My REM cycle will grow trunks like a mighty oak

   For somewhat obvious reasons that I'm not willing to get into right now, I've been having trouble sleeping lately. This is nothing new. I've had bouts with insomnia since I was a kid. But it's always been about having trouble falling asleep more than being able to stay asleep. Recently, though, I've been finding myself waking up at 3 or 4 every morning. At first I assumed that it was just premature onset of old age. But once I realized that it isn't to pee and already in the throes of a panic attack, I figured I had to do something. Changing my diet and/or exercise regime is clearly not an option, melatonin gives me really weird dreams. So obviously, I resorted to changing what I listen to.

   Up until 25 or so, I fell asleep listening to music every night, and I could use just about anything. It wasn't until I was living with someone did I realize that other people don't find shrieking blues musicians or DJ Shadow to be as soothing as I did. and frankly, it started to wake me up with a start as well, so I just stopped.

   I think I already mentioned this somewhere, but there's a site, You are listening to Los Angeles, that I use a lot when I'm writing or just trying to think. It's a combination of super ambient music and police scanner broadcasts. In spite of the obvious contrast, I've found it to be one of my favorite things online. Lately, even more features have been added and I love it even more. But as much as it soothes me, there is no way I can fall asleep to descriptions -however codified- of homicides and animal abuse. But I still love the idea.

   So I started using an app on my ipod called Ambiance. This is essentially a huge archive of sound clips culled from Freesound.org and sent in by users. Wanna listen to a campfire or crickets or a thunderstorm? done. Tuvan throat singers? done. There's even weirdly specific ones, like "rain on a tent" or "TV through a wall" that are oddly captivating. You can even opt for plain old white noise (though I prefer violet noise for reasons I do not understand)*.

   But as much as I love to sleep listening to these things, I've still had trouble falling asleep to them. It's just boring enough to let my mind race. So, inspired by the site mentioned earlier, I decided to start making my own soundtrack. You see, Ambiance can let you play your music along with the sound effects. So I for the last few months I've been experimenting on what works. One of my favorites is playing Brian Eno's Music for Airports with a clip from a bowling alley. It sounds like that would be torture, but with the levels just right it's just as good as any dream I'd come up with. I've also used an old Smithsonian Jazz Piano box set (my go-to sleep music for years) blended with the sound of rain on corrugated metal. Chopin's nocturnes seem to go well with a bed of white noise, and Elizabeth Cotten's guitar picking blends nicely with the sounds of a typewriter.

   If I was a normal person, I'd probably be content with that. But I had to go the extra mile, so lately I've been collecting samples for what will undoubtedly be my unfinished opus. Yeah, I'm planning on creating a 5+ hour, nonrepeating audio track. I've been collecting audio clips of music boxes and armoniums. Of 17-year cicadas and nightingales. Also a lot of clips of people talking, almost exclusively with received pronunciation. I don't know why, but it helps.

   I have no idea how long this will take me, and I'm pretty sure I'll never stop tinkering with it, but I've been enjoying the process, and I guess that's why any of us have hobbies. I just wish mine resulted in some cool ships in bottles or something.

*I also use Brownian noise, which bears a very clear distinction from the Brown note, which would be infinitely less pleasant.

you might as well skip this one...

Hello all,

I'd normally take the time here to apologize for my radio silence and offer a weak excuse before getting down to what I had already planned to write about. I'm not going to do that today, because I don't really need some of those details on the internet at the moment. All I will say is that we had a lovely vacation that was somewhat tempered by some shitty news from back home. As a result we barely got to spend any time in Philly (one of the main reasons I booked a longer trip than normal), but I did get to loadup on La Columbe, so there's that.

Anyway, I don't want to get to into heavy stuff right now, so I figured I'd offer up my schedule for the day, since I apparently have nothing else to write about*. It might offer some insight into what I've been up to as well as why I've been so horrendously overdue on returning several phone calls. See? It's not just the internet I blow off.

