Haircutted

Yes, rumors of my haircutting were not exaggerated.

technorati tags:haircut

Events

I step out of an airplane in Caracas in 1971. The breeze plucks and grasps like an elephant's trunk; a hot humid breath huffing into my ears and into my hair. I clunk down the metal stairs and onto the tarmac. There is no one here to greet me, so I start to walk over to the terminal building with the other passengers. They are mostly businessmen, their necks beginning to sweat under tight collars, their foreheads shiny beneath glistening coiffures that jump around in the wind. One man with no sunglasses holds his newspaper up against the sun, and glances at me, his mouth open to gasp, walking quickly, his other hand clutching a leather briefcase. A small boy hangs off of the arm of a rumpled woman who drags the child like another piece of baggage. A man with a blue suit is obviously an American G-man. We all walk over to the building, crossing the shimmering black lake of heat without wasting breath to speak. Men with large ear protectors drive carts or trudge towards the airplane on foot, disregarding us, their faces dark and unreadable behind silver sunglasses, their mouths all open in the hot sun, intent as lions.

The glass doors creak open and lukewarm air sloshes out. The air conditioning is flaky, and as we walk it gets hotter and hotter until it is hotter than it was on the tarmac outside. We wade through dense, unbreathable air; faded dusty chairs and the smells of other people's sweat and exhaled cigarettes. A man hits me in the face with a handful of cigars and runs by and I stumble over rows and rows of legs, children and mothers and dead bodies (?). (They are bags.) When I get back to my feet finally I walk quickly to catch up to the group; I have no idea where to go, and I don't want to lose sight of the others. A bird flutters near the high sky light and escapes through a hole, drifts upward until it is invisible.

I go to Kansas in 1983. It is another hot day, muggy. The blue sky stuggles to hold back a high dark cloud, so high and dense it is like a new continent disgorged from space. But eventually the cloud looms overhead, and the scent of rain drifts in with a cool wash of air, and then the hand of the cloud reaches down with a tickle and tiny drops fall so cool that they feel like cigarette burns.

I am giggling as I enter a diner. I sit near the window so I can watch the rain. I order soymilk and a donut. Lemon meringue pie remains are splattered on the counter top, in yellow and brown dollops, as if a child had eviscerated one with a series of wallops. The lady behind the counter grins at me and wipes it up, her big bosoms stiff as tree stumps. I am alone here except for a man behind a raised newspaper, one disfigured hand clutching at the newsprint. I lean over slowly until I can see his face behind the paper, and he grins back at me with a child-like pucker of mirth. No soymilk, only cow milk, which I slurp as I eat.

"Olive trees don't grow very well here," the diner lady says to me, pointing with her nose out the window towards a clump of dead trees. The air conditioner fills the background with a vibrato hum, and a woman bustles in through the door, and behind her comes the noise and smell of the downpour. She is wet as a doused cat, and shakes her head and and her hair and wipes her shirt down. Then looks at me. I am effervescent and dissipate.

I am in Tenochtitlan as the drum of night thunders from a lightning strike, exhilarating the air with brash delight. Water is death, and life is a cup. Hold them up. Praise them, not the ululations of the morning prayer. A mace hits me in the face. Flashes of light; on hands and knees; dirt and grit in my palms, stone tiles, bird feathers washing away in a torrent of water. Red drops that don't stop. A neverending flood. A man stabs me in the leg with a spear, wrenches it out and stabs me again. Accrual, light heart. In the end, there is a sum or something. He stabs me again in the gut, and only blood comes out when I scream.

In the flashes of light I glimpse the knotted ropes that tie my wrists. In the flashes of lightning the entire night is shaved of its darkness to the bare white clarity of blades and bones. The rain drops are picked out like pin pricks. There is a spearhead in the gutter that points at my bonds, and I start to crawl to it, and I am grateful, so eternally grateful, when everything washes away.

In the last part I don't know where I am, and I shuffle along a dismal alleyway towards a wide market square, full of noise and color, people and animals and cloth and beads and spices and food. I slouch in the alley mouth and watch it all, my body and heart sore and wicked. My feet are angry buzzards of pain. If anyone looks at me I stare at them, and they all cringe when they smell me, and hurry away. A mother and her child: If that beggar approaches you, kick him.

