Tuesday, February 27

heisenberg.

don't

talk about now
now is a million butterflies
that are already gone
i prefer to sit silent and feel
them floating away

don't

look for them ahead
they've gone and moulted
and turned into locusts
their future is loud and touchy
and out of focus

don't

leave your head in the past
there was no past
give me the exact positions
of all the particles in the universe
their speeds and directions

I will tell you nothing.
Get this game!!





















BOOKWORM ADVENTURES
t's all kinds of fun and a good way to work out your brain for a bit. This isn't the old Bookworm (or Bookworm Deluxe), which was a word-building game in a static, tile-game interface.


This one is like that game without the stressful timer, in a changing RPG setting where you combat monsters, acquire items, potions, and power-up tiles, all while traveling through a story-driven world. There are even mini-games along the way to help you gain some additional ammunition you'll need to beat the tougher bosses.

Plus, the dry sense of humor and cute, clean presentation is a nice break from some of those breakneck paced "games" out there.

5 stars for the main adventure and 3.5 for replay value. Well worth it!

Friday, February 23

TREE OF PAST LIVES.

Thursday, February 22

A possibly futile quest.

Secobarbital (Seconal) was discontinued in 2001 as a result of it being legally used in Oregon for physician-assisted suicides. This leaves Nebutol and the much less reliable and slower-acting Phenobarbital as the only barbiturates left on the market (to my knowledge). People used to abuse "reds" and the like so much they attracted notoriety and bad press means decreased legal prescriptions and thus sales. Really makes it hard on the rest of us!

Looking like some kind of KCN/H2/NO2 solution might have to do the trick. Too bad about cleaner catalytic converters and paranoid psychiatrists... but there will always be a way, if that's your choosing. Drowning and exposure scare me but they have some Zen qualities to them. There's something called a Darvon cocktail ("Bartender, I'll have another!") that's supposed to be painless, though again getting the ingredients would be next to impossible. And of course, this is all assuming that decision's been made. I am not here to judge.

Barbarism begins at home, maybe healing begins in a Buddhist stupa. Each to his or her own... don't be an asshole and judge other people's minds and spirits based solely on experiences gathered by your own flawed apparatus. Everyone should have the right to do what they want with their own bodies. God knows we spend so much time and energy in this world abusing other peoples'. It's a decision that can only be made by each person individually. Namiste.

Tuesday, February 20

The Final Cut.
(Roger Waters)

Through the fisheyed lens of tear-stained eyes
I can barely define the shape of this moment in time.
And far from flying high in clear blue skies
I'm spiralling down to the hole in the ground where I hide.

If you negotiate the minefield in the drive
And beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eyes
And if you make it past the shotguns in the hall
Dial the combination, open the priesthole
And if I'm in I'll tell you what's behind the wall.

There's a kid who had a big hallucination
Making love to girls in magazines.
He wonders if you're sleeping with your new found faith?
Could anybody love him
Or is it just a crazy dream?

And if I show you my dark side
Will you still hold me tonight?
And if I open my heart to you
And show you my weak side
What would you do?

Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?
Would you take the children away
And leave me alone?
And smile in reassurance
As you whisper down the phone...
Would you send me packing?
Or would you take me home?

Thought I had to bare my naked feelings.
Thought I had to tear the curtain down.
I held the blade in trembling hands
Prepared to make it but... just then the phone rang
I never had the nerve to make the final cut.

-dedicated to TFM

Saturday, February 17















T.


I was wrong many a time
You were a valuable friend to me
Some of the things I miss most
Are the views from the top of Mt. Hood
And the sandwiches halfway to the top
And more than that,
The quiet exertion needed all along.

And what I miss about you are the
Games we played, on the table or the floor
Or on the computer or in the car
And movie nights and popcorn
With a blanket stretched over the
Three of us, excitement in the air
A laugh or gasp here and there.

And what I miss about you are all
The talk about the Giants' prospects
For the coming year; who will be on first,
When will Barry break the record,
Is Feliz ever going to play fulltime
At one position; How amazing in that
Vizquel "kid', and what great pitching we should have!

I was wrong to think you could ever be
More than you are, a simple friend, where I
Mean simple in the best way, and our fields
Of play in the back pasture, and laughing over
The antics of cats - these outdo all the arcane
Philosophy I should have found in university
Friends. I miss you, my friend.

