A fair exchange

Suckling pig from Mid-Autumn Festival barbecue

I finish work at 9pm on Friday night on the other side of town, although that's only a 15 minute scooter ride from home. The joys of high density living. It means I get out of the east district and finish the week in the bright night lights of an area filled with bars, restaurants, pachinko halls and sex work places.

Today I left work feeling good and with enough $ in my wallet to own the night. I went to a barbecue restaurant and sat inside at a corner table and ordered draft beer in frozen mugs and ate only meat. I didn't want to see anyone. I'd found Pessoa again, lost in the shuffle of the books being read / to read heap on a low shelf behind this desk.

Reading in such places is great, I feel like a king. All the distractions are good ones - just the girls in skimpy clothes promoting beer, office ladies after work, and people who bring me food and drink if I ask them. Bending their will, and for what? For the paper I have in my pocket. It's a fair exchange if they're happy to make it.

To make my children more well-behaved

For animated Turing patterns click here

I'm an English teacher / proofreader living in Tainan, Taiwan. I read a lot of student papers.

One of my parents' punishments was to threaten me that I will be kidnapped if I am a bad boy. I was very scared of that and could not go to toilet alone for a long time. I think it was a funny experience, and probably I will use the same method to make my children more well-behaved.

Unidentified male student, mid-20s

Related posts:
Pattern recognition

Things that happen all the time

Two cool videos of Rayleigh-Bénard convection.

Achieve success, kill yourself

Tokyo Undressed

Camus said there's only one serious question, and that's whether or not to kill yourself. Even after I grew up that quote stayed cool for a while, but mostly struck me as dumb. Life is not an either / or decision, there are many ways to live or slowly die.

The aim of this blog is to keep a record of various things and see what emerges many years later. The patterns aren't supposed to be too apparent at first. So, time for the first of a series of posts noting when people who have achieved professional success and the respect of their peers choose to kill themselves. Since all information will be gathered online, it's likely to be restricted to famous people. In addition, the basic rules are that the person should still be at or near the height of their powers and with no impending health crises, no obvious external reasons to kill themselves. The model for this is Yukio Mishima.

First up, as you can probably guess, is David Foster Wallace,

(February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer as well as a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wallace was best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels (1923-2006).

Wikipedia

Who'll be next?

Posts tagged Mishima.

Consumption / production

Gerhard Richter - Niagra Falls

An interesting talk by Richard Lewontin entitled The Coevolution of Animals And Their Environment, which is about the micro-environments that each organism, at both the individual and species levels, creates around itself.

In the talk he uses a quote, which I think may come from Marx, but my search only came up with the following reference:

...in every act of consumption there is production, as in every act of production there is consumption.

Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption

By A. Fuat Firat, Nikhilesh Dholakia p77

Which made me think of all the microbes feasting on discarded food and just getting on with things, thriving in whatever we do.

Related posts:
Human Evolution and the Environment
The planet will save itself
Misdirected anger

Who writes these things about you?

A very relaxed Lou Reed in Australia, 1974, answering journalists' questions.

Simple rules, randomness, feedback

Lorenz attractor: unpredictable mood swings

...healthy systems are ‘chaotic’, while disease is characterized by a more regular rhythmic behavior...

From Dynamical Behavior of Estrous Cycle in Mice, an unpublished paper I'm proofreading

Toying with the idea of trying to map out the simple rules that would produce a somewhat realistic version of myself in a computer simulation, inspired by hours of GTA IV play, the thought of what makes me tick, and the idea of not having to be here, but something else taking up the slack. Also, Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind has been facing me on the bookshelf behind this desk for a long time, waiting to be opened, although I think most of the key ideas have filtered through from elsewhere, and I'm always open to having the idea of a centralized, conscious, controlling self cut down to size / blown apart.

A few simple rules, plus randomness - outside events - and feedback. Like a I wrote a few posts back: ...when I feel fat / ugly / poor / stupid I work harder, leading eventually to a period of contentment / over-confidence. Bouncing between moods in a deterministic fashion, albeit one that's too complex to ever get ahead of, essentially unpredictable. Far better just to let go and not worry so much about what happens next inside my head.

