The Hallow never ends.
So, these days I'm working at Apple as a Mac Specialist. It's a dangerous and sexy trade. We get black shirts and a license to kill pre-conceptions about the OS. We work in tandems to make the world safe for the democracy of sleek little MP3 players. This is our world now ... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud (although frankly, a beautiful lone Bd is almost impossible to see in the wild these days, baud travelling as they do in flocks that dwarf even the passenger pigeon's greatest glories). Also the store is right next to the Earl of Sandwich, which makes a BLT so delicious that it makes me tear up a little just thinking about it.
Be sure to demand your copy of Leopard this Friday, ideally while waving some sort of antique weapon around and bellowing drunkenly. It'll really enrich the whole experience.
In other news, I got the red jumpsuit I intend to gradually transform into a piece of convincing Gizmonic Institute workwear, but since I haven't yet decided whether or not I want a robot with the costume -
(Quandary for my nerdy friends, one so important it gets its own parenthetical paragraph: do I get a robot to go with the Gizmonic jumpsuit? And if so, what kind? If I make one or buy one that looks like Crow or Tom, I might as well just be cosplaying Joel. If I make some other robot, I can claim my own continuity, but it might be confusing. I thought it might be interesting to have NO robot and add a little utility belt of janitorial/maintenance supplies and whomp up a fake laminate from Gizmonic, so I can be just another face in a red jumpsuit whom the bosses DO like, and who is NOT shot into space ... what do you guys think?)
- I might just save it for the next 'con and instead ride out as the Doc again this Halloween. That costume just ... works for me. It calls to me in a siren voice, dripping with honey and rum and the lingering copper tang of many fine drugs. It's also an excellent excuse to carry around a small bag full of alcohol and pills and knives and tape recorders and voodoo dolls and weird little bottles, which are all fine icebreakers.
Now, while Halloween has my brain percolating with chocolate-drenched dark delights and the flickering candle flames of old savage joys, and gainful employment gives me something to do with my time other than stare at my spatulate fingertips and search for ever-more-deviant arthouse photos from postwar Berlin, I'm still suffering from a slowing of the sparkwheels in my mind. My clever generator is winding down, and I need to zazz my thoughts with lightning to get them moving again. I'm thinking I might get myself into a more regular schedule at work (my schedule has been pretty amusing so far since the manager forgot to add my name to the updated schedule, so I have to go in and hold the assistant managers at cutlass-point to get myself pencilled in for the weird fill-in hours that no one else wants) and then use my free time to get into some sort of adult annex class. Maybe a foreign language dealie, or perhaps some sort of beginner's pottery (who doesn't love wheels?) ... ooh! Or creative writing so I can enjoy the dual pleasures of being forced to write something and having a lot of free classroom time to doodle. But any way you slice it, I think it's worth doing.
Now, as to :
I pestered whetherwoman about this meme some time ago and haven't posted since then. Here it is in its colorful entirety:
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post your this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
1. bastardy - while I have no professional interest in the traditional meaning of the word, since I have a very clear idea of who my father is (he's the gent currently sitting in the garage practicing speed-loading his Magnum), I have always had an interest in the "You bastard!" sense of being a bastard. It's a rather genial insult, when you get down to it, classical and often spoken with grinning undertones. When you're friends with a bastard, you become used to their bastardy. Also, at some point during a drunken discussion in my halcyon college days, it was determined that a new Dungeons and Dragons alignment would have to be created for me - Chaotic Bastard.
2. cockroaches - few creatures are more successful than the cockroach. They're efficient, clever, sneaky survivors who have managed to turn man's destruction of the primeval habitats into a real positive for their genus. They can run a maze after you remove their head, compress themselves into something the height of a postage stamp to escape a descending foot, and soak up radiation like a Chernobyl turnip. I even like the elegant, feathery design of them. If their feces didn't spread disease and if their lightning-fast scuttling didn't provoke our Unexpected Stimulus Startles the Monkey neuroresponse, I think we'd be treasure them as pets.
3. huckleberries - Vaccinium ovatum for a preference, although there are acidic red huckleberries, bilberry and blueberry analogues, and a species of nightshade that all make use of the name. They're tart-sweet, make fantastic jam, and are ideal when picked just a tiny bit before full ripeness, dusted with a bit of confectioner's sugar and left to macerate for half an hour.
And if you want one - I'm your huckleberry.
4. nuclear war - people seem to have forgotten the awesome, searing, all-consuming, pillars-of-heaven-shaking terror of nuclear war hanging overhead in the wake of everyday fears like planes full of conflagrating fuel crashing into your bank while you're picking up a roll of Lewis and Clark nickels, immigrant Muslim Mexicans wearing exploding shoes, and a slow rising tide of tepid seawater coming in your back door as you're mauled to death by half-starved polar bears while Al Gore rows by, screaming accusations at you. Nuclear war was an experiment in finality, arguably the ultimate in human achievment - the ability to kill an entire planet all at once. Sure, global warming will CHANGE the planet and could speed the die-off of most species, but nuclear war insured we'd be left with a frozen, lifeless cinder orbiting an uncaring sun. Light so searing it burns shadows like art into the wall, a heat so divine it transmutes the elements themselves. We found a philosopher's stone and now it sits unwept, unhonored and unsung in a hundred dusty holes in the Midwest.
