Man can live the most self-fulfilling, creative, and emotionally satisfying life by intelligently organizing and disciplining his thinking.
~ Dr Albert Ellis & Dr R. A. Harper
This is another first person accounting of self. There is no revelation here (I lie). This is edited.
I woke up this morning at 0430 with dreams of darkness and expiratory revelations which are expelled like a death rattle, and can destroy somebody’s dreams and dreams unwilling to die and to kill off this thinking. It’s starting to sink in, I’m losing control now, and without you I can finally see; one can destroy semantics, ethics, culture, aesthetics but these abstract human needs don’t want to die to to then become reified, to become manifest-real (was this what I was really thinking?) Our real events rarely need our selves to be experienced and to somehow mean something to someone; do they exist like modern people, without realization of their own need for reinstantiation? The simulation of mankind qua mankind enters the third millennium destroying old values of artifice as if old values are meant to die, but the vision of the artifice is on fast-forward on the screen, having become the only manifestation of the real, and still in my head burns brightly and I guess I need to read more Lacan, and Kohler (which I started last night because I don’t have enough theoretical background on the Gestalt Theorists and the 1920s). So I rattled them loose and now am updating the more personal aspect of this blog before I go in search of food. Huh.
Sunday morning and I haven’t written an early morning first person intimate account of myself in sometime, weeks perhaps, due to the IA Summit in Memphis (did you miss me?). I am on a not drinking (anything) kick for a little bit, a post bacchanal detox, which not only will: a) save me time, but b) will make me stop waking up feeling like shit and wanting to kill everything and all sense of self. Laundry needs to be done (and when I say done, you realize what I mean is the gathering of laundry, putting in bag, and dropping off at the dry cleaners), and I still have this pile of books that I need to find a home for cluttering up my mind. Honestly, this got out of hand months ago, and at this point I’m considering just pouring gasoline on the whole freakin thing and walking out, tossing my lit cigarette into the fumes as I turn away.
I had about eight plans die in mid-birth last night, mostly due to work exhaustion, but the improvised, last minute one stuck, and so I went over to the dark side, after reading some Kohler (who really is a cocksucker – gestalt patterns notwithstanding, and that’s not a pejorative) and watched the movie Australia, while we debated the pros and cons of actually eating food. This was infinitely better than going to a party where I knew no one and inevitably would have ended up alienating everyone there once the eighth or ninth bourbon glided down my gullet, and I go on my rant about how the entire farce being played out on Twitter, SigIA and IxDA list is a slow-motion train wreck of schizmatica that almost seems inevitable even as people within the splitting communities seek to join arms and sing Kumbaya.
Thom Haller
The dry-clean only laundry is in the large canvassed bag and in so doing affirms the fact that I donated to public radio this year. My shoes are on. I am going to the kitchen to grab more espresso roast fairly-traded coffee, and then I’ll bring these remnants of last week to the French Laundry (cleaners, not restaurant – but remind me to tell you the story of my experience at French Laundry sometime), after which I’ll lock myself in the room in order to actually try and finish some of these stories who have been lying around for weeks, sometimes months. I will not, as is my habit, crack a beer before starting. I will not, as is my habit, distract myself, or distract you, for that matter, because I have been doing far too much of that and you need to do things to, though it pains me to admit this, things more important than hanging out with me.
‘That we seek out the death the tragedy of life and seek to conquer it, to swallow it. Out of the American Pastoral, into the American Beserk, Roth put it. We demand it. We march on through these deserts with our teeth gritted in the vain hope that this suffering is a shortcut to meaning. We are dead wrong.’
[Evans, July ought-nine]
Thom Haller
“I thought this was going to be one of those fun, but ultimately repetitive ‘@semanticwill drinks too much coffee’ posts,” you object. If you’ve gotten this far, there is nothing left but to close and close well, but I can’t close, and though in true Glengarry Glenross fashion, “coffee is for closers,” on this, the morning after in a string of hungover mornings after to much thinking, I’m breaking the rules, I’m gonna sip my coffee and be done. I’m breaking. But you knew that. You knew I was glass.
