As I Please.

Blocks. One of the age-old issues of writing are well, being unable to write. There might be various reasons for it. Maybe a lack of conviction on the subject material. Personal apathy. The words do not physically coalesce as images which are translated from electrical synaptic impulses into motor energy, which then is used to engrave, carve, type, write, symbols, which are then received as light energies, then transformed into electrical impulses, which then tap into other peoples’ minds.

legosarepainfullyfun:

I could not come up with blogs for the past week (did ya miss me?), simply because well, I lost track of the subject matter that I actually wanted to write about. There were things that I wrote as an exercise, simply for the sake of writing, and it was beginning to be all a bit shite really. So I decided to write about, well, not being able to write.

It’s curious, how easily identifiable such intangible traits such as passion, excitement, boredom, apathy, and ohshitohshitit’sdueintwohours, are in writing. Your professors know. Your boss knows. Even your mom knows. Maybe you might not know until you take that second look at it.

Being able to control that voice, provides immeasurable value in your artistry. Rawness, inspiration, and talent are all things that need to be honed. And once you can measure your craft, and repeat it as a science, then comes the mastery, of which may produce a prolific body of works. Then from those oceans of paintings, performances, albums, books, novels, short stories, videos, vines, latergrams, and what have you - there might be just one that is truly remarkable and unique. Or two, if you’re lucky. 32+9 if you’re Beethoven.

For this reason, classics that have withstood the ravages of that unstoppable beast, Time, are well worth the delve from reality. It is not just that one book you are reading, you are flipping through the bloodstained, sweat wrung, life effort of a master who has been vindicated and made invincible to the very beast which governs all of our lives.

it up! Funky Fridays are the best.

chilloutmixer.org

Somnambulism, sips of palatable poison. The famous painting of hazy gas lamps has been replaced with the ambiance of LED backlights, the clicking of fingernails, with the clacking of keys, the grainy jukebox with the crystal clear synths of electronica.

latenightpulse:

Some of us are creatures of the sun, basking in the warmth like lizards soaking in the potency of our lord and savior, Helios. Others are of the lunar persuasion. I find myself commonly identifying with the latter.

It’s a curious duality of preference that has often had me wondering, am I a lesser being, for not being enticed at all whatsoever by early worms? It’s the age-old adage that the best hours of the day align themselves with the sun, but I respectfully disagree.

And nothing about circadian rhythms and whatnot - while I’m sure there is some body of more than legitimate literature regarding our scientific body cycles, my reasoning is less pure. It really just has to deal with the solemn solitude of the night.

The night represents to me endless possibility - the sun clears everything to the mind, with little doubt left to be had as to what is being projected into the mind. Whereas the night will entice you with creepy crawlies, the darkness provides an almost meditative environment in which I can isolate myself entirely with calm music, calm thoughts.

In sensory deprivation, there is freedom, there is a release of the mind to disassociate with the familiar, to embrace the creeps of the mind which so inevitably worm their ways from the subconscious to the active imagination.

So when I say - I’m a night person, it doesn’t mean that I dive into debauchery of alcohol-fueled nights of camaraderie (although I won’t exactly refuse such a definition either). It means that I’m perfectly happy as I am, or less subtly, stop talking to me.

I am a fan of Arsenal FC. The word fan is generally positive, due to the fact that fans are the life and blood of entertainment. There are fans of Harry Potter, fans of Trump (ugh), but there are no fans quite like sporting fans. And it’s a bit shite, honestly.

#meditativefanaticism:

I don’t really feel that being a fan is a bad thing, and most people wouldn’t. Still, the word is short for ‘fanatic,’ which is undoubtedly a bad thing. A fanatic is often associated with cultish, one-sided (one direction?) attitudes, which really is not conducive to what you’d call model citizen behavior.

And yet we have sports fans who will start fights on the basis of results which have absolutely no bearing on their lives, other than the fact that they want it to. But that’s our role as fans - we give value and importance to the actions of things and people which are inherently unimportant. 

