a ba'b'ian journal

old stuff 2001


  • December 23, 2002
lots of christmas business to attend to. spoiled nephews to buy for. daniel got a puppy which was all he thought he wanted. he clearly just wanted affection without responsibility. a love slave. he didnt seem to understand the situation, and his mom just must have caved in under relentless insistence. i visited them. daniel is already after one day starting to ignore her. a cute little pug.

and its hard to shop with no income. i got a drum for one of freddie's kids, but I dont know which one to give it too. maybe aaron, the bigger one. if colin were to play it, aaron who is very possessive would get angry. but then what do I give colin? something he can hold. a baby computer would be neat. he likes buttons and lights

my dad sent me an email message that made me sad. he talked about how hard it is to get someone something they need and will always want. you just can do that. i remember them telling a story about how he got one of my brothers a fancy long gun, and the other one was the one who wanted it. you just cant give someone else something to make them happy. all they want is love. gifts are just our way of showing it.

  • December 18, 2002
dad made it to the house at 10:30 am. immediately making noise and getting on mom's nerves as she was baking pies and cakes.

went to see "Lord of the Rings: Two Towers". i was a little tired, i guess, but compared to the first one, it was dark and boring. and sure, as the middle one, in itself it had no signiicant beginning or end, just a couple of loosed ends on both sides. like totally weak, dude.

sitting at starbucks. rich boy getting homework help on his cell phone at starbucks. what is a straight angle, dude. brat. guy on the other end "should have dropped it". and the wireless internet isn't working. bummer. i should just go home.

Freddie and Grace and Aaron and Colin are flying in today. i should get a nap. i've been sleeping poorly. I miss Holly.

  • :(

    somebody wass telling her what school to send her kid to,G I said I went to MUS, and drunk dude amd his blond school marm in sked if I went to MUS. Twice I said Valedictorian '85. He had trouble with math there. who doesn't have trouble with math somewhere?

    a student arwyn gattas of houston high was sitting studying for her German exam. gonna be a musician. singer. we talked about various things. honor student. dad a civil engineer in LA right this second. cute little aspiring opera singer. classical she admitted is a long road. doesnt know much beatles. typical youth. i showed her that i had the schiller words from beethoven;s ninth on this computer, Jordy. Ringo had to whistle it in help to calm down the tiger on loan

    • December 13, 2002
    Happy Friday the Thirteenth!

    I went to see Star Trek: Nemesis. It didn't even seem as good as an average episode. Fight the evil crazy bad guy. Big freaking whoop. A species bred to be warrior, which surprisingly can't hit targets with a rifle from 10 meters away. Um. OK. And bad rubber masks. Ug.

    • December 9, 2002
    I skinned a duck today. My dad got a bunch of them from some hunters and brought me one. when I cut off the head, a whole lot of corn fell out. he didn't even get to finish digesting his meal. tiny legs. i'll cook him tomorrow. plucking clearly would have been way too much work.

    i had dreams that i remembered more clearly than usual last night. and someof them had unusual sensory content. I had one where i was a kid riding my bike home from school, and i distinctly remembering my sense of direction. I knew vaguely which direction i needed to go, even though i wasn't sure exactly where i was. In another dream, i distinct had the sensation of taste. In the dream, my dad prepared some duck leg quarters with lots of spices. I later went downstairs and ate a leg. I remember that it looked just like a breaded chicken leg, but when I bit into it, even though i kind of thought it would taste like chicken, it tasted quite definitely like duck, and an especially spicy duck. I remember thinking it was a little spicier than I would have liked, but it was quite flavorful and definitely duck, not chicken.

    doug was walking out the door when i got here to starbucks, and also walking out at that time was this amazing blonde. mississippi plates 520 HIB. later, sitting down, lady siting at a table talking on the phone mentioned someone was was nicer than most people as beautiful as that. Hmm. and a dude was typing on his computer. I asked him if he had wireless. he did but not here. i told him this place has it. i was using it. he had heard about it in pittsburg or philly, and was excited, but they close at nine. he also asked if i knew of other places that had it.

    this mocha soy chai is really good! chocolatey and with that rich spicey chai flavor.

    kids after school. MUS kids.

    I'm going to upload this and go browse. uploading my journal from starbucks! what a cool country this is.

    • December 7, 2002
    Camille. the hutchison babe is named camille. she was hear at starbucks, but i didn;t say anything. one of the other little girls said bye camille, when she left. emile and caroline are kids in that group.

    there is something I was gonna say. grr. i hate forgetting stuff I want to write about. but I got ftp working on this thing maybe that was it. i added just a few registry entries, which were described in the file perl.txt. no big thing. and the ftp must share the library, because they use the same registry entries.

    so i'm sitting at starbucks. drinking hot chocolate. i called doug before. he went to dinner at the belmont with lyle and might be dropping by. he's got lots of little projects.

    no doug. did some surfing. curly dude asked to see jordy. i wrote eve anderson. going home

    • December 6, 2002
    Has it been this long? I finally have a replacement Jornada. I call this one 'Jordy'. I haven't gotten the wireless card installed, but I am sitting here at Starbucks wishing I had. I'm drinking a venti soy chai. It's a bustly holiday atmosphere here. lots of kids. some suits having a meeting in the corner. punk dudes. mom with four teen girls. a couple of girlfriends hanging out in the soft chairs. a pack of four chicklets looking for something to do. And I'm writing again! I forgot how this device enables me. Aw mom and pack are heading out. a couple joined the pack of four. But who cares about the random happenings at starbucks? But it's life! the weekend is releasing them from ho-hum boring week. And there are still orange leaves on the trees. It's nice that I have my flash card, but none of my software is installed. And I have no idea what it took to install perl. I remember having to add registry entries.

    And I have the rubaiyat!
    "Open then the Door.
    You know how little while we have to stay,
    And, once departed, may return no more."

    So I'm in love. Well, when am I not in love? But this is more powerful than anything that I have experienced before. Her name is Holly. And she's great. A san diego hippie chick. I met her on match.com. Since she is an INTP, I knew she I would really like her, and through e-mail I learned more and more about her, and fell wildly in love before I knew what she looked like. And then I saw her, and of course, she is beautiful. Boarding school in austria, so she speaks French and Italian. But she is currently in Arkansas working in ag-econ. MBA, masters in ag-econ. She likes raising chickens and really knows how to have fun. We are definitely trying to figure out how to be together. She has given me a real reason to live. I described it to her as that she turned my life right side up. I was a turtle on its back, and now I can at least slink off. Now all I need to do is to find a real job again. Which shouldn't be too tough.

    back at starbucks again. and i got the wireless card working and i was checking emails before. there are some egyptians in the center table. one was studying surveying practice. earlier,there was a cute blonde sitting in the corner typing on her computer. i asked her if she was using their internet, and no, she didn't know how. i told her i had a card todo it. iasked what she was writing. papers. about what? all kinds of things. she's in high school. a senior. working on friday night. what school? hutchison. i said i went to MUS. so i knew people their graduated in '85. she was born in '85. Eww. she doesn't know anyone from then, but her parents might. not much else to say. she said have a good night when she left. i just kept on surfing.

    walk like an egyptian. bukurrah is tomorrow in arabic.

    so, since I had a chai which must have caffeine in it, i'm a little wired, and i decided to visit my other favorite writing spot -- hooters! Yay! same as it ever was. Jessica at the bar. big tall blonde cutie. and a guinness. I need a guinness.

    i remember that in fayetteville, Holly and I had lunch in a little microbrewery on Friday after we went in to her office. we had the house stout. it just didn't have the bitterness i've come to expect in guinness. of course, i think this bitterness is because it isn't as fresh as it ought to be. not like that one time i had it here at hooters, when it was amazingly smooth. still. it is what it is.

    an "I did it e-bay" commercial. and then mick playing guitar. freaky

    and i am more extroverted than Holly. it's a scary thought.

    and after you pay, you are no longer anything. back to dust. i was reading the rubaiyat. great drinking poem. i quit at three guinness, and gave jessica the change from a twenty. and she had reduced it by a dollar because she rung one up as a heinekan. i got the receipt. imagine. me drinking a heinie-ho.

    • July 13, 2002
    Back at Hooters, "The computers aren't working!"

    Julia, Dallas, 1975. Brunette. MS Chem E. going to UT

    found nail in tread at gold club

    Flies were in the kitchen when I got back home. I actually cracked the wings and legs of the first one and saw it hobble to escape. Then more showed up. I used the fly swatter on them. Pretty merciless, but they were trespassing.

    • July 13, 2002
    A very different day. Got up and picked up a .22. Went to see Andrea's gramma's house. Then the Mexican place around the corner, which The Sr. Mr. Tarkington took us to way back when. Curioser and Curioser. Kimberly the bartender at the wolfchasing hooters. missed her name. Has a "reece" nametag after Reece Witherspoon. Fooled me. . Orion the cat. owned by the roomate. Very weird day I've been brushed up against by a hooters. Kimberly has a six-month old kid and an ex.

    Now at TJ Mulligans on Trinity. The adventure continues.

    Time flies like a broken arrow.

    Mariah is th rkepn my end of the bar

    • July 12, 2002

    Sitting in the the Camel again, for round two.

