12:36am :: I read about an extreme case of road rage today. A guy, travelling with two friends in a pick-up, became so enraged with someone while driving on Mount Lemmon, that he followed them for 30 minutes after, eventually ramming their car, then spinning around and attempting to leave, hitting two more cars, including one with a 50-something Indian woman who's now in the hospital as a result of the head-on collision.
The end of the world is soon, and this is an omen. Too spiritual? Oh yeah. When the desert becomes a land full of the rage that can only result from our own self-inflicted over-crowded conditions, then we might as well give up; we might as well send for our kids, taken them out of college and buy a farm in South Dakota. I imagine that these more obscure western states are the only refuge left in this country from this sort of mass, intensely connected society that has evolved since the 70's. But what do I know, right? Besides how to burn scrambled eggs and how to intimidate based on subtle, non-verbal communication.
I don't expect to the right the wrongs, I can only hope to escape them. Whatever that means.
Is cleaning absolutely and totally necessary to our survival as human beings? Can't that roll of duct tape sit next to my stereo speaker forever? What if I follow up with the State of Arizona's plan and stay here for 43 years? What would happen to duct tape after 43 years?
Shit, I can't imagine what would happen to me, let alone my environment, in 43 years. Flying cars, people eating cats, Richard Simmons the immortal and all-knowing God? It's all possible I suppose, but I guess people thought the same thing 43 years ago. Damn, that was only 1960. I guess 1960 was very different, but it really seems very familiar to me for some reason. I can imagine it vividly based on colorful movie scenes and the choppy editing of civil rights documentaries.
But what about the fear?? The fear that is essential to our survival, or sanity? Communists? Definitely. 43 years ago, Harry Truman drilled America on the reds: duck under your desk, suspect your neighbor, horde your Van Camps and Spam, build your urine recycling facility, for the end comes soon and the fear is justified. Today, George Bush drills America on the terrorists: inspect your mail before opening, watch the mosques for suspicious activity, horde your duct tape, build your wall of mistrust and isolation (Pink Floyd reference intended), for the end comes quickly, swiftly and without warning (except for the Red alert status, which will give us ample time to run around in circles).

Enough of this political bullshit. Tyler was supposed to arrive tonight, but it's now 1am and I doubt that this will occur. I actually did not go online because I assumed that he would need to reach me when he got to town. Whatever. I probably should have bought beer, but we all should have done something at one time or another, right? If not kill whitey, than what? Drink more water, excercise more, spend more time with our family, spend less time at work, watch less tv, drink less alcohol. Whether more or less, nothing seems to follow through and I wander if this is an intentional weakness; if we're set sub-conciously to disobey our own goals. I think I'm more inclined to follow the goals that someone else has set for me, they always seem to be more realistic. But whatever.

12:44am :: I was supposed to do some sort of hiking thing today, but for some reason I passed. The communications port on my computer has decided to stop functioning, leaving me unable to use my wireless NIC, although the dial-up modem still strangely works. No real thoughts today, maybe because I haven't read in a while. Just disdain for the people in the apartment complex and sympathy for those outside of it.
I genuinely thought about moving yesterday. I saw an ad online for a 2-room place in West University for $385 with the utilities paid. I need to be Travis Bickle, I need to fall deeper into madness, into reclusion. It's not depression, nor loneliness, just a stage, another rite of passage along the line to becoming a true adult human. Whether you just push or shove people away during this period is up to you, I think it's a test of morals. I imagine a hot plate with a pot full of Van Camp's simmering, overcooking. I once tried to cook bao zi with a homemade steamer; it took an hour. Maybe that was a mistake, but it was all about learning then, as it is now. I feel like I'm teaching things to the people I meet everyday now. It's the theory: you make your life worthwhile not through your friends or family necessarily, but just through the people you effect, whether it be the bum on the street selling newspapers, or the cashier at Dunkin' Donuts.
I just thought about Florida, when I was in Panama City in 2001, right after 9-11. I looked at the map before going, obsessed with a point along the shore facing directly east, so that I could watch the sunrise. I found one, but when I got there, it was surrounded by swamp and houses, so I kept driving. I can vividly remember most everything from my trips, even the early ones like Las Vegas when I was 16 and LA when I was 13. I only regret not being able to remember the emotions as vividly, especially the first impressions, since those are so important in travel.
So I'm starting to learn PHP, and I find it very interesting, but just don't see the need for databases. Why can't dynamic web pages just utilize text documents? They're smaller, and you can multiple documents similarly as you have multiple tables. The problem is though, that they haven't really invented a language that can effectively deal with this. A future? Maybe. I would rather travel the country doing web sites for businesses like I had planned. But that won't happen. Cake??