There’s a wonderful episode of Black Mirror, which really takes this issue into it’s own interpretation, where the rights and purpose of a few individuals are wholly trampled on by the herd, the sheeple, and essentially, fans who are manipulated by a select few in the media.

By making the insignificant, important, by crafting values where none exist, we give credence and importance to our own association with such a trivial thing. Sports are trivial. No argument about it, and yet there are trillions of dollars spent worldwide on those very things. 

As an Arsenal fan, I’m out for the blood of Mike Dean, but at the same time, I cannot, for the life of myself, understand why I should be. He’s a poor official, no doubt, and yet he’s more than 3000 miles away from me - other than through the channel of Arsenal, he will never affect my life.

Declarative openers, half (roughly) the human race, the uglier sex, the protruding genitalia - there’s a lot to be said about men, and man in general, but, man, as a man, I have to admit, it’s a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in.

manbeats from mancaves:

There’s a lot in that vocal sample, it’s got that Mad Men art deco Jazz vibe to it, and honestly that’s the kind of man where maybe we saw the last shade of the man I refer to. Before this gets all confrontational as another installment in the battle of the sexes and what have you, I’ll state for the record that I’m all for the feminist movement. It’s frankly a disgrace that woman’s rights are still an issue, but that’s another topic, another day.

What I’m referring to is specifically the pursuit of happiness, the right and privilege to further oneself, to better oneself. This isn’t exactly what you’d say being a gentleman - being a gentleman was being a misogynist, a slacker, a facconable image of higher society. That’s why the phrase goes - “you’re a gentleman and a scholar!” Meaning, the two are not necessarily inclusive identities.

That’s the main problem for me - some people learn with their body, some people learn cognitively, some people just don’t learn at all. But in the end, what happened to improving ourselves?

It’s all turned into improving everything around us, as if we’ve reached some kind of pinnacle existence. We’re not gods, we’re not deities, and this attitude that we’ve come where we need to be, that life is good enough, that it’s the things around us that need to change that is man’s current and greatest hubris. We’re frogs in the well, there’s so much more to learn, whether it’s about each other, ourselves, the world and the universe around us. When did we lose ourselves? Well, maybe it’s just always been that way - history and its rose-tinted spectacles.

But I digress - what I’ve really been experiencing is more in the lines that there’s just too much goddamn difficulty in sorting out the noise in our lives. It was once my dream to own a man cave - blindingly giant technology, excess power coursing through black boxes, delivering to me to the greatest digital soma of the New World.

More recently, I used to dream of owning a study in my home - bookshelves, a piano, nice furniture, dim lamps, maybe a small humidor, whiskey cabinet. What’s the difference between that and a man cave - in the end it’s all about self-indulgence, about creating a box where your body atrophies and your mind sinks. “Study” they say - but the action really lies on you, not your things.

The dreaded Monday, the mundane, the mollusk of days, the melancholy, if you will. Forgive me for being drab, but if you truly relish Mondays, then all the power to you. You have found purpose in life, most likely, and left of us drowning in the office purgatory - workgatory, if you will.

timeistheenemy:

There’s definitely a series of questions that most people have asked at some points in their lives: “Do I matter?” “Who am I?” “What purpose do I have in life?” “What significance does my work have?” “Am I dancer?”

Regardless, I want to remind you, it’s always some solace that if you’re asking those questions, you probably aren’t asking: “Am I faster than that chicken?” “Can I eat this mushroom and not die?” “Donde esta la biblioteca, Paco?”

So we’re not dead, we’re living to live. The luckier of us have a roof over our heads, food in the fridge, and no real pressing need to do much else rather than work, have fun, die. Tend to family, make family, make friends, tend to friends, die alone. Depressing as that may be, I say we’ve forgotten that there is an opportunity in front of us.

So what, we all die. We all live, and frankly, we don’t know much else. I for one am curious, when my time comes. It’ll be a moment of reckoning to see what happens afterwards. After all, the consciousness is a flexing of the muscle we call our brain. Choosing how we decide to exercise it is the joy and and privilege our society has granted us.

Live for work, live for fun, live for art, live for family, live for music, live for friends, live for yourself - all of these things only have significance because, well, someday we just won’t be alive.