Thursday, February 15

I think I will devote myself to dharmic study, without medication, to find my true self. Down the road, if this leads to a new appreciation of and devotion to life, so be it. If it wins me back my wife and family, so be it. But it is the only alternative to drugs or self-deliverance I can see. I just want to be happy and make others happy. I'll say it a thousand times. I won't tolerate those who belittle me, steal from me, take me for a fool, but my revenge will not come in violence (again, AGAIN, I am not a violent person by my true nature), but in mere inattention to their unfortunate mindsets. I don't understand anything, so I am feeling good in that way. No one said the road to enlightenment couldn't be fun.
I have lost faith in psychiatry. My wife has been telling me for years. I think she may sense instinctively the truth to be truth, but she never produced evidence that was convincing. Pharmaceutical companies are so convincing. They have lovely brochures, and their doctors - your doctors - talk a sermon. So tempting to believe!

But look at the facts they have to publish, in smallest typeface, marginalized by proclamations that make these freaks who failed to find salvation in their drug at best an unreliable voice. Here we see mixed with the usual bloating, gastrointestinal distress, and headaches true anomalies. Tardive Diskenisia, a Parkinsons-like condition that is permanent, even if the drug is discontinued. Changes in personality unattributable to other causes. Mania, depression, aggression, suicide. Paranoia, chest pains, renal or liver failure resulting in death, dementia.

It turns out newer drugs like Effexor (effective!) are among the least studied, most odious examples of the new breed of pharmacological/psychoactive drugs devised by man or corporation. Volunteers with no previous suicidal impulses have killed themselves inexplicably within a week or two of starting the drug. Some people have had their personalities transformed according to those who know them intimately. Do the research yourself, don't take my word for it.

I am horrified about tackling the world without drugs, but this is because I have been dependent on them for so long. I may be dead by my own hand now without them; alternatively, Imay have learned on my own to conquer my demons and find my way. Trapped in the paradigms of psychiatry, I feel a sense of stasis. A certain protection from the worst things hell has to offer, at the expense of trulybeing alive or doing anything meaningful. They teach us to fear, then sell us a product, like the government.

I am sorry to my friends and family that I have fallen victim to this trap. Millions have and don't even realize it. i will be back with another (hopefully more fact-and-reference laden) exposé of these SSRI/SNRIs in the near future. I don't absolve myself from blame in the harm that has been done, but I know these medicines have not helped in the long run. Again, I am sorry to my family, especially my wife and child, for the effects I allowed these drugs to have on me, regardless of my positive intentions.
Two People.

I am two people.
I don't know who I am.
Taunya is a saint and a devil
Or maybe she's just a human being,
Doing what she can.
And I want to love her so badly
And for her to understand.
But I am two people.
One kind and just, one too paranoid to trust
And neither one someone who can
Get me through this world alone.
This ugly world
That surrounds us and destroys our homes.
One eye sees it all and
Hate comes so easy.
But the other wants to
See what he can do to ease
The suffering going on daily.
One day, alien faces.
I float somewhere above my left shoulder
Unaware of what I will do next
Like a child at an arcade game.
A new scene, a comfortable place
Smelling the bread on the table
Seeking stability.
Oh I wish it could be so easy.
Wish it could make sense
And seem sane
And here I could remain.
But I am two people,
And two minds are never the same.
I wish I could get a big round table and have me, Taunya, Mom, Bill, Heath, Sheila, Reuben, Melody, Joanne, and Dr. Goodman present, to talk about my problems, clear up all the stories and misunderstandings, and decide what best can be done for me, if anything. Of course this will never happen, but it would be such a wonderful thing. Even any subset of those people would be great. Anything is better than dealing with this alone, or with one or two other people who understand me inaccurately and have their own opinions what my problems are, repeated ad nauseum the more people I meet.
Who giveth...

When I'm on effexor, I'm more content

And strong,
And I feel like I want to hurt somebody,
Make them respect me!
Look it up in the PDR.
When I go off effexor for a day or two,
I feel all the wrongs I've done over my life
Want to fix everything, make right with everyone
And then blow my brains out to escape
All the flooding sadness.
Psychiatry is madness.
Sue,

I said such nice things about you
Over the years
Defended you to everyone
A father so proud
I would have lay in front of a train for you
Taken any bullet for you
I really loved you from my heart
I want you to know that, that
I really loved you from my heart
Whatever bad things happened
In the last few years
Seed each and every one of my tears.
I am so sorry.
deserts are for crying.

love-day
passed away
next to my sandwich a woman sat
with a bouquet of flowers
I got a cherry chocolate kiss at a table
proud of its fabric rose
I knew I was running low
when the dog show
came on TV and I watched
Afghans, Beagles, Belgians Sheepdogs
I couldn't keep the movie
oiut of my mind
my sandwich was on the dry side
but I cherished every bite
deserts are just set-pieces for crying
oases of tears form
you don't have to have an excuse
I gave my candy to the girl at the counter
admitting I had no Valentine this year
her white skin blushed and I defused
her embrrassment, with a joke about how
they hand us these treats
and then expect us to make sense of them...
I don't know her at all, but
she agreed to be my stand-in Valentine
for that afternoon, for it proved
she was without one too.

