Local Goods

Last day of J. Caesar's month and I’m soon drivin’ to my local farm cooperative; Loretta Lynn’s daughter’s place, she has a very cool rustic kitchen (huge space, and you can hose it down) where some superlative baking goes on. I'm stalking the fresh blueberry/plum pie,and I have intelligence that there will be some in-area this mornin’. Seriously…yum. I’ll picture if I get one...

(83 minutes later...)

La victoire à tarte!

And natch I couldn't resist the heirlooms, peppers, fresh eggs, the apple pie (Hi, my name is...and I'm a pieaholic)...support your local farmers.

Listenin’ to some KTT on the way down; she hits me in a soft spot.  She was in my neck of the woods last week shooting a video and sampling fried catfish amidst many a Faulknerian scene. The travelogue of her foray into the wilds of Mid-Tenn on her Facebook page had cheek, she (or her ghost-booker) captured some local flavor (21 - 24 July).

My last post of the month anchored to my favorite Scot in ‘Hold On’…framing some of my thoughts with a little license:

Say you to me
You're a bird with an eye for anything shiny
Searchin' the land
For a hero of a woman
You say I need
More than my fair share of attention
But I think you know
That just isn't so

Underneath, I felt the fire of a burning question
Tearin' me apart
Right from the very start
And now I see
That it don't take a trick of the light to excite me
So strong
So long
You'll see

Simplicity
A heart of gold, an old head, and young shoulders
Quiet and lovely
Becomin' part of me
And now I see
From a handful of names and a thousand faces
One light, burnin', furiously

Hold on
To what you
Been given lately
Hold on
To what you know you got
Hold on

To what you
Been given lately
Hold on
Cause the world will turn if you're ready or not

"I know those words, but that sign makes no sense." - Lisa S

So a woman who turns me on to wise and clever linked this Randall Munroe comic over to me yesterday ( http://www.xkcd.com/771/ ), it made my day. It has a rollover that reads:

 "The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care."

Rolling chuckle, still smilin'. Thanks Cheek-a.

Had mostly given up on chasing portals and taking feeds, but I lost myself on xkcd catching up with a lot of funny and poignant. Maybe I gave up too soon...

Too much junk

'Gadgets' by Mark Fiore

Not into technology for technology's sake, and don't like mindless consumer use...if it doesn't solve a significant human problem (i.e. something useful better/cheaper/faster), it's part of the noise not the song. A friend of mine trained as an economist once led me to the well of Bentham and Mill’s wyrd...Utility...and I drank the Von Neumann-Morgenstern kool-aid made from it.

The Zookeeper

In this memetic menagerie you may have noticed that logical consistency hasn’t shown up yet. Warned you. Anyway, it might be polite if a few more signs and guideposts are added.

Your adult years are framed by education. You have a lifelong affair with it, which sometimes gets torrid when your curiosity slips the leash. For example you get a big buzz reading about science and math. Pop-wise though, your grades in college attest that you never had the want-to rigor to make it a vocation, and never heard the empirical call to arms. You find that social sciences, strategic studies, and language come more naturally to your makeup (but you balk at classifying any of that as 'science'; none of the principles in there hindcast or forecast consistently, reproducibly). Your academic promiscuity eventually leads you into a tryst with the mercurial mistress History; you are smitten, you submit to her discipline, but she’s cruel and demanding, materially all take and little give, so you press-gang yourself to honorable work and leave her on the dock for a practical education.

If the Navy discovers you’re facile with language; you’re pretty. They find out you’re clean enough for all-the-compartments clearance; they like you. They discover that you can lead, follow, and manage; they’re in love.

Vocational training is the stock and trade of the services and you’re slated to be seconded to NSA from the get-go (many masters). Eighteen months of schoolin’ later you go to work against a ‘target’; knowledge as a weapon applied through directives designed in a context of military, socio-economic, and political strategies. You pay attention and you thrive. Note: that work is hit or miss on precision and accuracy based on luck, and how well you can work the elements of the intelligence life-cycle (John Keegan’s walk-through):

• Acquisition – sigint for you, collecting mid-v los traffic is a bitch, check my cant, uh!
• Delivery – Er…can’t talk about that
• Acceptance – vetting; the data, the collection, and the operator
• Interpretation – the distillation, sometimes nothing left when you're done
• Implementation – issues of tempo, no preservatives added

So, there’s your sluice, pan, and sift; if you have a nugget that's still useful at the end of that, you win. Often it's just GIGO writ large on the world's big white board...you had your share of being critically right though, and you like the mission. Shadows to the fore...your wiring has changed permanently (again) and you see information everywhere; unintended consequences to come.

