Looks like what they say is true: Another link found in human evolution.

I’m sitting in my cubicle now, at 2:37 in the afternoon, eating a triangle of toblerone and thinking that I might want to go get some chips out of the vending machine on the 8th floor of the Neurosensory Center. My rich, sweet little life. Said toblerone had been sitting in my refridgerator for hmm, about two months, so yesterday I brought it to work thinking I could share it with the two other people in the cubes beside me who, tripled with me, share the space that used to be one person’s office. I guess, standing in my kitchen, already late to work at abt 8:55 yesterday morning when I snatched the golden treasure out of the covered space designed to house eggs, I sort of envisioned this moment at about 3 pm when all of us would be sputtering on low and I would pull the hero move of surprisingly producing toblerone out of thin air. But yesterday, before my moment of joy-giving, I had the sense to ask if anyone wanted chocolate. Good thing I did because, as it turns out, I would have destroyed the newly embarked-upon diet regimens of Nancy G. and Tony B., my office-slash-cubicle mates – and worse still, very well may have encountered a “No Thanks,” which, we all know, would have meant failure and the ruin of my fantasy.

I really love chips, though I’d reallylike to quit chips. If vegans can quit dairy and America can quit Carbs, then I can quit chips, I think.

So now, a day later, toblerone from my desk drawer means toblerone en mi boca.

There is a lot of random space stuff on this blog now. Last year it was a lot of random journalist queries. One of whom must have googled herself and found her contact info on encantada, so she wrote me last month to urgently remove. I don’t know, I’m just saying it was strange. Completely capable of occurring, but karmically strange. I felt irresponsible and really stupid for having it up here in the first place. So I did, then realized that it was weird that I found all of those journalist queries so interesting last year. And I’ll admit right now that I did – find all of those queries so interesting. The point here is that, without intention, encantada must actually be the holding space for the random and sometimes slightly thought-inducing contents of my email. A proverbial bar bathroom door of grafitti’d telephone numbers and scrawled propositions, professions of love and hate and advice for life. Unattended. Deposited, then left to be encountered later with moments of small surprise.

No, that’s a probably a bit dramatic.

DiG was a really enjoyable movie. Probably moreso because I personally find the music enjoyable and it’s a naturally perfect narrative, but mostly so because so many characters in the movie reminded me of so many characters from a certain small timeframe of my past. It’s a movie with tragic characters who play themselves and, contrary to film noir cliche, are still alive and functioning today. Plus, it is so incredibly present. I remember most of what I was doing the very same time that the film’s characters were doing their thing…and that wasn’t very long ago. But all review and critique aside, the movie reminded me of people I used to know and of a life I used to be party to. It made me stop for a second and reflect on a time in my sort-of-recent past that was tangible, then completely vanished. I see movies and read stories all the time about people capturing a moment that at the time seemed realistic, then later found completely fleeting. Until the film got me thinking about those few years, a few years ago, I had thought of them as part of what made me me. Now, in the beginnings of adulthood, I see those people and those few years as a bright spark, then a dead match. There, then gone. Irrecoverable like youth. Only the timing and geographical vecinity of the film characters hit the timing of the tide that them to money and contracts, and the timing and geographic vicinity of my friends then did not. The A&R guy for TVR Records looked and acted like he could be related to goddamn Jones. Courtney Taylor is Eric Martin; narcissistic, self-centered and talented in that way that makes it difficult not to find the whole process of song writing and performance attractive and slightly mesmerizing. Yes, Courtney is Eric, only successful and not actively killing himself. The conversations in the film, names and literal content aside, were similar conversations I heard for 3 years. The music references, the influences – our influences from 1997 to 1999. The delusions of grandeur, the exact same. The shitty house everyone lived in – comparable. Their young twenties were spent the way my at-the-time friends spent their young twenties. I wasn’t really in it; I couldn’t be. I was crispy clean maybe, priveledged and young and having school paid for and afraid to take it there. Without the life experiences and the talent and the motivation to produce what they produced. But I was around alot then, choosing them over the school life, because the experiences were so rich and so personal and would so deeply settle into my understanding of myself, the creative process and the music – and every one of its derivatives and influences – that I grew to love so naturally.

Anyway, interesting how all of that came from my seeing an enjoyable film completely unrelated to my life in any way. I wonder how many people will be buying up The Brian Jonestown Massacre in the months that follow, especially now that we all recognize the dude from BRMC.

But anyway, back to work now. Back to work and maybe this toblerone. No, not in the mood for the toblerone but maybe some chips.? Ok, maybe a coke then.

Dude’s TV triggers international “vessels in distress” call

Can’t wait to see THIS on Tuesday…

Freud said “anatomy is destiny.” His subject was women, but it could have been the universe.

Why the Search for Life Drives Space Exploration, and a favorite quote from the piece:
Another approach to finding ET is to hunt for construction projects rather than signals. An idea that has intrigued the SETI community for decades is the thought that a truly advanced society might create a giant solar-cell array around its home star, providing an incredibly large energy source to fuel the good life. An array that completely surrounds the star is called a Dyson sphere, as it was physicist Freeman Dyson who first suggested the idea.

And thankfully, old Thomas L. Friedman is back:
I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them – the bad guys – not about us. We’re about the Fourth of July.

.

I can’t help it. I just love stuff like this:

Astronomers have discovered more than 130 planets orbiting nearby stars in our galaxy. Although the solar systems they have found are very different from ours, by studying the planets that have been found – their masses, their orbits and their stars – they are uncovering intriguing hints that our galaxy may be brimming with solar systems like our own.

