Dream

Walking through the night in Allston trying to get back home, talked to a shadowy homeless dude along my path, kept walking and ran into cico, talked to him and then the homeless dude caught up. Cico knew him from the greasy-hipster-underbelly of emerson. I'd offered to let John stay the night at my Westland apartment, and he in turn invited this guy to stay. I was apprehensive but knew that if John wanted it to happen then it would probably be fine. We got back and later in my room I found out this dude actually used to be in the hipster cliques at emerson before becoming homeless the year before our last year. I realized I had peripherally known him at some point. What I had not known before was that he was also a long lost member of neutral milk hotel. He had then had an underground-cult-famous solo project with a neutral-milk-hotel-ish name, which I was always unable to remember. There had been a documentary on him. Something had happened to him that had changed everything, and now he'd been living on the cold streets for four years. I was happier to help then, as I was fascinated by his story, but he was still a dirty homeless man and I worried about getting sick from having him sleep in my room.

The next night I was trudging across the crunchy-snow-covered backwoods of Boston with rob and Brandon when we heard a car coming. I thought it might be the dude from last night, or another homeless guy I'd come across, and didn't want to have to deal with him another night, so as the car came into view of us we, or I at least, pretended to be sleeping on the snow.

Then it was raining. We reached the part where we had to scamper down the hill to the city streets. I fretted that I had left my shoes outside in the rain overnight. We approached the bright colorful city lights of Downtown. I went into a convenience store and knew where everything was because I'd worked there a long time ago. But I might've knocked something over, leading to an unwanted conversation with the current stock-boy.

Then I was in the subway, asking someone–was it the neutral milk hotel guy? Or an Asian proxy?–what hard thing had happened in his life. I asked him two easy questions, then I asked him if he'd lost someone close to him. He told me that I had asked a question that he could not answer, and started zooming ahead of me. I could not catch up to tell him that I had too.

Obligartory Golden Moon Post

Response to Jesses Blog

Funny timing, the other night I checked the blog for the first time in months and there were no new posts. Checked again tonight because everything else out on the internet is so fast-paced and frantic and just carries an inherent stress, so this is the perfect introspective thing I wanted to read. Scott, adrian, and I also just spent the night recounting college stories.

I feel where you're coming from. One of the things we talked about was how much we used to laugh, how many just out-of-control overwhelming laughs we had. We used to just get sooo high, it was like a fucking space mission, we literally deemed it a different universe. Looking back there definitely is something garden-of-eden-ish about it. And we definitely all had winters.

But looking at it now, I don't feel so detached from my former self like you describe. Life is more rigid for sure. I haven't been able to get high or even really stay up late since I got my concussion in July, so that's an even bigger reason my life's been not as 'magical' lately. But I also feel more comfortable with myself, and stronger and independent as a person, than I did back in the day. The trifecta of working out, learning how to camp, and dealing with my dads death made me feel like I can deal with a lot of things life might throw at me. (I don't wanna say all or most because who the fuck knows what horrible shit could happen, but I'll say a lot.) So I've grown up, and maybe the rigid, structured nature of how my life is set up right now makes me feel less like I'm floating through a hilarious psychedelic dream than I used to be. But for the moment I'm ok with it.

I've always been interested with the arc of how you change as you get older. And wondered if you ever get stale. Like I look at my favorite artists over time- the Beatles soared through their early twenties, then in the mid-twenties got into their druggy crazy shit, but from then on got kinda boring. And in my mind that was when they "grew up." Like Abbey Road is still great, and the craftsmanship is brilliant, but they weren't capable of reinventing the wheel anymore, or just being on the cutting edge anymore. In my mind the early/mid-twenties Beatles have something in common with our college selves, this aspect of still-figuring-things-out, which makes everything they do a bit more exciting, because it's on the edge of chaos or something. Where as now I'm just repeating the same things over and over. Same job everyday, same house at night, same kind of jokes all the time. Am I stale? Am I boring? If I am at all I think it's mainly because that time is being funneled into a job to pay for a life.

