Second Dog Lesson

Chipper loves his squeakers.

He has a toy that resembles a fox tail. Not a literal fox tail, but the toy human children play with where a weighted ball is sewn in one end of a long sock. In Chipper's toy, the sock looks like a mink or a ferret, and the weighted ball is gone in favor of a squeaker-- sewn into both ends. Chipper starts by finding the squeaker (activated by squeezing or teeth chomping) and sqeaking it over and over again. He then tears into the fabric until he rips the squeaker free, and completely chews it into a silent, mottled, spitty piece of plastic.

Chipper has done this with every squeaker toy he gets, because he loves squeakers so much and is just trying to reach closer, still closer to them-- to grab the squeak and pump it like a heart, to have the squeaker until it is not only his, but of himself. This process, once begun, always results in the destruction of the squeaker. Therefore, there is no pre-emptive precaution to preserve the squeaker, except to never sqeak in the first place. And I can't get Chipper to promise to that.

First Dog Lesson

Chipper wants to play and Sawyer only knows how to fake fight. But his fake fight is just like his real fight, but Chipper doesnt know which kind of fight it is , and Sawyer is too scared to fight nice, then Chipper's play fight starts getting like a real fight because he's mad that Sawyer wont play any other way. And they both dont understand why I yell at them so meanly to knock it off when they are both still wagging their tails.

American Discontent

Why does Europe have better buildings? Does being around amazing architecture make laypeople smarter?

My Secret During a Poetry Reading in October

Forgive me, but your laugh is so loud

that I laugh less: a tactical counterpoint

to balance the space.

I try to dispell

resentments I may incur towards you

whenever your innocent gaffaws engender

the curtailment of my own amused yawp--

So I focus instead on the Buddha's

doctrine of negative action....

and choose to recall

how, after all, "the laughing Buddha,"

is too, a statue.

tech-love

We will not be as startled by the rise artificial intelligence as we once thought. That phase of human horror at the undead, the Frankenstein, and the robot is fading away each day now (link) as we work to normalize the uncanny. And what will soften this once-thought-of-as-threat is that our technology will develop as people develop. We would be alarmed if babies all of a sudden appeared and behaved just as adults. But they "develop" (you know, like software and hardware develops) and once they start talking and making decisions, we are ready for them to do so. We also love our babies, for the most part.

Like babies, iphones are gradually developing. Its not alarming to us now that our iphone "listens" and responds to our touch and voices. In fact, we are proud of the iphone! Did it just say what I think it did?! is our delight when we first engage with our upgrades. We giggle at its awkward voice, its answers (amazing if its right, endearing or frustrating if its wrong-- just like any infant). We are proud, because we love our iphones (link). I won't put quotations around love, because it does not need any qualification and it isn't ironic.

Also like babies, we have certain mysterious origin stories for iphones. The stork, or God, is responsible for children, and in a parallel formulation, Steve Jobs brings us iphones. God is dead, and humans are free to be and become. Jobs is dead. What will our devices become?

my roommate

I think if one was trying to figure out what makes a good person, they could get very confused and turned around. But maybe what is irrevokably nice... in an indefiniable way, that may be cross cultural, universal, and resonate with even alien species entertaining the same query... is tidyiness. Not in a stiff, depressing way and not in a look what I do, its a big deal and whats your problem anyway way-- but in the way that the person, whoever they are, takes care of the things they own and makes things clean even when they dont have to. Maybe its the only merit-making, and the rest is superfulous. Maybe its just Jess.

It amazed Ms. Kinman that she still awoke in the early morning time thinking of Harry. He was the single cause with a multitude of effects, the catalyst for Ms. Kinman's internal processes that continued to simmer and unfold for years after the initial event. Often times she considered herself as her own self-contained, self-perpetuated stove, or even an island star-- fixed in its own equilibrium of actions and reactions with no apparant relation to the world around her, save chance reminders of Harry that came from the outside like pre-daylight churchbells clamouring into her closed eco-system and startling her from sleep with messages of space, air, and tempo.

Something is wrong. Mizzie would think to herself for not the first, twenty-third, or even fiftieth time that day. The insidious notion was not borne from any intuition inside her. In fact, the absence of such as sense, an absence of worry or fear was precisely the genesis of the idea-- something is wrong. And from this something is wrong that liked to waft up from Mizzie's pillow in the morning time, an I feel nothing followed shortly after, perhaps simultaneously as its sister. The lack of emotion caused a certain inaction in its subject-- a no pressing urge to discover the sate of affairs-- only instead to passively acknowledge that something may be amiss and that this acknowledgment of unjustness, say, bred no feeling of paranoia or the least concern for Mizzie. In fact, she wanted to take a walk through the park to spell out what intuition told her that her absent intuition could mean, but just the thought of untangling what was looking more and more like a mass of previously unseen thistles, Mizzie felt sleepy. So much so, that her eyes closed and closed again as she tried to decide the order of her brain thoughts and how many doorways could something pass through before she lost sight of it completely.

I am wretched girl she admonished to herself. But the pathetic accusation, whether it stuck or not, on Mizzie's conscious had no affect on her morale. I am terrible loathsome un-awake creature. She added for good measure. Lazy too. Something turned over a little in her stomach. There, she then thought, some beginnings of a conscience. But she knew that wasn't right either.

For the record, I was sensitive and creative for a few days in November 2009.