Yaaaaaawn.

Site or Gossip?

On the Waterfront
Bonnie & Clyde
Wild Strawberries
Fear & Trembling

Addendum:

View From the Top (this is the meta-view piece I refer to later in this blog entry)

Okay folks, wipe that sleep dirt, those eye boogers away, we can all wake up and take in the deep breath of a Nyet Jones update. On a vital side note, I never intended this to be "here's the daily dealings" type blog, and I'm sorry if it became that. Will try to avoid such idiocy in the future. So fear not, if I should go, say, two weeks without updating the bloggity news, you might want to poke your head around the reviews to see if anything's new there, but trust that I haven't walked face-first into lion-infested waters or anything; I probably just haven't been up to much. All the same, here's the requisite shout-out to IPMM and the Pater for asking for news. And heeeeeere we go:



"The Civic has been bought," passively was said by him. We bought it, a 2006 Honda Civic Sedan. That's not actually it, above, but given that this is a consumer culture, dominated by Fordism and mass production, i bet even Andy Warhol would consider it a reasonable facsimile. It is even the same color, a deep navy blue, so you don't have to stretch your chromatic imagination. Anyways, the car itself is not here yet, but should be in good ol' South Grafton within the next day or so. Real pictures including smiling Becks and Nyets and dogs and pink houses will be forthcoming. I see you shudder with anitici... anyways, I'll need to pick up in the tutoring, sell some blood and generally stop eating "food" to make the monthly payments, but given that it's a reliable car that will last us well into the 22nd century, I figured that was a good balance. I'm kidding of course; I can't donate blood. I'm type "faints with dehydration," so I don't do that kind of thing. Seriously.

As for the car, Beck keeps rather insultingly calling it a "toy car" and "so cute" when I'm relatively convinced she means "manly Godzilla Cruiser" instead. Okay, admittedly it's a non-flashy, economical, pragmatic vehicle that just really isn't that large. But I don't choose to view it that way. I tend to view it as an ego-booster; when I wrap my pinky around the emergency brake and put the car into reverse by flicking the shift stick, when I steer with my knuckles - I mean, it makes me feel HUGE! I am a colossal beast! I am the lord of all that I survey! I am the master of my domain! Or... something. But the effect also makes me feel fat, given that my belly can't help but press against the steering column as it rests wedged between my knees. Which means I probably need to diet, which is convenient given that I can no longer afford to eat food.

Just kidding - the car is actually comfortable, I can comfortably afford to eat for at least the next six weeks. I do need to lose some weight though - a summer of not playing Ultimate and hobbling around on my gimpy foot has not served the waistline well. So it's all about cereal and Lean Pockets for the time being til I can make myself look a little more reasonable. Oh, and yeah, I guess it's implied by the above, but my foot is still bungled - I haven't tried any Ultimate since the last brutally failed experiment. Our end of summer tournament is this weekend, so i'm tempted to cleat up on the one hand but I value being able to walk on the other. These are the nerve-wrecking decisions that plague my time. I'm so depressed I could eat. Quickly, an homage to my insane, Jered-from-Subway-esque diet plan:



So other people seem more psyched about the car I am - not that I'm not psyched, just that I'm not bursting with fruit flavor. It reminds me of an episode of Lost where Jack, the de facto leader of the "tribe" or what have you, is having the crisis of the unwilling hero, the process of having leadership thrust upon him but not necessarily wanting it. Not to belittle the ordeal, it is indeed difficult to take on the leadership of the stranded masses (though in his case, it's actually pretend to take on the leadership of other pretenders who are pretending to be stranded), but I can't help but think that he would have a little more awareness of the metanarrative going on - meaning that he should be able to recognize the "hey, i'm struggling as the reluctant hero" nature of his dilemma. Not that he shouldn't struggle with it, just to say that maybe he could take some comfort in the idea that he was fulfilling a role, not encountering a set of events completely foreign to man. His role is scripted - he struggles, he debates whether he has what it takes, wants to run away, but ultimately fulfills his duty out of necessity and lack of other options (or at least options he could live with). So, in the episode, it just struck me as absurd that a person at least moderately educated in the concepts of tragic and/or reluctant hero would not instantly recognize his situation and at least have the thought, the "Wow, I'm playing the role now!"

Which brings it back to the car, that I feel like I'm at the "Hey, the Beck and I are buying our first car together" moment of our collective existence. Like the script notes say "His eyes jump, his heartbeat elevates as he handles the Honda keys for the first time." Um, yo scriptwriter, no they didn't. They just said "hmmm, you appear to be making a pragmatic purchase. Congratulations on your relatively mindless problem-solving skills." Then again, my eyes and heart-rate talk too much.

So yeah, that's something I've been contemplating a lot lately, the whole world-viewed from a meta-perspective and how this renders things unenjoyable. I've been reading a lot from the various Existentialists lately (see the review on Captain Fun & Games, Kierkegaard), a group that, well, isn't much of a group, but they do share a value of the subjective experience over the Objective, some even going so far as to saying the Objective is an illusion or a myth. This all stabs at living a life led by passions rather than stone-cold rationality. This entire topic, I think, deserves a musing. So I will muse on this later today.

Maybe another thing that deserves a musing - a shout-out to the non-bassist -for-Phish Mike Gordon! I got an e-mail from Robyn's Passionate Kisser recently, and he gave me this musing on the collected ramblings of Nyet:

You crack my ass up. Half the time I think you’re playing Devil’s Advocate either with yourself or with what you presume popular opinion to be. Intellectual shock value for the bored. The other half of the time, I wonder when you crossed over from questioning to cynical. And, Yogi Berra-like, the other half the time I completely agree with you, laugh out loud, and think, “Damn, I really wish we lived in the same city so we could have a weekly intellectual argument over an arbitrary bunch of caramels.”