And that is all. Words, words, words, and words. All that happens is the words stop.

technorati tags:rain, heat, caracas, kansas, tenochtitlan

Freakish morning weather

Rain.  Rain!

technorati tags:rain, sandiego

Friday

Going to see a Padres game this evening.  Should be fun since I haven't been to the new stadium in SD yet.

I will keep an eye out for stray monkeys to feed.

technorati tags:monkeys, padres, sandiego, baseball

Ink-dark roar

An ink-dark roar emerges from the ground. A rumble that becomes the blackest sound; a noise unlike any other, that increases until it is the loudest thing ever heard. The noise is so thick that it melts the soles of shoes and shatters the pages of newspapers lying horrified on breakfast tables. People are not screaming or shouting because no one can hear them. It is electrifying for the cats. All manner of objects are destroyed; the wanted and the unwanted. It obliviates an entire day of life. All will be gone before sense returns slowly, blinking.

"Are we standing here? Are we alive? Are we back in the earth that I know? Is the reality of before a different reality than now? Or has reality never changed? Is this event an inseparable part of reality?" I'm conscious of very little now. One word has not left my mind: silence. That is all I want, but somehow even the concept is hard to grasp now, with all that is in my ears.

North Korea nuked us, I'm thinking. Did they do it? Blow the shit out of us? I expected to hear sirens. I expected trembling, agony and violence. I expected murder around every corner, I expected to gag on all the gristle that was beneath the skin. I didn't expect to laugh, and to find venom dripping from my own fangs, or to find fangs in my own mouth. I didn't expect that the taste of it was so full, so bristling with juice and flavor. I didn't expect it to be like sea water filling me up. I didn't expect to become a concrete shadow, mouth open and expecting to wail.

Oh, that is how it is.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5103394.stm

technorati tags:northkorea, nukes

Camping

Went camping this past weekend with a group of 10 people, which was a lot of fun.  I have posted a number of photos on my flickr page.

We did a six mile hike on Saturday, up to a place called Suicide Rock.  We think we found the actual Suicide Rock, but I wasn't convinced, since there was a large ledge just beneath it and any attempt at suicide from that particular rock would be a unsuccessful reminder that gravity is fast and rocks are hard.  Still, it looked pretty impressive:

The hike was pretty fun for me, although we didn't really bring enough water along, so it was hot and sweaty and for some people not all that fun.  However, the scenery was beautiful, and the view at the top was worth all the pain and struggle.

Pete and Chris and I invented a new sport, called Stump Ball.  It is pretty damn fun for sounding so boring, but you stand on a tree stump and throw the football to the other persons attempting to balance on tree stumps.

After we got back to SD, we all pigged out on sushi, and it was good.  The End.

technorati tags:camping, idyllwild, hiking, stumpball

Blog has moved

If you're reading this, then things are operating correctly, the situation is nominal and Houston has pushed the big green button.

My new blog address is http://gschueler.blogspot.com, and the RSS feed is here.

I've thrown up a fabulous place holder at my website address http://greg.vario.us. I will continue to use that site for any software I write or web content I want to share, but the blog has moved.

For your enjoyment, here is a picture of a lizard:

technorati tags:blogging, lizard

Mog

Another music-oriented social networking site: Mog.com .
It sounds almost exactly like last.fm, but perhaps since this is more "social networking" oriented it will make the information gleaned about your listening habits and musical taste a little more useful. E.g. it would be cool to see a list of people in your physical neighborhood who like the same music that you do. Last.fm doesn't really let you coordinate your musical profile in that way.

This is a screenshot of the Mog-o-Matic software that they use to somehow determine your worth. I don't know what it's doing really, only that it seems like it is somehow making a catalog of all the music on my hard drive. Kind of scary actually... last.fm doesn't do that, they just passively index the music you listen to as you hear it.

