a fit of regression

It's hard to escape our irresolute minds. Old patterns die hard because we like them. Itwas a tough morning and I digressed into self-rebuke and loathing. Self mutilation never looked so good, so I did this instead. Breathinbreathout...breathinbreathout...

glass & steel

twisted shrapnel repeats inside me,
a fragmented, slivered, echoing mistake;
more relentless self-absorbing examination of intention -
a mirror that peers into the mirror that peers into the mirror -
i squint into its surface
anxious, it can shatter
sure, it will shatter
afraid, it will shatter
preemptively, i shatter

malignant despair, tangled rebuke,
fallacy of intricacy shaded by apathy,
after thought falls away, left with out
mangled, shivering dystopia
forced hand, fingers dripping cold with blood
impotent, important undeniable
trainwreck train wreck
trainwreck train wreck
trained/wrecked.
---------------------------------------------------------
Call it therapy I guess. Then this monsstrosisityty was born:

sph(e)re of influenc(e)

future discord, malign and sterilize:
keep the piece
the jaws of life can't
extricate

a symbolic truth, failure incarnate:
the flesh. the fleshly. the rotting;
a corpse of a dream of a shadow of sanity -
an eph e
me
ra l notion
of tan g(le)ibilit (libel/libert)y

uncertainly uncertainty waits in the doorway,
coa(t)l black, jackboot fascist depravity:
stompingon-stampingon-stompedon
hostility

eggshell ricepaper, membranous translucence,
brittle, untrusting, oxidized, and rusting

i'(m
e) falling a part,
mygripdestroying:

a butterfly's wings smashed on my fingers

---------------------------------------------------------

It was a tough morning, but Laura stopped by at work (where I'm writing now) and helped me to feel better. It's a good feeling, being loved. It's hard to feel deserving sometimes.

from a random email to a co-worker

...not evolutionary psychology, per se. I have, however, investigated a bit of the neurological origins of individuality and the evolution of developmental psychology…

I’ve really only scratched the surface of psychology, a discipline that I long considered banal and pathetic, which I’ve now come to see as a natural evolution from the discipline of philosophy, of which I am extremely fond. Therefore, the working title of my book:

power (in)serenity: the death of philosophy

I presently and rather inductively working on a survey of all disciplines in an effort to more fully assimilate them all in a manner that I find unconfining. Educational bulimia is an unattractive by-product of the overeducation of the Western world. My present valance is to self-educate to the point of convenient retention, then come up with a casual, causal theory of everything.

I call it the science of the art of a bunch of shit in the new university of the old school of jake (anyone can audit, but no one graduates).

hrm. too much wine at this hour, but this’ll be funny when you read it in the morning.

from home,
ajek

moreso's the pity

oh where does the wind blow,
what can the winding road tell me,
too tall to teach the reach of reason,
too short to take me where i want to be:
cold feet and calloused hands.

new leaves

As the trees lose their leaves, I continue to turn new ones over. I'm realizing my strengths and I can't always be so afraid to do what I want to do. Yes, other people may find it not suiting their tastes, but I have to explore the possibilities of who I am. I enjoy exploring and trying new things, regardless of how well its been done by someone else, because what I do, what I think and feel and know, is intrinsically different than any other person that's ever existed.

That is the beauty and genius of humanity: our vast differences; all of our myriad differences that combine in a random soup of genetic matter. And what do we get? Humanity. Patterned chaos. Each of our traits is distributed evenly and well throughout the species. Extremely desirable traits are reserved for a minority, while the majority shares with each other equally the fruits of our genes. The minorities at the other end then become the possibilities for change in contrast to those "perfect few" that enjoy the attention of desirable traits. The few on the opposite often make the desirable traits into undesirable traits, allowing them the strength of conviction to pursue change in the majority. If they can change the majority to accept their desirable traits and ignore their undesirable traits, then they can affect change in the overall scheme of the species.

As an example, consider the blind. The causes for blindness are quite numerous, but obviously it would either be something that you are born with or some loss of sight later in life; it could be considered to have been a biological or mechanical process; it could have been sudden or have happened over time. The challenge of the blind is then to convince their peer or social group that their blindness does not affect their other abilities. Truly, in the case of blindness, those that cope with the loss of the sense better than most - that is, those that stand out, head and shoulders above the rest - the ones that are exceptional regardless of handicapped, or rather, the "perfect few" that have coping schemes so good that they can operate at levels above those of most sighted people. These people are the ones that affect change, not because of their handicaps, but because of their inherent abilities and people's preconceptions of what it means to be "able."

