Phil

freewrite

2008-04-29T17:25:15Z

I've had an idea for a short story for some time now. In fact, I've had it for many many years, but now it sorta feels like I'm stealing from The Matrix, which I'm not. I've had this idea forever. So why not lay it down, here, now? Maybe it'll help things get organized.

So, the story begins in some fantastical setting. I like the idea of it starting as a fantasy story to begin with. It can be as stereotyped or cliched as necessary, with dragons, wizards, the whole nine yards. More than anything else, it needs to focus on the protagonist.

For a while, everything works out for him. He travels around, he saves princesses, solves riddles, overthrows evil emperors, etc. Then stuff starts to get weird. The landscape of the world starts to deteriorate. A formerly beautiful world begins to become more and more horrible. He starts having extremely strange hallucinations. Dragons he's killed spring up again, unchanged. People start speaking in incomprehensible foreign tongues - some expire right in front of him.

I don't want to go on about this too much, largely because I have very little time. I'll stick to the essentials from here on out.

He finds a kind of door of some sort. Not sure what the door looks like, but he finds one. It dumps him out in this kind of Nether Zone, where hundreds of portals are open to different dimensions. Or something.

Truth be told, it's easier for me to tell the story from the other end right now. I realize, now, as I'm typing this up, that I"m trying too hard to preserve the suspense and cool (at least, I think cool) twists of the story, when I should really be outlining things for advice.

So here's what's actually going on. Earth, circa not-too-far-from-now, is rendered almost completely uninhabitable. I like chemical war, 'cause nuclear war is so cliched, but whatever. There are no longer lives to be lived on Earth.

So, in an attempt to preserve human civilization in some form, Top Scientists harness the Internet to create NewEarth, or maybe HomeOne, or maybe Earth.net. Something cool and techy like that. Everybody who was still alive and could be found in the once-advanced countries were put into biological suspended animation and had their minds hooked up to this Earth.net. From there, they were shot, in capsules, into low Earth orbit (along with the various servers required to maintain Earth.net). Their bodies remain shut down, and their minds are permanently connected to this NewEarth server, which replicates human civilization in its happiest form. (This is the part that was irritatingly taken by the Matrix.)

Then, however, thousands of years go by. People find refuge from the eternal boredom of NewEarth by burrowing further and further into computer simulations - fantasy simulations, sci-fi simulations, all of it. Eventually, and this is the fun part...people forget where they came from. After thousands of years, their personas become lost in massive layers of simulation upon simulation.

So, anyway, the story would be the story of the servers failing. Of people who had been locked in these incredibly comprehensive fantasy worlds who start to experience the consequences of the main servers going offline. So the plotline is kind of one person, our hero, discovering what I've just told you, but in reverse. He has to "de-layer" himself, so to speak, as he maneuvers his way back down to NewEarth, which is of course a huge twist...and then, obviously, the final realization that he's a brain trapped in a capsule orbiting a ruined Earth, which is the final revelation.

That's the idea. Gotta go teach.

Brawl Codes

2008-04-26T18:53:34Z

Because all the cool kids are doing it.

Me: 3780-9398-9893

FIGHT!

why I'm voting for Barack Obama.

2008-04-10T04:56:31Z

I've been watching the HBO show John Adams a lot recently. It alternates between being some of the best and most boring TV ever made. If you ever wanna watch it, watch the following:

Episode 1. John Adams wins the Boston Massacre trial.
Episode 2. Independence. 'nuff said.
Skip Episodes 3 and 4, which are about John Adams getting sick in various parts of Europe and accomplishing nothing at all. Also, his kids grow up.
Episode 5. - the second half of this episode is maybe the best television I've ever seen.

The last two episodes haven't come out yet, so I'm pretty stoked.

Anyway. It got me thinking about American presidents, and how ridiculously important they are. For example - don't get me started on how ridiculously important George Washington was. We literally owe everything between the years 1775 to 1796 to George Washington.
:
Cool facts about George Washington:
1. the only United States Commander-in-Chief to ever ride at the head of the U.S. Army.
2. had four different horses shot out from underneath him, but was never wounded.

