So excited!

My sis' wedding is in Barcelona (BCN) is just days away. To top it off i ran into her best friend from high school last nite that she hasnt seen in years while i was waiting in a coffee shop for some dude i bought a laptop from.

Who Are These People?

Today at lunch, me and the other miscreant Yahoos were musing what a funny place to work this is. I've been musing over it since an afternoon meeting last Friday when I burst out into uncontrollable laughter during an otherwise very "serious" meeting between our video search team and another team that has been brought in from South America to help us with some heavy lifting. My boss was asking the Columbians questions about integration between our teams and this guy that was patched in on a conference call from who-knows-where (we have teams from all over the world collaborating on this thing) chimes in with a very serious tone, delivering a thoughtful but concise answer. Everybody's listening, nodding heads, stroking chins in deep thought. He finishes his answer and there is a brief pause of silence in the room, during which I'm not sure what happened but it sounded like some kind of child in the background or maybe an elf in the phone, I dont know what it was, takes over the phone call for a moment and yells "gnee-GNEE!" in a gleeful sounding voice in the background. It might not even have been a voice, maybe just some mechanical skittering at the phone company that sounded like a voice. Who knows. But given the circumstance, in this serious, mildly dull meeting, the sound was absolutely hilarious and I immediately burst out into laughter and COULD NOT STOP. One or two people cracked smiles and then immediately put their heads down in a kind of laughter-shame and stopped, but for some reason that just made it even funnier and made me laugh even harder. I. Couldn't. Stop. I finally had to put my head down on the conference table and breathe deeply to make it stop. I dont know what was more horrifying - my inability to stop inappropriately laughing or their inability to inappropriately laugh.

Situations like this really make me question whether I am insane or whether every person around me is completely insane. Its all relative I guess. I'm starting to lean towards the "THEY are all insane" side of the coin after sitting with the other miscreants at lunch today though. Our little lunch posse is all webdevs and we usually eat lunch and ponder in amazement all the douchebags we work with; people who don't hold the elevator, the guy who comes and takes loud painful-sounding craps in the men's room on our flor, the people who need special parking spots for their giant motorcycles and park them on the grass in front of the building instead of the motorcycle stalls 10 yards away, stuff like that. The hubris content of this building is pretty high overall. Today my former manager, the ringleader of the posse, motions with his eyes towards this guy in the lunch room and my other friend and I surreptitiously look over to see a programmer-type with some kind of rather longish green noodle stuck to his face, seemingly oblivious to its presence. He is talking to this other programmer-type who is eating with him who obviously hasn't mentioned the noodles' presence to his friend. Then the guy GETS UP, and goes over to pick up utensils from the utensil area... the question then becomes, how in the heck did the noodle get there in the first place if the guy doesn't even have utensils yet? Obviously they just went from the lunch line to the table, then to get utensils. How did a noodle get from his plate to his face in that time? Did he just lose it and bury his face in them while waiting for the cash register?

This is the kind of stuff we lose ourselves in over sandwiches and pizza every day. My former-manager starts laughing and tells me that the noodle is nothing, that I missed yesterday. He and the other guy go into this detailed story about how some random guy in the lunch room got up in the middle of eating with a bunch of people and went over and puked into a garbage can next to the soda machine, and then RETURNED TO HIS TABLE AND FINISHED EATING HIS LUNCH. I didn't believe them at first, and then realized they weren't kidding when they started speculating what he had eaten (they decided it must have been chicken from the looks of it).

That's a pretty rock-star move: eating lunch, puking, then returning to finish lunch. "That's hot." I haven't seen anyone so hardcore since the time Kelley got so drunk she peed on herself on our front porch because she couldnt open the door, took a shower, and went back to party the rest of the night. The funny thing is that most of the people that work here are so self-involved that nobody even notices things like this, and it all happens - the mysterious Gnee-Gnee, the noodle, the lunchroom puker - without anyone even batting an eyelid. And it makes it even funnier.

Tunak Tunak - Romanian Version

The whole world is falling in love with Bollywood. Which is great because it means more stuff like this.

A Conspiracist's Guide to the Universe

A few weeks ago, Dave Marin emailed me a link to this 'quiz' online that contains questions and answers based on information contained in David Icke's The Biggest Secret. Dave's email contained a note asking whether I had seen the quiz before, with a couple of sample questions to whet my whistle, enticing me to blog:

Q: When mono-atomic gold is consumed, what happens to the nervous system?

A: It increases the carrying capacity by 10,000 times, allowing a person to
process information like a super computer; also allows them to consciously
move through other dimensions and shapeshift

Q: What is Mario Brothers based on?

