people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Policy arguments are boring unless you're a wonk, in which case having sex is a dim possibility and parsing out appropriations bills adheres to a personal kind of logic I like to refer to as self-defeatism. That said, there is much energy devoted of late to the question of whether libertarianism carves out too much space for socially destructive behavior that doesn't victimize anyone specifically but gradually and inexorably erodes the terra firma of a just society. That question is - or may be - relevant, but if you're still reading, let's just be honest and admit that it's better (in our case) to spend time on other things than analyzing the respective merits of various kinds of libertarianism. Like movies or music or the merits of waking up at 6 am every day for months so as to secure a veritable truth, that adulthood means abandoning staying up past midnight.

Nix the policy.

Talib Kweli - Get By

I may be (OK I am) one of those mid to late-twenties specimens who continues to engage in activities that may contribute to a gradual diminution of self-esteem, insofar as self-esteem entails the capacity to not squander away momentary incidences of making the best of what is. And that's what this song seems, to me, to be about: making the best of. And - pardon the repetition - the song seems to really mean it, which I like.

Pete Dexter - Paper Trails, last essay as synecdoche

Being generally adverse to bold claims, I can only urge you to enter your closest Barnes & Noble type establishment (or whichever bookstore offers free reads and dark caffeinated beverages originating from coffee beans) and thereafter read the last essay in this collection. Pete Dexter has made me laugh in person, and though I am not from Illadelph, his stories capture enough of that corner of the world to catalyze thoughts about big cities and the general disarray and commingling they opportune in a way I tend to really very much like.


Hotel Chevalier - wes anderson, freely downloaded from Itunes Store

You see Natalie Portman's butt. Here are some lines from the short, some of which (guess which) resonate:

Have you slept with anyone?
No.
Have you?
No.
That was a long pause . . .



Whatever happens I don't want to lose you as a friend.
I promise I will never be your friend . . .


If we fuck, I'm gonna feel like shit tomorrow.
That's [not taken down]


I love you. I never hurt you on purpose.
I don't care.



It's not clear if W. Anderson's appropriation of standard relationships lines exchanged between self-knowing and altogether aware characters signifies something in the way of an advance in heterosexual relationships between affluent young uns. I kind of was OK with it all, but writing it out here gives (me) pause. I think Jason Schwartzman's facial hair ruins it all, and I think that its presence is implicitly there to give me a reason to be dismissive, and I resent that: it seems unfair to call attention to something and at the same time attempt a pull-rug-out-from-underneath maneuver. Call it a double-bind or just something calling attention itself.

Occurrences: IM participation, sports knowledge, beauty, Jim Rice

Much to my surprise and momentary elation, it turns out putting "Pedroia" on your intramural seven man football jersey, participation in which consists of smoking Marlboro Lights on the sidelines and periodically calling for the trips formation, may yield the approach of a member of the opposite sex owning objectively jaw-dropping beauty, make you subject to the subsequent inquiry into your views on Pedroia's possible ROY chances, and avail you the opportunity to hear said opposite sex beauty's opinion that Jim Rice is seriously underrated. And then play commences again and buttonhook patterns continue to be effective.

Just to show I care

from Sam Lipsyte:

"I shudder at the notion of Doctor Stacy Ryson and State Senator Glen Menninger remarking this update at some fund-raising soiree — oh, the snickers, the chortles, the wine-flushed glances, and later, perhaps, the puppyish sucking of body parts at a nearby motor lodge. Shudder, in fact, is not quite the word for the feeling. Feeling is not quite the word for the feeling. How's bathing at knifepoint in the phlegm of the dead? Is that a feeling?"

Goongala, goologa - How bout something, you know, for the effort

Halloween 2007:

Escalator Clause Responds to Market Fluctuations

I am preparing to eat ice cream and draw a picture with oil crayons. It is about fifteen minutes past midnight. The skin on my face no longer hides beneath inches
of beard, and for the past three days I have been listening to the music of this man obsessively:




Is there such a thing as grotesque voluptuousness? It seems like it might be a possible category, right? Cf. Freud, Lucien

In pursuit of awe

Here’s a way of looking at it: there are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.

“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced,” Einstein once said, “there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.” AKA the willful suspension of disbelief.

