I shall do nothing to counter the near irrepressible wave of mounting hysterical realism other than embrace it.

   —nfp

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake Gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

   —Tristan Tzara, from 'Dada Manifesto on Free Love and Bitter Love', (c1920)

. . . let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory . . .

   —André Breton, from The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930

   . . . It is only by making evident the intimate relation linking the two terms real and imaginary that I hope to break down the distinction, which seems to me less and less well founded, between the subjective and the objective. . . . I intend to justify and advocate more and more choice of a lyric behaviour such as it is indispensable to everyone, even if for only an hour of love, such as surrealism has tried to systematize it, with all possible predictive force.

. . . What is strangest is inseparable from love, presiding over its revelation in individual as well as in collective terms. Man's and woman's sexual organs are attracted to each other like a magnet only through the introduction between them of a web of uncertainties ceaselessly renewed, a real unloosing of hummingbirds which would have gone to hell to have their feathers smoothed. . . We will never have done with sensation.

   —André Breton, from Mad Love (L'Amour fou), 1937

How militarists view the world: the Evolution of Warfare (concise nfp edition)

0^d generation warfare:

  The ape fight scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey

1^st generation warfare: Naploleanic; use of line and column on a linear battlefield; direct fire.

2^nd generation warfare: Prussian; still linear but with a heavier reliance on indirect fire; heavy firepower replaces reliance on massed manpower; still practiced by most conventional forces (including US).

3^rd generation warfare:  German-blitzkrieg; first truly non-linear tactics; attacks reliy on infiltration to bypass and collapse the enemy's combat forces rather than seeking to close with and destroy them.

I

In February, the Middle East Media Research Institute published excerpts from an article it found on a now-defunct al-Qaeda Website, Al-Ansar: For the Struggle Against the Crusader War. The article, "Fourth-Generation Wars" by Abu 'Ubeid al-Qurashi, was pseudonymous, but intelligence sources tell Insight that the writer is a figure of significant stature within al-Qaeda and should be taken seriously. He openly acknowledges the 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article (above), embraces the principles advanced therein and says, "This new type of war presents significant difficulties for the Western war machine."

—Scott L. Wheeler, "Terrorist Tactics for War With the West," Insight on the News, January 6, 2003

5th generation warfare??  The Animatrix?

What is the Animatrix ?

What's the alternative to evolving militaristic warfare?  Peace?  No!  Peace is the absence of warfare-not an alternative.  The alternative, when peace eludes mankind, is non-evolving warriorfare :

Since last Thursday when I blogged:

The true warrior must take responsibility for his or her entire world.  The whole world.

...I have gone onto post a torrent of graphical incitements to include: Relax and Doodle, the Internet Landfill, the Electronic Dildo, and xanga without borders: RIOT.  Now, if that ain’t taking responsibility for the world, then I have no clue.  Actually, the World (which is also my world—strange how that works out) has seemed pretty stressed lately with all of its war-jargoning seriousness.  So presenting those graphical interludes was just my way of decommissioning myself (and my world) through curious diversions into a state of more wondrous OM.

Now ponder this:

money? women? nudity?

(better seen here)

A controversial note, this Silver Certificate was part of an ‘educational series’, with this particular one entitled ‘Electricity as the Dominant Force in the World’.  It was deemed 'inappropriate' for the era's young, impressionable American children due to its 'shocking' portrayal of a bare-breasted (tit-action), thong-less woman/angel symbolizing light-shedding Liberty. The note was quickly removed from circulation.

Daamn!  Didn’t they understand that ‘Electricity’ so glorified was an inspirational metaphor for the dazzling light of the feminine mystique?  Didn’t they understand that ‘taking responsibility for the whole world’ also means electrifying it with uplifting beauty and passion?

I say that now is the time to reissue just such currency.  And make current again the power of the Goddess in our worldly deliberations.  Or is Oil now ‘the Dominant Force in the World’ ?

I hate oil.  It’s too old: it’s a fossil and grimily wreaks of the past.  Give me a clean, fresh breeze for power and vigor, instead.  Give me, rather, the radiant beams of sunlight that terrify the dying null of night and gleam the glow of cascading life. 