And fuck carpe diem - every day is a ‘gift’ yeah whatever, but Monday’s suck. No shame in putting your head down and enjoying the cousin of death every once in awhile. Feel good, over and out.

People don’t need to write in sentences, not on Tumblr anyway. Which all leads to the point that this blog is ill-suited for this platform. But then again, it’s all about being in the wrong place and the wrong time - life’s true 99%.

dat1%tho:

Tumblr makes such excellent use of multimedia integration that the  user needs no patience to string to ideas together. Between gifs, comment strings, one-liners, pictures, movie clips, there are thousands of words that are unspoken, unwritten, but expressed.

Despite this site’s creator’s concern for the direction his product has taken (in that his userbase is filled with mobbing, angry, internet ‘activists,’ who take offense at everything), I find Tumblr to be a fascinating social platform. Each brand essentially performs the same function - connects people, hence the word ‘social.’ Still, whether it’s 9GAG or Tickld, Youtube or Vimeo, Tumblr or 4Chan, Instagram or Flickr, Squarespace or Wordpress (this can go on for ages), each brand has a unique set of values which are represented by the userbase that each platform has attracted.

Which is to say, that the sentence is becoming obsolete on social media, because each site has grown further in specializing a unique method of communication, or user connection. These ‘methods’ are like a painter’s style of brushwork, except the brush is held by millions of users. Power users grow with the platform, finding unique techniques to creatively express themselves through the limited method that is given to them.

This in itself is not surprising - if people use the same words everyday, they begin to find new ways to express themselves, even with the same words. Creativity has a way of finding itself through repetition, like hitting a dead end in a maze, over and over again, only to finally notice an open route not taken before.

What is surprising though, is how fiercely each userbase defends itself. The justifications, the competitions, insults - it’s the high school cafeteria all over again. 4Chan would be the hardcore, vindictive nerds that pulled passive aggressive pranks on everyone. 9GAG is where all the class clowns hang out. Tumblr, all the emo goths. Instagram, all of the artsies, Wordpress, the bookworms, and finally - Twitter, the jocks. The kids, who could barely string two sentences together, but had it all.

Not that everyone just sticks to one of course, but what’s particularly curious goes back to words, or the distinct lack of them. There’s a base internet vocabulary, lol and all that jazz, but then there are also certain words you wouldn’t find in many places except particular sites, and it all goes back to the culture of association, and what words are meant to accomplish in the first place - identify our thoughts, communicate ourselves.

Far greater than the Romans had ever imagined, combining new synthetic materials to further discomfort the masses more than stone ever could, America has created not one, but hundreds of coliseums - we just don’t call them that. 

Happy Labor Day:

Thankfully, truly, we pay our athletes millions of dollars in contracts that may seem absolutely ludicrous to the general viewer. Aside from the economics of it all, these athletes are heroes - they represent everything, from geographic pride to the American Dream. Now back to the money part, imagine, if they were slaves.

Rich owners take their teams of brawn and brains and pit them against other owners’ teams in a fight for supremacy. They buy and trade players as assets, thinking solely about the athlete’s value to the franchise, discarding them ruthlessly when their contract has run up, or worse, they have fallen out of favor.

Race aside, it’s all a bit Roman isn’t it. Luckily the main differences are the key ones - athletes are paid handsomely for their services and they are often respected as society’s elite. But what about the path they took to get there? 

There was an interesting moment last summer, when Arsène Wenger, manager of Arsenal FC commented on the lack of top quality strikers from Europe:  

"Maybe in our history, street football has gone. In street football when you are 10 years old, you play with 15-year-olds, so you have to be shrewd, you have to show that you are good, you have to fight, to win impossible balls.”

To give some perspective, Luis Suarez, playing for Barcelona FC is a man who is often ridiculed for his on-field antics, but is also almost worshiped for his uncanny ability to score a monstrous number of goals. Between the biting, the racism, and his abnormally large chuck teeth, there’s a child who grew up, not knowing exactly when his next meal would be, who almost didn’t even feel the love a family. He grew up on the street, fighting, playing football. Maybe that’s why he’s so damn good at football. Maybe that’s also why he’s racist, and possibly a bit feral.

