Pete Simon

The Garbage Man (6)

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:42:00 -0500

Becca was examining his nose again, she seemed calmer but concerned.

He’s not telling me something. He’s hurt, was there a fight?

“Oh, God!” she exclaimed; confused, Chinney recoiled from her, but Becca moved close to him, raising her delicate, clean hand close enough to touch his face. “Did he do this do you?! My husband? Did he hit you?” she asked in low, simmering resentment.

Chinney stood tall and averted his eyes. “No,” he replied.

Like a star in daylight, Becca seemed to disappear behind the yellow sky. He could hardly see her now, she was leaving his world.
“Are you here for something?” he asked finally.

“Yes, my…husband dropped off my computer, that was a mistake. Do you know where he might have put it?”

“I have it… I collect old computer parts.” he told her.

“Oh! What a relief,” Becca exclaimed; her posture softened, she put her hand on Chinney’s stiff arm and she laughed; Chinney tensed at the suddenness of sound; the sound of a distant star collapsing selfishly, and taking with it an entire system.

“I thought I would have to rummage through trash piles to find it. I’m glad I waited here at the door; I almost left,” she continued.

“Nope, I have it.” he stated. She laughed again.

“Maybe my luck is turning around. See, I have a lot of personal data still on the computer, that’s something my husband never understood: the value of privacy in the age of the internet.”

Chinney glanced at her, trying to read her expression, but it was a shattered mirror of faces, each with a toothy smile and no eyes to anchor with context; he knew she found something funny but he didn’t know what.

“So… Do you have it here?” she asked eagerly.

Now her face had moved in the mirror shards, and she was all eyes; a thousand Fates whose every eye saw him and every second of his life; the choices which he had made and the ones which life had made for him; the fact he had spend the better part of two decades living at a dump; the thousands of eyes saw his entire person, and when there was nothing else to see they kept watching him, expectantly.

Chinney fell back, repelled by bad magnetism, his back touched the front office door and he rolled against it like a full rain barrel.

“Yes, I have it downstairs,” he managed to tell her. “Just wait here a moment and I’ll bring it up.”

Not waiting for a reply, he twisted and found the door handle and with his sweaty fists squeezed it like a stress ball so that it clacked open unhappily, then he stumbled inside moving at a speed that defied large size.

Okay, he thought. Okay, I’ll reassemble the CPU and bring it back up; it will take seconds and she’ll never know.

His big heart pumped thinly banana-coke blood. Anxious thoughts flipped through his stuffed Rolodex head, made him motion sick in the pit of his starved stomach. He could feel his nose wet again the crumpled paper stopper.

He raised the hatch door to the heavy, stale bread darkness below; the faint, dead scent fled the hatch to fill his mouth and nose. He gasped, he inhaled the air but he could not breathe it. He groaned.

The staleness surrounded him, his senses, he could touch, smell and taste it, but not see it. His eyes rolled back as it curled around him with thin vein fingers, and it held him. Then it pulled.

Overwhelmed by emptiness, his mind browned-out, then down, down, down the rotted steps he fell, into the candle-lit darkness underneath the sour milk, coffee-ground dirt of the dump. His limp limbs banged on each lip of the old stair boards, spraying where they struck the loose wood dust into the shadowy air.

He landed on the concrete floor and rolled into the first metal shelf so it clanged out like a church bell, and he lay there on the concrete basement floor, crumpled up, used tissue paper, left in the dust on the floor, beneath the whisper hums of his CPU collection, beneath the Tire-swing candle light, beneath the town dump grounds.

The Garbage Man (5)

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:19:04 -0500

The July sun spread butter yellow light over the stale bran muffin top dump grounds. Five fat clouds sat like clods of dust, under the sedentary sky.

A young woman stood on the chocolate snack wrapper mud stained steps of the dump’s front office and tried not to breathe. Noxious air wafted off hot trash piles, closing in on her from all directions. The atmosphere was greasy and still.

She raised again her handkerchief wrapped hand and jabbed at the wart-shaped doorbell, this time it stuck in.

“Come on,” she weezed with short queasy gasps, looking at the sweaty front door of the red shed-office, with all its window shades drawn like lazy eyelids, wishing it would simply admit that no one was inside so she could recover her belongings and finish this horrible chapter of her life once and for all.
She glanced toward her teal Camry; it was idling nervously like a visitor in a sick ward, ready to race to the nearest car-wash.

