Happy Holidays.

I thought I would take advantage of Christmas off to pay some bills and stuff. I can't, though, because every bill I have is on a website, and every website is trying to keep me secure by making me have a username and password, and requiring weird things from my password (one big letter, one small letter, two punctuation marks, the numeral 7) so I can't remember them. They also all need me to answer questions like, "what is your favorite food?", which I can't answer in real life, so who knows what I said if they asked me that once before. You don't need to be so secure that I myself can't get in, websites. You don't even need to be close to that secure. If someone else wants to go online and pay my cell phone bill, that's fine.

Live fast die young and other options.

Maybe you live until you have had enough experiences, and then you are done.

Most popular video game.

Here is the new idea for your video game productioning:
Two players. One is a James Bond character (perhaps Codename: Pink Grapefruit) who has been working secretly for the government for years, but support is lagging so he is being dragged out to be on televised fake missions with fake guns on sets. Player 1 needs to control him and be dramatic and ridiculous and a tad realistic. Tricks and timing. Player two controls the camera. So bad playing means 1 can't see. Also I am imagining the edge of a moon set or a boom pole in frame. Scoring will be accomplished by streaming live to internet; a simple viewer count.

Brain drop.

So, yes, this past summer, my hard drives died, and now all my work from my life is missing. It sucks. But it doesn't make my stomach drop in the same way that it does every time I put my hand in my front left pocket, because, up until about two weeks ago, I had a little pink moleskine notebook in there full of ideas and doodles. About two weeks ago it disappeared. Not only have I lost all of my ideas, but I know they're out there somewhere. It has my phone number in it, but it's been a couple of weeks, so I am finally conceding it, and putting a new notebook in my pocket. I'm sadder about it, though, than I have been about anything in a long time. I feel like I lost a part of my brain. I feel like some stranger somewhere probably has a part of my brain.

Proof that every worthwhile director scores his or her own films.

In the form of a list:

Robert Rodriguez
John Carpenter
Herschell Gordon Lewis

I want this so badly.

Someone needs to make a website. Someone needs to make a nonprofit with a website. Someone needs to make a nonprofit called, "The Why Is It Terrible Institute" with a website called, "Why Is It Terrible" (might I recommend wiit.org). This website will be a curated list of what the institute can dig up on every business, so when a consumer is considering spending his or her money somewhere, she or he can jump on and see which businesses are the least harmful to the world.

The website would log businesses that have been searched for, and research any new ones, and also users could submit news stories or things they've heard, but the Institute would have to verify everything, because this will be a source of valuable information, not libel.

Seriously, do this.

Here is a song for your indie rock band.

"I Only Have Eyes for (John) Woo".
It should mention Face/Off.

In the shadows of Shareware.

I have decided that the reason I am inclined to software piracy is that I was raised in the era of Shareware. I hear it still exists, but not in the form it did as I was a budding computer user when there would be dudes at expos and little boxes at Radio Shack and even 4.25x11 newsprint catalogs mailed to your house selling one or three 3.5" floppies attached together with a cardboard band carrying an entire game for a dollar fifty. You could even get them free from bbs's, but that, I thought, lacked the charm.

Some of my dearest computer related memories are Shareware. Hexxagon. Blake Stone. Jazz Jackrabbit. Epic Pinball. Castle of the Winds.

Shirts say Stantz.

I was just walking around Target hoping they'd have Halloween shirts (which I did not find). They always have a rack of shirts with things they think I ought to be nostalgic for printed on them, and one of the options I saw today was Ghostbusters uniforms on a shirt, but there is only one design, and it says "Stantz" on the name tag. It seems weird that they'd decide which Ghostbuster you can be.

Good luck.

Perhaps this is a bit late in life, but I just realized for the first time that an appropriate synonym for "ass-hole" would be "burro burrow".

Use that for something productive.

Purely scientific observations on myself.

Frequently I am unemployed. At the moment I am at the end of a two-week period of waiting for a job I just got to start, so for the last several days I have been just floating, trying to not spend the very little money I have. Mostly I am in or walking around near the condo. My circadian rhythm has been shifting, and I have been letting it, I think, for science and curiosity and lack of deterrent. I seem to be going to sleep and, consequently, waking up between half an hour and forty-five minutes later each day.

At first I thought I was cycling. My rhythm seems to be slightly longer than the earth/sun's, so I figured I would drift out of synch with the world and then, given enough time, back in and through again. I am not given enough time, however, and am just sliding into the nighttime, which makes me think that I have no reason to assume that my rhythm is pushing me around and not just shifting me into another place. Perhaps I'm naturally drifting into the dark and quiet hours, since they seem to be when I am the most comfortable walking around. Perhaps I'm just disappearing from the daytime world.

A new thought occurs to me, though. When I am awake, I am busy. I am working on projects, I am doing crosswords, I am reading, I am watching a movie, I am cooking, I am thinking hard while out on a walk, I am exercising. When I am asleep, I am busy. I am dreaming of walking and thinking and creeping and peeking and leaping. It is that one long twilight moment, when I have ceased to fidget and figure, when I am waiting for sleep to take me, that I am lonely. It is the only part of the day where I can feel how alone I am. Maybe I am just putting that moment off every day. Just pushing it back, and that's causing the drift.

I would like to propose.

I would like to propose a Saw prequal. It would be the story of some total jerk's battle with cancer.