“Aha”, you shout, “but sunlight, by your own blog, might be drunken over a million years expanse.  So if you hate ‘old’, hate it.”  

It’s true, sunlight may be drunken and old from our perspective, but since it travels at the speed of light (duh!) , the Lorenz transformation, from its own perspective, has diminished its drunken preamble to a dainty dash and the time required to traverse its dash to a near-timeless smidgen.   No, no, no, I hate oil!

And I hate even more the prospect of war in the lands of oil.  Yet war now seems almost inevitable because:

1) Saddam is guilty: the burden’s on him to prove himself clean and in compliance—which he’s chosen not to do.
2) The UN (not just US) maintains that he’s deceptively unforthcoming and not disclosing, and hence, in mortal violation of formal commands.

Conclusion: the bastard’s hiding his instruments of mass death.

War could be avoided if:

1) Saddam comes clean and says: “Oh, man,—you mean all THESE  prototypical artifacts of infidel mass destruction?!”
2) There’s a successful insurgency arising from within to topple Saddam.
3) Saddam experiences an act of “extreme prejudice’ (assassination).
4) Saddam dies in an actual accident or from natural causes and the resulting instability allows for full disclosure.

Just before ‘old style’ war is declared/engaged, if the American Administration is interested in my full support, I’ll require:

1) A convincing presentation of some of the evidence that the Administration says it has ‘proving’ that Saddam still has the lethal weapons that he’s used in the past but now disclaims ownership of.
2) A general explanation of why insurgency and guerrilla warfare efforts encouraged and supported by our Special Forces were and would remain ineffective alone in toppling Saddam.  How much time, money, and effort were spent?  In other words, did we really make a genuine effort to avoid a conventional war by pursuing this alternative?
3) An account of intelligence attempts to assassinate Saddam and why they have failed.  How many attempts were made?  How many of Saddam’s doppelgangers (doubles) were killed instead?  How many of ‘our’ assassins were compromised or lost their lives in these attempts?  In other words, did we really make a genuine effort to avoid a conventional war by pursuing this alternative?

I hate fucking oil.  And fossil fool, thy name is Saddam.

But don't let me dominate the melee...go here to RIOT !

Here's What the Internet Really Needs!

Clean up the Web with the Digital Landfill !   Dispose of your unwanted e-mail, obsolete data, HTML, SPAM or any other digital debris just by clicking here--> Add to Landfill . All refuse is automatically layered into the Digital Landfill composting system.

Click View the Landfill <-- to sift through the virtual compost created by the Landfill, a fertile source of ideas for artists and web designers.

p.s.  Xanga makes good fertilizer!

Relax and doodle! 

The true warrior must take responsibility for his or her entire world.  The whole world. 

And as in the world, thus also within.
Tat svam asi--That is thyself.

Thus is the war first waged in the heart and soul of the warrior, the interior-cosm, reflecting the cosmos itself.

Consequently, the warrior who conquers himself/herself has already achieved a victory comparable to conquering a thousand of the enemy upon the battlefield.

Conquer thyself and awaken to proclaim "Hoka Hey!  Today is a good day to die."
      Crazy Horse, chief of the Oglala Sioux

Weapons are tools of violence,
Not of the sage;
He uses them only when there is no choice,
And then calmly, and with tact,
For he finds no beauty in them.

Whoever finds beauty in weapons
Delights in the slaughter of men;
And who delights in slaughter
Cannot content himself with peace.

So slaughters must be mourned
And conquest celebrated with a funeral.

    Tao Te Ching, Chapter 31

The true warrior is forever unknown.  And all the awards and medals for heroism and valour bestowed thereafter are but beads on a baby's bracelet.

As much, or more , than anyone here on xanga I have vociferously protested against the fundamentalist arab terrorist threat since the great awakening upon nein ee! leaven. 

But I'm forced to conclude that given this:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Wednesday dismissed French and German insistence that "everything must be done to avoid war" with Iraq, saying most European countries stand with the United States in its campaign to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to disarm.

"Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem," said Rumsfeld, a former NATO ambassador.

that the Bush admistration, in its current reckless posture, is, even if ultimately vindicated by yet unprovided evidence, a pack of hedonistic, diatribing, political self-absorbents.  Yes, they are super-power super-absorbing tampons yearning to suck blood that I'm not yet willing to let. 