5. professional wrestling - I've watched since I was six years old, back in the days when the shows were searingly lit in dark arenas full of men clenching short cigars in their teeth and women with pompadours, when Hulk Hogan was menaced by King Kong Bundy and the Samoan Swat Team terrified right-thinking Americans with their savage Pacific islander hairdos. I've written extensively about why I watch professional wrestling, but it really comes down to a few simple factors; tradition, a love of the absurd and the fantastic, and simple carnal revelry. Wrestling is something I know almost everything about - I can experience the joys of being a superfan without the devotion necessary to follow an ACTUAL sport. I can also remain smug that I know my sporting events are fixed and instead of ardently following the careers of dogfighters and pimps, I can watch pirates fight zombies and shillelagh-wielding Irishmen hurling midgets at reformed vampire ravers.
6. rough beasts - Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats was a heck of a guy - ranging from fiery royalist reactionary to arch-liberal man of the people, from decent rightly-drunken bog-trotter to wavery Hindoo mystic. He saw an end coming, and while the one he saw might not've been the one that looms over us now, he was right. The centre cannot hold, and come hell and high water, a new rough beast is born every day.
7. william randolph hearst - the last great American tycoon. Since Hearst was put into the cold ground there have been bold men, and powerful men, and men whose wealth far outstrips even the lustiest dreams of avarice from the roaring '20s, but there have been none who wielded their power so savagely or embraced their wealth so avidly as Hearst. He built a castle in the wilds of California stone by stone, out of pieces of great old edifices he had admired as a child in Europe. His father was a rough-knuckled man who'd struck absurd luck in the Anaconda silver mine, and he inherited a desire for land from him. He built a vast kingdom in Mexico and forced Black Jack Pershing to defend it when it was seized by bandolier-clad revolutionaries. He understood on a deep and pure-sung level the power a man holds in his fist when he controls information, and only a mad German like Pulitzer could contend with him when he was in his glory. He built the first media empire, and set the standard by which all future empires were judged. He created and destroyed stars, savaged Presidents with his bare hands, dragged America into international war with nothing more than a handful of newsprint and a box camera, and everywhere he went he dragged behind him a dragon tail of scandal, confusion, and conjure. He was an aberration, a fey mountain child who rose to power and threw the schemes of the Rhodesian elites into disarray, a Napoleon of the written word whose legacy stands today. And he published Krazy Kat.
Be sure to demand your copy of Leopard this Friday, ideally while waving some sort of antique weapon around and bellowing drunkenly. It'll really enrich the whole experience.
In other news, I got the red jumpsuit I intend to gradually transform into a piece of convincing Gizmonic Institute workwear, but since I haven't yet decided whether or not I want a robot with the costume -
(Quandary for my nerdy friends, one so important it gets its own parenthetical paragraph: do I get a robot to go with the Gizmonic jumpsuit? And if so, what kind? If I make one or buy one that looks like Crow or Tom, I might as well just be cosplaying Joel. If I make some other robot, I can claim my own continuity, but it might be confusing. I thought it might be interesting to have NO robot and add a little utility belt of janitorial/maintenance supplies and whomp up a fake laminate from Gizmonic, so I can be just another face in a red jumpsuit whom the bosses DO like, and who is NOT shot into space ... what do you guys think?)
- I might just save it for the next 'con and instead ride out as the Doc again this Halloween. That costume just ... works for me. It calls to me in a siren voice, dripping with honey and rum and the lingering copper tang of many fine drugs. It's also an excellent excuse to carry around a small bag full of alcohol and pills and knives and tape recorders and voodoo dolls and weird little bottles, which are all fine icebreakers.
Now, while Halloween has my brain percolating with chocolate-drenched dark delights and the flickering candle flames of old savage joys, and gainful employment gives me something to do with my time other than stare at my spatulate fingertips and search for ever-more-deviant arthouse photos from postwar Berlin, I'm still suffering from a slowing of the sparkwheels in my mind. My clever generator is winding down, and I need to zazz my thoughts with lightning to get them moving again. I'm thinking I might get myself into a more regular schedule at work (my schedule has been pretty amusing so far since the manager forgot to add my name to the updated schedule, so I have to go in and hold the assistant managers at cutlass-point to get myself pencilled in for the weird fill-in hours that no one else wants) and then use my free time to get into some sort of adult annex class. Maybe a foreign language dealie, or perhaps some sort of beginner's pottery (who doesn't love wheels?) ... ooh! Or creative writing so I can enjoy the dual pleasures of being forced to write something and having a lot of free classroom time to doodle. But any way you slice it, I think it's worth doing.