    Dick Shaw
    2396 Eastwood Place
    Memphis, TN 38112-3204
    Tel. 901.323.8520
    Mbl. 901.550.1084
    disckshaw@free-market.net
    www.dickshaw.net

    • July 12, 2002

    Sitting in the dowtown Huey's. AB works days. Not here. Like I would know that, but batkeep thinks I'm crazy. Well, maybe. Girl in the salmon top and black bra two seats to the right is drinking the House Chardonnay. Blondie to her right is drinking a Bud Light. Plus there are barflies. Where is that infinite improbibilty drive now. My burger and onion rings are on the way to join the Guinness. My car is at PARKING CAN BE FUN. When I came in, I set my bag of peanut m&m's on the bar, ordered it, went to the bathroom, picked up shit off the floor, was joined by a bald headed black dude, and took a piss. I specified as rare as they dare, but I did not specify for it not to be cold. Guess what? Room temperature. But the secret ingredient is love. The black dude is security. Another one of God's armed children. Perhaps it was his crack pipe that I found in the restroom.
    OK. I just caught the blonde in the flowery dress lifting her tits. The one next to the salmon moose with four eyes.
    Just what did Douglas Adams see in those telephone booths?

    Preen, bitch. Preen!

    At the flying saucer. Amy is the barkeep that gave me something German, something Dark. Ran into the yellow belt from Aikido. Jane's addiction was playing. Some other waitress tried the cinnamon altoids. It was the devil can.I went by Fred Astaire, but no Suzanne/Ruthie.

    How many Amy's have I loved? There's Aimee, and Amy Burcham. and now this barkeep. Who can count?

    • July 11, 2002

    Sitting in the "Bottom Line"
    "Melissa", with some house band or other. Guy and a guitar. And a PA system.

    Went to lunch with Suzanne at the little Mexican place at the corner of poplar and Ridgeway. Well, she's trying to change her name to 'Ruthie'. Am sitting here at the Paradise cafe having an "iron man". I need a nap. The place is full of prunes. And bananas.

    • July 10, 2002

    You have the ability to seep through people's skin.
    Your touch leaves a mark that lasts and over time washes away.
    It is like water rolling down a mountain.

    • July 5, 2002

    Petition,
    I attested that
    Aimee B. Pinkerman
    is a humble servant
    of His Lord,
    Our Almighty Savior
    Jesus,
    The Christ.

    • July 4, 2002
    Happy Independence Day!

    Sitting here at Newby's. bad jazz played too loud by kids.

    Bar Babes. A curly blonde in Wynne's spot. Led by a blind brunette.

    Skill is not made up for by hope.

    Saw Greg deWitt. Saw Billie Metcalfe again. Try to tell her the rambling story of that spot. Saw a wonderful dark haring painted lady who loves Beethoven. We were talking about the World's cup. I still don't know who has won (I think Brazil), or even whether it is really over or how it is scored....

    • July 2, 2002
    He
    must answer me
    these questions three
    ere the other side he see:
    Must God sleep?
    Can God sleep?
    Does God sleep?

    What do you get when you combine a Doctor nurse and a former nurse?

    • June 30, 2002
    The truth is the truth. Been looking for it, but it's there everywhere if you just accept it.

    • June 28, 2002
    sitting here at tom nehrer talk about how life works. only two beers before. not drunk enough. dude had a oneness experience. started seeking. saw gurus in san diego. sees them as filtered through beliefs. jnana yoga. hypnosis based. analysis

    there is quality, and there is value. i said to the waitress (here at bosco's) "I know the value of beer", and she replied "The beer is good here". She was referring to quality, and I was referring to value. Value is from the perspective of the subject, and quality is objective. Or it seems that way. Pirsig in "Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance" is talking about quality. I don't remember the point. I just recently dug that out to read it again. Maybe I'd better do that.

    • June 26, 2002
    I've been going to Aikido more. I get into a good mood after the exercise.

    • June 16, 2002
    I gotta just let it go, man. pissed her off. she closed the discussion.

    So, I joined the New York Acadamy of Science. Got a book about the Unity of Knowledge. Consilience, as per E.O. Wilson. The notion that all knowledge might form a causal web that totally integrates. Eventually all the disparate specialties might be able to be tied together. an interesting idea. It may or may not be true.

    Talked to Eric at starbucks. Lent him "Philosophy in the Flesh" he hadn't seen much of it yet, just definitions. they don't seemed to have proved anything to his satisfaction, as yet.

    i seem to be in love with an idealization of Aimee that I have constructed. it manages to hold together for, among other reason, because i don't have much contact with her. she. of course, very quickly lost interest in me. but there we keep writing to each other, and she has cultivated essentially a friendly facade, that maintains some semblance of friendship. But it appears that in reality, she doesn't trust or respect me. She simply gets some entertainment out of me on occasion. Or do I just feel this way because she is very unresponsive. Hmm. She is like water. She cannot be pushed. I went back and reviewed a bunch of e-mails from her. she has been emotionally supportive, but really uninteresting. blech. my advice to myself: wonder what you ever saw in her. realize it was practiced dale carnegie emotional manipulation-- practiced by a person trained in management. suck it up. have some dignity. move on.

    i've skipped three aikido classes in a row. my pride was hurt. stupid pride.

    I am worried about Aimee's planned marriage to Pete in August. In the latest note describes him as just what she has been looking for, but she's in love, and that sounded almost too good to be true. She has brought up a conversation between them on compromise vs settling. That sounded ominous. This seems to have moved pretty fast-- they met at new year's-- and yet she told me they had agreed to go slow. She even admitted to me that she tends to rush things. I have realized that I'm not one of her close friends, but I met him at church, and one thing about she told me about him is that he likes to do things with her friends. I haven't seen it. Hopefully, it wasn't just her girlfriends. I suspect that one of his good qualities is that he lets her do all of her stuff without him, and doesn't resent it. It is an issue for her. She does not stand coercion. I fear he is merely docile, and that he is likely to tire of this or change once the ink is dry. What bothers me the most is that she didn't praise his good qualities, but merely seemed to say that she liked him. But she has long quit telling me anything of substance--she doesn't trust me, which is probably wise. But the encounter that disturbed me the most, was at the May monthly mensa meeting, dude kept his cap on during dinner, which annoyed me, but put kept his hands on Aimee in this sort of possessive or defensive way that I noticed with her last fiancee. It simply did not seem like a good sign. Maybe I'm just being jealous. Probably I am simply no longer close enough to Aimee to have witnessed the good things in their relationship. But the fact remains that I haven't. And my feeling about divorcees is that marriage is no longer a sacred thing to them. What I am expected to do is to respect Aimee's judgement. Can I do that? Now there's a question. The answer is clearly no. I don't. Hmm. Not good for me. It has come down to the simple fact that Aimee has kept a great distance between us, while keeping up this friendly facade, but in truth, I don't know her. I can't respect someone I don't know. Or maybe I don't respect someone who hides so much. Surely I can respect people I don't know. Somehow she has built up some odd kind of trust in me for her, by only telling the truth. But this has been by greatly selecting what she will talk about. I find finally that she is motivated by comfort. Ewww. But what do I have? Aimee is hiding. I resent that. I should simply feel compassion for her. I hide too. Hmm. Better. Now I still have doubts, but I do wish them luck.

    • June 11, 2002
    Sunday was truly an awful day. Couldn't fall asleep till 8am. I think I'm better now. I think I have retained the conviction that I just need to avoid contact with Aimee-- it's bad for me.

    Went to aikido practice finally yesterday. A babe Choya led it. I think I remember her from when I studied under CJ. I need to ask her. We actually studied some stick forms. I have trouble with this one move where you turn around the other way and spin the thing. Turning around is enough for me to lose my bearings, and then I can't figure out which way I'm supposed to turn it. The falling tends to tire me out so much that I have trouble figuring out the movements.

    I am finally getting to the section in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science where he is describing how his computer experiments can explain real phenomena. But in talking about biology, he says that evolved changes try to "maximize" fitness. This is a very poor choice of wordsleading. It would be better to say "improves". To say "maximize" give the feeling that evolution is about getting the best possible form. It isn't. It just isn't. It is sort of a confusion when the phrase "survival of the fittest is used" because "fittest" has a subtle ambiguity. It isn't "fittest" among everything that is possible (the kind of sense that maximizing fitness would have). It is simply the "fittest" among the forms that are around. And it isn't definitely true the fittest will survive, but just a tendency, and a pressure towards change. And there is another subtle logical process where you might think, well if there is a movement towards improvement, that must be a movement toward the ideal maximum. This is subtle, and may be true, but it is not necessarily true. In once sense, if the motion is up, it must lead to some kind of peak, though it may be a local maximum. But the very fact that it could be the peak of some small hill and not the highest mountain means that when we speak of "maximum" we are suddenly speaking unclearly. To follow an upward path to the summit is simply not the same as finding the highest mountain. Evolution is not about finding the higest mountain. It is about climbing. (Or rather, piling things on to make a taller mountain, but I don't want to move on to that analogy right now). To say that evolution "maximizes" fitness is misleading, and probably just wrong.

    i'm sitting here at the monthly mensa meeting. gary is talking about the nautical mile being one minute (one part in sixty of a degree), dennis hison asked something about miles. i at least raised my hand. i knew that mile came from latin mille. a thousand. a thousand paces. he can get up to six knots 1.34 sqrt lwl. displacement hull-> more sail you add, slower it goes. wave propagate. bos wave. stern sitting in trough. 1978 windrose.

    tremendous evening at bosco's. talked with david (with son david), about IBM and mainframe issues. IBM is such a big world. and yet dealing with all the issues of the world.

    what happens when everything converges into your self? What am I? What are you? Take the world. Subtract you. What do you have left? Then take this. Take this away from the world. You should get yourself. But what is it?