A: The idea that the dinosaurs were not wiped out by the meteorite and in fact
the impact created a parallel dimension where the dinosaurs continued to live
and thrive and evolved into intelligent humanoids

How can I resist? I love stuff like this. I first came into contact with David Icke's writings was when living on Maui (of course). My back had gone out and I managed to drive to the grocery store and consume a handful of Advil before collapsing on a grassy median in the parking lot outside the store. My back used to go out with a frequency in those days, usually rendering me bedridden for anywhere from 2 to 5 days at a time. So there I was, melting in the heat and waiting for the medicine to kick in when a short, stout man in his late fifties approached me from behind and seemed to intuitively know what was wrong with me. A short conversation about back care ensued, which then rapidly went haywire and veered off into another conversation about interdimensional forest dwellers that manifest as balls of light in the jungle around the foot of the volcano. Here on the mainland the idea of a spontaneous exchange on such a bizarre topic like that sounds quite odd, but is actually pretty run-of-the-mill mid-afternoon conversation outside the grocery store in Maui. I often wonder which reality is more perverse. I digress.

He inspired me to actually try to read a book called Rule By Secrecy by Jim Marrs that my friend had given me a little while earlier that I hadnt dug into yet. She had said it was interesting but too dense for her palette, but that it might be right up my analytical alley. The book was an interesting take on history which followed a dark thread of conspiracy beginning with the modern-day geo-political institutional power structure and traced it back thru the industrial revolution, the French revolution, the renaissance, middle ages, biblical times, ancient egypt, ultimately landing us smack-dab in the genesis of civilization: Sumeria circa 26BC (modern-day Iraq). The author abrubtly posits in the last couple of chapters that the Sumerians - the humans from which we are descended - were actually a race of alien/hominid hybrids created by warring alien "gods" who needed a slave race to help them mine the Earth to fuel their technologies which had depleted the natural resources of their own planet, forcing them to travel to Earth to colonize and plunder it. Quite a juggernaut.

Most of these Icke-esque theorists posit that the alien race which created the human being have life spans of hundreds of years, and that when they blended their genes with the comparatively simian hominid which they found here on Earth when they arrived, they created a hybrid that could easily work and live to be 100 to 150 years of age. The "purer" bloodlines of the human ruling class created to keep the rest of us in line were those that contained a higher percentage of the superior alien DNA, thus explaining the urgency of the ruling classes' need to keep bloodlines pure by intermarrying one another even thru modern times. They also argue that this explains the seemingly bizarre life-spans of Biblical characters like Abraham and Sarah (remember Sarah was the 90 year old that bore a child in the Old Testament). In fact, Icke and others argue that the Biblical Adam and Eve story is actually an account of pre-historic gene splicing (God took a "rib" from Adam and used it to create his counterpart, Eve).

All of this inspired me to read both Genesis and the first few books of the Bible up through Noah and The Flood, as well as the ancient Sumerian The Epic of Gilgamesh which is one of the first recorded human stories that we know of. It happens to be a very touching tale of love and loss that trips through human relationships and ancient landscapes and ultimately ends with King Gilgamesh symbolically crossing a river to visit the world of the dead as he is grief stricken at the sudden loss of his human best-friend Enkidu to mythological forces embodied by a monster in the forest. Although I don't know if I necessarily believe Icke's conclusions about the origin of mankind, I was decidedly startled at the parallels between the flood myths of Noah and Gilgamesh and was ultimately grateful for having read this book that led me to this discovery, as both works are very beautiful both in and of themselves as well as together. (More the Gilgamesh/Genesis connection.)

It is said that when Aldous Huxley was on his deathbed he had his wife inject liquid LSD directly into his bloodstream. Huxley was a regular attendee of the church of ecstatic vision and used hallucinogens to reach into the future and bring back with him works like Brave New World, which was once considered sci-fi but is now
seen by many as a baldly prophetic vision of our modern predicament. I would argue that there are many ways to float a boat upstream of the here and now, but the kind of massive shift in consciousness it takes is probably more than your average post-modern hominid would be able to muster without massive and sophisticated chemical assistance. This ability to see the future seems to be the vestigial domain of expertise of Biblical prophets and Amazonian forest-dwelling shamanic time-travelers.

In the book I am reading right now, Daniel Pinchbeck recounts the ayahuasca trip of a molecular biologist who attempted to ask direct questions about her research of the "ahahuasca spirit" after ingesting the potion during a visit to a shaman in the jungles of South America:

One genetic researcher found herself transformed into a protein flying above a long DNA strand, and was able in this way to understand the meaning of certain patterns in what had previously been considered "junk DNA".

She saw DNA sequences known as "CpG islands" which she had been puzzling over at work, and which are found upstream of about sixty percent of all human genes. She saw that they were structurally different from the surrounding DNA and that this structural difference allowed them to be easily accessed and therefore to serve as "landing pads" for transciption proteins, which dock on to the DNA molecule and make copies of precise genetic structures.

