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