    • June 10, 2002
    My ego simply thrashes about now. it has lost it's moorings. and believe it or not, this is not a bad thing. what ego? is there really anything down there but fluff and pretence. One thing I can still be pleased about (though it is another bit of clinging that must eventually subside) is that i have not been governed by money. it is a harsh mistress. pulled along at times, of course. but everything pulls

    • June 9, 2002
    man, I was ready to kill someone today. pull out my knife and slash till their guts fell on the floor. poor girls in Blockbuster wished me a nice day and i just looked back in a daze and gave them a look that must have made them glad i was leaving.

    back to the old angry andi. and what did it? i suppose i was a little bit off because kelly, on the intp list, has revealed enough about herself to evolve into a sort of ideal girlfriend for me. tall blonde. aerobics instructor. computer person. loves star trek. the "intp" type is of course magical to me. 34. speaks spanish and hindi and certainly more that i don't know of. never married, no kids and looking for same. actually wrote to her when i heard that one. but then from what she said on list, it turns out she was looking for the extra money that that implies. golddigging bitch. i guess it's only natural, though. i hear that it's an evolved trait in women. bah.

    went to hope church yesterday. didn't see aimee. probably went to the fight. dude said to make a friend, be a friend first. wtf does that mean?

    so what happened today? after waffling, I called suzanne. with her parents. not going to monthly meeting tuesday. talking ballroom dancing. hey, i studied that. maybe i could call later and we could talk. ok sure. bye. but ballroom dancing! i took that at the same time aimee did, hoping that we might go dancing. a few weeks ago, at temperance, aimee stayed around long enough for the band to start playing, and during some slow dance, i asked her to dance. and we dance a little, and i was leading her around, and she laughed! it seemed a little odd to me, and she had had a few. but thinking about it earlier today, i realize that i hate being laughed at. i don't care what was going on in her blonde head. she was laughing at me. my blood just went cold thinking about it. and still went i think about it. all that i was up to a point a few years ago was about this anger. and now it's back. forget it all. back to the plan.

    of course, i haven't called suzanne back. forget about all that. but what to do now? time to forget about any kind of external reward. it ain't out there. all i can really do is try to pick up some change, and work on the machines.

    so i have been i knid of a fog lately. the aikido teacher wrote to see what was up. i want to start up on monday. man, a waste of a month. with luck, i'll be on track.

    went to tj mulligans to see if tara was there, and to drink a guinness while writing all of this. then came down to starbucks. and of course, stephanie was here. after i swore off women for the duration. not that she's a risk. brought her laptop. gotta essay due. it is clear that she don't like me. did recognize my existence at first though. that was nice.

    so, what now? hunker down mode. find sources of money. i borrowed 2k to hold me for a couple months.

    i just want to set the atmosphere on fire. that was such a cool possibility that they talked about before the first atomic bomb test.

    one fairly good thing about my attitude. individual violence seems totally unimportant. but perhaps, if i am to be a real warrior, i should not ignore it. under controlled terms.

    i should learn by doing. i should not attempt to study programming independently of doing actual work. at the very least, i should be writing demonstrable computer applications. like what i was almost doing in bioinformatics.

    • May 25, 2002
    Went to a cookout at Benno's house. Mom went too. I felt very mindful. I heard Bruce saying to my mom that Freddie was the smart one. That is a relationship killer-- to talk behind my back to my mom while I am within earshot badmouthing me. Bruce must figure that I won't be working with him for long. In his mind I am working for him. He doesn't seem to have the concept that I might want to work as a partner. And he is pushing too hard, or I simply out of nervousness allow myself to spin my wheels around him. He gives me stuff to do without having fullfilled the requirements for actually getting it done. Andrea is right. I don't want to work for him. I need to go over and see her, and soon.

    I decided to come down here to Satchmo's. The Mensa folks I think try to do a couples event here on Saturday night, but I didn't see them. I had coffee and chessecake at Bravo and saw the singing waiters. Kids. I requested 'Let it be.' My fat waittress looked at me as if I were cttttjrazy. Well, OK, I admit to being crazy, but at least I'm not fat. She said she would try to find out if anyone knew it. I guess not. I did go over to the piano queen and ask her what they could do with Beethoven's 9th, Ode to Joy. I'm trying to learn the German. She said they could only play it, but it was a good idea. One of the singer dudes, said something I couldn't hear, and then asked if I was a singing student. I said something about applying to U of MSU to learn Jazz. No tunes for me. I came back to the Jazz bar upstairs. It's an interesting scene.

    • May 11, 2002
    I'm at Hooters, and Alisha is my waitress.

    It seemed like the guy on the Shakespeare tape talked about a concept from Aristotle called "anignosia" which, to me, would translate as "not knowing". But this concept isn't just "not knowing" in general, but about something specific, I think psychological. It is about the core essense of one's self-- that at the core there is nothingness. I guess it goes along with that whole incompleteness thing. If you try to define something, with any boundary, you still won't have all the answers about it.

    Am I a genius? Mr. Saunders asked me that, and all I could do was look down and laugh. I don't know what that means.

    God is one of us.

    Tara is being gypped here and is going to work at the Cordova T.J. Mulligan's.

    Andrew Dawson. Manager in the black shirt here. I didn't like the cut of his jib.

    • May 10, 2002
    Bad day. been sitting here at Starbuck's with my venti chocolate chai tea writing for a couple of hours. I used the save command here in Microsoft Word. It locked up the computer, and I lost it all. It's tough to get that stuff back exactly after it has been committed to the computer's memory. I was writing about my cough, my headache, my sore toe, the start of my aikido class last night, what I was doing as I stopped by MUS today. I saw Msrs. Andy Saunders, Loyal Murphy, Norman Thompson and others. I wanted to see Mr. Hiltonsmith, but he was in class the first time I passed by. I went back after 3:15, when class gets out. Missed him. Somewhere to be. People. Places, Industry.
    I've got a trio from the sisterhood sitting here. maybe they distracted me enough so that I didn't think to save my work every fifteen minutes. Oops! One of them is named Joanne. I overheard that from some kid talking to her when they were standing four feet away. She had her back to me. She did turn around and we exchanged smiles. Long, curly brown hair. Some of it tied in the back with some loopy thing. Joanne is telling a story now. She announced it. Everyone in the group of four crowed around. The male is sitting opposite her. From me, she is sitting on the left. I describe it like this, because I'm trying to paint a picture that I will remember if I ever get back to this sequence. Youth is such a pretty thing. The song on the box said "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood." Deep. Now it's the sunny side of life. Jazz. I have really been meaning to get back to Jazz. Up till now, It was just too rich for me. But I think I've built up a strong enough platform to start building some real Jazz. Yeah. Now that's a plan! Joanne said that she and George used to play house together. She has a picture of him at church in his mom's arms.

    I'm blowing Susan and Dennis Hinson off tonight. Too fun a Mensa party. But Aimee has shown up. We'll see.

    shit. now that was an experience. talked to leslie who works here at the cockeyed camel. cyrus and steve, her friends who were concerned about her being here five hours after she got off work.

    i asked aimee to dance. finally. how many years has it been. slow dance. she asked if i could lead. she knew how to follow. turns out i did. but we were dancing in the wrong hand. i get that left hand and right hand stuff wrong these days. so i switched. i moved her around the dance floor. she laughed at some of my dips.

    the oddest thing that sticks out. as aimee was about to leave, i said that she was not obligated, and she replied that i was making her self-conscious. i don't understand how that was a meaningful response. i have had a few. she was working on her third. i'm going to need to think about this one. and this is a journal, anyway. notes on life. its what it is for.

    maurice and rhonda. joined my table. drinking some kind of pink martinis, and water. maurice asked what i'm selling. maurice is pushing stock. asked my name. guessed italian.

    beatles. i saw her standing there. trouble with the high notes. no purity in this town.

    a couple of bar hound. some guy from MUS class of '72, balding with mustache. had long hair back then. jock or something. gonna get some pussy. and gary--has houses in indiana and memphis. trying to enjoy life. didn't seem like they were succeeding

    • May 8, 2002
    The depth to which you misunderstand me is really quite amusing to me.

    • May 5, 2002
    happy cinquo de mayo!

    called michele to wish her happy cinquo de mayo. she's back in louisville. with kevin. but relax. she was so stressed out. it was good to hear.

    and i was getting ready to go over to doug's but then he decided to go flying. so i'm sitting here at starbucks. i tried to get a chocolate chai. got a chai latte. i didn't follow if there was chocolate in it. i'm trying to take this opportunity to browse for jobs. seems like 60k is pretty minimal.

    there was this cute little jailbait sitting in the corner. three of them. and i would over, and the one facing me was occasionally looking back. a little flirting. it was fun.

    so there was this lady in a black top. and the low wall between us reach up to cover about to the middle of her breasts. and i caught my eye on their own dipping to look into the wall. and i guess it only stI'm just ood out as an experience because i was unexpectedly looking at a wall. so i had been vaguely aware of it, but now i'm seriously wonder what it is like for a woman to be face to face with men. are some of us not so bad? is it flattering? you hear about how mastectomy patients don't feel whole. maybe it's a bigger deal than i have thought.

    so there's this couple in the corner. i can't tell if either on is male or female. one has shoulder-length brown hair. the other lighter and short. both in clogs. both pretty flat if female. i swear, they look like the cliche of a lesbian couple. but they could be guys. or a guy and a girl. freaky. ok, the longer hair went to the bathroom, and walking back, her green knit top draped pleasently to show that she is indeed a she. the other one is unclear. probably a guy. just statistically. is playing on a laptop. that should give it away.