Anyway, today we slept in until 8:30, which is a rarity in itself. After coffee, I run Carrie up to her work while I return back here, make myself a bowl of cereal and search/apply for whatever jobs I think I could be suitable for.This can take anywhere between 2-5 hours. Today, there isn't much new stuff, so  just check on the status of some stuff and see if I've heard anything.

Sometime aroud 10:30, I head to Project A**, where today I'm going to be sitting in a vault by myself and sorting through the personal archives of a semi-legenday nutjob who might have saved every scrap of paper he ever said a hand on. Essentially, I'm sorting through this stuff and trying to get it into a working order for a grant proposal I'm working on. It's a hot, dusty job, but fascinating nonetheless. I get to see a history unfold as I work on this stuff, the life's work of a fanatically religious naturalist and see images that people might not have laid eyes on since 1920. It's one of the things I like the most about this field I've found myself in.

While I'm doing this, I'll be alternating back and forth between listening to an audio recording of Elmore Leonard's The Moonshine War and a playlist I created the other night called "FROBERG!", which consists entirely of Drive Like Jehu/Hot Snakes/Obits songs.

I'll work on this stuff until about 5 or so*** and then head home, where Carrie and I will probably make dinner before she has band practice. At 7, I will begin work on Project B. Project B is archival work, and something I've been engaged in for roughly 21 months. I'm hoping to have it wrapped in the next 5 days or so, so you can imagine my eagerness to get it over with. Hopefully this will take me through to about midnight, where I will close my computer, watch the dumbest thing I can find on Netflix, and talk shit with Carrie about how the Eagles will beat the Steelers tomorrow night.


If I'm lucky, I'll get to read the copy of  League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III): Century #2 - 1969 that I picked up last week. It's been sitting on my nightstand taunting me, but I need to make sure I give it the attention it's due. The same could be said for Noir Afloat, which it's sitting on top of since I last opened it a week ago.

So that's the day I have planned. Try not to get too excited by it. When Project B wraps up, I'm hoping to be able to resume semi-regular posts here, but my concern is that by then Project A will have mushroomed into something scary. We'll see!

My apologies to anyone I didn't get to see back East, and to everyone I haven't been in touch with since returning. There's just a lot of pressure for me to take care of some things here, and I owe you more than a shitty text message saying I miss you.


I hope all is well, and I'll be in touch soon one way or another.

*except our trip to Forest Lawn a few months ago, my mindblowingly good steak taco recipe, the recent discovery of a ghost town nearby, and whatever else I'm forgetting...

**Sadly, I am not visiting the set of a 20 year old Jackie Chan movie, but I wish I was just to see Yuen Biao.

***lunch today: granola bar, some licorice, water

Hamburger Cake

 

homemade hot dogs and sausages, chilled beer, and probably the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for my birthday.

   As a kid, I think my parents tried to do what they could to make sure that there were always educational books and toys around the house for the benefit of my siblings and I. There was a 25+ year subscription of National Geographic, which remaine largely untouched in our loft* for several decades until we moved. There was Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, which was somewhat sarcastically presented to me by my brothers when I was like 9 (two years after they gave me a preemptive, unsolicited birds vs. bees talk, and maybe 23.8 months after my dad figured out that somebody had taught me the term rimjob). There were trivia books (my favorite) and keyboards and globes and all sorts of stuff. Whether or not they had any effect on us I cannot attest to. I mean, I'm sure the results varied, but I don't think rolling the globe off the top of our roof a couple dozen times taught me much about geography...
   But there was a few books that I devoured, and would re-read every couple of weeks. These were largely American history texts I've long since forgotten the names of. I'd pore over these, remembering specifics about Civil War battles and where the Presidents were born. I'd stare at pictures of the A-bomb tests and woodcuts of the Crispus Attucks shooting. I probably learned more from those books than anything else before 7th grade. There was another book that I distinctly remember showing how Samoas are made. But in spite of these amazing things, my favorite of these books was actually a science book, which is odd because I've probably never liked science as much before or since.

But this one was special. for one thing, it had one of the coolest covers ever:

 

Our Universe

   Seriously, what's not to love about that? Crazy-ass rocket ship? check. Massive, impossible-in-outer-space flames? CHECK. I think I still love this cover, and I'm sure it's the reason I ever picked it up. In fact, I think it's pretty telling that I gravitated towards a science book largely because it had a very science fiction-y cover.

