This is going to be a short post.
Enough time has passed that I can finally share what I know about a certain Brandeis University policy:
When I worked at Brandeis, I had access to an enormous amount of information about the internal function of the university, as I was partially responsible for the whirling shitstorm that is their Peoplesoft implementation.
Among the many, many problems I had with that school, its staff and its policies was the fact that every time the department of homeland security wanted any sort of information on any student of middle eastern descent, Brandeis would hand it over immediately and without question or fight. In fact, I was aware of at least one student that was watched very closely during his/her entire time at Brandeis, completely unaware. He/she of course hadn't done anything to warrant this profound privacy breach other than having brown skin and a funny name.
And the politically correct, feminist, right-thinking staff at Brandeis thought that it was just peachy to roll over and take it up the ass from the feds, while at the same time most other Boston institutes of higher education were fighting the feds as hard as they could--and as publicly as they could.
All of this was around 2003-2004. I wasn't involved in the handing over of this information by the nutless, spineless, weak headed staff at Brandeis. But I heard them talking about it nervously from time to time around the office, obviously knowing that what they were doing was wrong, and feeling very guilty about it.
But they did it anyway.
Of everything that happened during my short experience with Brandeis University, this one is by far the most revolting.
I'm leaving this post open to spiders. I hope some of the people I worked with eventually find this post and understand that their ironic roles in this blasphemy. A Jewish university handing over personal information about innocent kids to the federal government for purposes of national security is vaguely reminiscent of something that no one has any business forgetting.
Keywords: Brandeis University peoplesoft oracle PEAK ITS fuckheads
4.16.2009
fragment
It occurred to me last night as I strolled past Gramercy Tavern, where dinner can be had right here in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan...
Wait.
See here: I'm calling it the "Gramercy Park area of Manhattan" instead of the "Gramercy Park Neighborhood", because this is no longer a part of Manhattan where there are neighborhoods. At the time of this writing, most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan and at least half of Brooklyn (and 30% of Queens) have been obliterated. In their place are a growing number of towers filled with the sort of people for whom the person in the picture there to the right cannot possibly exist.
Wait.
There's no person in the picture. There might have been, had I taken it a few hours earlier. It's too late for a person, but just the right time for about 150 pounds of frozen meat.
So I mean to say "In their place are a growing number of towers filled with the sort of people for whom the 150 pounds of frozen meat in the picture there to the right cannot possibly exist".
It occurred to me last night as I strolled past Gramercy Tavern, where dinner can be had right here in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan for about $200 per person, so long as the wine is reasonably priced, that human urine isn't among the things a wealthy banker (one of whom I imagined was imagining to himself how nice a piece of waitress tail would be as a digestive after gorging himself on taxpayer money) imagines that he will find in his soup.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I do know that it was a very, very cold night when I found the body in the park.
Whatever mess there may have been was frozen and invisible.
I didn't know what I was looking at for a little while, which is what always happens to me when I come across a cadaver. Sometimes I can hear a little bit of the grinding in my mind: "Is it a lamp? no. Is it a book? no. Is it laundry? yes. I mean no."
I stood there for a little while after making sure that he was beyond any of us, and after taking a few pictures, watching people walk by. The body was in a certain context, see? The park, very cold winter night, icy sidewalks, yellow sodium lamps on the hospital across the street, dead homeless dude frozen to the ground. There's a harmony to it such that the eye doesn't pick out any of those elements by itself, but only sees them as a whole environment that one must traverse in order to get to the good deli on first avenue. Or to the emergency room just across the street.
Homeless dudes belong on the ground.
One morning in Brooklyn while I was in a cab, I saw something that reminded me of a person-sized ice cream cone that had been smeared across an intersection by a giant child. No one walked past that. And yet I hadn't realized what I'd actually seen until I was halfway over the Brooklyn Bridge.
I've never pissed in soup.
4.02.2009
genome suicide
I made a conscious decision when I was sixteen years old that I would never in my life have children.
It was one of those adolescent promises, like this: "I'll never eat anything that had eyes", or "I'll never be a Republican". But it was a little different than the other ones into which I was shoehorning the rest of my corporal state. I had a really good reason to never reproduce. It's my genes, see. I have a strong suspicion that they're really bad news.