So, just to very superficially clear some things up:

I generally don't play Devil's Advocate, unless I say something like "Damn, Nyet, you're SWEET, and by the way vote for Lucifer."

Let's say, for instance, that popular opinion is generally idiotic.

If my writings shock you, perhaps you should stop asking boring questions.

It was some time during Texas History, when they were talking about that line in the sand that Colonel Travis drew, and I was just like, yo, that's preposterous, that's just mythical crap, that never would have happened, and besides, wouldn't they have all recognized the meta-narrative cliché and jokingly thought "how ridiculous, I'm actually crossing a line in the sand! What an apt physical representation of my metaphorical moral stand!" !?!?!?!?!?!"

Mmmmmmm... camels.

Alrighty then, back to some events of the bloggily missed interim - Beck has been on Anesthesia for the past two weeks so she has been on-call a lot and spending late days at the hospital. We took care of her friend Kathy's dog Ingrid, who strongly resembles a black furry football with legs and weighs approximately that amount, too. I've had a bevy of rather uneventful Walnut happenings, including getting to spend the night in a dorm there, which was not awesome. School starts back up in a week and a half, so I am psyched, pumped and amped all at once. I've been reading a lot, actually a lot of postmodern discussion stuff on the web, which is neither here nor there, and trying to pay attention to the impending WW III in Israel. I've also been re-listening to the Existentialism series to make sure I have a good grasp of things before I go on to some other texts. I'm also up to "Martha My Dear" on the White Album, which is difficult because it's actually a piano tune. So either I can learn how to play a complicated piano song, or I can just fake it with chords on the guitar and dub it "my interpretation." That's more or less what I did with "O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da," so the precedent has been set. My writing has gotten nowhere since that flurry of activity two weeks ago, but I've got a new direction in mind that could work. Nice. What else... IPMM and IPJ are visiting this weekend; hopefully we will chance to see them.

It's very difficult to recollect the day-to-day. Let's just pin this down as another empty-promise to be more regular about entries. And I'm going to bite off and chew that attempt at the passionate life. May work, may not. Shall see.

Oh, and before I trek off into another 2 week black hole - regarding that terrorist plot "thing:"

Does it make me a psycho pinkie liberal bastard to think, after hearing what a great job the British and American intelligence agencies did for the 490th time, that this seems like a suspiciously large amount of self-congratulating, as in "feel at ease, free countries, big brother is watching... over you?" I mean, I'll grant that they caught the guys and there was an actual terrorist plot, I'm not quite that conspiracy theory crazy, but all of this back-slapping smells a little of "Team America, F@#$ Yeah!" And don't worry, I am glad that there are people who are sacrificing their lives for our freedom, I am thankful, it's just that the repeated "yay us" messages that dominated the airwaves all week were weird.

Also - another sign of insanity, that *after* a terrorist plot is uncovered, the powers that be collectively slap their foreheads and say, "oh, they could have used liquids! Let's make liquids illegal!" The logical conclusion being that a terrorist would indeed have to board a plane in order to blow it up, so from now on, no more boarding planes. Of course, we'll have to wait for that ban until after the fact, too.

One of the radio reports I heard pointed out that the "War on Terror" (or whatever the news station graphics are calling it these days) has now lasted longer (from Sept.11 to now) than America's involvement in WWII. And someone else referred to it as the "100 Years War-to-be." These are truly the greatest of all possible times. And ya, tell me, over and over and over again my friend...

One of my Existentialism lectures pointed out that the idea of "freedom and progress" has been used by almost every power in history as justification for their actions. The American conservative version of "freedom" appears to be winning these days. Again, don't eat that as more absurd liberal cynical hogwash, just think about it - there's gotta be some reasons on both sides, right? Oh, I'm sorry, that's right, we're battling ALIEN MONSTERS!!!! Who, despite the technology to invade planet America, do not have rational principles.

Do you think there's a word for "terrorist" in Arabic that is lexically related to a word that means "crazy ass knight with a big cross on his chest came streaking into the holy lands in the middle ages?"

Friend Ben recently read that the likelihood of an American dying in a terrorist event is roughly equivalent to that of an American being struck by lightning - though something tells me those two groups, the Manhattanites and the Telephone Poll Shimmiers Association of Alabama, are not all that overlapping. Ben then furthered that he was going to head to Washington and request billions of dollars in funding for the Homeland Lightning Safety Act. Ben's funny.

Finally, beck and I had the give-up-on-humanity, vomit into a cold glass and make it warm pleasure of hearing Monica Crowley on 96.9 on Saturday afternoon - she launched into an anecdote in favor of racial profiling which essentially amounted to the fact that she and other airline passengers felt "very relieved" at the sight of some Arab Americans being strip-searched, interrogated, humiliated, really just violated and having their property destroyed in front of a plane full of people as they boarded a transcontinental flight. She then went on to read the names of those arrested with a "wink-wink, nudge nudge, what do they all have in common" air, going on to say that we have to profile people with Arabic names because they are the ones doing these things. That's right, it turns out she's one of those aliens without rational principles. In related news, all black people have committed urban murders and all white people have committed white collar crimes. Oh, and no one's allowed to drive anywhere any more. Or talk.

If only that last rule had been in place Saturday afternoon...

later sk8ers