Dreams, agonies, joyful reminiscence, reflections, delightful fantasies horrifying truths. All just words.
Migrated from a blog, or “glot”, if you will, that I wrote from 2004-2016.
Oh, by the way, this is all the albums I’ve downloaded in the ten days since I figured out that solid music recommendations + bittorrent = audiophonic bliss:
Dream with my Dad in it… life’s maintenance and an artistic pursuit, the same one day after day. Slapped Dad across the face to elicit a reaction, no reaction but kindness. Wake up and realize it’s a metaphor. Dad is actually Dave my manager (we’ve talked together about our own fathers, not surprising it should show up somewhere). Slap across the face was me deleting a text message that was taking up too much of his mental energy. The daily pursuit is my work at the hostel. My subconscious tells me that I’m getting tired of doing the same activity, day after day. Which is odd since I’ve only been doing it for three weeks.
Maybe not that odd. I realize later today that it would be almost impossible for a person like me to stagnate. I have no tolerance for it, nor any desire to develop a tolerence. Even staying in the same place, the pace of my personal evolution is staggering. It’s hard to even comprehend—and I don’t think I could even understand it if I wasn’t living it. It never slows, always moving like a river. S’been said before: you never have the same brain twice.
Youth. Is it youth? So far this is the oldest I’ve ever been. It’s possible that all this figuring out eventually leads one to find what one likes. And stick to it? Asserted: boredom has lots of antidotes in the 21st century. I make no apologies for our collective generational attention span, in fact I think it’s an asset. If I’m tired of it that means I’ve gotten all I can get.
Unless it’s not just boredom. It could be… me. Ever since I discovered I can manipulate events in the world to meet my goals in it (what, about… junior year?), I’ve sought out new goals. Novelty—the “for the hell of it” factor. Sure most desires are transient. Sure it leads to things you won’t enjoy. But it’s the only way to find more things you will.
And I have no plans to stop. I have all the plans in the world otherwise.
It’s possible I might get paid to redesign the San Francisco hostel’s website. Money would be good. With that in mind:
I clean. I make beds. I drink beer. I listen to music. I hang out with friends. I hang out with strangers. I get done around 3:00. I read the internet. I watch the internet. I eat free food… I eat as much free food as possible. I do not bathe. I shower. I walk the city streets. I find things. I go to events that I’m lucky enough to notice. I meet cool people around town. I visit them. I go to parties. I meet more people. I cross things off my list. I live, satisfactorily, on volunteer benefits, honest work and the goodwill of a good city.
Coincidences have always pushed me into choices I would not have otherwise made.
I wouldn’t have gone to college in Monterey. Wouldn’t have gone to Melbourne. I definitely wouldn’t be here in San Francisco at the moment, and almost certainly wouldn’t be blogging glotting this from behind the reception desk at Pacific Tradewinds. Unlike most people, I like the idea that life is determined by chance and fickle fate. From my shoulders a great burden is lifted. One has only to look for destiny, and then accept it.
So when three people told me, on three separate occasions in the past week, that I should grow my beard back…
I like the new manhair. Unlike fur, which only grows a certain length, hair will keep growing until one looks like a kung-fu monk or yogic master. The hair on a man’s face is unique in that it’s the only hair exclusive to a single sex. It doesn’t keep the male face warmer, or scare predators or show dominance—it’s only purpose seems to be signalling that “I am a mature human male.”
I am a mature Human Male.
It’s raining outside.
It rained yesterday, in the evening.
It rained all last night.
It’s November, and it’s the first rain since I’ve been here. I used to love the rain, used to slosh around in it in rain boots that only ended up keeping the bottom third of my pants dry. I grew up in Palm Springs (well, Cathedral City) and rain was was warm and small and benign. We played in it because it was an unusual friend. But I’m not in Palm Springs, and now I think is the rain has come for a longer visit. It’s the difference between a visit and a visitor. November in San Francisco means rain. It means Dave was right when he said that the rain wouldn’t come till November, and then it would come like young travelers to a hostel—more and more. But it’s now off-season in the hostel, and I’m living here now, and writing a novel and trying not to be too presumptuous about it. The rain has its own reasons… it’s cold and falls in big drops that make the whole city darker turning the streets to black rivers. It keeps me inside. There’s a reason for everything. That’s practically a cosmic rule. I’ll stay in, and I’ll write, and I’ll clean, and I’ll craft for myself a sort of life. And what more could I hope for in such a month?
“I hate being young.”
Day one word count: four.
Suppose you take a few species of apes that lived in Africa about ten million years ago. Think of these species as nearly identical, but seperate populations. Now turn loose on each species the force of runaway sexual selection—an evolutionary positive feedback loop of genetic traits and the mating preference for those traits. One species might develop a runaway preference for large muscles, and turn into gorillas. Another might develop a runaway preference for constant sex, and turn into bonobos. A third species might develop a runaway preference for intelligence, and turn into us.