At a significant tipping point the community starts implementing full-scale digital transmission and storage of the vast information stores you use (vs. heavy dependence on venerable reel-to-reel magnetic tape systems), and you get heavily involved with that effort (changed the world a little in the process, you get a medal) ...long story short: you begin what will be a long-term career as an information technologist. This should be no great surprise considering you’ve been hobbying and tinkerin’ with computers since you were a tot, but it is. Material needs call, service ends, and you take your skills and perspective to the marketplace to see what they're worth.

Whew. Enough for now.
 
 

Wolf Cub Dilemma

From the Wiki: A dilemma (Greek: δί-λημμα "double proposition") is a problem offering at least two solutions or possibilities, of which none is practically acceptable. One in this position has been traditionally described as "being on the horns of a dilemma", neither horn being comfortable, "between Scylla and Charybdis"; or "being between a rock and a hard place", since both objects or metaphorical choices are rough.

So you’re born into a family that isn’t what you’d call spiritually deep inside country-Protestant territory. Somewhere between fundamentalist wildlings and Episcopal restraint…you know, anywhere BFE. Church is a place, a social construct, but god(s) doesn’t actually live there. You’re not forced to go (much), cause you’re the boy and you follow the masculine script of the family. The father wasn’t church’d…he grew up on a farm under a sadistic male lineage that probably didn’t feel comfortable with moral yardsticks (unless they were beating the kids with them). So on Sunday mornings you fish, you shoot, you explore, you read…a lot (the big break with the family tradition…danger Will Robinson!). You grow up comfortably independent in the physical world, spiritually feral and open-minded; about a half a normal local product and…something else. You socialize like a native, but one of these things is not like the others.

Flash forward to now and you’re driving home from the capstone performance of your little one’s vacation bible school experience; lots of kids singin' and dancin' in a space-themed program, periodically screaming out “Praise God!” It’s your sister’s church, a laid-back loving place with lots of family, and you expose the daughter to it for socialization and the fun kids have together no matter what adults are about. Apparently no one there has any sense of stage direction or child-friendly tempo, but the songs were catchy. The science included was actually closer to mainstream instruction than you would have expected until it was suddenly and inexplicably linked to some biblical precept; not bad but there is much correction to do.

Much correction…you’re multi-culturally mythic in the house, and ensure that everyone under the roof puts the same weight on most of the vehicles of moral and ethical instruction that are exposed, though perhaps not on the instructions themselves (extremes are out). You’re consciously growing an adult here, and tolerance and cultural respect are high up on the list of capabilities being funded. There were elements in that kid's program that you don’t agree with, and you are pretty sure they apply a myopic lens that once on is hard to take off. It’s indoctrination, which you understand and accept as part of the reason you let the girl go; she needs to have common cultural reference with the folks she's going to be around, but you want a bias-neutral posture, strength, and unassailable independence in the focal fundamentals of the tyke. Today you’re concerned. Concerned that even though you plan to parse the lessons learned with her and to unwrap the motive, creed, doctrine, and rhetoric, she's getting mixed signals about the sacred (or no signal, an ambush), about the cost of submission to dogma.

Kid gloves off? Some of what she learned this week seems slavish, hubristic, and anti-empirical (not non-empirical, I mean against reason) to me, all anathema. It exposes a real dilemma: How can you be certain to engender faith, community, and a sense of connection to the divine that will serve to protect and comfort when the decisions matter and the hard rain falls, without hobbling the mind? The wolfling road I trod is fraught, and I don’t wish it on my progeny.

Not sure.

Bermudiful Days

Belated Travelogue --

Bermuda…what can I say about Bermuda in the Spring? I loved it, it was close, and jumbled, and beautiful; terraced coral-color painted tumble-down architecture pressed up against crystal blue water and rocky ‘scapes. For fellow history geeks of the nth order I’ll say that crawling around huge colonial era forts built from a peculiar native limestone, peeking through gun embrasures and crossing moats guarded by grape-shot loaded cannon was a visceral thrill. Another shut-my-mouth opportunity just laying around was a near-full sized replica of a caravel-like ship that is full access for poking around and feeling below-decks geometry; a model representing two real vessels built from the cannibalized wreckage of a larger version by survivors of a locally famous shipwreck episode.

