a light truck that would be good for camping, backroads in B.C. kind of thing."

The man looks at me and, for a moment, I feel as if he knows what I'm up to, that I'm lying, that I don't want a new truck, that I'm just wasting his time when he says "How much are you looking to spend?"

Shit, I didn't think of that. "Well, about $500 a month. I've got $2000 for a down-payment and an old 92 Dodge Caravan for a trade in." All lies. Really what I would like is for him to buy my Van and give me money so I don't own a vehicle anymore. Again, somehow I have the sense that he knows this by looking at me.

The salesman thinks a moment, working figures in his head.

"Well son, do you have good credit?"

"Ummm, I think it's ok."

"Well your gonna need good credit to get into anything we have here with your financial situation. Look, why don't you go home and talk about it with your girlfriend and come on back with her? Then we can take it from there eh?"

I gather from his tone that he doesn't want my business, and I really don't blame him. He knows I'm not interested and I'm just wasting time, both mine and his. He's a good businessman, cutting the fat by not wasting his time with fakers like me. He's not interested in swindelling me into something I don't want.

He offers me a business card, we shake hands and part ways. As I walk away I look back and see him talking to a fellow salesman. They're probably talking about how they wish kids like me wouldn't come in and waste their time. I walk a little faster.

I can't help but think, walking away from the encounter, that there were two salesmen back there. He sells cars, whilst I am supposed to sell a piece on "what it's like to test drive a car these days". Neither of us made the sale. And that I believe, and I believe he believes, is a good thing. Do not sell your soul for money, lest you become a soulless salesman. Hell, for a while I had even considered driving down to Wetaskiwin, my home town I have not been back to for nearly 4 years dispite it only being a 45min drive away, and tracking down an old friend of mine who is now a salesman at one of the many car dealerships there and wasting his time, lying to him. Good lord, why would I ever actually do this? For marks? For money? There are intangible elements at work whenever you sit down to write. And though one may indeed make money for one's efforts, one must consider: at what cost?

Three things I learned from the experience:

1. I have absolutely no desire to buy a vehicle. In fact I feel now more than ever that I will try and never own another vehicle ever again, let alone a new one.

2. My writing must consist exclusively of topics that I actually really genuinely care about. I am a bad liar, and I have no intention of changing this state of affairs. If my up and coming "career" as a writer must suffer because of this general moral principle, then so be it. I can always go build houses instead and write on my own. After all, what I really care about is writing well about what I care about, not making a buck.

3. Nosce te ipsum.


fin

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be."

— Abraham Maslow

I, A.I.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

- Isaac Asimov


Artificial Intelligence is an area of great interest to me. I am particularly drawn to Normative Pragmatics, the goal of which could turn out to be the essence of A.I. - Artificial Sapience. The construction of an machine capable of understanding the meaning of symbols.

exciting (in a geeky way),

and maybe even a little scary...

Thank the gods we have ol' Asimov's stories to give us a little perspective.

exposition...river city

Well well, this story begins with a well. Well come to my story, welcome. I, the I that composed this collection of pixels that you are now reading but also the self same "I" that is not present in the pixels themselves, "I" am sitting on a couch in a nice little internet cafe like a good little yuppie university student pissing away the cold cold day with nothing much to say, but then if you've made it this far already why not a little farther eh?"....so said the serpent in the tree.

Since I have nothing good to say I will simply say a bunch of random magical bullshit.


1. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the universe is entirely composed of two basic substances: magic and bullshit.


2. There once was a man named Hegel who desired to know. What did he desire to know you ask? Anything at all, but he wanted to know it fully...completely. So Hegel went out and bought himself a nice big desk with a nice chair and some nice paper and pens and all the little implements, instruments, and artifacts he thought might aid him in fullfiling this strange but all to common little desire. He read books, lots of books. He thought thoughts, lots of thoughts. And he wrote words, lots and lots and lots of words. But the more he read and the more he thought and the more he wrote the more he realized....realized that to know any one thing, fully, completely, absolutely, one must know everything.
This sent poor Hegel into a deep despair, for his one and only true desire he could plainly see was unattainable. One gloomy, cold day, in this pit of his despair, a smallish spark lit in the middle of him. The spark did not reach his brain but it did reach his toes. And then it reached his feet, and legs, and before his brain knew what was happening his feet and his legs stood up from the desk and the books and paper and pens and began to walk, out the door, around the corner, down the steps, through the door and out into the street, out to the edge of town, out beyond the edge of town.

"Know one thing, know ten thousand things" - ancient Japanese proverb




3. There once was a man named Matt. One day, Matt was bored. So he skipped his class wherein he was to learn about what Mr. Hegel had written and thought and read and instead went to a nice little internet cafe like a good little yuppie and bought a coffee and opened his cheap little laptop, took a deep breath, and dove into the murky waters of the information super seaway. He looked for, and found, his good friend Jeremy's rantings, became at once inspired to follow suit, and indeed did, then and there, follow suit. Many posts followed, from trickles to floods. Then one day Matt signed up for a writing class, and on the first day the teacher told him rather bluntly to go out and get a blog.

And then go test drive a car...Stay Tuned!!!

And that brings us up to now.


But enough of this banter. There's time to be wasted and potential to kill!


4. Come Watson, the game's afoot!



Fin