Intelligence is a fitness indicator, which might be why we have it. Animals use them to judge potential mates. The brain—like a gigantic shiny colorful tail—is a good choice. It’s sensitive to the animal’s condition, it’s hard to fake, and it’s a pretty good show of what sexy genes you have. A mind gets pretty screwed-up if you have a screwed-up existence—and crazy isn’t sexy. Conversely, a good mind is, and it shows. Story-telling, humor, playfulness, creativity, wit, kindness, a broad vocabulary, social savvy, imaginative problem-solving, and refined taste are all mental fitness indicators used by humans. All these sexy personality traits lead to more sexy persons, the better brain genes making minds bigger and better.
That’s the idea behind Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind, in particular the chapter appropriately called “A Mind Fit for Mating.” Pages 77 and 111 are partially (and liberally) paraphrased above. His hypothesis is that our swollen primate cerebellums are the result of a sexual fetish preference our ancestors were lucky enough to stumble upon. 
And because our courtship (and brain evolution) got so carried away with itself, we very accidentally discovered all these really cool survival mechanisms like agriculture, language, architecture, metal-working, medicine, and the other stuff you can research in Civilization. Even more astounding is that all the quintessentially human self-expressives like literature, art, philosophy, music, dance, and making comic books are for mating purposes just ornamentation to show off our big sexy brains.
So here’s our modern mating problem, as I see it: we’ve got these neat survival strategies that freed up time otherwise spent acquiring food, finding shelter, defending from predators, etc… and so we’re supposed to have more time to develop our courtship skillz = music, art, being a total genius at pinball, etc. But we in modern society also have to work at time-consuming jobs so we can pay for food, shelter, cool new electronic gadgets, etc. And it’s usually the young, the horniest ones with the least developed courting-collections, who have the most time-consuming (and least expressive) jobs. Oh, sweet and hilarious irony! Etc!
Yet, the young are not doomed to unsexiness. Thanks again to our big brains, we don’t have to go through the first several years of courtship feeling dumb and unattractive. We have an excellent prosthetic using the now super-stylish concept of memetics (which you were sure I was gonna get around to eventually). Much the same way we horny youngsters long to transfer our living genes, information can move between the habitable environs of our minds, in discrete packages called memes. Memes move from brain to brain, making possible things like culture, religion, politics, and inside jokes. Just like organisms, the ones good at propagating get propagated more. There are harmful memes and relatively harmless memes, just like organisms. Yet again just like organisms, there’s mutations and migrations and whole populations of them.
This is good news for those of us who don’t have time to write the great American novel. Memes give us the opportunity to communicate, in a less forceful way, all our cultivated artistic tastes we’ve worked so hard on. Even better, they give us references for how good our own could be once we get around to it. Even better, individual memes vary from common to rare, meaning the rarer ones often reveal a deeper connection when they’re shared. Even better wow-I-know-so-awesome, they are a great social activity, entertaining, stimulating, lubricating, moldable, re-usable, bond-on-contact, dishwasher-safe, usually with a decent manufacturer warranty.
Memes seem like the perfect consumer item (and lots are). But the really good ones are also the perfect brainy aphrodisiac—for when we humans do finally get around to mixing those sexy genes. So now, whenever young people just sit around starting their sentences with:
“Hey, do you know about…?”
Well, you’ll understand.
I went to a spelling bee tonight. It was a special spelling bee… one made just for San Francisco. With beer.
A spelling bee for drunk adults, where the words are often inappropriate, misspelled, or shouted out by the audience. It ended with a cage match. Still with me? They put the last two drunk, adult spellers in a big giant plastic (or was it cardboard?) cage and make them spell things like “cunnilingus.” I didn’t have the fortitude to actually try and win, so instead I wore one of several metal colander bowls circulating about, placing it on my head, and given the word “xylograph” I spelled l-e-t-s-d-a-n-c-e. Which, yes, is kind of dumb—but entertaining nonetheless. For the record I could’ve easily spelled xylograph.
And I met a girl. Some cute nerdy kind, no doubt, the kind that wants to pick up dudes at a drunk spelling bee by giving them their Flickr screenname. Oh, who am I kidding… that girl would be Meredith, who is the primary reason that this entry didn’t get posted until January 2008, more than a year later. I didn’t have the analytic skills and distance skills necessary to make a fun entertaining lighthearted post for awhile. And, like many things, I just never got around to it. But—this being the impartial and startlingly complete record that it is—I’ll attempt an account.
After she gave me the Flickr-name, I kinda teased her a bit. See, no girl had ever tried to give me her number with a screenname before. Suppose I should’ve starting getting used to it this being San Francisco and all. But I was new to town; what can I say. After being adequately teased, she gave me her AIM name. Even funnier. Of course, if you understand women, you’ll understand the obviousness of why she gave me her number after that. Women respond to teasing, says I. Cool girl, I found out. I saw her again later, we hit it off, things progressed for a little bit and then they didn’t, petered off… old story. Didn’t last that long, maybe two weeks all told. Gave me a lot of happiness, but a dangling feeling. Left me wanting more, which I eventually found. “Worth it” is what I’m trying to say. That’s it. That’s all there was. All because of a spelling bee.
This is gonna be an awesome town to live in, huh?