Anyhow, yeah, I think I'm done rambling for the day.

fallfire

Just made this for a contest over at http://www.johnmundtesquire.com. It's not bad. I made it with various screenies taken from a program called Visual Thesaurus.

a: reason to :strike

hornblower, magnified and taciturn
indemnified, now ostracize,
when the world held high a head and sighed
what is required to we free to be
when is gone and done,
we rose again as one

(in)titled

This is pretty weird, a collection of "bad thoughts from a bad day" that I found scribbled on a piece of paper at work. I seem to recall it was a tough day.


I

a simple gesture,
a forgotten motive –
listlessly rustling in the weeds, forgotten by the river
restlessly unhappy, sinking in a muddy quagmire
disembodied unreality: this is not happening to me, the familiar thought a lie
a fragrant breeze teases my nostrils as i sink
deeper into whatever this is;
i try to concentrate on that thing, one thing,
any thing
that will ease this constricting ooze before it overtakes,
inevitably intoning, no longer breathing, i sink

deeper
deeper
i sink

II

bloodied railways hyperextended
superficial inspection,
a matrix of spoiled milk and forgone
conclusions, rippled apathetically
into-over-under-indefinite motives –
mitered redolence, failure to
communicate.
meagerly anticipated, steel on steel
reprisal
in fatuous deference, alarmed at
my reason –
I’d rather be

fallacy of flippant truths,
I’ve chosen a better lie
it’s easier than smiling.

III

my head has become smooth from rubbing it –
i feel is a fallacy that i adhere to
i cannot express this
i am is more appropriate
i am disgusted with myself
i am disillusioned with my loved ones
i am disgusting
i am not able to remain awake
i dream of sleep is a useless euphemism
i am tired of being alive is another
but they nonetheless mean something
too many i’s make you blind

IV

i’m not breathing to spite you
why do you defend yourself
i’, just trying to – i don’t know
i don’t care
what is that to me
who are you to judge
why did this happen
it’s all your fault
get out of my head
get out of my mind
get out of my world
that’s the best you can do
buy me off with questions
not enough, i’ll get you yet.

-jakeStephens
transcribed 09.14.2005

rantinabulation: a study in a#m7

frindulous, exaspertame, opiodine, ivertoid disclarifications:
whither goest thou gobly infractious knave?
was’t winderous wroth, chapsing intessimally?
undestrayed?
willidious crow, will crownst!
wilious, despotocranial, fluidition;
oft vilisibility taciturned, malefacted will:
rise unclarified, return unsent.

-jakeStephens, (A+MCP)*(MCSA-M) / MCSELMNOP = EIEI.0

the true believer knows!

According to a recent poll, 65% of Americans blame God for the flooding in New Orleans. 15% blame the President, 12% blame Al-Quaida, and everyone else was asleep when the polling took place.

Who knew that hurricanes could cause so much damage? Sheesh. Not to be flippant, but it kind of goes with living on the coast, doesn't it?

Blame the guy/lady upstairs (i.e. your head, not God) for the damage.

Ah well, I'm going to Hell. I polled a number of non-believers and they all hedged their bets and said so. Good thing that there isn't one. Oh well, call it karma, but that's be like getting mustard in your peanut butter (which I do actually like): you just marvel at the pretty colors and try to keep on keepin' on.

Truckin' ya'll. Truckin'.

exploration in the key of me

3:1

clotho tremulous, the fear in her voice is the only indication:
“something wicked this way comes”
has always sounded more impressive than our acrid, simple terror
of the unknown
of providence
of salvation – i know not what may and not what
means we should take
to arrive on these plutonian shores
unscathed, but for our fiercefully
beat heart –
“beat heart, beat and bleat and cower”
showing no sign or other outward indications
but casually distinct,
she trembles in our arms

lachesis tremulous, her voice a rage of indications:
something wicked this way comes has always sounded our simple terror,
revealing impressive depths of unknown providence;
by what means we arrive unscathed on those plutonian shores
our fiercefully beaten heart, not salvation,
beat and bleat and cowered,
showing no distinction,
she casually empties our trembling arms

atropos tremulous, her voice rages,
simply sounding my terror,
revealing depths without providence,
a plutonian shore where gasps a fiercefully beaten heart:
bleating, trembling, cowering:
an empty-armed indistinction,
an empty salvation