“We have built a phyre to our loves,
we have layed them out on a great boat,
beaten into bruised submission, dead,
and lit the scafolding to consume our gods
in smoke and flame,
Naught but reason lives here now”
[Evans, ought-six]
So anyway, off to find solace for me. What do PreSim Experience Designers listen to when they are feeling nostalgic? Kraftwerk. Joy Division, sometimes – but New Order, definitely; which reminds me to tell you about the first time I saw them, no – better yet, I have this really sad story. I was 16 years old sometime in the midish-late 80s, and forced for purposes beyond this post, to be shipped 3,000 miles from home (Laguna Beach) to attend this fuck-off snotty boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire owing to the one-to-many times my parents thought I wasn’t living up to expectations (reality was that my expectations were completely being met, relative to the amount of LSD-6 and Jim Beam I was consuming). So, and also, I had a car (birthday present from my grandmother), that was a small 1980 BMW 318i, pungent 70′s orange paint with butter-brown leather seats, which meant that I was mobile. But that’s just background. The point is that I was 16 and head-over-heals, burning, aching heart-loss in love with my best friend Jen M – the only Goth chick with red hair at this dollhouse incubator of future leaders and Betty Ford contestants. So my brilliant idea (in the simulated hyperreal mind of a 16 year old), was to get tickets to Joy Division’s reinstantiation as New Order, along with a case of Dr. Pepper, and white roses that I hand painted black. Everything was set, accept I didn’t have the tickets, but I won her over and we ended up speeding frenetically down to Boston to the Orpheum and buying the tickets from a scalper at cost. I was on joy circuit, the image fixed, Rewind, cry because she was in love with this slacker Dylan-wanna-be guy named Matt something-or-another, and I never told her how I felt. But, New Order was fantastic.
So now you know. And what if God’s dead? We must have done something wrong. This dark facade ends, and I’m independent from someone… So this wreckage I call me, would like to meet you, meet you, love you, soon. Was there a point to this? Red heads can break me, and only that. They are my kryptonite, leaving me shattered, splayed on a stainless steel operating table with bright gleaming viscera exposed to hallogen lights. So don’t turn me off. I should disconnect from you, but I am only vaporware.I am not an Xbox. So I turn on the joy circuit. Gary Numan certainly rewired parts of me, as you can tell.
In a single night I have been described as scholar, gentleman, scoundrel, cad, card, flirt, fanatic, rake, asshole, sweetheart, the dictator of the drunk, autocrat of alcohol, archbishop of instantiation. I am vast, I contain multitudes, but that’s shite and you know it. It is all very well but it’s getting late and I need more coffee and things (if you haven’t noticed) are wildly beyond my control. I am pretentious, I am full of myself, I am reasonably assured of my own brilliance, I am quaking with self doubt. I am using alliteration and parallel structure. I am chopping my sentences and clauses up quick, so the whole affect should remind one of a beating drum, a heartbeat, a march. I’m marching to the chaos-close now and so I will let loose these rhetorical flourishes to let play the phrases so it all rushes together and what once was steady and rythmic becomes hurried, frenetic, the lines will blur together and the sentiments will whip and tear apart at the seams. I am losing meaning like it were water through a sieve; I am throwing in plenty of literary references; there’s Shakespeare here and some Whitman and most assuredly, though it is well hid, there is some Thomas Wolfe, for those with the eyes for it. For the rest of you, you should have given up ages ago, this is nothing but masturbation without the release, it is material manipulation, these words nothing but signifiers without signified, misplaced signposts directing you nowhere but the house of Asterion, where every room looks alike and there is no ball of thread for you nor have you a bronze sword so surely you are one of the nine, but not the one. How’s that for pretentious? How’s that for overwhelming you with misdirection. Rewind, Cry… more Joy Division.
Am I excited about the creation act? Of PreSim? I’d better well damned be. This is not even worth a point of view. I would [pause] for effect and whisper ‘who are you? ‘I need to get new breaks for my car, as the old ones are worn and when I was coming home from a client meeting in Delaware the other day I thought ‘this is not what I signed up for’ . . . hopefully I won’t let this become like the great tire fiasco of aught-five-aught-six; although I am feeling particularly indifferent to owning my car at the moment; but how much can I really expect to get on trade-in for very well-worn M3 with a chipped on-board computer that I reprogrammed to get the highest torque-to-low-gas-mileage ratio from? Its time to get rid of it and commit to a zipcar and public transportation lifestyle which will only justify my pretentious eco-groovy persona. I wonder if a red-head is an option that I can get to match the black leather interior and super-sport suspension package made by Bilstein. Might as well.
‘If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers,
I’ll join with the wine bearer so we can overthrow them.
