User Profile Friends Calendar

Below are the 25 most recent journal entries.

	2009.09.13  13.58 spanish bullshit link

	2009.08.10  17.19 internet millionaire... i finally placed in this poem competition, after like 2 years of trying. yay me! http://ibpc.webdelsol.com/poems/on-phil-jacksons-tenth-championship

	2009.07.15  12.40 summer reading so far i've read the road by cormac mccarthy, snuff by chuck paluniak, and the inferno by dante. dark selection, right? some quotes:: everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. cassie said maybe if she was stupid and desperate, really clutching at straws and emotionally needy, utterly destroyed, she'd accept my proposal-- so i figured there was still hope. the double grief of lost bliss is to recall its happy hour in pain. here's a bonus quote, just cause i love it. it is by wolfgang borchert, from his incredible volume the man outside. the truth is like a well known whore: everyone knows her, but it is embarrassing to meet her on the street.

	2009.06.19  22.56 prose Pronouns are funny little things. I am lying on our couch, listening to our music, living, if only temporarily, in our space. But if you were here it'd be your couch, your music, your space, your life-- I'd just be a character passing through, heading towards the door. ( six weeks in June )

	2009.06.16  23.46 new work ( on phil jackson's tenth championship )

	2009.06.10  11.38 is someone who has a strong and unyielding commitment to traditional gender roles in a relationship a sexist?

	2009.04.29  17.02 muenster cheese sandwich toast, mayo, half a sliced avocado, 4 ounces of smoked salmon, muenster cheese. grilled cheese and tomato soup tomato bisque in a crock, rye toast croutons floating on top, muenster cheese melted over the whole thing.

	2009.04.21  01.06 dear adult swim: do you enjoy being a propaganda outlet? how much did you sell the collective attention of the 18-25 year old target market for, to the navy and the drug czar? fuck you very much, --cecil b demented.

	2009.03.30  16.23 i think the 'are you an elvis man or a beatles man' is a false dichotomy. they are apples and oranges. i think there are two questions here, 'are you an elvis man or a buddy holly man,' and 'are you a beatles man or a rolling stones man.' i hypothesize that there is a correlation between the two, but it is not 100 percent. so, are you a beatles person or a rolling stones person? are you an elvis person or a buddy holly person?

	2009.03.26  19.50 mia's mushroom salad party sandwich vegetarian recipe, easily converted for vegans. made it for my daughter's birthday party and it was a hit. enjoy. you will neeed one long french bread, one half package of low moisture shredded mozarella cheese, one pound mushrooms (i used half button and half portabello, but use whatever looks good at the store), one bunch of spinach, 6 medium garlic cloves, a small onion, half a stick of butter, and spices. this is a several step process. the first step is making the mushroom salad. clean the mushrooms and roughly chop them. rinse the spinach, and coarsely chop it. mince three garlic cloves and the small onion. heat a wok or large frying pan with sides and add a good dollop of olive oil. throw in the mushrooms and onion. as they start to sing a little bit (a minute or two on mid/high heat), add the spinach. use tongs to turn the spinach down into the mushrooms. you may want to add a little more oil at this point, but it isn't strictly necessary. keep the tongs moving through the spinach until it starts to shrink and wilt and lie flat on the pan. once it is lying flat, add the minced garlic. spice it with a little salt, some black pepper, and basil. i used dried, but i am sure fresh would work as well or better. reduce the heat to lowish, and let it reduce for a while. once it has reduced a bit, remove from the heat and put in tupperware in the fridge. it will be a little watery, but thats ok. part two: in a small saucepan, melt the half a stick of butter. once it is melted, add the other three cloves of garlic, some more pepper and some oregano. let this go just long enough to melt all the butter and get the garlic moving around a bit. take this off the heat. cut the long french bread down the middle, and use a brush or a spoon to coat the inside of the bread with the butter/garlic concoction. sprinkle a single layer of mozarella on the bread, and put it in the oven open-faced to melt the cheese. once the cheese is melted and the bread is just a little crispy, take out the bread. part 3: take the cooled mushroom salad out of the fridge. use the tongs to fill the sandwich, that way most of the moisture stays in the tupperware and doesnt make the bread soggy. once the bread is full, fold it closed, wrap in in tin foil, and stick it back in the oven. give it 15 or twenty minutes to heat through and crisp up a bit. take it out, slice it up, and serve. -jm

