Incipient Vagabond--Verily

I fail at being popular, I cannot obtain and retain friends. I've a million acquaintances, but nothing meaningful lasts. I understand that community is vital to a healthy life--I understand a lot of things that I cannot possibly implement into my daily life. I've tried, ohhh, I've tried. I also haven't, I've also failed at reading emotions.
Now, I'm not some depressed young punk. But I'm a loser, I'm a creep, and really, what the hell am I doing here?
Really now, I've heard something of Bond, Jones, and all the Marvel 'mans that I think applies to me: that they don't have time for normal lives, to mingle, that they can't make small talk. That's me. I don't want to bother with it. I'd rather live with purpose, get shit done, be amazing. Make the most of everything I have and leave my mark. A friend of mine I confided some of this couldn't understand. He wanted to know if there was some specific mark I wanted to leave on the world, some great passion of a program that I felt imperative to imprint into the world before I was gone. Well, there is none, and so this seems unhealthy. A bit megalomaniacal (my words, not his). But it's unavoidable, incorrigible. I can't help this, as it's a core aspect of my personality.

Nonetheless, I am in a rare and perhaps unique position here: almost ultimate independence. It is at great cost; the safety nets of my past, of society's protections and due course for someone my age, my reputation, everything is holding by frail threads, which I am at wit's edge to avoid tearing away. I have a few Don Quixote giants to chase down now, but I must seriously consider where it shall take me. What shall I glean from it? I pray I am more successful than he, if I elect to pursue it.

The internet is in limbo, still, and if i was more technologically savvy, I would be adamant about trying to help shape it; there's a lot of money in that. If I don't have the tools to help actually construct it, though, I can at least add my voice as a visionary to the development of it.

I've thought of what's missing. Currently, the internet is just another application to utilize on your computational device. But it should be--and we are rapidly going in this direction--a fundamental aspect of it. No computer should be disconnected from the web of computers. Increasingly applications are going online, and we have to upload everything to it. But as with p2p, the networking can and should be flexible to access without a general browser; the internet should be packaged into dynamic, accessible applications including word-processing, forums, games, discussion, newsfeeds--all which can be accessed separately and simultaneously, directly from the desktop.

Personally, I think Google's Android is poised to be the innovator to develop this more fully. They should be integrating that connectedness into their OS, such that facebook is a permanently open application on your computer, just like word or skype, which you can start chatting, videochatting, post feed or drag photos to at any time. No inputting the URL into your browser to enter and log in. Your profile is integrated into your desktop; you can drop links into your facebook bubble, your desktop background is your facebook background, your local albums are your public albums (unless you choose to keep it local). Comprende?

Facebook was what inspired the idea for me, but it works with other mainstream websites as well: youtube, google docs, stumbleupon, new york times. The browser will become archaic. if one needs to connect to a site for which there is not already a desktop experience, one can do a Google search directly from your desktop that opens a list of results. When we watch videos there will be a live stream of dialogue about it, when we post a note, link, photo, comment, or video it will be noted on our social program, and no longer will facebook be such a shallow interface for communication.

I know this is what will logically follow the current experience, but really I have two motives in posting this: 1_bragging rights that i posed it publicly before it happens, therefore guessing its development and being recognized for my true visionary capabilities, and 2_to open a dialogue as to what implications this has, what we lose in this environment, and where else one might see us going.

Dirty, dusty
crusty, tattered
A faint light within me of what I once was.

I used to be fantastic,
handsome friendly generous
I was generous
I gave and I shared,
I welcomed and warmed
Or i tried at least
My brain was operating too fast to interact with the laymen
But i wanted to make them my friends.
Wall-eeeeeeeeeeeeee

Now i'm cold
and home-broken
i quit my vice or two, and want to go straight
but it's fruitless
thus far
A shell of homeliness,
ironically covers the home lost

a
lonely

island

no mental peer
no econopeer
why am i so queer?

