Does anyone still read this?

Probs not. If I get one non-spam comment I'll write another post.

What Up.

I'm here.

Two Pseudo-Metal Platitudes

1.  I like people who hate people.

2.  I frequently cut myself (but not like a teenager, more like a six-year-old). :-)

Quote of the Day by Me

Men are like dogs on a walk: let them run ahead, and they won't go all that far, and keep coming back to you, but they'll be extra happy.

Massive Dump

I think about three people read this blog, but life being a pointless endeavor in general, I see no reason to stop writing it entirely.

So, here's a massive dump of stuff I would have written about all along but is coming all at once:

+ I've started writing a science fiction book about a computer that acquires superhuman intelligence and starts taking over the world. I'm writing it because I think it is going to happen in our lifetimes. Not that the book follows my predictions - it is altered to be digestible to the teeming masses.

+ I broke up with my girlfriend a while ago. It was about as surreal as a breakup can get.

+ Relatedly, I have a theory about how to deal with trauma. You have to "write over" your memories by recreating associations with everything. Say you cooked brunch every Sunday with your girlfriend and then break up with her. By my Insano Formula, you should continue to cook brunch on Sundays, even if there is only one of you, etc etc. Analogy: when you delete something on a computer, the memory location is freed for something else to write over it, but it's not actually written over until something else writes to that memory address. So to REALLY erase it you have to write something there. In the human brain, memory addresses are encoded not by numbers, but by associations. Hence you have to write to the association, almost reliving your relationship! or whatever the trauma was.

+ I have been coming around to a theory that single people are "actually" happier than non-single people, despite what members of both parties may think. The previous two bullet points make it sound like I am mired in a bog. on the contrary, I'm doing pretty fine - about as well as you can do when you have Tiresias-like curse of prophecy. It's a general comment, not a comment on my previous relationship. In school, a professor showed us a graph illustrating how kids make people unhappy. It's not hard to imagine these things - we have urges and we know there are tradeoffs. But when you just want to do something, period, there may be a hefty price.

+ I can get "back in shape" in about a week. What a genetic blessing!

+ Adult Swim is the best programming on television. People who cannot appreciate it are bloated, torpid, eyeless slugs. They deserve to be an ingredient on fucking Top Chef.

+ When music is around, 90% of people often sorta feel like dancing in some way, but don't do it. But does anyone ever regret dancing? I would contend 'no' or almost never. What does this say about our ability to be vaguely conscious?

+ You are one of my 3 readers! It's nice to have you here! ;-).

Small Exercise in Lateral Thinking.

What are locks for? Keeping people out of things. What are keys for? Getting into (those same) things. Simple enough.

A cafe has restrooms that lock; you have to get a key at the counter. But often, people don't close the bathroom door behind them as they leave and return the key to the counter.

A customer, finding the bathroom door ajar, doesn't need the key, so she goes in, closes the door, and starts peeing.

Another customer enters the cafe, picks the up the key, and heads straight back to the bathroom, opening the door and unintentionally ambushing Customer #1 while she is peeing. Then she enters the bathroom and they make out. (Ok, so maybe the last part wasn't needed.)

Were you thinking laterally enough to foresee this?

Everyone knows of course that locks and keys are both part of a system that lets you into places and keeps people out.

Why do we carry keys? To keep people out of places... regardless of where you might be at the moment, or whether those places are locked ;-)

If that was too easy: why do we carry keys? To signal that a space is locked. An untrustworthy stranger, seeing your keys, assumes you lock your house, even if you don't. Customer #1, wanting some girl on girl action, can dupe Customer #2 into ambushing her by leaving the key out - signaling the bathroom is empty.

11:23

When I was a kid I had a little difficulty sleeping at night. I would stare at the numbers on my digital clock. Without being able to help it, I would try to form little algebraic equations with the numbers. For example, if it was 9:33pm, I would think "9 = 3 x 3".

My favorite time, and often a time when I was in bed, turned out to be 11:23, because it is the first four numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. I still always think that when I see that the time is 11:23, which happens more often that one might think.

Dream

Last night I went to bed feeling despondent and lonely.

I had a dream that I was riding a bike. It felt like I was flying, like a dream in which you're flying, but it felt like I was flying not because I was dreaming but rather because in the dream I was riding a bike. I believe I was going down a hill in my childhood where maximum velocities were attainable.

I woke up (late) and was like, I like riding bikes!

Very Cold Today

It's FUCKING FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZING today.

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Blog.