I used to have mood swings, elation / despair, but not so much now, rarely ever. In part I ascribe this to being genuinely more content in all aspects of my life, and also to diet / exercise - the chemical basis of things that lay within my control, and finally to a certain cultivated disassociation from my feelings, a lack of identification with whatever just happened, because something else is always happening now, and then that's gone and there's something else.

Alternating periods of gaining energy, information and experience with blank spaces of becoming less complex, less contrived, less reflective, less assured and less self-aware. Being prepared and then being relatively passive.

Of course, you do this and then wake up and the better part of half the time has gone and you've done nothing by anyone's account, and possibly not even your own. The school report will be a bad one: must try harder, could do better. Alternatively, you work terrifically hard on some misguided project - truly misguided, as it doesn't come from some internal drive, and wake up much the same, far progressed along a road you had no intention of setting foot on long ago.

The idea for the rest of the year is to seem to do nothing, while still making $ and expanding in all areas of interest.

Blue Recursive

A lazy weekend of work and rest. The above is Blue Recursive by Don Relyea, made with software and based the Hilbert space filling curve. The link takes you to many other beautiful images.

Do you feel lucky?

Sonatine

I want to avoid politics, because I think the best way to such express such things is how we spend our time day to day. The personal is political, and all that. Still, the idea of McCain / Palin gathering momentum is like watching someone gleefully about to do something stupid, and you feel a responsibility to step in, but then the joy of the moment, and the fact that karma is almost certain to be enacted there and then, is somewhat infectious. I have a tendency to look at jackasses and think just do it, so long as I don't have to pick up the pieces.

American exceptionalism as a faith, the idea that no matter what happens something [i.e. God] will protect it, is one that an English person, especially, can't quite get a handle on. Things fall apart, nations lose their mojo.

That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hunter S. Thompson

When you've had a run of luck it's hard not to believe in something, and when you couple that with obvious ability I guess the combination is heady indeed. But pushed far enough these things almost always end badly, which is why they end. The random nature of certain things vs. the apparent reversion to the mean.

Even without ability and little native good sense my luck has held for a long time. I once made a list of genuinely terrible, life-ending / ruining events that I narrowly avoided due to situations beyond my control. It was a long list and a fun thing to do, but a literary exercise, not a practical one. I can see how things could have gone a lot worse for me without some luck, but it's hard to see how things could have gone better without stepping off into fantasy.

There's a Chinese folk story that starts with bad luck, that turns to good luck, that becomes bad, and then good, and then so one, as long as the teller can spin it. ( Mao being asked about the consequences of the French Revolution: "It's too early to tell").

A fun time had listing my narrow escapes, but no fun if I consider some reversion to the mean, which is to some extent why I remain so fearful of cars, suspecting that I'll be on my bicycle ogling some woman when the last line is written.

"What's wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally,"

Nsaba Buturo, Uganda's Minister for Ethics and Integrity, here.

Style over speed

Click on the picture for something like a mission statement from Copenhagen Cycle Chic

I'm big on riding my bicycle. Tainan is not a big city, and it's easy to get around pedaling so long as you don't need to be somewhere far, soon and not sweating. If you can move at a leisurely pace then every thing is good on a bike, and I'm all about leisurely paces.

Bicycle sales have increased a lot in Taiwan this year, and this is clear in the number of people riding them in the evening and at weekends. A new breed has emerged, generally moving in packs. Riding high-end, Giant cycles and clad in lycra, with face masks and helmets. They can't step off and do anything without attracting attention. This doesn't seem very easy or practical.

My unease about this was just a vague distaste at cycling being set up a hobby or sport rather than a means of transport, and one that demanded a lot of expensive equipment to become part of the club and one of the kool kids. So it was nice to come across Copenhagen Cycle Chic, which takes as it's tag line normal people in normal clothes on normal bikes. Many good pictures of people riding bicycles downtown, and I hope the practice becomes a lot more popular. Cheap, healthy, quiet and clean.

