cool website!

this one is rad. I was looking for my own blarg online, and I found this instead!

http://library.thinkquest.org/J0110014/NewFiles/art.html

drawing ghosts looks fun!

the headless ghost of ann boleyn! yikes! looks like a bad date.

this is a ghost called a kelpie. no thanks! too scary!

my 4 new girlfriends

Ipso Facto.

L to R: Samantha Valentine, Rosalie Cunningham, Cherish Kaya, Victoria Smith.




My favorite is Victoria. Who is yours!

songs with clatter bones

down in the bardo

Throw away your Excesses, slough off your Detritus, pare down to Basics. In the new century, the Myth of the sole rational Actor has been debunked, but the many tentacled, hyper empathetic social Networker will not replace him. No thing shall replace our dying Ethos. The Pendulum swings in all directions at once, and without its metronomic creak keeping time, the Praxis falls flat... a jumble of words where once was an Arc. Two by two, the Words disembark, leaving a dead Husk of a Narrative, like an old battered ship at dry dock.

Take yourself down to the landfill, let them pick out and resell that which others can make use of and throw out the wretched remains. Out with the old; the new starts as a clean pair of feet on the first steps of a long road back home.

transformation!

"the Death card is not a card of death - it is a card of transformation.

In the Tarot, as in reality, Death is nothing more than a transition to the next level of life. Whether you believe that a soul goes to heaven or back to Earth to be reincarnated, the fact remains that the soul lives on. The candle is extinguished, but only because the day has come. The river shown on many versions of the Death card is a symbol, showing that life will go on, no matter what disastrous things happen. The river water will reach the sea, rise into the clouds, then rain onto the land to flow into the river again. Nothing is destroyed, because nothing can be destroyed - there can be only transformation.

The only real reason the transformation shown by Death is so catastrophic is because it is being held back, fought against by those too afraid to realize that change is beneficial. Every change happens for a reason, and Death is a force like Justice in that it is absolutely fair. It does not discriminate against one group and spare another - everyone is equal in the eyes of Death. So if big changes are happening in your life it is certainly plausible that you are the reason for them. There's no point fighting death, it only makes things worse."

- http://www.ata-tarot.com/resource/cards/

Baseball makes you gay

I tried to think of something funnier than this, but I couldn't do it. Hello, it least I tried, you lazy butt!

the waiting game x5000

"you know what really grinds my gears? time & waiting. waiting for something you want that isn't coming as fast as you'd like it to but you really can't control." said me, to myself.

"but you gotta have patience, man." said the doorknob.

"what? you can talk?" I said.

"yeah, sounds like it, huh?" replied the inanimate object.

"oh my god i'm losing my fucking mind." I said because that's what I was thinking, and sometimes, when the chips are down, I can be direct like that.

"yes you are, but its going to take a while. so maybe do something else while you are waiting, and the waiting will go by faster." said D. Knobber.

"that sounds true. thanks." I said, and then I left the house, because you can't just sit around waiting for stuff to happen or you really will go crazy.

unrelated picture (or maybe this is what the doorknob really looked like. I don't know):

Reading Everything is for Winners

If you're wondering, that's the Loch Ness monster carrying a scuba diver in its mouth. And if the back of the book is to be believed, there is probably a story in there about that thing being in love with a person, or vice versa. Or maybe they're both in luv with each other at the same time! Perfect! Unrequited love is crap.

I don't know about the other stories in this book, but the first one, Black Charlie, made me cry, almost. It was really, really, really good, and also very, very good, and beautiful too. When a short story about a giant alien otter from another planet that carves statuettes out of rocks with his teeth and tries to sell them to an art collector using a reformed fur-trapper as an intermediary manages to convey something about love and art and the struggle to find meaning in existence, you have to take notice and then shut the fuck up about all the other books that are out there talking about Iranians flying kites, or about how its SO important and super grayt that brown skinned people in hot countries read some Flaubert or whatever. Shit, pretty much every other book out there can go get burned. Just kidding.