So to get back on track, it makes sense to wonder if who you are now will feel the same let's say 20 years down the road. Like, in our teens we looked back a year and felt different. Has that slowed down at all? I was gonna say it has, but I don't know, I feel like I can still go two years back and say I was different. But is now-me less different from 2-years-ago-me than 4-years-ago-me to 2-years-ago-me? I don't think so, I think I've changed more in the last two years. So the question is, if I changed and now feel like I have shit figured out, does that make me less likely to change in the future? Maybe, but I don't have everything figured out, just more of it....

To wrap this up. Before reminiscing about college, I was at work late and literally had life conversations like this with two other people, so again this timing is weird. But anyways, this woman I work with told me how basically she was married for 24 years before her marriage fell apart in 2015, which forced her to move back here from New Zealand. And she said for a while she brooded over it and cried everyday. But since she started working with us she's been feeling like she's living up to her potential better, working with people she likes for a good cause, and then she was like, "I know this sounds crazy, but looking back at it now, I'm grateful that it happened, because it's given me a second go at life that I didn't expect to have." So, case in point, if things feel stale, and like the magic has gone out, it's not impossible to change that. This isn't totally on the mark of what you're saying, because it's true you can never go back. But you can make forward just as interesting and exciting. I think?

Looking Back

Voices from the past. Moans of pain, contemplation and endless laughter. The over-use of the word "gay":
I read the blog last night.

It had been some time since I paid it a visit. Each time I would read a couple entries, laugh a little at how silly we were and lament the fact that the years of 100+ posts were gone.

This time I felt different. This time, my heart wrenched as I scrolled through the years, past dick jokes and long drawn out sentences meant to confuse for simple friendly delight. My heart wrenched because it felt no equal here. This blog is no longer a mirror, it's a photograph. And the people in it almost unrecognizable. The authors of theses stories are ripe fruit hanging over a lifetime. Swaying joyfully, soaking in the sun with there brothers.

That fruit fell and the harsh sun above drank it's juices and the ground below ate it's soft skins. A winter fell over the bodies and covered the remains with a blanket cold and real.

And when the rains dragged away the brush and the warm wind returned, what emerged was a sapling. Still young, looking up to the same heights it once swung only now with morbid trepidation. With the deep earthly knowledge that this will be my final form. From here till forever some version of this brain, these beliefs and this heart, ever growing heavy, will be life.

I cannot long for my former self, I think I've grown too old for such cheap tricks. And I do not envy the pain I felt five years ago. But with outstretched arms towards the constant Eastern winds of time I feel the all too sober conclusion, that one me has long past and before this life is through so shall another.

Wanna call watching this whole thing the Shepard's Challenge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9VMfdG873E

i just realized every blog post from 2017 starts with i

i carumba ;)

I had a dream

where I had some medical problem where I had to cut my own legs off. The only way to do it was to take a pill that made my legs atrophy right at the hip and then slam a car door on them. I never had the courage to finish the job and woke up before they fell off.

I'm on an unstoppable blog streak

I was listening to some dude's TEDx talk about how social media is bullshit, and while his talk was more bullshit than it needed to be, it effectively made me miss the golden years of the blog. So I'm gonna try to spend more time posting rando shit on here than scrolling through my Facebook. I do kinda want to purge Facebook out of my life, but the goddamn events feature is too convenient. Someday, tho.

Anyways here's a clip of Lawrence Krauss talking about the refined definition of multi-verses, which kinda brings the whole idea closer to reality for me. Some pretty great reaction shots of Joe Rogan in here too. Til next time.

i just went to the mens room and it smelled like fish.

some fucking fish-dicked asshole was probably fucking around with his fucked-up fish dick. heard him breathing in the stall behind me.

I Don't Know Shit About: Antioxidants

I was recently reading an article in the New Yorker called Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds. In it, they talk about how reason is primarily used to dissect other people's beliefs and not our own, which leads to confirmation bias and Trump. Then they mention this toilet experiment. Some dudes decided to ask some peeps how well they understood toilets, and everyone thought they understood toilets fine just fine. But then they asked the peeps to write out a detailed step-by-step explanation of how toilets work, and nobody could fucking do it. I can't say exactly how this connects to confirmation bias but the morale of the story is that when you write an explanation of how something works, it requires you to ACTUALLY know how the thing works. I am also aware of many massive gaps in my understanding of things. So in the interest of being less dumb, I've made a list of some of things I want to be able to understand as well as I possibly can. As I write this, I come to terms with the fact that I have essentially given myself homework essays for fun. And my first assignment is Antioxidants.