Space and time are relative. Quantum physics says that two things can exist in two different places at once and that all things are fluid. My god, I wish my mind grasped it all; that I/we could operate outside the “tip of the iceberg” analogy of our brains. I want to learn about quantum mechanics. How easily I had forgotten the innate desire to explore. How shallowly I didn’t notice the Columbus-era mindset that I am actually living in. It’s just interesting how accepting we are of what appears to be rather than what is. I mean, I think Earth is big. How do I compute the size of millions of galaxies and tiny quarks?

I know what it is, actually. It’s self-centeredness and it’s the chimera of being human, of thinking that everything applies directly to US. I have completely forgotten that I’m part of a larger system that operates in spite of me, the way ants are part of the natural system. I don’t realize that; really. I don’t want to generalize here because it’s so easy to fall into that and I do it all the time, but it seems to me that my natural thinking can’t be too far off from what is general to the public…so in that regard, I can generalize.
So, with that said…
I think it’s difficult-to-impossible for humans to understand things that go on outside of their direct understanding. Sure; some get it more than others, but in general. That things are a lot bigger than us. That the Earth and the tides and time and space and microbes and stars and planets operate via laws and process that do not even acknowledge our being. Because I’ve never been in extreme environments, I honestly have a hard time understanding that there are uninhabitable places that aren’t welcome to me. That can kill me. That I can’t just traipse about the Andes like I want to because I can die. That I could never survive an Arctic winter. I’m telling you, it’s foreign to me. When I think of what can kill me, I think of disease and dangerous people. Because I’ve never been humbled by nature, I forget that it’s not mine to control.

Now I’ve got me thinking about the mental leap. I think it’s one of those underrated, understood-but-rarely-realized realities of our living. They occur so often, but are so rarely acknowledged. I mean, it’s originally a mental leap for Westerners to try sushi, if you think about it. Once that leap is made, and it’s validated – that raw fish can taste good and not kill you, the flood gates are open. Another unnoticed mental leap – to operate a vehicle. To ride an elevator. To submit to X-ray. To meditate. To visualize our own biology. To fly. To dar la luz, probably.

*Sigh*…but I’m a liar if I didn’t admit that even as an older child, it was a mental leap for me to realize that the planets in our solar system weren’t just abstract renderings on a classroom poster. That they’re big and they’re out there right now. And now, that they’re being traversed by little rovers that we sent to their surfaces. They’re tangible.

Ha; the embarrassment of the admittedly small mind.

You know Nelson on The Simpson’s? Good; then say with me, “haaaa, ha“:

The Oklahoma Tourism Guide. This is real, people.




Oh, and click onthe title of the post below. The fkkin Onion AV Club, man. Manna to Popculturists.

Still, as an adult, pizza is in the top 3 of my favorite things to eat ever. Not saying that all pizza is good…only saying that I’ll always want it. Years out of college has not broken me of said indulgence. I don’t know how people do diets. I want pizza and kolaches and caffeine and sugar all the goddamn day long. And I no longer smoke, but a cigarette still looks good. As does a joint. And I may not want stuff around, but it’ll always be around. Ingrained into my memory as something that however harmful, is associated with dopamine and reward and bliss and dopamine and yummy pizza and dopamine for as long as we both shall live. “We” being the royal we – me and my memory, of course. *wink*

There is a lot going on these days, as all days, and so much fodder for vibrant conversation. Instead of getting caught up in the betrayal and disappointment and godforsaken evil and all the fkking sadness, right now I’m enjoying the fueling of the proverbial fount. The wheel in the mill, pouring in one medium and churning out another. The ideation. The awareness in the buzzing world. There’s just a lot going on. This grand sharing of energy that is vibrating at a higher frequency than in other times or months or moments. I’m a chatty little bug these days. So much subject matter. So many opinions.

What the fkk is going on with the weather by the way? Why all of these hurricanes? Why the earthquakes and the volcanic eruptions and the tornadoes and this cryptic humbling of man by Nature? What’s going on? Does anyone know? What have we done? Did the United States do it? Who knows the progenitor? Can we stone him?

I miss reading, I miss reading, I miss writing; by god I miss reading and discussing. The more I hear and see performed, the more I’m noticing the way to connect. And the way to connect isn’t difficult, it’s colloquial. It’s making good on the idea that I think is too obvious. It’s writing a book full of memories that are mild in reality, but in typical style, are impregnated with all of this meaning and symbolism that probably wasn’t originally there but has been assigned there by the author to make a point, to be memorable. It’s these poems that are really effective but simple. It’s these words that are human sounding and completely digestible and consumed. I’ve been noticing that. Nothing prolific or high-browed or steeped in impenetrable jargon, just connection through points. Through small points. Through words and pressure spots in the mind and in the memory..

Jon Stewart, in his Terry Gross interview, talked about how some minds just work in a certain way and I think he’s right. Instead of the boring explanation, “I’m this kind of person,” reverse-engineer it a few more steps and we say “My mind just takes it here instead of there or there or there.” At least for the sake of saying it in a different way. We’re suffocatingly in need of originality anyway. Anyway, I liked that way of explaning something that we all know to be true. I like those things; they’re communication triumphs to me. I know the creativity and ingenuity expressed collectively as a human race is a millifraction of what actually exists. We need more triumphs. Or, since I know they’re there, we need more expression.

what the hell am i talking about?