i am.

soon.

all i ever said was that this was never going to work. none of it.

so, you need to take responsibility for your self, instead of telling other people what to do.

in theory, if we were all nurses, right? but, we're not. and that was obvious.

al's old now.

"put on a mask, you fucker"

this is the world.

it's not working.

so, breathe!

breathe!

breathe!

breathe, you fucker!

so, they forced us to wear masks because standing six feet apart wasn't working.

now, the masks aren't working, either - which is probably as much about user error as anything else. you can't expect people to use masks correctly. you just can't...

so, what's next?

mandatory hazmat suits?

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/canada-s-active-covid-19-case-number-is-rising-shortly-before-most-schools-reopen-1.5085281

so, i've gone through and updated all of the noise trade links by replacing them with smashwords & lulu links in the other three blogs and am about to start it for this one as well, which was one of the loose threads i left off at in june.

my head is still oozy.

i've decided to avoid weekend shopping so i don't have to deal with the face mask nazis, meaning i'll need to get everything done tomorrow, plausibly for the entire month. it'll be a big run, at least, even if i have to go again mid-month. so, there should be a new fan in here soon, with a backup in case it breaks....

so, am i going to catch up on this?

i don't know.

probably, yes, but in a reduced manner.

everything in windsor is canceled for the foreseeable future, including the border. but, everything in detroit is canceled, anyways. well, at least on the surface, it is. it hasn't made any sense to me to start looking for house shows or underground raves when i can't get across the border, anyways. and, posting about them here would just be a liability, which i'm not doing to the scene in detroit.

the truth is that i fell into a very long head cave from mid-june to mid-august that initially focused me very narrowly, and then had me lose my train of thought altogether and in the end culminated in a very vicious migraine. so, i need to recapture myself, finish what i was doing and move the fuck on.

that is going to give me the opportunity to trace a few things, like the missed dso shows, but it's not even clear if people are rescheduling things anymore or when this is going to fucking end.

will there be shows by this time next year, even?

*sigh*

but, at the least expect some posts from the last few months to trickle in here over the next few days as i try and refocus.

the soundtrack, however, has the odd distinction of being a tangerine dream record.

i'm going to guess this isn't about a young drew barrymore, but it could be.

this minor socal punk band named themselves after the clown in it.

fripp is maybe easing up a little, it seems, but it's still hard to find crimson online.

this reference is reversed; stephen king appropriated the crimson king, and made it a character in several of his works.

years later, stephen king's son would write a book called heart-shaped box.

i guess he dug the salem's lot reference.

but fuck arnie, anyways.

it's the same basic mentality, though - when somebody tells you it's everybody else's responsibility to ensure they don't get sick, rather than their own, they are basically reflecting the lack of individual responsibility that is ruining the contemporary left.

and, you're just as likely to succeed in declaring a virus-free space as you are in declaring a safe one.

i'll let the internet run with this, and am sort of surprised that it doesn't seem like it has, up to now.

it would be extra sardonic if those kids were dressed like witch doctors, or orthodox priests, and were "cleaning" the air with sage (which is highly carcinogenic, actually) to ward the virus out of their safe space.

one of the few things i just can't do at all is draw. i've never been remotely good at it.

but, i'd like to see a cartoon with some activist kids holding up a sign that says

virus free safe space

...and some recognizable health experts looking at each other, baffled, with a bubble caption reading:

"why didn't we think of that?"

"life is short, art is infinite"

art is infinite.

you are finite.

submit.

so, i mean it's not about john a and it's not about that statue in that park. i have little but criticism for the man, and would probably support moving the statue to a museum, if it were to come up at a vote.

nor is it about race, or racism, however you want to define it.

rather, it's about the ideology underlying the actions, which positions them as public enemy number one, and something that cannot be tolerated in a civilized society: when the virus of religion rears it's ugly head in this manner, it must be rooted out immediately.

i would consequently call for the maximum possible penalties to be enforced against these people, and for the movement to support those penalties, and to clearly distance itself from this savage, uncivil barbarism.

if you don't want to be labelled savages, stop acting like savages.

i see that kind of thing and my only reaction is that red lights start flashing, and sirens start swirling, and giant words flash in front of me:

DANGER

DANGER

BOOK BURNING. RELIGION. DANGER.