I. WHAT THE FUCK DO I KNOW

I know the green tea I drink has antioxidants. I have seen this heralded as a good thing. I assume antioxidants prevent or reverse oxidation, which I believe is the process that makes rust. I also know that I don't want my bones to get rusty. Honestly that's all I can say I know about anti-oxidants right now so on to the next section.

II. WHAT THE FUCK IS AN ANTIOXIDANT

Thanks, WebMD. So I still don't know what an antioxidant is, but I know what it does. It protects the goddamn body from goddamn damage caused by goddamn free radicals. The good news is that I know what "the body" is. The bad news I do not know what a free radical is or what the damage is or how the antioxidant protects the body. ONWARD TO KNOWLEDGE!!!

III. WHAT THE FUCK IS A FREE RADICAL

Ok so a free radical seems like it's basically a molecule with an unpaired electron. And thus let us venture into the world of electrons to figure out what the fuck this means.

(If you don't want to get down to the nitty gritty, we can just say that certain atoms/molecules have a certain amount of unpaired electrons, and electrons really like being paired, so an atom with an unpaired electron is gonna steal that electron from another molecule, or give its unwanted electron to another molecule, and that's gonna fuck that other molecule up. And in the case of your body, that molecule might be a cell membrane molecule, or it might be a cell nucleus molecule, or it might be a DNA molecule. So if you're continuously fucking up DNA molecules, at a certain point they're not gonna get repaired in time (DNA is constantly getting repaired), and they're gonna start propagating mutations, yada yada cancer. If you're satisfied with that, meet me in section V. In the meantime...)

IV. WHAT THE FUCK ARE UNPAIRED ELECTRONS

So, unpaired electrons. This gets into the theoretical structure of atoms. Atoms have different "shells" of electrons, with each shell corresponding to a different energy level of the electron. Shells are referred to by numbers. Each shell/energy level can contain up to four different types of orbitals. Think of an orbital as the shape of the electrons' path around the nucleus. The four orbitals are referred to by letters (S, P, D, and F). And each orbital can contain a certain amount of electrons, which are referred to by little superscript numbers.

This takes us back to something we probably learned in high school chemistry, and then immediately forgot. Basically, to uncover the unpaired electrons, you have to write out the electron configuration of the atom. So let's say we're figuring out how many unpaired electrons are in Co.

 

The different orbitals correspond to certain columns, and the shells basically correspond to the rows. Why? Because the periodic table is beautiful. Anyways, you pretty much just fill out the atom from the top.

Co is atomic number 27. I put a little green box around it above. We basically just have to work our way down to 27 through all the other atoms. So starting in the top left, you have shell 1 (1 because we're in row 1 of the table), orbital S (S column), and two atoms in that row, which means two electrons. So your first shell is 1S². Row 2 has orbital S with it's next two atoms, and orbital P with six atoms, so you have 2S²2P⁶. Row 3 has the same orbitals and number of atoms, so you have 3S²3P⁶. Row 4 is where our Co atom lives. So starting from the left you have 4S². Then Co is 7 atoms deep in the D orbital section. BUT for those middle D atoms, you subtract 1 from the row number, so instead of 4D⁷ it's 3D⁷. So the final electron configuration you have is 1S²2S²2P⁶3S²3P⁶4S²3D⁷. That's step one.

In step two, you take the highest energy electrons and pair them off into funky little boxes. I know it would be nice if the highest energy electrons were in the highest energy shell, which in this case would be the two in 4S², but the universe doesn't give a single fuck about who you are or what you think. For the atoms in that D section (which are also called transition metals), the highest energy electrons are whizzing around UNDER the fourth shell, in the third shell. Fortunately, that shit we did in step one makes them easier to identify because it's just whatever the last number is. So we're working with 3D⁷.

So about those funky little boxes. Basically each box can contain up to two electrons, and a full box represents a happily-married electron pair. So each orbital has a different number of boxes. Like the S orbital only ever has two electrons, so that fella has one box. The P orbital gets three boxes. We're working with the D orbital, which can have up to ten electrons, so it gets five boxes. So we get five boxes, and we have 7 electrons to box up (the 7 in 3D⁷)(God bless you if you're still reading this holy shit). So what you do first is give each box an electron.