If we accept that:
1. What we know about human reproduction, biologically, is scientifically sound and factually true
2. That Jesus was a real person, and that Jesus' biological mother was a virgin when he was conceived
then we must also accept that:
3. Jesus was a clone of her mother
I was thinking about it the other night, up on the roof, which is where I do all of my thinking these days. It's a place where at 4am you can be in the middle of New York City while at the same time being utterly alone. Sometimes I think about bringing some binoculars up there and peering into people's apartments all over the neighborhood and a good chunk of the East Village, but somehow it feels like it would ruin my feeling of solitude. I think I prefer it when even just for a brief moment at 4am on most weekday mornings, I can easily imagine myself as the only person alive in the entire city.
I like imagining that. The feeling of absolute solitude, to be perfectly alone is a pleasure of the highest order for me. That's because even when I'm alone I'm not really alone. My ego-states appear to be so well designed as to be nearly capable of making a pot of coffee on their own, leaving what amounts to the rest of me free, for example, to misplace my keys twice while waiting for the rest of them to finish up with that coffee.
I made the decision to never have children when I was 16, and it was at a point in my life before I knew what an ego-state was. I didn't know a lot at the time, but I was fresh with the knowledge that sometimes space-shuttles blow up in midair, and that boobs feel nice when you squeeze them. I also knew... or I thought I knew... or I was just very keenly aware... that I was working with a mind that wasn't very stable. I would occasionally find it leaking, or drifting into semi-human ontological constructs which included lots of room for things like The Dilution of Murder with Recursive Morality and Diapers for Dixie: The Southeastern United States as the Wayward Brat, two expositions I wrote in 10th grade, both failed for plagiarism.
I still deny it, Mister Sobrinski. I'll never forget you or your flaccid red pen. You were a monument to lowered expectations, your giant, clay head and little eye slits, swollen with I suppose whatever it was that made the rest of you swollen, your fingers always fat and twitchy and uncomfortable looking, pointing impotently at the pointless scrivenings of the children of government farmers, trying to teach them that two 'very's is one too many but finally settling on nine being just enough to describe how much they hated your class, as we all did nine verys worth, even you. Most of all you, come to think of it. Your derision for your own classroom and everything in it made a mark in me that I have no business forgetting.
I call that one "Claxis".
I don't remember when or how I came up with that name, except I do know that a later moniker of mine, "abraxas" was a variant of it as far as I was concerned. Claxis is not a name of something like a person or a character, but more like the name of a certain kind of sorting of things, like "wooden" or "laborious" or "sticky", only for a kind of collective sort, like "cold, dewey leaves with little points on them". It's also as far as I'm concerned, the name of a state of mind. If I am in "Claxis", I have a very specific set of responses to stimuli, and a very specific set of patterns of thinking about stimuli. Here's the erroneously short version: I name my ego-states.
I name them things that you don't name something that's alive, because although it might be arguably useful to consider some of these ego-states as semi-independent entities from time to time, it's also patently false. Doing so would imply a plurality of autonomies, which I tend to prefer to rationalize beyond in my experience, always remembering what Mister Rogers told me when I was little:
...you know, the angry you is still you inside...
And the Claxis is the part of me which desperately needs to expose the lies of those in the role of "authority", particularly when humbled by someone "lesser".
It has a named counterpart, which is in all ways its complement. The counterpart is subtle and passive, and is the part of me which desperately needs to blend-in, to remain hidden and unexposed, quiet and undisturbed.
I call that one "Lliddu", and ultimately it is because of Lliddu that I decided to end my genetic line.
It was one of those adolescent promises, like this: "I'll never eat anything that had eyes", or "I'll never be a Republican". But it was a little different than the other ones into which I was shoehorning the rest of my corporal state. I had a really good reason to never reproduce. It's my genes, see. I have a strong suspicion that they're really bad news.