DESTROY.

they've taken away their own voice.

we need to talk about inequality, and the correlation between race and poverty. clearly.

but, not in the context of the destruction of art - it's a non-starter, and i won't engage with people that behave like that.

we've been through this before, and it is the single most serious threat to civilization: religion.

when people gather and start arguing for book burnings, or any other destruction of history or art, they need to be mowed down with drones and bulldozed into the lake.

"but i don't want to save the art. i want to erase it from history."

then you're a dangerous menace to society and need to be stopped before you bring us back to the dark ages.

i have no solidarity for any group that prioritizes the destruction or defacement of history or art.

there is no excuse for destroying art of any sort - books, statutes, etc - and it makes me infinitely less interested in what they have to say when they engage in it.

they just look like a bunch of ignorant christians.

i may support a democratic discussion to move statutes out of parks and into private collections or museums. i have no particular attachment to a statue of john a in a park.

but, the destruction of art has no place in a civilized society or a civilized discourse, and anybody that insists on engaging in the destruction of art de facto removes themselves from the discussion, and renders their voices irrelevant.

they need to stop doing this.

it makes them look like uncivilized savages.

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/statue-of-john-a-macdonald-toppled-during-defund-the-police-protest-1.5084561

ok, i'm not being totally fair; it wasn't just rand, there was grisham, clancy and koontz, as well.

i enjoyed the grisham and clancy, but found the koontz a little weak.

i'd rank the best king works higher than all of it, both in enjoyment and technically, which i know is likely to get some push back. but, i actually like king's writing style, and think he was maybe misunderstood by a lot of stuffy people.

i'd expect he'll be revisited by academia in a more positive light, in time.

was stephen king a "horror writer"?

no....

his best works are actually science fiction, clearly, and that's the best way to understand him. he also dabbled in various types of drama, which allowed him to write substantive social commentary into his works, and his books are deeply psychological in the sense of getting into the heads of everything from rabid dogs to people with paranormal psychic abilities, but he's a science fiction writer, first and foremost and that is how history should remember him, as one of the most important authors of the 20th century.

the horror side of things mostly comes out of unfaithful film adaptations, much of it just plain out silly. and, if you're trying to understand king via the shining, you're really missing out. a lot.

a common theme in his writing is the idea of self-control, and i think that's what i remember pulling from him, as a child, more than anything else: good dogs that don't want to be bad and scold themselves for it, kids that can't stop themselves from lighting things on fire, adults that can't stop themselves from altering the future, etc. there's good lessons for kids, there, whether it's intentional or not, about grappling with concepts of actus reus and mens rea. 

i was maybe on the young end of things, but these are actually good books to give young teens to read, despite the reputation otherwise.

i actually did not know that shawshank was the top rated film at the imdb, or that it has been there for a long time. i'm just learning that now.

i used to watch a lot of films with my father & stepmother, and the way this would work would be that we'd pick up two films at the blockbuster - one 'normal' film for the two of them to watch, and that i'd usually skip, and one 'weird' film that i usually ended up watching by myself, after my dad gave up halfway through.

i picked out shawshank 'cause i'd already read it, and the stephen king billing was enough to keep the stepmother interested enough to sit down and try and watch it (she would normally prefer the kind of films that do better at the box office). i'm not sure i have a second example of something that they both managed to get through.

in fact, it was probably my father's favourite film, post-1990, at least. certainly, i can't think of any other film he would reference regularly, excluding things like stallone flicks.

the fact that the three of us could agree on it at the time says a lot, as we really couldn't agree on much of anything. but, it was more than that: if you had polled us at that time, in 1994 or 1995, we would have all ranked this as one of the greatest films ever made.

i'm glad to see it get the recognition that it should have gotten in the first place.