11:21pm :: So I'm sitting at work today and I have figured out what's been bothering me: the monotony. I can't stand talking to these same people every day. Basically they can all be broken down into possibly 10 undefinable types that do not seem to have any leaway amongst them. They have same complaints, the same problems, the same resolutions, and the same uncomfortable vulnerabilities which are so easy to exploit. These are the people who are in the thoughts of every presedential candidate, every muppet news organization, every sappy author, every big film production company, every soft drink manufacturer, every advertising group, every PR department for every corporation. These are the people are Americans: the ignorant, complacent drones who would rather spend their time bitching about money than making their own lives, or the lives of others, better.
Right, I'm just pissed off and need to settle down, but I should leave now.

12:48am :: My century begins here. Centuries are not just 100 years, started when a clock strikes midnight, it's whenever you want it to start. Measure one hundred years from a single point in time and is this not also a century? Too deep man.
So I'm thinking tonight about North Korea, run by the sort of skewed Asian communism of Kim Jung-Il (sp?). Sure, Bush puts him on the bulletin board on his fridge underneath the letters "Axis of Evil" in purple Sharpie. Yes, he's on the list, but why isn't he the greatest threat to world peace at the moment? Because America is? Well, yes, but considering what he has done in the past to his people (subjecting them to famine, unjust arrests, violations of civil liberties, and generally inspiring fear in everyone), I don't understand why we went for Saddam.
Okay, the easy answer is oil. I mean, North Korea has no useful resources whatsoever to offer us except a potential cheap labor market to take some of the cheap plastic toy assembling slack off of China and maybe some rice fields. The US could gain virtually nothing by assembling a client-state government like we have Afghanistan, and are trying to do in Iraq. But then again, what does Afghanistan have to offer the United States as far as resources go? It's basically a big desert, the Russians used it for cotton growing, but this has ruined much of the once-arable land. Controlling the world's opium supply? This is possible, especially since we are, or rather, the government is, so hell-bent on irradicating drugs from our fine nation full of moral hygiene. Basically, I think it's more about eliminating potential threats to globalization. Eccentric governments and cultures need to irradicated with big cartoon-sized hammers. Send in Mc Donald's and GE, they all need lives as good as our's. No one should live without malt liquor and cell phones!
I think it also has to do with religion. We are VERY biased when it comes to religion. If they're not Christian, and are proactive in their beliefs, then they are threatening to us. It's a difference of opinion, and I just think we're afraid that their logic will make sense. North Korea is generally Buddhist or Christian, although officially atheist, being a Communist government. They pose no threat to the Western, Christian way of life because to us, they don't seem to care about their respective religious faiths. And besides, why would we attack our fellow semites? New things just scare us, and we compensate by becoming defensive. We feel that we need to protect our children from these outside sources and logic. What would happen if our sons and daughters found Allah? Sure, it's okay for those negroes in the ghettoes, but not for Mary Brown from Price George's County, Virginia, or Tom Paul from Westchester, New York. In a rigid culture, we are expected to stay within certain boundaries, and one of those boundaries seems to be religion: white people can either go atheist (with added "spirituatlity" or Buddhism or Taoism briefly during their college years), Christianity, Catholicism or Judaism, otherwise, the equilibrium is broken and the pieces fall to the floor.
Maybe that's too over-dramatic though, and I just need to go to bed. I'm thinking Sasco on Friday. It will be a nice break from cube hell. "I've had nothing but problems since I started this DSL." THEN FUCKING CANCEL IT! It's just a * code away. I'll cancel soon enough, and jump onto a chair, riding it down the aisle.
excuse me while i kiss this guy ::: canada's new deal (new deal canada), screwed by nature (renewed by nature)

