EXISTENTIAL ALLEGORY OF DOOM (deliberately bad writing, vol 1)

 He wanted to tell her to go to Hell, skipping Purgatory and Limbo in the fast lane to damnation like a drunken frat boy in a hurry to flunk out of his eighth sophomore semester; he wanted to make her pay life’s sad little fiddler with money from her own childhood piggy-bank, for the pathetic refrain that she had inspired in his bleak existence.
 But all he could do was stare at the lush mountainous terrain that rolled gently from the nape of her neck to the hem of her skirt, irrigated by streams of sweat like perfumed rivers.
 “Must you internalize everything, Max?” she sighed, sending his train of thoughts careening off of the tracks. “I thought you wanted to talk about Kevin…”
 “Kevin Kurtweiler Kinsley is a racist bastard,” Max spat. “That pointed-headed little bigot wouldn’t dare cross me.”
 Laura suckled at her cigarette holder with distracted infantilism. “Oh?” she quipped. “I thought you two had a history,” she cooed.
 She didn’t know the half of it…not the part, the division, or the moiety, he thought to himself; she was just stoking the fire, adding comment after comment to kindle him into exploding like year-old dynamite.
 “Come on, Max...admit it. It wasn’t the money, or the crass comments; you were jealous,” Laura giggled.
 “Hah!” Max Hahed; “Kevin tried to bring me to my knees for months, but I wouldn’t stand for it. The last time I saw him he was running out of the Blue Room over on Ash and Hunter, white as a sheet. What do I have to be green over?”
 And then it hit him like an allegorical frat-boy’s pre-owned Gremlin in the proverbial fast lane to metaphoric damnation: Laura…and Kevin…That was the second time she had two-timed him, and she did it with that double-crossing cross burner Kevin.
 “Don’t you get it, Max?” Laura asked softly. “I needed something real, not just an ephemeral connection to another cliché motivated by a mutual lack of multidimensional experience. That’s no way to raise a child,” she sobbed dramatically.
 “You’re not pregnant,” Max muttered perplexedly.
 “I mean my inner child, you idiot! My inner child has been suffering under the oppression of your godless and nihilistic model of the universe; you don’t believe in love, in nobility, or even the inherent dignity of mankind!” Laura cried.
 “You’re no saint, sister…”
 “Oh, Max,” she gasped. “Just because I don’t personally practice any number of empirically circumspect modes of emotional interaction doesn’t mean that I don’t accept them as being true.”
 Max frowned, his brow furrowing in the futility of the argument. He tried to tell himself that none of this was even real; nothing mattered, because nothing existed outside of the necessary delusions of the self that he created solely to represent amalgams of his own ever-shifting concepts of reality.
 But this phantasm of unobtainable and altogether too infuriating femininity, he had at some point decided to manufacture with perfect breasts and eyes like blue dinner plates, and he couldn’t ignore the sympathy and lust that her shuddering provoked.
 “Look, kid…it doesn’t have to be this way,” he admonished gently. “We can work things out; you’ll see, baby.”
 He cradled her against his chest, her isolationistically folded arms digging into his ribs like cruel little reminders of the discomfort created by attempting to identify with anything outside of one’s own existence.
 “Do you really think so, Max? Or is this just another of your carefully planned facades of human interaction designed to reinforce your self-identity as a sympathetic anti-hero?”
 Max smiled and shook his head. “It’s legit, kid; I know this will work.”
 “But how can you be so certain?” she asked, uncertain.
 “Because I’m not an existentialist; I’m a solipsist,” he admitted. “I didn’t know how to break this to you, but I guess now is as good a time as any.”
 “I don’t understand…if you don’t believe I exist, how can we be happy?” Laura asked quietly, beginning to sob again.
 “Oh, baby…you do exist. You exist because I exist, and all this time I felt myself falling in love with you I never thought it would work. You’re a figment of my imagination…I’m a Methodist; it’s complicated. But now I can accept that if you are an inseparable part of my own egocentric experience you no longer have the burden of developing your own independent emotional character,” Max explained.
 “But I’m the protagonist, Max!”
 “Nonsense. Why do you think my internal monologue is always illustrated instead of yours? This isn’t a literary convention; we’re the same person. Sometimes, I think from chapter to chapter the core concept of self has shifted back and forth…”
 “I knew it! That’s why Kevin has his own chapter!”
 “Exactly,” Max cried. “Omniscient multiple third-person perspectives can only occur if we accept that all entities are expressions of one individual ego.”
 Laura could feel the passion rekindle as he challenged her perception of reality and self; his manhood pulsed between them, and she felt herself flush with desire as she experienced his skin and her skin touch from both perspectives at once.
 “Make love to myself,” she breathed.
 “I’ll think about it,” Max acquiesced.

