Of Evil and Bus Stops

The bus stop was evil. I walked an extra five blocks every morning in order to avoid it. It was on the corner of 10th, and I would loop around the block to 11th, past the old empty Victorian house, and finally back to tenth where a non-evil bus stop resided. When asked what about it was evil, I came up blank. No upside-down pentagrams or dried blood adorned its walls--it was physically exactly as vile as every other public structure in the city. It had the same crooked blue pole and peeling out-of-date informative stickers.

Nor was it a gut reaction. No nameless fear or anything like that. I didn't feel any twisting darkness in my heart. It was just a knowledge, I guess. Solid to the point that one wouldn't really even think of questioning it. Like how I know soup is made better with the inclusion of salt.

I couldn't tell you why, but it was a property of the universe that the bus stop wished us all ill.

My friends tell me I'm anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, and that there's probably a disorder for that. I should look it up, they tell me.

I'm never actively afraid, you understand. I know it's evil, and it wants to get me, and so I don't like to be near it. But it is, after all, a bus stop. It doesn't exactly loom large on the scale of fine motor control, and I'm not the sort to believe in magic. An angry flea could do me more injury.

Still, it's hard to feel comfortable with it standing there out in the open. No sign or anything to warn people away. After my letters to City Hall were met with no response, I forced myself within the block to post signs of my own.

I guess people tear them down, after mocking me relentlessly in a combination of sharpie, pencil, and knife-scratches.

I guess people don't like those trying to keep them safe.

Of Crystalline Waters and Asking Why

Our last hope came in a wave. Not a metaphorical wave, I'm talking water and height and speed. They hid in the salt, tiny, fragile. Their bodies were crystalline, and they chimed when they touched. Communication through music, each too soft to hear on its own. They came in the trillions, and their coming was marked by a herald of sound.

We needed them. Our people were dying. Each one mutating, alone in a body they couldn't trust, shifting and cracking open with pus and blood and bile. Our people were dying, and we didn't know why.

We pleaded with our scientists, our politicians, our priests and our gods, and in the end we pleaded with the stars. We knew they were out there, somewhere. We had heard their music in the night, seen their shimmering forms in the light of the cosmos. We pleaded, and we cracked at the seams until the question was no longer if we would end, but how soon.

Our satellites still worked, our communication was sound, and for a long time we stayed in touch with each other--the diminishing dregs of our world. We swapped ideas, theories, asked ourselves why, por que, warum, keno, mbona.

The stars answered. They fell into our seas and oceans, like a rain of glitter. They waited in the night, waiting for the tide. Bonding with the water, they shaped it, gave it strength. Until they came at us in a wave.

Near the coasts the first of us were washed in water, carried on the surface as if all the saltwater in the world had become as dense as the Dead Sea. We tumbled, and feared, and some of us drowned. But when the waves subsided, those who could still speak spoke of their awe. The music had surrounded them, touched them in their core. They had bathed in the waters, and it had been cleansing, soothing, as no sea should be.

They came each day with the rising tide, again and again, washing the world clean. And those touched remained whole. Through the years, remained a person. Alive.

They stayed in our waters for a long time, becoming a part of our world so fully that our children scarce believed they had once been nothing more than music among the stars.

Po Po, take a gander

Ninaandika Kiswhahili

Siandiki huko sana. Pole sana. Nilisoma isimu ya lugha na Kiswahili. Si muda kwa kuandika. Pia, nililala na kuona Star Trek sana. Captain Picard anataka kusema na Daktari Crusher kwa sababu yeye anapenda Crusher.

Nitaandika! Kesho, nitaandika. Utaona.

FOOD

Robert made this tiramisu, and it's restaurant quality work. This shit is delicious.

Add that to perfectly broiled steaks, garlic mashed potatoes, and pancetta kale, and you have a dinner that wins. Wins in so many ways.

I've been snacking on the side dishes and tiramisu all night. I am so full.

Music?

I'm going to do something VERY RARE here and talk about music.

First: watch this.



The most recent Playing for Change music video, released for Bob Marley's birthday, is One Love. One of the groups that plays is The Exile Brothers from Dharamsala, India. Now, I never saw them play, but I often frequented the restaurant that they were affiliated with, and saw them around. I googled them up real quick and found their MySpace page. I'm a big fan of what I've heard. It's pretty chill stuff, but it's got a real power to it. They describe themselves thusly:

"Touches of the Doors mixed with Tibetan traditional instruments, Buddhist thinking, and the blues sewn together with dreams of being back in Tibet and physical and spiritual freedom."

Anyway, I recommend checking them out if you're into that sort of thing.

Another artist I've been listening to for a while is Andy McKee. He's ancient news, especially by internet standards, but if you haven't seen him play, well, he is fairly impressive, at least to a musical Luddite like me:



Sounds like a bit of a douche, though?

One last video to make up for a lack of original content!

Sense of Self

I had a fairly shitty day today, though I guess it started last night. These feelings have been building for a while, but just recently I've come to doubt my own character and integrity in a fundamental way. It's scary that I might not be the person I thought I was. That the people who know me might not consistantly tell me what they really think or that I might not listen when they do. I feel like I'm walking blind through the world, like I'm throwing out signals using technology I don't understand, and that I've never heard my messages played back.

This current perceived lack of self-awareness has made me interested in something I saw today on Boing Boing. To quote: "Since 1955, Jerry Davidson has obsessively written down everything he does during the day: visits to the store, telephone calls, meals, sex. Davidson has an impenetrable code, involving abbreviations and multiple colors of inks. A star on the top of a page means Jerry had a good day. Davidson never writes in the first person though, always in the third. He takes himself out of his experiences. His life is raw data."

I think this would be fascinating: to see myself through the data of my life. Of course, I would never create opinions of myself based solely on this data, but it could very well show me trends I normally don't perceive. It would be a way to look at myself through another filter, another lens, and would add to my collected knowledge of myself.

I would also be interested in other methods of developing self-awareness.

The lexicon and paradigm of sociolinguistics is slowly leaking into my life. Eli mentioned earlier today that a Spanish announcement on the bus didn't sound very announcementy, and my mind jumped to wondering about differences between unmarked speech in the register of announcements between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking speech communities. In this case I think it was just a poor recording, but I'm pleased that that's where my mind went. Maybe I'm actually getting a handle on this stuff after all.