And for every star like Suarez, be it in the NFL, NBA, or the EPL, or all the other countless professional leagues worth billions of dollars, there are countless youngsters who failed to make the cut, who laid down their broken dreams, facing the reality of their poverty-stricken lives. They gained no tangible skill sets, other than perhaps a strong mentality, to apply themselves to another trade. 

Is an awesome name. You can grunt it, shout it out loud, whisper it audibly, and inflect all manners of emotions and it will still have an imposing quality to it. Is it because we associate the name with an almost barbaric code of morality, or merely a happy coincidence?

Mesopotamianoir:

The Bible is to Hammurabi’s Code the same way Kit Kat is to Jelly Bean - upgrade! The rules of the game changed, but the idea is the same - rules are rules. Happy coincidence? Maybe not.

Hinduism, Norse Mythology, and everything else Marvel has made a fortune off of all have similar aspects, in that the core ideas lie in a set of rules for human behavior. Take a moment to think about the golden rule - it exists in almost every culture of notable history. 

Apart from the obvious fact that aliens landed on this planet many years ago and created us as hilarious behavioral experiments, it’s most likely that morals and ethical codes have developed independently in all corners of the Earth. It’s always fun to consider the alternative though, and there’s even been a movie made about the idea. 

And when you consider the base similarity, racism becomes awfully petty very quickly. It becomes the manifestation of a people’s unwillingness to consider that differences in lifestyle are simply thousands of years of independent cultural development - are the morals largely the same? Yes. 

Do other people sometimes eat with their mouths open like it’s perfectly acceptable, and is it usually revolting? Yes. 

Do we all shit the same way? Yes.

"Well, that's just your opinion, man" - Jeff Bridges. He didn't really say it, it was a character line. Still, it's a common enough line to hear from any mouth as we blunder through the age of political correctness where honesty has become, at best, a circus sideshow.

R life.

Of course that doesn't mean honesty is the best policy. And frankly we could use a lot less of it from certain Americans. When it comes down to it, opinions are like little slugs that fail to weather the salty test of time.

Shriveled slugjerky opinions are opinions like, "all Black people are lazy and therefore MY tax dollars are paying for their inebriation and drug-induced unproductivity." Many will ardently argue that this is a truth - it's a goddamn opinion.

Any time you decide to blanket an entire demographic in one sentence, without any particular evidence except your own limited, narrow scope of view - it's an opinion. And narrow views are largely what the majority entertains. We learn from experience and that experience is always conditioned from one perspective, yours and yours alone. There are always other influences and education, but in the end it's always going through your wonderfully drab filter of grey matter.

That's what political correctness is, or should be, rather - understanding that circumstance plays a part in your worldly views and self-proclaimed sage advice, and more importantly, understanding that everyone's circumstances are different.

Respecting that is a wholly different attitude than saying, "well hey... I'm too lazy to really argue that you're wrong and I'm right, so... Fuck off and let me embrace my tiny corner of the universe that is my soap box." The difference is in that you are not willing to engage in fruitful discourse.

People call the internet a cesspool, because it removes the social obligation of manners, but the same goes for people whether they’re typing or thinking - just because no one knows it doesn't not make you opinionated.

Take a moment, think about what your education stressed, who lives around you (socioeconomically), and how that has affected you. Then translate that to others and appreciate that behind every set of eyes you see there is an entire universe of thoughts that are entirely foreign to you.

It’s August 31st, eve of the first month of Autumn. 

The Pumpkin Spice is coming. I recall having a pumpkin spice latte, over a decade ago. Nobody was really ordering it, and at that time, Caramel Frappucinos were still a thing. It sure as hell didn’t taste like pumpkin.

Autumn Musings:

Pumpkin spice doesn’t taste anything at all like pumpkin. What it most likely is a variant made from the instant Chai syrup, 'enhanced’ with some kind of bitters and maybe 1% of pumpkin.