So fuck you Bush.  Fuck you Rumsfeld.  And Powell, you're but a handmaiden.   And Rice, you chance, at most, a stance as a token whore.  And if any, or all of you, were to meet me on the battlefield on the eve of an encounter with a truly mortal common enemy, I'd pray for the imminently quick and painless sacrifice of your souls.  For little more worth could you prove to the cause of a true warrior--which is peace--than to die to avoid all war at all costs short of losing a war.

I’m gonna foam-a
at da mouth
cause the gossypiboma
took me south…

The critical news reports and lawsuits may help explain why, in the language of medical journals, surgical tools sewn up inside people are not lost, forgotten or left behind; rather, they are "retained," almost as if the patient had chosen to hang onto them.

"It is kind of a euphemism," Dr. Gawande said. "It implies a certain lack of responsibility, or that the instrument did it itself. It is the technical term of art, undoubtedly developed in the malpractice context."

The profession has coined a word for a left-behind surgical sponge: gossypiboma, from the Latin word gossypium for cotton and the Swahili boma for "place of concealment."
—Denise Grady, "Forgotten Surgical Tools 'Uncommon but Dangerous'," The New York Times, January 21, 2003

I am the future face of air terror.  It’s the gossypiboma, the plastik sponge bomb within me.  The one they missed at airport security even though some small change in my pocket set off the alarms and they repeatedly wanded me down.  Hell, even my new running shoes alarmed repetitively as if there was a knife hidden in them—and they checked, but they were clean, of course.  But it’s the sponge bomb they missed.  The one implanted deep within my gut and remotely triggerable by radio signal.  By the little, transistor radio-like thingie I carried on in my handbag. And, oh yes, did I mention the demented doctor who implanted the bomb, also enwrapped it in a plastic-sealed bag of the bubonic plague?  He used to do tummy-tucks of cocaine for the Medelin Cartel but now he’s one with Allah.  He knows it ain’t a total science yet, but figures there’s a fair chance that as my body blows a hole in the plane’s fuselage, the plague will get jettisoned airborne over my departure or destination city.  What city?  Now that’s not a fair question.  I’m an equal-opportunity terrorist and would hate to see you personally miss out. 

with just pinkies intertwined we lay down side by side
under summer stars, in a cemetery, to watch the world swirl
far away from the bare touch of our share.
life takes to life—and now look what i’ve found.

i think: if the stars could fall,
they’d fall as i do into love:
not out of the sky, but into each other.
but it is the night that falls and not the stars.

darkness into darkness gathers
across the scape of crypted land
as I snuggle into the warmth that you provide
and likewise you unto the man of me.

our closing moments suddenly seize eternity by the balls—
oh my god, no, that was your  hand!
ha ha ha what are you doing, dear?
don’t stop…don’t stop…don’t stop…

the cemetery surges:
while spirits rise,
the frenzied scent of heated love decants
across the shaken firm of earth.

yet for all the eruptions of rapt emotions,
our pinkies remain entangled
like the strands of ivy clinging to the embedded tombstones
over which we roll, and roll, and roll…

it’s then that I realize
that we’ll never, never again be apart—
for even death as a voyeur unearths upon our thrill
and these damned ghosts are already clamoring for an encore.

and so like good actors upon a stage, we oblige and bow
once again in perpetual animalistic unison,
with the trail of stars overhead too much confused
yet our pinkies still, and now forever, entwined.

Despite the fact that one of xanga's most distinguished coding gurus (seanmeister) has a pronounced browser preference for Mozilla (and its variants: Netscape 7, Phoenix 0.5, etc.), Internet Explorer (5.x and 6.0) still reigns supreme as king upon the xanga-browsing hill:

Xanga is optimized for use on a PC using Internet Explorer 5.0.

Xanga Premium xTools is optimized for the Internet Explorer browser on PCs. The PC Internet Explorer software lets us do some neat things that Netscape and even Macintosh Internet Explorer browsers simply do not support.

