Talked to my Grandfather on the Phone

he said i sound good. he said i sound like i'm about 50 years old.
i wonder what that means.

Stuff on the Side of the Road

driving out highway 71 (i think) there are little signs by the shoulder that say stuff like 'weird plants, 3 mi on left" and "rare cacti, succulents" and also "magnetic jewelry" for some reason. we stopped there on sunday, and they really do have weird plants and magnetic jewelry, and also bad prints in overpriced frames. we bought weird plants. they are cool. these are they.
This one's mine, one and two.
This one too, one and two.
This one is Stefanie's, it's really funky.. see.

plants are cool.

Things I Try Not to Say Over the Phone

i was having a pleasant moment's relaxation, pausing between farming and remodelling, thinking of making some food, when i was Disturbed by a phone call from some girl with a script, asking me to donate money to some Dead Pig foundation for the sad families left behind to, most likely (statistically speaking), recover from the physical and psychological abuse inflicted by an alcoholic wifebeater who was killed in the line of duty (or possibly slipped in the tub, or suffered a traffic jam on the triple bypass). as you can imagine, i was stunned and horrified. i told her i'd feel bad about donating and hung up before i heard what she thought of that.
i sat back down and tried to forget about it, but of course couldn't resist thinking of amusing things i could've said if she hadn't called me 'Mr. Reynolds' and mentioned the police in the same phonecall. i was thinking about how America has the greatest prison poulation per capita in the world when i suddenly stopped to ponder the idea of a prison population.
think about it. prison. population.
now imagine the world. six billion people, all divided into myriad categories and groups, all overlapping and intermingling. race, age, income, life expectancy, birth rate, what they see, what they think, how they feel, what they look at when they wake up each day, all spread around the globe in different places. and, within this global population, one of the groups is a prison poulation. in my mind, it shows up as a gray blob, like black-and-white people concentrated in little stationary blobs, while the technicolor world outside swirls around them. people in the prison population are locked in a cage all day long. and in America, the black-and-white to technicolor ratio is higher than anywhere else on earth.
pretty fucking awful, eh? anyone who doesn't think so is wrong, and i hope they learn why the hard way.
ahhh, i feel better now. i don't even wish harm specifically on that stupid girl anymore. instead, i hope she learns to read some day.

Things You're Not Supposed to Talk About

you might remember this from a long time ago: politics and religion are passe, sex and death are much better topics for inappropriate discussion in mixed crowds. it's in the same spirit that we present our topic for today: Self-Mutilation.
anyone who's tried it is probably familiar with a fascinating phenomenon: cutting yourself isn't nearly as bad as making yourself cut yourself. i believe that this is actually the critical issue involved. if you're sitting there with a razor, and you tell you arm to slide the razor through some of your skin, an interesting conflict occurs. the front, talky part of your brain (what's normally referred to as the higher functions of consciousness, the part you pay attention to things with) has decided on a course of action and attempts to energize the necessary neural connections to make your arm move in the proper ways. meanwhile, other parts of your brain, higher-level stuff that's involved in making connections so you actually know stuff about the things you think about, quickly realize the ramifications of these muscle movements, associate them with pain and wrongness and energize associated neural connections to prevent your arm from carrying out the plan. at this point, there is a balancing of forces which may last for only an instant or which could keep your frozen and staring at your hand for quite awhile. on one side, your primary consciousness has made a decision and is attempting to carry it out. on the other side, your secondary consciousness (i guess the Freudian term would be subconscious, not to be confused with unconscious) has found this to be a bad idea and is attempting to prevent the action. in physiological terms, the struggle is between different sets of neurons, both of which have indirect control of your arm. they are both energized along their paths towards your arm, and before either can make it there they have to pass some circuit which will only allow one signal or the other. one path is energized by your frontal cortex which has made a decision, and the other is energized by a lifetime's worth of conditioning and cultural information which indicates that the decision is wrong. whichever circuit can muster an adequate electrical charge first will be completed and its course of action carried out: slice yourself open or put the knife down.
obviously a pretty funky situation. not often is the decision-making process so visible, or the conflict between different functions of the brain so pronounced. this is interesting as it is, but the really neat part is seeing how the situation gets resolved. for an act of self-mutilation to occur, either the single decision to cut oneself has to overpower a very ingrained defense mechanism, or one's defense mechanisms must be degraded to the point that even the decision to cut oneself (which is not a very attractive choice in several different ways) can overpower them. this, of course, combined with the sort of morbid brooding on pain and death which suggests the idea in the first place, is why people suffering great depression are pretty much the only ones who do. happy people who possess massive willpower usually do something else, Aleister Crowley being a notable exception.
this bizarre inversion of the decision-making process explains why people actually get addicted to hurting themselves. it provides the satisfaction (and probably dopamine rush, although i don't know) of exerting your will in the face of opposition. you can triumph over yourself and the world that says that you shouldn't do such things. at the same time, you are defeating your own ability to take care of yourself, and undermining the process by which you realize you're making a mistake.
all considered (not here, written, but considered) i would say that the act of inflicting injury upon oneself is a fascinating and bizarre process which involves alot of your brain in ways you may not use it very often. it has the potential to profoundly alter the balance and structure of your mind. a very dangerous tool.