Broke away from what little i once loved
in pursuit of my ideals and dreams
it's a hard, darkly-lit road
it doesn't have law-enforced signs
or friendly guidance
Sometimes it doesn't really
even resemble a road
just a wide open
rolling view
I say view, but
it's eery, frightening, unknown
but i know there's space forward

if i go far enough i'll pick up what i need
i can light my own path

for now, time and necessity gently urge me onward

Diggin' on diplo,
reachin' for the moon,
carryin' the stars.
How far back was that?


The sun burns with
lust, and anger, and every vice
rolled up into one
big bright beautiful "good" over the world

Yes, we run from hell
But don't you know
life's a racetrack?

And an ice cream cone,
and a box of chocolates.
How about a fuckin' rainbow
while we're at it? We fall
at the dusty, time-worn
feet of time again today,
but since there's no floor

since there's no floor
we'll fall forever, and
it's called entropy, and
it was good.
When it happens
you only feel peace

or shock at the peace

knowing what was never really there.

I already have a Yahoo account. I refuse to create a new one just to use Yahoo! Answers.

But I really want to jump in on the discussions!!!

So i'll speak my mind to you, empty sky... vast swirling thrashing intraglobal network of data streams... the most chaotic field ever to exist... for there is no directional flow, everything rushes in different directions simultaneously... yet somehow remains superefficient.

Some thoughts:

Here's my take on the hispanic/latino race question. The members online at Yah-Ans discussed this "resolved" question in terms of "social construct". This shows me that there is a major preoccupation in this society with human interactions on a more recent timetable, therein predominantly focusing on questions of oppression, dominance, globalization, identity, and feelings. And it reinforces my understanding of a common inability to see past our own self-righteous species and its supposed transcendence of nature.(yes i am simply reinforcing past prejudices in my own mind, but as long as i realize so, it's okay--right?)
But mine is a scientific mind, and as such i see us as animals, and still partaking in the cycle of things... so I read it as a question of evolution. I would say there was/is a course upon which South America was going in differentiating, adapting to its region! Life does that. Not even all hispanics/latinos look alike. But there is a differentiation, and who decides what makes a group different enough to be a new "race" or not? It is a source of identity, as there is much shared culture in the latino/hispanic, spanish-speaking hemisphere as in the "western" european/american hemisphere! caucasians, blacks, asians, hispanics... it works for me... different regions of the world, that have adapted definite physiologic differences from the rest of the world. I say if it isn't already a new race, it is was going there, and should be ALLOWED to be identified as a different race. It only makes sense considering its dominance of more than an entire continent and the fact that you can identify somebody of latin descent as different from white, as opposed to only the savvy (others of the race who have grown up with the race) differentiating Italians and Brits, or Koreans and Vietnamese.

In other, less controversial news:

NASA has developed semi-permeable bags (old news) that they are filling with sewage (newer news) and algae (newsest). They are producing biodiesel from it. They call the bags OMEGA!!! I find that remarkable, despicable, and hilarious. First, because i am remarking on it as we speak (so to speak [we need a meme to replace those phrases...]), second, in that they would associate the precious, worthy word that is omega with a sack of sewage, and third (which i'm not witty enough to do anything about myself) for the cultural potential of this. This is a major breakthrough!! I'll work on it so I can take credit for introducing it.... perhaps a running joke on products (or nutrients...?!) with the name Omega and the implications as junk food.... =D

What if, when we watch animals at play, at life, and remark, "oh look, the way they act.... it's like little people..."
....What if it is we that are mimicking them, and not they us? Our inspiration for everything is nature, you know... They were here before us, you know. Considering that we evolved from them, we have taken their mating styles, their instinctual reactions, and developed our civil and pretentious ways from them... but--to quote my mother's ex-husband, who is currently doing 15-30 in prison--our shit don't stink of no better roses.

I'm not talking about ascribing them romance. I was pushed toward this under-developed idea upon reading about bird mating rituals, and our manner of speaking that presumes we were the ones to initiate such an action and they were the ones to mimic it.

This follows that mental perspective of assuming that "we" are better than "they" until proven otherwise.

