A subway leaves the tunnel.

There is a train.

IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE POST BEFORE THIS ONE: STOP NOW
So you've decided to read the e-mails. Great! Just don't read this one first. The past two posts are sort of a unit to be consumed in series. There's lots of ideas in this one that are developments of thoughts I had in the last e-mail. If you read this one first you'll either come away completely confused or just think I'm a total whacko. So stop now, go on to the post immediately before this one and work up.

-Trevor

IF YOU DON'T LIKE LONG E-MAILS THAT DEAL DIRECTLY WITH THE QUESTION OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSE: STOP NOW
These e-mails here are incredibly long, like three printed pages each, and they deal directly with the questions of who god is, where god is, what our universe is and how we as human beings fit into all of that.

You may be in a place where these ideas are not what you want or need to confront in your life. If that's the case, I urge you to scroll down to the parts of this website that deal with daily life in our apartment. They're much shorter, and a lot more fun to read. There will be a time when you do want to read these e-mails. Just make sure that when you read them you want to read them. That's all I ask.

-Trevor (again)

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE LEFT, HERE IS THE SECOND E-MAIL:

---

Felisa,

As has become our custom, I’ve got to start this e-mail by saying how awesome you are! Lol.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked with someone who ‘got’ all of this stuff so quickly and so explicitly before. I’m pretty amazed at how quickly you found the essence and roots of my argument. That’s mondo-impressive.

It’s funny ‘cause I have all of these ideas in a theoretical vacuum--which is to say I do some of my own reading and exploration, but I’ve never had any sort of formal instruction regarding religious history or anything like that. It’s such a pleasure to hear what you have to say about these things because you actually know what you’re talking about! I’m afraid at this point I’m going to be stuck on you like a very inquisitive, religious, information-leech.

Maybe that wasn’t the best image to use there. Lol

I know what you mean about worrying that the universe is just chaos spiraling down in on itself. But I know for sure that the universe cannot be entirely without order, by the simple fact that I exist as a very structured, highly ordered being. Humans project order out onto the world around us. I’ve heard that in fundamentalist Islam, that creating artistic works that represent any part of god’s creation is considered sinful idol worship. I think that’s connected to the same idea. It’s sort of a sideways connection, hard to express, but there all the same.

If we imagine that the will of god is simply the laws of physics. And that as human beings we have invented ways and ways and ways of bending those laws to lengthen the time we spend on this earth. To keep us away from go longer.

A good example of this sort of bending is electricity. Which I think is about as magical thing as exists on earth. I’m going to do a teensy bit of physics here, so watch out. [grin]

Water sitting on the top of a very tall cliff has a certain amount of “potential energy” (imagine the niagara river at the top of the falls) and when that water falls the energy is released. Although released probably isn’t the right word, “converted” is better. As it falls on the rocks at the bottom it pounds on them and the “falling” energy is converted into mechanical vibration, or friction or a million types of other energy. I bet if you measure the water temperature at the bottom of Niagara Falls, you’ll find it’s a bit hotter than at the top because of the friction caused by the water beating against the rocks. (That, of course, is absolute wild speculation, there’s lots of places the energy could go besides heat, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true.)

This is all basically just the first law of thermodynamics “Matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but merely altered in form.”

So, when that water is falling, instead of having it fall on rocks, we have it fall through a tube with a big fan blade inside, specifically designed to convert falling energy into spinning energy. Then we use spinning energy to induct electrical current in a wire. All we are doing is taking a part of the universe that is unbalanced (the amount of “potential” energy in the water at the top of the falls vs the waters rest state at the bottom of the falls) and capturing the imbalance in an electrical circuit. (Interesting note: another way to say voltage is “potential difference.”)

So where was I going with this. Ah yes… so remember my thing about the dimensions in which we overlap, and the dimensions in which we are separate? And the universe we can perceive is just the places where we do not overlap. This whole world is just our separation from God. So what do we use electricity for?