  --the XangaTeam

Another area where Internet Explorer provides functionality that Mozilla doesn't is in displaying scriptlets that are included within a web page.  What's a scriptlet?  Just a web-ready DHTML page that provides for various application controls.  But one big function it enables is the inclusion of other-sourced URLs within the xanga post.  Think of this as displaying external, already-made, non-xanga content within the xanga post.

My post below from Saturday is such a scriptlet-include.  If you can't see it, it's likely that your either using a browser other than Internet Explorer and/or your security settings are too high and/or your browser isn't permitting java display. 

Another example of this include-scripting was my "Best Blog of 2002" post where the external, already-made, non-xanga content within my xanga post was your xanga post! 

Yet another current example from another xanga user is woodnymph's 'virtual sketch' utilizing the same external java drawing/handwriting/emailing applet that I used for my Saturday post.

The coding is simple and straightforward.  Two variants are displayed below: the first one displays a window without a scrollbar; the second one provides for a right-side scrollbar.

1:</p> <p><OBJECT id=Scriptlet1 type=text/x-scriptlet height=500 width=650><PARAM NAME="Scrollbar" VALUE="0"><PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="http://www.eigelb.at/HP/Links/Handwriting2_1/Show/Show.php?IDA=233734651024"></OBJECT></p> <p>or</p> <p>2:</p> <p><OBJECT id=Scriptlet1 type=text/x-scriptlet height=500 width=650><PARAM NAME="Scrollbar" VALUE="-1"><PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="http://www.eigelb.at/HP/Links/Handwriting2_1/Show/Show.php?IDA=233734651024"></OBJECT><br />

To utilize either of these:

1) You must paste one (include everything from the beginning OBJECT tag to the ending OBJECT tag) of them into your xTools with the 'Edit HTML' box in xTools first checked.</p> <p>2) You can change the 'id= ' name to anything you want or leave it as is.</p> <p>3) The current 'height= " and 'width= ' are optimized for my page for the Saturday display. You can vary these to match your specific needs. But avoid using '%s', i.e., 'width=60%', in place of absolute pixel specifications as the resulting display on the 'comment page' will be hideously foreshortened.</p> <p>4) The "Scrollbar" VALUE="0" provides no scroll bar while the "Scrollbar" VALUE="-1" provides a scrollbar.</p> <p>5) The "URL" VALUE=" " is where you place the URL reference of the web page you want to include. Make sure to include the http://... between the double-quotes (double-check if you cut and paste because sometimes the double-quotes 'disappear')! Also, never ever include your own private page (http://www.xanga.com/private/home.aspx) for this will create a recursive effect that will send your browser into an infinite oblivion of intractable looping (Believe me, you do not want to try this.)

There it is.  But remember: Mozilla-browser users won't see your display.  So either you just cut them short or feed them some text in addition to this OBJECT-scriplet to allay their sense of 'blindness'.

I just finished a 20 oz bottle of diet Coke and was about to toss the bottle into the recycling bin when I remembered about some guy who was building his own floating island out of empty plastic bottles.  I had seen a little blurb about him on TV a couple of years ago, had quickly forgotten the details, and had tried since several times to track down his endeavor by internet searches—with no luck. 

But today I typed “floating island of bottles” into Google and got abundant results.  It seems that the island has grown and that interest in it has grown also.  A handful of blogs were referencing it, but the best article was this one from the Sun. (More photos are available here)

A BRITISH carpenter who dreamed of living on a private sunshine isle built himself one using 250,000 plastic bottles.

Richie Sowa spent four years making the floating Spiral Island, which measures 66ft by 54ft, weighs 60 tons and has three sandy beaches.

The mangrove-covered paradise, which is anchored off the coast of Mexico, includes a two-bedroom house with a large living room and kitchen.

The walls are made from palm trees and the roof is plastic sheeting.

Richie hopes to make the island totally self-sustainable and is growing food including tomatoes.

Now it appears that a movie is being made about him and his adventure.  I bet that after the movie gets released, if it’s a hit, that a fad of building similar floating islands takes hold and that ‘floating island kits’ (including empty plastic bottles) become commercially available.

 The ultimate dream: make the island storm-worthy (largely by making it larger), make it self-mobile (turn it into a ‘ship’), and take it out to sea!  Hey, out in international waters, you’d become your own micro-nation!

aLRIGHT nOw everybody: start sending all your empty plastic bottles to me!!

