scarabic’s blog

The little grey American Shorthair lived feral for a while, out in the alleys before we adopted him, which means he'll never be totally emotionally right. He's jumpy at all times, seemingly unable to experience pleasure because of his constant need to remain alert. He is a beautiful creature, so beautiful that each time you see him you're surprised again at how handsome he is, how just-right the light seems to be catching him, how much gravity his expression or posture holds. He's a remarkably beautiful animal. And it's all the more sad that such a beautiful creature can never rest, can never relax, can never trust and luxuriate and play and doze and smile. He just doesn't work that way.

You can lull him into a lazy, pleasured state in one of two ways. First, catch him at his low-ebb time of day: say 11am. It's unlikely you'll even find him at this time because he's typically holed up somewhere, sleeping deeply through the nocturnal day. But on the off-chance he sleeps out on the bed or couch, you may get the chance to approach him as he sleeps and he's much more pliable when drowsy. You might even get a rub at his belly every now and then (but take advantage of the opportunity carefully).

The only other way to lull him into a state approaching happiness is to sit with him and love him, on his terms, for a very very long stretch of time. This means of course waiting for him to come to you, then letting him climb up onto you of his own accord, then letting him get settled, and then not moving for a long, long time. About an hour in, he will have melted into your body and become inseparable from you. At this point, your legs are probably numb and glued to the sofa as well. But if you can ignore the complete deoxygenation of that 40% of your body, you can enjoy Vitaliy as at no other time. He's dead weight. Dead, smiling weight. He purrs a steady, deep, background purr and the flashing of his tail eventually goes still.

There's just no shortcut to that point, though. You can't beg, borrow or steal his trust. Once you meet him on his terms and get him into this magical state, he is absolutely yours. Putty in your hands.  Once, he'd reached this level of relaxation while lying across my lap in bed. I enjoyed it as long as possible but eventually I had to go to the bathroom. I gently rolled over onto my side, lightly dropping him off of me and onto the bed. He dropped onto the blankets with his legs in the air like a cat drunk, and just lay there, motionless, in bliss.

I've always taken cats' behavior as metaphor for the intricacies of the human heart. We all know people who were knocked around when they were developing. And we all know how hard it is to achieve intimacy with them, how squirrelly they are. How they will jump at any sound. And we all know that you just need to power through, power tirelessly through that shit until you've put in the hours it takes to calm these tortured motherfuckers down. Smooth their coats hair by hair until they lie flat and can be stroked.

Naturally, these moments of being with my little grey man are all the more valuable because of their scarcity. I can rip a bronx cheer into the bellyfur of my marbled Maine Coone anytime and she'll love it. But if that ever happens with him, it will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I am quite relieved and grateful that my negotiations with touchy, post-feral personalities are, at present, confined to my feline pets. I have had more than enough of dealing with that personality in people. Of course, I am probably one of those people myself so it's simply a question of someone else experiencing the magic and mystery and pain. I do try to keep my fur down and not freak out at every sound from the hallway. But you know what they say about ferals: they form very strong emotional connections but they never really come down.

How is Babby Formed (flash, w/ sound) is just another another ROFL internet meme and I too have rolled on the floor with it. On second thought, it saddened me as yet another example of how Yahoo! is filled with garbage. Yahoo! is an interesting portal in that A) it's huge, often touted as the "most visited" site on the net B) most of the people who visit it are registered with it. You can tell (B) because something like 60% of its traffic is people using Yahoo! Webmail, and you have to have a Yahoo! account for that.

So why is this an interesting combo? Well, Yahoo! has all the ingredients of an online community, but the sheer size and all-inclusiveness of their registered base has a way of overwhelming any interactive or social space. It reminds me of a piece I snipped together a long time ago when Yahoo! News had comment threads on every story. Yahoo! Answers is the darling of the Yahoo! network now and sees phenomenal usage, but it's also plainly and visibly garbagy all over the place.

In the Something Awful video the voice actors simply read aloud a Yahoo! Answers question and someone's response to it. It's instantly hilarious that anyone thought to post these halting thoughts on the internet, and tragically hilarious that anyone thought them in the first place.

I don't blame Yahoo!. They're just casting a reflection of the illiterate masses. But I think it's a good case of "too much democracy." Or perhaps the lesson is that traditional media needs the Internet to bring it a breath of fresh air by involving more people and particularly more ordinary people, but involving everyone is not an improvement. It's worse.

Y!A is now swarmed with copycat postings. It's not easy to discern the original, if it's still up. I don't know what's sadder: that people have spammed up the service with copycat postings, or that some people continue to respond to them with genuine, helpful answers. Between the clueless, the malicious, and the inchoate, it's pretty difficult to see Yahoo! as anything but a high-tech dungheap.