We take the “potential difference” of Niagara Falls (It’s funny I keep misspelling Niagara… so far it’s been Niagra and then Naiagra. But then you never see that thanks to the miracle of editing! Phew!)

Sorry about that, I’ll start that thought again. We take the potential difference of Niagara Falls and use to heat our homes, give us light and television. We use the power we get from our separation from God to prolong the separation. I think I said that before, and I still haven’t quite explained it.

We’re using the separation to keep ourselves alive longer—x-ray machines, open heart surgery, even the electric oven I use to cook food to kill bacteria. Each of these inventions has the purpose of keeping us alive longer, to keep us from reaching that point where we return to God.

I think it’s fair to say that whatever God is, that the rules of physics can be accurately described as the laws of God. Because they really are the only “rules” that can’t be broken. We can bend them, find ways to twist them but never break them. We can never invent a perpetual motion machine, not so long as we exist in this universe and breathe this air.

I think I’m done with that point, but you probably know me well enough now (though we still, technically, don’t know each other at all) to guess that I’ve still got other stuff to say. J

My roommate and I were talking last night, and recently I’ve been really God-heavy. Before I was just presenting these as ideas that I had, and that had no relation outside of myself. But lately, I’ve started to think that there is some kernel of truth here. It’s a very dangerous place that I’m getting into.

Because I’m starting to dig deep into heavy theological points, and I’m starting to state with some confidence that what I believe to be absolute truth is actually an absolute truth, I’ve got to be very careful that I don’t get attached to the idea that I’m somehow special because of these ideas.

When you start to try and define God for other people, they get very nervous and upset pretty quickly. It’s a word with such deep and powerful connections to what they believe is absolute in the universe. In some ways, people have built their identity in relation to god. Because for them, god is the fixed reference point in the universe, the self is just a fleeting thought that passes in and out of existence. What’re the only sure things in this life? Death and taxes.

Well, given what I know now, I’m pretty sure that I don’t *have* to pay taxes. I mean, in order for me to continue living where and how I do now, I need to pay taxes. Otherwise I’ll be arrested. But I can not pay taxes and still exist. I might exist in a prison cell somewhere, but then I’d get all my meals for free, so I’d not only be paying no taxes, but living off the taxes. Kinda of a strange deal.

I guess it’s the same way with death. If I’m going to continue to exist in the world then I have to die, if I want to continue in what Buddhists call the endless cycle of rebirth, then yeah. To be born again I first must die.

But I think that through meditation, or music, or archery, or whatever it is that we do, we can reach a state of unbeing. We can get out of this circle even for just a second, but that second will beyond time and last forever. That’s where that experience of flow comes from. Buddhists call them kensho moments, or you could say that you experience enlightenment. Christians and other monotheists will say that they felt the presence of God.

They say that when someone sees God, or knows God that they are set on fire with belief and they have a radiance, and I understand that now. I feel that I have seen His face, whatever it is. And I really don’t like capitalizing "His", but I suppose its necessary to remind us that He doesn’t refer to a man. We just use the metaphor of a human being to understand what this thing is that is holy and divine in the universe. But if the metaphor is all there is....?

I guess now I feel like I have touched this truth. Like when I was eight and for the first time I swam down and touched the bottom of the neighbor’s deep end. I burst through the surface of the water pumping my fist and shouting. This time, though, it’s like the pool is infinitely deep, and instead of coming up to the surface, I fell out the bottom and now I’m falling back down to the surface, about to do a cannonball so big that it’ll splash all of the water out of the pool.

But what I need to remember is that the truth, that God is the only important thing, and even though I am God, so are you, and so is everyone else.

It’s interesting that you said I should start my own religion. To be honest, in high school I always wanted to start my own religion. You know why? You get to set your own holidays.

