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Consu-totha-mating

Yo! Traffic spike. You gotta know, I seen a lotta people be comin’ here lately from old Consumating.com. Who’s gonna say why. I mean, I could. I could tell all y’all. I could if I wanted fosho.

And why don’t I? Mystery and subtlety aren’t my obsessions lately. I’ve better things to figure out. Makeouts. Masculine identity. Communal living. City living. Financial deterrents. Financial dependence. Desire. Purpose. Choice. Path. Consumating.

One of these things is not like the other…

Consumating.com is a website. The same as MySpace, but tucked away and with a better crowd. No hustlers or 15 year-olds trying to get in. These people don’t dig the scene but they love the music. They’re internet locals. They live there and they know the place. They’ll flirt with you at two o’clock in the morning same as they would at two in the afternoon. The games are good, and the kissing’s great. Conversation’s even better. It’s the bar I never had growing up.

But then again I never been to a bar with a point system. Up front, strait up, above the table, not by the way, point system. Here’s how it works (like you don’t know): two points each thumbs up, one less every thumb down. Gladiatorial life and death has never been so simple. Your profile is there for all to look at (and it looks like everyone’s—no HTML soup to serve your friends). It’s got pictures, it’s got space for a witty l’il quote. So far it’s MySpace without the ugly. But instead of general movies music television schools businesses boring boring you go ahead and outright LABEL yourself with some web2.0y tags. Me, I’m tagged memetics, dinosaurs, pixel_fonts, and abandoned_buildings. I like ’em, and that’s who I am. And the “About Me” section? Who you’d really like to meet? All bullcrap anyway. He who gets his whole personality across when asked those questions doesn’t deserve to be met. An ingenious solution: don’t ask dumb questions; try interesting ones. More opportunities to be clever than you can shake on a pogo stick… That a pogo stick bounces at… That you can bounce a pogo stick to shake… Well, it doesn’t come if you force it.

The point is points. You get ’em when people like you’re answers, when they like your photos, when they like you. You collect points and get ranked against everybody else. Life or death. Being clever is fun. Taking jiveass pictures is fun. Flirting, notepasssing, and rating strangers is fun. Getting more popular is a job—an addictive job.

I wanna be cool like all the other cool people. I don’t wanna play SEO and figure what attitudes provide the most ROI. I wanna kill time, not waste it. I wanna attend Secret Santa consu-meetings and meet worthy people from another world, give worthwhile presents and get worthwhile kisses. But you know what else? I wanna break the triple digits. In the past month I’ve doubled my points. I wanna break 1000th place.

So why couldn’t I just say that up front? I linked to my own page from Consumating. And I did it because it’d be fun, sure. But I did it for points too.

Subtlety can be good. You don’t just walk up and ask a fella for a beer, you say hi and give an interesting perspective and make friends, then you ask for a beer. If it’s a good bar, you might be lucky enough to get that far.

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Notice the New

Please refer to post #35 (the Tragedy of Blogs) and post #55 (Cheating) if you require an explanation as to why I suddenly have all these new entries. I do what I want, people. I’m free.

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Damn You Thingy!

Personification is a dangerous force.

The context isn’t important. But what the hell: I was standing on tiptoes in the hostel’s common room, balanced on one of the the blue wave-print benches I’d grown so used to. Christmas decorations were rising. It was festive, but still a damned hostel. We couldn’t change much about the porthole lights, much as we’d have liked to change them to green and red luminaries of their former yellow selves. Rachel sat at the desk. An English girl of my own age, she no longer stayed at the hostel but still worked there. She was a paradox in pink and black.

Allow me to mention that I love decorating. Wait—that sounds gay. In this sense gay may be taken to mean “something which is overly sentimental or cloying, saccharine; self-indulgently emotional.” It’s the eight-pound heartful of bonbons bought the day before Valentine’s. Even homophiles can agree with this definition on a conditional basis—as we all know, male-female couples are nearly always more gay than gay ones. Anyways, I love decorating… I mean interior design. More on that later. Later later.

So there I was, hanging colored lights over yellow porthole lamps I wished were green porthole lamps and red porthole lamps. And I’ll be a monkey’s gay uncle if the electrical outlet we were trying to use (me an’ Rachel) wasn’t blocked by our silly desk-barrier-thingy.

“Oh, that would be so cool. Oh no… Orin it’s blocked by the thingy!”

“…Damn you, Thingy!!!”

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Reasons Not to Kiss Me

  • I have a thick beard, and it’s getting thicker by the day.
  • I’ve got a sore spot on the bottom left where I bit my lip, and it hasn’t healed yet because I keep sneezing too hard.
  • My teeth are crooked.
  • I only brush once a day.
  • I’ve lost the Burt’s Beez stuff and am back onto the Nivea Lip Care addiction.
  • You might accidentally suck my lips off (you don’t know! it could happen!)
  • People tell me I smell, just in general.
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Addicted to New Music

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:

  • Hot Chip- The Warning
  • Jolie Holland – Springtime Can Kill You
  • Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat
  • OOIOO – Taiga
  • Jarvis – Jarvis
  • Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say
  • Lupe Fiasco – Food & Liquor
  • K-OS – Joyful Rebellion
  • K-Os – Atlantis (Hymns for Disco)
  • Four Tet on the DJ Kicks series
  • Kid Loco/La Corporation on DJ Kicks
  • Kruder & Dorfmeister, Dj Kicks
  • Thievery Corporation, DJ Kicks
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Addicted to New

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.

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10 Things I would buy if The Hostel paid me

It’s possible I might get paid to redesign the San Francisco hostel’s website. Money would be good. With that in mind:

  1. food
  2. a circle tattoo
  3. Keith and the Girl Live! California+Boston
  4. cool new thrift store clothes
  5. a monthy bus pass
  6. new socks
  7. new shoes to go with them
  8. a ticket to Palm Springs to visit Homepie
  9. [something I choose not to reveal on a public forum]
  10. true happiness (and more food)
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Hostel Life

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.

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Fashionable Chance

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…

Growing a Beard back, first thing in the morning
I Grow the Hair

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.

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November has Come

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?