omnigatherum

Playing to the Groundlings

By in omnigatherum

Despite my best efforts, I have yet to drive off my most dedicated readers, my longtime blog-companions. So at this festive time of year, I feel I should probably reward their stubbornness and masochism with stuff that they might actually enjoy reading and commenting on, as opposed to my usual hobbyhorses.

So for Noel, here’s an article on the usefulness of hallucinogens in treating various mental illnesses. For research purposes only. Not that he would know anything about that himself, persistent, scandalous rumors to the contrary.
For Brian, here’s an article about how cyclists are a bunch of rich elitist snobs who should all be steamrolled.
And for Shanna, here’s something about some plucky Canadian musicians taking the Billboard charts by storm. Canada has its own rock bands? Aww, that’s so adorable!
Discuss, pontificate, fight, do as the spirit moves you.

Lucubrations, no. 8

By in drugs, lucubrations, omnigatherum

In case you were looking for some good writing on the darker side of the blogosphere:

It’s now almost 10 years that I have been living life on the needle. During that time I’ve shot up in parks, cars, toilets and on buses. In addition to my arms, legs, stomach and chest, I’ve also injected in my fingers, toes, palms and forehead. I’ve hit nerves, arteries, joints and bone, and have suffered every imaginable lump, bump and swelling. I’ve poisoned myself 4 times with ‘dirty heroin’, had abscesses the size of golf balls and I’ve Od’d twice. On my entire body I have only one visible vein left. In my determination to self-medicate I’ve lost family, friends, lovers, two Cockatoos and a dog. My bank is in the red and so after 34 years I have less than nothing.
As I write this it is 24 hours since my last injection and that seems a long time. Previous to that it was 72 hours and previous to that 7 days. The longest I’ve ever been heroin or needle free is 5 months. But I do have some qualities and I use them to convince the few people left around me that I’m changing… that I’ve finally seen the light. And as I sit there with my perforated escape plan laid out, I busk and dance my way around all the awkward questions. At one point I even promise to stop smoking and cut down on the chocolate. It’s then I realize I’ve gone too far, that I’ve said too much. The place kind of deflates with disappointment and without even looking up I know what they’re all thinking, “He’s not getting better… he’s getting worse!” And I can’t blame them for that… I’m thinking exactly the same myself.

Flight of the Dragonfly

By in omnigatherum

For the third time in the last few weeks, my front yard is absolutely swarming with dragonflies. It’s been going on for the last couple hours. Dozens and dozens of them, swooping and darting this way and that, snapping up insects like mad. I’ve never seen more than one or two in the same place before. Does this have something to do with climate change? More bugs than usual in the area? Jeebus’s imminent return?

Oh, you laugh, but I know how these things turn out.

A Pair o’ Pathetic Peripatetics

By in omnigatherum

Jesse Miller:

The proponents for why we should be walking (and Solnit and Careri can certainly be counted among the first of their ranks) extol the act for its ethical, political and environmental implications: walking as a defense of free time against the dark arts of technology, walking (as the urban and environmental conservationists claim) as a practice that will get us out of air conditioned cars and away from computers so that we can begin to live together “in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.” Walking that will cause us to remember to remember the world around us, to take some time to smell the roses and rivers and historic buildings and thus begin to care about what happens to them. And for these advocates there is no better or more important time to walk than now, when the processes of globalization, the ascendancy of car culture, and the ubiquity of cheap communication technology are increasingly alienating us from our environments, our neighbors, and ourselves. Both histories are written in such a way that they place the reader at the end of the historic road, hand off a baton, and say, now it’s your turn, walk, you’re our last and only hope.

But in taking such an untempered romantic, nostalgic, and somewhat regressive stance towards walking and its relationship to technological progress, these writers fail to encompass the complexity of the issue in ways that contemporary art and literature of walking has. The narrator of Sergio Chejfec’s recent novel My Two Worlds sums up the dominant discourse on walking when he writes, “Even before I could understand it with any certainty, in all likelihood I sensed that the main argument in favor of walking was its pace; it was optimal for observation and thought, and furthermore it was the corporeal experience with the best syntax to accompany one in life.”

This statement sounds remarkably similar to Solnit’s when she writes, “I know these things have their uses, and use them—a truck, a computer, a modem—myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed…I like walking because it is slow and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”

Many of my favorite writers and thinkers have extolled the virtues of walking. I like the idea of it, it’s true. But alas, if I am honest with myself, the peregrinator’s progress is not conducive to the kind of thinking I like best. For some reason, I much prefer driving on long, lonely highways, and if I do go walking, preferably in the woods, I inevitably settle down before too long in a comfortable spot and stay there. Hiking for the sake of hiking smacks too much of striving, accomplishment, that good old Protestant busy-busy-busy bullshit. No, I just like to wander aimlessly at a disjointed pace. Hey, wait, am I talking about walking or life in general?