There’s a big book in Ottawa (well, a metaphorical big book… just like santa’s list) that has all of the “officially sanctioned” religions in Canada, along with the dates of their holidays. And because our constitution guarantees the freedom of religious expression, then anyone from any religion can legitimately ask to have their holy days off without repercussions at work. So I figure, lets find out what the bare minimum requirements are for a religion, get officially registered and then declare that every day is a religious holiday. Then we get to take days off work whenever we want to. Sure they would be unpaid vacation days, but it’s just like calling in sick except that your boss is constitutionally prohibited from reprimanding you.

Whaddya think?

But seriously, in the last week I have been thinking about starting my own *real* religion, but that’s a dangerous path because it leads to where people would start to believe in the religion, and not really evaluate these ideas independently. I think that if people recite these words that I say as truth, then the point has been lost. Because the point is that I cannot tell you the truth. I cannot lead you to god, everyone must find god within themselves.

However, I wholeheartedly encourage you to take these ideas out and begin your own religion, a church of one. Find out what your absolute truth is and then radiate it out into the world like a beacon. I think it’s interesting that Christ said “I will make you fishers of men.” There’s a neat metaphor there, snagging these fish and pulling them out of the world of the water into air and sunlight. Like men lost in this world, fish believe that they need the water to exist. They need the water to breathe, they need the water to live, but they do not need it just to exist.

Also I think in that statement, Christ was referring to the power of personal relationships. That once you understand your own non-being you can rework the world in the image of your own choosing. The Buddhists say that as a soul reached the highest levels of enlightenment, it experiences nothing but the pleasures of the earth. This is because the process of enlightenment is a process of letting go of all things. Naturally, it’s much easier to release the things that cause you suffering. Once you have released all of those things, then the next step, the hardest step is to understand that the pleasure itself is suffering.

One of the Buddhist sutras is the heart sutra “There is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no cessation of suffering and no path.”

We need to understand that this universe we live in is a separation from god. I’m very sure of that. Even the love and the beauty we perceive here is just a shadow of the real deal. Like Plato in his cave, we have never seen the sun. What light what beauty must exist on the other side of the curtain?

I think this divide between human and divine is what Christ was trying to break when he tore the curtain in the temple. I know that’s the right story, but I’m not sure of what happened. This is where I need you, my religious-studies-major friend to help me out. What story was that?

Okay, this e-mail has now reached its maximum limit. But I’m not going to apologize for it, and I hope that you won’t either. I think we’ve both been spending a lot of time apologizing for something that we are both tremendously interested and engaged in. I think that we should celebrate what we are both contributing to this incredible exploration that we’re on.

So thank you for reading. Thanks for helping me ground my ideas in this world, because I think I tend to forget that these truths are not self-evident for everyone around me. So having a person like you, who can grasp these concepts because you have the theoretical background, is really essential for my personal development of these ideas. I’m still a little spooked out that you e-mailed me this week because before last Friday, I wasn’t interested in all of this, nearly so much as I have been since.

I think there is no such thing as coincidence.

So thank you for entering my life, thanks for making the choice to be part of this, even though neither of us knew we were making the choice to begin with.

And since I’ve been so heavy I’m going to write a little bit more that’s just about me, and not about all of this stuff…

I had a terrific date with the girl I told you about, today. Also I bought some nifty clothes:

* 1 Army surplus dress uniform jacket with a patch on the arm with a Torii Gate on it.
* 1 Hawaiian shirt that’s more 60’s than Hawaiian
* 1 Orange hoodie with the NASA logo on the front.

If you thought I looked good before…

You were crazy ‘cause we’ve never seen each other! (But I do look good, just so you know [Grin])

Heh alright so if it was at maximum length before, this e-mail has now pushed into extreme uncharted waters. Yet still I refuse to apologize, simply because I know that you’re enjoying reading these e-mails as much as I’m enjoying writing them. I hope you know that the same is true of the e-mails that you write and I read. Everything is awesome.