I am now 30. I discovered that hiding your birthday on facebook renders you invisible to the world. For my birthday I got technology, and a yoga mat. I could be like an IBM commercial where I connect with monks in Nepal on top of a mountain. I'm reading Los Detectives Salvajes. Por Roberto Bolaño. The last novel that I can positively remember reading is Memorias de mis Putas Tristes, which I read in 2005. Anyway, Bolaño is Pimp Slice. Makes me want to write another novel. Makes it fun to hang out in cafes and it has rekindled my appreciation of cappuccinos. The comparison of his style with Rayuela is fairly apt, though there are lots of differences. I like the fact that he started writing for real in his 40s. I used to think that I had to write my famous stuff by 25. I was thinking of Keats and Camus. And I sort of did that, but since then I've changed my mind and I think I'll write when I'm older, assuming I'm still alive. I will also write philosophy and I will be a grouchy professor as well. This may be after I have saved the world from robots, or given up on doing so. Being back in Cambridge has made me think about college. I didn't like college a whole lot. I don't like institutions. That simple fact unites the entrepreneurship, the writing, in my mind. And it explains why you might like being a professor, provided that you can bypass the fuedal system. M. tells me that I was an explorer in a past life. This would certainly explain my interest in Indiana Jones as a child, not to mention my peregrinations around the world and into the jungle. It's a fundamentally inconsistent calling, born of restlessness and samsara. My parents revealed to me a couple years ago that they had thought, when I was graduating high school, that I was going to be an actor. I was surprised. I never thought I had what it took to cut it as an actor. As soon as they told me I sort of wished I had been an actor. I would certainly in that case have aspired to write my own movie and then star in it, like Rocky. I'd like to make a movie about a tai chi master who is over the hill. He's middle aged and constantly fighting much bigger, stronger, younger guys. The key thing about being older is that your body takes so long to bounce back from little (or big) injuries. You can function and sort of repair yourself, but it gets increasingly harder to feel at the top of your game. But you have lots of character. That's what I liked about Dr. Jones.

Body Odor

My gf has been making me use natural deodorant. Instead of being made with aluminum it uses bark or something.

Pro: doesn't have metal in it.
Con: doesn't work.

So now I have B.O. every day. I'm more ok with it than I would have guessed. I don't think people can smell it generally out in the world. Makes me feel more manly. Also makes me feel like I have this new barometer of my hormonal status (a natural hormonometer).

Wilderness

Went to northern New Hampshire, almost Maine, with M. over the weekend.

We hiked many miles with full pack, and slept two nights in the forest...in pouring rain, and night temperatures that must have approached freezing. One campsite was improvised due to vanishing light.

We saw a huge-ass bear, and a moose down by the lake where we camped the second night.

It was a prototypical camping experience - the worst experience you'll ever do again. :-)

Breakfast

I can't believe I have a girlfriend who gives me stuff like homemade shortbread! mmm. Plus assam tea, Pandora radio, a sense of organization and centeredness, fast internet connection, and I've got a perfect breakfast.

Confession

I like Enya.

I just hope that my love for NIN is offsetting.

Three Pumpkin Ale Reviews

I'll continue briefly in the seasonal beer reviewing tradition from my previous post.

Executive summary: I have recently extensively tasted three pumpkin ales. Dogfish Head was the best in class, but if you're leaning toward this area (fruity, sweetish but not a weiss bier) I would vastly recommend something else, like Dogfish Head Raison d'Etre or Magic Hat Aprihop.


Post Road Pumpkin Ale
Grade: C

This comes from the Brooklyn Brewing Co so I was excited, but I found it rather mediocre. Right off the bat it had an empty, carbonated taste, sort of like a Miller Lite. Not much pumpkin taste.


Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
Grade: C/C+

This beer may have tasted better, but I was shocked at how similar it tasted to me. Maybe I'm down on pumpkin ales. But that suggestion doesn't really hold water for me. I was much more skeptical when I tasted Aprihop or Raison d'Etre, and those beers had me at hello. This one was sucko at hello.


Dogfish Head Punkin Ale
Grade: C+

I so wanted this beer to be good. I love Dogfish Head, but this is hands down the worst dogfish head I've tried. It's better than the others. But it's also the same price and comes in a four pack (with zero rationale vis a vis beer traditions, e.g., it's not an optimator style beer or an English longneck). It's just not that great.

Summary: Try These Beers Instead

If you want a seasonal-ish beer, get a Magic Hat Aprihop (A-), or a Dogfish Head Raison d'Etre (A-). Ok, maybe they aren't seasonal. I'm not strong on the seasonal patterns of apricots and raisins. You're also better off with a weiss beer, including Hoegaarden or Blue Moon (both B+). The pumpkin beers weren't a total waste of time, but they're not exactly worth it either.

sam adams: octoberfest

I spotted Sam Adams in the licky store today and it was the first sighting I've had this seen - it must have come out some time in the last week or so. Fortunately I had on hand a burrito from anna's taqueria so I decided to have a tasting.