For the higher brain functions the colonial military facilities have also been converted to evocative museums, and the Commissioner's’s House was one of the most impressive presentations of the past I’ve ever immersed in (Victoria, BC’s National museum is another of note). The trusts that built it all are very very proud, particularly of their sailing history…there is an odd fetish with their national bird.

Food-wise…uh, I don’t mean to perpetuate a stereotype (English food is…) but the food was lackluster. Combined with the simple fact that local edible resources are not particularly diverse, that kept the palate pointed to standard fare that was flown in from elsewhere. There were some mussels that were as plump and perfect as I’ve ever had, but had to go to a roadside Italian joint to find 'em. No worries though as I wrangled a top-floor bivouac for the trip, which included complementary breakfast, snacks, hor’dourves, light dinner, cocktail goodies, and evening sweets served like clockwork throughout the day…every day, on-time…decadent. Nothing like walking down the hall and piling a sampling of goodness on little plates then heading back for a private balcony repose. The little local if-you-can't-get-it-here-learn-to-live-without markets also kept a decent liquor supply on hand…so reasonable.

Highlight…scooters. The narrow left-lane roadways were made for scootering, so I rented what I came to know affectionately as 'the Hog'. The traffic rules and governance are simple and practical, and it was liberating and comfortable getting from one end of the island to the other on a cheap (don't tell the Hog I said that) little bike. Things get crowded near the cruise-ship infested capital (though it is cool that the big ships could come right up to the quay), but were peaceful along the winding, rock-wall lined byways that make up most of the roadnet (if you get claustrophobic or agitated with informal road rules in tight spaces, not your scene). Ridiculously difficult to get lost on such a small island, and the one time the map had to be extracted and pored over a local espied the situation and U-turned his scooter (you will get scooter-envy if you rent, the natives buy some impressive bikes) to pop over and provide a nifty shortcut.

That really was the most memorable thing about the place. I would swear that the term laid-back was invented for the people on this rock. There’s a strong ethnic population (including a disproportionate number of Portuguese -for the whole story see the Commissioner’s House…but be prepared to feel something if you internalize the slavery exhibits and the stories of Boer war POW’s interned there…didn’t see that coming), but none of the tension a US Southerner is bred to. At no time and in no place was there a feeling of tourist predation danger. The locals reported that there are some problems; drug economics due to the Caribbean back-and-forth for example, but it felt really safe, and folks were happy to see your scooter-helmet headed self coming through the door.

Big Fish, Pink Fish, Fried Fish, Good Fish

Ok, I like to cook, I like to eat; Cooking is much more fun, but I eat what I make so the real gastronomica esoterica is right out. That doesn't stop the exploration though, and that's moving into a new phase that is all about cooking like the Chinese do. Wait one...tangentially, I don't like the term 'Chinese food'. You can hardly bound their cuisine with the illusory meme 'Chinese'...it's the equivalent of saying 'European food'. Anyway, I recently got that wok up there straight out of Guangzhou (via some nice folks at the Wok Shop in San Fran...Grant Ave, that's legit), seasoned it just so...which leads me to:

So I went to the Fresh Market yesterday and picked up some fresh shitakes (from Arkansas, cool) ginger, scallion…and a big-ass red snapper, whole. They were just putting it out for sale from the truck that had just come from the airport. It was clear-eyed, red-gilled, and smelled great...the best a landlocked fella can do for la perche rouge. I had my monger scale it, clean it, and use some tin snips to chop out the gills (bitter)…then off to the liquor store for sherry.

Long story short: I salted it, scored it, garnished it with aromatics, sprinkled it with sherry, dredged it in flour and cornstarch, and deep fried it Shanghai-style in my wok. It did not suck. A lot of fish and hefty on price (it was banquet-ready, very pretty though I did lose the tail, clumsy gwai loh), but I was experimentin’. I can move down to fresh freshwater breeds with good result I suspect; trout I think, plentiful and not quite so devastating to my wallet…though I’ll miss that big-fish cheek and chin meat.