Again, I hope you don’t mind but I’ll probably post this e-mail on awesomejumbo.com. Why don’t you post your replies on your blog and lets see if this discussion doesn’t spread outwards from us? Also I’m CC-ing it to my roommate, so please feel free to include him in the replies. I think you two are both very important in developing and strengthening these ideas. And since they take so darned long to type out, I figure I’d save myself the hassle. Just be glad that he’s getting your hand-me-downs and not the other way. ;-)

Love, (not in that way, but love nonetheless)

-Trevor “The T-Unit” Coleman

P.S. This e-mail was written a bit last night, a bit this morning and a bit this afternoon.

Felisa,

This is terrific! I’m so excited to talk to someone who actually knows something about religions. I suffer from what I call “the great doubt,” which is to say I know that I know nothing. I think most people don’t really give the question the thought that it deserves. And don’t worry, you haven’t told me one tenth of what I want to know about Gnosticism, lol. I’m seriously interested in all of this.

Isn’t it funny that we spend all of this time apologizing for discussing our faith. I think the extremists out there have almost made religion a bad word. But then, maybe it’s our wholesale repression of religion that has created the extremists? There’s some element of conscience that’s missing from our activities at the international level. I have this personal theory that our society is just the human mind writ large. Could religion be the missing element?

I think it’s safe to say that most people believe there are serious problems in our society, in terms of the whole geopolitical thing and the exploitation of developing nations. And I think that people have a very strong sense that there is a great moral imbalance in our society. And because our society’s survival is dependent upon that moral and economic imbalance, we have to suppress our natural instinct to help our fellow man in order to keep the status quo. Since religions (at least any worth shaking a stick at) are all about being nice to people and generally trying to help everyone along, it’s no surprise that we’re squelching religion. And with that kind of mass repression happening, it’s no wonder that people are turning to extremism.

They *know* something is wrong, it’s staring them right in the face everyday. But the mainstream media can not, and will not show people the truth. Their success is dependent upon an audience that feels great about themselves, so that the advertisers can hawk their wares most effectively. So people are seeing on television images from CNN of absolute chaos and destruction, deaths by the thousands and mass hunger and strife. But then at the end of the clip, everyone is reassured that this is democracy at work, and these are people who are happy and free. And people believe what they see because they have to, because the alternative is so horrifying, so terrible that it is not to be believed. That or they believe even more horrible things that a fanatic tells them, just to escape the feeling of personal responsibility.

So no wonder we’re all messed up.

Crap, I apologize for going on about this sort of thing. I tend to get carried away by these kinds of ideas. But I’m getting the impression that you don’t mind, so I’m just going to go right ahead anyway. :-P

I had an idea just now, talking to my roommate. In physics they say there are lots more than three dimensions. Something like seventeen. And you could imagine them like sheets of paper, folded up around each other into a ball. If I were feeling more like a Buddhist I might suggest a lotus.

If you think about it, you and I--though we’re vastly separated by distance--are also co-incident at a particular point in time. So in one dimension, time, we overlap. I think that the place where we overlap is God. Whatever that is. It’s that unity that is whatever is divine in the universe.

The three dimensions that we experience, this whole world we live in, is a product of our division from the universe’s natural equilibrium. We exist in the place that is separate from God. The whole of our lives are spent struggling and searching for God, yet we are already God, whatever that is. Kinda funny.

I’m really doing a terrible job of explaining all of this. I’ve had about a million ideas about this in the last few hours, so they’re all cooking up in my brain. Right now I’ve got lots of chopped carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, and beef floating around, but it’s not quite a stew yet. So bear with me a bit as I fumble around here.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy, or disorder, is always increasing in the universe. Yet at the same time, another phenomenon, evolution, is gradually increasing order in the universe. The entire universe takes the path of least resistance to the state of lowest possible energy. Except us.