   Even though I learned a good bit of physics and astronomy from these books, the real reasons I loved this book were two features. One was that on the title page for every planet, there was a great illustration of the Roman god that the planet was named for, as well as some text explaining why the choice fits. I can still picture all of these quite clearly, although searching the internet has yielded few results.

 

As a kid steeped in Greek and Roman mythology, this was right up my alley. I wish I could find the Pluto and Saturn ones, both of which probably haunted my dreams well into my twenties.

But there was also something else. and that was a tiny section towards the back, where aliens were discussed, and several theoretical life forms were proposed, based on the environment of their respective planets:

This was the section, the 4-6 pages in the book that I would read over and over. I loved the idea of this, creating these aliens but with at least some basis for their appearance and behaviors. These seemed like things that could be. In retrospect, this was probably my first exposure to science fiction outside of Star Wars or The Black Hole, and it probably had a more positive impact on me than anything else at that age. Maybe it stimulated my imagination, or made me want to learn more about the other planets. Maybe it provided me with a desire to hallucinate. I don't know, and don't plan to. But it was something I lodged deep into my mind and never forgot.

   None of this is that interesting, I know. What is interesting is that I always thought I was one of few that read this book. It wasn't until much later, early into my relationship with Carrie that I made a passing mention to "stovebellies" that she bolted upright and screamed "You read that book, too?"

   It turns out she grew up with the same book. Since then, we've encountered at least a half-dozen people who also grew up with this book in their houses. and what's more, all of them thought they were the only ones that read it. Usually, with something that shared amongst a generation, there's some sort of reference made to it within popular culture or something that sort of cements it in our public identity. We realize that this is material that is sharing a collective brainspace, and from there we might discuss its impact on us.

   But I guess no Family Guy writers ever had this book as a kid. But looking aounf online, it's definitely more of a widespread phenomenon than either Carrie or I ever thought ten years ago.

   I guess what I'm wondering about is if there are still books like that in kids' hands. Or even those same books. There was no reason to have this book around (I thought it came with our subscription, but apparently not), and I was flipping through it long before I was old enough to understand most of it, but it still had that impact on me. I guess they bought it for my older siblings, but as far as I know they never picked it up. Their loss, but it was supremely fortunate for me.

   It concerns me when I see how age-specific some of the books out there are. In the library, there's pretty much an astronomy book geared for every age between 4 and 15. I understand the reasons behind it, but why not just get one that's way advanced. Hell, I probably couldn't even read when I first picked it up, but the pictures were enough to get me to want to understand it. Sometimes it can't hurt to aim impossible high.

   I still buy books like this whenever I see them. Hell, I still learn from books like this all the time (a few months ago, I bought a small set of Time-Life books about Jacques Cousteau, and I'm still loving them).  I look forward to having a little critter to show these to, and maybe I'll even know enough to help explain them to him or her by then.

So yeah, aim high. It's only going to help instill curiosity in a tiny person, and hopefully within you as well. Hell, you might even be able to use it to chat up an attractive member of the opposite sex.



*I grew up in a converted barn. Read this as "attic" and not "small apt. with high ceilings"

Pic Dump 11/16

Giant ant on the side of a museum in Orange County

Meats/Cheeses at the Side Door

Beer samplers at The Side Door

Outside Acerogami in Pomona. I just like the way it looks like the giant sculpture mounted on the front of the  bar looks like it's shooting out of the back of that pickup.

 

Mattress and Graffiti I pass every other day on my way to the library. It looks like a brand new mattress and I can only hope that one enterprising homeless person sleeps here. I often spot empty plastic fifths of vodka in the street around here.

Although it's also just outside of the gate to a trucker academy, so who knows.

 

Roscoe's. The butter seen at the top is about half of what I scraped off those waffles. 

Fisherman on the Santa Monica pier

My new favorite breakfast of all time: Ratatouille Omelette.

