I don’t know what this is actually

(this appears to be some sort of bizarre abstracted self-analysis of the sort that I sometimes subject myself to. I found it recently while acting on my new compulsion to dig up and post on this site all the shit I have written over the years. I will say that it was certainly not written to be read by anyone -including me. I don’t know if that makes it worse or just not quite as terrible)
(also I kindof wish I had been using a different word than passionate but I’m not exactly sure why)

3/22/08

Ethic

Seriousness. Choosing a passionate existence over a perspectived one. It is a dichotomy that has followed me throughout my life. Even now, I sit down, with a purpose, a passion, a serious intention to codify a set of principles by which to orient my gut, and I immediately digress into the practice of pondering or gaining perspective on the nature and repercussions of passion itself. To continue this line of thought: one might say that perspective is necessary, one must understand in order to choose. But ultimately, understanding and choosing are mutually exclusive: choosing can only start when understanding has finished.

I started writing this as a means of determining a proper life for myself, presuming that such a thing could be found through a keyboard. I

A life of passion. I want to believe. Desperate to care. Apathetic. One presumes or is taught or somehow comes to the notion that there are better modes of life than others. One presumes that such things can be reasoned out; That life can be improved upon: sought and found. I started.

I started writing this with an explicit notion of what it would be and how it would help. I don’t remember what it was. I t was compelling. There was a sense, I wanted to capture, of belief. Of trusting the analysis of my own mind. This is a problem for me because my analysis has almost always been inconsistent if not directly opposed to those around me, and often opposed to itself. I don’t trust it and often for good reason. It is a wayward son of a bitch. But it is wayward because it is looking deeper and harder, and sees things that other people ignore. I have often described my perspective as trying to walk around while looking through a binoculars: Intense, fleeting and disconnected details, fascinating in themselves but extremely inefficient and time consuming for the purposes of building a coherent narrative crucible with which to try my decisions.

I keep thinking that I “should” go to sleep, and then the part of me which I believe to be correct, the part of me which I am most content following, asks: why? The point being that what I have been trying to say is the fairly simple: “go to hell” to everything that doesn’t matter. The foot I started off on, of passion verses perspective was a red herring. Perspective matters and I might as well be passionate about it. I might as well be passionate about all sorts of things. I might as well be passionate about deflective and absolving humor. It is a stance that looks for the gold and polishes it. That doesn’t proscribe beforehand what it is looking for and only accepts right on its own limited criteria, but realizes that we are built to know good, by definition, and anything that fits that sense should be burnished and bolstered and brought forth to prominence. Defiance. That somehow seems appropriate. I have always tried to hide myself, and that is really probably what this is about. What I do has always brought me too many questions that I can’t handle…

The courage to be weird. It is largely a difficult thing. If you are aware beforehand that most everything you would naturally say and act upon will be met with puzzlement and confusion. How do you continue to act naturally? Drink. It works. Sort of.

I am superego.

World Music “Olympics”

Yeah it wouldn’t be called the Olympics because that would be (for lack of a desire to be more articulate) stupid.

Somewhere between competition and pageant, though neither of those are at all appropriate either. I’m sure there is some old retired half-dead word out there that would serve admirably in this role. That’s the thing about words, a lot of times the older and deader the words are, the more useful they become.

What these not-Olympics would be is a contemporaneous gathering of the greatest musicians in the world from each country. It would happen concurrently and uh co-spatially with each of the regular olympics but would be separate from the IOC.

The basic thought behind this came while thinking about the athletic Olympics and the idea that this gigantic world interaction really doesn’t really provide any real permanent benefit. All we get out of it, at least from the content of the actual Olympic events, is who is better than who at what. I think that that is a actually a worthwhile thing and not as dumb as it sounds. But I also can see a situation in which each country, each culture, puts forth its most striking examples of its own music, its own rhythmic interpretation of life, where, when it was over, we would not only have seen who was the best but we could take the best home with us; it could enlarge the world and open it in a way that the long jump never could.