They say it takes a shock, a startle, something painful to enact change. Is this really true? Can humans not be driven by logic to change their lifestyles? Particularly Americans, must we wait until we make the planet so sick that it shows the late-onset symptoms, raising sea levels 25 feet, drying rivers and hiking food prices for drought and pollution and riots? Wait, that’s already here. So what if we procure a glorious presentation to illustrate it through the best media to re-sensitize people enough that they buy less, recycle more, walk and bike and take transit, or work at home and trade at the market!? These idiots and blind consumers, apathetic pigs I’m not allowed to kill, are going to make the next few years tough, but gradually until *WHAM* forcefully they’re going to have regulations imposed on them, or some of us smart people will get under their skin, into their heads, and affect the change we wish to see. We will have to make changes to the way we get things, what we get here, what is the most easy to attain--This can take place by dissolving borders, slowly adding pressure via legislation

What about biological diversity? How do we illustrate its imperative struggle? [People are like sheep: tell them they’re walking into a trap, and they’ll be critical; show them another getting ensared in all the wolf’s glory and gore, they’ll run like hell with no second thought to you.]

I had two reactions on two separate nights of researching and developing my persuasive presentation on the need for swift, immediate, bold reform regarding destruction of our living home, Earth. First night, I remembered the thought, which I can’t believe I had neglected when it first formed on my brain, that humans are most resembling of cancer, of pathogenic organisms that infect and plague their host until it dies. This sickened me, drove a knot to my stomach, and instilled me with force to find an alternative, something that proved it wrong, some justification (while still maintaining logic & objectivity). But I couldn’t escape the solidarity and validity of the correlation. The most stressful aspect of that concept was that there was no cure, that it would be impossible to remedy a population of organisms that has pervaded its own history as being ultimately predictable and already predicted. Of having no sentient thought on the higher organizational level of society and culture, but simply being a vast diffuse beast. Primarily, I thought of American history, in which we trampled the natives, and slaughtered buffalo and other great species, in pursuit of “manifest destiny.” And of Rome, and its own example of the cycle of life as an empire which expanded quickly, grew too large, and collapsed in on itself. I thought of the Holocaust, and the social factors that had horrifyingly escaped a society and allowed it to be primal and horrify the rest of the world in how disturbingly natural we truly are.
I remembered also when the thought had occurred to me, and why I hadn’t had such an intense reaction and broad application already: Upon entering Wichita, KS, after an extended period of distance and of developing my education and self, and having studied biology, my eyes were opened and I DID feel disgust, and it was directed at what I would later be informed was urban sprawl; the way the city had these appendages that grew outward to consume small towns, everybody knew it was happening, I’d been overhearing conversations about “a couple more years and the city will probably reach all the way to Goddard.” The same patterns present everywhere you looked, a great, oblivious, greedy homogenous mass of cells of people, that had expanded instead of advancing and developing in the correct, positive, living sense; they had not replaced the faulty businesses internally, they had just left them empty because they wanted their very own to accompany the very own cheap houses of people living out farther from the city because gas is cheap and so is spacious privacy. Cancer.
At this point I didn’t think I would ever be able to look humanity in the face and speak as though there were nothing wrong. I was going to have to email Ms. Cole and implore her to allow me to switch to the satirical presentation on time travel, because this project had stirred up such grave emotion in me that I would never be able to tone it down enough for a class presentation. I really don’t want to become the beheaded messenger, a scapegoat criticized and scrutinized, because that would really ruin my potential for achieving any social ends in the future.
The second night I worked on this, I returned to another ghost of my independent research past, the biology in a bottle experiment from high school. I started to use this visualization in high school for portrayal of the impending ecological crisis as well, but I was paralyzed in development of how to present it because of short attention and lack of external motivation: neither peer assistance nor mentor facilitation to develop this urgent message. This image provoked the solution I sought, finally the reconciliation I needed to the first night’s revelation: that these bacteria, unconscious and not sentient as far as I could tell, with no signs of advanced structure development, one of our oldest evolutionary stages, had been demonstrated to explode in population followed by mass die-off, yes…. But it was the growth curve! They had also been able to reach a very low but stable population level just as another organism had entered their wasteland and transformed the material into useable material again, thus beginning the formation of a healthy, complex ecosystem. Oh no, hold on. When I worked it out in my head, the organisms first followed the growth curve where, upon achieving a peak, they were able to either achieve a stable level just below it or fall off the cliff and drastically fall in numbers.
So, there is really not much comfort in the growth curve. Simply, that our future is very tentative. The probability that we are setting the stage for complete extinction is low, since we’ve already caught ourselves. But we also are not highly likely to escape unscathed. Mostly, I’m thinking behind my great social concern, about my personal future, and I’d really like to determine the safest place in the world.
Following that thought process, I also hit a crossroads: do I continue my campaign for awareness, throwing myself at preserving the planet the way it is (futilely) where less noble souls will immediately think of self-preservation and not the greater social good, and whereas I’ll be caught up in my crusade, which, yes, will hopefully raise the survival rate, perhaps I don’t want even this; maybe I should just shut up and move to where all the other smart people will move, and keep quiet, allowing “natural selection” to take course over the close-minded, less motivated, or less capable. For survivors would include those with knowledge and physical ability, and the wealthy, with just the few who lived there before…. I’m sure you’ll understand that I am not so noble as to be able to say immediately that I would not leave the people… It is, you see,… they who have brought it upon themselves…. I have reconciled my own existence with nature, you see………