-jakeStephens

eyespy

fecundity in motion,
pass that lotion,
and i’ll spread a pint or two around
more to the point, i’ll make short work of passing notions,
more’s the pity if you don’t mind;
and if you don’t mind, then i don’t mind and we don’t mind together;
a three-legged race to the finish,
i bet we come in first,
but please don’t spread it around,
i wouldn’t want anyone to know those shortcomings were mine;
yes, i’m certain i’m better than you at this and that and the other thing too
so much depends on it,
that i shudder to think of what might become of not thinking so,
and so do
and so smile
and so it is:
my Perception is Reality

-jakeStephens
07.01.2005

data malaise, a boot record

structured parity check will begin at next login,
cycling redundancy, each error processed with algorithmic accuracy;
last known good configuration has been invoked,
but integrity is uncertain and profile corruption may be imminent;
cascading failover, a catastrophic failure -
malformed data, a collection of unnamed and orphaned records.
directory structure awry and unreadable,
the partition's pattern, a jumble of chaotic bits;
lost files will not be recovered,
the boot record, unbroken, spins lazily on fluttering platters,
no log or trace of this indistinct sequence of events.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Laura's birthday today. 31. Life is a beautiful thing and I am full to the brim with the sublime notion of living it. Perhaps I've been listening to too much Literary Criticism. It's a good lecture, by Louis Markos. I've actually picked up a version of Critical Theory Since Plato that I've not quite gotten around to reading. Must study for the MCSE upgrade test (wheee!). Must also create curriculum for Teya's classes over the summer - with any luck, she'll be inspired to want to learn again. The public school system in America is in a sad state... at least where I work and live it is. Welcome to the place where the intelligent are lumped in with the duds and are forced to drown in a sea of mediocrity. More decrying bureaucracy another time, since I'm on the compan dime right now. Back to work!

kafka-esque

it's the first book club today and we're all discussing "metamorphosis," from good ol' franz kafka. it's only the first part, so it's straightforward. book club consists of mainly pople from work... okay, only people from work, so it's an amalgamation of critters ranging from one-celled organisms to multi-cellular creatures that have what appear to be rational and/or cognizant thoughts.

which is a bonus for conversation.

no big a-bomb type insight into the book at this point, just the obvious and standard observations of Gregor Samsa turning into a big bug. Yeah, there's all kinds of subtext that can be found, as per the introductions, but I don't read introductions any more. Not since I read the intro to "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley; just in passing rambles he says something to the effect of, "that's why he had to die in the end."

Fucker.

That's the equivalent of having "And he never knoiws he dead until the end!" in a trailer for The Sixth Sense.

At any rate, the book I got for Metamorphosis is pretty cool. I picked it up from www.abebooks.com for $30; it is a 1946 first edition in decent shape. I feel so special! I also saw on abebooks that the copy of Robotech Art I that I have sells for a couple of hundred dollars; I feel so Kewl! Just call me "L33t ßoOk D@Wg."

I lIk3 h@cKt3xT, It M@K3$ m3 f33L $O cOoL.

ßü+ $0/\/\3 þ@ÿ$ ¦+ #ür+$ /\/\ÿ #3@þ +0 \/\/r¦+3 +#¦$ \/\/@ÿ, +#@|\|» Ç0Þ ¦ #@\/3 @ 9RçR@/\/\ +0 þ0 ¦+!