“Fine!” she exclaimed, and stomped away from the office door and with it the possibility of closure.

David, you are so careless with our life, as always. You want to know a why we failed and the reasons are all around you! You trash everything, just like this shit hole. No wonder I am here, this place; this is our life now, you trashed it.

As she marched away the door handle clicked behind her, she turned and the door ripped open like a yanked band-aid. A large man stomp down from the frame, almost collapsing with fatigue. When he straightened to address her, he toppled backwards and fell like an empty 2liter.

Helpless to stop herself, she laughed, and her laughter left her freely. She was grateful to forget, for a moment, her unhappy circumstances. She moved closer and extended her down-turned hand; an apologetic gesture towards the man.

“Hi, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think any was was in. Are you okay.”

Now she saw the red caked beneath the man’s nose, and the nose — something was sticking out.

“Oh my Gah — you’re bleeding! Are you okay?”

She moved closer still to inspect the injury, but kept a polite distance from the stranger.

“I really didn’t mean to surprise you, are you okay?” she repeated sincerely.

“Yeah. I’m fine.” Chinney muttered, and rolled slowly to his side, propping himself up from the rotten eggshell earth, brushing coffee ground-sized dirt specs from his khakis. He gathered his breath and rose with all the dignity he could unearth.

“Your nose? Are you hurt? Or…” the woman was puzzled by the piece of porno stuffed up Chinney’s bloodied nose, and Chinney realized it might reveal its nude subject; hastily he cupped a hand over it, and blushed pinkly.

“It’s just a nose bleed.” he told her, looking at her with the same puzzled curiousity she had for the wall-peg sized nipple that glimpsed from beneath his hand as he spoke in a muffled, unsettled voice.

“Can I help you with something?” Chinney asked in halting, stumbled words. He was looking at a real face, the face he had seen on his screens; but this person wasn’t other-worldly or distant, she was standing before him, facing him, looking at him, seeing him; those same black locks, licked with silver strands, tumbled around her simple face; those same purple-brown eyes, shining with hope, were seeing his own.

“Rebecca,” he said without thinking.

Becca froze, the humor and sympathy fled her, and the corrosive surreality surrounded her again, as though she had fallen through ice on a lake.

How does this strange man know my name? she wondered, her mind raced. It was not likely we’ve have ever crossed paths, this is her first visit to the dump; David always took care of the garbage…

Embarrassed, fiery anger licked the edges of her paper brain as she reached the only conclusion she could.

“Hi, yes, I’m Becca.” she replied rigidly. “You must have talked with my…husband, David. Did he say something about me?!” she demanded directly, those pixel-perfect eyes bore holes in Chinney’s heart and turned his brain to scrambled egg and brushed it into a dirty dustpan.

No, not yet, not this way, he groaned.

He wasn’t ready to address his new muse, having moments ago learned all her information, seen all her pictures, and admired her thoroughly from afar. To confront her now, face to face, unable to assuage her insecurity; how it pained him. What could he possibly say? He could not admit to her that he had access to everything she had ever typed, and be to her an intrusion of privacy; nor could he speak lies into those lovely eyes while they watched him narrowly, unbearably real, and Rebecca still stood impatiently for his answer.

Feeling the tears of distress gather, Chinney darted looks at the heaps of refuse behind Becca hoping to air out his eyes before the first drops fell so he wasn’t seen to cry.

He rested his gaze on a tall tire pile at the dump’s western boundary fence; the tires made him imagine a time in his youth when he would swing for hours from one suspended from the branch of an oak tree, up on a grassy knoll in the middle of nowhere; this place and time had never been, but Chinney held the idea as a refuge for his heart to go when nowhere felt like home.

He pictured himself there; a rusty blonde haired boy in a red and blue striped shirt under Osh-Kosh overalls, stuck through the tire hole, a look of perfect glee on his apple-plush face, two button hole eyes folded shut to feel the rush and full arc of the swing; behind him spun the dazzling rays of a parasol sun as she gave up her immortal colors to gild eternal a moment of pure joy; the freedom of not wanting anything but to be right where you are, as you are, forever.

Bah! Chinney grunted, and waved a hardened hand through the air to chase away the fantasy as if it were a fruit fly.

