Never been one to let the carrier drop

On May 2 of 2004, I joined/created/was part of the creation of a band called Mischief Committee. We’re working on a few last tracks before we all go our seperate ways, and we’ve had many people jam with us and (somewhat memorably) had a member leave for San Francisco already. But, at one point, we wrote a CD and had a CD release party with all of our friends and some of their friends and as far as I know some of the homeless population of Seattle there..

And somehow I never got around to ripping the CD and putting it up on the internet.

So now I have. Enjoy this particular bit of the number line, if you’re inclined, it’s at

http://www.mischiefcommittee.org/mc_album1/

Yes, it’s there in it’s entirety. I can’t claim to own this bit of the number line exactly, but then, I never really own anything. Everything I have I’m just using while I’m alive and hopefully when I’m dead someone else will come along and use it. I think of it as on loan from the Family. Those of you who know about the Family of dancing friends, or the Rainbow family, or any bloody Family you want to attribute it to, please make sure it all gets put to good use, when and if. I’m hoping I’m not going to die anytime soon – or that if I do, I go somewhere really interesting with lots of sex and friendly people and as little violence as possible. But I digress..

Anyway, so, I don’t own these tracks, but I am renting them on planet Earth for the time being. Well, me and Alex and Tory. It had a lot of fun moments, guys, and I’m sure glad we did it.

(p.s. Someday I’m going to set up all those lights and lasers and speakers and whatnot and have a free 80’s-themed party. It should be interesting seeing who we can get to show up.)

Once, a while ago, I made a comment on a mailing list about PLUR (which I think of as being the credo of the electronic dance community, although I know there are many who would tell me I’m wrong). I observed that the opposite of PLUR must be WHDD – War, Hate, Diversity, Destruction.

Just one problem – I *like* diversity. But yet unity sounds appealing as well. Which just goes to show the folly of having any credo at all, I suppose. I can’t even come up with unity within myself half the time – I’ve noticed that when I talk to myself, I tend to be more than one person.

Recently, I hit upon a interesting thought. What if I’m a cell inside my own body? Normally we think of the brain as being a whole bunch of cells built into a neural network, and I’m personally very foggy about what happens afterwords to give us free will, but it must be really interesting. If you’re ever bored, try to make a computer generate *truly* random numbers. It’ll keep you busy for a while. The cryptographers can probably write several very long books on the subject.

But really – how can I prove my experience on Earth isn’t, in fact, a experience of being within my own body, and all the other people I interact with – who produce such tasty food – aren’t in fact cells in my body.. and of course, I’m not better or more important than any of these other cells. I mean, we all are part of one unity..

At the very least, I am a team – all of my cells form one entity, which is me. Some of them might in fact be parts of other entities at the same time – as I’ve often demonstrated, I really have no idea what’s actually going on – but, they definately do form this person who walks around on Earth and does things – some of which appear to me to be improbable to come up with just by playing with a random number generator.

More in a friends-only post.

Me and K. were having a discussion the other day about life – as in, what ‘life’ is – I was commenting that there might very well be intelligent life on other planets, and that it was possible that not all life lived at the same clock speed i.e. a breath for a being made out of, say, uranium might take several thousand years.

Actually, I was theorizing tempurature had a lot to do with the speed of a life cycle.

Anyway, I checked the wikipedia, source of most knowledge, and it said this. So I’ve concluded that none of this rules out, for example, silicon based life that takes several hundred years to move.

Which goes to prove nothing. I’d like to think it demonstrates my out of the box thinking, but the truth of the matter is I suspect everyone thinks about things like this and I’m the only one who’s enough of a wanker to write journal entries about them.

I was looking at my webstats the other day.. and one particular track I wrote, Love & Hate, got over a hundred downloads. In one month.

Wow.

I may have to write some more songs.

I’m almost afraid as to what reception my mother’s birthday present is going to generate.

I really need to redo Mischief Committee’s web site and put up the tracks from the album.

Put it on the list of five million things that I really need to do.

Seems like nothing gets done around here any more..

For those of you keeping track, yes, I’m still alive. Although sometimes it seems like just barely.