H3H3. 3NoUgH fOr NoW. Th3 d@y @w@iT$.

meta-reality

i was being facetious. gor that words fucked too.

who the fuck

so evidently someone already has orphanos; that's okay, i thought of a sweet new word, meta-reality; never ind i was dead at the time. is this thing on? my fingers are itchy, my ass is scratchy, like wool.

you got'ny fingers in that bag, randolph?

able, and a cane, walking tall, like an old man on viagra.

more pissants in my tea, now i'm running out of frosting and ideas, so
i can't stay conscious for long; canticle article, descending,
yellow journalism and an artifical hip

opiode, the menagerie.

i'm not sure why our minds drift like treeswings in the breeze

i'm not sure why our minds drift like treeswings in the breeze

spinning a slow and steady arc, lonely and creaking,
bereft of a body to fill that empty hole
through which blue skies always seem to appear,
even in the bruised, stormcloud gray of today

i'm not strong enough to always be strong,
but i can be lonely enough to feel like i'll always be lonely

the smell of autumn rain coalesces,
peppering the last remaining leaves in the branches,
toy soldiers beating loose wooden drums,
no rhythm or cadence to the swiftly growing din

the treeswing is a familiar memory, often frequented,
it's comfy, and warm, and predictable

despite the rain, a child approaches the pendulous weight,
chain tethers jingle gaily in the breeze ironically
there's no fanfare as the void is filled and the rain continues
there's no signal that it will end, but it does in a bolt of lightning

a boy runs,
the tire is empty again

good words

a current, undeniably me

in a minor
key, turning circles
in dissonant
harmony
constituent melody, twitching
furtively the quavering vowel
of overtone in independent
integrity

a lyrical movement, its modes unspoken,
measure by measure, tongues unevenly ringing,
voices beyond us, breathing with meaning

now reverberates undeniably,
now oscillates uncontrollably,
now brassily swaggers,
now nasal, now sanguine,

the River

the River is music,
thrumming and humming, silent, the Giant;
passing the banks by, asleep in the morning,
the Body is golden in mist o’erflowing,
a symphony of song,
a cadence of dream,

at rest, transposition,
the timbre, the Key,
heart by beating heart, We sing

and our verse is instiflable,
our chorus, crescendo,
the People We singing,
our words are a window:

a nation, a notion of clamber our
words ineffably dream the sky overspun
with intricate rhythms and cleverest feet,
clogging in unison, oh melodious pipe,
oh singer of songs, oh bringer of dreams,
we beseech thee and lament the loss of our callow youth,
our wisened sages, and all the inkhorn flowers between,
we regret, so somberly, that we forget we live,
that we forget we love.

how we fiddle our tongues and think it music,
we silly race, we silly animal
we silly We


thank you.

new poem smell

yep, it's that time. explorations of rythm and subtlety of meaning. there's even a little oversimplified introspection and a dash of symbolism.

---

a strong west wind

cloven-hooved, agape, in consequential rhythm-rape,
odorous odifery in my periphery
stuttered for the sake of me
shuttered minds, dots connecting

fettered boat, an empty shore
weathered oarlocks overworn
shifting beachsand underfoot
lilting hoarsely cry the gulls
arranging rocks in circles
amazing and strange, cold sand
each agate borne smooth, but these,
these are not your remedy

muttered incandescently
sweltered in the light of things
open-jawed, westerly, plague of locusts came to be,
drifting like the snow, semantic shift in spite of me.

---

so there you have it. it kind of sits there like a toad at first, but then it grows on you... or at least it does me...

moreover

so today is better.

i'm presently listening to the history of the english language, focusing now, in lectures 18&19, on shakespeare. aye, there's the point. interesting bit, the quarto vs. folio versions of his plays, like hamlet's to be on not to be speech - more "grammatically" correct in the quarto version, and seemingly less flowery - an actor's version? a less perfect version? why was it changed? interesting.

anyhow, i think i'll start my new art project tonight. or maybe right now. hrm, there's an idea, the present. but not a lot of time, since i'm at work right now. maybe i'll map out some other ideas. i'm not sure that i like the yin-yang idea, but i do like the circle motif, because it's going to be hanging in the neonatal icu, where laura works. the circle is a symbol of life and eternity, so i like that, but they do have to watch out for death, since it is, after all the icu, so i do like the idea of the yin-yang, with the light in the dark, etc. hrm. a bit worth pondering.

i mapped it out in 4x6 (a little smaller actually) rectangles, because i'll have to print them out in pieces and then stitch it afterward, kind of like the piece i did for laura. i mapped it and thought about maybe trying to find photos that will fit the shapes for each grid, but the shapes aren't really that complex and i'm not sure how to represent properly areas that would be all white or all black, since there's no detail at all... maybe i could make it into two different colors - purple and yellow, perhaps. i don't want to do a cross or an ankh - the cross is a tired motif for me and the ankh, well, people just won't get it.