'cause, sometimes things are obvious, even if the world can't see it.

archive.org saves the day, again:

https://ia800700.us.archive.org/25/items/Popcornarchive-theShawshankRedemption1994_qkw5d/Popcornarchive-theShawshankRedemption1994_qkw5d.mp4

and, i'd recommend the text highly too, as you can see.

actually...

shawshank is exceedingly topical right now, with all of the talk of prison reform and racial conflict.

you don't get much more classic than this film. really. if you haven't had the chance, due to age or oversight, spend the time with it, in whatever way it is that people watch movies, nowadays.

i remember watching shawshank with my family, years later, and none of them realizing it was a king film.

and, i'll never forget the dropped jaws when i uttered those lines:

it's not as good as the book

there was a collection called the bachman books that i would have liked to hang on to, and had the running man & shawshank redemption in it. i also wish i had hung on to firestarter, the dead zone and cujo.

the weirdest thing is that i doubt she even read most of them.

my sister became very bizarrely propertarian over the books, for years afterwards. it is true that i gave them to her, if under duress, but nobody else accepted the validity of the gift. my mother vehemently insisted that she would hang on to them until i moved out and got my own place (i was 14.), but it didn't work out that way.

i do believe that taliban jackie discarded the bulk of them, in the end, when the sister tried to bring them into the house, which was foolish on her behalf.

and, i learned many years ago that arguing over ownership of the books was not helpful - and really should have taken it as a red flag of my sister's character, all of those years ago.

if you ask her today, she'll still insist they belonged to her, for no reason that anybody else can discern.

i didn't meet taliban jackie until i'd been walking for years, thankfully.

but, i basically grew up railing against this.

these were books that i bought when i was like twelve or something at the drug store with money earned via allowance, and still have, remarkably.

when i moved from my mom's to my dad's, i ended up "giving" my king collection to my sister (who stayed there) because my stepmother complained that the books smelled like smoke. then, she bought me a pile of books by ayn rand to replace them. yup, taliban jackie.

i never made it through atlas shrugged, because it was so fucking dry; it wasn't until years later that i even realized what i was even reading, or what she had tried to do.

i kept a couple squirreled away, though and still have them: the tommyknockers, it & the stand. in fact, they're sitting on my dresser, right now.

i was like 16 or 17 or 18 or something (i don't remember) when harry potter became a thing, which is the age you avoid things like that.

if i was an immature 15 year old, i could have maybe gotten into it, and if i had kids in my 20s, i could have found myself reading it to them. but, 16-18 is the age where you tend to avoid "children's books" pretty viciously.

i was also the kid that looked towards the older people in the room and really didn't like the younger people. so, i was the last gen xer, even then; i was interested in underground 80s rock music, and trying to build friendships with people in their 20s, rather than trying to connect with people my own age. even at the age of 20, about the year 2000, i realized i was dealing with a generation gap, or on the cusp of something, with people that were almost the same age as me. i'd go work on projects with kids in my class, and realize i related better to their parents than i did to them.

but, i had a handful of friends that were outcasts and rejects, and they tended to prefer the company of people younger than them. so, i remember hearing people talk about it. i never interpreted it as anything more than a children's story, and never developed an interest in it. i'm not exaggerating - i never even cracked one of them open.

even as a kid, i went for the classics. i wanted something more profound, and had no interest in literature for young people that just struck me as a waste of time. so, i was reading like joyce and asimov and stuff, rather than rl kline or whatever else the kids in my class were into.

the closest thing to a contemporary popular novelist that i ever got into was stephen king (by 1995-1996, i had read pretty much everything he'd written up to that point) and i was well aware that nobody my age was reading him.

so, i vaguely even know who she is, and i haven't the remotest interest in her opinion, at all.

the first time i remember reading about the gaia hypothesis was in asimov. foundation's edge. i was very much just a kid, but it got into my head, and i've wondered about it a lot since. nowadays, i wonder more if the real life force is the sun, rather than the earth. the ancients seem to have made a lot of sense to me, more so than the modern religions ever have. and, if the sun dims enough to save us from our own stupidity....

but, i want to react to the idea that geo-engineering is just an excuse, because we may be nearing the point where it doesn't matter anymore.

it's similar to the argument i have with myself about isis, because i bloody well know where they're getting their guns from. so, how can i sit here and argue that we have to stop this using western military might when i know that they're getting the weapons from us, and in fact doing our dirty work? and the reason is that the other option, a new fundamentalist caliphate in the middle east, is just a non-starter. the amount of suffering that would cause is too great to even contemplate. so, you find yourself supporting this struggle that you know is unnecessary, because you just don't have another choice. the intent may have been to terrorize the iraqis into specific concessions, and that may have been horrible, but now they've got us by the crotch and we just have to give in. it's the old story of blowback, and the deficit of good options to deal with it once it sinks in.

so, he's right: geo-engineering should be a non-starter.

but, we might not have a choice, and it might already be too late to avoid it.

