Segue

In lieu of improvising a world-changing five-page midterm paper on Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, I've spent my evening running perpendicular to the task at hand. I've been lurking on my message boards, playing hangman, watching the Food Network, etc. etc. I've even started my final essay for the same course (which will be beautiful and candid, for sure).

In my tired hunt for distractions, and upset by the lack of options available for my hangman fix, my hunt through the internet has taken me to WordNet, Princeton's database of the English language. Now I'm excited; I put my paper away and started scribbling out some pre-gaming code that would begin to process through the database. I'd like to tinker with a few ideas regarding natural language processing at some point, though I suspect it won't happen for some time. So my evening was spent playing with words and playing hangman.

The paper never got finished.

To Any Ready Reader

My primary source of output will be on tumblr henceforth. The interface is more enjoyable and the mode of output readily fits with my ramblings.

http://antiscias.tumblr.com

I'll still be on here from time to time to post my longer segments. There will always be a link through from my tumblr though.

Between Pontiac and Detroit

I'm a little comfortable here; that is, I am a little comfortable in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Aside from the coastal mentality I'm used to (i.e.: pedestrian lanes, general accommodation in passing each other), I could see myself enjoying the strip mall mindset of the rust belt. That's what is bred here, right? I am somewhere between the old monoliths of the automobile monikers, and they were certainly built on the necessity of the vehicle.

Being conscious of the different industrial revolutions through which these regions came of age, it's easy to see why it is a two mile walk to be anywhere. New England became a global giant during the age of boating, and likewise again in the era of rail; from these growth spurts sprouted the metropolitan coast and the savory pockets of a distinct culture found in rail towns. Michigan however, was born from the ashes of these eras; it became the fertile plant moist and alive on the idea of sprawl; it characterizes how the last seven generations have known America.

I really think the problem with suburban sprawl is an issue of perspective. People are not as inclined to walk, and I think it's that these destinations people are actually willing to go to are too far away. What happens then? you can't really feel sprawl unless you walk through it, and sprawl begets cars which beget sprawl.

Admittedly, I enjoy walking, but it doesn't seem to be the norm. It's a little over a mile's walk to Trader Joe's (do I get hipster cred for buying organic?), and the path takes one by a number of beautiful watershed protected areas. It seems and is nice, but cutting through the middle of these supple young trees and streams is a highway. At some point, someone had come through this region, likely densely wooded and lush, and made the decision to tear down a forest for a quarter-mile strip plaza and highway to border the already-20-mile radius of the Detroit metropolitan area. We've made progress in recent years to return beautiful things to Earth, but we've only stunted the acceleration thus far.

My prescription for all of this is, like all things, to get outside and meditate on a walk. Some things in this world are unmanageable by any standard, but the things we can change are staring us in the face. I am guilty of contributing to the destruction of Earth, and I share that guilt with everyone else, but I don't want to be here for the ship to sink.

What not?

They're getting fatter and stupider you know. They're getting fatter and stupider by the minute. They breath and enervate. They breathe and eat the fat which clogs the brain. My, how they grow: guts stealing mass from brain.

Soon we won't be able to grow, you know. We'll have taken all the space up. Soon we won't be able to go any further than our doors, lest we walk through another's doors. Each half an ounce of mass in the brain is equivalent to limitless activity, yet only makes fifty pounds of fat and flesh. We'll be big we will! We'll fill in our door frames, expand our tubs we will, we'll will our influence on the bruised universe.

With Three Weeks Left

Before college, I ran an angsty Myspace blog which less than subtly described my laggard disposition. I like to believe the music I was listening to was the real epicenter of my writing, with a few sophomoric sentences thrown about to mask my boring days. College changed that habit of mine, albeit marginally; I shut down the first blog, started this one up, and appeared here as frequently as an eclipse masks the sun. I blame The Way of Heaven, for what can I possibly give you, reader, but only that which is communicable? I can't write love, I can't write l'oeuvre.

I'm a college senior now, and in spite of the advising and direction and inspiration and... I come back to November: Father's birthday, Thanksgiving, the semester closing darkly. I am again drawn to dualism and weigh my thoughts heavily on consciousness and existentialism. It's all hypersensitivity, really: I can look out in the murk, see Oneonta shining like a power grid, and despite its flaccid streets I am enamored, in love with nothing at all.

