self

Posted By iambarr on September 3, 2010

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: summer, word cloud, wordle

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Posted By iambarr on September 3, 2010

Category: Uncategorized, rant | Tags: 2010, baby, becca, family, friends, life, reflection, summer, thankful, wedding

so i must say, this has been a fantastic summer.

there have been issues, certainly. there were broken ribs (pain and breathing and waking up and more pain and hiccups and PAIN and addiction and withdrawal and PAIN) and a pretty little scar on my face as proof of devastation; there was an infection of the face; there was sickness, followed by more sickness, followed by more sickness, much puking, shitting, coughingsneezingwheezing, laziness, lethargy, and sloth; there has been a serious lack of funding for the month of august; there have been fights, complications, and general disappointments. at the moment, i’ve got poison ivy all over my body. it began on my arms and hands and sprung up quickly on my feet and legs. it’s been working its way inward for 5 days and i’m seriously afraid of where it will appear next. i think it’s fair to say that more has gone wrong this summer than at any point in my life in the past several years.

but it’s been absolutely fantastic.

i live in portland, maine, probably the greatest city in the known world. well, okay, maybe that’s a statement rooted largely in my ignorance of the known world, but it’s certainly my favorite city of my known world. big and small, menacing and comforting, beautiful and grungy, it’s the place i hope to call home for the rest of my life. i think that will be true whether i stay here forever or someday leave it behind. this is my home and i’ve come to love it so completely that it’s hard to imagine ever calling another place home. in this wonderful city, i’ve somehow wound up in the most beautiful living space i could ever hope to have. i’ve lived in many spectacular places, from the marvelous gutters of sanford’s only nason street, to the bland and wonderful richland suburbs of south portland; from the shipwrecked tower on valley street to the coziest shoebox on state street. but this spacious victorian cathedral on deering street has become more of a sanctuary than any other place i’ve ever occupied. it’s made more magical by the fact that i connect it with my 9 month (and counting) streak of unemployment.

this probably doesn’t come as a shock, but i simply cannot believe how swell unemployment is. it is probably the single greatest key to happiness that anyone could ever hope to find. i strongly recommend it to anyone. want to immediately reduce stress, blood pressure, anxiety, fear, worry, depression, and all the other terribleness of life? leave your job. seriously, just leave. okay, i understand that’s not really possible for most and not really advisable for anyone, but it worked for me. granted, i’m coasting on meager savings and money borrowed from the future (almost certainly a bad idea, of course), but i’m so damned happy doing it. really not trying to gloat here, just mentioning it thankfully as a major contributor to my awesome summer.

Much of my happiness is due to miss clapp, the swellest gal i could ever hope to share my life with. despite the difficulties and disappointments of the summer, she’s done so much to make it a cozy, comfortable, sexy summer that i can’t even imagine how i would have handled such painful weirdness without her. i’ll spare you the strange and wonderful sexual exploits of this summer, but i’m going to pause for a moment while i think about them.

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there are many things in my life that i can’t figure out what i did to deserve them. she’s at the top of that list, and i think probably will be forever. it’s hard not to think about forever in light of so many other events of this summer…

this summer marked adulthood in strange and varying ways for several people; the kind of adulthood i never really expected our little group to ever experience. we experienced the arrival of rose whitney jagger to rob and corinne. she is, in my little world, the first of the next generation and that thought alone blows my mind a little. so far, she’s still a strange and alien-looking little gremlin, but i’m told she’s actually quite cute. as usual, all i can see is a mixture of yoda, winston churchill, and lyndon johnson. but i’m a bastard. someday i’ll see a real human in there. i do have to admit that it’s made me really happy to witness the beginnings of their family. it’s an epic event in the chrisbarr cosmos.

this summer also brought the first wedding to the group and though i never thought i’d be happy for anyone getting married, i was actually pretty excited for them when it finally came time. the wedding was a much more formal (and fun) experience than i had expected and i’m truly glad that i was able to be a part of it. there was kissing and loving and eating and drinking and sexing and partying and dancing and drinking and talking and laughing and camping and puking and even a little bit of prisencolinensinonciusoling. overall, there was much rejoicing. along with the wedding, i was able to attend my first bachelor party. strippers? lap dancing? burying prostitutes in the nevada desert? not even close. it was actually way cooler. you see, we are geeks, so we played pinball. funspot arcade is the happiest place on earth. when i finally shed this mortal coil for a more appropriate robotic receptacle i would like to have my ashes surreptitiously deposited in the coinslots of the many classic pinball games in that beautiful mecca of arcade geekery.