Now, as to :
I pestered whetherwoman about this meme some time ago and haven't posted since then. Here it is in its colorful entirety:
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post your this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
1. bastardy - while I have no professional interest in the traditional meaning of the word, since I have a very clear idea of who my father is (he's the gent currently sitting in the garage practicing speed-loading his Magnum), I have always had an interest in the "You bastard!" sense of being a bastard. It's a rather genial insult, when you get down to it, classical and often spoken with grinning undertones. When you're friends with a bastard, you become used to their bastardy. Also, at some point during a drunken discussion in my halcyon college days, it was determined that a new Dungeons and Dragons alignment would have to be created for me - Chaotic Bastard.
2. cockroaches - few creatures are more successful than the cockroach. They're efficient, clever, sneaky survivors who have managed to turn man's destruction of the primeval habitats into a real positive for their genus. They can run a maze after you remove their head, compress themselves into something the height of a postage stamp to escape a descending foot, and soak up radiation like a Chernobyl turnip. I even like the elegant, feathery design of them. If their feces didn't spread disease and if their lightning-fast scuttling didn't provoke our Unexpected Stimulus Startles the Monkey neuroresponse, I think we'd be treasure them as pets.
3. huckleberries - Vaccinium ovatum for a preference, although there are acidic red huckleberries, bilberry and blueberry analogues, and a species of nightshade that all make use of the name. They're tart-sweet, make fantastic jam, and are ideal when picked just a tiny bit before full ripeness, dusted with a bit of confectioner's sugar and left to macerate for half an hour.
And if you want one - I'm your huckleberry.
4. nuclear war - people seem to have forgotten the awesome, searing, all-consuming, pillars-of-heaven-shaking terror of nuclear war hanging overhead in the wake of everyday fears like planes full of conflagrating fuel crashing into your bank while you're picking up a roll of Lewis and Clark nickels, immigrant Muslim Mexicans wearing exploding shoes, and a slow rising tide of tepid seawater coming in your back door as you're mauled to death by half-starved polar bears while Al Gore rows by, screaming accusations at you. Nuclear war was an experiment in finality, arguably the ultimate in human achievment - the ability to kill an entire planet all at once. Sure, global warming will CHANGE the planet and could speed the die-off of most species, but nuclear war insured we'd be left with a frozen, lifeless cinder orbiting an uncaring sun. Light so searing it burns shadows like art into the wall, a heat so divine it transmutes the elements themselves. We found a philosopher's stone and now it sits unwept, unhonored and unsung in a hundred dusty holes in the Midwest.
5. professional wrestling - I've watched since I was six years old, back in the days when the shows were searingly lit in dark arenas full of men clenching short cigars in their teeth and women with pompadours, when Hulk Hogan was menaced by King Kong Bundy and the Samoan Swat Team terrified right-thinking Americans with their savage Pacific islander hairdos. I've written extensively about why I watch professional wrestling, but it really comes down to a few simple factors; tradition, a love of the absurd and the fantastic, and simple carnal revelry. Wrestling is something I know almost everything about - I can experience the joys of being a superfan without the devotion necessary to follow an ACTUAL sport. I can also remain smug that I know my sporting events are fixed and instead of ardently following the careers of dogfighters and pimps, I can watch pirates fight zombies and shillelagh-wielding Irishmen hurling midgets at reformed vampire ravers.
6. rough beasts - Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats was a heck of a guy - ranging from fiery royalist reactionary to arch-liberal man of the people, from decent rightly-drunken bog-trotter to wavery Hindoo mystic. He saw an end coming, and while the one he saw might not've been the one that looms over us now, he was right. The centre cannot hold, and come hell and high water, a new rough beast is born every day.
7. william randolph hearst - the last great American tycoon. Since Hearst was put into the cold ground there have been bold men, and powerful men, and men whose wealth far outstrips even the lustiest dreams of avarice from the roaring '20s, but there have been none who wielded their power so savagely or embraced their wealth so avidly as Hearst. He built a castle in the wilds of California stone by stone, out of pieces of great old edifices he had admired as a child in Europe. His father was a rough-knuckled man who'd struck absurd luck in the Anaconda silver mine, and he inherited a desire for land from him. He built a vast kingdom in Mexico and forced Black Jack Pershing to defend it when it was seized by bandolier-clad revolutionaries. He understood on a deep and pure-sung level the power a man holds in his fist when he controls information, and only a mad German like Pulitzer could contend with him when he was in his glory. He built the first media empire, and set the standard by which all future empires were judged. He created and destroyed stars, savaged Presidents with his bare hands, dragged America into international war with nothing more than a handful of newsprint and a box camera, and everywhere he went he dragged behind him a dragon tail of scandal, confusion, and conjure. He was an aberration, a fey mountain child who rose to power and threw the schemes of the Rhodesian elites into disarray, a Napoleon of the written word whose legacy stands today. And he published Krazy Kat.