"There is no dream"

(quote: Neutral Milk Hotel, video: Krishnamurti Discipline)

I've begun to take action towards moving to Turkey. The plan being to live and teach in Istanbul from roughly August of this year until July of the next. Following that, I will make another attempt to gain entry into MFA programs. The overall failure of the graduate school try stunned me for a a few weeks. It's easy to think that this lack of validation is the best measure thus far of my own abilities. But this is art. It doesn't work that way. It can only be done with no fear of consequences or failure, with an irrational belief that your work is good and that it will only improve. And to write with the discipline and stimulus I need, new surroundings and daily demands are a must.

But the decision to go to Turkey is motivated by many things. I am dissatisfied in my job and all the possible jobs related to it. I have purposely stumbled onto a time in my life with virtually no responsibilities. I have always wanted to spend enough time in a foreign land to be a citizen of it, to meet its people as an equal, to learn the language, to not merely observe but participate in its culture, to break the narrow views placed on me at birth. I am in love with the world. It's so tremendously big and so much different than you'll come to understand it through television. So beautiful that you can only look at it in small pieces. For all my nihilism and misanthropy and doomsaying, I love this place and hope to soak up as much of it as I can. And do my best to interpret this experience in words as I go. I've dedicated myself to narrative. And this isn't simply reading and writing, narratives are the things we live too. The story of people on this place and at this time, the story of your life starting at the moment you saw first light to the moment you see last. And just thinking of these billions of stories as they interweave and conflict and gyrate and come together and split apart, thinking of that hulking place just outside my window, a great human novel in constant motion that can never and should never be written . . .it's enough to keep me awake at night.


Also. The mookfish is coming out, for the foreseeable future. We will have a time.

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I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Alan Moore's advice to young artists)

For a minute there I was a nihilist. I came to a philsophical conclusion that I shirked away from telling people because it sounds so bleak and inhumane. The crux is this: that we can never achieve social stability or equality or sustainable prosperity or peace or freedom if our population continues to grow. The thesis, generally, being that a confluence of phenomenon (including but not limited to the Tragedy of the Commons, False Consciousness, the quantitative/psychological constraints of human interaction [i.e. how many people your brain will allow you to know/trust/etc], and a sheer logistical impossibility) strongly suggest that a group as large as, for instance, the United States, could never accomplish utopia. That is, there is no model for governance with a system this large that provides for satisfaction to all of its participants.

First, the Tragedy of the Commons is an observation that self-interest will cause users of a shared resource to abuse their privilege to that resource. In Hardin's original essay he spoke of common grazing areas in a village, but the best way to understand this (I am a transportation engineer after all) is to think of how commercial vehicles (big trucks) operate on our highways. Large, multi-axle trucks do virtually all of the damage to the publicly-funded (i.e. 'common') road system. They do pay higher use fees (above and beyond driver's licenses, fuel tax, etc for passenger cars), and yet without close supervision it would be in commercial vehicle operators' best interest to run the heaviest loads they could at top speed. Human beings cheat to get ahead, they use resources disproportionally, they leave things worse than they found them.

Now, this problem is mitigated in small communities. The home, for example, has many common areas and goods. And they are generally respected because of the authority of the household (complete) and the familiarity between the members. And it could work in a neighborhood, perhaps, where everyone knows each other somewhat intimately and their lives are crushed into shape by their public identity. But expand the numbers of the community to some threshold and people stop giving a shit. This number likely has some connection to the group-sizes that we spent much of our mental development in. Australopithecus hung out in very small groups. A few families. Even allow for a thousand and it might work. But,we live in a country of 300million, in a world of 6billion plus. We are not wired to give a shit about any of these people. The fact that we do is actually sort of weird.

Logistical impossibility doesn't have a link because I haven't heard of anyone who has done a great deal of work on it. The idea is that even in a purely-executed Communist state there would be no way to equitably distribute resources. The same amount cannot be put in each cup, because the things used to fill them are not distributed equally. Arizona does not have the water to survive, but if they are to use the water of some place else how can that water-bearing land be thought to have the carrying capacity of both places? Especially when we humans grow so densely and rapaciously. And live for so long. But further than the efficiency of moving resources around, there is a certain chaos in the economy of ideas when the numbers get this high. anarchists can conspire, religions can procreate, language can vary . . .and in the end you get smaller political communities. These subcommunities distrust each other, formulate nonsensical rivalries. Shun those of the other tribe. Anyway . . .I have many more thoughts on this that I'm going to discuss further in an upcoming blog on Terminalism (this is a name I've given to a philosophy that amalgamates Marxism, Darwinism, aspects of Existentialism, and Absurdism)