I wrote this my senior year of high school, and came across it as I was cleaning my computer. Give it a chance... Might just use it for getting into thick skulls back home in the middies.
Go green. Think globally, act locally. “10 Simple things to do to be green!” We hear these ads like a fad. Buzz words, they are. But it’s gonna take more than some alliteration and catchy phrases to constitute real change. It takes a cultural change, a movement of the masses, so to speak. What does that include? Not abstract, fuzzy generalizations. It takes cold, hard, on the ground (in the ground, in the case of gardening) action. Legislative reform, and individual responsibility. For example, if you see litter out by your yard, do you just leave it? If you spill a cup of coffee, do you just watch it run and say “oh well, it was bound to happen”? Noo! You whip it up, pick it up, put up a fence, set a coaster and a lid and take recovery action followed by preventative action. Make sure it can’t keep happening. This is what we have to do.

I see this sequence of cause-and-effects that has built up to our culture of laziness and unquenchable thirst to be entertained and do as little work as possible. We were happy people, people in Europe are happy people, in local townships and villages and compact living, as far as I’ve heard. But when we moved out to the vast Western frontier, we found seemingly unending space. Huge tracts of land that had never been laid claim to were snapped up. We still have miles between towns in the Midwest, more empty space than we know what to do with. Urban sprawl was born with the car; we can build new homes on the edge of town where land is cheap and it is much quieter, then a new grocery store and fast food restaurants and a gas station pop up to serve us, and boom! You have suburban living, a microcosm appendage of the greater body. We don’t have to interact with people we don’t want to. We have several feet of aluminum and steel, and glass, and pavement between us. Flip ‘em off, what are they gonna do? Then began the internet boom. We could go online and focus purely on what we wanted, ignore the critics and write THEM off as the fools. Anonymity let us be as cruel as we wanted to complete strangers. But suddenly we feel empty, and we can’t understand why. Do you feel as isolated as I? Well, I did, I felt isolated, bored, apathetic and unaware. Ennui has creeped in, America--we are blissfully unaware, in this state, of global issues that are driven by our lifestyles.

Water crises, for example, because we pay for transporting water from municipal sources hundreds of miles away from ourselves because somehow it is no longer of this earth if it is in a clear bottle with a pretty label carried by a truck…. A magical transformation takes place--yeah, the plastic leaches mildly toxic chemicals into your water, so I guess it is a little more artificial (read: delicious) to the human palate.

I'm developing an argument for my final project in communications, to argue that time travel is more likely than we think and as such we should do what we can to limit experiments to make it happen.  

Just wanted to throw down a couple scandals.... The first one I made up to try out Tucker Max's writing style, and the second one is bona fide real deal.  I even tried to keep exaggeration down, too.

This weekend's escapades:

Just a few thoughts I wanted to record, as facebook is far to superficial to keep any sort of reliable record for me; though now these arrangements are rendered practically public intellect.  Oh well, words can be found a thousand a pound.

