New Blog

Hey I'm starting a new website to accommodate more bullshit as I think it up (like the new podcast I'm piecing together, the music clips I want to post, etc. )

http://imijasis.tumblr.com/

Christmastime is a time for...

My new jacket is so motherf*cking rad.
So extremely rad.


Thanks to my wife.

It's the stuff of life...

If all of life were normalcy and comfort, good days would be redundant and success would be the same as stagnancy. Love would be like something you slipped into, like sleep or like a flu. Laughter would be reserved for it's most meaningless, cordial contexts, and would thereby become as insulting as handshakes or ironic high-fives exchanged between strangers. People would get face-drooping surgery to look young again. You know, what if that "old familiar feeling", that "old age fondness" is simply what happens when people's emotions die down enough for the lows and highs to lose amplitude... so  I suppose it's worth fighting it to remain whole people with whole reactions. It's like... maybe they're like muscles.. and if you don't exercise feeling pain, the same muscle that lengthens into pleasure becomes atrophied and only invisibly tightens every few days or so.


But I'll keep lifting this huge shit, and it's gonna hurt like a bitch. It's gonna hurt to go. It's gonna hurt to think. It's gonna hurt to say hi. It's gonna hurt to say goodbye and log off. It's gonna hurt to see her. It's gonna hurt to not see her. It's gonna hurt when I realize I'm staying. It's gonna hurt when I realize I've only been there for 2, 3, 4 months. It's gonna hurt when I realize I'm going home. It's gonna hurt when I see her again. It's gonna hurt when I see them again. It's gonna fucking hurt. But I'm gonna be fucking strong when it's over, and people are gonna watch me flex and lift pickup trucks off of burning children, flex and topple buildings as I walk through their walls, flex and battle herds of burning, rabid cattle as I treat them with vaccines and put their flames out with water that I spray from my inflated lungs, flex and educate blind Nairobi schoolchildren in hybrid, eco-friendly, desert-based and nutritionally balanced self-sustainment/economic-development-farming while I broker peace deals with tribal chiefs as they file in the door draped in white flags covered in peace-signs....


so yeah... feel sorry for me now. I appreciate it for sure, but we'll see who's worse off in the end.

Part two or three

My cat is an idiot. "So seriously, what do you think?"
I am a very annoyed person, perpetually. Every favor that is asked of me is always the last straw. Somehow, even on a Saturday morning like this one, with cold sun sharply slipping in the cracks in the curtains much like I imagine a scalpel slips into and underneath skin, somehow even now, his innocent demand for some mental response in me was the fucking last straw. "Cat," I said like it was a confession, "I didn't listen to your poem. I heard a part of it and I liked that part, but I'm a little overwhelmed right now. Can we do this later?" My cat, who always looks sarcastic, somehow looked at me sarcastically, bitterly. I felt bad; but I was still annoyed, overwhelmed. For some reason on Saturday mornings, it always feels like the world is rushing across my brain like for some reason all the morning foot traffic in New York City was re-routed to cross the rickety rope bridge that starred in at least 2 Indiana Jones movies. I fell back asleep a little sad, hoping I would feel better when I woke up for the third time today. It was 3:00 PM.

Part one or two

"So what do you think?" My stupid cat asked eagerly, with his grating, needy voice, "Any thoughts?" I gave him thoughtless words, "I don't know, man. It was good. You're cruising. You've got a nice rhythm going." I actually thought it was completely incomprehensible. It meant as much to me as every other piece of verbose nonsense he would read out loud. His poetry sounded like it should mean something, but I could never make head or tail of what was going on. He needed something, "Maybe I'll read it again and see, you know, if it feels right." I was just sleepy. That thing was happening again, where I feel like I've passed out almost completely, every part of me  but my face and legs. I didn't want to do anything, but the veins in my legs were fast rapids, crashing through under my skin, itching. And the stupid world wouldn't stop requiring my face to talk. Brain asleep, face still going. Eyes open, but if you looked into them you might think I was dead. I was a rag-doll with the legs of a turrets patient. My cat was reading again. I heard him say "Am I dreamer or a dream, a character, small thing, flash of glass reflecting sunlight into the eye of the victim in a car crash " before I stopped taking account of what was happening outside my head.

