ecology

I've been waking up earlier everyday. Call it a mental reprogramming. Rather than sleeping in until half past seven, hopping out of bed, rushing to shower and get myself out the door for work with hectic haste, I have mellowed the process. I set my alarm to shortly after six, turned it to a loud country music station (so that it quickly annoys me and compels me from my slumber) and am ready for work by shortly after seven.

The result is nearly an hour of caz-time.

I get to sit around, go grab a coffee at Starbucks, read a chapter of the current luggable-novel I'm devouring, or better yet, sit and write.

This new process has been musing for about two weeks now, and the thrill is settling into a steady, productive roar. I've been trapping some seriously cool ideas on paper, neatly scribbled into a coiled notebook that I force myself to carry around for just such emergencies. The second, followthru result is simply that I've compounded a new literary ecology for my morning mind to work through, and it's yielding some vague progress.

I'm stirred.

A few dozen pages of scribbles, quirks, ideas, invented conversations, and descriptors can managebly make the leap into a short story of some sort, potentially in the near future. That would be cool.

And then the city stirs.

08:38 AM on 02/03/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

ecosystem

A blade of grass is just a machine of carbon and amino acids. Nanotechnology of nature: a self-regulating collection of chemicals and fluids, harmonious together in a thread of neatly packed sugars, folded and twisted into a matrix of growing and changing swarms of cellular units, plexing into random chao-biotic shapes and forms.

One wonders what might happen if our invented machines of carbons and plastic were allowed to begin from such a primal state and evolve to form their own twists on ecology. Does anyone know of any twisted science fiction that explores this idea? I want to write some short stories about this.

09:18 AM on 28/02/2005 | comments (1) | trackbacks (0)

burn

I would like to the pull the erronious nuances of my interaction with the city into a tight bundle and toss them from a tall bridge. There is that lurking feeling, something is again hiding from a travelling circus of reality, like a core buried beneath the teaming surface, locked without light or air, but stemming a flow of information that it controls and with which it controls.

I pull back for a moment and contemplate my options: engagement or plurality.

Plurality seems like the choice of more interest, a nagging follow-through, swinging fully outwards into the quantum foam and examining the whipped lemon-merangue of the universe, trapped in metaphorical descriptors that would otherwise be fragile and pointless, but now offer the only taste of indescribability.

I would like to the pull the erronious nuances of my interaction with the city forward, lock them into some cohesively nervous twitch that could be visualized and augmented with a digital becon, quantitative and pure, abstraction locked in the function and not the purpose.

It might not happen, so I pull those notions together, weave their varying strings of confusion into a fabric that I can pull over my eyes like a blindfold: the depth of perception fades to a blur when the truth is held to close. The pattern is lost. The chaos is shrunk to a single point of colour. The idea is not perceptible.

Explain and justify.

11:41 AM on 10/02/2005 | comments (4) | trackbacks (0)

900th in a big wide world

I do more with this page than meets the eye. Case-in-point: this is the nine-hundredth article spread across about ten (give or take) blog and content sites to be found in the depths of this domain. It just goes to show that I've been moving far too fast for my own good. I even worked through lunch today; though I did sneak out early to peek at the progress of our new living space just a twenty-minute drive away.

Consequently, the RoundUp was in mid-broadcast, and I was surrounded by audio version of a sociology lesson:

Around three-thirty this afternoon, just when the audience who needed to hear it most was busy working, the CBC conducted an insightful reflection on the general speed of the world. I can give neither the broadcasters nor the host credit for originality as it been extracted, the bulk of the context, from a guest reviewer's opinion of a magazine article, the article itself republished from an alternative media source. Initially, I thought all that filtering would make it less valid; But no. The filtering and amplification, like so many published memes passed around some secret network (until it wound up in my ears from the speaker of my little red truck) really only makes it more potent.

My inner-most muse was very impressed. He's a sit-back-and-smell-the-roses type of character, and I've been ignoring him far too much lately.

It seems, or so the article would try and impress upon us, that the world is moving too fast. Cell phones connecting us to previously untapped social and professional networks wherever we are and whenever we want, syndicated television on two-hundred channels entertaining us with the dogma of Hollywood, and the bulk of human knowledge available twenty-four hours a day to anyone with the means to buy a moderately priced computer and a high-speed Internet connection. What the article and subsequent broadcast meant to tell us is (really) that we are moving too fast in the world.

