An everyday order belies the incredible weirdness of life.   There are phrases and words and compliments and mannerisms and womannerisms and made up words and single and double and triple entendres all like a giant raging river and it’s dammed and controlled by whatisit? our language or our God or our culture or our wommanerisms or our nationality?  I won’t even venture a guess.  But it’s controlled – only slightly, barely, as if a tiny hole would bring the whole thing crashing down.  It’s controlled and harnessed, as best as can be expected by the things we take for granted.  The power of language and ideas and conversations and arguments and confusion and boredom.  It’s all important.  This video plays with language the way today’s child plays a video game.  It’s sure-footed and quick and it comes out of a place apart – let’s call it the shore of the river that’s dammed by God.  Was that a pun?  Dammed by God.  Damned by God.  Does that even have to make sense?  Remember the river is life or truth or something I probably didn’t clarify because I never claimed to know in the first place.

The things I don’t know are probably not answers to questions.  They are things though, I can tell you that – they are items that can be quantified and probably stacked like books.  But books are filled with more things listed on pages.  Those pages are counted and numbered and then read and turned-over.  The aggregate of those things leads to less things but bigger things.  Bigger things are probably more important things; things with weight.  What is the thing of a book?

2666 is 900 pages of things that I’ve read and loved and when you ask me what is the book about? I answer back that it is probably…… probably about life – life like living, the verb part of life, the noun.  It’s a documentation of many things that are semi-related but man, they are barely semi-related.  The only thing linking them is the beating heart and blood and raging stupid sweaty hormonal thoughts of the characters involved.  God are they stupid.  God, did I love this book.  What was it about?  It’s about that god damn river.  Did we even get to the part where we wonder where the river originated and to where it leads?  Do metaphors have myths and origins?

It’s so hot, the crystal key in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler Imperial just set fire to the back-up hair piece he keeps in

It’s so hot, the crystal key in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler refracted the spitting image of Ricardo Montalban

It’s so hot, the Corinthian leather in Jeremy Piven’s Chrysler just drove itself back home, leaving his crystal key refracting a laser beam through his second best emergency backup hairpiece.

the Chrysler Imperial is out.  can’t figure it out yet.  Believe me, at the time in my mind when this came together, it was hilarious.  Now it’s too much.

Take 2:

It’s so hot, the boils on Larry King’s ass….. nope.  still not there.

comedy………………………….  GOLD

Everybody shut up for a second: The internet is being used to solve the world’s problems.  Let’s zoom in on that ridiculous statement to Slate.com, which recently asked its readers to propose inventive solutions to the world’s public transportation woes.  Notice that this question, which I have paraphrased and then re-phrased not as a question but as an invitation, does not target a specific public transportation mode, city, geography, state, nation, or planet.  Each of these specifications come with their own unique set of woes that a community of readers might solve with collective wit, imagination and inspiration.  My problems as a subway rider on the Boston T might differ from the complaints made by a Metro rider in DC, which would alter dramatically from the issues raised by an Earth-ferrying intra-orbital zeppelin passenger, etc.  There is a reason Slate.com generalized this topic – Slate.com lives in the cloud and clouds can’t be fenced or they won’t be fenced, or they are never fenced no matter if you try to fence them or not.  They float here and there in an ethereal fog that sharpens colors and outlines temporarily before fading away.  Slate.com is not a community.  It does not represent a locality.  It represents ideas that are written by people with editors on topics that shift like the cloud, with the cloud and in the cloud itself.  This cloud can’t be chained to a location – it can’t be tied with any specificity because it will rust or whither or it will die or you will stop going to it because your visits give it power and when it stops moving, you stop caring.  Anyway – I’m over-writing.

Slate.com can’t ask you about the T or the Metro because it doesn’t know who you are.  And if it knew who you are, then it would know where you are.  That knowledge is the thing that makes a cloud-based publication a community.  That knowledge is the thing that can be harnessed to solicit information of value from a community that is not interested solely in prize money but rather in the value that is collected by the community itself.  Because the community shares a problem that needs to be solved.

So Slate.com which may or may not succeed in solving the world’s transportation woes made me realize recently the difference between an online publication with user-accounts and comments sections and blogs and the same thing that is also an online community.  I posted a solution to transportation woes and if you were to be so kind, I ask you to please vote in favor of my smart buses solution.

– Einstein & Freud & Jack –

Death is a dead, at least that’s what Freud said.

Long considering, he finally thought

Life but a detour longer or less long;

Maybe that’s why the going gets so rough.

When Einstein wrote to ask him what he thought

Science might do for world peace, Freud wrote back:

Not much. And took the occasion to point out

That science too begins and ends in myth.

His myth was of the sons conspired together

To kill the father and share out his flesh,

Blood, power, women, and the primal guilt

Thereon entailed, which they must strive

Vainly to expiate by sacrifice,

Fixed on all generations since, of sons.