Okay, so I agreed to come and be wooed by a potential employer in SoCal, and they put me up at the Radisson in Newport Beach, for a price that I won’t quote because it’s too horrific. This hotel seems to be very good at looking ostentatious, but has some serious problems with the details of being a good hotel.

My first complaint: All hotels which cost more than $120 a night shalt have fluffy towels. Their towels remind me of motel 6 towels – entirely too thin and small to dry off a entire person with.

My second complaint: despite the fact that I was clearly assigned a king size bed, they originally tried to pawn off two very small queens on me.

My third complaint: The laundry vending machines that sell dryer sheets and whatnot are mislabeled, making actually buying the correct laundry product difficult. The staff are very hesitent to refund money and mostly claim that this inadequacy is ‘somebody else’s problem’.

My fourth complaint: (and I admit, this may be petty) Room service closes at 10:30. Calling at 10:28 by the cell network, which I think gets time from the atomic clock, will result in them telling you they are closed.

My fifth complaint: There are no snack machines.

My sixth complaint: There is one microwave in the entire hotel.

My seventh complaint: None of the hotel entrances have access card readers, and they’re all locked at night, allowing access only through the front entrance.

My eighth complaint: Only a very few rooms have refrigerators, and no minibars either. 😉

My ninth complaint: The TVs are really small.

My tenth complaint: The hotel keys have ‘sleep number bed’ proudly emblazoned on them, but neither of the rooms we were in actually had sleep number beds.

My eleventh complaint: The wifi must be renewed every day, and for all I know they’re tracking my MAC address – certainly they ask for my name every day. They threaten to charge in the lobby, with placards such as ‘applicable charges may apply’

My twelfth complaint: The tubs are tiny – they’re not deep enough to immerse my head in, and they’re not long enough to stretch out in, and in general they’re just too small in all ways.

Aren’t you glad you have me on your friends list? Didn’t you really need to know all this?

Okay, sorry..
S.

In another hour, I’ll be 30. Actually, as Kayti points out, where I was born, I’m already 30. I’m not sure how I feel about this – I keep waiting to suddenly turn republican, but so far it hasn’t happened. I’m not sure what I have turned instead..

Depressed.

Why do I obsess on religion and hate it so much? I’m so sick of feeling this way..

I left the real world a while ago. It was rather pleasent. I just stopped reading the newspapers, stopped watching the television news, and figured they can all go to hell in a handbasket however they like. So far the kind men at the power company have kept the power on, and my friends at Blarg have kept the network connection up. Oil prices seem to be climbing but as long as I can get enough solar panels to keep my computers running when the power company starts charging twice as much a kwh, I should be okay.

Or will I? I’ve had thoughts that bordered on the darkest insanity I know.. this repeated anger that I was created without my permission and then forced to live in a world that requires me to eat and subjects me to miserable conditions unless I work – basically enslave myself to other people and other people’s priorities.

It’s frustrating. I want to build electric vehicles and write music. (and probably fiction, and probably fingerpaint for all of that). Now that I understand that all you have to do to be omnipotent is be a number line, my patience with this situation is waning, to put it mildly.

Did I ask to be created? I can’t remember it if I did – but it wouldn’t astonish me to discover that I in fact somewhere back in the depths of time thought that being a human would be a lot of fun. And yes, it’s definately had it’s high points.

But I’m not looking forward to the slow decay of years, and I’ve had enough pain already, thank you very much, I really don’t need more.

I went to a bipolar support group meeting today. If nothing else, it’s reassuring to note that I’m not the only frustrated one, nor the only one who thinks I’m stuck inside a system that often makes no sense at all or is counterproductive.

ClueTrain

I lack enough power to make it through the flight. I did get a chance to (via my cell phone) get the address of the hotel, so there’s nothing critical not happening.

I can’t keep track of what day it is. I think 27.

My life has been exhausting lately. I keep hoping things will settle down to a more managable pace, but as of yet it hasn’t happened.

Met with my lawyer today. Well, not really my lawyer because he’s leaving the firm in a week. But he took my information, radiated general legal competence, and I have high hopes for this firm actually figuring out a solution to my legal woes. Or at least, I can hope.