I'm not sure what the solution is but they need to implement network-wide identity, filtering, and reputation systems fast. If they have them they don't work. Yahoo! has the traffic and the technology to be the "well lighted place" of the internet that so many have tried to be (AOL, MSN, even Prodigy) but I think they're more concerned with generating pageviews and ad impressions overall to buoy their battered stock price. It's a shame when your stock price suffers and you have to focus 110% on making those quarterly growth numbers sparkle for the assholes on Wall Street.

Alcoholics Anonymous call this "The Serenity Prayer:"

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Here's what I want to know.

It's a prayer. It asks for three things: serenity, courage, and wisdom. Why isn't it called "The Courage Prayer?"

Is this a subtle way of hinting that, while there may be some courage and wisdom to be found along their righteous path, what it mainly brings is acceptance?

Curious.

BART, our regional transit system, is run like a business and advertises on billboards and such to increase ridership.  Sometimes I like their ads, like the one that shows one of their commuter trains full of passengers, with the tagline: "500 MPG. Groovy!"

Recently, they started a campaign that bugs me. They're trying to say that riding the train gives you time to sit and relax instead of driving. The slogan is: "BART: Nap, Read, or Just Doodle."

Here's the problem. One of my coworkers takes BART to work each day, travelling for something like 45 minutes each way. He's a computer programmer and we rely on him a lot. It would be great if he could, oh, I don't know, USE WIFI for that additional 90 minutes of his day. He says he loads up his laptop with his morning email and then reads it on the train, or works on programming problems as much as he can while disconnected.

But wifi, which is available on all the corporate shuttles these days and now even AC Transit's cross-bay busses? Not only does BART not offer it. They think it's great to just sit and doodle. They think your time is so worthless that they can woo you with promises of sitting there idle for an hour and a half each day. I understand if offering wireless internet is difficult or expensive. But it's like they're proud of the fact that you can't get any work done on the train.

Lame.

I have a headache which is more like a tumbleweed of pain that spills out from my left ear canal and branches to ensconce the rest of my skull.

I can't stop thinking it's a tumor. Feels like something is out of place in my cranium, expanding to claim space.

Oddly, the gums around my upper left molars are also sore... what the hell is infecting my head?

I think I'm going to found a religion today. I'm not really sure what to call it, but the principles of it are pretty clear to me after many years of ponderous consideration on the subject:

1) Science can and will ultimately describe and explain all aspects of reality, creation, and the nature of existence.

2) However there is much about the experience of being human, the stuff that goes on between our ears, which science can't even begin to ask the questions about, let alone give the answers for.

3) There is more to being human than biochemistry, and to seek an evolutionary rationalization for every human behavior is reductive and avoidant. Consciousness is more than the sum of our neurological functions and hormones. Choice is real. You know what I'm talking about, and that's exactly the point I mean to make.

4) The human creature has a built-in spiritualogical faculty which asserts itself alongside our built in capacity for reason, and our emotional and sexual impulses, even our primal need for food and warmth and safety. This spiritualogical faculty is either a fatal flaw or a transcendent strength depending solely on its application.

5) This spiritualogical capacity is not to be confused with superstition or laziness or slouching toward easy explanations. Indeed, even the most rational, rigorous, and informed individuals may experience a transcendent wonderment at the complexity of an ecosystem or the mere fact of simple visible light. The pleasure and temptation and terror of this wonderment is the expression and end of our spritualogical capacity.

6) Atheism is not necessarily incompatible with the exercise of this spiritualogical faculty. The belief in magical gods may be irrational and laughable but our spiritualogical faculty is a necessary tool in our own artistic endeavors, ambitions after greatness, our humility in our technological might, our joy in the face of eventual doom. Atheism is too often confused with rejection of traditional religious convictions.

7) The reasonable pursuit of an atheistic life is not necessarily the expungement of all religious practice from the world, but rather leadership in its refinement and evolution away from destructive practices designed for more primal stages in our development, and toward an aspirational future.

8) Denominations and churches are records of the spiritualogical seekings of others. Nothing more. It is of primary importance to exercise our own faculties, make our own seekings. It is no better or worse for posterity if we record them.

9) Death is the end of our agency as conscious beings. There is such a thing as life beyond the grave, but it is less of a literal afterlife and more of an interplay of how we teach our children, how we impact our peers, and what damage is left behind by our existence.

10) Nine is enough. Eleven would be fine. There's no numerology about any of this.

What sounded at first like mumbling from the distant car radio of someone parked across the street turned out to be a faint, faint voice coming out of my own computer's subwoofer, situated under the desk. It is very low volume, and as it's under the desk I don't actually hear the sound until it bounces off a nearby wall, which threw me off the scent for a couple days. Just the sound of typing is enough to drown it out.

Tonight I located it. I crawled down there, placed my ear against the cone, and lo! For all I know, I may be receiving messages of peace and friendship from aliens in another galaxy. Perhaps demons are teaching me the spells to unlock the gates of Purgatory. Perhaps there is a delicious new chow fun recipe that takes only 15 minutes to make at home. But alas. I don't speak Cantonese and I will never know.