Exiled in London, a surviving Jew,

Freud died of cancer before the war began

That Einstein wrote to Roosevelt about

Advising the research be started that,

Come seven years of dying fathers, dying sons,

In general massacre would end the same.

Einstein. He said that if it were to do

Again, he’d sooner be a plumber. He

Died too. We live on sayings said in myths,

And die of them as well, or ill. That’s that,

Of making many books there is no end,

And like it saith in the book before that one,

What God wants, don’t you forget it, Jack,

Is your contrite spirit, Jack, your broken heart.

– Howard Nemerov

I’m waiting for the NBA finals game 3 to start.  The pre-game show has lasted for an hour and a half.  The pre-game announcements have lasted over a half-hour.  The lights are off the stadium.  The entire nation is watching the Boston Celtics’ home-crowd promo video.  Paul Pierce just told a tired nation to GET LOUD.

Enough.

I love the Milwaukee Bucks more than you love anything.  When I make $1 Billion, I will buy the Bucks from US Senator Herbert Kohl (D-WI).  He will sell the team to me because he will know that I love them and will keep them there forever.  I will also build a new arena for the city.  I will hire a thick-accented old man to call the games at the new arena.  He will be old.  He will be unpolished.  He will wish he was calling an arena league football game.  He will be stuck with the Bucks.  He will fall in love with the team in spite of himself.  His love will infect the city.  There will be no dancers.  The music will be provided for by a city band that does not include Warren Wiegratz.  It will be plainer but purer.  I know what I sound like and deep down you agree with me.  Let’s replace the shine with boredom.  It’s okay.

When my Bucks (our Bucks) make it to the Finals, the game will start earlier, I don’t care what the networks say.  The tickets will be cheaper.  I don’t care what the sponsors need.  The game will reflect the city that will shine in the league.  The old man announcer will speak to something you forgot you thought you didn’t know.

I don’t have to make sense here – a) I’m going to be a billionaire, b) I’m going to own the Bucks, not you, and c) I’ll buy you a couple tickets to show you what I mean.

Go Bucks.

After a while, one recognizes the boundaries that frame a point of view – the things that define normalcy – are keeping other perspectives out.  This video demonstrates how our concept of time is determined by factors that have nothing to do with the seconds clicking away on the wrist watch you used to have but don’t anymore because your phone does it all.

Music is a math problem without a calculator.  Or without a right answer.  Or without a remainder?  I don’t know what music is or how to solve it.  I quit my trumpet 10 years ago like she was cheating on me for my impotence.  It’s not my fault – I was raised on the B flat blues scale and could rif mindlessly on it like 2+2.  Then one day my 2-D world grew shadows and I saw angles that made no sense.  For the first time I was sincerely lost in the room I grew up in.  The piddly little scale sounded like Mary Had a Little Lamb.

This song introduced me to the 3rd dimension.  To shadows.  To real symmetry – that is to say, it introduced me to asymmetry because every note I played was over-thought-out and wrong and slow and behind and did I mention it was over-thought-out?  A7 means A dominant 7 which means A C E G-flat – is that right?  tickticktick G-flat sounds weird, should I think of it as F sharp?  What’s the normal way to call it? tickticktick How can I connect this to an F tickticktick shit.

This is another language problem.  So many problems.  Problems like arithmetic.  Problems with remainders.  Problems with formulas.  Problems with answers and guesses that are right and wrong.  Problems with answers I already know but can’t yet communicate.

I miss my trumpet.  I am sleeping with a 49 key Yamaha so that someday I can come back to her.  But this is going slow.  I’m playing Mary Had a Little Lamb in Bass Clef so that I can someday play the thing I am already hearing in my mind.  Same with Bangla – I am squeezing out elementary phrases so that someday I can say what I mean.  I know what I know but can’t communicate either of them.  It is a math problem – I have the formula.  I have the variables.  I even have the answer.  I have trees and squirrels and bad metaphors and brooks and beavers and beaver dams but not yet do I have a forrest.

That was horrible.

As I finger Mary Had a Little Lamb (single entendre) I listen to Mendelssohn.  I was just handed sheet music to a Chopin song I can play (ostensibly).  Playing it drops me in the shadows of this 3rd dimension.  I am touching the sounds buried in my brain – the sounds I can whistle but can’t play.  I am touching them through the finger tips on those 49 electric keys.  I am feeling the curvature of their geometry and I am surprised and confused by the shape of things.  I am not trusting that feeling yet scared of wasting even more time in this struggle.  Both of my linguistic battles are stuck in muck.  This is why toddlers scream when they can’t say what they really feel.

Humans! from three legged legs on Vimeo.

I don’t have a third one.  This is a Twotych.  I just made that up.