So let's go over this topic of racism.  Prejudism.  Stereotyping.  A stereotype, a generalization, is founded in a fundamental human behavior pattern.  We gather a few details and relate them to our past.  We misinterpret. Fucking realize that people are people, and that should be the first 

I've noticed that Christians and non-Christians live pretty much the same.

So we're evolving.

Facebook had a lot of potential.  It could have been the tremendously valuable community building tool that our vast, busy global society needed.  But it has largely failed at facilitating meaningful and valuable interactions.  At least as far as I can tell; mostly we're all being self-centered and spending a lot of time maintaining our personal, interactive portraits.

I've been awake since yesterday morning at 8 a.m. It is now 12:03. Forty hours of straight consciousness, and nineteen years old. I got an ugly feeling in the pit of my stomach when it hit me. That's such an ugly feeling to no longer be 18. I don't even care about 21. I wanna stay young forever. As far as lack of sleep, tomorrow's not even an empty day. But I have to get this damned Spanish caught up. Gool.

I was thinking the other day that it appears to me we've hit an evolutionary brink as a species/society. What I mean is we are following the Sigmoid growth curve to a T!
This pattern is occurring the exact same in humanity as has been demonstrated in bacterial cultures thousands of times; apparently this cycle hasn't changed since bacteria, or even earlier.

Do biological cycles/patterns evolve? Actually I'd probably venture a negative on that bet. But we are approaching carrying capacity, and it'll be huge if we are able to conscientiously stabilize. I don't think any other invasive species has ever achieved this without the introduction of a predator or drop in prey, with a drastic fluctuation in population. If we manage to stabilize without a drop in numbers, it would be nothing short of miraculous, as well as a tremendous benchmark for life as a whole.

I'm afraid I'm not really that optimistic though. =/

This economic crisis reminds me of virtual reality.  Partly, because it is.  But it also reminds me of one of the few things I learned worth mentioning in playing video games: the morality of using video game cheats.

Most video games have cheats built in.  These might be shortcuts that developers left for themselves to skip to certain parts of the game in testing, or deliberate keys made to enhance gameplay after finishing the game.  Anyone who's played more than 10 hours of video games in their life probably knows where I'm going with this.  If you use cheats, it will suck the soul out of the game.  It might mess with code, and in exploring the game, you'll come across bugs and glitches that can make it freeze up.  You mutate it.  You fall out of the game, you become infinitely rich and powerful and the rest of the world is powerless to stop you.  But it is artificial, unnatural, and cannot last; not in the real world, not in video games. 
At this point, you argue no, dummy, it will last as long as you keep the game on; there's no time limit.  In the game, people don't revolt.  But what I'm referring to is the reaction of you, the human element.  When you reach ennui in gameplay, when you get bored with it (and you will get bored with it), this is the same as what happens when real world bubbles burst.  It's a slap in the face, it's a pang of guilt.
Let me clarify that the situation I am describing is the situation that occurs when you use cheats prematurely.  It's when, before you've finished the game, when you still have plans for achieving awards and gaining merit incrementally, you use cheats.  Let's talk with Grand Theft Auto in mind, since that's probably the most recognized video game in history (aside from PacMan and Pong, of course--which also don't have cheats built in), and it fits the bill precisely. 
Grand Theft Auto even warns you: in using cheats, if you save your game, you will ruin its reality.  You can no longer proceed as planned, you have effectively mutilated it.  This is reality. 
Let's return to the other side of this analogy.  The big bankers, the multinational corporate CEO's, the business and political elite have installed and enabled the cheats in our global system.  In banking law, in global politics, in our finance systems, credit and greed and dark corners and giant unsolicited walls have given these guys space to hide in plain sight their manipulation of our reality.  These guys are virtually rich, they have more many than should be possible.  It has created an obscene gap and socio-economic cliff.  Now we have to do a system restore.

But by age 2, I was already quite linguistic. Ididn'twrote this poem:

"beauty's waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it.
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd'rous shame commits."

Now, I realize that it probably doesn't actually mean anything, but it seemed profound at the time. And my mommy put it up on the fridge, right next to the Domino's Pizza menu.

Poooooooooooooooooooooooooop =)