This stupid fucking life of mine, he thought sourly. Here I am, buried in unwant and I think like this?

“Yes, we spoke.” he said at last, his voice was scratched and flat like the bottom of a bathroom tile.

Becca’s face contorted suddenly, horrified by a thought; her mouth was wide, her eyes were pinched tweezers around a splinter.

“Did he- did he do this to you?”

docshaner: Eye for an eye. Beautiful.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:13:59 -0500

docshaner:

Eye for an eye.

Beautiful.

The Garbage Man (4)

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:24:37 -0500

Swoosh-Chabling! Magic chimes, the sound of a digital wizard casting his spell awoke Chinney from his dream: the doorbell to the front desk.

Undoubtedly, another saintly visitor had come to discard earthly goods upon him.

“Will you bleached assholes leave me alone?!” Chinney muttered, the taste of blood was fresh in his mouth. He spit hatefully on to the carpet, with a sudden disregard for the sanctity of his office. He sat upright and felt the familiar rushing sensation of his body realigning gravity, and he peered up at Mother.

“Mother, status.”

“Last process completed at 3:22PM: User profile for Rebecca Pellier. Awaiting instruction.”

Swoosh-Chabling! Another wave of the wizard’s wand as the saint signaled impatiently his arrival on earth.

Chinney bolted up.

“Mother, show and detail latest profile.”

Eight desk monitors blinked on, calibrated and displayed, with increasing clarity.

The first had a profile listing that looked like the back of a baseball card; this one was read aloud by Mother as Chinney gazed upon images of the fair Rebecca, shown in a rapid slide show on monitor 4; images retrieved mostly from information scraped from her Facebook pages.

Rebecca Pellier
Age: 39
Sex: F
Relationship Status: Single
Religion: Christian
Politics: N/A
Friends: 512
…

In the image, Rebecca looked through her webcam, her brown eyes registered warmly in the milky cathode light that adorned her; thick hairs swirled from her head like eddies of a black river; so black the cathodes could not describe: those made her divine. Her skin’s pixel-complexion was a beautiful RGB hue that skewed towards light purple (the monitor’s bias), but not without blemishes; zits and dips along her jaw line, puffs beneath two tired eyes, a small dollop of flab beneath her chin; those made her human.

Mother continued her readout…

More personal details available: 2610KB+
Networks: Triage Financial Group, Affinity College For Graduates
Bank: Citibank, Merril Lynch, UBS
Bank Access: 2 of 3
Accessible Net Worth: Three-

“Stop!”

Mother, winked her green eye and killed her audio thread.

“No, I don’t care about any of that. Mother, isn’t she beautiful? She is. She is gorgeous!”

Mother’s green eye flicked distrustful red.

Swoosh-Chabling! Again, the wizard wand cast impatiently his spell.

“FUCK OFF!” Chinney screamed across the cavernous office towards the staircase.

“Mother, catalog images,” he commanded, then he stuck his middle finger at the #4 button on an extracted phone dial pad to set the input focus on monitor 4. Inching his hand to the left, he touched his thumb over a trackball soldered to the side of the number pad, and began rolling through the compiled album.

The same lovely face flickered between photos of different contexts; appearing with friends, sipping the last drop from a Vente Starbucks cup, spreading her arms wide before the Eiffel tower, frolicking at the beach (bookmark these, Chinney noted), and lastly: looking longingly into the neon glow of a flat screen while her webcam looked on.

“She’s lonely,” Chinney sighed. He could read those eyes, the expression of beaten down expectations still held a glimmer of hope for a better life.

Chinney grasped a handful of graying, mouse brown hair and dropped his head onto the wooden flats of the desk top, beneath the indifferent stares of millions of cathode rays. His bloodied magazine nose flapped, his unshaven stubble picked the splinters of the frayed edge like an off-key music box as he tilted up to see again the hopeful eyes of his muse.

Chinney’s grip tightened, his thumb gouged at the trackball. Scalding shame fomented between his creased brow. His words were crushed down by the weight of cold rationalization. Undeterred at last, they escaped into the air.

“Mother, detail relationship status.”

“Rebecca Pellier, single as of April 24th, 2011 (Easter). Formerly married to David Brenard.” Mother explained.

David, Dave, what did you do to lose this woman?