Seasonal beers are great. My gf always complains that our eating has lost its seasonal rhythm. As she explains, we import foods from across the globe to eat them when we want, even when they are wildly out of season where we live or even on our continent... with the effect that we lose touch with a vital aspect of mother earth, which is seasonality (not to mention eating stuff that grows within 100 miles of you).

But beer comes to the rescue, as it so often does. Brewing companies create seasonal beers and then market them according to strict seasonal rules -- whereby you can get octoberfest only in autumn, summer ales only in summer, etc. -- and thereby imposing an artificial naturalness on us that we have otherwise artificially deprived ourselves of from mother earth.

My favorite seasonal beer of the summer was Totally Naked by New Glarus up in WI. That beer is seasonal. Last fall my dad went to buy some and was told "they're not making it anymore." We thought it had been discontinued until the next summer came. :-) Then like the Lady of the Lake, it arose from the waters in beautiful, radiant, nakedness.

I'm not so huge as many people about Sam Adams octoberfest (in my mind it may be the best known seasonal beer in America) but this beer it tough not to like. It tastes good. I spent a year in Germany. I even went to Oktoberfest. Here's proof:

possibly the only photo in existence of me with a beard

I can't say that this beer strikes me as unusually German. It's not a helles, weiss, dunkel weiss, not even a pils. But I taste it and the word "roasted" comes into my head. Meanwhile, it is very easy to drink even for poor souls whose palettes don't prefer that kind of thing. A rare combination that warrants recognition of the coming of fall... and the end of the roasting heat of summer.

the war against crack

i drove down to philly last weekend. i experience mild narcolepsy and on the road i was fighting it. my mint tea didn't seem to be helping.

a couple months ago i quit coffee. i had only been drinking one or two cups a day, but when i quit i noticed that i was sleeping way better, deeper, waking up without that feeling of grogginess that i had grown accustomed to as normal. (unless i had been drinking and then sometimes i felt a bit like ass.) so i was staying off coffee willingly despite the fact that i fucking LOVE coffee.

but on the way down to philly, i was a bit drowsy and i decided that i was not interested in dying. so i got a cup of coffee. it sorta helped. but something about the warmth of coffee soothes me and can make me drowsy (it was for this reason that before i tried quitting coffee i had not believed that it had any cracklike qualities.)

so i got a red bull, which from now on i am going to refer to as CRACK BULL. i've had red bull before, but always with vodka, amid smoke and lights and often already drunk and in a mind-altered kind of mood. this was the first time when i was ever kind of going along in life in a normal way and i cracked open a can of the good 'ole crack bull and drank it. the fact that wired had a one-pager on its cracky ingredients had captured my interest a bit.

boy, that stuff is crack like i didn't know. i was zooming in and out of traffic, pumping up the trance music and confusing the hell out of my shitty automatic transmission in my low-performance geekmobile.

today i made a pot of assam tea and forgot to take the tea leaves out, then i drank pretty much the whole pot. that stuff is pretty cracky too man! i worked for like 6 or 7 hours without eating anything. i had a sort of epiphany when i was jumping around on my mattress and blasting some electronica during a little break: who needs money, when crack bull and cracky assam tea are so cheap? we'll see how i sleep tonight relative to my rich colleagues: that is the acid test.

Getting Grounded

i have found "the cafe" near my new place. this is the sign of having settled into a place (and also that it's a good place). hence i am currently writing from True Grounds, 717 Broadway, Somerville MA in Ball Square.



it takes me about 15 seconds to size up a cafe, and i'm happy to discover that this one is of superlative quality. it's good, real good.

it has old chairs and sofas, and the personality of a place other than a chain. it has good beverages. it has nice people working there, and maybe interesting patrons. it has free wifi, without any bullshit about codes or any such. (although not old school, wifi is a must these days. seriously, could you start a self-respecting cafe and not have wifi? how the fuck could i blog about it if there were no wifi here?)

there is food. i used to think that food was not essential. but i have come to believe that it's a great thing, for multiple reasons. having food lets me eat here and hence work uninterruptedly. also, if i'm going to buy a sandwich somewhere, it's good that it should be here, because then i feel ok about staying to work longer.

areas for improvement: 7am to 9pm is too short on both ends. closing at 7pm on friday is a huge what the fuck.

we're not too far from my first love in a cafe, which was the 1369 cafe in inman square. that joint will always have a place in my heart, though it was a bit small. in arlington, va, there was common grounds on wilson ave, which brought a soul to a fairly soul-less town. chicago had some contenders, but no really great ones. san francisco had lots of cafes that were excellent by every objective standard but had the wrong vibe (like pretty much everything there, to someone from philly).

it's interesting to be back here. when i visited during the years between leaving in 01 and now, i felt alienated by the city, like it was no longer home to me in any sense. but now i feel like it's about as homey is pretty much any place is to me (the presence of other people dear to me being held equal), which maybe is not all that homey but fine.