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"The lost eyes of a thawed caveman"

(quote: me; video: Ricky's "Meaning of christmas")

Xmas party season. Everything more or less a persistent hang-over for the last few days. And I have little to no actual responsibilities. My classes ended spectacularly. A great grade and excellent feedback in one class, an epic bar-crawl with the members of my other one. Last night had my xmas party for work, which is always excellent. And then two of my bosses and their wives genuinely wanted to 'hang out" and we went to the bar and listened to music and I talked to them about writing. These guys are saints. I'm bringing in stories for them to read in the next few days. And the conversation served as a glowing preamble to the awkward, bent-ear explanations I'll have to give to extended family next week. quoth a boss: "in the annals of history, how many people have gone from engineering to english?"

The world is different walking through it late at night and waist-deep in winter. Everyone is hid out, in front of their screens. Everything is slick or jagged, and smells older than it is. Blackened snow clinging to everything looking fungal and nefarious in the arc-sodiums. And cars tumble along testing brakes and mingling cigarette-smoke with the vapor of their words. And front lawns broadcast to no-one the christmas mythos and Bosch-like populate themselves with jarring juxtapositions such that Frosty waves to Rudolph and Santa lords over them both disproportionate. And a frazzle-haired romantic that listens to BRMC steps from his 70s-era duster and snaps a pic with his gadget. And at some point I sit at the head of the table and drink the bottom-third of fancy cocktails and forgive people in my head. And when we're back out the doors the cold is treatment of an overdose and I gasp and run and clamber half-up a statue. Cut my hand and it bleeds like eyebrows in bar-room brawls. My own blood on the snow, dilute in the ice.


Reading through Gravity's Rainbow again. I made it 2/3rds of the way through, but lost the plot in Africa. This time around there is a certain cognizance of deliberate density. It's wonderfully complex, the detail rich, and every one of them distinct and well-executed and beautiful. But I think I'm seeing some cracks in Pynchon's methods. An immense and complex narrative that does not pause for stragglers, which has an integrity to it. But the big-picture . . .something is missing there. And reading Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein which I'm loving. But there's also a problem in his rendering, a sort of chaos for its own sake, covering Burrough's territory but trying to maintain lucidity. The images don't hang together like they could. Well, that's only 10 pages in. So who knows. Anyway, I really like both of these books.

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" . . .Like: 'Momma I want to sing'"

(Quote: MF DOOM, Video: Keith O. Special Comment on Prop. 8)

I've come to realize that my political perspective boils down to a theory of what government has authority to do, and where that authority comes from. The government is our agreement on how to operate, a system developed to collectively protect and promote one another's livelihood. As a consequence we have police and fire and health services and educational systems, and as economic cooperation we have roads and business regulations. I don't believe that any government has the authority to impose rules on anything that doesn't substantially effect the agreement. The government cannot tell you you cannot smoke marijuana, or marry someone of your own sex. It also cannot arbitrarily delegate huge sums of your money through deliberate and secretive strategization. It cannot tell you to protect yourself from anything. It cannot tell you where and when to work. It cannot make you change your personality. It cannot meet nonviolence with violence. We need to rethink what it is that our government does in the sphere of our life. Every government that distends our agreement, or degrades our humanity . . .is a usurper and a tyrant. I think of these things in light of two very recent legal anomalies. Pot took one small step towards legalization, and we will watch as the Federalies attempt to crack down on one more complex of nooks and crannies. This slow progress will make the war on drugs more ridiculous with each DEA budget, and more absurd with each $100 ticket that replaces jail time. Proposition 8, in CA, is a different breed. The most "liberal" state in the union rescinded its decision to allow gay marriage. Homosexuals are less free than the rest of us, even in what people think of as our freest state. This 'rule', outside of the bounds of our agreement, is a lie, an impossibility. The materialization of an ideology based to its core on lies and self-deception and pitiful hatred. We do not have the permission, the authority, to decide another's life like this. We do not have the right to take away that which we cannot give. A supporter of Proposition 8 is a fascist and a repulsive artifact of a past that I want nothing to do with.


The past two weeks I've been swimming in a head cold. I sweat in my sleep, I wake up with a broken nose, food is unappetizing. This gets in the way of everything.

I had the best workshop of my short career. This story excited positive comments from the full round of cynics. There is an old man in the class that seemed bewildered and frustrated about it, he spent 5 minutes articulating some dissatisfaction that no one else could follow. Though of course, that happens every week. I plan on putting the story in the above link in my graduate school application package. I'd appreciate any commentary. It is not of the MFA aesthetic, and that may be what I like about it best.

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