I reflected momentarily, and went back to driving down a busy road. Later I found myself sitting in front of two screens, one a television playing reruns of Seinfeld, and the other a LCD monitor checking my email and catching up on the latest news from the under-belly of technology.

This time the muse, most definitely, was not impressed. My life, after all, moves far too fast. That would be fine if I could keep up. But much of the time I'm sitting on the edge watching it all slip through my fingers and wondering why I can't seem to find the motivation to tap out a few words on the keyboard or etch out a few lines on a clean sheet of paper, gritty charcoal in my hands.

Step one step backwards.

It's not my objective to preach. Nor is it my objective to state abundantly obvious clichés of the nature of society in general. It's my objective to create yet another node in this, the meme-engine. The world is moving too fast. And thus this one idea re-propogates. I state it, and it enters your brain (albeit temporarily) and perhaps one day you'll share that notion somewhere else. Barring that, you'll become a end-node in the network and you may not even matter to the grand scheme of things anyhow.

It's about choice, information, and how we use it to our advantage.

I've been trying to recalculate something about this webspace. Doing so has made me notably absent, one may have also realized, until those unremarkable though vast bursts of creative energy are sporadically dumped into these pages. It is symtomatic of something else, and even if I tried to explain it, it would be the metaphorical tip of the iceberg to the grand scope of it all. Even Jess was reflecting on a lack of general motivation lately. I won't try to steal her thunder, nor try to arrogantly presume that I had anything directly to do with it -- but it does beg the question: in a universe created by the bursting interaction of ideas by like-minded individuals, how many nodes can collapse on that network before the engine folds in upon itself?

I am just a node after all. And not a particularly vital one at that. That's not pitiful self-doubt writing. It's just a quantitative fact of how many people load this page on a regular basis.

So, do we stop the world? No. The momentum would fling us all into outer space. Whatever. Then, without dropping dead of virtual exhaustion, how do I as a person sitting here with a computer on my lap make my little node vital?

I realize it isn't the question of stopping the world. It's a question of grokking the nature of the information, learning what is important and what is not, and filtering the filters: meta, as it were. I see you, I understand you, and I fall back to quietly leach off that energy. You presume that this is a parasitic relationship, and that by reading you've done your part. I understand it to be symbiotic. I guess it starts there: I write another nine-hundred pages of rambling giberish, contribute to the digital swath of information, and narrow those filters just a little more.

You? Well, that's really not my decision.

10:55 PM on 12/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

the universe is broken

For those who go looking for greater things, there is gold to be found.

:: end transmission

03:32 PM on 10/01/2005 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

yellow christmas

'Twas the morn before Christmas and all through the nets
Not a mousie was stirring, not even the pets.
The floppies were stacked by the modem with care
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.
The files were nestled all snug in a folder
The screen saver turned on, the weather was colder.

And leaving the keyboard along with my mouse
I turned from the screen to the rest of the house.
When up from the drive there arose such a clatter
I turned to the screen to see what was the matter.
Away to the mouse I flew like a flash,
Zoomed open a window in fear of a crash...

The glow from the screen on the keyboard below
Gave an electronic luster to all my macros.
When what to my wondering eyes should appear
But a little Google icon, Gmail. With nine (count'em) NINE! invites to anyone who wants one. Just leave me a comment by Christmas morning. If you've taken the time to read this grabage this morning, you deserve one. HA!

07:21 AM on 24/12/2004 | comments (2) | trackbacks (0)

engagement

I've been plotting.

Since no one has really (truly) offered any concrete suggestions for a NaNoWriMo plot, I've been left to flounder. As such, I've been thinking: And I've decided on a direction. It's vague. It's still very much open-ended. But its a direction, and I've started down that path.

That said...

I'm still open to suggestions. I still want people to leave comments and suggest things. Just be aware that the page is no longer blank: there is a medium sized box drawn roughly in one corner, and if your suggestion falls too far from that box... well.

Someone's sig from slashdot yesterday read: Do not try to think outside the box. That's impossible. Instead, realise the truth. There is no box.

True, but the representation exists purely in my mind.

09:56 AM on 21/10/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

winterfall push

I find myself creatively overwhelmed this time of year. It's an annual event. For example, last year as I hobbled between a cartooning class, a month-long novel project build-up and writing, my general photographic efforts, and the onslaught of a massive web-redesign at work -- I found myself thinking, on more than one occasion, the magnitude and drain of working my right-brain at such a pace.