the only thing i could think to do otherwise would be to create pieces for each one, but that's about 16 separate items.

i could also take smaller close-up pictures of things and stitch those together. maybe some flowers, but i don't have any that i'd like to shoot, since the roses are all dead. hrm. that's not a bad idea though. or maybe a face stitched together from other people's faces, but who to use? laura would not appreciate being in it - maybe a bunch of babies? that might be a little too ann geddes or whatever her name is - i hate that baby shit. unless i use full-sized paper and then it's four pieces, rather than 16, since it's 17.5x22.5, so it's twice the length and width of a standard page... it bears some consideration.

i also have to work on my song and get it recorded so that keith and jason and john can come up with their parts. i want to keep a feel in the song. only thing i noted when we practiced it was that jason needed to slow down the drums in the chorus, maybe half-time, compared to what he's doing now - try to get it to open up a little, because the song needs to breath in that part... but the bridge really needs some work. i had a rhythm that i thought would've worked, using triplets instead of standard 4/4 type rhythm. oh well, i'm off for now.

minor dactyl surgery

today was a lousy day. six hours on-site trying to get wireless networking going...and a printer...and that's it! Nothing complicated or hairy, but i managed to get side-tracked every time i turned around. how did it start? oh yeah, getting this old windows 2000 dell on the network. no problem, the system has a usb nic and a pci wireless card installed (wireless b, not g, like everything else in the house). so i try to get the nic going and it's refusing. while waiting for a reboot, i decide to pull the pci nic out and move it to another system, a windows 98, that we didn't have an adapter for, then i head back to the original system and proceed to dig myself into insanity trying to get this thing in there. every time i think i have it, error 31 pops up in the device manager. what the fuck is error 31? i look it up in the knowledgebase and find out that it means a parent device isn't working... okay, it's on a add-on usb card, that might be it, so i move it to the on-board (1.0) usb connectors, to no avail. so then, i decide to swap the usb nic i have with a different one i the office and get the latest drivers at the same time... try the nic after the switch. nope, try again. so then i open the dell back up and put the original nic back in and download drivers for the pci nic on another system...

but wait, do i have a cd with open space that isn't scratched to shit or otherwise unable to be opened due to poly-session-unreadable-osis? as luck would have it yes. and the drivers are all happy and the networking is done... big sigh of relief...

enter the customer, stage right:
"how's it going"

"oh fine, thanks. i got things going by swapping nics around"

"that should work"

oh wait, let's back up, i forgot that during this time i was working on his print server as well. yeah, it has a usb and parallel connection and the parallel connection didn't want to see the ibm 7039 laser attached to it. Probably afraid of losing a finger to the behemoth dinosaur. i astutely point out, "oh silly mr. customer, you need an ieee-1394 cable for this thing to work." and slap him firmly on his beefy posterior. he is unamused, but during the following minutes and subsequent reboots (see above for proper linear order...this comes around during the cd search), i decided to call the shop, since i was only five or six miles away, and ask for someone to run me out an ieee-1394 cable, which they do. and i connect it and the printer is still not recognized by the print server although (as I found out later) it did actually light up the parallel LED on the print server. can you hear the excitement in my words?

so back to the customer and our conversation...

"you get the print working on all of them then?"

"uh, no. the cable didn't seem to do the trick, but i've got some ideas."

"okay..."

so he went away to make money, since he's a stay-at-home-self-made-type, and i proceed to reconfigure the printer's settings in an attempt to get things to print. i changed the language to pcl and thought i was clever. i changed the parallel port mode to standard and thought i was even cleverer... hell, i remembered that you could set a standard tcp/ip port up and select lpr, instead of raw, and configure it to print to whatever port by lpr number... and i actually printer to the printer, but just got garbage characters...hrm, bad driver perhaps?

enter customer:

"how's it going?"

"well, the printer is kind of sucking."

"oh, well, just make sure that the hp 5550 is working. if you can't ge the other one going, i understand."

but i'm an mcse.