Chinney thought of all the possible reasons for a woman to give up on a man, and there were many. Similarly, he thought of all the reasons a man might give up on woman, and there were few, and those didn’t make much sense to a reasonable mind or a committed heart; so Chinney decided it was safe to presume that Mr. Brenard possessed neither.

“Mother, identify David Brenard.”

In a moment, Monitor 4 lit up with a new picture: a low-resolution face of a bored looking, fit, clean, middle-aged man, so ordinary looking he might have been a television extra, yet the image registered as a vague, disconnected memory; something that may or may not have been. No matter, David was of depleting interest to Chinney, who was slumping back in the minivan car seat, exhaling slowly.

Swoosh-Chabling! Swoosh-CHABLING!! The charm sounded again, tiredly, and then again still, with renewed vigor.

Chinney rose with dazed solemnity, having found refuge in the story of Mrs Pellier, who appeared as though she had not the life once hoped for; a condition he could understand painfully well, living life on trash heap, underneath the feet of better beings, as every waxy Q-tip, lipsticked napkin, crumpled tissue, pealed back snack-wrapper, was dumped there, in piles, to remind him.

Rage Against The Machine, Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium - Freedom - 3:00 to 3:25

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:35:28 -0500

Rage Against The Machine, Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium - Freedom - 3:00 to 3:25

The Garbage Man (3)

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:18:33 -0500

Clickity clickity clickity whirrrrrrrr; the sounds of the hard disk being accessed under a high-charged reader head.

Chinney tilted his thick neck back against the sneeze-snot car seat head rest and felt the blood drain down his spine. With his dangling left arm he pawed around the side of the desk searching for the tip of an upright 2liter.

He was completely faint for lack of food, deliberately so, because of the crash diet he began four days ago. Now he was eating nothing but bananas and diet coke, and all the bananas were upstairs.

“Ughhhhh, Mother, I am so hungry.”

Mother’s ninth red eye winked with disapproval.

Far in the recesses of Chinney’s elaborate mind, a fomenting pressure was building. Chinney’s eyes sank in the sockets like depressed power buttons. Little sparks were prickling over his brain, causing strange visuals in his eyes. Pixelated shapes became objects, a triangle became a rectangle became a board. Then Chinney thought he could see the drawbridge of a castle lowering; that changed into a road, with cubes racing along it. Or were they cones? and was that a pyramid, not a castle? The red-blue-yellow-pink flashing forms danced with contextual abandon; nothing stayed the same except for the rhythm.

Suddenly a big white flair appeared at the fore of his vision and Chinney felt a sensation of wetness under his nose.

No.

“No!”

Chinney shot forward, his bleary eyes scanning desperately the expansive flats of his desk.

“Mother, where are the tissues?!”

Mother’s extra red eye winked again, as blood sputtered from Chinney’s nose, cascading down the corse hair of his upper lip, running thickly into and over his mouth like a cheap party wine.

“Shit!” Chinney mumbled wetly.

“Muhhvver, TISSUES!”

Mother’s one green eye flicked on angrily.

”Tissues are stored in the top right drawer. Last purchased on April 25th, 2011 from Walmart for $12.35”

Chinney cupped a club hand over his capsized nose as a sea of blood welled up and with the other hand yanked open the top right drawer as Mother suggested.

Nothing but cables.

While blood leaked through his clenched fingers and pattered down on his kakhis in marble sized drops, Chinney’s mind queried the items he kept in the basement where material equaled “fabric.”

Fabric:
Car seat.
Carpet.
Backpack.
Gym clothes.
Socks.

Forget it, I need all those things, he decided. Now he thought of paper…

Paper:
Reference Books
Porno Mags
…

“Mother, Magazines.” he said through his bloody muzzle.

”Magazines are kept beneath the chair,” she replied. “4 subscriptions total. Last issue recieved June 21st, 2011.”

Yes! Of course. Chinney rolled off the car seat and hit the floor with a round thud. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the carpet as his eyes strained like a nocturnal carnivore to see into the shadowy underworld.

All of his skin mags, ordered by best, descending; Chinney knocked the stack forward and grabbed the lowest magazine uncovered.