Then Christmas hits. Then Spring. Then Summer. And at the end of that nine-month stretch I'm suddenly feeling lost and disjointed -- and lacking in that outlet of mental energy that keeps my sanity in check, though some would surely beg to differ.

This year, again, is no exception. For starters, were building a house. (A house. A whole house!) And houses, well, they are more creative than one might imagine. The photo-ventures continue. We're off to Disneyland in a few weeks, though I don't know if that counts. I'm also taking an art class through Grant MacEwan College on Thursday nights. And now, I'm planning on taking on the pulse of another microcosmic world -- to write fifty-thousand words of yet-to-be-determined prose.

It is the creative winterfall. It is the push towards the long haul through snow and cold. It is my vent, and it's tough to explain to a idle reader who is without that volcano brewing under the scalp.

09:02 AM on 13/10/2004 | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

curious re-joinders

Oddly enough, those weird pattern networks are appearing again.

There must be something in the air.

Jess, hiding out on the east coast for a while, has been spinning some enviable tales on her extended vacation. I've found myself picking through them a little more thoroughly than I would usually have time for, partly because my work-website is about to go live and I'm just on the verge of being mentally fried, but also because travel tales are always more interesting than sitting, complaining, in one's office tales... and I write that from personal experience.

I'll spare the exact details, but ultimately via the infmaous Milkcrate, I wound up leafing through the archives of Image 9000, the photo-blog of Jess' quasi-travel companion slash "guy"...

Normally, this would be of little consequence, and I would have simply lurked around for a while, read the walls, and then lurked away unseen. But I stumbled upon this link which revealed not one, but two parallel facinations: not only is Mr. 9000 the only other person I've met to have at least one photo of a shopping buggy on their website, but even more surprisingly, he's about the only person in the existence of humanity who has obviously read one of my favorite novels.

I just thought it was interesting. Subtle. But interesting.

08:44 PM on 29/09/2004 | comments (0)

a politica

Read this slowly, in a longing -- sad -- sort of way. Like your facing the inevitable.

It's not that I'm tired of being political, but with the looming elections (here and abroad) the issues have become clouded in a media frenzy of fragmented, quasi-facts. Things are mis-shapen, changed, or manipulated to form orwellian truths. The slide, we realize too late, is in progress. I see a pattern emerging, and it only those with even more raw opinions than myself who will be able to step from the ebbs and tides of the city's lights and project their strength to the rest of us. It's not that big brother is watching. It's that there are echos of uncertainty in what that even means anymore.

I stumbled across a blog last night that had been written by yet another a tangled soul. He had filled a page with hollow comments about the crumbling of society (in his opinion) by the shift away from (in my words) the intolerance of rigid-class America. The partisan bashing -- the ignorance -- the arrogance that I see everywhere now broke through somewhere, so I flamed him. Annonymously, I wrote that he was a drone in a society that was like an unruley bully, slowly maturing and realizing what he interpretted as respect from others was actually fear and hate -- but unable to cope with that realization, continued to turn to force and pain to exert his will. I told him he had just not explained why society was crumbling, but rather, through his rant, demonstrated the attitutes that will eventually allow the tides of fear to break across the shores of calm, and wreak havoc.

It was a short comment, about one paragraph in length, and I went back this morning to see if there had been a retort -- an angry comment -- anything.

The blog had been deleted. Oddly enough, I don't think people realize that others listen and read when they say or write silly things. And I don't think those same people realize that harsh opinions are open to harsher citicism.

I really have no opinion. I have thoughts and worries, and sometimes I need to explain them in words. Mostly, though, I'm apolitica, in the most maniplated of meanings. I care, deeply, but sometimes it seems like trying to convince a can of yellow paint that it is really a can of yellow paint, when the can of yellow paint thinks it's a yellow lemon. Everyone else knows, but what can one do?

There are bends in reality. I can see them. I can feel outside influences. We go on with our lives like the wars and the hostages are characters in a really dramatic reality tv show that people are just bored of watching. And folks sit back and suggest that there should be limits to freedom -- or that equality is great, as long as it only applies to a finite and narrow set of "us." So I dare you. Flame me. Write your narrow-minded comments below. Tell me how world decay can only be solved by brute intolerance and the blind application of political systems on foreign cultures. Explain to me in your stilted arrogance everything you think you believe. I'll laugh. Then, I'll sigh. Then I'll feel sad that the world is slipping in the long, dark fundamentals of unpredictable anarchy.