Regarding kt's, Kuchen, and Kannada

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad handed out 400kt of potatoes to rural Iran in a relatively transparent attempt to curry favor with the represented demographics. Supporter of his opponents, in protest of this, did not engage in any sort of flowery or overly sophisticated intellectual argument; they instead emblazoned signs and chanted fervently the simplest thing they could: "Death to potatoes". In much of the Western world, 'death to' whatever seems awfully serious - the sort of shit you say about something you positively hate, but in context it's usually synonymous with the much less threatening term 'down with'.

Sometimes things just get lost in translation, and sometimes the linguistic license we use facilitates that unintentionally; in German, for instance, you can write the sentence Der Mann isst den Kuchen, and that means "the man eats the cake". If you instead wrote Den Kuchen isst der Mann you will not have changed the essential meaning of the sentence even though the word order might, at a glance, suggest otherwise.

A co-worker of mine speaks the regional language of the Karnataka area of India, Kannada, which has an amazing number of possible phonemes and graphemes; basically, you can formulate almost any borrowed word from almost any language in Kannada, which immediately makes me wonder if it isn't easier to disambiguate an anthropophagic bundt or a pogrom of tubercide from superficially similar but far more benign constructs.

Bösendorfer Is The New Bupropion

If you know a damaged, depressed, artsy girl, whatever the fuck you do don't put her on antidepressants; give her a piano (lessons and talent are optional) and tell her to dress provocatively. It is presently and shall be for at least another few years a guarantee of a record contract.

Laying Down The Fourth-Dimensional Real-Vector Mack

Minkowski described a special form of geometric space that lent itself easily to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, being a space defined by four mutually orthoganal vectors (e₀, e₁, e₂, e₃) such that −(e₀)² = (e₁)² = (e₂)² = (e₃)² = 1.  It is a pseudo-Euclidian space that also accounts for time as a fourth dimension.

This is all, as you can well imagine, a pain in the ass to anyone who isn't a Lithuanian mathematician, or at the very least mildly engaged in some nonrelative physics now and again; it does, however, conjure a couple of immediate puns and a bit of semantic chicanery here and there, so it is infinitely useful for my regular purposes.

Take for example the concept of the learning curve.  I've always seen that plotted in two dimensions (measure of performance vs. number of attempts), giving no thought to the geometric concept of torsion on a curve that exists in Euclidian space.  It is unfathomable in that model, apparently, that in addition to moving up that curvature from a slow beginning to an accelerated learning state before gently curving back to a plateau, that the line might deviate from true on some Z-axis (like whether or not the learner actually gives a shit about the subject).  This is exactly the kind of tragic, incomplete analogy that occurs when psych majors appropriate slang from physicists.

To continue, let's add a 4th dimension of time to our model; I would suggest that the number of attempts is often interpreted as a timeline, but strictly speaking that isn't true.  Think of it like picking up strangers in a bar; sometimes "Nice shoes..." works on the first chick, and sometimes you end up telling eight people a twenty-minute story about how your dog died and you need to be held.  Number of attempts is in no way synonymous with time invested.