Tokyo Cycle Chic

Why I am so chaste

Tokyo Undressed

I think if I worked in an office I'd be far more lecherous and alarming than I am, far more prone to obsession and liable to lose my bearings if an attractive young woman struck up a friendly conversation. Yet because my job - teaching adults English - puts me in classes of mostly women from 16 to 40 there is a high level of ambivalence that goes with any attraction or appreciation, because someone else with something else will always be along a moment later. This summer especially had all these cute young things who were smart and enthusiastic and appeared to get my jokes and the overall way that I like to get things done, and it was gratifying that I fell for no-one and not once thought of doing anything rash, at least, no more rash than the general run of ill-considered actions that I consider far too long but rarely carry out.

Like I wrote a few posts back, the main attraction of the young folk, beyond the shallow cuteness, is a) their obvious, relative health, and b) that they haven't yet f***ed-up in many ways beyond repair. My attractions, if I have any, are going to be much more contrived.

All posts labeled sex

Doing nothing, getting things done

I would caution that what one wants to think about is not hours of work but rather disutility of work--the extent to which work is not play, but rather something that alienates one from one's essence.

Brad DeLong, here.

Indeed, but this week it seems my work's become play again, a nice mix of conversation and exam prep classes along with some proofreading, but mainly time to cook, exercise, read, rest and play [GTA mayhem amid beauty], and so my essence, for good or ill, is starting to bloom again.

Taken somewhat out of context:

...for when we have abandoned our natural temperament, there are no longer any limits to hold us back.

From the Sixth Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 80

Henry Miller, by Peter Gowland

"To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers are that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine."

Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion, p341

Scattered points along the path of life

Burning ghost money

In the vicissitudes of a long life, I have noticed that the periods of sweetest enjoyment and most intense pleasures are, nevertheless, not those whose recollection most attracts and touches me. Those short moments of delirium and passion, however intense they might be, are, even with their intensity, still only scattered points along the path of life. They are too rare and too rapid to constitute a state of being: and the happiness for which my heart longs is in no way made up of fleeting instants, but rather a simple and permanent state which has nothing intense in itself but whose duration increases its charm to the point that I finally find supreme felicity in it.
From the Fifth Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 68

Dull to add at this point, but near the end of my first week on the new routine and the charm of it's only starting to sink in, albeit unaccompanied by any kind of horror at how long I did things that I didn't really want to. Not just the three hellish months of 08:30 - 21:30 this summer, but the years of having to do what my visa-holding bosses wanted me to. So, a week or two of self-indulgence before I want to kick off more seriously with a return to studying Chinese via podcasts, a friend's excellent book, and, y'know, just living in Taiwan and spending less time in classes where I'm supposed to teach / speak English.

I'd like to be able to talk more clearly with my wife about things, and although ideally that'd be in Japanese or English, it seems Chinese is the most practical option for now. My Chinese is relatively good, but there are large gaps in my advanced vocabulary and overall it's an insanely slapdash affair, with islands of extreme competence in an ocean of ignorance.

A rod for my own back

The kindness of folk in Taiwan, which could be a running series, either that or the devil sent a man who had a spare Xbox 360 [hardcore gamer, bought one early and then an updated model] and a copy of GTA IV that they lacked the English to play, so the console is staying with me. I'm pretty hopeless, mashing buttons when I fight and knocking down way too many lamp posts / pedestrians, but some late night urban mayhem is exactly what I need at the end of the summer.

And I have my new routine, classes only in the evening, proofreading from 7:30am until 11am, the afternoons all free, my training wheels for a greater freedom, until good habits are more deeply ingrained.

Meanwhile, bouncing between over- and under-confidence, which seems to be a natural state that I need to accept. The idea being that when I feel fat / ugly / poor / stupid I work harder, leading eventually to a period of contentment / over-confidence. I see this at work with the smart and beautiful students I know - they tend to be very insecure, hence the exercise, make-up and study. Harnessing low self-esteem for self-improvement. I guess the key is to narrow the gap between the extremes, to get the good habits in deep enough that they're automatic, require no prompting from a sense of weakness, and all the time to be on guard against arrogance, et cetera. Ha.... At the moment I'm on a clean food / exercise kick on the old paleo model, which, coupled with my new found mastery of time and the concomitant ability to eat when I'm hungry, sleep when I'm tired, is leaving me feeling very good.