It was a year old Penthouse with a skanky blonde on the front, Chinney preferred redheads anyway. Even so, it broke his nose-bleed heart to spill blood over his girls, no matter where they were on his party list,

Uncupping his nose he let the blood splash onto the Table of Contents. He turned the page; Letters to the Editor. He wiped his hand, smearing a coat of deep red down the crass words of “readers”. He continued to turn pages, wipe his hand, and let blood from his nose until it was dripping smaller, then he tore out a page with a busty nude blonde in scanty pink panties and a white-transparent blouse she had pulled up, just above her nipples so that they stuck out like wall pegs. Chinney crumpled the page with heavy set regret. It was a good picture.

He sighed faintly and stuffed the page up his left nostril to stop it. The sharp angles of the crumpled page jut into the nostril walls so painfully that Chinney had tears.

He rolled on his back and let the tears run, feeling totally pathetic and humiliated by life.

“Mother, fuck my life.”

Mother winked a red eye in disapproval.

”Scan complete, data recovered. Ready for command,” she told him.

“Profile user,” he sighed.

Chinney closed his teary eyes, and his mind drifted back to darkness like a discarded magic eight ball prediction; there he allowed himself to dream of a better life, one in which he lived in a different town, near a university, where he would teach young, bright, beautiful students who respected him for his brilliant mind. He would earn enough to hire a private trainer to improve his shit health, lose 100lbs or so. He could publish Mother and become famous in academic circles. He would be welcome at parties, invited. People would see the amazing accomplishments of a misunderstood guy, who truly came from the trash heap of society. He would remake himself, redefine his entire persona, every aspect, every detail; and people wouldn’t remember who he was. He wouldn’t be known as the loser at the dump: the Garbage Man.

The Garbage Man (2)

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:52:55 -0500

The “office” was a vast square basement of a demolished home, a plot of relative sanctity, engulfed in the spoiled banana peal, wet coffee ground, used chewing-gum, crumpled tissue dump grounds.

Chinney stomped down the splintered worm-eaten steps leading into the office, heaving the beige specimen, and weaved his way through a metal shelf maze which was layered with stacks of discarded CPUs; each humming at a near-whisper tone, feeding of chained power strips and networked by lemon colored Ethernet cables.

The room was lit by “Tire Swing” scented candles he salvaged in bulk from dumped boxes, placed in the bottom halves of cut Diet Coke 2liter bottles, and distributed throughout the shelves.

The shelf maze opened to a broad clearing in the far corner; here the power cords converged into an overstuffed circuit box, while the Ethernet cables continued up the wall, across the concrete crumb, iron beam ceiling, then descended down into the cobwebbed recesses behind the office desk like the sinewy branches of an elven vine tree.

The office desk was constructed from plywood from the center angle of a roomy corner, and built out with the fantastic whim of a fantasy tree house. Small, blocky monitors perched on each platform, hopelessly enmeshed in wiry growth.

There Chinney sat down on a juice box stained, goldfish crumbed, minivan car seat, with a half-drank Diet Coke 2liter stuffed in a sticky plastic cup holder, and he held the new unit; a mother bear nursing her bee-stung cub. He had tethered the box to a small cube screen perched on the edge of the desk and watched the BIOS readout.

Reading volumes:
CD-ROM Drive D - ok
Harddisk Drive C - …
-DISK FAILURE-

The system whelped out a flat A beep. Chinney sighed sympathetically.

“I bet you’ve never been defragged, not even once” he whispered with solace.

He pulled a thick wooden drawer from the desk, it was filled like a viper pit with screwdrivers. He reached in and rummaged about until the sharp head of a right-sized one made itself known.

Chinney took it and threaded the screw head on the brushed metal back of his dusty beige buddy. Then he fished from behind a thick stack of diet coke liters arranged at the foot of the desk, and retrieved a fresh air can.

With the metal case unfastened, a round plume of dust grew into the air like a nuclear mushroom. Chinney coughed and released a small fart of excitement which sounded like a cell phone vibration.

With the silicon guts of his specimen were exposed, he wasted no time locating the hard disk and extracting it gingerly like a pearl from a beige oyster.

He blew an affectionate healing breeze across the scuzzy pins, kicking up fat flakes of dust like leaves in the wind over a hill top.

“Hello there,” he giggled. Then he stiffened with a serious air and sat erect in the minivan seat, facing the centrifuge of his desktop system; eye to eye with Mother, who was hibernating.

