The Twilight Report

I'm thinking about cooking some pasta for dinner, which of course brings up the whole low carb thing. It's a serious inconvenience that pasta is now worse than slathering your blood red cow stake with the thickest bacon grease imaginable, because when cooking for people you have to think up something more complicated to make. So I send Tyler an IM asking: "are you on any of those funky low carb diets?" in hopes that if he comes out to visit me in New York I can make something simple like pasta. But he doesn't answer me right away.

I decided I really needed a paper clip. I riffled through my desk drawer, but come up with nothing. I decide to go buy some and tell Tyler: "i need to go get paper clips. i'll be back in a bit."

To which he responds: "no; they don't work. my dad actually wrote a book which describes why"

I was about to walk out of the room, but I stop with a feeling of dread in my heart. Suddenly I had been thrust into some strange universe where Mr. Spock has a goatee and for some reasons all paper clips have become non functional. I wonder what else is different about this parallel universe? And why did Tyler's father write an entire book on why paper clips don't work? I've been so wrapped up in the future and being an optimist and all that B.S. that I have made myself susceptible to believing it just may be true when somebody tells me something like "paper clips don't work."

"huh? what?" I type.

Then I remember the question before that. "oh. heh. cool. got confused there."

Tyler responds with: "the diets"

"i thought you were saying PAPER CLIPS didn't work."

Relieved that I wouldn't have to double check my Star Trek DVDs to insure that Spock didn't have any extra whiskers (except of course for that one episode that he did), I went off to get some paper clips.

On the way back I'm listening to a CD I burned with just music that I like to listen to and none of the extra chaff which is on those CDs that those musical corporations expect us to buy. It struck me recently that with the exception of the first ("reptile") and last song ("suicide notes") it is all "happy" music, and that I haven't been much interested in listening to the "unhappy" tracks. Guthrie used to imply that the fact that I used to listen to depressing music made me unhappy. I contend (as I did then) that I listened to depressing music because I was depressed, and now that I prefer to listen to "happy" music because I am optimistic.

For a second there it didn't even bother me that I still don't have plans for New Years Eve. It occurs to me that New Years Eve is really Old Years Night... and is so about the past, not The Future.

I've been meaning to get back to a story I wrote about some time ago about nin (nine inch nails) some time ago. For those of you who care to read what I wrote earlier here it is: [ short entry about me trying to sell one of my old nin acquisitions on eBay ]. If you don't want to read that, don't worry, it essentially says that I was troubled by the behavior of the bidders to my auctions, apparently nin fans, but in the end I decided to give one particular bidder (a Canadian, so I suspect he talks funny) the benefit of the doubt.

Denmark: My Prison (in focus)

So in the end somebody finally won this auction for four nine inch nails CDs and I send off an invoice, waited a few days, sent a reminder notice, waited a few days, sent an extremely polite eBay message asking the buyer to pay up, or at least contact me, waited a few more days and finally filed a non paying bidder complaint with e-mail, waited a few more days and still heard nothing. I sent an offer to the next highest bidder (our Canadian bidder) and posted negative feedback for the non paying person. The first time ever, I really didn't want to do it, but I felt like I had run out of alternatives. I was planning on re-listing the item the next Wednesday, which was only a couple of days away, since I hadn't heard back from my Canadian bidder about the second chance offer.

The next day I got a message from the winner of the auction apologizing and saying that she had sent payment via PayPal. I checked my account and sure enough I had received my dough. This left me a little uneasy, because I had a second chance offer out there to my Canadian bidder and only one set of discs. I wasn't sure that it would end well if he decided to take the offer, and I wasn't sure if I could cancel it. It all worked out ok though, because I was able to cancel the offer and sent this stern message to the winner (and now paying) bidder:

I really wish you had contacted me sooner.  It said quite clearly
in the listing that payment needed to be received within ten days.  I
was about to relist the item.  Anyway, since you have sent me the money,
I will be posting you your CDs first thing tomorrow.  Thank you for
taking care of this.

...and the next day I posted the CDs. Mind you, all of this was during the most stressful part of my Color1 class: preparing for my final portfolio, so I was already ripping the hair out of my scalp because of work and school.

Denmark: My Prison (out of focus)

I started writing this story out at one point, but the whole thing seemed rather angry, and I wasn't in the mood to sound angry, because I don't think I was particularly. Then I forgot about it, but I was looking at someone's profile on-line yesterday. Boredom had set in I think, and usually I hate it when people have music playing on their web pages, like this one did, but I stopped for a minute to listen to it.