And Many More…

By in omnigatherum

Today is the natal anniversary of a certain Shanna who regularly haunts the comments here. I asked her if she wanted anything for a gift, and, well, you know young girls — she wanted a bunch of fluff that had to do with hearts, flowers, stuffed animals and the color pink. Thankfully, I managed to convince her that Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards might be something she can make use of for her woo purposes, and she was absolutely delighted by my perceptive thoughtfulness.

So there you go. A gift for Shanna, and an article on Eno for Noel. If only I could have worked in an angle on extreme Scandinavian metal, cycling or wine snobbery for Brian, this post could have had something for everyone! I’ll keep aiming for that trifecta.

Don’t Run Away from This, Dude! Goddamnit, This Affects All of Us!

By in omnigatherum, writing

I certainly hope IOZ’s cryptic post is just announcing a hiatus rather than an end to his blogging career. He’s long been one of my favorite writers on the web. His prose is alternately highfalutin and comfortably familiar, but always highly enjoyable and sometimes even breathtaking (I can easily find several instances in my own writing where I can clearly see his stylistic influence). I love his calm insouciance and even his disdainful sneering, especially when answering angry hecklers with quotations from The Big Lebowski. (I even watched that movie for the first time years ago so I could understand all the references.) And most of all, even though it was an acquired taste, I deeply appreciate the fact that he often forced me to think about things in a new way, not by being cheaply provocative or predictably contrary, but by being a genuinely iconoclastic thinker. I’ve often found myself uncomfortable and even pissed off by the things he wrote, especially early on, but I quickly came to realize that in many of those instances, it was because he was forcing me to confront my own intellectual laziness, that he had essentially zeroed in on something that I had been complacently accepting without careful scrutiny. It was the same sort of irritation that you feel when you’re comfortable on the sofa, and you’re asked to get up and move. Eventually, I came to eagerly anticipate and delight in the provocation, and even when I still disagree with him, I’m glad for having had the chance to be challenged. I imagine he must be a fun person to shoot the breeze with.

If you are done, IOZ, here’s a heartfelt thanks for all of it. Best wishes.

Brinksmanship

By in crime and punishment, omnigatherum

Being a homeowner, I thought I should look into a security system to protect my property from the roving hordes of barbarians, cannibals, zombies and other undesirables sure to be seen lurching around the post-Rapture hellscape (no sign of Jeebus around here yet, but it’s still only late afternoon). I took an informal survey of the yard signs throughout the nearby suburbs, and a company called Vector was the clear favorite, but still, I ultimately decided to go with Brinks. I figured the people who make armored cars should know a thing or two about keeping your stuff safe, right? And installation was a snap, so now I can kick back and relax, safe and sound.

What? Oh, no, you misunderstood me. I didn’t actually install a security system. Jeez, you know how expensive those things are? I just stole a Brinks sign out of someone’s yard and put it in my own. What burglar is going to call my bluff when there’s so many houses without security signs around here?

The Yellow Peril

By in environment, omnigatherum

I drove down a rural road this morning, turned around and came back the other way a minute later. Not only was the pollen still swirling through the air in my wake, like a grainy mist or fog, but I could see my tire tracks, as if I had driven through a light dusting of snow.

There are many lovely things to appreciate about spring, but this is not one of them.

Pietzsche

By in nietzsche, omnigatherum

It translates into this: I end up playing video games with a bunch of 23-year-olds until 3 a.m., and he ends up reading the Nietzsche I give him.

This is a pretty cool glimpse into Glenn Greenwald’s personal life. I already held him in high esteem for being the closest thing to a mainstream Noam Chomsky we can likely have in our media, but he’s a Nietzsche fan too? Awesome.

Omar Is Taking His Evening Constitutional, Yo

By in omnigatherum, the wire

If at any time besides its treatment of Templeton The Wire flirts with caricature, it does so in the character of Omar Little. Yet no one would ever reduce such a monumental culmination of literary tradition, satire, and basic human desire for mythos as Omar Little by defining him as mere caricature. Little is not Dickensian. Nor is he a character in the style of Thackeray, Eliot, Trollope, or any of the most famous serialists. If he must be compared to characters in the Victorian times, he most closely resembles a creation of a Brontë; he could have come from Wuthering Heights.
The reason that Little so closely resembles a Brontë hero is of course that the estimable sisters were often not writing in the Victorian paradigm at all, but rather in the Gothic. Their heroes were Byronic, and Lord Byron himself took his cue from the ancient tradition of Romance, culminating in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but originating even further back. Little would not be out of place in Faerie Queene, and even less so in Don Quixote: an errant knight wielding a sword, facing dragons, no man his master. The character builds on the tradition of the quintessential Robin Hood and borrows qualities from many of the great chivalric romances of previous centuries. Meanwhile there is an element of the fay, mirroring Robin Hood’s own predecessor—Goodfellow or Puck—and prefiguring later dashing, mysterious heroes who also play the part of the fop, as in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
As previously mentioned, Little also has the flavor of the Gothic: brooding, hell-bent on revenge. Indeed, there is a darkness to the character that would not suit Sir Gawain, but does not seem out of place in a Don Juan or Brontë’s Heathcliffe. Little is in fact an amalgamation of these traditions, an essential archetype.