Tainted, in on the joke

Francis Bacon: Self portrait 1973

Being 38 a lot of people who were young when I was a kid have now become old, with the implication clearly being that for the kids I see today I'll be old before too long, when they're finally getting the hang of things. Always a lot of high school / university students in the summer classes, and the idea that I'll be almost 60 when they hit my age freaks me out a little, although I intend to make it in good physical shape. And when I meet them on the street 20 or so years later they'll also be tainted, in on the joke.

I started losing my hair when I was 18, so I've done the mid-life crisis thing enough times to have burned through it, and I shave my head with relief twice a week. I have a good skull, a stroke of luck.

I like living in an aging society, it means that I won't look out of place, but I also like folk young. It's such a seemingly arbitrary property, but no more so than being attracted to something because it's on sale, the same as before but just cheaper. When something is a bargain you can afford to take a risk, as the chances of regret are greatly diminished, and at a certain cost/wealth things become disposable. Much the same is true of youth, plus it's usually an attractive package. So little permanent physcial damage has been done to anyone under 21, little that a good rest and a month or two of diet and exercise couldn't put right.

The other reason why I like some young people is that they haven't f***ed things up yet, but then others are wasting away. I have nothing against people being young and confused - I spent years wandering around - but it frustrates me to see people tearing themselves apart within such narrow boundaries, "should I do A or B?", with neither appeals to them, without testing either to see if it really works, let alone considering C or extending their options even further. If you're going to f*** up at least do it in a spectacular fashion that leaves you twisted and broken from pursuing something you actually wanted.

Autodigestion

A time lapse study of inky cap mushrooms by Kent Loeffler, via the Cornell Mushroom Blog, which contains a much larger [and better] video of the same and an explanation of the autodigestion process at play. The former leads to the Cornell Plant Pathology Lab, which presents yet another career path I never had the chance to consider.

There are so many ways of being alive, as the inky caps and plant pathologists make clear. Yesterday was the last day - 8:30am to 9pm - of my summer schedule, and I'm now on full release, only teaching for two or three classes in the evenings from now on, doing proofreading when I want, and generally in a position to master my own time and system. The elation has yet to kick in, but I expect the number of posts here to finally pick up after the three month lull, and that will make me happy.

Busted rhythms of limited interest

"Wealth is passed down from generation to generation, you can't get rid of wealth. Rich is some shit you can lose with a crazy summer and a drug habit."

Chris Rock

I wrote a post entitled Manumission a few months ago, before this summer of lost IQ, declining health and massive opportunity costs really kicked in, and now only five days to go until everything becomes more human, In the middle of the summer I finally got my permanent residency, so I can do anything to make money that's legal, which opens up a whole arena of things that I don't want to do, but also the possibility of functioning independent of a boss, which is key. Although my class hours will fall way down, as desired, but I'm lucky the remaining ones are all in the evening. It greatly reduces the opportunities for mischief inherent in being able to start drinking at noon. I spent my 20s and early 30s coloring outside the lines, and am happy to set myself up within strict limits.

Still, no idea how people cope with a long career of 9 - 5 with a commute at each end and continual debt. It's been interesting to watch myself deteriorate, but not a lot of fun, and I never want to work like this again, 50 - 60 hrs a week on projects not of my choosing. Still, I've got $$$ in the bank for the rest of the year, and that's always good. F*** you $ beats possessions every time.

The main thing is to get my health back into condition, so more cooking rather eating out, more exercise beyond bike riding. Basically back to the paleoconservative plan of veg / fruit/ meat - low / no carbs - and short bouts of hard exercise interspersed with frequent, low level activity. Living like a caveman again, letting the system right itself.

With regard to exercise, I got bored with my regular free weights routine. Too many programmed actions that isolate muscle groups rather than giving a workout that mimics real actions. To keep things fresh, the next phase of hefting metal disks on steel poles with be based around these sledgehammer routines. I haven't bought a sledgehammer but just took the weights off one end of a regular EZ curl barbell, and I don't use anything to pad the heavy end. Certain elements of the routine will change after I've had my first accident, but the sense that a false swing might cause intense pain / lasting damage is a good way to keep attention on form.

