Wired featured a product called Iris Neo Cool – a liquid eye freshener that the Japanese Schoolgirls are said to love. But that’s not what I’m writing about. Many of the offerings in Taisho’s catalog feature in their product descriptions a series of accompanying illustrations that describe when the product is best used, and what benefits it provides. This product, whose purpose I cannot begin to divine, seems to cause leering and madness. Maybe that’s purpose enough.
Category Archives: thought
Ride It!
Scientists are so excited about all the extra terrestrial life they’re finding. Seems like they can’t avoid it these days. “Oh, look at these bacterial remnants we found on Mars.” “Oh, look at all that brothy briney liquid beneath the ice caps of that moon.” THAT’S NO MOON! “Oh, look how the sun is pulsating and gesticulating about that hungry hungry black hole at the center of the Universe and saying, ‘Look out! Black hole!'” Whatever. You know, I’m waiting for something a little cooler than fossilized alien rabies. I’m waiting for there to be bigger stuff – stuff we can ride! Because it’s all about riding around and stirring up a commotion. Yeehaw! Spank that tentacled mofo! “You git!” Ride it across the sandy red veldt! At least that’s what I think.
Little By Little
My hands are dirty with MovingType scripts. That’s how this beast is conquered: from the inside out. I watched a nature show a good while back about a kind of demonic fluke who inserts its parasitic larva within the carapace of a snail. Over time the wee ones, subsisting on the precious bodily fluids of the host snail, burrow their way merrily toward the eyepods, rendering the snail thoroughly insane. As the snail continues to crawl directionlessly, the wee ones lie just beneath the translucent skin of the stalks, and there begin to pulsate: a black and white throbbing strobe. The snail is no longer home. A bird invariably spots the strobing snail and plucks it off its leaf, thus propagating the fluke species… or some such. I don’t know what the snot all that’s about… but I myself feel like a burrowing larva within the deranged body of Movable Type. And I’m beginning to strobe, baby–time to get it on.
Take the Stairs
The reason I jog up four flights of stairs isn’t because it’s good exercise. The reason I jog up four flights of stairs is because I can’t stand being in an elevator with people. After pressing the button, the seconds tick by, and I feel a small crowd approaching me from behind.
“Did you press the button already? Okay, good–we can all ride up together! Say, would you mind breathing the same air that I just expelled from my body?”
In fact I do. And you’re ugly.
Yes, taking the stairs is good for the heart.
Waking Up
I can’t imagine how much energy I’ve expended, over the years, ensuring that my stamps were placed on their respective envelopes right side up. The only reason I became fully conscious of my behavior is because I recently affixed a stamp to an envelope sideways, and then spent the better part of a minute peeling it back off, as careful not to spoil the adhesive as an archaeologist dusting an ancient skull with her toothbrush.
Realizing the ridiculousness of my situation was not unlike having a lucid dream: “Hold on,” I thought. “None of this is real. Everything I know is but a construct, my actions determined more by institutionalized rote than by conscious desire.”
True or not, ever since that day, being around stamps makes me feel reckless. Now I never put stamps on right side up. How could I ever go back? It would feel like a forfeiture. Sometimes my stamps are not even properly within the confines of the “affix stamp here” box at all. I have twenty some odd years of blind conformism bottled up inside me, and something has to give.
In fact, I feel that I may soon escalate my practice into more ritualistic experiments, wherein I subject my stamps to all manners of unspeakable influences, involving everything from X-acto knives to hydrofluoric acid to–possibly–laser beams. Perhaps it’s true that this all expends more of my energy than being a philatelia drone ever did. But I’d also posit that the satisfaction of gleeful triumph is worth far more than 37 damned cents.
Animation
In one old Twilight Zone episode, the protagonist, a soldier, realized to his horror that he could sense which of his comrades were doomed to die by the eerie halos that enveloped them. Call it an overdeveloped case of synesthesia, this would best describe how I see the world.
It hasn’t always been like this. For me it began when, as a child, I noticed certain subtleties in the rendering of cartoons. These were visual elements that were plain enough for anyone to see, given they were a slightly autistic child with a penchant for obsessive attention to detail. In any given scene it was possible to divine which objects were destined for interaction by looking for telltale black outlines. Elements that lacked these outlines belonged to the background, and would remain static throughout the scene. (This was before computers made it possible to animate everything cheaply.)
Around the time I hit my teens I started noticing a similar weight around household objects, with those of imminent animation marked more prominently in a kind of thin spectral penumbra. As I gained experience reading these signs, the effect actually seemed to diminish. But this was only because it became just another type of information, like color, temperature, or roughness, woven into my perception of the things in my world.
