All that stuff I said earlier? I was quite drunk. Completely. Not that what I wrote was worth disavowing, just to be taken with a grain of salt, lime, and tequila.

Qute drunk.

It's been throwing me off. I was doing a halfway decent job of not getting...something.

I've forgotten now.

I hate having hair. It's so inconstant. every time I walk by a mirror (which is often in the north americas) I am pushed to check my appearance. Hair can say a lot, even though all my studies have classified hairstyles as "cheap signalling."

A lot of thing fal under cheap signalling. I want to argue about hair because it can take a long time to grow. Hardly whimsical. Shaved heads, like I had, should be cheap signalling. I could be bald, or gray. or have biting leeches that grow and bite instead of hair. Who knows?

Probably not leeches. I have little use for blood that wasn't produced by my bone marrow.

Unless it's my type. O+. I'm quuite average.

I hope to take writing classes this summer break. But I sorta forgot to pay them. I doubt I can charm them into teaching me for free. I'll sure try, but I doubt it. The only advantage I have, eh, the only advantages I have is the inconsistency of English majors and the crippling bureaucracy of every large system I've encountered.

I've had this diligent suspicion that the only way to go through life is naked and fearless.

Perhaps it's time to test that.

I think I miss going crazy.

Not crazy in the traditional sense. I don't mean babbling drooling biting myself and pinning things to other things. I mean just diving in.

Going crazy is taking part in a very natural process. It is a conscious decision to dive into the uncertainty.

Because it is there; I swim in it, breathe, rise to the surface and spit it at the passing gulls. Doubt, frustration, excitement, wonder, surprise, watching the car in front of you on the freeway spit up a pebble and crack your windshield.

The freedom that oozes out of our ignorance. We have no idea what is going to happen next. We gamble, yes, we hope, doubly so. We don't know. I don't know. So it's okay.

I'll do what I think is best.

Will it be enough?

It'll be something.

I think I like being part of the uncertainty.

Training Continues: Lesson 34: Pwnage

All the baby books say that your child should be teh pwnzor by their first year. They're coming along well; today Ender said his first Chuck Norris joke in l33t speak.

So people always ask me, "Do you put up the picture first or write and then put up the picture?"

No!

That is, no, nobody ever asks me that.

In truth, I pick out the picture from a plethora of art I've stolen- ...eh, art I've fair-used from the various internet tubes and then proceed on as usual. Sometimes the image will provide me with an anchor for a mood or theme but usually not. In the editing process, the image appears as a bunch of html code and that conveys to me very little mood except for maybe futuristic-robot-language mood. (That mood can also be conveyed by gratuitous amounts of LEDs.)

Sometimes I'll listen to music. It also helps establish a mood but even less consistently so than an image. I can listen to a few songs or albums over and over again to try to grasp what I'm feeling but not many. Sarah Mclachlan's Surfacing album works pretty well for the introspective stuff. And for falling asleep to. And maybe the rare karaoke party when I'm alone in my room.

I'll throw in Live's Throwing Copper when I'm feeling morbid.

Portishead is good for when I'm feeling morbidly obese.

I haven't chosen an image yet. Maybe I won't. I didn't used to. The original intent was not particularly artsy; nowadays with tabbed browsing and e-mail instant messaging I figured a picture would indicate at the quickest glance that I had put up a new post thus saving some people the effort of reading the first few lines to find out.

People are often surprised by how considerate I can be. The inverse is also true.

Rituals are important in my writing process. Not crucial, but I certainly know that at night if I get out of the shower and sit down to write with my wet towel tucked haphazardly around my waist I have a much better chance of engaging in critical thinking than if I say, slide over to YouTube to watch videos about copyright law explained by Disney characters.

Today as I fed Ender and Joshua a healthy breakfast of single-grain oatmeal and Cheerios, NPR played a live recording of Every Day I Have to Cry by musician Arthur Alexander. He wrote songs for the Beatles. As I engaged in the daily battle to get more oatmeal into Joshua's mouth than onto his face, Joshua began to bop side to side in his high chair to the music. I stopped, looked at him for a second, then I began to dance along with him. Ender looked at us like we were crazy, then he bopped right along with us.

I think this is why people have kids. Moments like this when you suddenly have someone to dance with. It feels like you'll always have someone, that they'll be with you forever.

I don't want to have kids. I don't believe anyone will be with me forever. We're all here for a little while and I prefer to enjoy as much of our little while together as long as I can. It's okay if it's not forever. I have this small time with my nephews now, the three of us splattered with oatmeal and dancing. What more do I need?

I won't deny the possibility that I'll change my mind. It's also possible that I'll find religion and join the Marine Corp. Parents, mystics, and Marines have the same mantra, "You can't possibly know until you experience it."

I can only respond gently with "But now you can't possibly know now what life would be like without it."

I don't think I'll put a picture up today.

In the constant maelstrom of reorganization that is my bedroom, I stumbled across a pile of journals. The earliest is from 1998. It would be an admirable summer goal if I were to organize everything I'd written chronologically and translated where necessary. This is not a new idea, but every time I consider it the same fear arises: as I gaze upon the anthill of what I've produced my edges will blur into depression. And depression leads to poetry. Nobody wants that.

Besides the inevitable delusions of euphony, it'd be bliddy hard to track it all down. The journals' relationship with linear time can only be classified as blatant infidelity. I will write in one journal until I'm distracted by the bright color or page size or sultry binding or dark color of another. If arranged from most-written-in to least, the cheap, wide-ruled composition notebooks with covers that look like a dead channel on a tv screen or the world's laziest Rorschach, they would contain 98% of the handwritten writing. The beautiful leather-bound journals would contain the other 2%. Sort of the opposite ratios of the economic classes they metaphor.

Ooh, second summer goal: Fill up the nice journals. Fight the alphabetic disparity. Redistribute prose to the pages that need it most. After all, we're the most English country in the world. If anyone can do it, it's us. I mean me.

Damn, I've lost myself in analogies again. I'd better just go to bed before I hurt myself. I'll do all that stuff I said tomorrow.