Wednesday, February 28, 2007

that's what you get...

...at two in the morning when you're cracked out on caffeine. I think it was more like 3am, though. I'm pretty sure the timestamps on my blog entries are off, even though the time zone is set correctly.

Anyway, some links for those interested in some stuff I was talking about last night:

Age of the Universe
(I said 13.45 billion years, but it's more like 13.7)

Stellar Fusion

Stellar Classification

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (stellar life cycle)

Map of the Universe

Big Bang

Cosmic Inflation

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

if you ever get bored...

...or run out of ways to boggle your mind:

Cast your eyes to the heavens.

Those entrancing, twinkling lights you see are a series of photons flung out hundreds of millions or billions of years ago in the process of Hydrogen, Helium, or Carbon fusion. Fusion, caused by gravity so powerful as to instantaneously break you into your constituent atoms if you happened to be teleported suddenly there one day while minding your own business. Perhaps you were buying coffee at the local cafe or gazing into you lover's eyes one sublime moment, and the next sublime moment you notice you are compressed to the size of a cherry and you have a bit of a fever. Only you wouldn't really notice those things because the electrons and chemical transmissions in what used to be your brain that would have conspired to make you think such thoughts are now zinging off to play in that nuclear inferno. My advice would be to think mellow thoughts. Nobody likes a disgruntled star.

Those photons you see, some of them traveling since before life began on this planet, came all this way, millennia upon millennia, to end their epic journey *splat* right there on your retina. You, standing on a giant, spinning ball of rock and ocean, slinging around your very own class G2 star, which is in turn screaming through space in orbit around the black hole in the center of your spiral galaxy. Oh, yeah, that galaxy is hurtling faster and faster across the universe, too. That photon just spent 2 billion years moving with all haste possible just to land on your retina at particular location at this particular time. Don't you feel special now? No? Ok, whatever, Mr. Chaotic Dynamics Guy. Or Girl. You know who you are.

Think also on this: some of those 'stars' up there are not stars at all, but other galaxies brimming with their own stars and black holes and nebulae and quasars and dark matter. Some of those galaxies are really far away -- 30 billion light years, even. You'll need a telescope to see them, but they're there. That means it would take those photons 30 billion years to hit your retina from their source. And yet, you say, the universe is only 13.45 billion years old! Well, WTF, man? So now shit really gets crazy.

We can't be looking at light from some galaxy that's older than the whole universe. Also, those galaxies we can see at this distance are fully formed, replete with stars and structure. So not only can we see these things that are so far away, we see them as they were many years after the Big Bang. Also, if everything started at a single point at the Big Bang, how in the hell did stuff get further away from us than 13 billion years? Those galaxies must have been going hella fast. Faster than the speed of the light. By a lot.

Ok, so it turns out that space and time unfurled from the Big Bang faster than the speed of light. For a little while, at least. That doesn't mean that matter within space expanded faster than light, but that the fabric of spacetime itself did. Like, if you put metal bearings on a sheet of rubber and then stretched the rubber out in all directions. But, you know, stretch it faster than the speed of light. Whoa.

Hold on while I go throw up.

...

Anyway, my point is this: this universe we live in is fucked up, crazy, intense, amazing. The beauty and complexity and vastness of it all is more proof of God, or Gods, or whatever, than I've ever seen. For me, the universe, seen in this light -- with it's unceasing synchronicities and chaos and unforeseens and unknowables and the way it all conspires to make a coherent whole, a big picture that, at this moment in our little nook of it, allows my life, our life, life itself to continue -- is God. There's no better object of my worship and devotion than the universe as it is and what's going on it right now.

Yeah, Universe, keep on truckin'.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

1978 Hunter S. Thompson documentary

It's funny to watch the BBC documentary crew try to keep up with him.

Of note is a conversation Thompson has with John Dean about two thirds of the way through. Dean brings his own tape recorder. Makes me wonder if he's been carrying a tape recorder around with him ever since the whole Watergate thing.



When they're talking about his memorial monument towards the end of the documentary, Thompson mentions that every two years the doctor tells him he has six months left to live. He kept it up for almost 30 more years before his suicide. Then he had his ashes shot out of this cannon:

Saturday, February 24, 2007

those eyes...

Your eyes are straws and my heart is a slurpee.

You stare at me lustily every time we bump into each other. You, with the saccharine smile, you always have some issue or complication. Tell me you're just doing this thing right now where you're not getting involved with men. *Sluuuuuurp*. Tell me you just got out of a relationship and you're too busy right now. *Sluuuuurp*. Tell me you just want to kiss me but then things would be too weird. *Sluuuuurp*.

You suck.

I'm not waiting for you.

Why am I still here?

sometimes the simplest things...

...can have a profound impact on the rest of my day.

I finally got around to buying a new mattress today. I've been sleeping on this crappy futon mattress for the last year and a few months. The whole thing has been caved in for months, and flipping and turning it provide no remedy to the situation. My back has been killing me.