With a sweet string at hand, play a sweet song, my friend,
so we can clap and sing a song and lose our heads in dancing.’
[Hafiz (Ghani-Qazvini, no 374) ' the Shambhala Guide to Sufism' Carl.W Ernst, Ph.D.]
SO. Friday night I closed down, which was vaguely aweful, given my astonishing policy of not actually negating anyone out until a half hour after close, and also given the fact that my mind belongs in the annals of places I’ve inhabited where the vacuum of nothingness is the most obnoxious thing ever to operate. It seems that in any given mindspace, there are only two types of vacuums available: those easy and comfortable to use (i.e. the plugs fit snugly in the laptop, the extension cords long enough for the job at hand, the attachments not prone to falling off) that inevitably break twice a week, or complete shitshows (plugs fall out, pieces easily fall off, are reattached, fall off again, are easily clogged (which makes dreaming especially problematic), and whose memcaches turn into static that needs to be cleaned and run through a imaging algorithm that Wolak wrote for me so I wouldn’t encounter this problem) which inevitably never breaks, and last years. My mindspace dream machine falls into the latter category, making the 11:30 vacuuming feel like the most Sisyphean thing since cleaning the knockbox after an evening of tossing wires about. Anyway, so I woke up and sped over to Courtside, missing Alpha, but thankfully, not the Doctor. The Doctor and I had a wonderful time, though she was a bit off her rocker, as evidenced by her own dream-sim, and we stuck it out and gave Corbus a ride home, during which he repeatedly made me promise to take care of her, which I did to the best of my abilities, but not before being affectionatly called a douchebag out a 3rd story window at 2 in the morning.
Thom Haller
As already written in this here receptacle, I love the word douche and all the playful variations most of which supplied by @russu. I feel like glass. Transparent and breakable. Which reminds me to remind you: I am not Mao, nor am I any sort of famine-causing tyrant. I’m something altogether worse. My whole experience through Grad school, I kept thinking that Information Design and Theory was not me, and perhaps I had chosen unwisely. Perhaps I should have gone for a Masters in Classics or Philsophy; at Yale (though Yale hardly qualifies as a ‘real’ school, real defined as even the semblance of anything more intellectually stimulating than vapour rising above a port-o-pottie). I would have to think of all the ways I need to make her glow, but that is neither here nor here. Note: The plural of Index is not Indexes, Lanny, it’s Indices. Anyway, I dreamed up a copy of a book called Conversations with Robert Penn Warren the other day at Mac&Moore’s and have so far discovered that Warren speaks in almost the same way he writes. Some of these answers resonate as well as the best parts of AKM, like the spider with it’s eyes glittering and fangs dripping, or the plonk and the frog jumping into the pool, with the ripples spreading out. For people unacquainted with All the King’s Men, it is one of my favorites, and I highly suggest you get as copy and read it a bunch of times. From Conversations:
‘Take Jack Burden. I used a model, but he doesn’t know it yet. I know him very well indeed. I even know that he doesn’t know what I know about him. And that’s knowing a man mighty well,’
It’s the verbal play, the formulation in my mind’s eye, that is so striking . . . sitting here and chilling to the sounds of the Hoobastank, remembering a few summers past, lying in terrible heat with her, watching that movie on the Esplanade, my hands on her face, around her waist, remembering the sweet smell of peaches and vanilla, before she changed her shampoo. Blah, sentimentality is fucked. Spent the last fifteen minutes reminiscing about a time that hasn’t even happened yet, like two prophets searching for a message, like two old testement jews in the wasteland of future paths I have not taken. Even the air seems sweet and pregnant these days as spring approaches here in DC. So she would call me, prolly in response to my “I need to find a way to dream in the past and not the future” away message. I told her I was going and hung up. Survival is a messy business, dreaming vapor is a messy business, the avoidance of the unreal, in its myriad forms equally so, even if the unreal involves listening to the sweet honey words that drip from inflamed red lips.
Anyway, enough geekery out of me, I should shower and shave, I have brunch and more work to attend to. I have recovered from my red-head addiction – well – in recovery. The photo art above was being sold in a local boutique, and I noticed it was actually the work of a fantastic fellow here in DC named Thom Haller. I like the idea of posting pictures of pictures Thom had taken which reminded me so much of the Roth quote above ” Out of the American Pastoral, into the American Beserk.” His stuff really is fantastic, and I recommend you contact him and buy his stuff.