then there was a bunch of other stuff that just sort of blew by in a crazy non-linear blur like kayaking in bridgton and backyard fires with much grilling and drinking and entirely too much ritilin, pot, and whiskey, the usual (and unusual) nights at the villa with pirates pinball, friends, pizza, and knob creek, and somewhere in there was a godawful sunburn of doom, lots of maker’s mark with becca, lego star wars & lightsaber duels & need for speed, long drives to bridgton and cape elizabeth and falmouth and freeport and places that don’t even exist on maps, so many wednesday morning breakfasts with chuck at brea leu and becky’s and hot suppa, countless hours of dr who (david tennant is so dreamy), and fireworks on the east end at a killer party, and eventful evenings and mornings of mice and bats in the house, a trip to frenchville to see alice in wonderland, and we passed our 3 year aniversary (yeah, seriously), and i even got to have my niece kim and my nephew ethan up for a weekend, and adam got married – little adam, can you believe it?, i installed ubuntu and spent hours working on computers and phones and game consoles only to be thwarted at every turn by my own technological curse, and a weekend visit to sanford that was actually amazing and rewarding (i’m not even joking here)..

and, sweet creeping gods, i’m sure there’s more..

but for now, i guess i’ve rambled as much as i want to ramble. the words are never as coherent on a page as i would like them to be, but at least i got them out. i guess the point of all of this was that i don’t ever want to forget how incredible this summer has been. someday, in the future, when the world has moved on and everything i now know is behind me, i want to remember how lucky i was, once upon a time. i love my little world and i’ve loved my wonderful summer..

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Posted By iambarr on July 14, 2010

Category: connections and things, video | Tags: cloudbusting, kate bush, ogronon, orgone, video, wilhelm reich, youtube

okay, so my wonderful girlfriend becca, who never runs out of surprises, turned me on to this video:

somehow, we got onto the subject of kate bush. i think it had something to do with a nick cave song, but i can’t honestly remember. this is why it’s a good idea to write things immediately after they happen. anyway, she wanted to show me a swell, powerful kate bush video and she picked the swellest, most powerful one she could think of. turns out that the original lacks the swellness and the power that she remembered. more on that later. the thing that blew my mind when i saw it was that i immediately recognized the title. i couldn’t quite remember where i had heard or seen it, but i knew that somehow, it was important. then, a few minutes into the video, i recognized it for what it was.

this video is a fucking fantastic mini-musical drama about the fall of wilhelm reich. shit, yeah. no overdone choreography involving bad dance moves and pop-music love stories. this is the real fucking deal and it involves a god-damned hero of psychology. some folks might say parapsychology (or even pseudo-psychology) and those folks should be stoned to death for their false belief in the inerrancy of the AMA and APA. fuck established medicine. what really attracted me to the video, aside from becca’s infinitely superior taste in music, is the fact that i’ve been to orgonon. it’s in maine. yeah, that’s right. while “it’s in maine” isn’t a phrase that can be applied to many interesting things, this fucking crazy mad scientist’s estate, complete with a mad scientist’s laboratory actually does exist in the greatest, most northeastern state. nate and rory and i went there a few years ago and it was a fucking fantastic introduction ot all things orgone. and yes, we saw cloudbusters.

as it turns out, the version that becca remembered as being incredibly powerful was the organon mix version of the song. i’d embed it here, but youtube has apparently degenerated into absolute shit over the past few minutes and i’m unable to do anything useful with it.

swell facts:
1. it is, in fact, donald sutherland who plays reich in the video.
2. the video is based on kate bush’s understanding of peter reich’s memoirs of his father, rather than on her knowledge of wilhelm himself.
3. it is very hard to say wilhelm himself 5 times in a row.
4. organon is an incorrect spelling of orgonon.
5. terry gilliam worked on, but did not direct the video.
6. reich was the last scientist in the u.s. to have his books publicly burned.

a lot of cool info here

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Posted By iambarr on July 14, 2010

Category: Uncategorized | Tags:

one step closer.

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Posted By iambarr on July 9, 2010

Category: connections and things | Tags: doom, id software, john carmack, robots, space exploration

so i’m quite often a few days behind, but this kind of rocked my socks this morning.

there are many things that simply can’t fail to excite me. space exploration, despite that it’s about 30 years behind where it could be, is one of these topics. robots, finally coming into the 21st century (thanks japan) are another topic that simply never ceases to amaze me. unfortunately, so far they’ve mostly been used for manufacturing labor and occasionally for fucking (thanks again, japan). although these scientific endeavors might be maddeningly medieval compared to where i feel they “should” be, i continue to feel the giddy twinge of adolescent expectation and boyhood amazement whenever something remarkable comes from either field.