“Lets examine this, Mother.”

He unknotted a free scuzzy cord from one of Mother’s Hydra port connectors. Mother clicked and whirred awake and an array of nine red LEDs flicked on like spider eyes.

…

“1st read attempt failed,” said a young, sterile, synthesized voice. “…Increasing voltage by 10%.”

“Careful now, Mother!” yelped Chinney.

The red LEDs blinked without concern.

The Garbage Man (1)

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 18:00:51 -0500

A squat wooden shack sat atop a garbage mound under the sweaty yellow July sky. On Saturday, all the wealthy pricks parade their minivans through the Chinney’s dump to pitch their valuables into the rotten slimey decay, stooping for a moment down to Chinney’s level to shit on him from spotlessly clean assholes; to remind him of his place underneath their eyes, otherwise out of sight and mind. But under their radar also.

“Hi! Excuse me!” one faceless saint blared through pearly teeth. Chinney saw past those even row white rows into the total emptiness inside—hollowness, but not empty.

“Hello, yes, I’ve got some old computer stuff here. Should I put it with the appliances?” The hollow saint looked past Chinney, despite his enormous size. The only thing they hate more than being here is me, he thought grimly.

Chinney chomped down on a blackened banana and tossed it towards a tiny pail, then he flicked off his blocky beige CRT and spun around his pivot chair. He heaved himself up from the front desk, sigh hustled towards the door and approaching the customer in an attempt to make eye contact.

“No, don’t get up, it’s okay. I only want to know where to put electronic stuff,” the saint’s voice picked up as Chinney approached, and Chinney could feel magnetic force repelling him backwards, but he pressed on.

Now standing at the front office doorway, he was actually higher up than the saint who now swayed uneasily. Chinney was looking upon the inhuman figure trying to find his eyes.

“I need to take a look at it.”

Overpowered, the saint turned away.

“It’s just some old computer stuff.” he said in a weakened voice.

“Okay” said Chinney, “just leave it here. I’ll take care of it.”

“Are you sure?” asked the saint, still positioning himself in any angle that would evade Chinney’s eyes, as if attempting to be invisible.

“Yeah, I mean, usually there’s a fee for this,” Chinney continued. He looked down to the cinder block sized desktop laying flat int the dirt, he breathed slowly, patiently, and buried his excitement beneath his huge frame. The boxes were bursting at the screws full. Chinney wondered how the hollow arms of the saint could lift and carry them.

“I’ll pay the fee then.” the saint seethed, the sound was like wind sneaking through the cracks of a rickety home.

“it’s 5$ per component, so this will be 15$.” Chinny stated.

The saint made no audible sound but the magnetic fields around him buzzed with disdain and Cinney would have been repelled through his shack had he not weighed more than a cement mixer.

Chinney pushed back, “you’ve got 3 components, a CPU, a monitor, and a printer. Give me ten and I’ll take care of them,” he said with tint if affection.

The saint grinned through gritted teeth, “nice racket you have here.” then he pulled money from his back pocket and punched it at Chinney, who caught the bill as it fell crumpled from the unclenched fist.

Chinney found himself again trying to make eye contact with the inhuman, but the eyes were like buttons beneath a fold of cloth. The strange, shapeless face was without an angle from which to be seen.

And now the body was slipping like the shadow of a kite beneath a cloud, out of reach and sight, occluded by the sun.

Gone.

Chinney’s bear sized arms scooped up the discarded items from the moss brown mud. He hummed as he hustled back inside and headed down to the main “office”; he was electric with excitement.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:39:07 -0500

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

- Donald Knuth, High Priest of Computer Programming

"One day that fellow will build a grass hut upon a lonely peak, and scold the buddhas and abuse the..."

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:21:00 -0500

“One day that fellow will build a grass hut upon a lonely peak, and scold the buddhas and abuse the patriarchs.”

- Isan the monk.

"Spring she comes and spring she teases Brings summer winds and summer breezes Blow through your hair..."

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:47:14 -0500

“Spring she comes and spring she teases
Brings summer winds and summer breezes
Blow through your hair till autumn leaves us
When autumn leaves us, oh how winter freezes”

- Kings Vengeance - Thin Lizzy

thedailywhat: This Is All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day: Father...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:34:29 -0500

thedailywhat:

This Is All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day: Father Nathan Monk of the St. Benedict Orthodox Church took to the podium during the open comment period at last Thursday’s Pensacola City Council meeting to call Council President Sam Hall out for arbitrarily denying speakers with whom he disagreed their right to redress of grievances by ruling them “out of order” and having them removed by force.