Take a guy like FDR. He sits down in front of a radio transmitter and millions of people sit down to listen to him. He'd just sit back and smoke a cigar and look as contented as could be, and gravely inform the American public that everything was hunky-dory. And even though there was a Great Depression on, they believed him!

I consider myself an independent-minded kind of guy, but I can't deny I'm victim to it too. George W. Bush is my president - this is a specter that haunts my life as an American. I wake up in a cold sweat at night, apologizing for having George W. Bush as my president. As Americans, we have experienced a great many cultural emotions throughout our long years...but outright hatred is a new one for us.

I hate being hated. I really do. It blows.

So, almost unconsciously, I have found myself an ardent support of Barack Obama. It's some kind of magnetism he exerts on twentysomething-age kids. I know nothing specific about his policy choices, I don't know the details of his immigration plan, or his health care plan, or his get-out-of-Iraq plan. And yet I find myself intrinsically certain I want to vote for the man.

Recently I decided to take myself to account. I wanted to figure out why I really supported Obama as much as I do. So I thought about it a while one night, and ended up watching this movie - Thirteen Days. It's about the Cuban missile crisis, and it's a damn good movie, even though it has Kevin Costner in it.

What I'm really seeing during the movie, though, is JFK. And I'm struck by something I've actually spoken out loud before: "Obama reminds me a lot of Kennedy," I tell people. When people ask me why I say that, I tell them it's 'cause they're both good public speakers, which is true. But the more I think about it, the more I'm struck with a different conclusion: they're both YOUNG. And then I realized something.

John McCain can't be president because he has ten years to live. Hillary Clinton can't be president because she's a shriveled up old hag. I don't mean this in a nasty way, although I can see how it would come off that way.

I need a president who really, genuinely gives a shit about the future. Why would John McCain give a shit about the future?

"Mr. McCain, do you understand what the world will be like in 2020 if we do this?!"
"Why would that matter?"

Same with Hillary Clinton. Why the hell does Hillary Clinton want to be president? Look, you don't want the president of the United States to have really serious personal issues. You also don't want a president of the United States whose only seeming reason for pursuing election is power politics - and apparently family power politics, at that.

So? I'm going for Obama. You hear the guy talk and you get the sense that he genuinely wants the world to go on living. You figure, the guy's gonna be alive come 2040 - he probably wants to keep the world going 'til then. Contrast that with our current administration - which, honestly, if considered in the span of the past eight years, can be seen as a desperate plot to speed the end of mankind by dozens of years. America is still capable of great things, I think - we're not a bad people. Not yet. We're a bit sluggish, overcome with apathy, a bit unsure of our purpose...but we remain a people of great possibility.

In all objections to Obama as president, you hear the word "experience" tossed around like so much confetti. From everyone who opposes him: "where is his EXPERIENCE?" "he's done NOTHING!" and etc. etc. To these people I can't help but say, nothing could make me happier! I'm so, so sick and tired of the presidential candidates being spit out of the political system. George W. Bush? John Kerry? These people aren't candidates, they're synthesized products of a deliberate political process. The Republican machine cranked out Bush, the Democratic machine spit out Kerry, and what the American people got were generic products of an extremely corrupt party system.

George Washington warned against political parties in his farewell address. I'm just sayin'.

Barack Obama is a Democrat, I guess, but to me he mostly just seems like Barack Obama. I love that he went on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO, so now the world knows our future president could be a sick ball player, if we play our cards right. Picture this: Barack Obama leads the U.S. Olympic basketball team to a gold medal...IN BEIJING. I'd rally around that president.

You get the idea. He just seems to really believe in a future, and it makes sense, because he really has one. We should elect a president who has at least 40 years to leave over a president who might have less than ten. Everyone SAYS they're working for the future generations, but we're pretty self-interested bastards at heart. Think John McCain really cares about the state of United States foreign policy in 2025? Or the state of the environment? Or the growing wave of anti-Americanism sweeping across the world? No. Because he'll be dead, and he knows that.

