I've made a handful of abortive attempts at a post in the last week. In my typically long-winded manner it was to state that I was deep in a nadir of sorts as regards different spheres of performance in life (fitness, professional) and had spent the better part of a month and a half completely slacking . That would be nothing new, and also not new ( Read more... )

Two Sundays ago I moved back into Manhattan, aka NYC proper. The very next day I was off to the Dominican Republic to see off my dying grandmother. That corner of the world has a quality almost as fantastic as a GGM novel, at least to this city slicker. Everyone I meet is described by a long chain of familial relations and marriages, legit and ( Read more... )

About three weeks ago I sprained some muscles in the neck/shoulder area doing jiu-jitsu. The pain was nothing new as I always have some small nagging injury. In recent months this included a bruised throat (from a 200lb forearm crushing my neck), a swollen earlobe (from fighting off headlocks), and a bruised up rib cage (body scissors). None of ( Read more... )

I find almost every cultural product I come across insipid. I am not sure where this critical attitude stems from at this point. My snobbery made some sense years ago at the start of my college career. Back then I believed I was something special and somehow smarter than the average bear. As such I had to turn my nose up at anything that did not ( Read more... )

Whenever free will discussions come up I tend to come out on the side of the determinists, who believe that free will is just an illusion. But I don’t share their conclusions or outlook. These discussions & conclusions about free will remind me of pro-wrestling ( Read more... )

No one around me can really keep up with me. Everyone I know is either not interested in life outside an apartment, too hung up on themselves , too broke or too cheap, or too boring. For the last three or four weekends whoever I have been with just never seems as committed as me to having a good time. Not necessarily all of them are downers but ( Read more... )

Meme: "You take the first sentence from every month from your journal, and put it all together so you can sit back and go 'I really AM a freak' and take a good look at 2004. Ta-da!"Instead of resolutions my thoughts have been on revolutions lately, because there are few things that provide as fresh a start as a radical reorganization of the realm ( Read more... )

"The truth is balance. However, the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie."
- Susan SontagHave to admit that I didn't know a damn thing about this Susan Sontag until she died recently. Read 3 or 4 obituaries about her yesterday though. The titles of some of her essays are intriguing. This quote that I ran across while reading an ( Read more... )

An Imperial Message by Franz Kafka ( Read more... )

I ran into this short parable last Friday, and liked it tons. I'm still rereading and pondering it. Is Kafka this way in general? If so I will have to check more out.

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Before the LawFranz Kafka ( Read more... )