If time is relative, then to what does it relate? I don’t feel like it relates to me. It seems to me to be recursively relative. I’m very near the end of this day which is near the middle of my probable life and yet I’m sitting in front of an LCD wasting whatever time is relatively at hand. Hours pass like hours and as I contemplate the rest it sort of feels like stasis. Yet tomorrow morning I’ll be at the start of my day and minutes will race by and I will be franticly attending to all the things that need to get going and that guy in front of me will inevitably be going too goddamn slow! Why won’t he go faster - I … must … go … fass … ter! Then work will go up and down, grinding thru meetings, rushing to finish projects - bleh. It’s up and down and all over and it correlates to rhythms that ebb and flow predictably at random. Or randomly in a predictable way. Plan for retirement by giving up time now so you can have it later - just don’t get hit by a Brinks truck. Hurry up and get to the good parts but don’t go too fast and miss the good parts.

The trite idiom says Time is Money, but more importantly, money makes time irrelevant. Rich people who care overmuch about time are either stupid or terminally ill. If you gots the cash, you can afford to slow down, take it easy, do what you want when you want. Things will go at the rate which you choose. So get lots of money. Which means you gotta be in the right place at the right time, time the market, make time, manage your time and be on time.

When we were kids a week lasted - I dunno: a really long time. I can even remember as a kid, all the things that could happen in a single day. A day could roll on and scramble itself up and turn out one way and then resolve into something else. I could play with toys, run around, play with friends, eat meals (there were like, 8 meals in a day), take a nap, watch TV, , ride a big-wheel, read a book, take a bath, play a game and then finally end it in bed. All kinds of crazy shit could happen in a day and yet I know I was only awake for maybe 12 hours. Time is relative to where you are in it and so that makes time recursively relative to itself which is really friggin annoying…

I’m guessing that I am in a minority. The way market dynamics work, the stuff that people like, and therefore want to buy, is the stuff that the market produces and distributes. So people apparently like boring music. Boring music is really easy to find. It’s on the radio - even satellite radio. It’s on iTunes, it’s at amazon.com, it’s in the stores - it’s everywhere. Even walking around the mall or sitting in a restaurant - they pipe the boring shit all over the place. Vaguely melodic noise. I can’t stand it. I’d much rather have silence.

There is non-boring music - it definitely exists. But getting it almost seems like work sometimes. And the thing about even good, non-boring music is that even that eventually gets tiring. I can listen to the same thing for awhile, but then I need something new. I got an account on emusic.com, which bills itself as a vast repository of indie music. This brings connotations of unique-ness. It’s made out to be all the great stuff that you’ve never heard of, that the market maybe didn’t accept, presumably because it was just that: different and unique. So I’m all over this thing. And actually, for the first little while I did find a bunch of stuff, although admittedly it was stuff that I had meant to buy or check out and happened to find it amongst emusic’s catalog. Eventually I found all that old Fugazi and a few Bad Brains and Daniel Johnston that I probably had on some 8 inch or crappy cassette someplace at some time. But then I was left to try and wade thru lots and lots of stuff to try and find something new.

Here is what I learned: finding music that is appealing is hard work. Not hard in the sense of developing callouses on the mouse finger, but tiring none-the-less. Find a genre, pick something, read the blurb, download the samples, maybe find something that might be good, download a full track, find out that it’s boring. Repeat.

They try and revive some of that old Napster magic from the good old days, much the same way that Last.FM also tries. That is, “We noticed you like XXXX, another member on here also likes XXXX and he likes YYYY too.” This works okay on Last.FM because you are listening to “real” music - that is, music everyone’s already heard of. It’s tougher on emusic because the catalog is pretty narrow. So it’s really hard to just get to that “We noticed you like” part”. Even then, I haven’t found that to be very helpful for me. But then, the Last.FM thing tends to just tell me stuff I already know, stuff like: you listened to Fugazi, you might like Helmet. Yeah thanks, but, I already knew that - in fact, here’s some Helmet on the old HD right now, but I’m actually already bored with that. Napster was kicking of the ass because you could see the whole freakin collection of that other dude whose songs you just downloaded. You could judge for your own self how closely your musical tastes might align by just reading thru the bands and tracks. Then you could start grabbing the ones in between - the outskirts of the Venn Diagram. It was a beautiful system - too good to last.

Pandora works really well, but I tend to just listen to it - which is fine. Sometimes I rank something up, I often jump over to the PC to rank something down (for some reason, my choosing of multiple HipHop tracks leads Pandora’s algorithms into thinking that I don’t revile R&B with a burning passion of disgust). But I only rarely have the presence of mind to note down the occasional new artist that I hear and find appealing. I need a voice-activated Pandora. So then I could just shout “Sucks!” to give a track the thumbs down or “Fuck yeah!” to thumb up and then a “Buy it” to the good new stuff. Although, as cool as this idea sounds, I can see problems developing as a side-effect of this already. I’d be shouting out Sucks and Fuck yeahs at all kinds of inappropriate times whether music was playing or not.

Prose is the normal form of writing - obviously. It’s what you see in newspapers, magazines, novels - every piece of reading material you make use of. The normal course of writing is to be explicit and direct and grammatical and generally easy to use. We like that. Occasionally a good writer will take some liberties and attempt some flow or pretend some substance via an affected linking of words or playing of metaphors. But generally speaking, nothing we read would trip the squiggly green underline of MS Word. We write according to rules and try not to get in our own way when conveying meaning via written language. This is a good thing and something for which I am all in favor.

But prose is not the end of everything. There is more out there in the dangerous world of thought and concept conveyance. For every 10 strictly photo-realistic portrayals of human experience, there exists at least one mad attempt at stretching the imaginations of a witness with a twisted shape or a crooked pallet of abstraction. In words, there is poetry.