The sweater I bought for my Slick Rick costume.

Corona Del Mar

Fergus, tongue out.

There was a big fuss over a school bond or something that they were trying to pass in Claremont on election day. They had a protest one day and I saw this professional sign-holder in the middle of it and actually had to turn around to get a better picture. It still makes me laugh.

Triceratops backpack in garbage

Western Bento!!!

I found those (and the following, more disturbing) photos in a book at the library. I recommend browsing your local library from time to time.

Doesn't this look like a smiley face?



It's not.

These were on sale for $60. I didn't get them, but really thought about it.

 

Also part of my walk to the library, not far from the aforementioned trucker academy. You can imagine how nice this is.

 

From Library II. I just think it's a funny title.

 

Oddly, they're taking bets on this.

Part of a monkey shrine we saw at Artswalk

Yeah, text or something on its way...

Mildred B. Soule, 1916-2010

   Last week was among the worst that I can remember for a number of reasons, and its opening salvo was the death of my grandmother. Before I get into this, I don't want to make this sound sad. It's not. She was 94 years old and, though sharper than most I know at a third of her age, she was ready for it. I am grateful that her family and friends were given the time they had with her, and I am happy that she may now rest. This isn't a dirge or anything, just a way to process what I'm thinking.

   My grandmother, to anyone that met her in the last 20 years, could easily consider her a prototype for Lucille Bluth; a stubborn, sharp-witted, heavy drinking, old-school socialite who was remarkably quick for her age. She would regularly wound family members with unintentional quips and could let fly with some frighteningly dated comments*. I don't say these things to denigrate her memory, but to define her better as a person. She was widowed relatively young in her life (and again much later) and long before I knew her, she was traveling the world. For most of my life, that's how I thought of her. She worked as a travel agent and lived by herself in an old lady house on Long Island and did old lady things. It was a beautiful house, and I remember being allowed to touch about 4 things in it.

   We would visit a few times a year, and I remember she had cable, which seemed so extravagant in 1982. I remember her calling all of my siblings insane because we would go there for a week and I was the only one who went outside. Everyone else watched copious amounts of MTV, the boys falling in love with Martha Quinn and the girls watching it because, well, it was MTV. If I wasn't so freaked out by the dwarves in the "Safety Dance" video, I probably would've been right there with them.It was in a nice suburb, and I remember loving the prospect of having new yards and parks to explore. Every time we visited it was like moving without the hassle of having to make new friends.I like to think I climbed new hills and let my imagination soar or whatever, but in reality I'm sure I just sat on a bench and read somewhere.

   It's funny, because I started writing this with something else completely in my mind, but, but this one memory just unpacked itself in my brain, and I'd be foolish not to document it now while it's here. This is from later, when my siblings were old enough to want to (or be able to) get out of these visits to New York, and so I would be the one kid left to go with my parents. In retrospect, I have no idea what the rest of the kids were doing, but they were old enough for it to be no good. But I digress.

   I read a lot as a kid. I'd pretty much read anything, from album liner notes to sporting goods catalogs to whatever I was allowed to check out of the library. This included pretty much anything, but specifically by just grabbing whatever was on the new shelves. It's not the best approach, but nobody was going to complain, because I was a kid reading on his own, right? As a result, I read a lot of standard kid books, including most of the Judy Blume catalog. Yes, you probably see where this is going. In the autumn of 1987, I brought a book called Just as Long as We're Together** with me to Manhasset on one of these visits. I'm not sure if I read the whole thing there or what, but I remember walking back to my grandmother's house from the park and asking her what a period was. My parents weren't there, off visiting some of my mom's high school friends or something, and my grandmother went white as a sheet. So yeah, my grandmother then was tasked with the chore of explaining menstruation to her 9 year-old grandson. I wish I remembered it more clearly, but it stands as a rambling mess of awkward followed by shoving my towards my mom when she got home. I can't say I blame her for that, it's probably what I would've done, too.