If music reigned pre-eminent:

Amen, amen, I say to you: unless a man be born again

Of song and the holy rhyme

He shall not enter the kingdom of hymning.

                         Hymn, amen.

                                   Hy’men.

Behold, how beautiful is the erotic girl dancing...

But how even more erotic is the beautiful girl prancing!

I watched a bagel get guillotined this morning.  It was still bagelling even after is slithered apart. *gasp*

Scrambling eggs is tantamount to beating fetuses.  Eating scrambled eggs is equivalent to delineating your stomach as a jumbled mass grave.  I eat hard-boiled egss instead: one by one by one…

Solution to ‘scalding coffee’ lawsuits at restaurants: have a lid that first passes the coffee through a heat-sensitive chamber that will self-seal if the coffee is ‘too hot’, i.e., scalding, and will unseal when the coffee cools to a tolerable temp.

What’s the longest straw that you can drink through?  If the straw is ‘too long’, you’ll never pull the sucked stuff through.  Rather, it will keep going back and forth.  They call that ‘physiological dead space’ in respiratory therapy: if the breathing tube is too long, the patient will never get the oxygen, but keep on resucking old (and deadly) exhalant.  Has anyone ever heard of a straw-sucking competition?

Remember the song: One Is The Loneliest Number  ?
(Originally written and performed by H. Nilsson) 

One is the loneliest number
That you'll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It's the loneliest number since the number one…

That is so untrue!  The uniform distribution of digits of randomly selected numbers states that ‘one’ is no more or less ‘lonely’ than any other digit.  And, if you’re dealing with real world numbers that are socially or naturally related (not just purely, randomly contrived), then, according to Benford’s Law, ‘one’ is not only NOT the loneliest number, it is the most gregarious number of all!  The number ‘1’ ,as the first digit of socially or naturally related numbers, occurs actually about 30% of the time!  ‘Number 9’ is essentially the loneliest, occurring first only about 5% of the time.  So if you ever need to ‘fudge’ a set of 'realistic' numbers and want to avoid suspicion: ($234, $1256, $1690, $681, $16, $335, $47…there!)

But I'm at an entire loss as how to 'fudge' fudge (see: Fudge for Father's  Day) .

Hot dogs are a great meal for a guy who doesn’t know how to cook.  After all, they are already innately terminologically ‘pre-disposed’  as ‘hot’.  All he (the guy)  has to do is actually get them hot, and Voila!

   Hey, wait…strangely enough, that’s how some of these guys who can’t cook feel about women, too...

Warrior comments (of mine enhanced )...

I have a vision of a child in Iraq--and I pray  that she knows no war.  But I also have the love of my daughter here in America--and to prevent the tyranny of a war on our own shores that might victimize her, I'd personally, if necessary, wage a pre-emptive, relentless war afar at it's source.  Now is Iraq just such a bubbling source of imminently erupting havoc?  There is the touch point of current controversy...

left upon a MarcoPolo blog

But what does Osama bin-Laden smell like?? A camel, for escaping on one over the mountains into Pakistan like Hannibal on his elephants over the Alps? Gunpowder, for getting a close shave from the daisy-cutters (super bombs) that killed all the daisies but spared this weed? Irish Spring soap—I just had a psychic flash of Osama taking a shower and whistling "I’m Singing In the Rain." ?

Hot on the scent of a suspected terrorist? Darpa — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — hopes to give literal meaning to the phrase. It wants someone to develop a sniffing machine that can detect individuals by their body odor.

The idea is not as rank as it may seem. Dogs are said, at least by dog handlers, to recognize the scents of individual people. Researchers have found that mice can detect from body odor and urine how closely they are related to one another, a useful way to avoid inbreeding. So Darpa, the grand patron of exotic military arts (not everything it does works, but it did have a hand in creating the precursor of the Internet), is soliciting "innovative proposals to (1) determine whether genetically-determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals, and if so (2) to develop the science and enabling technology for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes."