Decline is inevitable, so you have to keep moving just to stay the same, but add a little more effort, a little more smartly, and gains can actually be made, at least terms of learning, strength, performance and finances, if not my face, which has already moved well from the boyish to the characterful phase of its existence, aka the Dirty Old Man.

On walking away from bad food

There used to be a good Sichuan restaurant near here, with the owner from Chengdu. Most of the food was inedibly hot, but - and I've been to Sichuan - it was the real thing. I went there a month ago and the food had gone downhill a lot, perhaps a combination of static prices / inflation / catering to local tastes. I gave it another go tonight and was left filling up on beer and sunflower seeds. The food was no good, so I didn't eat it. At one time I'd have thought that was wasteful, but now I understand that as long as something rots it's being eaten.

I often feel bad for not posting more often, but a truly erratic man is Yechezkel Zilber, who goes weeks with nothing and then several entries in one day. His latest:

Unhealthy food, should be thrown away as soon as you realize that it is negative to eat it. "Do not waste it" is irrational and unethical. The Talmud recognized it two millenia ago, when saying that the prohibition of wasting stuff, is irrelevant when the body is the counter party." The waste of the body is more important".

There has been times when it was crucial to keep food. Nowadays our trouble is the opposite and attitudes should be adjusted accordingly.

His previous post:

cool + true observations...
- how much do you do for your body (instead of wasting time on ... whatever)?
- and why the body as a measure, why not the soul, the spirit, the other ... or what?

English is not his first language. His blog is here.

Are you real?

Bragg: "I believe you play roulette, don't you? Why is that?"

Bacon: "Well, they say it's the silliest game you can play."

Reasonably long article on people's memories of Francis Bacon 16 yrs after his death in the Observer. A mention of a South Bank Show interview / profile, part one of six below, with parts occasionally being removed and then replaced, but worth the time if you have an interest. A vivid defense of figurative art with the work to back it up. The interviewer, Melvyn Bragg, tries to pull him into depths, but Bacon kicks ass and holds onto nothing but the moment, while getting drunk and saying it all. Really straight, no pretense, no complications. Amusing moment when Bragg expresses surprise shock that Bacon feels that humans are - shock - animals. Lately I've begun to think this is the only thing worth learning, so simple and yet it overturns everything we're supposed to accept about our special place in things. What a joke.


At one point he asks Bragg, "Are you real?"

But it must be said that I hate drunks, and nearly all that drink has made me do. But I keep drinking because I like to be in some control of my chemistry, and it cuts the caffeine and adrenalin at the end of the day.

Instruments of our passions

Thelonius Monk / me typing, from Pinamar

Botany is a study for an idle and solitary person: a point and a magnifying glass are all the apparatus he needs to observe plants. He walks about, wanders freely from one object to another, examines each flower with interest and curiosity, and as soon as he begins to grasp the laws of their structure, he enjoys, in observing them, a painless pleasure as intense as if it had cost him much pain. In this idle occupation there is a charm we feel only in the complete calm of passions, but which then alone suffices to make life happy and sweet. But as soon as we mingle a motive of interest or vanity with it, either in order to obtain distinction or to write books, as soon as we learn only in order to instruct, as soon as we look for flowers only in order to become an author or professor, all this sweet charm vanishes. We no longer see in plants anything but the instruments of our passions. We no longer find any pleasure in their study. We no longer want to know, but to show that we know. And in the woods, we are only on the world's stage, preoccupied with making ourselves admired. Or else, restricting ourselves to armchair and garden botany at the most, instead of observing vegetation in nature, we concern ourselves only with systems and methods - an eternal matter of dispute...

From the Seventh Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 98

Other posts in this series:

I resigned the post I then held
Reveries of a solitary wa*ker

Human Evolution and the Environment

An interesting talk by Paul Ehrlich at the Long Now Foundation called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

The first four steps on our path to dominance:
1) Living up in the trees [binocular vision, judging distance, grasping hands]
2) Down from the trees
3) Up on two legs
4) Language with syntax

A considerable gap, then the next four, which are rather obvious, but added for completeness:
5) Agriculture
6) Writing
7) Printing
8) The Industrial Revolution


Related. An overview of Merlin W. Donald's theory of How our mind, brain and culture evolved. Many of the actual papers, which I've yet to dig through, in pdf form here.

