Wednesday, February 1

truly beautiful women always reminded him of horses
or maybe deer
graceful animals with legs and eyes
usually skittish
often only glimpsed over fences
or caught momentarily in someone's lights
(not his)

walking down pearl st. with no capacity to buy anything does a lot to your perspective. not even a workable credit card in my pocket, or 5 bucks to spend on a drink - and there goes the traction you feel like you've got. $20 in my pocket and i'm the king of the world. w/out? tricky to decide what you're even doing there.

all value/traction/liquidity seems to be encoded in dollars. cash or the ready access to debt.

it is after midnight
a rustling noise
outside and i turn
on the light to see
a momentary wind
in the brown grass
and the orange-leafed tree

most days in this
place they don't
have weather
they have something else
with fewer teeth...

"when one door closes, another opens" – who makes this shit up, anyway?

Here is the problem with every anti-smoking campaign: Smoking, fundamentally, just looks and feels cool.

Also: Addiction always creates an economy of need, and a specific kind of currency between addicts. This can take on very ugly forms, but it also (as in most drinking & smoking cultures) can take the form of a kind of reciprocal altruism.

And smoking, like drinking, has tangible social benefits - only in a wider range of venues, especially including the workplace.

memory colors the present like the parallaxing layers of animation in a 2D sidescroller.

behind every scene moves some other. loops of life distorted and torn by the passage of time and the slow chemical death of knowledge.

The analogy of unix system to physical security measures in a corporate office works especially because as an administrator, your visibility of either system is limited. This fits with power in general. It's much harder to see the failures of a system when you navigate it by exceptional means.

You'll never know how secure a given machine is until you navigate it without root. The inequities of the social system are not manifest to the average CEO. They aren't even manifest to the average college student.

Hoppottermus Dreams: an apocalyptic vision

The life of an archivist must be sort of nightmarish. Like that king in Dunsany trying to conquer Time himself. Your whole life is dedicated to a noble, necessary impossibility.

I guess it's a value, if not a dedication, that I share. The record, at least, should be preserved. Much else should be torn down and fed to the ravening ages. But I digress.

[Small cartoon of a stick figure tossing a crown over the edge of a cliff to the bug-eyed, toothy, ravening Ages below, while a castle burns in the background.]