I’ve figured out why my dad saying the universe doesn’t owe me a living angers me: I didn’t ask to be created, and I am not permitted [or at least strongly discouraged] from ceasing to exist. Given that these things are true, it would seem that the universe does indeed owe me a living. And he is directly responsable for that.

I keep wondering.. in some previous life, prior to now, did I ask to be here, to watch friend after friend die, to experience system after system of my body failing, to experience pain and loss and suffering? Is it ever moral to have children, given the dark sides of the world that we are bringing them into? Is it moral to expect our children to work, given that they didn’t ask to exist? To ask them to give up their dreams in order to work on projects they don’t care about or even actively dislike? (i.e. parking meters – if I could make every parking meter in the world dissapear by waving a magic wand, I’d start waving. Actually, that probably applies to every form of currency as well. I’m not against money as a basic concept for energy exchange, but I am getting awfully sick of some of the fruits of capitolism as it’s currently implimented. Starting out with, why do all of the professionals I’m seeing, who don’t actually have any more hours of training than I do, get paid more than I do? In the meantime, why does my friend Tory, who’s every bit as worthwhile as a human, get paid less? It’s sick, people, and it needs to be put out of it’s misery. Especially in the case of CEOs who draw millions of dollars of pay.)

My basic choice was either stay under parents who tried to apply the morals their religion specified on me, despite the fact that I rejected that religion – or get out and work, at that time for $2/hr. I chose, obviously, to get out and work. But I find that on some level I harbor some anger for the whole situation.

I feel kind of like humans are intrensically selfish. Having children, for example, is a selfish act – most of the time you want them to conform to your ideals of what a ideal human is, which leads to many fights between parents and children. I don’t think that parents should have any authority over children. But then, I reject all authority in general unless it is operating in a advisary capacity. You all may have the might to throw me in jail, beat me, kill me, deprive me of my possessions, or in general make my life miserable. That doesn’t mean that it is right to do any of those things, any more than it would be right for me to do them to any of you. This would seem self-evident.

If I could destroy every government on earth without hurting any of the humans that are the component parts of those governments, I would probably do that also.

Can you tell I’m in a bad mood today?

Every government should come with a built in mechanism by which the governed can request a re-authoring or update of the government and governing documents. THis isn’t saying that any of the people involved in the government should be hurt, although in many cases they should be removed from power. However, every government suffers from some basic weaknesses. Any time one human attempts to order another human about, bad things are going to happen.

I can’t decide if I’m green, liberetarian, or anarchist. I have a little bit of each in me – for example, I don’t think it is correct for me to take actions which poisen the enviornment that we all have to live in, or use up resources wantonly that our children and their children and their children will need. But in terms of drug laws, and ‘blue code’ laws, and laws concerning who can and can’t marry, and things like that, I’m strongly anarchist. You shouldn’t be able to tell me I can’t marry someone that is the same gender that I am, marry multiple people, or marry my dog, cat, or dolphin. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying, those of you out there who support such insanity.

I’ve been thinking of a project – a web site that allowed members of the internet community at large to vote on passages from the bible. Basically, the idea is, there is some good content there. However, there’s a lot of passages that I could, honestly, do without reading. There’s a lot of darkness, negativity, genocide, etc. I want to see a book that contains reasonable advice for life, ajusted for modern technology (birth control, condoms, etc) and cutting out all sexism, agism, genderism, sexual-orientation-ism, and in general all of the text that offends my egalitarian beliefs. I’m not demanding that anyone read this tome, but I think it would be neat to have a community resource that enabled it to be authored.

One possibility I’ve thought of is dumping the bible into a wiki, and then publishing the location via google and sitting back to watch the fun. But I’m not sure that this would achive what I’m trying to achive, so somewhat better tuned software might be in order.

I admit, it’s not a huge priority. But I wish *someone* would do it.

Okay, that’s enough of my bad attitude for the moment.

Actually, one more comment. I seem to have different opinions on some subjects every day. So all of the above text is subject to change without notice, at least in terms of my attitudes about the world.