It is that. And that is all.

11:35 AM on 24/09/2004 | comments (0)

emergence

There is humour in the city. Humour in the darkness and blindness of not knowing what lurks behind the colourful billboards and flashing light-matricies. And there is something behind the cracks, but we think we know what it is...

It seems like I sit and wonder about these things all the time. I'm trying to join the fractured elements of whatever I can grasp out of the air and construct it into a thing that I can see more clearly. I can see it now, but it is floating in the jetsom of my brain and I can't figure out how to clear away the mess and reach out to it.

I had an idea. Blogs. These things. They are literal self-expressions, of a sort. They exist because real people drain their minds to the digital places, sharing their every whim with the netwerk of electronic wanderers. It's this, I think, that makes these blogs universally popular and also universally hated. The arguement falls something along the line of artistic expression versus defining art: what constitutes the elements of free expression, but also becomes a useful addition to the pool of thought and idea that makes up the blogosphere? In other words, are the shared journals and ramblings of a thousand-million people the makings of something grander and bolder than humanity has ever created -- or the flotsom, garbage and cheap roadside junk-stands on the cliche'd metaphor of the digital highway?

And so what? It takes publishing to a quasi-grass roots level, letting folks like the reallivepreacher make the jump, bound across that threshold. People will read what they think is (a) important, (b) interesting, (c) valid, and (d) real.

Ah, but you say, people read fiction all the time. And people -- most normal, sane people -- don't think fiction is real, or are at least able to parse the absolute concrete from the absolute mind-vapor on a fairly consistent basis. So people don't care if something is REAL, right?

Perhaps: but I wouldn't read a news story that I knew was fabricated. As an example, supermarket tabloids, in my humble opinion, grasp at the absurd every day -- and people purchase them. Don't kid yourself. The publishers make a lot of money. But you need to remember: grasping at the distant truth is a more literal truth of such publications, and most folks will tell you: it's for entertainment. Rarely do people believe: and when they do, society goes to great lengths to discredit those people.

So -- back to the real.

Blogs are real: presumably, because real people write them. Real people, mostly, read them as well -- though that is an "audience factor", and I'm still building to that. But what if: what if you -- YOU -- came across a blog that was not real? What if you, wandering through the incoherent ramblings of a million digital journals, stumbled upon a glimpse into the life of a completely fictional person? Would you know?

I think it is a valid question. How would you know? Honestly, I don't think I could tell. I don't think I could differentiate between the incoherent ramblings of (for example) girl "A" who is a real live person, sitting in her quiet two-bedroom apartment, waxing-poetic to a keyboard and girl "B" who is actually a fourty-seven year old man, writing the fictional account of a person sitting in her quiet two-bedroom apartment, waxing-poetic to a keyboard. For example.

Just for example.

So what happens now?

We sit here and ponder the influence on internet culture through chat and instant messaging, through email and other forms of direct digital communication. Fraud and misrepresentation, we call it. It's harmful, misleading, and meant to cause harm and mis-direction to many impressionable minds. But what about the indirect communication? What about fiction? What about the idea that I could sit down, right at this very moment, and start writing as someone else, setting my words adrift in the digital ether, afloat in the tides of a vast sea of information: is that wrong? Is that mis-representation? Or merely fiction? And ultimately, with no other influence than the occasional passer-by believing the illusion, what harm have I acheived?

It's all hypothetical. But it would be an interesting experiment in a new kind of fiction: stories the audience doesn't even know they are reading...

The idea lingers. It's The Matrix. It is an illusion, just the control is different. Who creates the illusion? Who controls the illusion? Who controls the ideas and threads of human thought? And what really is the impact of fiction-unrecognized?

Which brings us back to blogs. These things. They are literal self-expressions, of a sort. They exist because real people drain their minds to the digital places, sharing their every whim with the netwerk of electronic wanderers. And do we continue to trust those people as real? And what kind of skill -- if any -- would it take to create the illusion of real that we continue to trust. I'm real. I assure you. If I were to make someone up, they might be a certain level more interesting than a mis-directed twenty-something lingering in a life where barbeques, ten-kilometer runs, and plastic aquariums seem to consume more of my time that anything. Or would I? You would wonder.