By us, I mean life, this strange and bizarre collection of self-replicating chemical structures that’s led up to me typing a letter to you, a person I barely know who lives hundreds of miles away about the things most near and dear to our hearts. We go through such great lengths to be alive, to find our place in the universe. It’s such a struggle, we’re always fighting against the gradual tide of disorder that’s washing over the entire universe.

But before you go calling the suicide squad for me, consider this: What if time actually moves backwards? The direction we’re going now leads to nowhere. The gradual heat death and dissolution of the universe? Not my cup of tea.

But if time is running backwards, then all of the universe is gradually ordering itself up, and returning to the moment of its creation, which is also the moment that it disappears. The universe is returning to unity, to god.

I imagine the two forces, order and disorder like two rivers that flow into each other from opposite directions. Our lives happen in the turbulent intersection between the two streams. Our choices are the randomness, the turbulence that happens between the order and the chaos. We exist at the boundary of the two.

As living things we have the power to see things in the future and in the past, and we have the unique ability to bring things from both of those worlds into the present moment. Like this e-mail, for instance, is really nothing more than a record of my finger movements. Ideas from the future and the past are captured in language through abstraction--the one defining trait of humanity--and recorded on this computer in a virtual letter I’m sending to you.

The funny thing is that the computer itself is a metaphor. When we move a mouse or type on the keyboard, we employ a metaphor. We have to. The thing that is your computer, and the immense complexity of the device itself (Mine’s doing *BILLIONS* of calculations a second!) is far beyond the understanding of anyone who doesn’t have a computer science degree, The genius of Windows is that it allows you to use the metaphor of a desktop to control the behaviour of a vastly complex system in a simple intuitive way.

The interesting thing is that all of life is made up of these metaphors. When I say the word “jar,” I could easily point to the same thing and say “glass” (to mean the material its made out of) or “container” (a thing which holds other things,) Each of those words is equally valid to describe that object. The fact is that the whatever-you-call-it exists as all of those things at the same time. Imagine a cloud. We can all point to a cloud, and we all know that they exist, but could you ever draw a line around one? The cloud is at the same time a cloud, but also just air that happened to have a certain temperature, humidity and pressure. Clouds form, quite literally, out of thin air. But because it facilitates communication and allows us to conceive a mental picture of the world, we use the signifier “cloud” to represent the concept.

How does all of this relate back to religion? It has to do with how we define ourselves, and the matter of our own existence. I believe that we are a lot like clouds.

But, let me go back to the metaphor of the two rivers flowing against each other. Grant me that time moves backwards, which is a leap, but no more of a leap than to say that time flows forwards. It’ll be interesting.

If the natural progression of the universe is moving towards chaos and disorder, towards things un-existing. Then our struggle against that current is our struggle against unity with god. I said before, we have to struggle to stay alive, and we do. Every gulp of air could be our last. Each sip of water is necessary to keep us going. We exercise muscles constantly to breathe, and the heart is like a runner in a marathon with no finish line. Just keep going till you can’t go no more. When you can’t go more you let go, stop existing and begin flowing backwards through time again towards the single point that is complete harmony and equilibrium with the universe. Back towards God.

What I’m beginning to think now is that we should just let go of this world before our lives are over. It’s possible to just let go completely. Budhists do it through meditation, but there are other ways to get there, I’m sure. As long as your heart is pure, you are on the path. But when meditating, you can achieve the state of unbeing. Remove yourself from existence and return to the pure flow of the universe backwards through time to the moment before. When all was one, and there was no separation between the things on this earth.

All souls go only one place. All people reach enlightenment before they die. We can let go of this universe, this being, this separation from god. We can lose the entire world.

And I know you’re thinking “This guy is going to kill himself.” But that’s not at all where I’m going with this. Suicide is not releasing yourself to the flow of the universe it’s being so enraptured by your own ego that you believe you can end your own existence through force.

If I kill myself I haven’t let go of the universe, I’m actually holding on to it so tight that I think that by ending my physical existence I will end the universe.