Clippity-Clop

I was asked by someone I like what my joy for the day was a little while back. Well the day before I’d had my share, and as my joy is wont to be it involved my little one. She's a budding equestrian, but on the day in question she was slated to be on an unfamiliar beast, one that she knew by reputation as a not-for-the-faint pony named Cowboy. There was joy in the outcome.

Earlier in the Spring she had heard the tales of his sometimes compulsive need to gallop at his own direction, and he has thrown experienced riders. Diminutive, but strong; she's ridden bigger but nothing with Cowboy's spirit. When we got to the barn yesterday her teacher told her to go get Cowboy ready; we both did a double-take, but moved down the stalls.

As we walked past the tack room one of the young interns (stables owned and operated exclusively by females) asked us what we needed, and I repeated the instruction. She was also surprised, and double-checked the schedule. Sure enough, Cowboy was on-tap. At this point the munchkin's wheels are turning and she's brave-facing it I can tell, but once he's on his side ropes she goes through the combing and brushing rituals like everything is A-ok, picks his hooves and helmets up.

I walk away when she's under almost any kind of instruction at her request; she has performance anxiety associated to me for reasons I sort of understand...not completely, but I do have expectations. At the barn, she's under expert instruction and I walk away.

I loiter outside near the ring listening for any sounds of distress, but a half-hour passes with only benign whinnying and blowing from some very warm animals (it’s June in the jungle after all). When I went back inside to the ring and peeked around the corner I saw miss priss trotting by, posting perfectly, looking out where she should...and grinning ear-to-ear As it turns out, when he's behaving, Cowboy has a beautifully smooth gait that matches the girl's rhythm. He's solicitous of her on his back, and she is riding as well as anyone has ever seen her. Afterwards, she led him back to his stall with such confidence in her gait, glowing, that my heart went puh!

My joy lasted well beyond the two scoops of Baskin-Robbin's best creamy treat (jamocha is her current obsession) I sprung for afterwards.

FaceBeast Rampant

Yea, verily, did the people cry out in one voice, Give us words of knowledge and succor in this net of ether, and lo there did come that which were named blogs, and their shape was spherical. Then did the people rejoice, and followed the prophets and seers of the Lord of language wheresoever they led.

And it came to pass that evil entered the host of the people, whispering, Why dost thou follow? Are thy thoughts not the equal of those that would lead you where *they* would? And the people embraced the corruption of the asterisk, of eyes made of colon, and of phrases abbreviated, and then did grow wroth saying, OMG, verily all *should* know of my offspring’s feats, and of our pilgrimage to the Garden of Olives this very end-of-week. :)  And so the voices of the Lord of language were drowned in a sea of look-at-me, and sticks of bread never ending.

And from this sea there arose a beast, and its mark was a Book made of Faces.


Cheek full of tongue folks...I really do like and participate happily in FB (and most conventions of typed language), but that's in spite of the fact that the same social vampires swilling quiet desperation and breathing need into your face everywhere else are in there with us. Speaking of mild rants...

I've been online 'chatting' with folks for 30+ years (not quite back to pneumatic tubes, don't laugh) and a constant negative of social networking in Al Gore's genius lovechild (conceived in a lockbox?) has always been that you can pretend to be anything you want (sexual predators and extreme fetish-folk are excluded from this discussion, I'm talking about people we know); creating a persona that is entirely wishful thinking and social promotion in a nearly consequence-free environment. For example you can plagerize egregiously, and self-describe as a scholar/athlete/Buddhist, then tout your 'independent' thoughts, produce no scholarly work, only dabble in fitness, and not understand or believe in the basic tenets of Buddhism. Look at me! Look at me!...I’m quirky and eclectic! Honest! Plenty of people out there that want to believe.

The courageously real is increasingly rare on the wires; know it/love it when it shows.

Pas de Deux with Shiva

“Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy.” - Salman Rushdie

Furies pursue us...some of us more than others. I've always considered fury as a positive force. Fury, savagery, aggression...properly lensed and directed they can solve a lot of problems. They also happen to be unavoidable by-products of passionate living, so why fight the system right? No runaway reactions allowed though; accelerate it, stimulate it, focus it and burn through obstacles...then shut it down.