If we accept that:
1. What we know about human reproduction, biologically, is scientifically sound and factually true
2. That Jesus was a real person, and that Jesus' biological mother was a virgin when he was conceived
then we must also accept that:
3. Jesus was a clone of her mother
I was thinking about it the other night, up on the roof, which is where I do all of my thinking these days. It's a place where at 4am you can be in the middle of New York City while at the same time being utterly alone. Sometimes I think about bringing some binoculars up there and peering into people's apartments all over the neighborhood and a good chunk of the East Village, but somehow it feels like it would ruin my feeling of solitude. I think I prefer it when even just for a brief moment at 4am on most weekday mornings, I can easily imagine myself as the only person alive in the entire city.
I like imagining that. The feeling of absolute solitude, to be perfectly alone is a pleasure of the highest order for me. That's because even when I'm alone I'm not really alone. My ego-states appear to be so well designed as to be nearly capable of making a pot of coffee on their own, leaving what amounts to the rest of me free, for example, to misplace my keys twice while waiting for the rest of them to finish up with that coffee.
I made the decision to never have children when I was 16, and it was at a point in my life before I knew what an ego-state was. I didn't know a lot at the time, but I was fresh with the knowledge that sometimes space-shuttles blow up in midair, and that boobs feel nice when you squeeze them. I also knew... or I thought I knew... or I was just very keenly aware... that I was working with a mind that wasn't very stable. I would occasionally find it leaking, or drifting into semi-human ontological constructs which included lots of room for things like The Dilution of Murder with Recursive Morality and Diapers for Dixie: The Southeastern United States as the Wayward Brat, two expositions I wrote in 10th grade, both failed for plagiarism.
I still deny it, Mister Sobrinski. I'll never forget you or your flaccid red pen. You were a monument to lowered expectations, your giant, clay head and little eye slits, swollen with I suppose whatever it was that made the rest of you swollen, your fingers always fat and twitchy and uncomfortable looking, pointing impotently at the pointless scrivenings of the children of government farmers, trying to teach them that two 'very's is one too many but finally settling on nine being just enough to describe how much they hated your class, as we all did nine verys worth, even you. Most of all you, come to think of it. Your derision for your own classroom and everything in it made a mark in me that I have no business forgetting.
I call that one "Claxis".
I don't remember when or how I came up with that name, except I do know that a later moniker of mine, "abraxas" was a variant of it as far as I was concerned. Claxis is not a name of something like a person or a character, but more like the name of a certain kind of sorting of things, like "wooden" or "laborious" or "sticky", only for a kind of collective sort, like "cold, dewey leaves with little points on them". It's also as far as I'm concerned, the name of a state of mind. If I am in "Claxis", I have a very specific set of responses to stimuli, and a very specific set of patterns of thinking about stimuli. Here's the erroneously short version: I name my ego-states.
I name them things that you don't name something that's alive, because although it might be arguably useful to consider some of these ego-states as semi-independent entities from time to time, it's also patently false. Doing so would imply a plurality of autonomies, which I tend to prefer to rationalize beyond in my experience, always remembering what Mister Rogers told me when I was little:
...you know, the angry you is still you inside...
And the Claxis is the part of me which desperately needs to expose the lies of those in the role of "authority", particularly when humbled by someone "lesser".
It has a named counterpart, which is in all ways its complement. The counterpart is subtle and passive, and is the part of me which desperately needs to blend-in, to remain hidden and unexposed, quiet and undisturbed.
I call that one "Lliddu", and ultimately it is because of Lliddu that I decided to end my genetic line.
12.25.2008
12.24.2008
12.19.2008
Allium Amber
It goes like this:
Chew up a mouthful of garlic.
Now bite down as hard as you can on a nine-volt battery while at the same time you have a very attractive friend who smells a little bit like lavender hit you right between the eyes with the round side of a ball-peen hammer as hard as they can.
When manage to wake up, have your friend offer you a choice of orange juice or coffee. Pick the coffee and pour it down your shirt. Have your friend hand you another cup of coffee and pour some of that one into your mouth and note the existential confusion as your tongue remembers a thing that your brain doesn't:
heat.
Pour the rest of that one into your lap and hand the empty cup to your attractive friend who smells a little bit like lavender.
Your friend is a little too good looking, the way a chick bartender with big tatas is a little too good looking. There's a reason they're both very attractive, you dig? The bartender is very attractive because it helps redistribute some of the wealth in your pocket to her pocket. But why is your friend so good looking? The bartender pays the rent with her looks, see? That's why she has a job like that.