No such luck, though. Bung it up this time and you’ve just got to go back to the beginning. It’s like a game of snakes and ladders, everyone will eventually get to the top. Suicide’s just an extra long snake that drops you back before where you started.

Okay so I’ve dropped a heavy load on you there. I would have given up reading by now I think, but you’ve made it this far (if you’re reading this) so thanks for sticking around.

I think I’m going to post this on the blog ‘cause it really sums up a lot of ideas I’ve been having over the past four or five months quite concisely. Well, concisely considering the weighty subject matter anyway.

I never did have a cottage on Peggy’s cove. It’s out on the east coast and cottaging is more of a central-canada thing, I think. My family lived outside of the country a lot, so we never bought cottage.

Oh and as far of the type of songs I write you can download two I just recorded last week:

How Can I Make This Any Clearer – http://www.awesomejumbo.com/anyclearer.mp3

Kinda Strange – http://www.awesomejumbo.com/kindastrange.mp3

They’re just made-in-my-living-room demos so they’re rough. But let me know what you think!

Okay have a good night, I hope that you’re interested by all of this and that you will share some of your insights as well. And if you see any connections in what I’m saying to any cool stuff that you’ve learned about, do tell! I’m sure you can see that I’m pretty enthusiastic about this stuff. I'm terrifically excited to have a chance to have these sorts of dialogues.

May your heart's beauty shine through all that you do,

-Trevor

I haven't been posting because I've been going to school and editing articles for my magazine, not smoking pot and jerking off to zen kones.

Today I discovered a new kind of angst: Epistemological angst. We'll define it in a comic as soon as we get some drawrings from Dr. Henderson.

Evan oot.

Watching the State of the Union tonight. It's making me sick, but I can't turn away. It's like a canker-sore I can't stop tonguing.

In one of the more loathsome moments, Bush lashed out at "activist judges" imposing their "arbitrary will" on "the people."

"Our nation must defend the sanctity of marriage!" he insisted.

Then the picture cut to Senator Rick Santorum (R).

You think Dan Savage had anything to do with that?

-Trevor

Hrm, I looked today and Evan hasn't posted in so long that there's NONE of his posts on the front page. I think this is terrible, because he's a much better writer than I am.

So for your own sakes, please e-mail him at evan@awesomejumbo.com and tell him to get his ass posting.

Now that we got the domain name we both have fancy @awesomejumbo.com e-mails. Mine is trevor@awesomejumbo.com. Send me a message, I'm usually pretty bored in my multimedia class, so I'll probably answer you. Honest!

-Trevor

Neil Armstrong never dreamed that he'd step on the moon.
But when the chance came, he took it.

-Trevor

Love isn't finding someone who believes in you. Love is finding someone who you can believe believes in you.

Today's a weird day, went a long way last night and ended up right where I started. You may or may not know that I am the Lord God incarnate. It's okay though, I don't often exercise my power. And neither do you.

Water falls, a turbine spins, and at the end of a wire a lightbulb glows. That power is availible to all of us. And if you think I'm talking about electricity you've missed the point.

The armies of the world are made only of men. If you can convince one man, you can rule the world.

The people are reclaiming their culture. We are on the dawn of the age of distributed intelligence. We are all our own television and radio stations. We are all the source and destination of every message. Man, I love the internet.

-Trevor

Ron is sitting on a chair.

The wrens leg pierces the surface of the pond.

And now for a moment we saw the man behind our own curtains.

I was flipping channels and I came across this really awesome video montage, all pop-art inspired with crazy good music.

Turned out to be a Much More Music station promo.

I can't help but wonder what great things that video editor would create if he wasn't spending all of his time making station promos.

Our current culture rewards artists not based on the merit of their work, but on their ability to sell themselves. To "make it" you have to be singularly focussed and driven. I think that comes through in their work. It has to, when so much of your life is tied up in that dream.

I always say that culture is our society's way of talking to itself. Like the voice in your head that's reading this article to you.