11:48pm :: I was reading yesterday, perched above Rose Canyon Lake ironically, about "spots." The idea is that in every place, each person has a particular place which is best suited for them, in less of a physical comfort context and more of a spiritual one, where you are most happy and comfortable. A little too spiritual for me, but it got me thinking about spots and places. Perhaps it can be taken into a broader perspective upon different levels, like seconds minutes hours days weeks months years, there would be couch room house street neighborhood town county state region country continent, all zeroing in. Each of these different levels would have a place set aside for a precise person. With an innumerable combination for each one of these levels, each person could have their own specific "spot" without interfering overly with someone else's comfort. I guess it's kind of like that sleep number bed idea: everyone has their sleep number and subsequent body position and sleeping scenario, the possibilities are again innumerable. I thought about that maybe Tucson was my spot, but that's stupid since I'm sure that there is a more comfortable spot for me on the earth. I think that you can find happiness in your spot on any one of these levels, but to find your spot at each succeedingly higher level is to find more happiness.
This idea is too fatalist for me (it would imply set paths, divinely-arranged encounters and experiences, and tacos that hold together when you bite into them) but I think it's interesting nonetheless. So many ideas come from these books.

I was just thinking about a movie that came out in Singapore while I was living there in the mid-90's. I think it was called "Army Days" or "Army Daze" or something (after writing that I found out that is indeed "Army Daze" and it makes me wonder whether or not the drug reference was intended). It was a Singaporean-produced movie, featuring the best star-power Singapore had to offer at the time, about life as a young army recruit serving your national service duties for the small island oligarchy. Three things are required for living as a Singaporean citizen: two years national service beginning at age 18 for all able-bodied citizens (men and women), voting each year in arbitrary elections (yes, it is illegal not to vote) and speaking English with an accent that no other English-speaking culture can readily understand. I remember clearly hearing fellow expats at my school mocking the movie, mainly because it was supposed to have been a very big accomplishment for Singapore, but it was actually filmed in Malaysia. I never saw it, and for good reason. I realized sometime after the movie came up (it was only a few years ago, but I don't remember when exactly) that it was complete propaganda, as was almost everything else in the country. This was a comedy, and the underlying purpose was to brighten spirits about an otherwise retched institution (being forced to serve in the military), and so that the army would be seen by those who were growing old enough to begin thinking about it as a fun time to develop comraderie and life-long friends. Numbness in the face of emotional pain, it's not just a Singaporean thing, really more a remnant of Chinese feudalistic culture. What do I know though, right?
Web site

So I figure now that this late night stuff will never end. I'm just stuck in a funk, where I get off of work too late to do anything but sit around and type, and then go to sleep only to wake up with the sun up, day warm and mostly passed, and a questioning sense of what I missed during my little unconcious hibernation. I suppose that that's a little too cynnical. As long as I'm getting roughly 16 hours of being awake, I should just be satisfied. But what happened to the phunk of the 9-5? When I used to wake up at 5:30 for no reason and get to work at 7, driving to the music of the sunrise.
Listening to Postal Service tonight, I again became nostalgic of Houston: driving to work down 290 and then Fairbanks-North Houston Road to avoid traffic, blaring the Postal Service as I drove past that unbareable perfume/soap smell near the Little York intersection, and then with the dump trucks coming from and going to the area landfill. Past redneck city (I forget the name of the subdivision, but one its streets was named something like "Norma Jean"), the horse track and the golf club with the salmon special that I never tried, next to which was a mosque, under construction for the ever-growing-despite-the-facists'-best-efforts Muslim population in the area. Enough of that though.

8:58pm :: The Catalina Highway remains closed tonight, amongst worries that the sky islands will follow and crush the towns of Oracle and San Ramon. This fear is justified because god is vengeful, reaking havoc to those who know him well. He is an angry god, willing to thrust a hard-boiled through a telephone pole just to inspire awe in his believers.
I don't know. I saw a bobcat in the parking lot today. It streaked in front of my car as I was leaving and jumped the cement wall into the jungle of palo verdes and junipers. I think it was looking for me, but was unsuccessful because it did not write down my apartment number, and got the numbers mixed up. Either way, I know it will be back, so that I'll give it a ride to Wienerschnitzel for 25 cent hot dog night. Everyone likes hot dogs, they just satisfy that natural craving for shit. I can imagine a bobcat in my passenger seat: it staring blankly out the windshield, somewhat nervous from getting jostled around by the car (bobcats don't wear seat belts and for good reason), while I sing loudly to The Flaming Lips. Too bad bobcats have no equivalent howl, I think it would be interesting to hear it. Sure, they have their little roar, but it's not nearly as funny as a howl. I can imagine coming home one night to find my apartment full of baby bobcats, barely enough room to step past them, with the mother gone, most likely to the store for some Pepsi, because after all, hot dogs love Pepsi, and I think bobcats should too. What would I do with all of these baby bobcats? Most likely train them, make sure I have them during their essential socialization period, thus making sure they're socialized to humans, THEN I would give them milk until a complete trust as a caregiver was established, THEN I would teach them to form a chain, attached to one another's tail and walk around the room. This would be better than a circus.
I must regress for it has gotten for too cold in my apartment to be dwelling on the absurd. I must think about fire, and warmth and big, steaming plates of minute rice. I had a desire tonight to break one of the many bottles in my apartment; throw it against the wall, in a vain attempt to destroy. I need to destroy, to forcibly and permanently change physical structure. I don't think artists destroy nearly enough, they only create this beautiful work but I think should destroy something terrible to offset it. Balances must be kept, otherwise the banks will shutter and send out little slips of paper in the mail to be ignored or fretted over, or maybe both.