But what do your friend's looks have to do with the job she does, to ask people to eat garlic and batteries while hitting them as hard as she can in the head with a hammer?
It was obvious the very second you met her, remember? Ah, no... probably not. That's the hammer part. Well, if you did remember meeting her, you'd probably remember looking up at her from your wheelchair and shaking her hand when she introduced herself. You'd probably also remember her smiling warmly and looking right at you with her beautiful eyes when you said your name, and then watching her articulate her pretty, light pink lips sweetly as she said your name back to you to make sure she remembered. You'd not be able to remember hers by the way, whether or not she'd been hitting you in the head with hammers.
Then you'd remember, while still holding your shaking hand warmly with both of hers, her asking if you'd like to hop up onto the gurney so they could hook up all the cables they need to make sure you stay alive. You'd remember hopping up onto the gurney, swiveling on your butt and lying back, absently rubbing your wrists under the sleeves of your gown, pensive, wondering when the restraints would make their usual sudden appearance.
And then you'd remember realizing that they'd been there the entire time.
That's why she's so pretty, get it? Do you remember now? Do you remember the garlic zap? And do you remember what you wrote back then? I remember what it was:
"She was worse than a straitjacket, that monstrous woman. A straitjacket robs you of movement, but a pill and a pretty face rob you of will to resist"
You could have just as easily been writing about sirens.
So, to put it under a nice little bow with v-cut tails, here is the question again:
What do your friend's looks have to do with the job she does, to ask people to eat garlic and batteries while hitting them as hard as she can in the head with a hammer?
And here is the answer:
To make sure they'll say yes.
e.s.a.: 2 -- k, ktb
Chew up a mouthful of garlic.
Now bite down as hard as you can on a nine-volt battery while at the same time you have a very attractive friend who smells a little bit like lavender hit you right between the eyes with the round side of a ball-peen hammer as hard as they can.
When manage to wake up, have your friend offer you a choice of orange juice or coffee. Pick the coffee and pour it down your shirt. Have your friend hand you another cup of coffee and pour some of that one into your mouth and note the existential confusion as your tongue remembers a thing that your brain doesn't:
heat.
Pour the rest of that one into your lap and hand the empty cup to your attractive friend who smells a little bit like lavender.
Your friend is a little too good looking, the way a chick bartender with big tatas is a little too good looking. There's a reason they're both very attractive, you dig? The bartender is very attractive because it helps redistribute some of the wealth in your pocket to her pocket. But why is your friend so good looking? The bartender pays the rent with her looks, see? That's why she has a job like that.
But what do your friend's looks have to do with the job she does, to ask people to eat garlic and batteries while hitting them as hard as she can in the head with a hammer?
It was obvious the very second you met her, remember? Ah, no... probably not. That's the hammer part. Well, if you did remember meeting her, you'd probably remember looking up at her from your wheelchair and shaking her hand when she introduced herself. You'd probably also remember her smiling warmly and looking right at you with her beautiful eyes when you said your name, and then watching her articulate her pretty, light pink lips sweetly as she said your name back to you to make sure she remembered. You'd not be able to remember hers by the way, whether or not she'd been hitting you in the head with hammers.
Then you'd remember, while still holding your shaking hand warmly with both of hers, her asking if you'd like to hop up onto the gurney so they could hook up all the cables they need to make sure you stay alive. You'd remember hopping up onto the gurney, swiveling on your butt and lying back, absently rubbing your wrists under the sleeves of your gown, pensive, wondering when the restraints would make their usual sudden appearance.
And then you'd remember realizing that they'd been there the entire time.
That's why she's so pretty, get it? Do you remember now? Do you remember the garlic zap? And do you remember what you wrote back then? I remember what it was:
"She was worse than a straitjacket, that monstrous woman. A straitjacket robs you of movement, but a pill and a pretty face rob you of will to resist"
You could have just as easily been writing about sirens.
So, to put it under a nice little bow with v-cut tails, here is the question again:
What do your friend's looks have to do with the job she does, to ask people to eat garlic and batteries while hitting them as hard as she can in the head with a hammer?
And here is the answer:
To make sure they'll say yes.
e.s.a.: 2 -- k, ktb
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