It's alright, we're all a little crazy.

The music we listen to, right now it's all made by people who had to fight and struggle their whole lives to get where they are. Is it any wonder that a lot of successful artists have substance abuse problems, and that most celebrity marriages end in divorce?

These are the voices in our heads. These are the people who sing the song you listen to when you kiss a girl for the first time, or the song that you play when you get home after your mother's funeral. These moments, taken one at a time, are our lives. Who do we want writing the soundtrack?

We need to nurture and support artists. We need to bring culture back into the fold. The rebel has been king in popular culture since the 1950s, and no wonder. In the 1950s, exploitation was rampant in all of the cultural industries. The screen- and songwriters of the day can't have been happy with the situation, so it's little wonder that they began to idolize the outlaws and iconoclasts of society. The system, after all was not so good to them.

The McCarthy communist witchhunts drove a wedge between the american government and cultural industries that remains in place today. And lets not forget that in 1963, 50% of the world's population was 18 or younger. That's fucking weird. We still live in the shadow of this enormous demographic anomaly.

The rebel is our parents' hero, not ours. So lets get over it already. Lets stop fighting the system and lose ourself in the enormous, complex, beauty that is civilisation. We can't change the system ourselves, it's too deeply ingrained in our beings. But we can change ourselves and we can change each other.

The baby boom has seriously fucked us over. We have gotten used to social conditions that are far from what is normal. The process that's happening now, with the advent of the internet, and the reduced significance of the large centralized media is simply a return to normal. We've just never seen it before.

But neither have our parents. And we're younger and faster than they are.

The meteor has hit.

-Trevor

Hey, a big shoutout to sitemeter.com who give us free web statistics. Through the terrible magic of Javascript, we're able to see what page people were on before they came here. My favorites are the people who came from bizarrely unrelated search queries.

To showcase these beauties, I'm proud to present what I hope is the first in a series of posts entitled:

SEARCH TERMS USED TO FIND AWESOMEJUMBO:
1. "pictures of elephant's genitals"
2. "how big do orangutangs get"
3. "bum pictures orangutans"
4. "picture of plato's cave"
5. "tommy hilfigger cincinnati"

But you don't need to search anymore. awesomejumbo.com is coming soon. Very soon.

-Trevor

Evan's busy playing Seventh Saga on the olde skool 16-bit Super Nintendo. I hate those role playing games, and never fail to mention it, which I'm sure Evan appreciates. So I mentioned it.

"I hate having to earn experience points!" I said. And I do. I mean, really, any time in a game where you have to stop and just kill stupid little monsters for like ten days just bores the hell out of me. So I switch it off. It's why I never liked any of the Mario games. Brand me heretic if you will.

The whole idea of experience points is so annoying. Why even have them? Newer games like Half-Life are paced so that you just move from one goal to the next without having to wind some imaginary odometer forward point after mind-numbing point.

I was complaining about this to Evan as he tackled another horde of "undead" and these weird stone tablets that try to fall on your character.

"Well," he said between waves of imaginary monsters, "in video games like half life your control is direct, so you control the characters experience. It's not so much a character, just you doing stuff. In role playing games your experience is alienated from the character's. The character is like a doll that you control, and issue orders to. You are more of an observer than a participant."

I pointed out to Evan that the games almost universally feature a god-like third-person perspective, further reinforcing the sense of distance. He went on,

"So you become alienated from the game world, alienated from the character. Just like geeks feel alienated from the real world. I'm not suggesting a causual relationship, maybe just a mutually reflective relationship."

Which came first the role playing game or the geek? Psychologically, you could say that geeks are drawn to video games because the alienation from the game world mirrors that which they feel in real life. Distance is percieved as safe and comforting, so it's natural that an interface that precludes an intimate relationship with the character would appeal.

"And the feeling of distance in the game reinforces the sense of distance in real life," says Evan over his shoulder. He's fending off an android and some sort of large bird with a Kryn sword.