And lo.

Letting nostalgia beat out practicality is an act of privilege.

Hero or villain.

I would like to see a hero or villain whose powers are determined by the doubts of people. He or she would be able to do anything that people were actively doubting he or she could do. So the only way to accomplish things would be to convince people that he or she could not, to start small and work up, doing things secretly and failing at things publicly.

Maybe the best use of this is a video game where the use plays this person as a supervillain. The player would have to balance wins and losses to get better.

There is a beverage store in my dreams:

I go there quite frequently. It is a giant warehouse in the midst of a strip, across from a building with lights that has been, at times, a motel and a restaurant. The warehouse is cinderblock and orange, and it contains aisles and aisles of all kinds of beverages.

First assignment.

Your first assignment is to send me a video. But don't fret. You can do it.

I am asking for any kind of video. And by any kind of video I mean nice looking hd video, I mean something off a vhs tape, I mean an animation, I mean a series of ten photographs and two minutes of recorded dialogue, I mean three sketches you made sent to me in the mail and you call me on the phone and I record you reading your script. I want everything.

Your scene is an interaction between Patrick and Camilla. Or a few short interactions. Patrick wears a red shirt, or if he's topless he's painted red or really sunburned, or if he's a bird he's a red bird. He's identifiably red. He likes dinosaurs. Camilla is similarly identifiably yellow. She is probably holding a carrot. They may be in whatever setting you choose, and their interactions may consist of anything you choose.

I also would like a shot of you saying your name in the same format as your submission.

Notes (I just found) from my trip to shoot Lincolns.

On the flight to DC, the two women I sat next to smelled like Camel cigarettes. One of them gave me strawberry-banana gum.
A couple, Jonathan and Sam, offered me a ride from the airport to wherever I was going.
The room next door to the Lincolns was housing a Green Seminar.
Some of the Mary Todds were pretty hot.
My life doesn't make any sense.

My impossible crushes.

Thu Tran
Diane Rehm

Both my external hard drives died.

I have lost all the things I have ever made. Videos, digital photos, musical scores, music, words I've written. Also all of the music I listen to. It is a time to reset my life.

Too hip for good posture.

It is an issue.

My new tagging name.

My new tagging name is "Joe Bitin'"; I only write on other peoples' tags.

We're starting a band.

Let's start a metal band and call it Brutal Souza.
Our first album can be called Marching Orders.

I demand more customization.

Someone needs to start a company that makes all-white (or, eventually, maybe, pastels) appliances. All the important information (like the names of the buttons on the blenders) would be on those stickers that say 10:10 on new digital clocks, so the consumer can peel them off. The same company would have to sell a variety of paint markers in colors and sizes, and people would decorate all their own appliances.

Why am I not yet a college professor?

Selections from my course catalogue:


The Culture of Garfield.
A study of both: the representations of Garfield presented by Paws, Inc. and Jim Davis, including the comics, the cartoon, the recent films, and the merchandise; and the representations put forward by other artists, such as Garfield Without Garfield, the Garfield Randomizer, and various mashups that have been made with Garfield and Wolverine, or Garfield and He-Man.

Symbols and Abstractions.
We will look into the use of iconography in our culture, particularly in business and advertising. We will also consider the creation of our written language and discuss letters as abstractions rather than constructs (as provided by a font)*.



*When we learn initially, we often try to get the whole concept as quickly as possible and skip past the phase wherein we appreciate the abstract qualities of language.

Sometimes, and please do not ask me why.

Sometimes.
And please do not ask me why.
(I am not sure I even know.)
I miss being lonely.

Double features in which an actor could be playing the same character.

Double Feature: Rushmore, I Heart Huckabees
Actor who could be playing the same character: Jason Schwartzman
How much I would enjoy watching this: About seventy-five percent. One hundred percent at first, and fifty later.

Double Feature: Anatomy of a Murder, Road House
Actor who could be playing the same character: Ben Gazzara
How much I would enjoy watching this: So, so much.

It should be huge.

Why is there not a black market for senior/disabled metro cards?

Skelebration.

Skelebration.

the newest sport

Freestyle sleeping.

Time Manifesto

I will live eternal. To me, there will be no end. My approach to ensure this will be: I will create. I will not slow down. I will drop out of the flow of time. I will dream.

I will create art and rhetoric and friendships. I will create goodwill. I will create memories in those around me and artifacts in the world around me. These things will endure. I will place my print, cast my shadow on the consciousness of culture (of the world itself).

I will not live fast and die young; I will live fast and never die. The more perpetual my motion, the faster the speed I can maintain – the more slowly time will flow for me, the longer my relative time on earth.

I will, as often as possible, drop out of the flow of time. Whenever I can work hard enough or play hard enough or love hard enough to step out of the timeline to which more mundane practices are confined, I will do so with all of my being. Every instance, every moment of this, provides me with a new eternity in which to dwell.

Finally, I will dream as often and as richly as I am capable, because it is through dreaming that I can accomplish the tasks I have laid out for myself. It is dreaming alone that will allow me eternal life.

Surviving is not enough.

Surviving is not enough.

the solution to a culinary issue that arose in a dream i had last night

Graham cracker falafel with tahini-style peanut butter sauce.

Also it could be called

Also it could be called "Perfunctory Revelations".

Happy New Year