    • May 4, 2002
    i am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom told. i have squandered...

    back at starbucks. felt lonely. and bored. and stephanie came by. she asked after doug. said she was bored. i said i could relate. i didn't do anything to help her out. it's really busy here. it was empty at hers. i was hoping to build up some steam to go somewhere. but i'm just sitting here. some web surfing. tried to find wyman brantley. dude needs to stabilize his personal website.

    • May 3, 2002
    spider-man! finally. swinging from building to building like tarzan. kirsten dunst in a wet blouse. meow. a comic book.

    imagine.

    we just let the world settle down over us. are we not the world? we struggle to break free, but we only stir the pot.

    so, i'm sitting here at the cockeyed camel after the mensa meeting. they brought up regional gatherings. there's the one in brimingham in august. i think it's one that aimee goes to. i guess it's close. so she wrote me back after she hadn't written in a long time, and i was panicking. she was really pleasant. or i was really pleased. and she even likes me. and yet, there was this lack of feeling.

    cranked up the wolfenstein. having trouble with the sound on my 'puter. rebooted to '98 and got sound, and it worked after that in 2000. but today, no sound. that's annoying. but wollfenstein. kill. kill them all. kill them without mercy. whitman talked about the joy of it. men going down with complaining. there is the love to save your comrades. and your country. tell my life i love her. but this. to fight on your own. just to strike without thinking. i remember the team competition at the sci-fi convention. to work on a team to defeat some other punk kids. it was a fully different experience. that was just a game. and not real. i don't know how it would be if it was real. but still. to shoot likkn a mahine. i guess real war never gets like that. i'sm just living in a dream.

    so what am i doing with aimee. i think i'm just avoiding a real relationship. a fantasy is just what i want. i don't want anything real. am i just afraid? i guess, i don't want to try people and try people, hoping that one of them will accept me. part of my deal is that i don't even give women a chance to accept me. hmm. but, i suppose that is just that i have a conflict in myself. i want to be tolerant of everyone, and accept everyone, and don't want to admit that i don't like a specific person. i don't want to reject, having been rejected. so maybe, i don't give them a chance. but to me, some of them seem horrible. do they not care? are they so important to themselves? have they no hope for the future? why are they so stupid? do they like being so stupid? are they so wilfull that they would rather aimless spend time blabbering instead of improving themselves through learning? or maybe they prefer to indulge in feeling. to feel good. to drop the search for infinite happiness and be satisfied with a square on the sidewalk? do they not see that they can live forever in happiness, but it takes a damn huge amount of effort? to not even look? to simply listen to the gentle cooing of their mothers to lull them to sleep. god is with them.

    the band has started playing. there the ones that know what they are doing. i'm reserving judgement. it is something i'm not used to. i'm sure, i could enjoy it. covers. old, stale pop blues. they're having fun. am i? kid on trumpet. i saw him just giving it his best. girl on the sax. old singer. they know where it is. let's remember, i'm thinking of grabbing an acoustic, and wandering around. so i need this. but dude doesn't even go for the high notes.

    it always happens. i get up to piss. someone takes my seat. this time it was one bitch. six chairs at the table. only takes mine. something about wanted the table for a group. so i'm out of there. back at starbucks. at least they have internet. band sucked, anyway. or maybe the crowd. actually, yes. band was find. crowd was neanderthal. no. band sucked. and crowd was neanderthal.

    $17.50? shoot. beck's is overpriced. and minimal tip for theresa.

    i don't like these hard chairs. dude in the corner seems to have that one tucked away. three in the middle are taken up. the bench over there has some kiddies. so i'm just going to sit here. but wait. they left. couple at the table took two. i took the third. lady said "these are a lot more comfortable aren't they". time to cruise the porn.

    ok. so i leave a table for an easy chair. at the table i left are four pretty young ladies. what is that about?

    slither down the little drain, o my little self. did anyone see you?

    people sure though i was smart back in high. i thought i was doin well. it's been so long, i can even remember enough to say whether i was really doing well or not. i need to go back and evaluate my writing at the time to see how well i was doing or what. i seem to remember some kind of stupor since then. man, i really need to go back and review. maybe if i go back to some of that trashy poetry i was doing. probably i was just tortured. that sure isn't doing well. maybe i should look at how i'm doing now. fantasy bliss seems to be my current situation.

    • April 29, 2002
    got paid! yay! now if only i can spend less than i make. or make more. rode my bike in the evening. life is pretty nice.

    • April 28, 2002
    oh man, that did not go well. i had flee the house for a venti chai at starbucks. suzanne and paul are getting a divorce. i went to the march of dimes walk yesterday thinking she would be there. she wasn't i call her as the race was starting. sick. so today i call her back. she had looked in the mirror. tongue was white. went back to bed. i walked anyway. i had fun. would she like to get together sometime and do something sometime? maybe not the right way to ask. coffee or something. maybe during the day, lunch, since she works so close. and then she comes back with, she isn't divorced for three months. well, in a time like this, she needs friends. but i am really starting to dislike having my mo es questioned when i am struggling with them myself. a pox on them!

    so what am i going to do? i spent a lot of time reading through the intp newsgroup. several people talked about wanting to be editors. so writing might be a possibility. i need to find out what to do with what i have. get some criticism. find some writers to talk to. and then there's stan franklin. a great writer. i am going to go down and talk to him, and i'm considering just offering to work as a programmer for him,now that i've rolled back into the street. matt at temperance seemed to recommend working with him. that sounds like one of the best ideas. i don't have a plan yet. i guess i need to work on a plan.

    so why did i toss the fedex thing? i had been hired by this friendly manager tim, and they pretty quickly switched him to another group, and pushed up the project manager, who, according to the nature of the position, has the schedule as a priority. so we started being pretty much on schedule. and maybe that's fine, but that isn't the sort of personality i like. for a long time as just onof the grunts, that was ok, but i got to be more of a lead. luckily, we still had the real lead, and he could mostly work with the manager. but in their wisdom, they put our lead on a different project. so i was supposed to take on more of it. that meant more interaction with this manager, who was ok, i supposed, but not really what i would like. this of course, could only be one contributing factor, not enough to leave. we have to add that i had just recently come across the notion of software craftsmanship. programming as a craft. according to this idea, a programmer really does needs to move around a good deal to really master the craft. i had been on the project for two years, through several iterations. it logically made sense to leave. also, development had stalled. the next release had not been defined, and we were only going to do bug fixes. also, the requirements of supporting a production system meant that we programmers had to trade of being support. system support really is a separate skill from system development, and we did it, but i thought of it as a sign of poor management. Because of the 24x7 nature of support and the no tolerance anti-alcohol policy, this meant a restriction on my personal freedoms that, frankly, chafed. And i went on a three week tour just after developing a like for guinness at hooters, and wine with steak dinners. And then, as the real lead went off on his other project, i got my own pager. I thought i could live with it when i took it, but i thought about it a little, and i quit either the day after or the next. Irreconcilable differences with management. I was also not getting programming done because of administrative work, and maybe that was the biggest thing. The manager seemed to understand that this might have been the biggest thing, and she tried to talk to me after i had made my mind up and moved all my stuff out. Maybe some of this could be fixed, but it was too late. Had she missed it? maybe. i think i could have communicated something if had wanted to stay. but one final thing. in two years, i had not made a single friend there. that certainly is mostly me, but still. it is a family company. it is just people's job. they go there to work, and go home to family. it is not a family in itself, like some places. erin has been a question. i tried to be friends. but somehow, she didn't seem to call me back when i left messages on her machine

    and i suppose it started when i went back to MUS. a place where i had respect, and the teachers still respected me. even if i have since just wasted my life. and i guess i felt bad about that. mr. brown suggested that i teach. i'm sitting here at hooters. i wouldn't mind working here. i could mop, maybe. i suppose i'd rather work at platinum. maybe after more time studying aikido. or maybe i could cook.

    for me the question is, perhaps, whom do i want to work with? for a long time, the people at fedex were the people i wanted to work with. tim, the manager, was fun. i did lose him pretty quickly, though. john, the computer science professor, has always been good, but i see him less and less, and i get from him less and less. robert, the philosophy phd, meditator, turned computer guy, has possibly been the most influential to me, but i think, his value to me was diminishing. i think it was good for me, but i feel it is good that i move on. but where? and how do i decide. i think it really should be based on this people. am i ready to work on my own? i don't know. i'm afraid i'm not, but that is always a problem in a decision like this. for a while in there, i was feeling clear and confident, but now i'm facing questions. actually, i have seen almost no one who believes in me. they pretty much all want me to latch on to someone. so maybe i should do that. but with what has happened, my trust in many people has fallen off quite a bit.

    and i think about it a little more. that little blip of a conversation with suzanne has caused me to doubt myself. and that's not good if i want to work for myself. it is a bad sign, as it were.

    • April 26, 2002
    so, it's the next day, and i realize that i misunderstood a question that stephanie was asking. i asked her about organic chemistry. grimaces. i had said i had done well enough on the mcat to get into med school, but with organic, i didn't think i was motivated. she asked me if i had a degree, and i thought, "omigod, do i look like i haven't graduated from college?" and i said i had the masters in engineering, and i only just realized that she was asking if i had an md. i think i said later that if i finish the phd, i'll try organic again.