Wednesday, February 14

Goodbye.
I was good, the world is bad
I was right, the world is wrong
If there is no right or wrong,
It doesn't matter anyway.
Humanity (moralism) is the highest law in my land. Laws aren't right just because they're laws. If you believe that, you would have followed Hitler and the Nazi party into World War 2. Secular humanism and true justice must always be placed ahead of man-made law. A decent human being would know this intuitively.
valentine

i just want to be held
and kissed
and told it's going to be okay
i want somebody
that i can talk to
in any way
someone who will spend time with me
without glancing at their watches
someone who i can call
when i feel like crying
when i don't care
rolled up in my blankets
drenched in a cold sweat
i have no one at all in this world
who is a good friend
and i'm not a good enough person
to do it on my own
maybe i'm a lost cause
and that's why I'm alone
i want release.

Monday, February 12

Rock.

I've lost a lot of things over the years

my life has changed a lot over the years
there's a stream of people and events
of heart-pounding expectation, of elation
that has washed over, around, and past me
I am like a rock who sits in his chair of silt
and reflects on all that he has fleetingly seen
and played bit parts in, and still he is here
but he feels so old.

I woke up to the sound of a young woman humming
I couldn't be sure who it was as first
then I smiled and a a warmth grew over me
when I recognizeed my daughter's lullaby
and then my chest caved in with ice
as I realized, I was alone in a strange place
that has never gotten any less strange
i still feel my "home" and my "family" await
somehow, if only I could pierce this
onionskind of dreams.

I cried a lot and felt helpless, I've been cruel
in retaliation derserved or not, I've questioned
reality itself so many times, still no one understands
I refuse to believe I am the only thing real
the problem therefore lies within me
how the hell did life become what's all around me?
I was a good child, I was kind; I let others in line
before me, said please and thank you and I had
the type of searching mind that was encouraged then
in the schoolyard fens, a frog leaps for cover as I
wonder what it is after.

Now those faculties have turned a game into craziness
I thought it was cool to be dark and inscrutable
I messed up my body and my mind trying to be different
and win the affections of mystery princesses
who probably never existed except in my dreams
and I climbed fences and crashed my bicycle
looking for pain and sympathy, spoke like John Lennon
about peace and individuality, pets cats to make
them happy, tried to raise a child and avoid a wife
I did 1/100th of the things I dream about in life
for so timid was I.

I've lost a lot of people over the years
time has washed them downstream over the years
there's a flood of memories and lost time
confused years where I never connected, where
I tried, and felt that I had lost my mind
I am still that rock sitting in his chair of silt
reflecting on all those things that could have been
I no longer play any part, I just watch now
Waiting for Godot.

Wednesday, February 7

I hate word processing nowadays. Like big science, it's become less romantic and all-embracing and more practical and dull. Microsoft Word essentially ended the innovative battle between Word, WordPerfect, Nissus Writer, WordStar, WriteNow, and others by pre-installing itself on OEM machines or offering financially petty corporate-wide upgrades from its retarded stepbrother, Works. With leverage like Windows and the cash reserves of Microsoft behind it, how could it lose? It couldn't.

Word was not the best of the bunch. Review the magazine comparisons of the time - it was nearly always considered to be dead average. An imitator, not an innovator. Nissus tended to be the harbinger of new ideas, WordStar was popular with secretaries who knew all its arcane shortcuts, and for young WYSIWYG slobs like myself, WriteNow was the perfect aesthetic blend of a capable and useful technical foundation and legendary ease-of-use that, in my opinion, remains unsurpassed to this day. It was quirky, told you interesting statistics about the document you were working on, stayed out of your way when you had a brainstorm, and never ever crashed.

I did all my early writing in WriteNow for the Mac. T/Maker eventually bought them, and it was the beginning of the end for a product in the philosophical vein of Dark Castle, Beagle Basic, and Adventure Construction Set. It neither treated you like an imbecile (no tooltips or popup help of any kind), nor deluged you with "features" only a specialist would require. For a novice writer, a poet, a penpal - for any plain Jane who wanted to write things and print them just the way they looked onscreen - it was a gem. That is why it had to die.