Panama 2005, Part 2: Isla Tigre

we're back in panama.

Last time I started us off on the Panama journey back in 2005. Here's a refresher on some of the salient points:

Timeline to Date
June 18 - arrived in Panama City
June 19 - Walking tour in Panama City. Casco Viejo (the old town), Bella Vista, shopping, excellent dinner in Casco Viejo.
June 20 - flight to Playon Chico, the crappy little island. Negotiations with ANAM. tour of community. hunting mangos. swimming on island and m's ass stung. crab dinner. hunting little crabs. camping in room with rat-dog climbing on pipe.
June 21 - black tongues and despair. negotiation for motor boat to get the hell out of dodge. boat ride to isla tigre. stopping on tierra firma community and meeting god bless new york old dude. the new boat and the intense boat ride on open sea. arriving at isla tigre. swim. dinner. discussion of robot future. efigenia and her food.

Isla Tigre Continued
Now, it's June 22. We're in Isla Tigre. Caribbean coast of Panama, native peoples named Kuna, first week of trip.



We're at the top left thumbtack at this point. I have tried to make an interactive map of the trip. Right now there is nothing there but I'm going to add thumbtacks as I go.

As you may recall, the primary virtue of Isla Tigre was that it was not Playon Chico. There was some cinderblock, but it was a bit more like the cool kind of native island that we were hoping for - thatched huts and stuff.


palm trees and soccer goal on the tiny island of isla tigre


hello, dinner

the bitchinest thing about this photo is the flipflops. those were I believe purchased in guatemala years earlier for one dollar. they are stylin. I think I lost them because now I have u.s. flag flipflops. I'm not sure where that crustacean came from. I think efigenia brought it to our tent for approval as something we were going to eat later. she consulted us carefully on meals and planned them hours in advance.

After an emotional talk, some time on the beach and slothlike in the hammock, we went for a walk in community and buying molas.

Molas are woven decorative items that look a little bit like placemats. I talked about this a bit in the last post. I bought the stupidest one, which involved Santa on a horse. 95% of them featured animals, a couple had abstract geometric shapes, and there was this one with the Santa. I felt obliged to get the Santa because it reminded me of 1997 when I was in Guatemala in a small sweltering town and came across a statue of Santa in a town square. I can't find the mola anymore. M. must have stolen it or hid it.

the weirdest thing about the molas was that everyone appeared to make them, with no one to buy them. there were two other people visiting the island when we were there (I think they were panamanian or columbian but we didn't talk) and we didn't get a feeling that people really went there. it wasn't as unvisited as playon chico but it seemed close. that was part of the reason we bought our molas i think, and with melissa's purchase of a hammock and woven handbag, we definitely contributed some moola in return for the molas.


Clothes drying on a thatched roof in Isla Tigre


wild pig jaws hanging outside a home in isla tigre

Only through inquiry did we learn that these suckers were pig jaws. We figured out gradually that one of the ways to stand out socially as a Panamanian native was to be a slayer of pigs. For tribes that had subsistence agriculture, the occasional pig was a feast. There were tigers, but they were very rare and who wants to eat a tiger. Anyway, whoever lived in this house must have been Captain Bad Arse.

The Pipe Dance
The thing to do when you are a native tribe and you have visitors is give them a dance with some music. As dusk approached, we were led into town to a small square, where we sat in front of something like a bar, in a large ring of people, and watched the men of the villages dance their asses off while playing instruments that were sort of like pan flutes. it was really cool. M. wanted to photograph it but I wouldn't let her because I thought it wasn't appropriate. We later decided I was wrong, which is too bad since we didn't get any pictures. But I have some great pictures of another tribal dance coming later in the trip.

That dance was the first really cool thing we saw on our trip. But we still left the San Blas region a bit shakey on how our trip was going. I was pretty happy, but M. was miserable and vocal about it.

So instead of sticking around the Caribbean coast we took a little plane back to Panama City the next day. We had to take a boat to a nearby island, Corazon de Jesus, that morning. Unfortunately, in our relaxation the day before, we had neglected to negotiate the price for this extremely short boat ride. The boat dude took us over to the planes (VERY LATE) and then gave us our price on arriving (VERY BIG). I was ready to kill him, but eager to make the plane, just paid him.