Though -- and I ask because I am truely considering the experimental, yet fraudulent existence of a blog-sprite -- could you find me if I was someone else?

09:07 AM on 23/09/2004 | comments (0)

gmail

I have four gmail invites left. If anyone cares. If anyone even knows what I'm talking about... I'm willing to share.

12:13 PM on 22/09/2004 | comments (1)

just grass

We found a little edge of peace in what we had been looking for. We drove in circles, examining, and parting the fringes of unfmailiar territory. I don't know where any of that will lead to, but it seems to be some kind of tough and binding fabric holding the raw planks of support in place. We etched our own place there, paused to take pictures, and then returned thinking of what could be, should be, or might actually occur in a rawly conceivable timeframe.

It holds, and becomes mystically cryptic in its essence.

I've grass. It's right there behind me, sprouting like a newly seeded lawn, which it could only ever be if someone made the leap from reality to fiction, or from imagined to concrete.

I've grass. Though often thought holds that if ever there was a tiny etch of life that should be somewhere grander than on the sill of my working mind, this should be one of those things.

I've grass. And trapped in the creamless delight and confines of some sort of mental atrocity, they sprout and being their drab life locked away from a truer calling, deeper and stronger.

One should never assume that there is a grander truth hidden behind a simpler one. It creates doubt, and lurking in the shadows of the city, a meaner and more coniving unreality is holding court to pounce when you stop looking at the fringes of what has absolute meaning, and what could simply be a fragmented trim around a glossy attraction. It requires focus, and too often we find ourselves shifting and loosing perception of a blurless mindscape.

I've grass, and the grass is peering out the window. It's looking for something. Longing, if grass could long.

There is an absolute honesty hidden in the fringes of something I can't yet see. I want to draw it, paint it, write the words that compose a million billion sihouettes of imagery and shadow that inscribe the series of life surrounding the complexity of its existence in nowhere. I long for something. I long for complexity in the rolling emergent elements of neural cells and quantum mental states. I long for, perhaps in some small way, understanding of something no one has satisfactorily explained. And in that, a grasp from the everyday trend of looking deeper and further into the trailing tails of those comet-like thoughts that bash through a vacuum and paralyze us with wonder. In that there is meticulous understanding of some sort. And perhaps peace. Or perhaps more frustration. Ah, well. It's all simply grass. Just grass.

09:21 AM on 07/09/2004 | comments (0)

drawing on something...

It's been an odd sort of week with all those bits of change again. For a long while I was contentedly on that four-month cycle: university term, another university term, summer, repeat. Then there was stability. Three years of only sporadic change with the fundamentals dragging out for much longer. But now, for some reason I'm thinking in fours again. Part of that is Sharyl, moving up next weekend. Another part of that is creative contemplation.

I'm thinking about my continuing ed. I've made it a bit of a habit to take some evening courses, to register in something creative at a local school, and to learn something out of my element. I'm considering the next round. I'm thinking of taking an art course. Cliche, I know. But it has potential. What would that stimulate, again? The left or the right brain? I can never seem to keep those straight.

I spent some time last night flinging writing projects of the past present, and future into my new project system. I call it the Scribbler. It's a little PHP script with a database backend: it's a crude sort of content management system that lets me put all my writing work into one central repository. Those who find that sort of thing interesting can feel free to browse randomly through the first bits that are lingering there. As time goes on I'll pack it full of more stuff that I dig out of the secret corners of my hard drive. As always, it's disclaimed with the work-in-progress flag. I don't need the criticism: my ego is fragile enough already.

10:57 AM on 31/08/2004 | comments (0)

the details

I've been steering clear of details for a while. I don't know why, other than there can be more interesting things to read about than my life.

First, we all now understand the consequences of visiting the land of mosquitos. Three days post, I am glad to report I am bite free. The same can not be said about my wife.

Second, upon re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four after a decade lapse, I am finding myself haunted by the relevancy of this story. Literally, there is no comparison. But extraction and literary interpretation can bring haunting images to one's dreamstates.

Third, coding. There is something tediously rewarding among the silicon dance, despite the slipping hours.

And I'm certain there must be more somewhere...

09:04 AM on 03/08/2004 | comments (0)

if was really that important

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12:03 PM on 30/07/2004 | comments (0)

patterns of summer wordiness

The city has been very warm lately.