I think it should be a competition of sorts because nationalism and pride and a desire to be the very best are (at least in this format) good and useful and even great things. I’m not sure how the categories would be set-up or how each country would decide which musicians would be sent but something could certainly be worked out.

The Double Barrel Toilet

A messy subject, indeed.
But an ubiquitous one.

The function of the modern flushing toilet, at the least the western* variety I am familiar with, is to remove solid waste; yes liquid waste as well, but that is rather easy to do, which is largely the point of this post(at least on a practical level).

*supposedly the western toilet’s Asian and particularly Japanese counterparts are some sort of highly advanced precursors to the singularity.

My point about the distinction between solidish waste and its liquid counterpart is that the need to use water in disposing of the former is non-existent in the latter. Flushing liquid is kind of a stupid thing to do. And yet the modern toilet makes no distinction between the two tasks. According to the (at the time) drought conscious parents of a childhood friend of mine:

“if its brown flush it down, if it’s yellow let it mellow”

It’s a nice enough idea in theory (or maybe it isn’t) but in practice it comes up short. Coming across a bowl full of yellow, either of my own doing or someone else’s, generally tends to cure me of any notions I might have entertained about my own meager commitment to the cause. The fact however remains that at a systems level, flushing water is dumb, so dumb in fact that I am writing a blog post about it.

What is to be done?

Half the problem could be solved (the male half) by running a direct pipe from the outlet to a small and separate receptacle on the side of the toilet. This could theoretically be achieved with nothing more than some PVC pipe and half a milk carton, though I would imagine most normal people would want something a bit more civilized; maybe you could paint flowers on it. Like I said though, this would only solve half the unnecessary flushing problem. It might be however that female liquid flushing, involving at least one solid in the form of toilet paper, along with sundry other possible rituals and procedures to which I will not pretend any useful knowledge of, may simply have to just follow the standard flush method entirely.

Even if we as one big happy global village were to just cut down on all the male miteration related flushing we could significantly reduce the wastewater throughput in the world today.

I don’t really see the separate urinal catching on in any form however, milk carton or no, mostly because the separate urinal has not caught on, at least in the private restrooms I am mostly talking about.

What all this eloquence is supposed to be getting at is my brilliant idea of some sort of hybrid bowl design. I don’t really have an exact picture in my mind of how this would be built but I think it could be done in a doable way. The concept I like the most is to just have a small tube-like structure suspended above the waterline that you could pee into, you would miss a lot but an acceptable majority of the payload would reach its target and the collateral damage would only consist of hitting the regular part of the bowl. The problem would come in playing defense. One would imagine that such a structure would be rather highly susceptible to acts of intestinal violence and the ensuing cleanup would likely be more unpleasant than the free market would bear. Maybe a much better solution would….hmm..that might actually work and be economically feasible………..Maybe I should put it on my ridiculously long list of things to patent.

This site was created largely to be a reprieve from my habit of constantly writing stuff down that I should patent but that won’t ever patent(or do anything else with whatsoever). Not that patents are even good or worthwhile. I think I need write out my opinions on this subject so I know what I actually think.

as a side note: The word miteration apparently does not exist, or if it does it is spelled in some bizarre manner beyond the capacity of Google to intuit. Did the Coen brothers just flat out make up an entire word? I found a small number of people, myself now included, that have used the word but none of those people were dictionaries or, by most appearances, remotely associated with anything of a dictionary like nature.
(edit: the word is micturate apparantly, a la the comment section, I don’t eally feel like changing this though)

And now for some bizarre reason, I suddenly have a bloody nose. I feel like I’m ten years old.

Crevassemobiles

I was just reading an article about scientists in the antarctic and their snowmobiling into crevasses and how they would really rather not do that. My first thought, for whatever reason, was to attach large longitudinal poles to the snowmobiles that would act as a sort of bridge or something like a shish-ka-bob to suspend the unfortunate traveler above the yawning chasm’s gaping maw. My second thought was to post this on my little repository of things that I will never actually do or make but will at least have thoroughly discussed with myself.

The Rightness of Things

The absence of artifice, water in a net, nearness to the flame, the love of god, earnesty.