	2009.03.17  20.05 26+6=1

	2009.03.17  11.50 my intuition is that today is the day to buy. if i had the loot i would buy AIG, bank of america, and citibank. because i do not have the money, i am going to record their numbers, and see if i am right, and we are bottomed out. AIG 0.970 citigroup 2.45 bank of america 5.98

	2009.03.03  14.31 it is painfully obvious that the duty of the intellectual class in this society is to enforce the group nightmare. that is the only sanctioned way to make a living with your mind in this post industrial paradigm. as a teacher, or a lawyer, or a journalist, or a writer, or a professor, or a psychiatrist, or a diplomat, or a senator, the job is to maintain the illusion. to be convincing. even being critical is enforcing the nightmare by denying it, the way that vacation enforces work or disneyland enforces wall street. to make a living without being materially productive (ie without using my hands to build something) necessarily entails collusion with the nightmare. there appears to be no way around it. for the longest time, i preferred to work in menial positions, specifically food service. waiting tables and tending bar are morally neutral. i think that moving beyond that level of existence necessitates collusion with a warped society with which i strongly disagree. so i am faced with a conflict of opposing moral stances. i have an obligation to be the best father to my daughter that i can be, which includes making more money and living a better lifestyle than restaurant work provides. i also have an obligation to my own ethics, to resist what i think is wrong in this world, and not to assist it. if i cross the threshold towards becoming a high school teacher, i will be reneging on my duty to myself, in service of my duty to my daughter. maybe that is what this 'growing up' thing is all about, learning how to compromise yourself in favor of those you love. or maybe there is some way to satisfy both moralities at once that i haven't yet thought of.

	2009.02.27  12.37 when does a cell phone conversation take place? seriously. my daughter was playing with my phone, and hit the last number dialed. which happened to be her mother's. who happened to be sitting right next to us. so she picked up and started messing with the kid (as you do with 2 year olds), trying to get her to talk into it. during this exchange, i noticed that there is a delay between when she spoke and when the words came out of the speaker of my phone. which is totally sensible, i don't expect my prepaid piece of shit to break the speed of light and allow me to speak instantaneously across distance. but the little delay made me think... presumably, the delay applies to both sides of the conversation. what i mean is that, if i were talking to my babymomma, there would be a quarter second delay between when i spoke and when the speaker in her phone relayed my words to her ear, and the same would apply to the words she spoke. but from my experience, conversations on the phone are seamless. there are no extra delays. the quarter second each way, if added together, would lead to something like a half second disjoint between the two halves of the conversation, which would be a noticeable barrier. but our conversations are in sync. they are seamless. there is no half second delay. does this mean that somehow both of our quarter second delays cancel eachother out, and we are actually holding a conversation in a frame that is a quarter second behind each of our location's chronology? do cell phone conversations happen in the past?

	2009.02.20  10.32 oh, therapy to document the discovery of a new flavor of emotion, i need to come up with a word for that weird, unpleasant kind of pissed off that one experiences in therapy, when one discovers that common thread that has caused all one's most precious relationships to unravel, a few short months too late to save the most precious of those relationships. also, i need to note that i am equally pissed off by vehicles that fly the confederate flag and those that fly the union jack. america won, you fucking idiots. we kicked your hick/limey asses. fucking deal with it.

	2009.02.11  08.43 i was extremely moved by that plane landing on the hudson. it was just such a fucking testament to how awesome my city is, and how quick thinking and good reflexes can save the day. and at last, there is a cocktail to commemorate this wonderful event:: Mark sends me his friend Sassy's recipe for a new drink, The Sully, honoring Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, the intrepid US Airways pilot: Two shots Grey Goose One splash very cold water Shaken hard, and set down gently. Garnish with a lifevest. from The Airline Biz Blog

	2009.02.09  12.16 ( grad school thoughts, solicitation of advice )