    • April 25, 2002
    been to Germany. it was very nice.

    we went to the 50th anniversary of my mom's step-mom, Olga. lots of relatives. I really went to see relatives. love as a given. lots of hugging. this was the main time when i had people who wanted to speak english with. one was a computer guy,and he told me how germany had a shortage of computer specialist, including java. so maybe if i learn the language, i could go to work there. so, as for writing. i realized that for real writing, you have to write about stuff that other people will relate to and find interesting. i wasn't sure that the kinds of things i think of, people will relate to, since i have a different set of values.

    i am more into universals than local things. local things like 'common sense', which really is pretty arbitrary.

    sitting here at starbucks with doug.

    stephanie. red head third year nursing student at u of m. likes psychiatric nursing. works at some other starbucks. spotted 3 schizophrenics. friend of byron, who came by. her boyfriend is steve. mentioned him quite a few times. funny how that happens. t.j. came by. peabody place starbucks. michele came by, with lee. big goth dude.

    need to get list of projects and services.

    enterprise java system.

    lots of peaceful, blissful feelings. confidence in myself and the world. faith. got back to memphis and felt a little scared. i was forgetting how hard it is to make money, and how large my bills have gotten to. i mean, for some months, i was spending more than i made. and i made a lot. i think it was good to quit so i would not spend so much.

    i want to study jazz piano. guitar. aikido. get ready to wander the earth. some meditation.

    • April 7, 2002
    in hooters again. the sweet blonde waittress from st. patricks day came up to me and asked how i was and if imade it home see had worried. it could have been her ass. which is nice to look at, btw. all creatures great and small, all things bright and beautiful.

    • March 28, 2002
    yesterday was quite a day, trent skull. sam skull. josh hammond, buster's (todd rich), billie metcalfe
    • March 18, 2002
    i clearly just don't understand women. i mean, i used to have white t-shirts on which i wrote "h dne". now this is sort of mathematical jargon, so i could see them not getting it right off. but (this was in college) they would ask me what it meant and i would say it means that h does not exist. and they would ask me what h was. and i would reply "it doesn't exist". and somehow this wouldn't quite be enough. i mean, it doesn't exist! what difference does it make what it is supposed to be? i never have been able to figure out their response. i mean, really, what difference could it make what i said didn't exist? now, of course, there was a referrent which i didn't feel like telling them about. to me, as part of a complicated conversation with doug, 'h' referred to a person (woman) who would make me happy. so, i suppose, the truth of the matter might have actually made some kind of difference to them. i suppose. but they would have no way of knowing that. so it sure seems to me that it couldn't really have mattered. maybe it really didn't. but it also surely seems odd to me that somehow it did seem that it did.

    so i went to hooters. had to share a table. pete, scott, dude in yellow shirt, dude that used to work there that likes riding his bike at shelby farms. doug finally showed up. they watered down the beer. they even watered down the guinness. in germany, that would be a crime. purity laws. for shame. tara, the beautiful blonde waitress, said she was from germany. she even gave me a sobreity test aftger the first pitcher before giving me another. she seemed quite iffy about the third one, but doug had showed up, and hadn't had much. and it turns out, that she thought i was riding with one of the others. oops. she told me not to drive at closing, and sat me in a chair with a back instead of the stool. manager dude said something to me about calling it a night, and i thought about my loyalty to tara for a minute and left.

    • March 17, 2002
    happy st. patrick's day !

    i clearly haven't been sufficiently trained. i'm sitting here at hooters, waiting for the waitress, tara, to tell me when she thinks i'm fine to go. isn't that something? cute kid tara, sweet. said she was german. sold me a third pitcher of guiness when doug showed up. brave. i'm happy to reassure her.

    finally, the manager dude said something to me. something like "time to close it up", and i thought about it. i was sitting there because the waitress told me to, and i was going to stay there until she told me to leave. but i knew i was reeady to leave. so after a few minutes. when everytone was heading to the exit. i got up, and shuffled out.

    so, what is the lesson learned? general it is good to submit. sometimes it is hard to figure out what to submit to. but still, it is a good idea.

    • March 16, 2002
    no rush. everything in it's place

    so i've come downtown. hoping to have mittagessen at erika's. i figure, if it's really german, they will be open for lunch, since that's when german's eat there big meal of the day. and actually, during the week (tuesday-thursday), that is when they are open. but on friday and saturday, they open at 5:30. it says it's german american. i guess that's the american. so i'm here at huey's

    there are times when i'm ashamed to be an american. i came in here. there was noone at the bar. so i sit at the bar. then fucking sheep sit at the bar. two chicks come in sitting four feet to my right. chick on the right ask what beer do they have on tap. she is four feet from the tap, which is clearly labelled. bud's on there. of, course, though, i'm having a guinness.

    so black homeless dude asked me for some moeny or something. i just gave him a blank look. and i was thinking, if i were black, i'd want to get him out of there. making them look bad. or at least, go for parity. white people too. and later, some old white bag lady ask me for money. there is justice in the world.

    so the map room was closed. erika's was closed. i'm so self indulgent as to think someone might care about reading this crap. yeah, that must be why i'm writing it. i might actually want to remember this stuff. let it go, man. let it fucking go.

    so, i step into a world of imagination. leaving huey's i crossed the street into the peabody complex. i stepped into a little souveneir (how come i don't know how to spell that?) shop. what caught my eye, was this little silvery memphis cup, with a guitar for a stem. and the old lady working there was talking to me, and it didn't even seem like she was talking to me. just shouting out to the room. "isn't that a nice piece" "why don't you try that on". trippy. i was reacking up to handle one of those cup, and it startled me, so that i stoppen and move about the room. they had yellow submarine lunchboxes! i did eventually settle on the little memphis, cup, but not without realizing that i had stepped into a nonordinary reality, and needed to continue to explore. i decided that i would head back to the car to drop off my trophy, so i could continue my adventure. leaving the peabody by the car entrance, i made my way toward the street, but i looked back, and saw that there was a wide covered walkway to get to the peabody place, and i had fortuitously parked at the parking garage for the peabody place, so i made my way thither. andd wandering about, i find that there is an establishment that calls itself "dan mcguinness- irish pub" lucky accident. but me with my touristy prize, i felt a little foolish dropping in with a bag in hand, announcing for all to see "I'm a tourist". not that i could pass otherwise in a place like this, but still, we must attempt at least to keep up appearrances. so i duck in for a look, and smile at the sweeper at casting about. but i will have none of it. and i move on. so i mosey on towards the garage. there is a skywalk conveniently adjoining to the little mall. but just towards the exit, there is an officious looking gentleman standing at the top of the escalator. i amble over to investigate, and the escalator is out, and said gentleman appears to be operating upon it. i nod a good day to him and make my way. a trio of the fair flower of motherhood with their precious golden haired darlings is also making their way into the garage. they take the elevator. and i walk around. some seasoned gothic girl passes. so i drop off my package and return. back to dan mcguinness's. what'll i have. well, how about a guinness! overpriced. a tourist trap, i suppose. nice enough barlady. has she been to ireland. hasn't. hasn't been out of the country. asked me if i have. i say no. i guess it was ambiguous. i start with, i'm going to germany in april. i guess as far as "i", somehow cut off. other bar working dude has shown up. black guy. sounded like she called to the other bar chick, "hey andie"

    You are a savage, Mr. Babian.

    nobody has to touch anything they don't want to. even with a pole. and they are going to make ever longer and longer poles. so, how would you make a world where this is true? restrict what poles are? well, it looks like first you would want to grant what seems to be free will. and if you are going to set up rules, you are going to set up rules consistent with not requiring people to touch things that they don't want to touch, "with poles". Separating things. Always putting enough distance between things. I would want to say, make things somehow like the way things are.

    If I were to offer a bit of advice, it would be: relax.

    i came down to the parade. st. patty's day. got the undercovered out. pissant

    wet back to the starbucks. saw max garzon. decided to stick around. ordered a venti chai. got it, and saw cody from work. trippy day.

    there is a kind of physics understanding of the world that says that things happen because chance collisions happen in such a way that the interaction causes the two pieces to stick together instead of just bouncing apart again, which is the regular result. the situations where things are stuck together, are then just a result of these uncommon connections. but it is possible to set things up so that two travellers do collide and stay together. is this providence?

    so to top off an interesting day, it gets to be after 5:30, so erika's should be open after all. wait long enough and good things will happen. but i have blown all the money i have. i find the cash machine near the exit, and look into my wallet for my credit card. gone. i've lost it. it had to happen eventually. i have no idea where. probably left it in the machine when i got cash. luckily, i left money in the car for the parking toll. so i just drive home. no schnitzel for me today. i listen to the bluegrass cd i have bought. with cash. when i get home, i all the chase people to cancel the card. the last transaction was yesterday at the cash machine. at least i haven't been maxed out. but it would only have been two thousand dollars. i could have absorbed that. price of life. but i had gone to the long john silver's to get an a&w root beer. while i was waiting in line. some guy's order came up. a number one. some greasy fish something or other and chips. worker shaniqua tries to hand it over to dude, with one of the trippiest froes i've seen in quite a while, so i pass it over the rail, but dude turns it back. this isn't what he ordered. so i put it back down. shaniqua read the ticket, and that's what it says. looked like dude finally took it, but it was past me at that point.

    and the day continues.

    saw resident evil. that was a movie i really needed. sort of teen boy candy, and yet written by real people, with some psychological depth. symbolism. not heavy. but you could see they were to do a good job.

    and now i'm sitting here at denim and diamonds.