In a scene that would make George Orwell blush, Father Monk was himself ruled “out of order” and approached by Police Chief Chip Simmons and two uniformed officers.

The priest stood his ground and refused to leave, calling attention to the fact that he still had over a minute left to speak.

A tense standoff ensued, during which two council members — Sherri Myers and John Jerralds — exited the room to protest Councilman Hall’s unconstitutional ruling.

[digest / thanks jessica!]

Patriot.

Timelessness

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:02:27 -0500

Endeavor to have the kinds of ideas, to hold the kinds of beliefs, to tell the kinds of stories, to create the kinds of art; that cannot be outgrown.

"I come here to be different, and hope that being here will, somehow, make me more myself."

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:32:08 -0500

“I come here to be different, and hope that being here will, somehow, make me more myself.”

Beethoven – Symphony No. 5 In C minor (as heard in Austin...

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:07:38 -0500

Beethoven – Symphony No. 5 In C minor (as heard in Austin Powers: Goldmember)

Yewbush

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 15:08:30 -0500

Yewbush was planted at the foot of the driveway, a low-profile marker for wayward cars meandering down a dirt road in the rural heart of Eden, Connecticut.

Yewbush was a squat shrub, non distinct from any other; green, scraggly and with angular shape; but underneath the hairy bark of his tiny limbs, ambition coursed. Yewbush could not stand the company of the fair maples, which the landowners so admired. For Yewbush, the malcontent of being small and unnoticeable was an unquenchable thirst.

Yewbush looked across the derelict dust of the sand driveway and saw reprieve: the ancient brook that ran through Eden, carrying in her waters the dredged muck of forgotten times; bloody property disputes fueled by small town reputations, deceit and treachery between neighbors; sin seeped through the soil of Eden, into the ancient brook. Of her waters, Yewbush was forbade by natural law to drink, for it ran through the dark ages of the spirit of man. But Yewbush saw that she ran so near, just across the sandy driveway, and thought it destiny that he should be planted close such an awful power.

Watch me, Yewbush told the fair maples, and he sent his little roots beneath the sandy driveway earth too the edge of the ancient brook, and he drank deep the stories of Eden’s dark ages.

And Yewbush grew. In three years time, Yewbush became Yewtree. He emerged from the shadows of neglect, coarse and dense, needles darkened, a hundred limbs spread tall and strong, he cast the blackest shadow across the grass tuft lawn.

Surely, he had become a dark thing, a natural outlaw, grown from the sins of the ancient water of Eden.

No one had ever seen a tree like Yewtree. No one could believe that Yewtree had grown from bush; he had grown too tall to and horrible to be imagined younger.

What is this tree? aghast visitors would ask. Alas, it was a small yew bush, but it grew to this unsightly tree! replied the landowners.

Yewtree heard all this but didn’t care, he thrived on the negativity of his new-found attention.

Now they notice me, he told the fair maples.

You are a stain on this fair earth, they replied. Though forbade, you drew from the ancient waters. You grew from sin! and they rustled with fear and disapproval of Yewtree.

Scorned by his brethren, Yewtree decided to grow taller still.

Once again, Yewtree drank deeply from the ancient brook of Eden. The brook laughed as Yewtree drew her murky waters, but Yewtree didn’t care.

This time, Yewtree didn’t grow at all. Instead he became dry. His dark green needles browned, and like a rotting apple, his limbs withered from the center out.

Soon visitors would notice he was even wilder than before, and dead on the inside. This tree cannot stand much longer, they told the landowners.

But Yewtree didn’t care, he reveled in the sour looks of all of his beholders.

May all of Nature hear me! I was but a driveway marker, set in sandy earth where derelict dust sweeps and blasts. Now I am a full grown tree, unlike any other, and as coarse and wretched as I may be you cannot help but notice me.

Finally, the landowners eyes tired of the foulness of Yewtree.

This tree has grown from a mere yew bush, and though it was impressive once, now it is an unwelcoming sight that forebodes visitors and casts a long shadow over our land. And see, the branches are beginning to die on the inside but they can’t be removed because the tree is too dense.