Proof that I am no longer in control, or never was...

That morning, around 8:00, after a one hour physical fitness session with the squadron, where we lay in freezing wet grass and contorted our bodies, where we flexed our fingers and faces in synchronized agony, pushing the ground against all hope that it would ever stop pushing back, fighting slowly, a strong, constant force against our palms, the ground, ever pushing to lay flat against our panting faces, our heaving chests, a cold, flat, grassy, and yet somehow comforting embrace. The sun came up slowly as we heaved and dragged our pathetic selves across the grass and up and down. Every push from our puny arms pushed the ground downward in space until we had fully uncovered the glowing orange flanked by clouds on fire. Nobody was talking. I tried to talk to the one person I knew. It was like trying to talk to a paramedic driving in traffic. Responses only barely fit the criteria of responses. I was alone, but my muscles were grateful for the pain. Why? Because that morning, at 5:00, right before I woke my son up, I had swallowed a small capsule of a drug designed to stimulate my brain, to make me awake and motivated, to make me more in control. I had driven to drop my son off, cheerfully drinking coffee and singing loudly. I had dropped him off exactly as planned, at 6:00. I had made it to squadron PT early. I had waited in the cold and kicked a soccer ball around to stay warm. I had expected somebody to join me in this, but the people only looked sideways at me.


After PT, I was excited to go shower and get in my nice warm uniform. After exercise, getting clean is a great, refreshing feeling. On my way into the gym locker room, I thought about how little we'd run at pt, and how I really needed to keep up on my run. Logically, since I was sweaty already, now was a great time to do a workout on the exercise bike. Good for the back, good for the legs, good cardio. I didn't question myself. I got on the bike and pushed myself for 10 minutes. I got my heart rate to 171 and kept it there. I was impressed and energized. I was miserable, because cardio is miserable, but I won in the end. I walked away having completed the task at hand. I felt much more worked out now. 


In the shower, as I relaxed, my brain opened up for business and started greeting guests at the door. Of course, there was me, who strutted in having just worked out, and felt pretty refreshed, didn't feel like I had slept only 4 hours the night before, and had done for a few weeks or months or years. I sat down and just asked for a water, because it's really the most refreshing thing. Then in strolled me, the me that dragged myself like a water-logged wedding dress- the me that felt like he was always just waking up, because he was always just waking up, who knew for sure that one of these days, those little naps I took in the car was going to lead to a sudden and pivotal point in my life, who sometimes forgot to shave and sometimes forgot I was in the middle of shaving when I blindly,  brainlessly and sleepily walked into the living room and fell asleep on the floor again, only to realize what I had happened only after I was already late for work. He walked in having forgotten his socks and his pants at home. He was covered in spilled coffee and smelled like he hadn't showered in a week. He walked in and looked at the me who had just finished working out after working out and said "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

As I sit

and it seems like everything is a rushing around, a wind tunnel that flings shit, flings pianos at me like they were made of balsa wood, the little sentences that people hand to me feel like the pelt of a piece of sand in a roaring desert storm. I cannot hear what you are saying; why are contributing to this?

I have to pull my head over the surface of the rushing water to understand what you're saying. No, I fucking heard what you said, I just don't know what it means. What's that? Oh. My day was fine. Thank you for asking. It is so hard to sound sincere when only most of me actually is.