I have been organizing my thoughts in less chaotic spaces, writing code where there should just be words. And writing words that should have more meaning than they seem to collect, idle on the roadside.

Sweat is a common factor these days. Mental and physical sweat. It is the pain that will bring later fruits, or so they tell me.

If writing were as simple as passing a thread through the eye of a needle, it would all be great. Perhaps that thread is too thick. Perhaps there is no needle. I stayed awake late on Sunday, unintentionally. There are reasons for why we toss and turn, wide awake late at night while our partners are blissfully unaware. There are reasons why things haunt us. I have ideas, concepts, thoughts. I stayed awake late on Sunday night to kick the whisping nanoturbines into motion and flush the silicon freckles into some form less volitile than my own neural networkings. If writing were an activity of complexity, then the story may emerge upon itself. If writing became an exercise in elaborate vision, the path would build itself.

It is conceptual.

It is fleeting.

I have things to do now, as time passes slowly through the open windows of my apartment.

12:03 PM on 27/07/2004 | comments (0)

who polled you?

Someone, anyone, write a comment here if you were among the Canadians in last six weeks to have recieved a phone call from a pollster. I just need to know that someone, somewhere got asked, and that these numbers came from a group of individuals even marginally representing my demographic.

It may seem slightly in the vein of 'conspiracy-theorist', but I don't think the modern poll is all that accurate. For one, I have neer been asked. That sentiment might seem a tad egotistical, me assuming that as my opinion is not one among the two-thousand daily thoughts that make up the bouncing numbers we hear on the nightly news that they are not valid. But strolling through the CBC's website, I found an interesting note: "A representative randomly selected sample of 2000 Canadians was interviewed by telephone. With a sample of this size, the results are considered accurate to within plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult Canadian population been polled. The data were weighted to ensure the sample’s regional and age/sex composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to the 2001 census data."

Fine and good, but again: I've never been asked.

Why? Perhaps this is because I spend large chunks of my day nowhere near a personal telephone line. And, to make it worse, I know a great many people who are the same way. No cellular, no voicemail, and they are within sprinting distance of their idle landline for less than thirty daily minutes, primarily relying on other semi-modern means of communication such as email and ims.

This seems to matter, somehow. This seems, in my swirling consciousness, to have some reflection on WHO is answering these questions: people who are at home to answer their telephones. If that isn't a bias, I'd better buy a new dictionary.

So, I just need to know. Did ANYONE get a call?

09:23 AM on 28/06/2004 | comments (4)

sweet blessed pain

I can imagine that there is a pulse in this place, somewhere, deep down that I can't quite feel yet. I can imagine that there is a vein of enduring rationality, lingering logic, draining and coursing through the etherworks of the hidden layers of the city. It is fantastic and mildly amusing, but for some reason it makes me hold onto those glimmers of something greater hidding in the shadows of cement and jet black girders. It is sentementality wrapped in unchecked imagination.

For those yet to be informed, anomolies gripped the fabrix of layers stretched between already taut places. It's a pulse in this place, somewhere, deep down that I can't quite feel yet. I want to, and I'm reaching to find it, but it's an effort past my current abilities.

We held back. Waited. Paused with faux patience, and scratched nervously at the surface of things we shouldn't be scratching. Yet, as cliches could have told us, only time will tell our fates. I shouldn't be so stretched, but I am and I can't figure that out. It is an essence of something bigger, bolder, colder, deeper, and yet manageable. He hides in the shadows of polished wood and yellow lines painted on jet black asphalt.

Focus.

Anomolies piqued from the etchings of words and images have revealed more than -- perhaps -- was entirely recommended. Yet, we'll wait, linger, pause, and wonder if the wild reveals itself as days pass.

09:30 AM on 22/06/2004 | comments (0)

seeking aquatic silence

I was pondering fish the other day. Aquariums to be exact. In a way, I'm trying to accomplish something that resembles an aquarium: literally AND figuratively.

This is beyond the fact that I've been pondering how, exactly, I might go about fitting a small aqarium in my office, setting it up atop the file cabinet, and making sure the little buggers don't die of issues regarding food or cleanliness. This revolves around self contained universes.