Recently that fair-weather supposition has broken down a bit along the lines of SR's missive above. A well-focused fury can start lasing an unexpected, unmeasured source of fuel without warning. Things can go negative fast when that happens, and you might wind up on the warpath ('pure unafraid destruction' is seductive as hell) with a hole burned right through your reason. Dangerous...and maybe irresponsible. No matter what provocation you receive, regardless of how the accelerant gets added, uncontrolled outcomes involving high energy emotional reactions are just as likely to crater you as your object, *and* anything/one close by. So unless you're a misanthropic loner with no one to care about, your beloved proximates are likely going down with you. I've seen it, I've been on the receiving end of it, I recommend against it.

So what to do? Button up and repress?...cowardly, and ultimately deformative (I have one of these lurking at an edge of my life). Ignore it, and hope for the best?...that's magical thinkin', the 'haints and boogies you count on wont save you if/when that goes wrong (dive bars and prisons are full of the folks trippin' this way).

I think the only reasonable choice may be to mix up the metaphor. Maybe stop burning holes through things and instead cowboy up...break it, saddle it, and ride it around the problem.

I'll keep you posted.

Flak Jacket for Life

A sage I know once said something so profound that I’ve invoked it to settle arguments, foster creative dialog, manage loss and pain, inspire laughter, bring tears, engender peace, and provoke violence.

Theveet said “Fu%k all that dumb sh!t” (sorry, sages are not concerned with petty sensitivity to sounds). Try it the next time you need to respond to the sublime, the unknowable, the unthinkable. It's much more approachable than anything attributed to Lao-Tze, and makes Sartre sound like a navel-gazing poofta by comparison. Frankly, Theveet would "stomp a mud-hole in their asses"...quite an existential dilemma if it should happen to you.

I use it every day.

A Desert of Conspiracy

So Michael Shermer is an inspiration. Clean logic and good brand management to represent for those of us that default to Occam's shiny razor. With the G20 in full swing the conspiracy folks were out in force to protest the Novus Ordo Seclorum...ironically using the communication nets (to which they are addicted, and claim as a 'right'...got to love anarchists that like good leadership) provided by the ordo they fear and loathe to organize and 'report' on some provocateuring. Somebody had to say something.

Dr. Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, a publication dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories, urban legends and other fictions some individuals embrace as fact, is, as you might imagine, mostly skeptical.

"If we go back to Roman, Machiavellian times, you see political manipulations that happen high up and so conspiracies really do happen. People really do plot and conspire, and so we can't dismiss these things out of hand," Dr. Shermer says.


...To the conspiracy-minded, there are monsters under every bed. And if you can't see them, then you are simply one of the sheep. Conspiracy theorists operate under a "confirmation bias," meaning they look for evidence supporting what they already believe to be true while ignoring any evidence proving it isn't.


"In other words," Dr. Shermer says, "you remember the hits and you forget the misses. You notice the connections and ignore the non-connections and then, once you have it in mind that, 'OK, I think there is a conspiracy theory here,' then all you have to do is open the newspaper and start connecting the dots."

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Conspiracy+theorists+riots+were+inside/3261906/story.html#ixzz0tf3XIoH7

But you don't have to go so far back in time as the medieval or the classical to find some truly melodramatic shenanigans..though it does seem to help to focus on Italy. Here is a pithy comment from Robert Anton Wilson (henceforth known as Bob, not to be confused with Bob Heinlein, both formative tutors) on a conspiracy scandal (the P2 Masons hatching plots) from the 80's that has a decent Wiki article associated:

In Italian, potere occulto means "hidden power," or the clandestine group behind the visible rulers. Roberto Calvi, murdered president of Banco Ambrosiano, was a fervent believer in potere occulto. Calvi believed that the secret of success was to find which hidden group held the most power and then join it. Since he ended up hanging from a bridge in London, he perhaps did not find the strongest group after all.

So with my mind on my conspiracy and my conspiracy on my mind, I've been looking around patriotically for the US manufacture of kibble for the paranoid. It's a disappointing lens. For one thing, the ability to keep secrets seems to have vanished from our national kit. Arrogance breeds inelegance, and with nothing more than greed and lust propelling our furtive collaborations (e.g. Iraq Management, Dick Cheney's 'secret' oil cabal coffee-klatch, and those morons over at C-street that couldn't even keep their rent a secret) we just don't have an A-game in the World Cup of nefarious collusion. Maybe the bureaucracy is just too big and mindless (brute-force is good enough, lcd thinking), maybe we just have artless, heartless power-players...I don't know.