Advertising

I think if I was an advertiser, I would probably do a series of commercials that took place at funerals. It would be like, people at the funeral of a loved one, tears streaming down their face, breaking apart inside, at their most exposed, most vulnerable, most miserable. Then Bill pulls out  his smartphone, which transports him instantly from this awful reality to a land of endless internet possibilities. At first everybody else at the funeral is horrified, because Bill over there is on his smartphone at a funeral, but seeing how happy he is, they go check out what he’s looking at, and are instantly blown away by the number of apps on the marketplace or whatever, and then they’re gone, and suddenly the funeral has become a dance party, and then we get to see that the dead guy is floating above them all in spirit, and he’s happily filming it all with his smartphone.

Because, if something is enjoyable at the funeral of a loved one, it really has to be great, right?

Ruining Your Childhood

Inspector Gadget was a shitty movie. It made me angry. 

When Inspector Gadget 2 came out, I was confused.

Star Wars Episode 1 made me like the Star Wars Trilogy less than I used to. What was the world doing to itself? Was this an example of greed winning out over art?

When I heard an interview with George Lucas, he said something like, of course lots of fans of the originals didn't like the new Star Wars movies; they were too old to; they were outside of the target demographic. You know who the most popular character was? Jar Jar effing Binx. 

And here, an entire generation of movie-goers was like, "What did you do to my movies?" 

How funny. 

In a recent post on the Best Week Ever blog, I saw a post titled "Of course the Yogi Bear trailer looks stupid. You know what else was stupid? Yogi Bear."

And indeed, it probably was. How would I have enjoyed it as a 4 year old, if it had not been stupid on some level? The more I think about Yogi Bear, the more I wonder how it entertained me in the first place. 

I was all about Yogi Bear, Inspector Gadget, and Bugs Bunny. They were completely awesome to me. I think back on them like pinnacles of entertainment, like models of excellence. When my friends talk about the unsurpassed greatness of Care Bears, the Smurfs, or, essentially, any children's show that our parents didn't let us watch, I think, 'what an idiot. They have no idea what they're talking about'. I am, in my adulthood, still critical and judgmental of these obviously, to me, inferior shows. 

As adults, we all stand by these things which we grew up with, which instilled in us this insane sense of loyalty and attachment. I saw an episode of the Pink Panther cartoon the other day, something I used to completely love. As a child, I would hang in anticipation, nervous, clutching, clenching and fixated on what was happening. Now, snoozefest. It takes something else, something entirely else, to fire off these neurons now as an adult. Now what I tell people about is not how awesome a show The Pink Panther was, but rather how awesome it was to watch as a kid.

I must tell you, in was a long time since a movie or TV Show had breached this cold exterior and affected the emotional receptors in my brain when I watched Inception the other week and left feeling mostly just tired. My friend and I walked out of the theater afterwards- unimpressed, dissecting the film, walking with people who mostly seemed to love it. I watched the movie Kick Ass a few days later and loved it. The same way that I loved the movie  The One for an entire Summer, keeping it running on repeat for seriously an entire Summer. I know The One was one of the worst movies ever made. It was ridiculous and insane. It was hilarious, and stands out in my mind as a pinnacle of entertainment. I'm a little afraid to ever watch it again, because that might just ruin it.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

Reductio ad Hitlerum is a term for a fallacy of irrelevance (aka association fallacy). It is when an opinion, entity, or person is challenged in a discussion merely based on the fact that they can be linked by association with a characteristic of Hitler or the Nazis. For examples, look at criticism of any world leader since about 1945. The term was coined by Leo Strauss as early as 1953.


Godwin's Law, coined in 1990 by Mike Godwin, was, as he stated "an expiriment in memetics" (memetics being a term referring to "meme", originally coined by Richard Dawkins to mean a unit of social evolution through information transfer (articles, songs, catch-phrases, videos, etc. ) from person to person. The idea of the meme being related to Dawkins' field of genetics is largely based on the way that these pieces of information (videos, etc.) survive through a process of natural selection whose criteria for selection are dependent on the current state of the culture (e.g. what the hell were we thinking back in the 80's?)
                       back to Godwin's Law. In 1990, Mike Godwin stated:


 "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."