Perhaps its the notion of the heart of an arctic crystal, which I wrote about approximately the same time two years ago. My how so little changes; I am enervated again, awakened to the teetering equilibrium of failure.

Il y a quatre jours...

As of this publishing, I can safely say that the conscious among our western world has embraced the start of a new year. January first, despite being one of the coldest and darkest days of the year, cruxes the holidays, relinquishing within us the arcane anxieties that well up within humanity during our tribulation. Though I can't speak for everyone, I sense a sort of reverence or austerity in today. Despite the noise and nature of our gathering, watching the snows swirl in a menagerie of light wuthering in the capital region reassured a good end and beginning to the years.

Honestly, a lot has happened this year, and retrospection keeps popping in and out of perspective. I tried to push myself this year, and succeeded, from skipping classes to read a poem, to periodically changing the language of my keyboard to force myself to relearn to type. My grades were mediocre, and more the representative of my inability to focus on even the hedonist pleasures. Christmas was pleasant this year, though I think this might have only been in comparison to everyone else's subdued nature.

It's interesting that in this decade we embraced the rise and fall of multiple sectors of the economy, continued to murder across the globe for the health of the state, and lived in a time of incoherence in art and literature. I lost my childhood, had my adolescence; lost my adolescence, and stuck myself between ages. Music continues on a downward spiral of productivity and sales, and the merchants of cool have a tighter grip on the world than the forces that bind it.

Life may very well be a tragic, inevitably dead existence, that much I've learned from this decade, and from the microcosms that continue to unfold; but as I sit spaced from riding home, daydreaming of cryptographs and protractors, death feels further away than the columns of the Sahara. Four days ago, my sky darkened, and was still alive to the lights and sounds of the great final civilization. So here we are, hurtling toward the darkness as a great comet bowing closer to the sun, and back again into the darker three quarters. May we grow our tastes, and appreciate not the watery blathering of bureaucrats. Enjoy your year!

Good ol' Oneonta.

Historic Downtown Oneonta, as a title, hits a nerve. It perpetuates the same reacationary mentality you typically find in these small, dead towns, while managing to be the most pompous statement in the area. I do not need to point out that, while Oneonta may have had a history, any town has had a significant history, if it's around to-day. Need I point out Norwich, whose history touts a criminal organization and an aspirin factory, or a real city like Boston, whose countless events have throughout America's history impacted her for better or worse?

Suffice to say, I don't get mad when I hear Boston claiming to have a history; but it's weathered itself long enough to be able to boast such claims, while Oneonta, not so much (and Norwich is even more of a joke).

Like Sun Tzu said in his treatise on war, you cannot hope to win after you've already declared war, you must win before going. Maybe the Oneonta officials could be doing more to create and promote a functional Oneonta, one where oppressive taxes didn't destroy the industrial park.

Star-nosed Moles

"Star-nosed moles write beautifully about the arts."

This picture has strangely shown up in my folders, and is a peculiar one to say the least. Does anyone know the origin of this image, and who the writing is from?

Still not published, still not published, still not...

On writing this, I’m on the harbor, by Battery Park, and by the infinite light of the night. My apologies to those who have been patiently (or impatiently, as you so choose) waiting for another journal response for me to shew. It has been a quiet month, with too many whispers to write about at once.
I am in the bitter abyss of the Hudson, somewhere on the delta islands, and ultimately alone, though with the more esteemed of friends. They have given me shelter in the warm winds, the dirty winds. But is it that which has compelled me to stay in the desolate city? They are happy here, presumably for themselves, and with that connection I am not unfamiliar with, though presently without.
There have been many subjects of discussion floating about the river lately, on nostalgia, wontedness, loneliness, futurity and other things. Among the recesses of conversation, I stumbled on Solomon, and how he is the truest words in the Bible; and the sun is down now, just like he said, the sun will rise anew.
The sun is really the only thing to be jealous of, from that antiquated point of view, but ultimately, even the sun’s rises are in vain. And yet I struggle to get published, while Poetry magazine still shovels out shit by the bucketful. What a load of vanity.
And what's worse is that I know I'm better than 80% of the writers out there; but I appear not to put in the effort for it. This is the cost of being spoiled early on: it's a rough time of it to adjust at any age. At least a child has nothing to lose for wasting a few precious moments. Though maybe it's theirs to waste?