Blogathon

Ok, this weekend, I'm going to try a 24/7 blogathon. All blogging all the time. No stopping to eat, or drink water or coffee, only to play Nintendo DS if I ever get it in the mail.

When I pass out from dehydration, you will know it because blogging will cease.

By the way, I'm just kidding. I'm going camping this weekend, so that you can have an all weekend 24/7 blog-free enjoyathon.

technorati tags:blogging, marathon, blogathon

Flock

Been trying out Flock. It's pretty cool... I wish the blogging tool integrated the photo-uploading feature of blogger, though.

Nor does it really do a preview.

The other option is performancing, which works on Firefox.

For some reason, both of them seem to lack something though.  Somehow just writing a post on blogger.com seems like a more intuitive and cleaner process.

technorati tags:blogging, flock, firefox, performancing, tools

Borat

Oh I'm looking forward to that Borat Movie. It looks I am thinking to be the surely shit!

Yowza!

Wow, I give a 10.0 to the luscious cover of "Killing Moon" by Nouvelle Vague.

Testing some titles

• Greg's Space-time Cavitation (the name of my old blog).
• Greg's New-wave transendence
• Something Less Pretentious
• A Blog About Shit Nobody Cares About
• Words Upchucked Onto Your Screen
• Read These Words Or Choke on a Baby Carrot
• I am Remorseful About My Lack of Creativity
• I Hate Fucking Titles, Like I Said
• Oh God I'm Bored Trying To Think Of a Title
• Why Don't I just Use The First Thing that Comes Into my Head
• And Why Don't I just randomly Capitalize Words As I Write them
• Untitled
• Untitled Blog
  
• Untitled, But This Blog Is About Monkeys
• Untitled, But Please Stay and Read It, It's Not That Boring
• Monkey Fuck
• ...
  

Somic Youf

Music news of the world of my interest...

The new Sonic Youth album "Rather Ripped" was released today, although I admit to having had a copy of it for months now. (And what true fan did not?) The iTunes version has an exclusive track ...those bastards. There is also a live show going to be streamed from NPR's website this friday. Check it out.

And Pitchfork today has an interview with Dan Bejar of Destroyer.

The album I've been most delighted about recently is "Ships" by Danielson. Go find some tracks to download here.

Titles

I hate titles, really. I never titled many of my poems, simply because i felt like the poem itself served as the most succinct representation of itself: plus many times there was no single focus of the poem: can you call it a Beef Stew if it contains beef, barley, chicken, prosciutto, etc? Ig, no.

By "Ig", I mean hell.

However, some things, and sometimes even Blogs, need titles.

Trying to come up with a new one.

Get a mac

"It just woiks!" - www.apple.com/getamac/

And yet, with no irony, none of the ads work on Firefox...

Nintendo

I'm full of the urge to play nintendo DS, but mine has not yet begun to ship. ...grrr...

La la

La La, pretty cool, you should check it out.

Jokiest joke ever?

My favorite joke (select the black area to see the answer):

What's the difference between an elephant and a plum?

They're both purple, except for the elephant.

No luck found indoors

More woe and disfunction. Reading about luck... some people are lucky, some are not. They say that being aware of your surroundings, being open to opportunities, and being optimistic increases your "luck". That seems obvious. If you are the type of person who increases their chances for good things, or decreases your chances of bad things happening, your are "luckier" than someone who is not.

E.g. walking under a ladder: it's not unlucky in the superstitious sense, but it does increase your chance that something will fall on your head.

So, how to increase your chance that something good will happen: expose yourself to more opportunity. I will have to take this to heart.

To Blogger

hey blogger, what the fuck. try not to go tits up anymore okay?

Oh my multi-tempered patience

Note: to the person constantly practicing the mariachi trumpet in my apartment complex while I try to work, know that I am only a man, and men can only contain their frustration for so long before they are forced to write a righteous blogger entreaty that you will never read because you can't take your puffy cheeks away from that trumpet's brass blowhole long enough to go to a computer long enough to find your way through the entire internet before finding my lame blogspot page that nobody not even my friends know about so how would you know about it, you wouldn't. But please stop. please. stop with the ear-poop.