With nothing more to be done, the landowners decided the yew bush would be removed.

Then came the morning when Yewtree was to be removed, and all of Nature looked on.

At the first strike of the shovel, the Yewtree recalled his proud life.

Unlike you, I have accomplished something in my time, he told the fair maples that grew nearby.

Unlike you, I have proven my worth; I am the biggest, wildest, roughest, densest, darkest, deadest bush on earth.

If I could change myself who would you have me be? I could be anyone anyone you want.

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:41:18 -0500

If I could change myself

who would you have me be?

I could be anyone

anyone you want.

Wyclef Jean - Bubblegoose - 3:06 to end

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:08:31 -0500

Wyclef Jean - Bubblegoose - 3:06 to end

Adobe Illustrator QR Codes

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:54:17 -0400

Here’s a tip for the designer who is seeing QR Codes everywhere and wanting to make print-ready ones (AI files).

This is a cynch, but requires both Photoshop and Illustrator.

Start with a QR code image as generated from your favorite generator. I’ve been using http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Here’s mine:

1. Once you have your code image, load it into photoshop:

2. Go to Select->Color Range…

3. The Color Range selector will pop up and allow you to pic a pixel from your QR code image. Pick a solid black one and drop the Fuzziness slider down to 0:

4. The selector lines will appear around all the black parts of your QR code image. Go down to the Paths tab (also available via menu option Window->Paths:

5. You will see a new path appear in the Paths tab window called Work Path. Do a CTRL-A to select all of the canvas, and CTRL-C to copy:

6. Now open up Adobe Illustrator and wait the usual forever for it to load. When you awake from your Rip Van Winkle nap, create a new document. Make it a square. You can see below that I have the dimensions at 600x600 pixels:

7. Do CTRL-V to paste the Work Path you copied from Photoshop before you fell asleep for 100 years waiting on Illustrator to load. To the Paste prompt just stick with the default Compound Shape and press OK:

8. The Work Path has been pasted into Illustrator ready paths, and if you’re a designer this excites you:

9. Go to the fill in the tool bar (see tooltip in image above) and choose black:

That’s all there is too it!

You can save this as an AI file and any other designer type can work with it.

I’m using CS4 in this step by step but I’m pretty sure this works a few versions back.

Anyways, I hope this is helpful, and I hope a get a OccupyTumblr’s worth of followers for posting something useful on tumblr.

Computer::Drunkard

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:50:14 -0400

Programming requires an insane amount of patience.

Imagine you’re speaking to a machine that wants to fuck-up in the most incomprehensible ways. The computer is just that: a fuck-up machine, but it’s so well built that it will continue to run so it can fuck-up again.

Actually, it’s coldly effecient at fucking up, like a Terminator unit that is build in so its arm joints can only punch inward and toward the face.

But the computer’s mistakes are entirely self-serving. Like a goth-kid writing encoding his diary so no one, probably not even his future self, will ever read his innermost thoughts; similarly the computer keeps most of its issues to itself, whereby you must keenly decipher of a set of erratic, and mostly alien behavioral patterns to figure what is out going on. In computing, this is called debugging, and requires even more patience than programming.

Unlike the goth-kid, the computer won’t cut itself, but it will bleed memory until it has none and locks up like an epileptic fit. This is normal and should be expected.

Far from being sympathetic, whenever the computer errors, it does so in the most callous way — but not in the same resentful way of teenagers, where there’s a strong undercurrent of pubescent angst; it’s more like a drunkard when it errors.

It behaves terribly for a unbearable stretch of time until it blurts out something unconscionable, then it passes out. Similarly, the computer will engage in the most egregious mismanagement of assets, spending recklessly on loose processes and consuming unseemly amounts of information until it can no longer hold it’s data/liquor, at which point it will vomit chunks of unparsed text onto the screen without an iota of concern for your sense of decency. It leads a hugely irresponsible existance and will make no effort to improve.

Putting up with a sob drunkard friend is an accurate way of describing a job in computing; the shit you put up with on a daily basis, the verbal (beeping) abuse you endure because you see *some* semblence of worth in keeping the sumbitch around, because the human being you are cannot simply Give Up on another destitute soul; that’s the person<->computer relationship without the human to relate to.