And thusly ends the night, with the mad siren carrying someone off.

The Catskill Eagle and the Owl

Oneonta's population makes up roughly one third the population of Otsego County, likely employing most of its Susquehanna Valley inhabitants, and more along the fringes of Delaware County. Since so much of Otsego County's population rests in Oneonta, I thought it adequate enough to use Otsego County statistics for the sake of this argument.
Unfortunately, like most of the nation, it seems Oneonta has been rather stagnant of late. Between 2000 and 2008, Oneonta grew by 0.5%, far lower than the 2.7% growth the whole state of New York has experienced. Paltry in either case, the spike between the two numbers is indicative of the lack of incentive to come to Oneonta.
I can imagine the population shift in Oneonta is mainly due to births vs. deaths. In short, it only looks like population growth because older people are living longer here.
I am not wholly opposed to the Oneonta World of Learning, and as far as I'm concerned, as long as it is privately funded, it flies with me. While I'm not sure of its funding status, the point is rather.. pointless, so to say. What's missing is the community's apathy toward our stagnant bubble of a world; even in a depressed state like New York, we could at least exist with the standards set by the census average!
I propose a lack of ambivalence toward the impending disaster that is Otsego, Oneonta, the sleeping folk north-west of the Catskills. Wake up, please; we need business models, industries that aren't taxed to death, and places for our work force to keep themselves happy, not museums these apathetic majority will scoff at while their children are barely kept fed with the hiking unemployment rates and social services benefits packages.

sources:

Census QuickFacts

Census FactFinder


addendum: I added in the sources, which I carelessly left out.

I Am Home; Where Are You, Dark Thoughts?

I told people I love America. That's such a lie; I do not, in fact, love America. What has really happened has been a love for the ideals, the fleeting respects of a country that could never really exist.

Where is the existentialist paradise? I do not require much; in fact, I request a country, a state, a plot of land where I am simply not protected from myself. That's what I want; a bare exposure to reality, to catch a glimpse of Cthulu, or some nameless inevitability we call death or kismet.

My God! I could really think you dead, that you could create a real world of suffering. And I know it to be true, that suffering exists. The spark of the glimpse of terror, the finger on the axis of reality, and then to have it yanked away: that is more torturous than any other pain I've thus far encountered. It is an all-encompassing throb from the neck to the pit of the stomach, a scorched line extending outward; a yearning for convalescence from this state of being where people do not follow the golden rule. I do not like being told what to do, or how to do it, on any level; I'm sure no one else does either.

The Moon is Full Somewhere

The room is atrocious, yet again; I want to ignore it and just play games or sleep.

Smoke on the Water

This is primarily in response to the lack of energy in this blog about the cigarette ban proposition.

Unlike alcohol, whose effects clearly show even after fifteen minutes of consumption, and are clearly inhibitive and dangerous, tobacco is hardly at the same level of danger.

As doctors become better at diagnosing problems in the lung, we can find more subtle onsets of cancer, emphysema, etc. And within reason, these have been attributed to cigarette smoking. What then, about the folk who do not show negative signs of smoking? They are not necessarily uncommon, and there is likely a similarity between them.

My guess is that they keep their lungs healthy; eg: they use them. The appendix is now a nuisance because people stopped using it centuries ago, and can in fact be deadly to you. With the health of the nation in question, it's no wonder that cigarette smoke pools in the bottom of people's lungs. People also eat until their stomachs either stretch or burst, never bathe, drink themselves into stupors, eat horrible things, etc. etc. etc.

People also let themselves get addicted to things. That's their own fault, not everyone else's.

The idea of cigarette smoke killing you is the same as the statistical fallacies of radiation poisoning. It can and has killed people, though numbers from the Chernobyl incident are skewed if you look at the numbers. Those numbers, too, were suggested by scientists. So were the ridiculous graphs Al Gore hired scientists to skew.

