God of Biscuits

It's kind of strange to say that meeting a new friend (whereby ‘meeting’ and ‘new’ I mean ‘in person after a long time as blog acquaintances’) put me in the mindset of some kind of old school week, but that's exactly how it went down. Ted Gideonse of The Gideonse Bible came up to San Francisco last weekend and we hung out quite a bit. Never running out of things to say, having real conversations about real things, using words I know without having to second-guess my audience. Generally a refreshing and enormously enjoyable time for me, in a time when it was badly needed.

To give you a the smallest part of an idea about Ted, here's a bit from his website, admonitions to his potential audience:

Qualification: Do not read this site of you are:

• a small child
• easily offended
• confused by big words
• litigious
• prone to psychotic splits

In other words, my kinda guy. Sharp wit, off-the-charts smart, well-spoken, and perhaps most importantly, a warm and decent man.

Why does life have to be any more political or obfuscated than that? Even the Golden Rule holds hostage: do unto others as you would have them do unto you? There are a lot of self-esteemless people out there who actually want to be treated badly, beaten up, insulted, denigrated, etc. I prefer this one: be nice. Period. And the worthwhile people will show up in your life.

Please, just take that small chance.

But back to last weekend. It was as terrific a few days as I've had in a long time. Parts of my brain were exercised that had gone to flab a long time ago, pale and shutdown for lack of opportunity around others.

I hope he comes back soon. And I hope he brings his partner Rob with him next time.

So thanks for a great weekend, Ted.

Nine sentences, twenty-eight seconds of film. Huuuuuuge waste of time.

I TiVo'd The Fountainhead a few days ago. Well, you didn't expect me to actually read Ayn Rand, did you? Good lord. Read that dialog.

I stopped watching. But then I decided to rubberneck (the only way to describe watching and listening to something like this). This scene dissolves to a friend telling him to compromise, then dissolves to an architectural firm where he gets put down, etc.

“Oh my God, Ayn!” God of Biscuits rages. “Could you be any less subtle?” (GoB has been known to channel Chandler Bing).

But seriously, Ms. Rand wrote the screenplay of her novel. Can't you picture her salivating at the chance to push her religion of Faith in Existence—a tarted up philosophy of Everyone For Him/Herself—to the masses? To get everyone to think just like her?

I've written about her before (did I just masturblog in public?), but to see it up there on the silver screen (it's a black and white movie from 1949)? Yeah, she's just as tedious on film, as you can see by the opening dialog. But picture this: picture her sitting at a typewriter salivating and thinking "me! me! me! It's all me! I've done everything myself and owe no one else my success! I'll make millions from this film—and without anyone's help! Because if anyone ever helped me, they'd be hurting me! My senses tell me what exists, as I clatter away at the keys, bringing my story into existence and—oh, wait, it existed before! It did! In my mind, which any one of the five only senses will confirm—oh, wait. Millions! I'll make millions! And it will all be because of me and no one else. I'll make more money than I can ever spend! The extra can go to feed the poor because—wait, no! I'd never be so cruel as to feed a man a meal he didn't earn himself! ...”

Blah blah blah. God, what a heartless bitch she was.

I am Norman Burroughs: watery blue eyes, disappointed, dispirited, plowed under, a melancholiac. Gravity works differently on me: I accumulate it.

Historically I've considered being disappointed in others an indulgence, a crude luxury. Bad taste that comes back to bite you on the ass. I was wrong: sometimes that which is must be spoken of. In pure and simple terms.

But it's also the surest way to get you into a trouble you don't deserve, surest way to get myself into trouble. Trouble deflected, trouble no one took the trouble to create invective much less hurl it themselves. Too much effort: it's trouble deflected. The trespasses of others made into mine.

Perhaps that's where all this extra gravity is coming from: ceramic hearts deflecting cold stabs where I was expecting the warmth of a beating human one.

Never say “it can't get any worse” unless you're on the last breath or two from an expected death.

I've gotten a couple of hits recently from the .nl domain, who found me through other blogs who've linked to me (don't you love how blog linking is a concept that's so easy to understand but so inevitably awkward to describe in English?).

I'm going to blanket this entry with tags in hopes of attracting who might want to have some off-line email dialogs about current-day life in the Netherlands, perhaps some common folklore taught to children, etc.

Why? I do write more than just this blog, and a few story ideas would be better for having some details which I, humbly, do not have at my disposal. Longer-term readers already know of my...predisposition...to anything Dutch, but this is one step further.

Those who can help me out with this, please email me.

Thanks in advance!

But where can warp drive take us, except away from here...?

A bit of a geeky reference, yes (it's from Star Trek: Insurrection), but serves as a fairly equivalent statement to all those things I feel about San Francisco. It's not a Dorothy's-back-yard thing nor fear of itinerancy, not even xenophobia, but if you so love the place in which you live what purpose is there to travel, what impetus to improve means of travel?

To outsiders this particular bent in my geographical sensibilities would conflate xenophobia and agoraphobia to the point where the Dome of the Sky is so obvious as to require no belief system in place at all.

Still, the jewels adhered and embedded in the Dome of Sky are the same that all see except domeless, wide open; no context. And no context = no story and no story means no magic.