Naturally you’d assume that I would exploit these powers by getting into the shell game scene, popular in metropolitan centers. But my ability actually loses cohesion in dynamic environments. Beside which, I do not wish to profit from the less gifted gentry. It would make me feel less than virtuous.
No, what I do gain is a cool appreciation for static spaces. I am a voyeur of inertia, and that gives me a sense of subtle satisfaction. Plus I know what you’re going to pick up a few moments before you do.
Coincidence
Lately I’ve found myself tempted to take part in other peoples’ coincidences, and it’s all I can do to restrain myself. I’d just gotten home yesterday evening, and had left the front door open on account of the air being so cool. I’d received a package in the mail, and was using a steak knife to slice through the four hundred yards of super-reinforced tape they wrapped around it when I overheard a conversation outside. I went to the living room, knife still in hand, to get a better view. Two women strolled abreast down the sidewalk, one of them speaking with great enthusiasm about how events in her life had recently come to a head. “Then,” she said, “with him holding me at knifepoint, I’m like, I just can’t take this anymore…”
I looked down at the knife in my hand and felt guilty for no apparent reason. Or perhaps there was a reason. For just a second, I thought wouldn’t be fun to run out my door and leap from the bushes brandishing the knife over my head? Oh, the stories the woman could tell her friends then! A coincidence like no other, that’s what it would be. At least, that’s how it would seem to her.
But then I went back to the kitchen to finish unpackaging my new book on relationships.
Where I Am
What if I’m not really here?
That is, what if I’m somewhere, but not precisely where I think I am? The thought has plagued me for as long as I can remember: what if, as I’m going about my daily routine, everything around me is merely a convincing full-sensory hallucination?
I imagine it somewhat like this: I’m standing in my shower, shampoo bubbles trickling down into my eyes… except the whole thing is an illusion, and I’m really standing in the middle of my office, hands in my hair, eyes closed, going about the motions of washing my hair. Some of my coworkers notice, giggle, shake their heads. Weird graphics guy’s goofing off! Look! Except I don’t stop, even when a manager passes by and questions me about it–at first lightly, and then again, in a more brusque tone. He puts a hand on my shoulder, “Don’t you have some work you could be doing?” Perhaps, but for all intents and purposes I’m in my shower. I don’t budge, and a crowd gathers around me.
Or! Or what if I think I’m walking home, and I really am walking home. At least right up until I trip over the curb. At that point reality and perception diverge once more, and while I see myself continuing to walk up toward the car park, I’ve actually landed on my face, and am now rolling back and forth on the pavement, legs obliviously beating in a useless walking cycle, like a broken windup robot.
Poor me! What went wrong? And does it really matter? For the last tree has fallen, and the woods were never really there to begin with.
Whirr Click
I like to make click sounds with my tongue each time I lapse into one of my obsessive Undo, Redo sequences: Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. Sessions typically last for upwards of 3 minutes, and the patience of coworkers erodes proportionately.
Sneezing Conventions
Even in meetings, where there is a supposed order of business, no one has ever taken anyone to task for a loud sneeze. It’s a pretty outrageous thing to go without admonishment, when you think about it: the convulsive exhale of air from the nose and mouth, usually with some sort of primal vocal accompaniment. If you were to bark as loudly during that same meeting everyone–even that one quiet guy who never looks at anyone directly–would turn to see what the hell you were doing. Not a sneeze though. Somehow that is acceptable.
Unless the sneeze is just completely ridiculous, that is. I knew a guy once who enunciated his sneezes. “Ah-choo!” he would say, almost conversationally. But the way he clung rigidly to the pronunciation quickly became annoying . “Ah? Choo.” Was he actually attempting a British accent? You half imagined his sneeze included a reference in the pronunciation legend footnote, complete with a schwa and an accent behind the last syllable. Mr. Proper Pants just can’t unleash, not even for a sneeze.
But then there are people who let go a little too much, and that’s hardly any better. One of my best friends has a sneeze that sounds like the exclamation of one of Vlad the Impaler’s victims. “YEEEHHHHAAAACH!” she says in your ear. Never once. At least twice–once for each eardrum. When she sneezes bits of plaster fall from the ceiling, and nearby banshees are like, “Fuck was that?”
Now, if this friend of mine were in a meeting and sneezed then I think people might finally be moved to halt the proceedings to issue corporal punishment, social allowances be damned. Except for me. The catatonia brought on by meetings would be just enough to cancel out one of her sneezes, so I’d be rendered alert and oblivious.