The government is making money off this, and it's the only reason they want to "tax it out of existence". Big brother gives people the impression that nicotine is intensely difficult to break off from. What? That's an argument that targets right at the psychosomatics.

With a little bit of exercise, cigarette smoke should do relatively little, or no, damage on the lungs.

As an aside, smoking is a nice way to break down stress before an exam.

I should only be thankful that my final exams only last until Thursday this week. I'll be more productive afterward, methinks.

The Sounds and Senses

I think I understand poetry now. It is not a marked impact on any particular object or instance; rather it's an impression on time and all time.

According to some existentialists, an infinitesmal instant happens forever. It may be an application of Zeno's paradox, or a suggestive fatalist idea on the circularity of the universal timeline. Regardless, a poem, maybe art in general, is an expected deviation from the destiny of things.

Or maybe poetry is only an empty art that tries to define itself? Who knows, but the beauty behind is the suggestion of a foundational medium that cannot be eliminated, unlike the other arts. In music, sound is deemed unnecessary. In visual arts, there are no rules as to what works.

Poetry needs words, even if they make no sense together. There can be no Jackson Pollock of the words.

Breaking

I wonder who would wake up if for an hour the internet broke down, and our telecommunications ceased entirely.

The lilacs have been out, and right now, you are staring into the eldritch.

Buzzwords

NYT had an article in the way back about how the FBI has a gigantic record with "1.1 million names and aliases" potentially linked to terrorism. Naturally, the ever-astute Times reported that these names were from outdated and poor methods of monitoring suspects. If we had brain-stemmed folk running the papers, this wouldn't be big news.

Of course that bothers me; I can casually tell someone that the FBI is watching me, and not be actively concerned about it. It takes a lot of perspective to really wrap your head around that sentiment.

And on top of it, the magnanimous NYT, along with everyone else, seems to go right along with it. How can we find people "...with genuine ties to terrorism"? What is a tie to terrorism, or, in fact, what the hell is terrorism? I say we arrest the police state we've been forced to grow up in.

If we're looking at principle here, the FBI should be an Ouroboros

The Old Trees

I'm pretty sure there has been no word either way toward the demolition of a local park for, quite literally, a parking lot.

If you're not familiar with Oneonta politics, allow me to explain. There has been talk about a tremendous lack of parking space for people's vehicles in Oneonta. Of course, such isn't the case. You're looking at two small pictures of the top floor of the parking garage I took a while back. It was a peak time, and there were plenty of folk walking around, so apparently they've parked somewhere while barely touching this place.

Now that an historic building is being renovated, and in the process being turned into smaller stores and apartments, people are pre-emptively demanding even more parking space. What the hell, seriously.

I'd like to pose a few realistic solutions. Considering that thought toward the long run is essentially proven to be more effective in the long run, it would be sensible to create a space for commuting folk to leave their cars behind, then connect the rest of Oneonta and the surrounding area to an electric-run trolley system.

If every employed body in the city donated $100 to a project, we could come up with almost $2M. Realistically speaking though, a few large financial backers could run the trolleys through Oneonta, and turn an incredible profit in the long run.

Because America has lost the sense of enjoyment in day-to-day life, it's not surprising that there would be opposition to this idea. But Oneonta did have a trolley at a point, and in that time, Oneonta thrived.

Occam

My gripe with "existentialists" is that they assume everyone else in the world feels exactly the way they do, or that existentialism is an incurable advancement, so to speak.

I just think people misunderstand Occam's Razor, that's all.

Weekend-Wide

An interesting idea came to me earlier. What if consciousness happens five seconds after the present? In other terms, something happens and we react to it, then five seconds later, we become aware of that moment as being the present.

We would not have control over ourselves, only a sense of volition through trying to make coherence out of involuntary strings of events.

Everything on the way to the capital seemed so stretched out. The highway system is ruining the countryside, and these "environmentalists" keep missing the target.

Why is everyone so concerned with the state of our planet, anyway? A large quadrant in the propaganda relies heavily on aesthetic value. So, if people care about the way things look, then why would the government want a say in Chrysler?

I don't get the "too big to fail" argument. I was brought up in a comfortable environment, in one which provided a level comparable to what would make the old kings envious. But doesn't all that seem pretty artificial, anyway? Where is Solomon's wisdom now?