  • March 14, 2002
i've taken to eating snickers bars for lunch. they have a big size that's a dollar, as well as the small size which is sixty cents. the big one has 500 calories. that's about a whole meal. instant lunch. in fact, the thing says it's three servings. i really should try to be more cost effective if i'm going to eat anyway.

saw we were soldiers again. was going to ask for 'bravehart in vietnam' if a chick was at the ticket window. was a dude. sitting here at hooters. my pint glass is empty. i'm waiting to see if they are going to ask if i want another. doesn't look promising. i'm thinking i need to really try to study aikida again. as a martial art. i won't need a phd where i'm going. but i might need a little more unarmed martial training. i don't want to become a 'master'. i don't want to teach. but you fight like you train. and should at least try to train. maybe study a little more guitar. artsy.

there was a little of,what did i do wrong. i don't have to fuck to love. but i did really love, now. what should i have done. gia was asking me if i could have a relationship without sex. i wasnt ready for that. i wonder if that's some deal. so one thing that helped a lot: andrea said i should forget about her. she's just a person. i think that needs to be unwrapped. is that to say she isn't something special? not a unique snowflake? not without fault? do i want too much? did i elevate this to some higher plane?

no buzz today.

  • March 12, 2002
been working all day on this one bug. grr.

so. i'm shocked into that 'life is short' feeling. saw a thing on vh1 on marilyn manson. spoiled little dweeb stoner. 'smart guy'. totally sucked into that material world.

travelling salespeople posers. sitting here at tj mulligans. never been here before. it was time.

damn. waittress pushed me. about an inch left, and she asked me if i wanted another. it's 2:35, so it's close to closing. but still. pushy. one of those. at least the guinness is pretty warm. well, i figured i couldn't sleep, so i came out here. i left work early. i got to work at 6:15 because i dropped my mom off at the airport. was asleep by 4:30. woke up at 10.

so, aimee's word just isn't very good. she'll say stuff, and it won't happen. she means well. i said i trust her. because i know she always means well. she is kind and forgiving. but she makes promises. and i'm thinking, i can't call her on it. that just wouldn't be nice.

blonde down the bar said she loved languages. bitching that wherever she was going didn't have arabic. terry. not the blonde. old fedex dude. something about rice. dude said something like he can't remember his number. mine is 398438.

trust in the lord. he is our shepherd. it's nice to know we have a shepherd.

bar closed. i decided to see if autozone was 24 hours. nope. i then decided to try to find tunica. i drove south into missippi. i never saw a sign. i was on 55 and wasn't sure that that was the right rode. so i took state line over to 51. got a few miles past hernando. no indication anywhere. turned back. was listening to the psych tapes. this one was two lectures on the whole ai thing. i learned a little more about wittgenstein's notion that meaning is socially constructed. i think computers could do that. dude thinks the arguments against ( goedel, searle, wittgenstein) are fatal.

bit of an infomercial. increasing breast size. american beuaty values are a little cruel. you need to be thin with big tits. but if you lose weight, you're bra size shrinks. kind of cruel. i guess it's elitist. some people are just lucky. and maybe if you're especially rich, you could buy it. as opposed to brazil. thin with little tits. something poor people could achieve.

saw the video for blurry by puddle of mud. love. kid. mother. taking it all away.

  • March 11, 2002
went to asian palace with mom, andrea, her mom venca, and randy. saw karen b. and chris. they recommended the sizzling beef, the scallops and shrimp and the eggplant. we also got crab rangoon and spareribs and dumplings and the peking duck. nice. ate too much.

  • March 8, 2002
i am becoming ineffective here.

  • March 7, 2002
i'm such a spaz. so, after waffling, i'm again thinking i should ask laura to lunch. or maybe not. we shall see.

i put the two fify pound weights on the 17 pound bar to do bench presses, and it's too much. i must have lost some muscle. i was at 175. since i was down to 170, i' guess the last 5 gained is just fat. blech.

maybe i should take up smoking.

i just lost what i had written. arg. stupid microsoft.

let me try again. i had a trippy experience. i had something of a caffeine buzz. it's mostly gone now that i've started being absorbed bymy sai wu duck here at asian palace. but as i was driving, i felt that i was not my ego, which at this point is bruised and broken. it is there, but i am more than it. so, how did it go today? i was finally going to ask Laura to lunch. before lunch, i went to the bathroom, and when i got back, everyone was gone. no Laura. an hour later, when she came back, i actually did go over to ask her. i said i had a question, for her, and she said she didn't have an answer, and yet i pushed on. i asked her if she would come to lunch with me tomorrow. she was already going out with sharee and two other girls. rejected! this was just too tough. after three days of building up the courage, to be caught. i don't think i will be able to do that again. she didn't say she didn't want to go, but she made an excuse. and she didn't say maybe some other time. slink away! get thee to a nunnery!

'Oysters, come and walk with us!'

wow, listen to that!

home now. now i don't think it's a good thing. i'm just dissociated. shell shocked.

  • March 5, 2002
so i'm stuck. i'm just going to see how long i can go without writing aimee.

  • March 4, 2002
  • so there's this lady in our group, laura, who is like a twin of aimee. just about the same interests. similar personal history. really alike in many ways. i just rode with her to a meeting at whq, and in chatting, i found that they go to the same church. i almost asked her out, but she doesnt seem interested. i even asked aimee, and she said to ask her to lunch. well now i'm having second thoughts. do i want another aimee? i can see by analogy that we would never be serious. we aren't compatible. and at least aimee and i have mensa.

    i am just savage today. i'll be eating with a sharp knife. i've come to ruth's chris' for a steak. but i'm still on call. no rick today. so no wine. cranberry juice. lobster bisque. they didn't have lemonade. and soft drinks. ick.

    so, a frustrating weekend. tried to install linux 7.2. the xfree86 that came with it, 4.1 just does not support my card. even the backup generic drivers dont seem to work. but it is supported in 4.2. i tried getting that from xfree86.org. but the version they had was for a different glibc. i need to call redhat.

    i dont think i'm going to ask laura out

    i finally set up an email account on ababian.com so that i can get the intp mailing list. and i can check the mail on the web. my people. maybe a little sad. but it's home.

    man. this place has, like, plaques on the walls from various companies about town. commercial

    i'm a pig. maybe i'll try my own kind at corky's next time

    so where to now? i think i'll try the good, the bad and the ugly.

  • March 1, 2002
  • all men by nature desire to know -- aristotle

    • February 22, 2002
    telia philia,completed friendship. a concept from aristotle. friendship where you want what is best for your friend, not selfishly but for your friend's sake. they celebrate and encourage each other.

    i must remember to read augustine's confessions. the piece on augustine talks about how religion needs intellectuals to promulgate it because intellectual skills are needed to communicate to others.

    i have awoken from a most remarkable dream. the ending of it is about all i remember, though. while it was vivid, it was not lucid, and it faded quickly, i was imprisoned in some way, and one of the guards or something was talking to me, and he seemed to be wanting mme to confess to something. and he asked me about my predatory nature, and while i guess i admit to having thoughts of that nature, i didn't remember having indulged them, and i was tearing up as i was lying there, and a nurse or something came up to me and they turned me on my side, and she gave me a pill to swallow, even popped it in my mouth, and i had troulbe getting it down but i did, but i was swallowing it, i could follow the sensation of waking up. as i turned my head, focusing on my mouth, my feeling shifted from the position i had when i was asleep to the position i had when i was lying in bed, the way i was when i remembered falling asleep. and i have the feeling: is this the dream? this seems like a world where fantasies occur.

    i got my hair cutat mitchell's in collierville by a sweet country lady. this is the barber shop that my sister-in-law julie recommended, where my nephews and presumably my brother go. julie described it asthe sort of place on the andy griffith show. the barber lady sure chatted in a friendly small town way, but this was extremely odd because i was actually from "the city". i said i came there because i work at fedex, and she said they get a lot of people from fedex. it truly was a surreal experience. even the neighborhood barber here around the corner that i have been going to (though not very regularly) for years makes me nervous, but this was strangely homey. she asked me where i went to school. and i said college at christian brothers, and high school at mus, and she asked, isnt that on ridgeway? what was that john cougar mellancamp song about the small town? i really was letting myself go because i had given up on women. just yesterday, i tried to go by there, but it was closed, and when i was walking back to my car, i looked in the open door of a women's store, and after i walked by i could hear them all laughing. it sure seemed like they were laughing at me. i had an odd wild west feeling (this is the old town square and it tries to give an old small town feel) that if i had been toting my gun, i would have just gone back and blasted them. unlucky time for them to have been making a joke. from there i went to kinko's to get my passport photos made. cute girl elizabeth took quick care of me. thenn to the post office. i waited in line, and she gave me the form. i tried o fill out the form, but i didn't remember my parents birthdates, and i needed to go to the bank for cash. i kept trying to call the, with my cell phone but the line was busy. so i got all the way home, and found their old passports. so i go back to the post office, and wait in line again. i havent put in contact information, because it says "if you wish" but she told me i had to fill it out. and then, since i have a current passport, she says she can't do it. and i have to send it in by mail and fill in this other form. and now it's two hours since i left work and i don't jave this done. and its going to take 3-6 weeks and i might not have six weeks, and i'm starting to fume. blood pressure. when i got back to the office everybody is looking at my hair cut, since i have let it grow out. joel, who has shaved his beard, asks if i have gotten as much grief as he has, and i say no, but i dont know how much grief he has gotten. robert asked me why, (and the barber asked me why) and i said "passport photo". they last ten years.

    chivalry, trinity, sacrifice as nobility. politeness,control of emotion. apathos. rule of reason over passion, self sacrifice. the things in world are symbols. everything has meaning.