Aquariums, watery glass cubes supporting life, are (apart from a minor input of food and heat) minature ecosystems that are distinct from the world in which they exist. A box of life-supporting liquid, maintained to the precision where tiny animals otherwise doomed to non-existence, are allowed to exist in relative peace. Fiction is something like that. In fiction, writing, we build micro-universes -- minute ecosystems -- that are maintained by a tiny input of energy and creativity, and allowed to grow into something self-contained and autonomous -- and unique from the world in which they are stored, displayed, consumed. Our characters are fish. Our plot is water. Our story is a little glass box, sealed shut but radiating it's swarming life to the outside world.

When my world lets me find a place to put it, I'm going to build a whole aquarium of fishes.

11:34 AM on 01/06/2004 | comments (0)

emergence

A central purpose of the city is to network. In a neo-modern trend-sense this might mean building interconnected relationships between people, linking individuals into synapse-like patterns of information and favour-passing nodes. In a traditional sense, the idea of a network represents the demodularization of task, spreading knowledge and function across an ever-branching spread of links. Given the loss of a single node or link, the large network would survive and continue because it would still be supported by those other still remaining participants.

The city is a vastened network. It is grand in it's simplicty, and marvelous in it's complexity.

One wonders what nodes one might be linked to, man, machine, or otherwise.

02:55 PM on 25/05/2004 | comments (0)

debunking universal truths

What I'd really like to do is open this place up to creative thought. You know. To move away from the whole thread of reality that has spread like a bad haircut over the face of blogdom, now that would be nice.

Make that choice for yourself, of course. I'm just lacking in scope since recombining the fractured efforts of an attempted commentary of my literal life. I think I need to sway. Drift, as it were.

Thus, this feed becomes the garden: in that literal space, a place to cultivate ideas and random norms of ficticious environs. A play on words envelops the world, and I stretch into the original purpose of my digitalis: scope the memes and creative pathways stretching untapped from this source, and draw them into a universal dictum.

Wowsers!

In a vague sense I'm thinking of relationships: whose and whatsits. The foundation of any thoughtspace is a gap into the fragments of menial and structured relationships between ideas and people and things. It is a gripping thought, bringing something to nothing, connection to individual droplets of disinterest.

I was reflecting on a modestly old book about dragons. Something Pern-related actually. I was thinking about the mentorships and relationships between the universe and beings and between beings and other beings. It is deeply profound, really, that idea of symbiosis. And it resembled the embryonic shards of some idea I have been trying to convey.

Perhaps I will have more thoughts later.

01:09 PM on 21/05/2004 | comments (0)

I've been prompted...

...to start writing again. Here. There. Everywhere.

It seems settling in sends one signals. On some higher plane of existence -- some vague level of animal existence -- there is a hierarchy of space and mind. Food, shelter, safety: these all rank near the foundation of that preferential needs pyramid. Entertainment, stability, well-being: tucked neatly into the middle somewhere. Creation: well, it's the point at the top.

Take many animals for example. In zoos, they will not mate / reproduce / create offspring until they are well-fed, safe, and content that their world is secure and entertaining.

I think I can be the same way: with security looming on the horizon, time seems to be my only issue -- and I'm scoring that in leaps and bounds as I cut off my commute, cut off my laundry duty, and cut down on my dishes-chores.

That peak is in sight. I think I could almost start writing again: what? That's a different question.

02:09 PM on 14/05/2004 | comments (1)

refinition of character

It's stuff day. Apparently. According to the vague interpretations of those involved we may have delivery of our moving van this afternoon. This makes me happy, in a simplistic sort of emotion kind of way.

At the moment, however, I'm still thinking about where my virtual home is headed: simplicty or obscurity.

I'll be sure to inform or display. It's such a thing. Such. Whatever.

10:18 AM on 05/05/2004 | comments (0)

so this is what a new blog looks like...

...and I'm never too sure where to start. I guess it would help to have a destination. With over seven hundred raw entries of pure bloggy goodness under my belt, you'd think I'd have this thing under control by now.

But no.

It's May One. I'm no longer a BC resident. I'm no longer lost in an unfamiliar city. (Missing one that grew on me perhaps.) And I'm not sure where I'm going here, yet. Here, as in Edmonton. Here, as in this webspace. I considered something more serious. I considered keeping it free. I considered... well, I considered a lot of things. But I think I'll let it decide for itself, and like my iPod, flip randomly as digitalis dictates.

So that's it. A first entry. This place will not look the same in a little while. It will change. Evolve. Grow to fit the space.

But I just wanted you to know that I was still here.

11:05 AM on 01/05/2004 | comments (0)