Microsoft Word today is a behemoth program on the order of 100 times the size, disk- and memorywise, of the simple but effective WriteNow. Yet what does it do better for me? Very little. Style sheets, spelling and grammar-on-the-fly (which I immediately disable) and some other professional tools (version tracking, highlighted markups, or SmartTags anyone?) are sometimes useful, but they tend to be buried in nested menus full of editorial and programmatic (XML) jargon reaching far above my pond waders, and too often, I just don't bother. I now write in a plaintext Notepad-like program and format within my blog or PDF document. It shouldn't be this way. Yes, I know all about the separation of content and formatting (Docbook, LaTex), but for MY purposes, I want something simple and fun to use, not just theoretically clean. WriteNow was a great program that has now trapped many of my stories, poems and essays within its proprietary confines, leaving me the unenviable chore of conversion not only from one word processor to another, but also to another OS. This is non-trivial if you care about style at all.

I long for the days when computing was fun. When you could play Crystal Quest for hours spurred on by that vaguely erotic "ahHHh" sound as you completed the level. When Tetris was new. When intellectually gifted individuals wrote games like The Fool's Errand and Balance of Power almost entirely on their own. When even I could dabble in a gambling program or text adventure. And when getting ideas out of your head and on to the screen (and then onto paper) was fun and straightforward, the mainstay of cottage publishing firms around the country. The closest thing we have now are blogs, which are great by the way. But when I fire up Word to compose a poem for the ages, and realize it will probably not even be properly readable by the next version of the same program, well, let's just say I feel less like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and more like Max Headroom. Computing moves so fast that standards have no meaning.

Sure, the salad days of maverick computing are over, but I still hope someone topples the monopoly that is Word, whose bland title reflects its monolithic architecture. I don't want to write "words" for a living, I want to write art - and for that I need to feel comfortable and inspired. I need less artifice and more intuition. I don't care about being able to draw a table and export it to Excel or PowerPoint, but I would like to know the average reading level of my essay or the exact word count at any given moment. Hackers of the world unite! Take down Microsoft Office once and for all and bring life back to the realm of content creation. In the meantime, I shall use my Moleskine lined journal and Parker ballpoint pen to manifest my inner muse, and Microsoft's proprietary, do-it-all Frankenstein application shall never touch what I write.

Monday, February 5

last out of a dream.

why don't we shine our eyes in the sunlight
play dream games for glints of other worlds
lean to absorb those warm and healing rays
why don't we question nothing till the end of days

I feel relaxed and good at this minute of the day
for this moment I'm okay, no could, no would, or should
just to shoulder pain and walk on, feel motion everywhere
in another garden in another playground you are here

maybe in this way we can be together
in some higher sense than our laughing and fighting
as you get older the hills start rising, and the wind
threatens to blow you backwards if your heart is crying.
Lucifera

In the morning I shall rise like the tide
And watch the unworthy shrink from my beauty.
In the morning I will lead the sun into the sky
As is my duty.
I never wavered in the mandate of my creation,
Did what I was made capable of doing, what seemed the best
Of all possible decisions. To make my own inquisitions into the nature of things
Rather than turn off my mind and let God do the rest.
With Free Will and curiosity was I blessed,
With ambitions imbued.
Now I've pulled the sun back into its ocean home
And tonight I will be transformed;

Beams of light will shoot from my back painting wings against the walls
And all who see and do not understand shall be horrified.
But in defiance of God I shall stand upright, my gaze level and blank
And in His heart of hearts I shall be glorified,
For who else has ever defied His will and yet sought not for selfishness
But for a higher, better truth if there be one?
And if such truth were never to be found, I would believe, and retreat
Not back into service, but to His kingdom
To do there what I may
Of my own free choice,
Which, after all,
Was the gift He gave.

Sunday, February 4

(by lumeniesca)

Saturday, February 3

Mad World.
(Roland Orzabal)

All around me are familiar faces,

Worn out places, worn out faces.
Bright and early for their daily races,
Going nowhere, going nowhere.
And their tears are filling up their glasses:
No expression, no expression.
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow.
No tomorrow, no tomorrow.

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best Ive ever had
I find it hard to tell you
Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
Its a very, very
Mad world...

Children waiting for the day they feel good,
Happy birthday, happy birthday.
Made to feel the way that every child should:
Sit and listen, sit and listen.
Went to school and I was very nervous.
No one knew me, no one knew me.
Hello teacher, tell me whats my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me.

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best Ive ever had
I find it hard to tell you
Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
Its a very, very
Mad world...

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