For some reason people draw the electrons as arrows. I think it has something to do with quantum spin but at this point who the fuck wants to figure out what that means. So now we have five shitty, lonely-ass electrons, but two of them are about to get motha fuckin girlfriends, because we started with seven electrons. In the spirit of the times, I will say that the two left-most electrons are Adrian and Deanna, while Scott, Rich, and I are represented by the three arrows on the right.

And there you have it. This atom has three unpaired electrons, making it unstable and ready to mangle.

This represents copper in its neutral state, meaning it has the same number of electrons as protons. It's possible for it to have less electrons than protons, so a free radical can probably be any atom that has its electrons fucked with. But I'm not gonna look into specifics because I want to finish this goddamn

V. WHAT THE FUCK WAS I TALKING ABOUT

So where I left off the reasonable readers, I was saying how these free radicals, with their unpaired electrons, are ready to steal electrons away from wherever they can. If you're wondering where they come from like I was, I should mention that these free radicals come from ordinary metabolic processes, immune system responses, and external sources like fried food, alcohol, tobacco, pollution, etc. So you can't avoid them.

Since this post is supposed to be about antioxidants, I should probably talk about those. An antioxidant is a molecule that comes in and A: takes that unpaired electron away, B: donates an electron to the unpaired one to calm that shit down, C: nip the formation of free radicals in the bud, D: break down the entire free radical molecule, or E: some other shit that seems complicated and I don't want to get into because I really want to finish this goddamn post.

Antioxidants are very complicated and scary looking molecules. What you're looking at here is Phytic Acid, an antioxidant found in grains, corns, and legumes. It is complicated and looks scary. Maybe someday I'll dive deeper into the chemistry of how this works, but today I really want to finish this goddamn post. Suffice it to say, somewhere in this behemoth monster is a mechanism that deals with a free radical.

VI. I REALLY WANT TO FINISH THIS GODDAMN POST

Ok let's get to the takeaways, because I have to go to work in ten minutes, and since I started this post I've thought of like ten other, funner things I want to write about. So free radicals: some occur naturally, some come in from the outside, bad if you have too much of them. Antioxidants: same deal. I guess a bunch of studies show that antioxidant supplements that just dump mass amounts of antioxidants into your bod end up causing more harm than good. Besides Vitamin C, which you can pretty much just pee out if you have too much. But then you'll have to pee more and who the fuck wants that. Anyways what we have here is a classic yin and yang situation. Your bod is ready for the free radicals it produces, and creates the proper antioxidants to deal with those, but since you're getting more free radicals from pollution and shit, you should help your bod out and eat foods and drinks that can offset these radicals with more antioxidants. As with all things in life, nature works in a perfect harmony within and without our bodies, and since we fucked the world without, we gotta try to unfuck the world within.

VII. BYE.

Thanks for reading. I hope you learned something. I'm not sure if I learned anything.

I'm High And I'm All Politically Juiced Up On A Sunday Night

I put the movie that put the goddamn cherry on top of this weekend on the bottom of this post.  But I watched a lot of shit this weekend, and it reminded me that the people who make the laws are more and more just the mouths of some money-controlled puppet monster.  And that's super-fucked up but they think it's fine that's just how it works.  (Also does Steve Bannon really want a war?) Dan Carlin talks about it all the time.  And that was a huge problem forever and now the forces at work just squatted over this whole horrible problem and took a big shit on it and now Donald Trump is the president.

Some striking tweets from the weekend:

I think it's crazy that someone who's been working in talk radio/US political commentary for decades is at a complete loss for words. Also, someone said Russia was considering giving Snowden to the U.S. (Trump) as a gift. Tonight I read in the news that Russia's official people were denying it. What the fuck? Who said they were considering it? The Russians? Trump people? Irresponsible media? Any combo of those options? I'm right back to essentially having to ask "what the fuck is going on?" and I have to ask myself this question everyday to keep up, and I can't keep up because I have to go to work, so I feel like I can't know what's going on, and that's fucked up!!!! Give me some goddamn answers, blog!!

Anyways, sleep calls because I also have biological functions to fucking worry about. But here are some vids.

Bless the Blog.