The thing about poetry is that almost one hundred percent of it is smelly, puss-oozing, shit-stained crap. To give insight to my opinion, understand that I hold the same objections for abstract art. Jackson Pollock was a clever fraud even if VerMeer never touched a brush. Generally, poetry is too easy just as much as splashing paint on something may as well be an accident. Really good poetry is rare, even when the author takes great pains to make it great. Maybe even especially so. My idea of a really great poem is something like Blake’s burning tiger. Stuff like you read in 6th grade and maybe yawned at.

But those were clearly different times with different motivations and structures for rewarding or cursing those with a desire to string together words in an artful and compelling way. I don’t necessarily think that times and people are all that different today than they were 200 years ago when Coleridge doped himself up and wrote about sailors. I almost guarantee that he and dudes like Wordsworth would be equally successful in 2008 as they were in 18 whatever - but instead of straight written words, they most likely would’ve written songs. Or maybe commercials about fast-food and fizzy sugar water.

Regardless, poetry in the strictest definition of it is stupid crazy rare today. There’s just no market for it. Writing it is mostly an affectation of art-fagdom, not something someone seriously takes up as a form of self expression. People who might be good at it would simply take too much heat from their drinking buddies to ever write some shit down, much less share it with anyone who might read it. All that is probably for the best anyway.

Color in dialog is underrated. In general, I don’t like extra verbage that doesn’t aid understanding, but I do like to be entertained. I appreciate wit and clever interplay between words, meaning and sounds during a conversation. Likewise, I tend to make attempts at injecting some joy of life into my speech whenever possible.

So, for example, I like to make exclamations: very binary and abrupt qualifications of opinion as if they were Einsteinian fact. Early on, in my teens for instance, this would come across as “That’s awesome!” or “That sucks!”. Lots of people do that - it’s typical. Then there was lots of profanity introduced. As I moved out of dorms and into cubicles, profane outbursts (eg “Fucking fucktastic , ass-grinding compiler! Why the fucking Fuck won’t you build this shit-stained code?!”) were brought directly to the attention of my good friends in Human Resources. Gradually, as I tried to reach a bit further to both convey my views and dynamic sense of sarcastic cloy, I branched out - but not too far. At some point I latched on to “That’s retarded” (better would be, “That’s fucking retarded”, but then I get in trouble). Not sure why, certainly bereft of originality, but there you go. I also liked to call things “Gay” or “Gay with an H” (as in G-Hay - sort of an extended, over-wrought pronunciation). Later I added “Gaytarded”. I have hundreds of other of these little verbal punctuation marks, but these serve the example well enough. The common theme here is that certain people will take offense. Which is a shame for both them and for me.

Over time I have had differing views on this situation. The most obvious is that it’s fucking gaytarded for someone to take offense at words that aren’t even being directed at them. The possible exception could be those who are gay or retarded or who have close relations who are either and who have also made the analysis that the subject of my description is in fact being derided and therefore with that derision is being made an unfavorable comparison to the state of being either homosexual, cognitively impaired or both. The other view is more complex in a semi-introspective way. Why is it that it’s the offensive words that are the most satisfying? By that I refer to those times when you really want to expediently stretch the expressiveness of an idea or just give breath to some pent-up frustration. I could just as easily say “I find that unappealing or inadequate” or “This falls short of my expectations”. But for some reason it’s much better to say something vulgar and/or obscene that people involved in the conversation or just within earshot might find off-putting.

Much has been written of the word “Fuck“, so I don’t need to go into it here. But making that quick little guttural sound is just so very satisfying that little else can be effectively substituted. My grandfather used to say “Dirty Name”. Somehow he trained himself, probably with help from physical punishment at the hand of various authority figures, to utter that little phrase if he stubbed his toe or broke his pencil. I dunno how he did that. I much prefer “Fuck”, or “Ass-pimple” or “Shit-butter” or “Dick-puss”. Apparently when the world offends me by allowing me to drop a transmission on my foot, or fails to prevent me from cross-threading a bolt into an engine block, I need to be offensive right back. Nothing else will do…

I once read that spelling wasn’t really any kind of a thing until Webster invented the dictionary. Back in the day, people just put letters together based on the way things sounded or on some type of tradition. But that doesn’t explain words like “through” or “rough”. For those I guess it has to do with the Olde Inglish or whatever - welsh? I have no idea. But some type of Viking or isolated influence that has since been removed from our vernacular. So we’re left with a whole lot of weird words. Or is it “wierd”? I guess not since my Firefox spellchecker is underlining that one. It’s “i before e” after all. Except after “c”. And except when your writing about friends. So it’s all inconsistent. And I grew up as one of those annoying nerdy kids who aced the spelling tests and just basically always knows the right spelling and can point out when people write “there” when they mean “their” or my favorite, “then” and “than”.

Except that I’m also supposed to hate tradition and generally thumb my nose (what a stupid expression) at useless rules. Do I know what that person meant? Of course I do - if they had been speaking, there’d be little or nothing to clue me in to the difference in those words. So why the hell get uptight about it? It’s stupid.

So that’s something I’m working on - getting over the shitastic compulsion to notice spelling errors.

In parallel to all of that, I have been trying to bring in words like “thru”. Why must we type those extra bullshit letters? It’s dumb. I be done wit dat. I even keep that “thru” in proper documents. Of course, someone will always edit them out before they get published or shipped out to customers or whatever. But maybe one or two will slip thru, you know?

Now, I will say I’m not going to be about the “nu” or the “tru”. Maybe one day - baby steps. I also do have a certain sick sort of admiration for the 133t-speak and the loltok and the various other modern intarwebs types of dialogs that I see. Making shit up is good. And sometimes, making shit up that other people don’t quite understand is even better.