Talk about a totally bizarre research methodology.

The thing they have in common - this French geneticist and Aldous Huxley and David Icke - is their total abandon, their complete willingness to sacrifice the narcissism of empirical analysis and rationalism on the altar of divine knowledge; to just plain get wierd and crack the nut and see what comes out. The limitations of the human mind are staggering when we begin to try to rub them up against the endless chasms of great mysteries like "where did we come from?" or "what is the real history of the human race?" That's the spirit to read conspiracy theory in; it is the rock against which we can break our foolish spoon-fed assumptions about the past, the dose of mind-altering-ness that clears out the debris of modern scientific hubris and puts us on the path to beginning to try to understand the wierdness of all this flying around in space on a rock orbiting a giant flaming ball of thermonuclear meltdown.

OK. Tirade sequence complete. Now you can go take the quiz.

Jimmy Swaggart vs. the Meerkat

Hamburger Eyes

Found this cool photo blog today. it's kind of old-school zine meets internets. Link

Excerpt

I will now seek to pepper your consciousness with thoughts from the Person of the Week. (note to Dave - i am still ruminating on the topic you sent).

Disbelief in any spiritual reality is also a belief system. The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences. If there is still a vauge and oppressive sense of guilt, of wrongness and imbalance, this gnawing guilt spurs capitalism on to greater acts of consumption, more violent attempts to subjugate nature, more totalizing efforts to create distractions. To the "rational materialist" mind, death is the end of everything; this thought feeds its rage against nature, which has placed it in the position of despair. The destruction of the world is revenge against a vanished God, and a drastic attempt to invoke the spiritual powers.


...The dialectical processes that created the possessive mind-set of the capitalist and the "rational" outlook of the technocrat required destruction of the premodern vestiges of communal and animistic beliefs, whether these beliefs were found in isolated pockets of Europe or in the indigenous populations of the New World. This destruction was part of the process that Karl Marx described as the alienation of all of the physical and intellectual senses into one sense: the sense of having. Of course , "the sense of having" is not really a sense - it is an illusion of fulfillment that seems to extend outside of the self.

Modernism caused a profound shift in the way we use our senses... We have sacrificed perceptual capabilities for other mental abilities - to concentrate on a computer screen while sitting in a cubicle for many hours at a stretch... or to shut off multiple levels of awareness as we drive a car in heavy traffic. In other words, we are brought up within a system that teaches us to postpone, defer, and eliminate most incoming sense data in favor of a future reward. We live in a feedback loop of perpetual postponement. For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost.

The Internet is a Strange, Strange Place

My friend at work showed me this guy's site... he grew up next to a Hostess factory and realized there was a huge demand out there for those delicious(?) Hostess "dessert products" we'll call them (emphasis on the quotes) that you can't get your hands on anymore if you live in say, Ohio. Kind of brilliant when you think about it. Anyway, something for you faux-foodies out there with a flippant attitude towards your coronary and arterial health who are missing your down-home American treats. Order online, straight to your door. Link

Swimming Pools, Movie Stars, Smiling Elves, and The Tough and Lovely

So I spent July 4th weekend in Los Angeles. I had been promising Sammy I'd come visit him and beat him in the head, which I totally did. I met his dog Gus and his sweet Greek mother who gave me a gigantic bowl of sherbet that I couldnt finish. We went over to Brianna's mom's house where he tried to drown me in the pool after I told him his nursing-home-cruise-ship idea was bananas.

We went to Jocelyn's birthday party, who was all dressed up and looking spiffy in a dark blue polka-dotted dress. She introduced me to her fiancee Simon, who by all accounts had a perky ass in those grey slacks he wore and is better known for his Pizza Hut commercials. Everyone got to take out their repressed anger on a couple of multi-colored pinatas as I huddled in the corner with Sammy's friend Cedric talking about kundalini and spirit guides. I kind of geeked out for a minute on one of Jocelyn's friends who plays a nerdy anthropologist on that show "Bones" with the ever-hunky David Boreanaz. We also got to the bottom of the fact-vs.-fiction debate over the 2-day cleanse where you drink a cup of olive oil and then supposedly poop out waxy globs of toxins stored in your gallbladder.

The next day came the highlight of the weekend. I was in his friend Cedric's apartment all by myself in Silver Lake late Saturday night, about to walk a few doors up to the barbeque but decided to pee first. When I got done, I swung the bathroom door open into a dark hallway when suddenly a dark figure jumped out of the shadows in front of me, making a mean-sounding noise with arms and hands and fingers spread wide in the universal I'm-gonna-git-you-sucka position. For a moment I was scared and I reached back with my fist clenched and thought that whatever happened, it was at least going to be fun hitting someone as hard as I could. As my elbow was somewhere behind my ear and I was ready to strike, I noticed the shadow's pointy head and realized it was Sammy's dumb ass that had jumped out at me. In that split-second I decided he deserved to get hit for doing that anyway and instead opened my hand into more of a slap and let her rip right upside his head. It all happened in the blink of an eye. He was a little drunk and staggered around for a couple of minutes alternately swearing and complementing me on a good first strike. We walked back up to the party with a quickness so he could show people the red handprint on his face. (I told you I'd get you back for that shit in the pool, punkass!)