Sound a bit like a bad nine inch nails rip off... I thought to myself I wonder who it is. I found the place in the page where the music was playing. In this case it was actually a music video. I pulled the temporal navigation slider back to the beginning of the video to see if it would tell me who the band was. Nothing there. Then I tugged the widget back to the other end of the song to see if that would offer any clue. There was nothing there too, but in this case it was spelled out for me:



For those of you who don't know, don't remember, or more likely don't care, Trent Reznor's label is Nothing Records. Ahhh... I thinks to myself so this isn't a bad nine inch nails rip off, it's just a bad nine inch nails song. There would have been a time when I could not have accepted the thought. I would not have been able to utter a sentence which included the term bad nine inch nails song. Fortunately, my tastes in music have become less dogmatic, and maybe even more refined. I still listen to nine inch nails on occasion. I think my favorite song has got to be Reptile - I would still like to write a demo to that music - but my devotion is obviously not unquestioned, as evidenced by the fact that I was even selling off part of my collection. And oh yeah... the fact that I listen to Trent on the order of once every few months instead of several times a day as I did back in 1995 (which as some of you already know was the 1985 of the 90s...)

Denmark: My Prison (interference patterns)

A friend of mine a while back essentially told me that my taste in music was, how shall I put it? Well let's just say that my taste in music is apparently "gullible." My initial reaction to this was amusement, because, it is such a silly "Ha-Ha" thing to say. After all how can my taste... my preference... be gullible? You can be gullible enough to believe that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, or that this gentleman here owns and can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. You can't be fooled into liking trance or rap or country or any other form of music, either you like it or you don't. Even when I described my taste as being dogmatic, I do not think I would be so insulting as to call my taste in music gullible. Which is how I sort of take this narrow minded kind of statement now: insulting.

Even if you are more "expert" in a subject than someone else it's quite obviously unfair to apply your standards to someone else's taste and expect them to take it as a friendly act. I see nothing wrong with being critical of a piece of art, for example, if you are a movie critic and are not critical enough of Titanic to write a poor review then you are clearly not doing your job (that is just my opinion... Man).

I visited a friend recently in an apartment which she had just moved into, so when I discovered that she had hung up on her wall one of my black and white prints, I was honored. Ahh... was actually my first thought of the prints I gave you, you chose to hang the most cliché. Instead of saying that thought, I simply said that I was honored. Now, admittedly it is easy to say something nice in place of something insensitive in this sort of situation, but pretty much in any situation if you are creative you can say something nice when socializing with your friends, and when you can't maybe you ought not say anything.

I suppose that means I shouldn't have said the last three paragraphs. Pretend you didn't read them.

Driving to work today I was reminded of a old friend way back from the days when I was the Chief of a high school tribe by the name of FRIZ (always spelled in all-caps). His name was and probably still is Nick Bishop. I was listening to track 6 on the downward spiral (which I suppose is always spelled in all-non-caps). Back in '94 or '95 I recommended halo eight to Nick, not because I had particularly good taste in music at the time, and more because I had found myself attached to the angry morbid musings of Trent Reznor, and would have probably recommended anything with the NIN label. I am always shocked and surprised when somebody enjoys something I recommended, so when Nick came back a few days later saying that he especially liked track 6, I was pleased with myself and filed the information away so that I could relate it to you ten years later.

Of all my over achiever high school friends, and I mean over achiever in the most annoying of all possible connotations, Nick was probably far and away the most brilliant. Probably the only peer I've ever known who could be fairly described as brilliant. He had an interest in aging and developing the technology to halt it so that he could... as he would often tell us... sell the technology to the fabulously wealthy. My best friend of the FRIZ days - "gUe" - would often joke with Nick that he'd work on the time travel device and Nick could work on developing a cure for aging. We didn't realize until later that he wasn't really kidding. If it can be done in my lifetime, Nick will probably be the one to do it, and he will probably become fabulously wealthy off of it himself.

When I was in high school, I thought Nick was cool. I found myself, not entirely subconsciously, picking up many of his verbal habits. I don't suppose Nick was a bad or evil person, but I don't think Nick is a particuarly nice person, and today I know he was not worthy of my admiration.

I don't really know what ever happened to Nick. I know at one point he was going to graduate school at MIT, because I sent an e-mail to him there, and I got a curt response. As I do with all my old friends I invited him to come visit me in New York, since he was so close, but I knew that he wouldn't even keep my contact information and that unless I kept tabs on him I would never see nor hear from him again.