"The story you tell yourself is largely the story you're living"

Terence Mckenna in his farewell speech to the community, Posthumous Glory, via Lorenzo

I resigned the post I then held

From the time of my youth, I had set the age of forty as the terminal point for my efforts to succeed and as the one for all my vain ambitions. I was fully resolved once this age was reached that whatever situation I might be in, I would struggle no longer to get out of it and would spend the remainder of my days living from day to day without ever again concerning myself about the future. The moment having come, I executed this plan without difficulty; and even though my fortune then seemed to want to take a turn for the better, I renounced it not only without regret but with actual pleasure. In releasing myself from all those lures and vain hopes, I fully gave myself up to carelessness and to the peace of mind which always constituted my most dominant pleasure and most lasting propensity. I forsook the world and its pomp; I renounced all finery: no more sword, no more watch, no more white stockings, gilding, or headdress; a very simple wig, a good coarse cloth garment; and, better than all that, I eradicated from my heart the cupidity and covetousness which give [sic] value to everything I was forsaking. I resigned the post I then held, for which I was in no way suited, and began to copy music at so much a page, an occupation which had always greatly appealed to me.

From the Third Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 30

The text goes on in a way that'll appeal a lot if you like the above, and I find it hard to believe that it's unavailable for free online.

My summer of far too much work is now over, and today's the first day in eight weeks I haven't had a backlog of proofreading / class prep breathing down my neck in every stolen moment to myself. So, a day to do nothing, to let being busyness wash off me with frequent showers and a shaved head and no aims beyond watching There Will Be Blood, drinking tequila, riding my bicycle, and gardening.

Related post: Reveries of a solitary wa*ker

I always elected to ship out

In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.

It reads good until you find out the author was Philip K. Dick in a letter to his daughter, Laura, in 1974. It'd be hard to find someone who achieved so much and failed to adapt both to school and then to 'reality' after it in such a spectacular fashion. With 'reality' in quotes, of course, since this is PKD.

Amazon just delivered the second volume of the Library of America's PKD set, and the quote is from an appendix. They're handsome volumes, the highest quality books - in terms of paper, binding and so on - in this house. Volume two is 1,100 pages in slightly over an inch, with all the amphetamine logic you'll ever need.

A good site, regularly updated, for all that's old and new in the worlds of PKD: totaldickhead.blogspot.com

Insincere faith

A brief profile of Nassim Taleb in Bloomberg magazine, photographed with part of his collection of Christian icons. Taleb often expresses disdain for atheists, and at least an aesthetic interest in religions.

I can't get with the faith, for so many reasons, but let's pull out one for today. Why do Christians get sad when a loved one dies? It makes no sense. The loved one is now with God, in paradise, forever. The sweetest deal that ever could be. Sure, it sucks that they're gone and you'll miss them, but a) they're in a good place, and b) you'll get to spend eternity with them in the relative blink of an eye. It's like me getting pissed off because my wife gets to go on vacation a week before I do.

I'm sure there's a neat argument around the above, but I'm not smart enough to see it for myself.

Still, I have my collection of psychedelic literature that's no less - but certainly no more - absurd in places than the Christian faith is throughout, although I just to go it for ideas to play with, not for rules to live by. Consequently I can be legitimately sad when someone dies, although to date I never have been and can't imagine that I will be. Death's the main thing to prepare for, the only thing that definitely happens.

08-09 UK tour dates

Only one more week of this ridiculous, self-inflicted schedule. Essentially 60 hours a week, hence the reduced posts. But things will ease up somewhat after August 8th, and much more so at the end of the month, when I'll only be teaching in the evenings.

The exhilaration that comes with working hard and like a good machine wears off pretty fast, although at least the job isn't monotonous in the details - I can do what I want in class, and this summer has seen a lot of good students who repay all my efforts with their own. And there's $$$ in it.

The next big thing is my trip back to the UK, the first in several years. No tickets have been bought yet, but the provisional dates are December 20th until January 10th, with the bulk of the time being spent with my folks in Devon, and a few days in London at the end. For the few who might be interested in hooking up for food / drink, email me nearer the time.