With the high-tech identification industry going into full gear with machines that recognize fingerprints and scan the iris, why is Darpa messing with something as old-fashioned as B.O.? Dr. Gary Beauchamp, director of the Monell Chemical Sense Center in Philadelphia, notes that odors can be detected through just a handful of molecules. Also, unlike sight and sound, the smells from a fugitive can linger for hours or days.

—Nicholas Wade, "On the Scent of Terrorists," The New York Times, January 5, 2003

Can you imagine having the sensitivity of a mouse and asking your date to piss in a jar so you can sniff it before you take him/her home for... ?

Ah, this initiative reminds me of a favorite movie, Scent of A Woman, with Al Pacino.

Could we turn the gun of a potential terrorist-sniffing device into a plowshare of aromatic matchmaking?

So, what are you sniffing or would like to be sniffing today?

I’m still not exactly sure what happened this morning, but I do know that it was one of the worst times of my life and, at the time, seemed almost to be the end of it.

I awoke this morning with my right calf devastated by a charlie horse cramp that I had failed to awaken to in sufficient time to stem the damage.  Normally, you want to lift your leg up in the air above your head and wiggle your toes at the onset of such a cramp.  And normally I do.  But I had mysteriously slept through the cramp and woke to the pain in its aftermath, damage done.  Smarting badly, I hobbled into the kitchen, grabbed the bottle of painkillers, snatched one, and downed it.  But it was the wrong medicine.   Oh it was a bottle of painkillers alright, but it was a narcotic that I had never taken before.  And apparently, one I shall never take again since I seem to have severe side effects from it: Vicodin.  

Waiting for the med to kick in, with my calf still pulsing painfully, I hobbled on into the bathroom to soak in the tub.  The first 15 or 20 minutes soaking was all the comfort I was going have until about 2 in the afternoon. 

The ‘reaction’ started with a general light tingling all around and a little light-headedness.  I got out of the tub then, thinking not too much of it, and got dressed.  But shortly thereafter, while sitting at the computer, I began to perspire.  First, a little, and then more, until I was flush with heat and had to open the door and walk outside in a tee shirt into a freezing 18 F. just to feel a moment of relief.  And while standing out there in that cold, knowing that I should be shivering, but feeling instead like it was summer outside, I knew I was in trouble.

After about 5 minutes outside, I returned to the house and began again to sweat profusely.  And the lightheadness was intensifying, joined by a sense of restlessness, and slower breathing.  Fuck.  I was losing it.  I had to get out—it was just too hot to stay in the house.  So I hopped into my truck and started driving, having decided to drive down to the university and ‘walk it off’.  Right. 

A little over a week ago, I was running for hours under a noonday tropical sun.  Today, I found myself exhausted after climbing one flight of stairs at the university—and my muscles were starting to go limp.  Fuck.  I walked a little, then sat down—with no relief.  I went into a restroom and tried to induce vomiting.  But was unable to.  By that time, I was experiencing severe dehydration and was sipping at water fountains every five minutes till the point that I was bloated with water sloshing around in my belly.  What to do?   What to do?...

Beyond the unrelenting misery of these side effects, I thought and felt: I might die.  I imagined that it was possible that death was watching and saw me creeping closer to its portal, minute upon minute. 

I know what some of you are going to say:  Why didn’t I call 911?  Why not get help?  I don’t know how to respond to that except to say that the notion didn’t occur to me—perhaps because of my pronounced disorientation, perhaps because I still hoped that I could ‘walk it off’.  But I didn't, couldn’t walk it off. 

I was growing dizzier and flirting with sleepiness.  But I didn’t want to just lie down there at the university and sleep.  So I went back to my truck, having decided then that I'd be better off at home.  Once underway on the road, it felt like I was driving too slow, like it was taking forever to get home, even though I was maintaining the speed limit.  My sweating had relented, so I was hoping that returning to a heated house wouldn’t be discomforting.  The trip home seemed automized, like I had the truck on autodrive.  Smart truck that truck: conveying a dizzy, slow-breathing, nauseous dude homeward...

At home, I still felt overly hot, but not so severely as before.  However, I really started to feel strange otherwise.  I needed to lay down, to rest…to rest…  I wanted to sleep…but feared lapsing into a coma.  The charlie horse cramp earlier had seized me in my sleep.  I didn’t want death to surprise me thusly too.  I laid down, nonetheless, and looked at the clock: I had taken the pill 2 and a half hours earlier, it’s effects were rated for 4 hours—I calculated that I’d only need to stay awake another hour and a half for the effects to wear off. 