Show us something that you really treasure. 
Submitted by An Olympic Dream.

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Usually in my home we wait until the house is completely empty of food before we go food shopping. We both cook and we're both good scroungers so often we skate by for several days after, seemingly, all the food is gone. Needless to say, what with the multifarious demands and scheduling pile-ups of modern life, we don't always go shopping the very moment the food runs out but at some point, perhaps quite too long, afterward.

Whole Foods (aka: "whole paycheck") is good for this, because they have a full-service deli, salad/bistro/burrito bar you can eat at when you get there. We like to show up, get a bite, then do our shopping and take it all home. However, the post-luncheon coma that sets in after chawing down a chile verde burrito on a spinach tortilla is a powerful impediment to getting the chore of shopping done. They do say never to shop hungry, but nobody ever considered the other end of the spectrum, where, full to the gills and ready for a nap, you just belch "aw fuck it" and waddle home with nothing but a wedge of mozzarella and a hummus tub. I usually credit Whole Foods with possession of keen retail science (quite overly so) but they have missed this one pitfall - that is, unless their grocery offerings are merely a shiny trap to lure me into losing 8 bucks on a limp green burrito.

Anyway. The other day we hit the counter for grub before getting behind a cart to do our grocery schlepping. I ordered the above, a chile-verde chicken burrito with cheese and black beans and no sour cream but yes guacamole. A rotund and listless woman in a white chef's coat took my order. Her face had a puffy and breathless look, as if she'd spent several hours too many in the sun and just been slapped in the face. There was nothing more her expression could have done to let me know my need for food was the last thing on earth she gave two squirts about. Well, I guess she could have yawned.

As she milled around, shovelling ingredients onto an increasingly overwhelmed tortilla, I gazed through the sneeze-glass at the gathering pile and thought "she's going to forget the chicken." Sure enough, after wrapping it and putting the sticker on and all, she caught me halfway to the register and desperately confessed she'd forgotten the chicken in my burrito. I handed it over and watched aghast as she chucked it and made the entire thing again. I might have protested the waste, but you see, I was too busy being puffed with arrogance over my precognition.

As she again buried too much rice in too-wet black beans with all the grace of an earth-mover, I stood there, reaching out with my precognitive senses into space and time for a truly meaningful event to foresee as long as the metaphysical tornado still had its eye on me. I couldn't really think of much of anything. The things that came to mind were mundane and selfish impulses, such as how large my upcoming tax bill might be, or vague but important-sounding questions my humanism shoved at me, like whether everything would be all right, or downright dumb shit my brain just farted in desperation, such as whether George Bush would lose the next election.

Did I mention I was only there out of an extreme need for food?

There my psychic experience ended. No answering the phone before it rang that afternoon, no impossible card tricks that evening, no rabid midnight sketching of a nuke going off in New York City while my cats paced eerily about me. Nothing. Once more, ESP had proven entirely real for me but in a single, random, meaningless moment, and again likely never to return for another 15 years.

That's right. It's happened before. When I was in my early teens I was struck by a strange urge. I stopped what I was doing, tapped my brother on the shoulder and said, "I'll bet you that Poison video is on TV right now." We went to a place where there was a television and sure enough, the second he turned the tube on, there they were, rocking their hairsprayed cocks under green lighting, having Nothing But a Good Time.

I crossed my arms in triumph as my brother, flabbergasted but reluctant to admit it, suggested possible explanations for my feat. A neighboring house must have had the TV on and I'd heard the song through a window (mmm doubtful in that suburban landscape of 3,000 square foot single-families). Or perhaps the fillings in my teeth had momentarily resonated the broadcast signal into my auditory canal. That one sounded so plausible I was sure, for half a second, that I'd heard of such a thing before - people who hear radio stations through the plate in their head or whatever. "It 's a cock-sucking cable channel," I frowned.

I don't mind having an only extremely occasional and quite meaningless superpower. I mean, really. Superhuman is superman, whether it happens day or night or on Tuesday-falling Boxing Days. And I have reason to be hopeful. It's true that the particular Poison video in question was popular that summer, and the odds were more than remote that it might be on at any given moment. But I ask you: what are the odds that an obese and sunburned sandwich slinger will fuck up your order? In the exact way you expect?

I can only conclude that, however long the cycle might take, my powers of psychic perception can only be getting stronger. In another 15 years, I may have developed a truly frightening power to divine important information. And if this turns out to be nothing more than dressing exactly like Jay Leno each morning, the day before, down to the color of tie and socks, I'll still be proud. After all, what the fuck have you foreseen recently?

I've never been afraid to toss out everything I've ever done and double my aspirations at the same time. In fact I think the only way you can blow away your aspirations is to see everything you've ever accomplished as a path you've been walking down, not a mountain you've been piling upward, and to step right off that path to somewhere else.