 This is very helpful to me, as my original intent in venturing into Wikipedia for answers was that i did not understand this string of comments: 


Comment 1: "The mind of [a fully informed, yet dedicated] believer is a disgrace to the human species." 
                                                                                                       -R. Dawkins
Comment 2: Hitler was "fully informed and dedicated".


Comment 3: Wow, Godwin's Law on the second comment. Impressive.


Comment 4 was a refutation of comment 2, and stated that neither Hitler nor commenter 2 "knew dick about dick" . Then somebody (not the second commenter) said that the second comment was obviously a joke, and commenter 4 was an idiot. Commenter 4 said he was truly sorry, and had realized the error of his ways. The conversation continued, and eventually some late-comer said "Why is everything these days always about Hitler?"


This string of comments was left on this video, where Richard Dawkins refutes Creationism with what he considers the most compelling fact (or observation) that we have at our disposal. 

pachao

I get nervous when somebody so much as asks me my name. The words come forced. The answer is not quite as close to the surface as it seems for everybody else. I say “um”, and there is a genuine pause as the machines spin and whir inside.  It feels like I am learning the answer to every question posed to me in the brief period I am given to look at the ground and say “um”. It’s like one of those TV shows with a psychic, who’s every response comes suspiciously delayed, because they’re reading people’s thoughts. I wouldn’t be surprised if people thought I was obviously lying. I’m not lying. I am a poorly designed, often wrong encyclopedia, with huge gaps in information, but brief, bat-shit entries for just about everything.

Abandoned window

The world unfolds

before me like an un-gasping-for-breath stream of un-punctuated sentences, meant as a metaphor for a meaning greater to a higher being than we. We sleep peaceful dreaming in colors that don't exist. There is no light inside our minds, only miles and miles and thousands of miles of dark tunnels, busy as all fucking hell, like rush hour in extra high speed. And to what end?

Somehow they're all driven, coordinated by consciousness, amassed to create, and what they build, like the sad pushers of stone that build cities for man, what they build for me is a little story-- a two dimensional metaphor for a meaning higher than it's two-dimensional characters. And that story begins with the words that you just read. You are reading that story right now.

Work is important

What you do here is valuable. If you didn't take up that space, nobody else would. If you didn't fall down those stairs at that exact moment, somebody else might have. You prevented that, you martyr, you. If you didn't annoy me, I wouldn't have been doing anything, not even existing in the moment that you did. If your space was empty, we would all merely be sucked into it like a black hole, because without you, nothing would be there, absolutely nothing. You are more than simply the water to a you-shaped riverbed. You keep this fragile balance of reality in equilibrium, and your non-existence would certainly mean an apocalyptic end to it all. 

The illusion of consciousness is nearly inexplicable. 

There are species of parasites that trick animals into eating them. Then they find their way to the brain and commandeer the animals' instinct into making them swim high enough to be caught by a bird, to climb high enough to be seen by and eaten by a larger creature. All with a final destination, sometimes leaping several different species to get there, to their naturally ideal habitat in the gut of some unsuspecting animal. All this is carried out without consciousness. All without thought or reason, merely biology. 

And then there's we, who have nothing but consciousness, who find ourselves trapped in psychological turmoil over the meaning of it all. Some find peace in letting go of the logical struggle and grasping onto a shred of faith. Some find peace in getting back to what their bodies are saying to them and surviving comfortably and healthily on instincts we have dismissed as unnecessary. They exercise and meditate, seek that equilibrium our bodies still beg for, all getting back to what? That unconscious, selfless animal state? It seems no surprise to me that so often those who lean toward religion lean thus quite far away from the reality of our animal nature, demanding that, as humans and not animals, we are above instinct, and thereby should fight for the right to laze, fattening, until the end times, distracting ourselves from our bodies through television shows and meaningless sports. It seems logical that nobody has it right. 

A new style

Here's my first stream of consciousness writing piece:

Bananas, cool morbid underground bananas my feet are a little chilly,,, , , , ,  ,

& penile implants undercut applebottom jeans boots with the fur. I hate that song. This writing style sucks.