I closed my eyes and images of beautiful women, one after another, floated through my mind.  But they were all dead.  Perhaps these were the women of the cemetery I would often run around in.  And I thought: they are waiting for me to join them.  Had I taken two of those Vicodin (the allowable dosage) instead of just the one, they may not have been waiting for long.  But I was still waiting on ticks of the clock. 

And after a long, long hour of sleepiness checked by mental determination not to fall asleep, I started belching profusely.  And after 10 minutes of that, I started laughing: I was…feeling…well, better.  Suddenly.  And ten minutes after that, I was back on my feet, dressed, and ready to take on the day.

John, our hard-working, innovative, xanga CEO-type, sometimes cracks me up:

From :  
"John Hiler" <john@xanga.net> 
  
To :  
<notforprophet@hotmail.com> 
 
Subject :  
FW: Your Instant Update from notforprophet's Xanga Site! 

Apparently, you have readers in high places.

John 

-----Original Message-----

From: White House Mail Relay Autoresponder [mailto:White House Mail

Relay Autoresponder] On Behalf Of Autoresponder@WhiteHouse.GOV

Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 11:08 AM

To: subscriptions@xanga.com

Subject: Re: Your Instant Update from notforprophet's Xanga Site!

Thank you for emailing President Bush.  Your ideas and comments are very

important to him.

Unfortunately, because of the large volume of email received, the

President cannot personally respond to each message.  However, the White

House staff considers and reports citizen ideas and concerns. 

Yeah, so where are my damn eProps, Dubya?? 

Fundamentally, by my held namesake alone—notforprophet—I am an Islamic heresy and worthy of having my throat slit so that the dogs in the gutter where I’ll be cast can drink of my gurgling blood.

After all, the ‘Prophet’ was Mohammed, and if I’m ‘not for’ the Prophet, then I must be against him!  I must be the penultimate Infidel, the quintessential enemy to be brutally and tortuously butchered, whose possessions must be seized, whose women must be opportunized and defiled, whose pets must be barbecued alive and fed to hungry muslim babies.  Let the Prophet declare:

 "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. ...And slay them wherever ye catch them...."

   --Mohammed, the Koran.

He shall smite my fingertips so that I can no longer blog?  Oh shit!  I’m not going to take that with deliberative grace.  No, never!

In 624 AD (note how I even defile time by pegging it to the Christian calendar) , the Prophet announced the concept of the Jihad--the Islamic holy war.  Targeting who?  Well, who on the shifting sand dunes do you think?...

“Moslem jurists would later declare that there are two worlds: the world of Islam--Dar al-Islam--and the non-Islamic world--Dar al-Harb. These two territorial spheres, explained the Moslem scholars, are in a state of perpetual war. According to some Koranic interpreters, any leader who fails to 'make wide slaughter' in the land of the infidel is committing a sin. A statesman is only allowed the temporary expedient of peace if his forces are not yet strong enough to win.”

    --Howard Bloom, excerpted from The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History

Now in the epochal year 2003, I officially decree the founding of the perpetual mind-state of Isn’tlam with its core determination to wage a holy war of jijaw (Spanish j  pronunciation as in Jose ) during the holy month of RamSaddam.  My preliminary vision of this realm of Islamic non-fundamentalism was revealed here.  But having just shaken off the vengeful assault of Influenza type-A (for Allah, ricin-deriviative), I’m now possessed of inerrant energy to jijaw (heehaw) all jihads back down into their indigenously nondescript and storyless desert dusts. 

Smite my fingertips, will you, Prophet?  Nay, I shall seduce the virgin daughters of the daughters of your daughters to provide me delicious manicures as they render my blanket ripe with their precious peaches, pears, and plums.  And should my fingernails even ever show  wear, let it be known that my keyboard took its toll while  I was unrelentingly blogging the ideological crap out of this pretentious yet extremely dangerous politico-religious stance called ‘fundamentalist Islam’.

note: it's 4 PM and I'll likely be 'inactive' here for awhile...I need a break of forgetfulness and a taste of forever.