I promise to tell whatever is expedient and nothing but what is expedient, so help me future experience

Beautiful Monday morning, walking and internalizing some music, came upon a Super Bouncy Ball and felt compelled to sling it straight down into the concrete above the steps of the National Museum of Music. And it hung up there, next to cottonwood leaves whose time is coming, for some time. I caught it on the third bounce and found I'd captured a spectator, a little black kid age 9 or 10 with a heavy bookbag that gave him a kind of geriatric hunch.
"Do it again."
And I did, and this time the launch angle was a little off so the ball actually moved back behind me at its apex, and threatened to carom off one of the Hellenic-inspired statues in the fountain outside the museum entrance. after a bit of a chase, I grabbed the ball and turned to find the audience had doubled. A professorial type, in gray suit-blue shirt-yellow tie ensemble, who I've previously seen picking up and disposing of plastic bags and other detritus around campus, was standing next to the little kid. I held up the Super Bouncy Ball as if it may be a talisman of sorts, and the older fellow smiled and walked away. I bounced the ball to little guy and walked happily home; thus the week begins.

from oh five

I guess I am saying: Be cautious about having what you want, and be satisfied with wanting what you have. We will die before simplicity comes back into favor out of necessity, but it is not too early too scorn what you cannot have. Anyway. Good night or good morning, wherever I find you: holy happiness don't be false.

Something or other

1.
It's a strange thing to hear your downstairs neighbor throwing up at 12:50 am in the morning - late nights are ammunition for reflection unto themselves without that thrown into the mix - and but I don't want to think about the probable sequence of events that led her to the porcelain and led me to be sitting up in bed, pouring over page 388 of a novel that I began at 7 and that I suspect I will not sleep until it is read all the way, right down to the last sentence. And so, wonder of wonders, I hit a key on the minimalist white computer, the screen flashes, and I bear this little snippet, a single word in the vast self-sustaining manuscript of sensations and perceptions that make up the last minute or so of my life, out into the public domain.


2.
In my dissertation and my other early studies, I told people short stories in which a person does something disgusting or disrespectful that was perfectly harmless (for example, a family cooks and eats its dog, after the dog was killed by a car). I was trying to pit the emotion of disgust against reasoning about harm and individual rights.

I found that disgust won in nearly all groups I studied (in Brazil, India, and the United States), except for groups of politically liberal college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said that people have a right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

Philosophy is its own time apprehended in thoughts

It may still come down to what gets swallowed and what gets spat up.

But who can foresee with what success and with what result?

Thanatos and Eros sat on opposite sides of a meadow, watching a red-tailed hawk circle slowly overhead.

Miles away, TechmoBowl Bo Jackson broke seven tackles, through sheer force of will and the rapid B button pressing of he whose avatar Bo was.

Monks in Myanmar are taking hostages, and reticulated pythons 10 yards long lie in wait somewhere hot and humid in the Myanmar territory, squeezing for practice's sake.

In millions of boxes of crayons the world round, the red and blue crayons outpace the others in one respect, and are outpaced in another.

For all x, there is some y such that - ahem, actually - for all X of type T, for all Y of type U, P(X,Y) if and only if Y = F(X).

Insomnia redux

When you're 35, you can like Ghostface and Miles Davis and the Dead Kennedys and not feel weird. – Craig Finn

There was once a post proffered by Mr. Adams that took seriously (rightly, in my view) the anxiety that, having reached a certain age, it’s no longer clear to what mixture of attachments/personal fixations you should devote time. Sports, music, books, “cultural offerings” in general – one of my guiding principles, which may or may not be leavened by the egoistic idea that breadth indicates something wholesome and American, is that canvassing spectra of genre and medium is a must. I agree with BA that it’s not clear at this point in life how to assess whatever enduring springs of meaning you happen to look to and draw from in your daily goings on. It’s not really even clear if it’s important to make the anxiety/uncertainty somehow less damning. (I just wrote damnifying, which isn’t and shouldn’t be a word). Or: should you be conscious of the process of intake through which you apprehend a set of references, aesthetic experiences, grounding poles, etc. by which you navigate the world? I’m not sure. I think he puts it well, though, and for whatever reason the reasoning put forth sticks with me. So go read this thing.

PS - I don't know who he was quoting, but "mark twain traveling through time sounds like a tough sell" - upon re-encountering - made me spit beer out of my nose. Ponder the nasal-mouthular gravity of that shit.