I propose the influence of the Z-axis (everything orthoganal to the learning process) and the number of attemps within a given space both impact the learning curve, and if the activity of learning is assumed to be utterly unrelated to all other activities and the iterations of learning attempts are spaced irregularly or inadequately, the 2-dimensional model doesn't plot anything meaningful.

It's also worth noting that the unrelated fractal known as Minkowski's Curve is also called Minkowski's Sausage, and that somewhere there is undoubtedly a cognitive psych / discrete mathematics double major that will respond well to that veiled reference if you buy them a beer.

The Modern Primitive in Flux

There is something mildly perverse about blogging during a power outage.

During my formative years I had the good fortune of experiencing abject poverty, and the amazing fortune of only enduring it briefly; due to the perfect storm of both generic single parent misfortunes plus the very specific effects of a serious car accident on said sole provider, things got a little touch and go for a couple of years. Sometimes people slip through the cracks; usually they never crawl back out again, so I'm grateful for the experience because I wasn't unlucky enough to get trapped in it.

It does, however, fuck with my perspective. I was a cub scout at the time, so spending a winter without heat followed by a spring without power and a summer without air conditioning was essentially just an extended camping trip that didn't involve going anywhere. Making due for food was a little like foraging, so thanks to an imaginative guardian and an early inclination for roughing it we got on just fine for over two years where we didn't have electricity, hot water, or temperature control at the same time at any point. We lived right across the street from a vast tract of unclaimed, unpopulated land, and there were things slower than an eight year old that wound up being fairly tasty upon further inquiry.

And now, I am having difficulty reconciling those memories with my present predicament. I am sitting on my couch blogging in the dark, and my wife is shopping online and watching streaming television because even though the power is out, I have a 3G router combo and a house full of laptops, and somewhere in the back of my brain I am wondering what the fuck to do when all of that shit that I can't recharge in this condition begins to go dark.

What then? Physical books? Stories by candle-light? Retire early?

It occurs to me that there are rabbits in my neighborhood, and I probably have a sharp stick somewhere.

لدي زوجة

One year has passed, and yet the moment itself seems to occupy the entirety of that timeline. Sure, the rest of life keeps transpiring, with all the ups and downs one would expect, but fundamentally I still feel the same way about my wife as I did the day I said my vows, so in a weird sort of way I'm still in that moment as much as I am in this one. Sometimes kissing her strikes me as a continuation of that first married kiss in addition to being a discrete event unto itself. I suppose that must either be a sign of our enduring, storybook love, or possibly some indicator that I am trapped in an existential paradox and unable to segregate retrospective memories from prospective memories due to my persistent simultaneous existence in two time periods.

I've noticed (wioll haven notice) that settling into married life has just refined the relationship instead of altering it grossly. The same exact irritations occur (willan have occurren) but we have learned to deal with them a little differently (haven on-dealt witha learnfor willmay...you get the idea). So maybe the essential secret to marital bliss is a combination of framing your experience like a time traveller(1) and cultivating selective hearing.


(1) With thanks to Douglas Adams, who prepared me for the curious grammar and the general absurdity of life.

Amaranthine Arduousity

When I was a kid, video games were hard, but they were largely formulaic and short (all the better to entice another quarter out of the player). Over time, difficulty waxed and waned with length, story, graphic and sound qualities, and other factors, until the industry grew to expect games with budgets higher than Michael Bay films that took five years to develop. The end result is that once in a while I pick up a fantastic game that only has a single, terrible flaw: the fucker just never ends. I'm not talking about pure sandbox games...those get boring and I quit eventually, maybe to pick them back up again in a few months. I'm talking about 100+ hours of core gameplay, characters who appeal to my emotions, and sidequests upon sidequests upon sidequests of shit to collect, kill, or sleep with.

Fuck the grue; it is dark, and I am very likely to be eaten by the couch.