12:39am :: No need for that kind of tone at this moment in time. Tomorrow, I will finally have my cymbals. No applause or tears of joy should be necessary, looking only for that bitter smell of cold metal and the contentment which only comes from a complete drum kit.
So where are all these new faces and places? Not here obviously; my apartment is only full of empty beer bottles and the warmth of a growing self.
I finally bought a newspaper today. $1.50 solely to look for jobs. I felt kind of guilty purchasing it at Walgreens as opposed to one of those guys that stands on the street. Screw it though, I need a job. Well, a new job at least. Interesting prospects:
- State-mandated test scorer, same wage as I'm making now
- Night auditor at the El Conquistador, the hotel and job I had just barely missed out on last time
- Tech Support for Planned Parenthood. No, seriously.
- Monkey burner. Not too interested, but I might as well apply
If all goes as I expect I will have the same fucking job by the end of the month, complaining just as I am now and walking in 10 minutes late, sandled and unshaven with a book and a pack of cheese and peanut butter crackers. NOTHING CHANGES in relation to the status quo. Redundant? Very! But who will ever cover a Boards of Canada song? I think I should. Maybe 'Beware the Friendly Stranger' because I am that friendly stranger. I lure kids into my car with those over-sized lolly-pops you buy at the mall, and then talk to them incessantly about my thoughts on religion, human relationships and the future of mankind. This is abuse: ingraining ideas inside a child's mind for the good-intentioned, but misguided purpose of conforming him or her to a set standard of values (culture). Sure, inculturnation is necessary to an extent, but we need more tabla rosa children out there to breathe life into our ridiculous social networks. Too self-righteous.

1:25am :: I don't know when or how this late streak will end. As a human being, I realize that my physical self is not capable of sustaining it, due to my own natural weaknesses and reliances. What? What? A nice bottle of wine and a block of cheese; how could it get any better? It could get a lot better, at least that's my hope. Fuck Saturday night. Fuck all of this money. Fuck this materialism and overly-impressionistic manner. I need to find some peyote and wander out into the Sonora to find a better lifestyle.
Lifestyles are choices, deliberate or otherwise, and are the genres of life: convenient but meaningless when considering the larger picture. I think lifestyles are something that we can resign ourselves to, so that we can concentrate on things far less meaningful, but much easier to make decisions regarding: the commutes, the suits, the pain and the joy, the job, the friends, the sharks and the tuna fishermen, the terrorists and the xenophobes, the exploited and the exploiting, and how we can always conveniently disassociate ourselves from either; the coffee, the alcohol, the lunches and dinners, breakfasts on the go, the clap, the carbohydrates, the cancer, pollution by land, sea and air, the heroin addicts, the crack whores in the ghettos, the Mary Kay speed freaks and the socially-acceptable drunks, the criminals and the victims, the plagiarists and the geniuses, the oxen and their carts, all of them following some undefined, yet preset path. Fate? No, just a resignation.
Stop being so damn self-righteous, Colin.
I remember back in August how nice it was, waking up in that big, empty suburban home with the knowledge that I had nothing to do and no responsibilities besides feeding myself and my dog. I could walk around with a true smile, not this depressed, kill all hippies, wide-toothed grin I give people. I could sit comfortably, speak in a soft, reflective tone, and enjoy the sight of rain coming down outside, and be happy despite the world's best efforts.
Am I not happy now? I don't know. There are so many things that bring me so much joy now in my life, but so many others that make me want to sink deeper into resignation. I suppose I don't know what real happiness is. Does anyone? Sure, seeing your child born, getting married, getting a great new job, buying a new car, falling in love, all of these things make you happy, but none of them are happiness. I guess it's totally subjective, and I'm not going to worry about it, starting...now.