	2009.02.09  12.04 my uncle here's the text of a speech i gave today for class. read it in memory of a man who has shaped me profoundly. This is not the first speech I have given about my uncle Scott. I gave his eulogy in September. I don't think anyone ever wants to give a eulogy for a loved one, but I felt like it was my responsibility; partially to my family, but mostly to my uncle. Scott had always respected my ability to use words, and had a copy of an email I wrote after September 11th hanging on his refrigerator. He once said to me "Thank you, Jon, for putting the right words to what we all were feeling." I didn't know what to say, I sort of blushed and mumbled. It isn't easy being thanked by one of your heroes, someone who taught you what loyalty is. Writing the eulogy was hard. There are so many stories that surround Scott, and I couldn't think of a single one of them that was appropriate to the occasion. My favorite story took place when I was maybe ten or eleven years old. I was helping him move out of his place in Reading to Harrisburg. At the time he was a chef at the Peanut Bar on Penn Street, and through that gig he hired a few dish washers to help us move his furniture and stuff. It was summertime, the dead of summer, right after the 4th of July. Doing hard work with Scott was always a blast, because he had a way of making it fun. We were drinking beers, setting off fireworks, and generally making a party of what is usually a pain-in-the-ass. Well, one of the guys he hired had a packet of ladyfingers, and would use them to surprise us as we were coming around corners or coming out the door. One time, this stupid idea went very wrong, and a lit ladyfinger fell into my shoe and blew up there. In reality, it did me no injury at all, but at the time it scared the hell out of me, and since I was 11 and in front of a man I really looked up to, I expressed that fear in anger. Scott pulled me aside, handed me a beer, and said "Don't worry about it, Jon." And I wasn't worried about it, really, because I saw a look of abject terror cross the man's eyes when he realized what he had done to Scott's little nephew. Later that week, Scott told me what he had done to even the books; he took the man's hand and put it in the deep-fryer in the kitchen of the Peanut Bar. I don't know if any of you have ever worked in a kitchen, but a deep-fryer is essentially a steel bucket of 350 degree oil with a basket in it. Now I don't know whether he actually did it or not, and I really don't care. Whether Scott was the kind of man who would deep-fry someone's hand over his nephew, or he was the kind of man who would say he deep-fried someone's hand to make his nephew feel better, it didn't matter. He still demonstrated what it meant to be loyal, what family means. But you see my dilemma; I couldn't tell that story at his funeral. So I made a lousy speech, heartfelt and touching, but more about us and our grief than as a testament to the man we all loved. I am trying to remedy that in a small way, today. When I think of Scott, the man who taught me what loyalty is and what family means, I think of a quote by another of my heroes, Dr. Hunter S Thompson: "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

	2009.02.06  12.29 i fucking love spearhead. micheal franti is a truth speaking man. here's some lyrics for your head, but you should hear the songs. the album i am listening to right now is the new one, "all rebel rockers." check it out. Ai yi yi put your hands up high coz' you never know how long your gunna live till' ya die They hit you with a missile, hit you with a bomb, hit you with the law try to take your home. Break into your house in the middle of the night, track you on a cell phone by satellite, stopped any time you're in your car, search your body search your home an' listenin' in on your phone calls. Still no politician got enough balls, lining the people up against the wall. When the truth comes out all hell will call and someday guantanamo will fall, until that day we all will ride on. Some holdin' on, some so damn gone their whole lives livin with their tv on, then radio play the same 10 songs, set your clock by which ones on an watching the news try to see whats wrong, find sombody else to blame it on. Hope they never come and research you coz' your grandmother was an immigrant too. So if you love somebody better tell them so coz you never ever ever knwo when they gonna go, if they love you back, just give thanks, cant keep love like money in the bank

	2009.02.05  11.41 sometimes a conversation just gets out of hand. for example, last night my pops tried to convince me that no language can have a double negative in it, because a double negative is logically equivalent to a positive. when i tried to explain to him that the double negative rule is not an organic part of a natural language, and that it was an invention of 19th century grammarians, he became a little heated. when i gave him an example of a spanish sentence which is perfectly grammatical but contained a double negative, he got even more heated. "no tengo nunca" was the grammatical spanish sentence i used, which translates to the english sentence "i have nothing," but literally translates to "i don't have nothing." now my pops is an engineer, and a hard nosed scientific thinker. for him, logic rules all. logic preceded human kind, and determines all human development. for a sentence to contain a logical fallacy and still be a grammatical sentence is unthinkable for him. i tried to explain to him that logic is a formal subset of language that we use to talk about determinate relations. as such, it is derivative of language, and language is not subject to logic's rules, but in fact the opposite is true, that logic is subject to the conventions and rules of language. this pissed him right off. i think the reason that it irked him so is that it is coming dangerously close to causing him to confront a contradiction in the unquestioned core of his beliefs. i almost got him to assert that logic precedes the universe, that there exists in some meaningful fashion somewhere the various rules and laws of logic. once he started to realize that he was being backed into a position of idealism that borders on platonic religious faith, he backed up and said that physics and logic are coextensive, two sides of the same coin, one couched in material relations and the other couched in language. all this from a bullshit argument about grammar! i didn't push it farther, because it was 2am and we both had to get up the next day, and the wine ran out, but i think i could have convinced him that i am right. i don't know if i want to, because i don't know that i am, and i am certainly not confident enough in my position to go changing anyone's mind on the matter. anyone else have that problem? you suddenly find yourself in a position in a conversation where you can deal a crushing blow to someone else's ideas, but you really don't know for sure that you are right and they are wrong? you just know that you out-argued them. . . it is a weird ethical dilemma.