I always get overwhelmed by shit like this, taking all the crap I've been neglecting as one whole thing I've got to fix in my mind and forgetting that it's really just a series of small, simple tasks. Do one little thing, and it's better than it was before. Do one more, and you're closer to your goal. Just keep doing one more thing, get into the rhythm of it, and soon enough you've bought a new mattress, cleaned your room, rearranged the furniture, gotten a vet appointment for the cat, taken your car in to get serviced, posted on your blog, uploaded some pictures, and had coffee with some friends.

I have to learn it over and over, but it's way better than 'Fuck! I've got to fix my entire goddamn life,' which just leads to chain-smoking, video-game binges, and stress-related injuries.

Maybe I'll remember that next time. Ha!

I'm actually excited about going to bed for the first time in years. w00t!

currently reading

The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

Friday, February 23, 2007

because I feel the urge to rationalize...

I'll tell you why I'm doing this.

The truth is this: I have no idea. Maybe I can convince myself here that it's a good idea.

I could never keep a journal - I'm too chaotic for most daily habits. Shit, brushing my teeth every day is struggle enough. I have endless amounts of resistance for anything that's good for me, anything I enjoy doing, anything that might benefit me sometime in the future. Things like surfing, playing piano, sleeping, waking up, cleaning my apartment, shopping, going to work (and actually getting my shit done), calling friends, cooking, telling people I love them, telling people I'm upset, etc. Writing, along with everything else on that list, I find to be a cathartic experience. Once I actually do it. Thinking about the things on that list for days, weeks, years, without actually doing anything about it produces quite the opposite effect.

Eight years of withdrawing incrementally into a fortress built out of drugs, alcohol, and neurotic ego control-freak bullshit left me in a sorry state. I only realize things like that now, after twenty months of slowly knocking down those walls and crawling back out into the sunshine. I'm learning once again how to be raw, vulnerable, open, honest, and it scares the crap out of me. Welcome back to the human race, asshole - now you get to feel. I couldn't, and still can't, hammer those bricks out on my own. Increasingly, I find that I need people in my life to encourage me, to point out my fucked-up thinking, to empathize with me, to laugh with. Sometimes I just need to be dragged out and slapped a few times.

Take playing piano for example. I love playing jazz, but left to my own devices I apparently have no motivation to sit down and play every day. So I started taking lessons again after a three year hiatus. When I've got to show up at my teacher's house for an hour every Tuesday and show some progress, I have a little more incentive to just sit down in front of my keyboard a few times a week and do it. And, like most things, just sitting down and turning the damn thing on is the hardest part for me. Then I can get into it and remember why I love it. But, even if I manage not to touch my keyboard all week, I at least have that solid hour on Tuesday of intense practice and excited, bubbling talk about tri-tone substitutions and diminished scales. I get giddy watching 'Stella by Starlight' turn into something of my own creation over the course of a few weeks. I leave his house every time feeling so fucking amped. A few hours later, though, that fear creeps back in and it just seems like that last thing I want to do.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. So, I'm not an aspiring writer or anything. I'm not really an aspiring anything. I just want to be happy and sane. It takes work - to be true to myself and honest with others. It takes friends - to laugh and argue with, to put up with my bullshit, to be available when life starts to overwhelm me. Most of all, it's being revealed to me, my happiness and sanity are contingent on my usefulness to others. It's the strangest thing, but wrapped up tight in the smothering blanket of Self doesn't work.

What I'm trying to say, somewhere in this bramble of words, is that maybe having this blog will make me want to write more. I like writing and I usually get something out of it.

I don't know if anybody will read this ("nobody's going to read your whiny bullshit"; "they're all gonna laugh at you!"), but maybe somebody will get some entertainment, or relate to something I'm talking about, or in some manner find something helpful in what I've got to say here. Which is not much. I'm trying to have no expectations about this. I'll just write whatever, waxing by turns poetic, insipid, dry, insane, insightful, monkeys. Semi-anonymous honesty, ahoy! Why the fuck am I publishing this? Fuck it! *click*

Thursday, February 22, 2007

something i saw today...

A man and a woman walk towards each other, both blind, canes gently swashing a pendulous path before them on their intersecting trajectories. The Market Street crowd flows around and past them. I hesitate for a moment to watch, wading out of the stream of people pouring down to BART. Canes scrape brick softly as they close, capsize imminent, and I think each hears the other's. They draw up and halt, face to face, an instant before canes cross. Briefly anchored, they stare through one another. I can almost feel them searching out. A speck of time stretches before them in the silence of cars splashing puddles and wet shoes squeaking down stairs.

The moment ends. The woman moves around him and continues up the street, cane scraping its soft arc once again. The man, too, resumes his course, but pauses and turns back the way he came. The way she went. He takes three half steps towards her, stops again. Swept into the current of the busy crowd, she washes farther and farther away. The man cocks his head for a moment and listens.

He swings around and sets his course down the street, a slight spring marking his determined gait. His pendulum ripples to and fro across the soggy bricks.

I take a deep breath and plunge down to BART.