I don’t have beef with pumpkin spice lattes - it’s sweet and ‘spiced’ so obviously people will like it. But to wreak mayhem in Starbucks nationwide, is the product really that good? Teenage white girls will stampede to the nearest shop where they can get one, and I’ve even overheard, “Well shit, they’re out, should we try the Barnes and Noble on 66th?” I was on 111th street at the time...

My theory is that Starbucks is brilliant in limiting ‘pumpkin spice’ to the fall season. It reinforces the idea that pumpkin = fall, and by having the product exclusive for only a season, it gives a compelling reason to the consumer (”I can’t get milk and sugar disguised as coffee any other season you say?!”).

My suspicion is though, that people just really like Autumn. It’s a wonderful season, with beautiful foliage, crisp nights, warm afternoons, and also, Thanksgiving. Pumpkins remind us that Autumn is here, and since few of us actually bother to pick our own pumpkins and grow them, we go out and buy as many fucking pumpkin spice lattes we can carry.

...is still press. The age-old adage has been circling print and hearsay for decades through generations, but it rings truer with the monstrosity that the media, that the American people, and the Republican GOP has created in Donald Trump the (Potential) Candidate.

crashandburnandacceptitallmusic:

I sat down with a few friends for brunch (poached eggs and some kind of hipster sausage), and we somehow ended up on the topic of Bernie Sanders and how wonderful (and seemingly impossible at that time), it would be if he could win.

Then the conversation devolved, like raspberry swirls into a steaming hot pile of horse shit, as we inevitably landed on the ugly topic that is Donald Trump the Candidate. I’m all for Donald Trump the TV Personality, or even Donald Trump the Businessman. Frankly, it’s a great source of cathartic schadenfreude (or simply, #smh) to see his media antics here and there, but when he threatens to invade my reality, I say kill it.

How, though, is a real stump of a question. Enough has been said about the responsibility the press has to not write about or cover Trump’s candidacy (while still somehow writing about Trump). Much of it is quite good (i.e. “Enough is Enough”), and would be better if it actually had any impact on media practices. The small select few who have chosen to publicly speak against Trump is akin to pissing on a bonfire for shits and giggles. It’s really more about absolving one’s professional career from what seems like a bystander crime. So where does the buck stop?

You cannot, not cover Donald Trump anymore. It’s too late, he’s at the forefront. The damage is done. It’s up to us, the people, to directly engage in damage mitigation. We consumers must boycott any Trump-related media, refuse to vote for him, eschew his public image, and not discuss his platform of spewing white supremacist hatred all over international waves. 

There was a time when I was less immersed in the luxurious dolce vita of writing for nobody, and I was still in Chicago, I spent some time going door to door, canvassing for the environment. It was for protecting the ecosystem against foreign species. Very American, I know. The girls had it easiest, ponytails, short shorts, white t-shirts, all college-aged, pulling home several hundred bucks every night. It was respectable - both the work and the monetary amounts.

Still, guys had a very rough time, and people looked at their money like:

It was only when an older buck pulled me aside (as they are prone to doing so), and told me - “The girls got all the guys sure, but what we gotta aim for are the stay-at-home moms, dying for some excitement.” I only found out in later years how exciting it really is to just throw your money around.

The opportunity to test the words of ...mettle (let’s not call that wisdom), soon approached, as I walked up a driveway, and lo and behold. An obviously domestic woman, lounging about on her front steps, beckoned me closer. I walked, excessively nonchalant, taking the time to wave awkwardly, and stopping at a distance just beyond arms reach. Was I nervous? She had long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, and the rest I fail to recall. Use your imagination for a change.

So I started on the spiel, and she quickly said, “Alright, well here’s your money, now let’s talk about something more interesting.”

If you haven’t heard by now, the sandwich diet mascot has been unearthed as a predator. And the system didn’t quite go all ahnold on him either. But that’s besides the point. I hope there’s really no need to go into detail about what was wrong with what he did - if there is, you either live under a rock (which begs the question, how did you get here?) or, you need to get off tumblr and find some help. Support a shrink.

auralrelief:

Let’s talk about the Jared that we all knew. Or we thought we did - it was part of the brilliance of having Jared as the Subway ‘spokesman.’ He was a real person, down to earth, and a relatable celebrity who realized the American dream - lose a metric ton of weight. And the brilliance of all those factors was that it disguised him from being a mascot.