So it's a feedback cycle, geeks make role playing games which make more geeks who make role playing games which make more geeks.

And then they take over the world, while the rest of us are playing half-life.

We're all doomed.

-Trevor

Every time I expect something to happen, something else happens. I can't tell if I'm in a Murder Mystery or a Romantic Comedy. Whatever happens next, I guess it's the movie.

I wrote a song couple of days ago that feels related, though I'm not sure why:

You're making something out of nothing
Think you're getting somewhere
Look around you
It's all the same faces, it's all the same places
But you think you're getting somewhere
You're making something out of nothing
Think you're getting somewhere
Look around you
It's all the same faces, it's all the same places.
And we are all the same
We are all the same
We are the same person, we are the same spirit
We are all the same.


They say lyrics without music are like a skeleton without flesh. I dunno, though.

Maybe it's the other way round.

Anyway, Karen, if you're out there, I could use an acting partner, and I think you're holding the script.

-Trevor

Every hour, a day, this week that she's gone
Was hardly that long that she was here.
Now, chased, kept away by a dragon of a mistake.
Smoking words fanned to flame by her honor,
Burning, billowing until they block all light above.

But give me one week.

I will slay this dragon with apologies and tenderness.
I will douse the flames with tears of repentance until
every smouldering ember is extinguised.

Then will our phoenix love rise and carry us together to the end of this and all lives.

-Trevor

1. Five most depressing "Christmas Gifts" for sale at Walgreens
2. Five great reasons to buy a Hummer™
3. Five things I like more than I want to admit
4. Five disturbing fake names for ejaculate
5. Five (presumably) fake personality tests (and what I think my result would be)

For the rest of the lists, and more all the time check out www.5ives.com.

Two stops to Yonge,
but I'm still riding the
hangover train.

Wish it was Bay-er
as this sardine can
of universes whips
along the ringing rails.

Goddamn! That's one hell of a squeak.

Four hands on the piano
two of them sweating
two so soft you'd kill to hold them.

And the shampoo-perfume
rolling over in waves, timed
to the gently sway of her
body and the music.

An eleven year old could die before
he reaches the end of this bliss.

Okay, I'm going to call Evan out here. Writing one post about hipness is hip (especially if it's a hipster how-to). But two in a row?

He violated the most impotant rule of all from Swingers: Never Call Her Back.

As of now, I am officially placing Evan on a hip-suspension. For the next 48 hours, you may only refer to him as "cool" or in desperate circumstances "groovy."

You should believe me on this one. I wrote the book after all.

-Trevor

there's something about being a hipster that I think implies effort. A hipster is, by definition, conscious of their image. That's why nobody wants to be called a hipster; it sort of means you're shallow.

By that standard, I guess Trevor and I are hipsters because we have discussions like this one. However, we're the kind of hipsters who don't take it seriously. So we're able to be hipsters without being vacuous, self-obsessed, dickweeds. That's not so bad, then, is it?

This morning number 3 was going to be, "3. Be hip."

It's true, though. I've been getting tired of all the "hipster" talk we've been into lately, precisely because of rule two. Everybody knows the real secret to being cool is to stop trying to be cool.

1. Stop reading hipster "how-to" guides.

2. Forget that hip even exists.

3. Do whatever comes naturally.

-Trevor

but it coudn't have been as happy as Trevor's.




Maybe as happy as Liisa's.




Mark's was clearly happy. Lydia... is Lydia. There's no explaining her. Like the Matrix.




Apparently we were the after-party, because a lot of people showed up just after midnight. A girl who I don't know puked in a bag, Trevor's cousin Rick won our chugging contest, Johnny Blair pissed off the balcony, I verbally abused my sick friend Bill on the phone, then I kicked everyone out of my room so I could fall asleep complaining to my girlfriend about how sick I felt. She barfed in the morning, but I was cool. Happy 2004.












Also, Ryan took a picture of his cock (not included).