The author is Gordon R. Dickson, and the net doesn't have a lot to say about him, but I'd guess that he probably has some sort of cult following. He died in 2001, at the age of 77. Also, he was an asthmatic, proving that nerds and asthma are married to each other.



Here is a little piece of Black Charlie, which I took some of my own incredibly valuable time to copy down:

But there was one more thing to tell. For a long time, after I returned home from Elman's World, I did not look at the crude statuette. I did not want to, for I knew that seeing it would only confirm what I had known from the start, that all the longing and desires in the world cannot create art where there is no talent, no true visualization. But at the end of one year I was cleaning up all the little details of my office. And, because I believe in system and order- and also because I was ashamed of myself for putting it off so long- I took the statuette from a bottom drawer of my desk, unwrapped it and set on the desk's polished surface.

I was alone in my office at the time, at the end of a day, when the afternoon sun, striking red through the tall window beside my desk touched everything between the walls with a clear, amber light. I ran my fingers over the grainy sandstone and held it up to look at it.

And then- for the first time- I saw it, saw through the stone to the image beyond, saw what Black Charlie had seen, with Black Charlie's eyes, when he looked at Longan. I saw men as Black Charlie's kind saw men- and I saw what the worlds of men meant to Black Charlie. And above all, overriding all, I saw art as Black Charlie saw it, through his bright alien eyes- saw the beauty he had sought at the price of his life, and had half-found.

And, lastly, how super is THIS cover?


Gordon R. Dickson is my dead science fiction homie, and that's the truth of it!

CLH

My great grandfather, Chester Losie Hancock, had a trick he could do. He could roller skate around on his hands. My grandmother says he was too tall to be a gymnast, a few inches under six feet, but he practiced on the pommel horse every other day at the gym. There is a picture of him in 1923, when he was 31 years old, doing a handstand on the beach. In the picture, it’s easy to see his athleticism. Big quadriceps, narrow waist, calves flexed with toes pointed toward the sky, and a casual expression, lank hair falling down, away from his face and toward the sand. He’s just standing there on his hands, looking like you or I would have if we posed for a picture on the beach, right-ways up. The picture comes along with an obituary clipped from a newspaper in 1938.

Great grandpa Chuck was born in Brooklyn in 1892. He met great grandmother Lulu in California, but I don’t know when or where, maybe down south, near Pismo Beach. He signed up for the army in 1917, and was chief gunner’s mate on the USS St. Louis during the Great War. Sometime after he came home he found a job as a sales representative for the Santa Maria Gas Company, and then my grandma was born in 1921. He died at 46 of some sort of heart problem. My grandma says that it grew too big from fighting off an infection. In the next year or two following Chuck’s death, my grandma met my grandpa, a freshman at UC Berkeley, when he started boarding at the house that Lulu ran.

I’ve never seen a picture of great grandpa Chuck before this one. There is a disconnect between us. I do not grasp what my inheritance is from him. There is something of him in me, of course there must be, but it’s not his physicality. I’m athletic, but a gymnast has a special sort of ability. Looking at it him on the beach there, I can imagine the taught grace with which he did things, the muscular intelligence he must have possessed. I imagine the fluid, shifting balance with which he moved, angling his center of gravity and his posture to maintain poise. Carrying a big plate of food to the dinner table, loading heavy baggage into the trunk of a car, closing a door with his heal, even, or doing whatever it is that a chief gunner’s mate does when his ship is under attack.

If you take the picture and turn it upside down, he looks like a diminutive, airborne Atlas in an old-timey bathing suit, propelling the Earth through space, driving us onward through each day. He’s settled and focused in his work, sure of where we are headed. In 1923, on the beach in Pismo maybe, when his heart was beating strong, and his two-year-old daughter played in the sand nearby, he must have thought, “I have survived a War. I have a job with the gas company. I have produced offspring. And now I’ll do a handstand.”