Bedridden mostly for the last 24 hours, sinking into and re-emerging occasionally from a feverish flu, I finally, at this very moment, have collected enough wit, energy, and clarity to compose a thought.

And that was it.

Visions.  The flu wracks the hell out of my body but almost always provides me with hallucinogenic visions.  So I find myself slipping between ‘reality’, lucid dreaming, and a fevered frolic.  I have been stomping on huge bugs that scream ‘motherfucker’ as I crush them to death.  I have been climbing a mountain where I could only see the single patch of dirt beneath my feet—nothing prior and nothing ahead except for deluding fog.  I was wirelessly drawing upon the internet without the intermediacy of a PC or communication device whatsoever.  There were a thousand conversations enjoined—but with whom?  There was someone who was lost, there was someone else who knew that I was lost, and then there were all the nondescript other characters just wandering into and out of a tête-à-tête. Someone informed me that the faerie Death was waiting just over a hill on the right.  But I didn’t explore that hill, I just sunk deeper and deeper UP my mountain until I ran out of earth and awoke.  Here.  But where in all of altered consciousness is ‘here’ ?

Which of these activities occupies more of your time: foraging for food or surfing the Web? Probably the latter. We're all informavores now, hunting down and consuming data as our ancestors once sought woolly mammoths and witchetty grubs. You may even buy your groceries online.

—Rachel Chalmers, "Surf like a Bushman," New Scientist, November 11, 2000

Information foraging theory...views humans as informavores, continually seeking information from our environment. In a sense we are foraging for information, a process with parallels to how animals forage for food. For both human and animal there are cues in the environment that help us judge whether to continue foraging in the same location or to forage elsewhere.

—Jason Withrow, "Do your links stink?," American Society for Information Science Bulletin, June 1, 2002

But if 'surfing' is akin to 'foraging', might not 'blogging' be akin to 'food preparation and dining'?! 

surfing:foraging :: blogging:dining ...

So we are, more aptly, blogavores . 

Well, I've only been a semi-blogavore lately as I've posted from abroad (the food preparation simile), but have done little commenting (the dining simile), yet have dined to surfeit on your comments.  A sense of balance now begs a redress.  So I'm off to feast on some of your blogs.  But don't bother with any table setting--since revisiting the jungle of Panama, I now tear into prepared dishes visciously with my hands alone.  *licks fingers*

There are times of healing when one must center oneself so deeply within oneself so as to seem non-existent to the whole rest of humanity.

January 1^st.  First words of the new year: I really want to stay in Panama.  And if I had a quarter-million $ devotable in a bank account, I would.  Forever.  Except for vacations, mostly back to the U.S., now and then.  And an adventurous excursion or two in the outback of Australia and the Amazon basin.

As it is, today is the first overcast, rainy day of my Panama stay and it is also the last day.  So fittingly, the more dower portrayal of the sky is corresponding to my reluctance to leave most appropriately.  And the tears of the clouds surrogately supersede my own unpeeling emotions.

But the opportunity to secure employment here that would furnish me comfortable financial means isn’t patent yet.  And lacking a currentially convertible nest egg of sufficient diameter and circumference, back to the cuckoo’s nest of previous stateside employment I seem remanded.  For now—and until my wings are strapping enough to sail me away once again.  And, perhaps, for good.

Jan. 2^nd.  I’m back in the States and in an utter state of displaced shock.  Is there a drug available to make this terrain seem more hospitable?

Jan 3^rd.  Okay.  Now I’m up to snuff in real-time but still feeling somewhat bereft of the pulse of life I tapped into down upon the equator.  You know, our summer has already began there and is slowly migrating northward miles-by-hours.  I have already tasted and drunk bountifully of our summer of ’03 to-be and am utterly mourning the withdrawal, by virtue of geographical displacement, of that savorable sensation.  I am almost certain to remain seasonally-incomplete unto time resumes my summer interrruptus  sometime about May or June.  The immediate outlook:  Yay!!!  I have the dubious opportunity to run circles in the snow once again in a cemetery replete with a conundrum of vanished essences.  hahahahaha.