Of course, Subway had to cut ties with him, like a leper on a long voyage, heave ho, off the plank you go. It had to happen - after all, losing weight and pedophilia might have been the next insane causality picked up by the midwives of Beverly Hills. So, thank you, Subway. A real PSA there.

But back to the topic of Jared Mascot versus Jared Fogle. Jared lost weight, and Jared lost weight by eating Subway - and that’s pretty much all we cared to know about one of the most generic-looking, middle class, white Americans for over a decade. He had about as much character as Tony the Tiger, but he wasn’t orange, heavily inked, and had a normal voice. We didn’t have to hear “That’s Grrrrrrreat!” to know it.

The Jared Entity was Subway with a flesh mask - the pinnacle achievement of his life. He embodied the efficacy of the Subway diet in the most efficient way possible, and it made us forget the fact that there is always more to a human being than two-dimensions, or two sentences for that matter.

Until the mask was ripped off, and we saw something inhumane, and so revolting that Michael Jackson now looks (relatively) innocent. He still physically is the same being, but the human capacity for preconception is so powerful, I think we all know the answer to the question, “Will he ever look the same?” Does Will Smith, after this?

That’s the order I like them in. My cycle begins when I leave work and feel truly alive again. And then I slowly succumb to Mr. Sandman who drags my eyelids like a homeless man dragging his giant stash of recyclables along the sidewalk.

reading muzak: 

In case you didn’t notice it’s not Cole Porter. Still good, though. And it’s actually not muzak, either, I just like the word. Too bad muzak isn’t a thing anymore. Now it’s all earbuds in the elevators and awkward shifting to avoid looking one another in the eye. What is it that makes us so intensely averse to looking someone in the eyes?

Today I decided to do an experiment, where I looked up and gazed intently at someone to see what would happen. One woman looked at me with disgust - "oh another misogynist.” Or maybe I’m just ugly. Another attempt cost me two dollars - don’t look homeless people in the eye. The vacuum of their eyes is entirely soul and morale sucking, and then you have to pay for the ride. (But really, please help the homeless, unless they look dangerous - listen to the flight response).

The final attempt, it was in an elevator, where this poor bro in a pink polo could not get away, and finally I had to speak, to not look like an axe murderer. “What are you listening to?” “Lil’ Wayne.” “Wow.”

There’s something wonderful about mainstream rap (but I hate it). For one, it’s deliciously meta. A lot of people, rapping about getting rich, while getting rich because rapping about getting rich is in vogue, which makes them rich. Yo dawg... 

And number two, it’s a perversion of the counterculture that rap had been born out of. It’s so revolting its hard to look away. And somehow by rapping about that perversion, it spawns a continuous counterculture of underground rap that scorns and eschews it. Gotta have both, night and day.

But everyone hates those people, guys (it’s usually guys) who comment like it’s a freaking race to the front. It’s juvenile, it’s reminiscent of shoving your best buds under the bus to get the first heavenly processed rat-wiener from the disillusioned and angry lunch ladies who have had enough of bratty kids for a lifetime.

Listening moods:

I digress. I made this blog, really, well, out of boredom, and my hope is that it adds to yours. There is nothing quite like making angry people angrier, and bored people even.... bored-er? It’s the troll mentality, the internet perversity, and the habitual desire to consume anything that makes us all such voracious suckers to the bait of the clicky-clicky. Doctors hate this guy! Who is this guy? Why do doctors have emotions? So many questions, and all the time to answer, but no one cares - click on it so advertisers get the hard numbers on everyone desperate to look healthy while munching on EXTREMEEEE DORITOS.

Apathy and nihilism are the internet’s flagship virtues, and yet everything in it is designed to make us care about the blah life and we fall for it, knowingly. Like jumping into a gym pit full of foam, we desperately want to feel something real and are afraid to commit to the risks (hence significant others and BMW’s).