not sure how i feel about the fact that its name is r2.
kind of feels like blasphemy.

several months ago, nasa announced its intention to launch robots into space. yeah, this is something that could have been done in the 70s or 80s, so it really shouldn’t be all that surprising or fantastic, but it is. it’s finally happening and it blows my fucking mind. robots in space. that’s fucking awesome. but it gets even better, i promise.

the company being contracted by nasa: armadillo aerospace
yeah that’s right. it didn’t mean much to me either.
until i found out founded armadillo.

it was this guy:

john carmack

so maybe, just maybe, i’m connecting too many dots with some fuzzy lines and i don’t know everything there is to know about this whole setup, but i try never to let reality get in the way of fantasy. so let me tell you how i see it. we’ve got robots which we’re sending into space to conquer the galaxy in the name of robo-humanity propelled by rockets which are engineered by the company founded by my favorite video game designer. holy shit, the future rocks.

fuck you, cacodemons, we’ve got robots, chainguns, and cheat codes.

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Posted By iambarr on July 7, 2010

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: blasphemy, crocoduck, eschaton, meme, pics, trololo, vids

disclaimer: stoned, deliriously sleepy, twitchy

been spending too much time inside lately.

it’s easy to use the broken rib excuse, but i really can’t defend my compete and total regression into mind-numbing lethargy lately. need to fight it and get back into things again. spent the morning reading today and it reminded me how little i’ve done lately. as usual, it started with books (like, the actual paper kind), then moved into web reading. checked a lot of friends’ pages, interweb hipsters blogs, godblogs and techblogs. strangely enough, since i’ve stopped working, i find most of my internet reading time (actually most productive free time) has cut way down. guardshack time was multislack time. it quite forcefully kept me motivated to be sober, awake, and filling my time by avoiding work. someday need to get a job again in order to get more productive slacking accomplished.

anyway, here is your daily dose

of blasphemy:

of eschatonic hilarity:

of  a regurgitated meme:

and, finally, of crocoduck:

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Posted By iambarr on June 26, 2010

Category: Uncategorized | Tags:

shitty. yes, shitty. really really shitty.

i am in a shitty mood.

seriously.

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Posted By iambarr on June 22, 2010

Category: links | Tags: goals, religious directory, sites

as though i really need another one, i’ve given myself a new project. this came about due to goal #2 ffrom my last post. it started out simply enough – to look up and memorize the main branches (families) of protestant christianity. well, i did that.

(honestly i can’t say i’ve fully memorized them, but i think i’ve mostly got them down.)

but then it became an epic reorganization of knowledge that i got a little carried away with. anyway, that’s it for now. going to work on it some more later and hopefully it will turn into something very useful.

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Posted By iambarr on June 22, 2010

Category: grammar, language, religion, writing | Tags: clarence darrow, gerunds, goals, grammar, joke, leopold and loeb, nietzsche, participles, tenses

i have goals.

#1 – read about tenses. yes, all of them. i like to think i understand the basic english tenses, but i think perhaps there is a lot i could learn. lately i’ve been trying to fill up the little cracks in the things i think i know. as of this moment, i cannot define a participle. i think i use them properly. i think i have used them properly. i think that, in the future, i will have wished that i had taken the time to learn their usage more precisely. having had not learned what i intend to be learning, i expect to had learned the learning of what i’d not yet learned.
learninged
will have learningined
whatever. i blame the oxycodone. regardless, i’m on a mission to learn tenses, participles, and gerunds.

#2 – memorize the main branches of protestant christianity

first, a bit of historical punnery.

clarence darrow, the lawyer who defended john scopes in the scopes trial had previously been involved in another famous case. he was the defense lawyer for leopold and loeb, two strange fuckers whose only motive was to carry out the perfect murder. they believed themselves to be nietzschean supermen who were above the law and not accountable for anything they did. turns out that they were held accountable and were convicted of murder. clarence darrow’s claim to fame in this trial was that he was able to prevent the two men from receiving the death penalty. instead they received life in prison.

while in prison, loeb was murdered by a man named james day, who claimed that loeb had sexually assaulted him. the interesting thing about this is what loeb proved about nietzschean supermen. a superman may kill without fear of being killed in return. what a superman may not do without the fear of death is ending his sentence with a proposition.

sadly, i can’t take credit for that joke. it belongs to ed lahey, a journalist for the chicago daily news. when i read it i almost broke another rib. it hurts so much to laugh and that one just tickled me into hysterics.

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Posted By iambarr on June 22, 2010

Category: Uncategorized, video | Tags: adriano celentano, prisencolinensinonciusol, video, youtube

sorry, but i feel this needs to be done:

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