	2009.01.22  12.51 i am thinking about cars and the necessity of theory. the way i see it, there are two primary ontologies for a car. it can be, as mine is, a collection of parts put together in a certain way, operating at some imperfect level of efficiency, which i use to take me places. in this ontology, the car is organized matter. it is tending towards entropy with every passing mile, and only my attention and maintenance keeps it from returning to dust fairly quickly. however, an equally valid ontology for a car is its phenomenological existence. the car of my imaginary interlocutor isn't my second-hand ford, but rather a leased mercedes. this car's mode of existence consists of creamy heated leather seats, quick acceleration, and a movie-quality surround sound system. this car, while it consists of parts just like my piece of shit does, does not exist primarily as organized matter like mine does. its primary mode of existence is its effect on the consciousness of those around it. the mercedes will not be in the presence of my imaginary interlocutor by the time its parts require maintenance and attention, as it is leased. but even if it was purchased, it is purchased by a person who has the financial capacity to insulate himself from the demands of the physicality of the mercedes. he need never get grease on his hands packing bearings or replacing a worn rotor, because such things will be taken care of by paid professionals at the dealership. these two opposed ontologies for a car gesture towards the necessity of theory. a child raised in the presence of my car or my imaginary interlocutor's car will have different understandings of the world, and without a sort of philosophical training the two children will have intractable differences. theory can cultivate the self-reflection necessary to allow these two children to bring their different understandings of the world into a conversation.

	2009.01.16  10.27 anyone who doubts that New York is the greatest city on earth, ask yourself what would happen if someone landed a plane in the river of your town. Philly, i am looking at you. by the time enough kickbacks and bribes had exchanged hands to figure out who would get the contract to rescue the lucky bastards standing on the wing of their plane floating down the Delaware, they'd've all drowned or frozen to death.

	2009.01.09  14.31 on luck:: a meditation for the new year i always take a while to reflect and figure out resolutions. my birthday is mid january, so i feel free to take the time between the year's end and my year's end to meditate a little. so here's something else, a thought that i had in the midst of that meditation. here's the thing: i believe in luck. it's genetic, my moms always says 'we don't have good luck, we don't have bad luck, we just have luck.' when i explain it to people, i say 'as i walk down the road of life, my bad luck kicks me in the balls and leaves me staggering into oncoming traffic, and my good luck pushes me out of the way into a muddy ditch.' so with that in mind, i will sometimes buy a scratch off ticket or two, not with any hope of winning, but to sort of soak up a little bad luck. i am not paying a dollar or five to get any return, i am doing it to try to protect my balls from my bad luck, just up around the bend.

	2008.11.20  17.05 winter’s here, thank god Blowing, bare-handed, un-hatted, jacket unbuttoned, lifting burning leaves above my head to mingle with the snow grey & white & white & grey and silver moon and fall My lungs full filled with ice speckled air, two full sails straining on the breeze, drag my heels cross mud & heath-- crystalline, sparkling, cold night void embracing me in its infinite space-- i am adrift, un-ruddered, in between ice specks & stars, memories & ghosts, & whispering night vapor 'Miserable cold,' you said, 'winter's here.' The dark in my eyes and the red tips of my ears disagree, my love. The cold is not miserable, the cold as cold happily blows, contented as the trainwhistle at 3am, contented as the cracks in the ceiling i count instead of sleeping -jm11.8

	2008.11.12  15.36