    • February 21, 2002
    trippy week. very busy at work. distaster after disaster. but only in our test environment. so it's really unimportant. just gave me stuff to do. kept me from other stuff. we are doing pretty well with our project.

    saw aimee at the ai lunch at a-tan yesterday. she was there first and got up to give me a hug. she's such a babe.

    i'm sitting here at pf. chang's china "bistro". what is a china bistro? has this odd chop house/ wannabe yuppee flavor. rotsa roundeye working fo' chinese restraunt. quite interesting. i had the duck. it came with "pancakes" these half tortillas, which i used to make wraps of duck, rice, and cucumber strips. different. not remotely chinese. except maybe the soy sauce.

    i've decided to quit the whole kidney doctor, blood pressure maintenance thing. it just seems pointless, considering that life just doesn't seem worth prolonging.

    • February 15, 2002
    free will. will is "free" because there are factors that influence that we don't know about. we can't predict our actions consciousless. there is something else. so when we ask whether we could have done something else, from what we know, we could have. we just don't see all that determines what we do. of course, we can't. the world just can't be predicted. but it does in some sense, follow rules.

    • February 14, 2002
    happy valentine's day!

    i tend now to precompensate a lot. i seem to always be 15 minutes late getting somewhere from the time i have planned when i start getting ready. So in general, i have always just shot to being 15 minutes early, and i usually make it coming to work, i've shifted the whole operation back to where it doesn't matter. i'm trying to get here by 7:30, and i've been actually making it here around 7:50, but it's early enough not to make a difference.

    i've had the feeling that i'm having the reaction a dog has when his master leaves for the day. he feels so forlorn abandoned and doesn't believe. he will ever see him again. i've been feeling like that about aimee, and it has been almost two months now, but by now i should realize that eventually i will see her again.

    somehow it came up that i tend to show my feelings, even though i try not to. it was actually as i was listening to searle talk about daulism. or is it materialism. in behavioris, a form of materialism, thoughts are equvalent to the behavior they create. believing that it is raining is the same as closing the window it it's open and bringing an umbrella or wearing a raincoat. this has problems and really is pretty silly, so i don't know if it is a fair characterization. one problem is that you could have an actor who acts like he is hurt, but isn't really, or a spartan who doesn't show emotion, even if he feels it. this made me think that while i would like to be such a spartan and not show pain, i'm just not good at it. i'm horrible at poker. another problem with the philosophy of behaviorism is that it can be circular. behavior may depend on desire which depends on beliefs which depend on desires.

    i often have complex feelings. i have a little magnet wall chart that has a few dozen moods and little cartoon pictures with a magnet marker for "how i feel today". and i've been trying to look at it and keep up with how i feel. but even with the large number of selections, usually nothing matches it exactly. and one thing i noticed today ws that i have a mixture of moods, and the ones on the chart are all simple pure ones. suspicious, guilty, sad hapy, excstatic, exhausted, curious, hopeful, angry, etc. today I feel tired but blissful, kind of like worn out from having so much fun. so not really happy, but surely not exhausted, or at least not exhausted with a frowny face.

    major disaster in production at work. the 4 million dollar super duper disk system went down. ouch. when it came back, our stuff didn't restart properly. blech. and we were scrambling over something when that happen. Pat is worn to a frazzle after two rough weeks on call. but i'm feeling pretty good. we worked it out pretty well. my back is feeling better.

    i showed robert the classes on tape that i'm looking at. he said i have too much time on my hands, and i need a wife. and robert told me what happened to him, and it was very sad. he used to teach philosophy. he has said before that he was a continental philosopher according to his original study, but he at one point had to "retool" and study analytic philosophy. i asked him about this searle philosophy of mind stuff, and he just let it all out. he spent a seminar at brown learning about this analytic philosophy, and he could not get one coherent sentence out of it! so he decided to give up on philosophy! i mean, he had a phd. he was a professor. and he was giving up. he thought, well, he understood something about mathematics, so he would take that up. and now he's into computers. he was even saying that he hopes he gets out of computers before every bit of creativity is sucked out of it. it's still fun. but he would recommend to anyone who could possibly do something else, to do something else, before it completely dries up and we just become little cogs in a big corporate machine. that was really pretty pitiful.

    • February 12, 2002
    fat tuesday. last night, shared two pitchers of guinness with doug and went to platinum. much frolicking. he got a dance with ricki, who got him off. i found out after we left and went back. tried. didnt catch her.

    sitting at chez. by myself. sort of ritzy. quiet.

    in the fish course. i'd say i'm stunned. it's one of those, i wasn't aware that food could get so good. and yet, i had a similar experience with citizen cane. having seen as good as it gets, the whole medium (of food in this case, film in the case of citizen cane) just seems limited. i guess it's part of the whole truth that life is unsatisfying.

    but i am shamed. dude came by and had to wipe away crumbs. freakish. onto a little gold tray. i think they are ready to have me out of here. good memphis water, though. and my reservation was for two. that probably pissed them off well enough.

    its about this time we get into the blissful point of the evening. i tend to have moods deeply related to how well, or maybe just how much, i have eaten. blood sugar, i guess. haven;t eaten anything today, except a couple of chocolates. and yet today was quite calm and good, at the minimum of mood, as it were. pretty darn blissful at this point.

    that was spectacular. i had this cough, though. probably sucked the wrong thing. very wet. must have been annoying to the other guests.

    now i'm wondering about coming here with aime. seems like i wouldnt want to share this kind of experience with someone with whom i wasn't very close.

    • February 8, 2002
    been horribly moody lately. blech.

    so i quit talking to erin because i thought she didnt want to see me. i wrote and asked. she hadnt even noticed.

    • February 4, 2002
    i'm sitting here at folk's folly. prime steak house. the pretense is almost choking. in the lounge. baby grand and jazz. i feel like i'm going to split open.

    lots of wolfenstein over the weekend. seems like i've almost finished it, i found something cute. if you use the flamethrower to torch the nazi babes, they scream like little girls.

    watched 'black hawk down' . gritty. field medic trying to clamp some ranger's femoral artery. had retract into his pelvis. didnt get it. i kept thing how i love aimee. and for her not to change. she was talking about i seem to always try to change her. forget it.

    28 ounce porterhouse. asparagas. broccoli. merlot "special cuvee". skip the salad. rare. get me out of here.

    was thinking about getting a .357. for russian roulette. seems like you can still find a game

    i haven't eaten today till i got here. started with beer. then bread sticks.

    am i such a savage? they put me off in this room. i started by myself. then they inserted corporate sleeze. viva la revolucion! the

    sizzle!

    they've added stock sharks. i have a knife. but the wine is strong.

    the feeling i get is that these all have the money such that they can afford the best. but they want someone else to figure out what is the best and give it to them

    peace. the peace that passeth understanding.

    • February 1, 2002
    i bunch of ants were crawling into the kitchen. i had left it dirty, with butter and crumbs. i killed them mercilessly, coldly, cruelly. i broke out the windex, which i have described before. just spray, and as it falls, they just stop. no twitching. just stop. they were just hungry. living their lives. these were very tiny ants, about as small as i've seen.

    i wrote aimee again. it seemed important. i can't remember what i said. she semed mad. i hadn't said nice things. i tried to accept her feelings. she hadn't seemed to believe me about how bad things have been. i tried to say i was sincere. i don't think i helped anything. i need to let go, but i find myself clinging.

    i'm just indulging myself, to no end. all that happens is as it should be

    • January 30, 2002
    ok. it was pete. i completely melted down on monday. had to take tuesday off. but at about 7:00 on monday evening, somehow i got over it. a little meditation. and i told aimee it was because i thought it might not work out (she was pissed at that). but what was it? acceptance? there is clearly more to this than just my wanting to be with aimee. this whole thing is a bad habit i've gotten into. holding on to a desire to be with someone who doesnt want to be with me, so i don't have to deal with the real work of trying to meet new people and form a real relationship. it is a way of avoiding a relationship.

    i remarkable notion came up in the ai lunch at a-tan last week. stan was wondering where the choice of action happens, do we make it up in the cortex, or do we modify actions lower in the brain. i related that we use natural resonant movement of the arm in performing action. it is an equivalent process to rely on natural resonant mental behaviors. to the neural net, it is just signal flows. the magic of the brain is about kicking those signal flows in ways that are helpful. an integrated dynamical system with influences more than just directives.