So let's elect Barack Obama, because he seems happy to be alive. Because U.S. presidents really do matter to the American populace. We want our presidents to be inspiring so we can feel inspired ourselves. We hate feeling an instinctive need to nervously watch every speech Bush makes, waiting and cringing at his bumbling mistakes like a mom watching her idiot son at the school play. If America can elect Obama, than America deserves to believe in itself again. I think. It will be, if nothing else, an awesome victory for the young.

Okay. That's all. But we should really elect this guy.

Ease My Mind

2003-08-27T03:39:31Z

Life. It's such a funny word, an innocuous sounding little thing that is somehow supposed to encompass the interconnectivity of all "unwavering bands of light," as Vonnegut put it. It's something of a cruel and unusual task to set upon the shoulders of such a frail and short-syllabled word, and too often we lash out at it out of fear, out of depression, out of anger, out of hatred.

I am nearing my nineteenth birthday. I've survived one full year of adulthood through a careful practice of plausible deniability and half-acknowledged truths that allow me to merrily go about my business while studiously ignoring the raven of reality perched on my shoulder, pecking at my brain. It's ironic that we primarily prolong our lives through ignoring them. Too much acknowledgement of our own mortality leads to a lack thereof, which is why it has always been better to lurk in that dangerous state that is willful ignorance. It isn't enough. Like Morn Hyland, I am searching for a better answer.

I suppose I, and all of us really, have been unconsciously conducting this search for some time now. We subconsciously cry out for meaning, value, and purpose in our own respectively puny ways, dreaming of questions that need answers and answers that need questions. I think the hardest part of this near-futile task is we all appear to be conducting in contrast to all others. Everyone else seems to have their proverbial shit together while we quietly and courageously fall apart at the seams. Everyone else seems to fit. Why don't I?

It can seem like a cruel joke, at times. We've all been tossed onto this pickup truck called life, but everyone else seems to have gotten their instruction manual while ours has gotten lost in the mail somewhere. We emit tiny, controlled distress signals that nobody else seems to pick up on and we inwardly curse ourselves for having them, for questioning ourselves, for being aware of our lack of awareness...for knowing that just pretending not to know won't suffice forever.

Unfortunately, all our individual gropes at the "answer," that mythical solution that will bequeath us with understanding and purpose, seem to result in abject failure. It flits out of reach, slipping out of our hands like a bar of soap, skittering off to where we will never find it. It can drive someone mad. It has, in its way, driven me mad. But it has also made me realize something. I'm not the only one doing this. I'm not the only one who desperately needs something that doesn't seem to be there. Across the world, everywhere I really look, I can see them. People who want the better answer, just as I do. And so we form a web, a net of solidarity, of camaraderie, of unified determination. Everyone says that it's impossible to truly understand one another. They say that we lack the fundamental connection required for any sort of universal comprehension. I'm beginning to believe that that may be bullshit. I'm beginning to believe, period. I think we are unified through our collective will to mean, to understand, to matter, to be. And through this collective will, something is created. Some sort of answer.

And it may be that we never know the answer. But I don't think that matters. It's not the answer that's important, in the end. It's knowing the question...and knowing that everyone else is asking that same question. We may already know all the answers. But it's the question that we've got to get right.

And I think we can.

Sit this one out.

2003-08-19T18:22:23Z

The POTATO has BIG KNOCKERS!!!!

The Diatrabe of Redemption

2003-08-14T05:16:43Z

There's something to be said for wooden owls. They don't run away when you throw metal rings with spikes at them and you can use them to prop up a glass of water (or, I suppose, Jim Bean) that lacks propiness itself, and most importantly it scares the Gamma Rats away.

The interesting thing about Gamma Rats is their extreme fondness for female politicians. The best way to catch one is to imitate a phone book, and the best way to upset one is to enter politics. DO NOT SHOW FEAR, VISA CARD.

Isn't unplugged just another way of saying not plugged in? And if so, what does that say about our current financial system?