Conspiracy in and of itself is fine; that word is really just a pejorative term for cooperation when the details are none-of-your-damn-business. What rankles is that since the founding fathers/framers masonic/deist masterpiece, apparently we've abandoned the subtle art of the manipulative subtle.

 Phrase of the day: "Dr Shermer says"...if you use it and someone gets the irony, you've found a friend.

Riddle Me This

Perfect stillness in my left hand
Raw destruction in my right
One to build, One to break
I stand World-rooted, I act

She burning quietly, beautifully
Reaching, fire seeking ice
We create the world in gentle swells, warm, wet, and alive
Without hesitation, I melt in her.

Grounded and willing, bent to purpose
Yielding and receiving, a fuse for the spark
Connecting me to the beginning
Pulling me sighing to the end

Protecting, beautiful thorns
Full of promise and sweet, heady venom
Tempting fate to be near her
I don’t care if I bleed a little

A warm sweet catch in the breath, a gasp of joy
Answering the call for swirling pleasure
Warm and drowsy when the wind is spent.

I spin a fiery wheel, bright and shining
A signal to come home
I trail through the sky
My time measured, my presence felt
Burning for us both

Opening the heart, the lips, a kiss of beginning
The past burns, flickering heat and shadow
Phantoms of pain never felt
Dispelled by new sources of light, opening…

Raucous Calls

"Hugin and Munin fly each day
over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin, that he come not back,
yet more anxious am I for Munin"

-Elder Edda - Benjamin Thorpe Translation

 

Thought and Memory, two crows coming and going. Odin was worried about Alzheimer's more than run-of-the-mill dementia; guess he had given it some consideration while hangin' on that tree.

Lately life has been bangin' away at me with more than it's customary zeal for breaking the status quo. As a stone-cold Erisian from way back, s'no surprise. The latest round has been harder than most though. Moments of schism are deeply affective; when you realize viscerally that you don’t love/want something you were devoted to any more, and maybe never did. Liberating, but when you look at the cost of the misjudgment, and watch the object of your wasted time spinning away on down its wide and indiscriminate destruction path, it’s a little sad.

Sad doesn't trump stupid though. Being at odds with change is...well...stupid. Mutaphobes suck, mutaphiles rule and all that. It's not that consistent order is negative; sort of need it for cool stuff like peace, molecular cohesion, and a decent stir-fry; but there's a time and place for everything. The things that we are are not the things that we were. Note: I wrote something here that was not positive, but when I finished it there was no feeling in it so I zeroed it as just an echo. 

Chi'ing the Ku* a little today, lost time tastes like Tab.

* There is a Chinese maxim: "Eat Bitter or "Eating Bitterness", known as Chi Ku. It is a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship. Or as Occidentals would say: "Grin and Bear It." Other references are: “Keep on Truckin”, “Hang In There”, “Stick It Out”, “Suck It Up”, etc., all to mean to endure something unpleasant in good humor. Or to continue despite difficulties in a general phrase of encouragement meaning to stay focused. In relation to, quoted by; “If you're going through hell, keep going.”-Winston Churchill. /  “We acquire the strength we have overcome.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson. / “I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.”-Jewish Proverb. / “There is no success without hardship.”-Sophocles

"He said true things, but called them by wrong names" - EBB

So here we are, the last gasp of my sharing inhibitions has been gasped. Like a Penthouse forum letter this starts off with a "this sort of thing never happens to me, but..." sort of vibe.

Reading other blogs to minimize rookie mistakes...in many there's some confession of I-don't-know-why-I'm-here. No repeat here folks, this is on purpose. I'm always noodlin' something, but usually confine content to an audience of few (well, to be fair, I Am Many). All well and good but I just recently got such a kick in my thoughtspace-ass that my head started leaking...channeling myself maybe? (been to the Chapel P, got my own key). Mental hydraulic pressure is pushing things out to ones and zeroes, so hold-on if you read through this, s'gonna be some turbulence.

Rules? Nope. Editing? Little. Stylistically, I'm parenthetical and elliptical and only vaguely self-conscious about it. My bias is for the tangential, diagonal, and formless if I can swing it; those angles of approach marry well to my clockwork. Citations may be common, but I wont give up flow for erudition; it's my blog not a scholastic exercise. Narcissism? that's what blogs are all about...but it ought to thin out sooner or later.