And we all have to have at least some magic in our lives. It's everywhere, in everything. Some people assign all things magical to one true source, others find magic to be oddities of nature and the beautiful light cast upon the walls by a candle being filtered by irregular weaving within the fabric of Nature. Still some others find the unexplainable to be sinister, dark, evil, no good. Spirits here! And magic for them is just a gateway to paranoia. Piteous, yes, but those deserving of the most sympathy are the ones who refuse magic. Refuse its benefits, its entertainment value, its very existence!!! Those are the dry and rational, staid and stolid individuals who must explain away every waveform, every molecule, every action, reaction, cause, effect, correlative and causal in order to exorcise magic any given day.

Magic is not easy to find, until you find it and realize you've known all along that it was right there in front of your face. “Right there”; “RIGHT there”; “Right. There.”

It's getting harder and harder for me to find magic here in San Francisco, fewer and fewer reasons to leave the warp drives dismantled. More and more refusers of magic spinning their wheels more and more feverishly to get away from the magic they don't believe in anyway. More and more refusers finding less and less interesting ways to distract themselves from the demanding presence of magic. The magic of an orgasm as a cheap substitute and as a relentless way to contrive a society which expects less magic, expects less in others and in themselves.

For myself, I have found that paths to the best, most powerful magicks follow deep roots and deep fault lines to inhospitable places requiring work you can't outsource, strength you can't employ machines for, and commitment so deep and pensive and single-minded it sparks the first lights of honor and good will. Sparks which then fund a hearth, a hearth which eventually ascends to light the skies: the sunlight by which these best magicks can be seen.

But for a while now, the furrows and cracks in the earth, the places where oddity and life might have found purchase are paved over with the even, non-porous surface of acculturated sameness and so there is less and less access to the kinds of magicks my life requires. Dissent, conflict, even ridicule are unnaturally ineffective, as the sameness has lost the ability to adapt, to learn, to abide.

Yes, an arable for magic is no longer in this place. At least not in my traditional potreros.

So the piece of the puzzle that can't be moved must now be moved. Towards, away, forwards, backwards, down or up, near or far. Or surrender to cacophony of the denial of greater things and welcome in the death of hope.

Lord God of Biscuits. I just got comment spam from:

Commenter name: Jizz Download Commenter email address: jizz_covered_love_holes@gmail.com Commenter URL: http://google.com/group/jizz-clips/web/jizz-xxx Commenter IP address: 203.162.2.134

“Jizz Covered Love Holes”

And they say romance is dead.

Some people hate poetry. “Pretentious,” they say. Well, I say anything can be pretentious, and poetry like any work of creation, can be good or bad, effective or not, applicable or not. Impactful or not.

I'm up against Choices. What started as a tactical “let's see” has on its own volition inflated to include most of the space around me and inside my head and has become a choice of strategic importance to my life going one way or t'other.

For reasons I can't yet fathom, a quote by Maya Angelou hit me like a ton of bricks, yet it didn't knock me off balance, it gave me grounding. It didn't settle a thing, but I was more settled. It didn't provoke, but I felt as if the words demanded something of me. It didn't comfort me, but it pointed me in some direction. All in the midst of these Choices.

Maya Angelou and her wisdom:

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer,
it sings because it has a song.

Only those far from my personal realm will find pretense, not only in the quote, but perhaps in me as well. Oh well.

Life is song, all rhythm to keep it going, all words to keep it interacting, all music to carry it to places neither rhythm nor words can reach.

Angelou knows why the caged bird sings. Choice is my cage right now; Decision is the key which will unlock it.

Nod to Gruber on this one. Not sure whether to thank him or...or...or...just go ahead and tell rixstep that Gruber doesn't like the font on their homepage or something. Funny how you can't threaten bodily harm, but no one can press charges for sicking (good word) rixies on someone. Death by someone's hand or death by a thousand annoying kindergarten insults written by ham-fisting a jumbo Crayola: I pick the former.

Anyway, watch at your own peril. Because not only will you see and hear field sales sloganeering going on, but late night infomercials for penis-enlargement, acne medication and fat loss pills have better production values and even better pitches.

Watch at your own peril. Yes, peril!!!!

For my own efforts, I couldn't make it through the entire thing, but I wouldn't be surprised in the least if they got the UI guys to produce it. It's not like they're sequestered in their offices sweating the details on the Vista UE.

Oh, and one more thing: in the verse that addresses the ‘wait and see’ IT professionals' attitude towards Vista deployment, the song's answer to that attitude is “SP1!”. Pardon me for sweating the details myself on their behalf, but if those IT professionals have already waited until SP1, how does that combat ‘wait and see’ since, like I said, they've already waited. Already seen. And the adoption rates post-SP1 aren't anything to write home about.

Meanwhile, IBM—yes, IBM—is giving their employees the option of having a Mac for their main computer. Early results of the trial? 86% of them wanted to keep the Mac they were given for the testing period.

I'm not sayin'...I'm just sayin'.

As for the video, are you embarrassed for them? You should be. Are you ready to shoot the messenger? You should be.

They should have called the video “Two Girls and One Cup of Vista”.

P.S. Bruce's butt is much hotter.

P.P.S. He's flagging right, red. Some of you will know what that means. I do, but ew. But it's apropros imagery for Vista. Double ew.