But what really has had me rethinking my grandmother's life as of late was finding out when I was in my early 20s that she was a lawyer. This was a complete shock to me, and something I had never even considered. She had been a part-time travel agent for all the time I'd known her, and it was pretty shocking to me. Even more shocking to me when put into the context of the time. For the sake of argument, let's consider the world of Mad Men. Normally, I'd try to avoid including a reference to a TV show while eulogizing my dead grandmother***, but this is apt. Watching that show, it's amazing to see what kind of shit women had to put up with in 1960 suburban New York. It's incredible when juxtaposed with the climate today. Then I remember that in 1960 my grandmother was in her mid 40s and had passed the bar in 1943 and my head reels at what she must have been put through. The amount of determination and sheer willpower that must have taken is more than I can imagine. I'd be impress if I inherited a sliver of that. She was an amazing lady.

In any case, I'm thinking of her now as I look at my cat sleeping on a rug that she made for me when I was a baby. It has a picture of a Peter Cottontail on it and it's one of the only things I still own from age 2. It's remained a valued possession for all this time, and even moreso now. In fact, I might have to yank that cat right off of it. I'll try to attach a picture of it to this site later.

My reasons for writing this dumb and unflattering attempt of a eulogy are twofold. For one thing, we aren't going to be having a memorial for her until late September, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts down now while they were fresh. Second, when I was looking around for an obituary online, it was disturbing to realize that aside from one written up by a local funeral home and a lovely tribute written up by one of my mother's neighbors, there wasn't one. I don't expect my 94-year old grandmother to have much of a web presence, but it's kind of sick when you think about the complete absence of one. If this is what's supposed to pass for posterity, if we're supposed to forgo written documents and burial plots in an effort to reduce our planetary footprints, shouldn't we at least make an effort to remember our loved ones? It pains me when my grandparents tell me about how all their friends are dead, but it's also a plain fact of life, I guess. What isn't fair is that they rarely have anywhere to talk about them, remember them. It would probably take like 1% of the internet to set up a database that could host every obituary that was ever written.

I'd like to see more than that, but at least it's a start.


footnotes after the jump

My wikipedia history

As an apology for that last post, here's a worse one: My wikipedia history of the past 48 hours or so. I'd link them, but that'd take forever. But it's a nice little peep into how I spent my weekend:

Joshua Harto, The Dark Knight, Hello Mary Lou: Prim Night II, Psycho Cop, Friday the 13th (1980 film), Pumpkinhead (film), Basket Case (film), Mujeres Asesinas (Mexico), Mujeres Asesinas (Argentina), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Nubbins, Neurodegeneration, List of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Characters, Sombrero, Texas Ranger Division, L.M. Kit Carson, Powaqquatsi, Category: Golan-Globus films, Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, Paul Molitor, Silver Slugger Award, Category: Living People, Shimenawa, Moun Tsukuba, Emishi, Chi McBride, New Zealand National Rugby Team, Pushing Daisies, Shoe Tossing, Watcher in the Water, Dionte Christmas, Gregg Foreman, Tav Falco, Toni Basil, Rcky Ross (drug trafficker), Giant Hogweed, Hogweed, Noxious Weed, Stock Route, Sumac, Glechoma hederacea, St. John's Word, Weed, Gunga Din, Kenny (2006 film), Shrike (comics), Amygdala (comics)Wong Fei-Hung, Hei hu quan, Dragon Kung Fu, Five Animals, Leopard Blow, Lady Shiva,

Yeah, so there's actually a pretty good account of what I've been reading about, not counting the books I have out of the library at the moment (3 photography books about war journalists, modern Russian, Edwardian England, a book about Cold War politics, and a Bill Moyers book about the signing of the Constitution that I can't even find a review for).


I assume you're reading this because you're bored at work. And now the internet has managed to bore you as well. I apologize. Maybe one of those topics might interest you. If so, go check it out! I read some interesting wikis. Or, go look at some awesome MRI's of food. In fact, go for the latter.

This blog is like the mental equivalent of ipecac for me. What comes up might be interesting, but more than likely it's a jumbled, disgusting mess of what I've eaten over the past few days. 

I'll be back in a few days with some good stuff, I promise.