"no, i can get them going. i've got a few ideas."

after trying the driver on the windows 2000 system and the windows xp system over the wireless, i decided to try the printer locally on the xp system and proceeded to get shit characters. i reset the factory defaults and tried again... now i'm out of paper and have to send it through a second time. no dice. so i try it on the windows 2000 system, which the customer had taken it off of,to put it on the print server. it should print just fine, right?

wrong. still printing crap.

this is with the built-in drivers and the downloaded drivers for 2000/xp, from lexmark, not ibm, since ibm washed their hands of this damnable fossil.

i put the printer on the 98 system and try to print... no luck, doesn't even try. *sigh* oh wait, there's an epson print driver installed on here and it's got an epson printer port. aha! so i change the driver & it becomes lpt3 and i know that it won't print, but do i try? you bet i do. you bet i fail. so i'm in the process of uninstalling the software from the system... did i mention it's a pentium 200 with 64mb ram? no, i didn't... so the reboots are five minute ordeals. and i sit and wait and think about how many hours i've been here at this point (something like 4)

enter customer:

"how's it going?"

listen wiseass..."going not-so-good; printer won't print from anything. maybe it sucks." i forgot to mention that the sheets i had sent through it before twice i had now started sending through for the third time, and, oh yeah, now it's jamming every other sheet *sigh, how stupid can i get?* "but i'm just trying it on this 98 system to confirm... well, fuck me runnin' it printed fine."

"no shit?"

"yeah, no shit."

"well as long as it can print to something..."

"i should be able to set it up to print between them through sharing." now, i know this is wrong now, and i know that i should've realized that 9x would not be able to provide the xp systems with a driver and it would all suck anyhow, but i was frazzled, cut me some slack. so i start setting up file sharing on the 9x system and of course it doesn't work. the sytem can see out but nothing sees in. and i can't share. and yes, file and print sharing is enabled. so, i dig out the networking keys from the registry and remove dial-up networking and try to reboot and the systme locks up and i reboot and the registry didn't take so i have to do it all again and reboot and okay now i can see things (take a breath, take a breath).

"how's it going"

"you're sneaky, i didn't see your entrance written anywhere. the 98 system is able to share, but (working as we speak) network printing (realization hits) won't make a bit of difference for the xp and 2000 system, since the driver sucks, but hey, let's try it (to no avail) again."

"can it print to the 5550 as well?"

"oh yeah, sure thing." realizing that i hadn't set it up yet. "just as soon as i do it, it will."

"well, everything is pretty good then."

"yes. except for your wireless encryption settings."

now, i'm not sure what rock that thought crawled out from under, but i curse that thought to hell and fire and damnation.

of course, you can predict the rest - a couple of hours showing him how easy wpa was to set up on the xp system and how the 98 system couldn't use wpa and neither could either of the other two, so let's move to wep and fucking passkey fiveortencharactersneverworksihateihateihateihateihateiahatethat shit!!!

so i put it back the way it was. and retested printing and it's slow on one system and then its not.

customer says, "well it least it wasn't anything easy. i would've felt bad if it had been too easy on you."

"here's my card. i'm usually a lot better at my job."

yeah, that's the day. it sucked. it also continued, but i'm too tired to even consider writing about it...

ouch

so i just dumped my guts out personally and rambled about the history of the english language and the historical jesus, only to get spanked by internet explorer's security settings and lose my whole post. a bit of scribbled margianlia, lost in the dustbin of history.

damn, now i really understand the implications of the burning of the library in alexandria.

*sigh* i am fortune's fool. but i lament...

i'm going to go contemplate the validity of my mcse...

unsolicited mail

unsolicited mail

is this thing on?

mapping the stars

I made this a while back, but it's cool and I need to decorate. ;^)

the die has been cast

die-cast member of motives unseeming;
winsome, worthless wagging words -
alliterative, the hammer slams,
the ear's door shut,
is doesn't seem like much,
this gesture,
but it means everything to me.

from ether to substance

Blog. Blogger. Clogger. Clobber. Climber. Limber. Limb. Lamb. Slam. Slum. Some. Same. Aim. Lame. Game. Name. Shame. Shade. Share. Shire. Wire. Fire. Four. Nor. Soar. Soul. Bowl. Bile. Bowl. Foal. Foul. Fool. Cool. Drool. Drawl. Shawl. Shoal. Shale. Shag. Shrug. Bug. Bog. Blog.

So there you have it. The first post.

I'm not sure what. I'm not sure why. I'm just trying to sound smart, I think. Hrm. Fairly monosyllabically, no less...