Review of Hoseries
This great hosiery encouraged me to begin compiling a List of Hoseries, a record of when we got hosed the worst. So far it read:

1. Boat ride to Corazon de Jesus to catch plane. $15, should have been $2.

2. Lunch for 4 (including our guide and Mundo) on Playon Chico during all-expenses-included town visit. $8, should have been $0.

3. Price of room at the ANAM building in Playon Chico. $30 for two, should have been $10 for two.

Ranking the hoseries was a difficult task. The boat ride was a petty, traditional, but perfectly executed hose job. The ANAM lodging price was kind of a boring one, because we were negotiating with Mahone from a weak position and we weren't sure if we were even going to be able to stay on the island (we should have known it was just about the dinero baby).

The second hose job, in more ways than one, was really a stroke of genius of a hose job. Looking back, Mahone looked like the shrewdest kind of lex luther mastermind of a hoser. You could almost argue that he had hosed us so bad that we had gotten our money's worth, because he had given us a great lesson in how to hose the crap out of someone. If he had sat down with us and informed us that I was to pay for lunch for m. and myself, I would have objected, noting that it was an all-expenses paid visit to town. But no, he had us pay for lunch for ourselves AND FOR HIM... but no, also for his RANDOM FRIEND WHO WAS JUST SITTING THERE. As a further distraction, he asked more for lunch than was appropriate ($4 would have been more like it). Ah, what a bastard. Looking back I still can't figure out how I felt about him and Mundo, who were likeable in so many ways.


bye, thanks for having us
if we stay any longer my girlfriend may try to swim away

Was the Jungle Trip in Jeopardy?

We got back on a tiny plane, somehow took off, and we were headed back towards Panama City.

The status of the trip was precarious. M. had her ass stung, had eaten very poorly (including a black tongue), had slept poorly (think: dog-sized rat), and had not appreciated life in a cinderblock community at Playon Chico. She ventured to say that she was not having very much fun.

I was concerned. Our first leg of the trip was supposed to be a warm-up for the most intense part yet to come, our journey into the jungle of Darien. I would be damned if the jungle trip was aborted. Also, I wanted constant recognition along the way that this was the coolest trip ever and M.'s comments were getting in the way of that.

We needed to recuperate and build up M.'s morale before doing the jungle trip. Admittedly, I was not averse to a little break myself. But the problem was that M. did not like Panama City, which was where we were headed to recuperate. For some reason, the idea of relaxing for a couple of days in a dangerous slum did not appeal to her.

The solution I had in mind was a two-pronged attack. First, we would go to El Valle. El Valle was a frequent weekend destination of Panama City's wealthy. It was supposed to be a lush area with great hikes and horseback riding, and good restaurants. I would take M. there and bribe her into submission, to the extent my non-budget allowed it.

Second, we would return to Panama City and take a boat south to Isla Tortuga, a former pirate stronghold.

If anything could appease M. and bring her back to spirits, I thought, it would be a vacation destination, food, horses, and pirates.

To find out what actually happened, stay tuned for the next episode of Panama 2005: the Greatest Fucking Trip Ever.


next time: a horse adventure, "camping", and a pirate island

my ultimate dream in the universe has come true

before I was a tea aficionado, a wine connoisseur, even a coffee drinker, I was a beer guy. shortly after turning 21, nadia and forrest took me to Cambridge Commons in Cambridge MA, where I imbibed my first draught beer, which happened to be a Newcastle.

cambridge is a great place to drink beer. there are many pubs, and it is common to find 10 or 20 brews on tap at an establishment. unlike any other city I've experienced outside the U.K., you can walk into a random pub and, if it has any air of authenticity, you can expect a properly poured Guinness. there are many pubs, and many of them are located near each other, making for the best bar crawls on earth.

when I took a year off from college, I supplemented my laboratory job income by walking as a bouncer at the Thirsty Scholar (pronounced "Tersty Scholar").



I spent many an idle moment lying on my futon bed in my un-air-conditioned apartment pondering my appreciation of Guinness. (Guinness and Sierra Nevada are my long-standing faves.) and frequently, a davinci-like sketch of a brilliant invention occurred to me: imagined a draught tap in the wall next to me, over my bed, from which I could pour myself a cool heady guinness.

this vision, my ultimate dream in the universe, has come to pass. for me, it is confirmation that all the major problems of humanity will be smacked down by the march of technological progress, at costs accessible to the common man or humanoid robot. it is not quite a tap in the wall over the bed. but it is a good substitute in the short term.