It kind of went something like this:



The next day Sammy, Cedric, Cedric's girlfriend Mariana, and me all went to some place they kept calling "The Caves" that turned out to be a beach in Malibu called El Matador or something like that. We swam in the water until Sammy got a headache and Mariana thought the kelp was trying to drown her. Sammy and Cedric got obsessed with breaking rocks with rocks and hurled just about every small rock on the beach at another big rock about 20 yards out. It was very simian. Mariana and I saw a small pod of dolphins rolling around just offshore. Cedric tried to communicate with them by hitting rocks together in the water. Not sure what that was about, but it was funny.






Sammy really liked the idea of appearing to "hang" in pictures.


Mariana.



The next day I went to a 4th of July party at Abby's gigantic house back in Malibu, who it turns out works on one of my favorite shows, Bridezillas, the show where they follow around high-maintenance brides-to-be who think their weddings should take place in a fairyland of high-priced couture and cuisine. We sat in the jacuzzi and wondered what the view would be like when the fireworks from Danny DeVito's boat went off. Who knew he was such a pyro-enthusiast? Anyway, my carriage was turning into a pumpking so I snaggled a Boca burger, said bye to everyone, and rode back home - incurring one ticket for not wearing my seatbelt.

PS to those in the know: I was supposed to ride down and back with The Weapon but her sister ended up getting sick on Friday night when we were supposed to leave, and they didnt end up leaving until late unfortunately, so I told her to go without me and drove myself the next day because I didnt want to show up at B's house at 4 or 5 in the morning. Oh well. There's always next week.

EPILOGUE: when I got home I pretty much went straight to bed and ended up waking up early around 6am to meditate. As I was walking from my bathroom back to the bedroom I looked out the window to see one of my neighbor's creepy ceramic elves propped up on the fence between our houses. Oh, right... let me explain. You see, my next-door neighbor's yard seems to be dotted with ceramic elves; they live in these creepy 3 foot by 3 foot squares in her yard that have red rocks in them and are surrounded by creepy little picket fences that come up to your knee. It's so wrong I won't even post a picture of it. You can't really see the elf-farm from my yard unless you really try so most of the time it doesnt bother me. She hates cats and even shot poor Fiki one morning with a beebee gun for being in her yard, whining. I think the elf that was propped up on the fence was supposed to keep the cats out, as they have taken to jumping over that part of her fence to get to my lettuce, which is now quite fluffy and large and inviting on the other side.

The sight of the creepy, smiling ceramic elf up on the fence between our houses was really more pain than I could bear in the bluish pre-dawn light. I swear when I saw it I heard that one violin note they always play in horror movies to punctuate something scary. A horrible rush of blood shot to my head and made me want to run outside, shimmy along my side of the fence, pull it down, and "disappear" it for good. I even thought how I would have to burn it in a pile of trash to get rid of any evil spirits that might be lurking in it. But then I thought twice, imagining what kind of horrible elfin turf-war I might inspire with such an act. I might come home one day and see all the elves propped against the fence, smiling and staring down at me.

A few mornings ago I had been complaining to someone about how disgusting the beach is sometimes in San Francisco. I was out surfing this one day and the fog rolled in on me so bad that I couldnt see shore anymore. I got the heebies from it and paddled in, only to find four fat black crows picking over the beach where I got in. It was very Adams family and didn't sit right with me. So of course as soon as I complained about it out loud to someone, the next day a pack of crows descended on my backyard at 6 am, right before I was about to start my morning meditation. Now mind you, I have never seen any crows in my backyard before this, ever. I sat there wondering how in the heck I was going to meditate with them sitting there outside my window sqwuaking their horrible sqwuaks and considered going outside and turning the hose on them. I decided that that would be a mean thing to do and I would be better off taking the pacifist's route and just sit in meditation and let the universe take care of the sqwuaking crows. And it was magic; as soon as I started meditating they almost instantaneously stopped.

So I decided to take the path of least resistance with the elf/gnome/goblin situation this morning and actually also threw in a begging sort of prayer to make it just go away. I did my meditation, fell back asleep, and when I woke up again at 8 am found that the elf had disappeared itself without my intervention.

ONE MORE THING: the musical discovery of the weekend comes to you courtesy of Cedric and Mariana. The band is called "The Tough and Lovely" and you can hear some of their stuff over on their mySpace page.