Also from Twitter

I had a very surreal dream last night that my dad was teaching me how to drive a motorcycle. Nevermind that I sort of already know how, or that he's been dead for over 3 years, it was nice. I don't have dreams like that very often, and I remember them even fewer and further between. Sometimes I think about how that folder in my brain is more or less closed. Aside from the occasional story from one of his friends or an older relative, there isn't anything else I'm going to experience with my dad to pad that up. A dream like the one I had is like some little appendix to that folder, it it's nice because it means I get to pull it out of my file cabinet of a brain, dust it off, and page through it fondly. I've had the luck to do that twice in a few hours last night; the dream came just a few hours after my sister told me a story from last summer that was downright chilling. Not in a malevolent sort of way, but in those "LIFE AFTER DEATH!(?)" ways that might cause you to look over your shoulder late at night without realizing it. It's not a story I feel comfortable publishing on the internet, because technically it's my neice's, but ask me nicely and maybe I'll tell it in person.

But back to the motorcycle. My dad never had a motorcycle. Aside from a picture on my grandmother's wall back home, I've never seen him on one. In that picture, he's on some little dirtbike, in St. John's or St. Bart's or one of those places that I've lumped into a liturgical micronesia in my geographically challenged brain. He looks happy and healthy, and it's always been a favorite of mine, and more than likely the inspiration of my dream.

Anyway, my dad never had a motorcycle. He did, however, prolong his life significantly when some anonymous motorcyclist* with an organ donor card crashed and died, giving him a liver to replace his diseased one. I've thanked that guy a thousand times, and once considered tracking down any family that may have survived him to show them that his death wasn't entirely in vain. (Donate your organs, people).

This morning, I remembered the dream suddenly and blurted it out to Carrie over breakfast before it could slip back into my subconscious, and she reminded me where his liver came from. Then, she remarked "maybe he wants you to ride a motorcycle because he's after your liver".

This is the kind of thing that probably anyone else would find unsettling, or even ghoulish, and understandably so. But it made me laugh and I bet it would've made my dad laugh if he heard it. It was also a pretty fucking great reminder of how lucky I am.

I wanted to post that picture of my dad on the bike, but to be honest I'm not even sure if it survived the move from my grandmother's house. Maybe I'll find it someday.

*weird, right? I feel like "biker" might not be appropriate, either. I mean, they can't all be Hell's Angels or Malcolm Forbes.

11:11 PM, Wednesday night

This is my setup as I sat down to write a paper. Visible are laptop, notebook, texts, coffee, water, vodka...

... paper towels, cat treats, and... plants vs. zombies. 

I'm not much further into writing this paper than I was when I took this picture over 4 hours ago. But, I've got a lot more of the background in.

Also in the back of my mind, another mix on the way. Hopefully it'll be done in a week or two. Expect some sex rap and a 14 minute rock jam. No, seriously. 

Stay tuned, there's still life in this site yet!

Cellphone photo dump: San Francisco

 Japanese Tea Garden in the Park

Some kind of church for Cylons, I think.

This mail lady keeps an A&W in the mailbox!

More Tea Garden

Albino alligator! If you're wondering, YES, I did call him Whitey.

Apparently the reason they're so rare is because they last like 2 seconds in the wild. Kinda takes the excitement out of the whole thing. They're rare because they're so poorly adapted. Stupid pigments.

The California Academy of Sciences

Francis Scott Key Memorial (seen in last photo)

Japantown

Bindi Irwin

Hoagie dreams

I don't know who tipped the little bugger off, but my subconsciousness is now aware that I'm going to be back in PA pretty soon. I had a frighteningly intense dream last night about my favorite sandwich. I actually woke up with my mouth watering. This can only means that dreams about Sarcone's, pizza, and maybe a cheese steak are forthcoming.

I've been pretty wound up lately, with Carrie sporting some sort of H1N1 action lately, and my finals in full swing. I don't see this dying down before next friday, but I should have some more time to post here next week. Going to Conan on Tuesday, so that should be nice.

In the meantime, Paul F. Tompkins' new album came out today. It is hilarious, and you should buy it, here or over on iTunes.