Woe is Omen

saw the Omen last night, but I was disappointed: the devil kills people by curious Rube-Goldbergian accidents involving roof-shingle repairmen and smoking hoboes? Lame. There was only one evil minion person in the whole movie, how disappointing. And she didn't even put up a good fight!

Lame, oh lame on you!

Luckily, I thought of a great Idea. It's called, Take your Monkey to Work Day!

It is a pretty simple idea, but I'll lay it out for ya: go to work, but bring a monkey! Hooray!

You frontin?

What up gmail? Why you gotta front and shit.

Oh awful

that zwan cover of the iron maiden classic "The Number of the Beast" is shite!

Get the real thing here.

Devil muzac

I hope the devil, if he's listening, is stewing in a giant pot of annoyance.

Check out all the devil-oriented music floating around on the blogosphere today.

I know it's also Slayer day. But you gotta wonder, if the devil truly exists and is truly made of hatred/evil/bad things, then, uh, is a successful rock and roll band designed to appeal to disaffected 80s teenagers really the mascot of the true source of evil in the world? they wore torn blue jeans, what?

There's also the good ole' "Devil went down to georgia".. plus the talented but inevitable dreary Bright Eyes.

Woe woe woe.

the sixes

Wow, I never thought it would get to today, but it did. 6/6/6. it means so much. the magic of numbers. Who knew? a calendar system based on shaky history and a decimal system, combined with a mysterious numerological superstition passed down for millenia have all culminated with such a magnificent bang on a dreary tuesday! Woop de doodle do!

woe betide motherfuckers.

Oh woe

woe is me. woe is you. i woe you one. woe.

woe?

and now I've said woe too much and now it doesn't mean a thing. the word is now too weird to think of. woe. woe. woe. your boat.

Hold on

Within seconds of publishing that last message, I realized that what I wrote was mostly crap. I'm really apologize for that, but I am crossing my fingers meaning I don't really give a shit whether it is crap and whether or not you will enjoy reading it even. Even!

Even! I think I might do a podcast too, If I can get the nuts up to do it. Most people, most guys, wouldn't hesittate to get their nuts up, but that's just me folks: you know I hesitate. Often, and regularly, particularly in groups.

Oh man, why am I writing this crap. I have shit to do. I have humor to enjoy elsewhere. I have a life to live (uh huh). I have money to spend (yah). I even have parenthetical sarcastic statements to make about what I write (you sure do, bitch). Oh god, why am I even writing this.

what if I publish this and NO ONE reads it? what do I do with it then? Cuz I'm not going to read it again. holy shit no.

About it all

I am not going to worry too much about what I write about. This allows you to read it without worrying too much about paying attention, and me to write it without worrying too much about whether it is worth being written, published, and then read later by you, who will not have to worry too much about reading it, again, as I said before.

So like I said, don't worry about paying too much attention to it all.

A robustified blog of mutilated word soup.

Hi, I would not be writing this right now, unless I really wanted to. I DO. Thus I am.

What the fuck is this shit, you wonder. this is a new blog by me. I have to tell, I'm not really sure what it is, but I thought I'd write it, just for the taste of it.

I have to pontificate for a moment on blogs, or bloginess, as i call it weirdly sometimes:

What are blogs? Blogs are usually just crap, or they can be good. Two options, crap, or good. I am writing this new blog for one reason, I have enough crap to fill TWO whole blogs, so this is the good one.

what the fuck does that even mean? Sometimes, I say things. they don't mean much, they are just pontifications on a pile of crap.

Let's re-address the issue: this blog.

This blog should allow you to get a small daily dose of the normally wacky things that come into my head. I am posting them all here. What could be better? Free food? Yes, that would be better, but take this instead.

I will write as often as I must, which may be every day, or even yearly, but is guaranteed to occur sometime while I still draw breath.

Welcome, take a deep snort of it all. Oh wait, why is it called Milking Ducks? There is no such thing as milking ducks, so the irony is, that now there is, but it is a blog. That's fucking irony, for reals.

Let's publish this shit.