Looking sideways

When I'm driving in my car, I cannot help but look at other drivers. Once in a very infrequent while, they manage to snap out of their robotic daze and look back at me; but most of the time, they are too deep in process, in thoughtless autopilot, to look anywhere but exactly where they need to. Sometimes, I realize that I haven't been looking at the road for a really long time. Subconsciously, I was taking care of the turns, the pedals and lights of driving, while my conscious mind was busy with the rest of the world, with looking at the other drivers, who never look back. A metaphor for my life. I can't figure out how everybody can seem so damn focused on mere tasks, when there are so many more real things to pay attention to. It's always nice when the mindless journey to a mindless task such as work is, by itself, an opportunity to step outside that autopilot. What most people do to step outside the mindless autopilot of work is merely the autopilot of home, and that won't get you anywhere.

Memories of my Childhood

The sky turns a bright wash of pink as my head hits the concrete. I love that feeling, when alcohol has taken you to bed and you are simply playing your body like a marionette, clumsily prancing about with all the strings tangling up. As I fall, I have no awareness of anything at all. When my head hits, like I said, I only know that the sky changes color, and I realize that I’ve fallen, as the sky has now opened up in front of me, pushed the earth back, simply to get my attention. My friends are manic with laughter, help me to my feet. Alcohol at age, I don’t know, we’ll say 16, is freedom. We’re suddenly stereotypes of ourselves in a stupid ‘90s movie. In the parking lot of the gold dome church that night, I have no other memories, just falling, then a little bit of blood, nothing too bad. I think we smoke and drink and kiss the girls and spend time sneaking around, feeling like our souls are on fire. We own the world at night, when grown-ups are confined to their houses. If we can make it outside and run, which we usually do, we can get to a hilltop somewhere with a backpack full of Mickey’s 40s or a bottle of something that makes you retch. We can get fucked up and hug each other and be sincere and somber when we’re exhausted from acting like crazed apes. It’s less a memory of an event than a memory of a feeling. A good feeling. Well done, us.

holding a dry rose head

This blog is all about me

Manual labor, tired and hungry, a new kind of humility, lies in sharp contrast to the humility of sitting slumped at a desk, tired and sickly, overly full from snacking.

I wish people would take my picture more often, so I could look at myself, and wonder who the hell that guy is.

Shoveling snow, sweaty and cold, taking off and putting on jackets, wondering if my tiny muscles look strong, panting and resting with every few shovel-fulls, is a new kind of humility, stands sharply in contrast to the humility of showing up to work and sitting, drinking acrid acidic coffee-like black water, eating stale snacks, and trying to muster the focus to work at work. 

I read what I have written several times to verify that I am just as cool as I thought I was before I forgot what I wrote. 

Driving to work sometimes, I sing along with a pulsing, energetic song, and remind myself that I do not have a voice for performing, no matter what anybody may say, thus reminding myself that I am surrounded by liars. 

I listen to the songs that I write thousands of times, and still leave them up for the public to hear. 

I find myself utterly hilarious, in the moments that I have forgotten how utterly pathetic I am, and especially in the moments that I must appear utterly, hilariously pathetic.

Like right now.

Self Portrait

As I drive...

the music cuts in and out. Transfixed, hypnotized by the passing road, I exist entirely in the back of my head, staring only through these two eye holes, watching just the road, listening to nothing. The music cuts in and out, but transfixed and hypnotized I don't notice. Static slides in and out, masking words and music, but so subtly and deftly that I haven't a clue. I'm transfixed and hypnotized by the ever opening road, broadening continuously from a pinpoint in the horizon, or bending slowly around mountain corners.

Beautiful and yucky, all at once

Winter Hellscape

Went on a nice hike lately. Got some pretty pics. Cold as hell, but looked nice, and quiet... which is nice. Thus, nice hike. More pics at:  http://picasaweb.google.com/daniel.hulter/100106#