    • January 26, 2002
    well i got the story on aimee. seeing someone. paul. met him at the new years eve party. found out in a kind of rough way. decided to go to her church. she was with him, and it looked like they were holding hands. lovey dovey. decided it would be better not to join them and made my way around to the door on the other side. pedestrian service. hope. dealing with troubles. builds character. trying to get out, aimee spots me. she had seen me at the beginning and saw me wander off and didn't see me after. didn't know if i had left. she had brought two people, bob, a colleague, and aforementioned paul. working the coffee bar. gotta run.

    been a rough day. when to bed at 7. got up at 9. i was hoping to get up at 6 to not lose the cycle, but it just wasn't enough. 14 hours. a lot of recovery. and then after a slow rise, i go out to walmart to get my oil changed. no chairs for a while and my back just goes crazy. i finally sit and it's just rough. builds character. an hour and a half. then i go to sears to get my tires rotated. one wheel is out of alignment. had to get a new one. i decided might as well get two. got out at 4:30. go home. rick has called. is rick there? he's out. tell catherine i'm calling him back, but i won't be there. he's outside. well get him. can he call tomorrow? sure. and then church. at least he talked about how sex is only for in marriage and how people make excuses. take that, aimee, you slut. but really, i think it was probably good that i went. i didn't really need to sit with her. just something to let go of.

    so how about my plans? the work on eddie's house is moving apace. it was enclosed by mennonites this week. it could probably use more money. with all the extra spending, it doesn't look like i will even have one card paid off in time to cancel and improve my credit rating in time to buy a new car for summer. noteven close to having both paid off. so i can just hope it passes inspection in june. maybe i need to get a tune up. but it seems to be missing, and probably needs a new head gasket. ain't gonna happen. so which road am i looking at? the hobo thing just doesn't sound like it would work for me. maybe a new city. maybe i can hang on to this job till i have some money. maybe the end of the year. but i get this feeling, that if i can get to zero, it will only be a matter of time before it just isn't worth it, and i will just leave. will i even be sensible about it? will i have a new job lined up? will i just go for the final end as was the plan? maybe. that's just too far to even try to see.

    so there was a two for one special. on wednesday, i went over to erin just before lunch to ask about the ai lunch at a-tan and she just blew me way the fuck off. can we talk later? i don't want to forget where i am. sure i said. but that was it. i'd had enough. she never calls me back. about half the time she's too busy to even chat. i don't need that aggravation. aimee is a good influence on me, so i have reason to try to stick with her. but erin. forget it. she doesn't want to see me; i'll leave her alone. with aimee, it comes to whether i can muster the self-respect. probably not. i'll just try to use reason. going to church was good. avoiding her when she's with her current lover, sensible. i just have to trust myself. and since i'm feeling bad, i hope i can take it as an opportunity to let go.

    • January 23, 2002
    maybe the question was just too difficult. i actually try to ask tough questions, and maybe i just naturally overcomplicated this one. i asked aimee if she would like to go out and do something this week. i think about it now and it's surprisingly subtle. and aimee just hasn't answered. so i'm thinking about the question. i figured she probably wouldn't want to say yes because she already has stuff planned. everyone always has stuff planned. and she's particularly busy. but it's not like she wouldn't want to if she had time. so how could i ask that? not very nice of me. i was supposed to ask if she was free on some particular day. but i never really was about being expected or nice. so in itself i've already been annoying. and, being the sweet person she is, she doesn't want to tell me 'no'-- just because she tries to never say bad things in that dale carnegie way. and maybe especially since to a certain extent, she really would like to, it wouldn't be entirely true. this points out a difference in our ethical viewpoints. i would say that not saying anything is not telling the truth. but Aimee finds not speaking acceptable. and, according to the buddhist ethical lecture i got from robert, the important consideration is to do no harm. so probably aimee has the better approach, but it just isn't my way. in any case, aimee just didn't reply, and probably thinks nothing of it. actually i do the same thing of just not respond to e-mails when my answer is no. but this kind of thing has really messed with me in the past-- it's hard to know for sure that no answer means 'no', i guess that's part of the nature of that response.

    • January 22, 2002
    that was an eye-opening experience. went to lunch with bruce and his little college kid employees. erin and liz. they all look the same. but there are a lot of them out there.

    • January 19, 2002
    appropriate attire required. that's what the sign says. this is at bosco's. a beer drinker's bar. clothes you've slept in? a smell of urine and vomit? grungy? sweatshirt and jeans?

    so i had this dream. i had been thinking about telling aimee i wanted to go to church with her this saturday (now today). the thing is, she has alwayssaid i was welcome, but i still feel its a good thing to ask her. showing up would be too much of a stalking move. but then, church is all about "come for the music, stay for the sermon". context. this barstool is killing my back. so i had paid $10 to go to this show. the organizer was chris dunovan, an old mus alum (that may not be a real person). there were going to be a bunch of bands. soi show up. and there's even a bunch of food. like a case full of neatly wrapped in paper burgers (maybe macdonalds) and sandwiches. I go grab a couple of those (I guess I'm hungry) and a rocking metal type band is playing. it seems like this is in the hyde chapel at mus. seems a little larger. but just a small thing. and i go sit. and it's a revival meeting! and it seems like they snookered people, didnt advertise it like that. timeshare in florida style. and the audience really doesn't dig it. the mood is sort of resentful. a little grumbly. kind of churchlike. the applause isnt great (and what is it with aplause in church? that just seems wrong to me.) but i'm digging it. i like it. they've got the music, which is your basic rock, but also their inpirational messages stuck in between. i can appreciate it, but i'm mostly in it for the food and music. so what does this mean for me? i actually go to church with aimee because i like being with aimee. but i like the church service. i shouldnt try to go to aimee's church just to be with her. i was tending to try to do that so i could be with her afterwards. in that subtle, fooling yourself, semi-subconscious way.

    empty stomach. two beers getting to me. good beers. scotish ale.

    purity and excellence of thought

    so what could have happened here. david and mrs. stowell could have showed up. and randy. and other temperance two regulars. maybe they are here and i just didnt see where they are sitting. but they could have showed up. and aimee could have come by. and we could have chatted and had a nice time. and i could have left with aimee and gone to church with aimee. it'sabout time now that we would have had to leave to make it to the service. and a few beers might have been good for my ability to appreciate the service. very forgiving and worldly-wise folk, them christians.

    sitting here with dick shaw. the lesson to be learned: don't spill your drink. got 86'ed.

    wise-fold. them christians. sitting here with dick shaw. a little into the german stuff. talking about guns and such.

    man. should i be embarassassed? 86'ed. left by the person i was with. barmaid, i said i didn't thin i was ready to pay up, but she gave me my tab anyway. so at the camel yesterday, i wasn't done. i was wanting to stay around to listen to the band but i got up to go to the bathroom and i came back and my table had been bussed and there were people already seated. so what should i do? i'm 86'ed. but i know myself. still. they know their limits. so i have to respect them

    it seems that many people are aware of and are into the power of positive, increasing affirmation. but in fact, a more powerful, and productive force, is increasing, negative response. a response that causes an effect that may be stronger than the initial effect, but in the oppposite direction. if this response is again inreasingly counter, the result is the same increased positive response, but that is only one partial result. so the increased negative response includes the positive affirmation as a positive result, but has additional results as well.

    mad abdul signing off

    • January 13, 2002
    so i asked aimee for her phone number and she said she'd give it to me the next time we go out for dinner or drinks. i guess that's fair enough.

    i wouldn't say my heart is broken. i'd say it was ground into a fine dust. smashed and smashed and smashed and smashed and smashed and smashed.

    i gota little heart rate monitor. i want to take up jogging again and that really helped. we'll see

    i was at 178 today. the super accurate scale, to the tenth of a pound, that helped me really obsess about my weight, has died. i need to get a new digital. we have an old spring scale, but i dont know about it. something about having the numbers was comforting.

    i played wolfenstein for 18 hours yesterday. keep my mid off of things. i have so much work planned out for myself. i need to clean out my closet so i can move my boxes off books into it and bring my weigths back downstairs. i was thinking of getting a treadmill.

    i have a bunch of things that i want to do for an hour a day. exercise, of course. and scanning 'i am that' ( which should take about two weeks). studying ear training with the software i have. studying java. studying compilers. playing guitar. and a little playing wolfenstein. probably i should add some programming. and evetually i want to do videography. i suppose drawing is out. i'll probably keep an hour of tv and eating. and i wont skimp on the sleeping.

    this weekend i was procrastinating because i left some work to do. i need to do a final build, and i want to work on some bugs.

    • January 6, 2002
    so it turned out that that after a party nap, i went back to the con. i was thinking i was going to just sleep through but i got up at midnight, and checked the con schedule and saw that there were late night events. something about belly dancing. i caught the tail end of a costume contest. deborah was a fallen angel. wings and little white horns. not particularly mad at me this time. and there was this cute blonde girl tracy. i guess it was be nice to men night. she wore painted on hands on her breasts. something about tape made it legal. i got to look at her for several hours. a very prety girl. some point late in the evening, i told her she was beautiful. and i hugged her goodnight a couple of times. and deborah seemed to like being hugged. one thing that was funny was how some of the girls would just be staring at her chest. it was kind of funny. and i even got to play a little guitar. i dont know if i got the chords right, but what shall we do with a drunken sailor.

    • January 5, 2002
    so it was deborah. but it is too late. she doesnt care. though, i did say something about playing games wasnt so good a thing.

    • January 4, 2002
    at shadowcon. what a bunch of losers. but quite a few cute chicks.

    i know there was something i was going to say. heck if i can remember.

    in i am that, there was a questioner who mentioned a realization experience in which, let me quote: " By realization I mean a wonderful experience of peace, goodness and beauty, when the world makes sense and there is an all-pervading unity of both substance and essence. While such experience does not last, it cannot be forgotten. It shines in the mind, both as memory and longing. I know what I am talk- ing about, for I have had such experiences. By liberation I mean to be permanently in that wonderful state." been there, but sri nisargattada says this is just an experience. real desirelessness is the best happiness.

    bored. a sad bunch of people when you haven't had enough to drink. and maybe im thirsty. i get moody when im dehydrated. plus im getting tired. but bored.

    i offended venus. maybe that's why i had a bad time. it only comes to me now. there was the cute girl that was with roy on new year's eve. she said to me cheerfully 'hi andy', and i couldn't remember her name for sure. i thought it was deborah, but i wasnt sure. i still dont know. but i said hi, like she was nothing to me. grr. sounds like seven years bad luck.