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/regenerative-agriculture-and-massive-planting-of-trees-is-our-only-hope-earl-katz

i have never read a word jk rowling has written and i do not care what she thinks.

that is all.

yeah, i'm not exactly a fan, but this woman's career trajectory is particularly exploitative, from the start - from child actor to legal prostitute and everything in between.

the court should have probably put a restraining order on her father, rather than give him custody over her as an adult.

there's such a long history of this kind of abuse in the music industry. your favorite female pop stars were essentially all slaves to the men in their lives, going back to the 1930s and no doubt longer.

she should be granted control of her own finances, for better or worse, in a country that is supposed to be about the pursuit of happiness.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-53930167

i impress myself sometimes...

this is a mix tape i put together in 2015 of material initially recorded before the year 2000.

use headphones. please.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-works-vol-0

my grade three teacher had a thing for yellow submarine.

and, in hindsight, perhaps lsd.

he kind of disappeared. we never got a straight answer.

freakin' kids.

this should be taught in grade school, along with other timeless classics like beethoven's fifth.

be kind to your children.

please.

the world depends on it.

energy. momentum. love.

it's just physics.

conservation law.

qed.

i forget sometimes that there are children in the room.

ok, maybe your dog cares about you, but not if you raised it like a nazi.

i'd rather flip this over; dogs, like kids, need love, first and foremost. and, these wise words are perhaps useful, in the context of parenting:

and in the end,
the love you take
is equal to the love
you make

i mean, you don't think your dog cares about you, do you?

you're just a cookie dispenser.

your dog would eat you in a minute, if you ran out of treats - and your kids will too, if you raise them that way.

the woman is basically stupid, if she thinks that kid will grow up caring and compassionate.

that kid is going to turn into a utility monster. that's what she's teaching it - selfishness as a virtue.

https://www.cbc.ca/parents/learning/view/train-your-baby-like-a-dog-parenting-is-here-and-the-internet-is-angry

does this seem kind of oddly current?

i think most people realize how absurd that is, today.

yet, they wear masks to the mall and don't see the irony.

but, your kids will....

if you read up on this era, you learn that it's only half the case that the politicians were idiots; they knew that wasn't going to be useful, but they pushed the fear anyways, because it was more about control and dominance.

we're in a very weird moment.

you're not free, not exactly - not any more free than an electron in a field is. we are subject to the effects of external forces. clearly.

but, you're certainly not predetermined.

that's not even classical.

that's not even wrong.

i mean, if it was a church group, i'd maybe have a more subtle response.

but, it's not.

so, my condemnation is clear:

you? never did! fuck the kenosha kid.

i can condemn this kenosha kid.

if he blew up a mosque, that's a diversity of tactics to advance secularism - i wouldn't advocate it, but i won't condemn it

but, i have no common cause with anybody that wants to shoot black protesters on the street, unless the protesters are explicitly christians.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with shooting three people — two of them fatally — during a Kenosha protest Tuesday night, considered himself a militia member trying to protect life and property

you never did.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/08/26/kyle-rittenhouse-charged-kenosha-protest-shootings-militia/5634532002/

i never did.

- the kenosha kid

it can't happen here, right?

if death grips were half this good, they wouldn't suck.

but, they basically built their career on this old bowie/eno/reznor/ice cube/rave ogilvie collab.

i had to do a lot of running around yesterday.

i was concerned about cops sitting on the street corners with baseball bats, but almost nobody was maskless, indicating that the fear, uncertainty and doubt seems to be working. there were again two cases yesterday...

people actually seem to have been taken aback by something they saw on me that they may not have seen on anybody in quite a while, namely lipstick.

i'd bet cosmetic companies are taking it hard right now in some places, because what's the point when you're wearing a mask? but, you could see it in the eyes of random females walking by.

i remember that. i miss that, just a little. not jealous.

i managed to find another month's worth of brand name estrace, right here in windsor. is there more out there? there might be, i don't know....

this month was been awfully unproductive. i keep trying to clean up posts back to early august, and keep getting stuck, either via distraction (posts this month are twice the average) or as a consequence of migraines or oversleeping. it snuck up on me this time by accident, but quitting smoking is not fun. but, i'm inside now for a bit, and am two weeks past it, so let's hope i can get a bit of work done before i have to do groceries for september.