Books Fuck Me Up

Just a quick tip for anyone who has or might reproduce for some reason. Before you go encouraging your kid to read, consider the possible hazards involved.
Other than the obvious abuse and depression normally associated with being a nerd, geek or freak (which is probably good for you, in my opinion) there are serious neurological issues to think about. Reading alot during the developmental years can contribute to an overdeveloped prefrontal cortex and the advent of a little voice that has to analyze, critique and comment upon anything and everything that comes to mind. This can lead to anxiety, insomnia, melodramatic tendencies or excessive introversion, an inability to chill out and can interfere with one's sex life.
The psychological consequences of reading can be severe at as well. Take, for example, Tolkien Syndrome, brought about by reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy at a point in life when Middle Earth seems far more real and worthy than anything real life has to offer. This particular disorder is characterized by hopeless romanticism, dissatisfaction with humanity at large, ennui and a yearning for an epic cause that would elevate the sufferer from an ancillary role as a common villager to hero and main character of whatever story they are apparently trapped in.
These and other dangers await your child should they find they like books. Maybe it would be better to buy the kid a Playstation instead; it'd certainly help them to fit in a little better.

Waging War on God

...with organic robots piloted by unstable fourteen-year-olds.
Christianity looks awesome as an anime.

Amygdala

I don't know if I spelled that right.

edit: I did. Type it into Wikipedia for your daily dose of neurophysiology.

The Wal-Mart Event Horizon

Everyone knows Wal-Mart devours its competition, but no one has yet grasped the true seriousness of the situation.
The future: Wal-Mart continues to expand and diversify, evolving from Super Wal-Marts into Ultra Wal-Marts and Uber Wal-Marts, until finally the entire surface of the Earth is converted into seven Omega-Marts, one on each continent. Everyone will work for Wal-Mart, rent apartments from Wal-Mart, spend their wages at Wal-Mart. Pretty soon the Wal-Buck will be discarded completely and everyone will just have to eat at the complimentary employee's cafeteria and their only possessions will be their Wal-Mart uniform and nametag. They will live in Wal-Hovels and eat Great Value gruel, and everyone on Earth will be a Wal-Slave.
By this point, upper management will have become incestuous and demented and will probably actually all commit mass suicide some afternoon after lunch, but no one will notice and the Wal-Slaves will labor on in ignorance for hundreds more years, because the secretaries will simply keep taking messages and refusing to forward calls.

what's fascinating about this scenario is not its uniqueness, but rather the way that I arrived upon it in a completely aesthetic sort of way, and only then did I recognize its similarity to Douglas Adams' crappy-shoes-destroy-the-world scenario and probably alot of other things I'm too lazy to recall at the moment. In other words, um....

...whatever.