The Wire re-imagined as a Victorian novel. This is the coolest thing since Adam Bertocci’s retelling of The Big Lebowski in the form of a Shakespeare play. I think this makes me a gigantic dork, but I don’t care.

Kaleidostrophic

By in omnigatherum

“What’s your favorite color?”

Such an easy question, wouldn’t you think?

That was my mom asking, though, and given the context, I had a feeling she was aiming to get me a gift, most likely clothing. Gods, please, no. Not that again. Not a godawful honkin’ bright purple shirt that will never get worn, even out of pity and obligation, even while lounging around the house. How do I answer? Let’s go full-on philosophical. Split every hair in sight.

“It depends. What are we talking about?”

“Huh? Just… your favorite color, that’s all!”

“But it depends. Do you mean like pure, abstract, contemplation of color for its own sake? Then I like purples and blues. If you’re talking about clothing, I like faded, worn colors — whites, greys, blacks, olive drabs; nothing bright. If you’re talking about painting my living room for me, I like soft, warm colors, anything from yellows to browns to greens. If you mean when it comes to vehicles, I like that grey-green color that I’ve seen on some Toyota trucks. If you mean hair, almost anything goes. If this is about flowers, the brighter and more varied, the better. So, again, what are we talking about?”

She made an exasperated noise and went back to what she was doing.

I don’t try to make people’s lives difficult, I really don’t. I just can’t play along with questions that demand a one-size-fits-all answer.

And So the Conversation Turned Until the Sun Went Down

By in omnigatherum

I haven’t disappeared, I just spent a long weekend visiting with a close friend. Taking turns reading out loud, trips to the mountains to enjoy the almost-spring weather, and lazing around on the couch watching TV. Life is very good. Back to the blogospheric grind as soon as I catch up on sleep.

No Complaints, but I Wish I Had More Time for My Brain

By in omnigatherum

Snow. We were promised an inch and a half, and we ended up getting something close to ten. (The ladies in my life have precisely the opposite complaint, come to think of it.)

We’ve been lucky so far, this being the first significant storm of the season. But after the trauma of last year, I don’t give a fuck. I swear by Odin’s icicle-festooned scrotum, I don’t want to see another snowflake for ten years, period, full stop. You know how Caligula ordered his soldiers to attack the water in the English Channel? Well, that’s going to be me; stark raving mad, hacking at snowdrifts with a sword. Or maybe I’ll just run screaming off into the woods, where I’ll become a wendigo and prey on the local hillbillies.
Anyway, I have to hit the road in this mess in a couple hours, so the rest of my day is probably shot. But here’s a story from a few weeks ago to entertain you in the meantime. And if Shanna shows up jeering about how this would barely be considered a flurry up in the frozen tundra of Canuckistan, throw something at her.

Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work

By in omnigatherum

I’m laid low with a bad case of food poisoning (Chinese takeout). My goals for today are modest: spend most of my time dozing in the comforting embrace of painkillers, and maybe have a bowl of soup. Regular programming will resume when I return to the land of the living.

From Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday evening, I lost eight pounds simply by my body violently ejecting everything that wasn’t nailed down inside of me. Maybe if I can catch the flu later this season as well, I’ll have my bikini body all ready to go for warm weather!
What is it with hospital waiting rooms keeping the TV tuned to Fox News? Nothing quite like sitting there shivering, aching and moaning like a junkie going through withdrawal as you watch G. Gordon Liddy tell you to invest all your money in gold and the news anchors debate just how much of a Communist Jared Loughner is.

The Only Good Thing Ever to Come Out of Religion Was the Music

By in george carlin, music, omnigatherum

I know it’s de rigueur for the blognoscenti to avow their hatred of Christmas music, but I love it. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, carols like “O Holy Night”, “Angels We Have Heard on High”, “What Child Is This”, “Away In a Manger”, and even “The Little Drummer Boy” are some of my favorite pieces of music, holiday or otherwise. Being in the Appalachian region, it’s easy to find lots of instrumental versions of Christmas music featuring traditional folk instruments, and I especially love the version of “Snowbird on the Ashbank” on this compilation. (Here’s three other favorites that I’ve collected and listen to every year.)

Sound and scent are so especially conducive to a contemplative state of mind. Music like this, specially reserved for one particular time of year, thus heightening its emotional intensity, combined with the smells of cedar and pine, mistletoe and sugarplums, sage and holly, and, of course, freshly baked foods — well. Who needs heaven?
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