Today, sitting at a small table in a cafe, a group of four (two girls, two guys), sitting at a large table near me, were joined by a fifth, another girl, who had been, apparently, in the bathroom–I assumed, since this was the first I had seen of her in the five minutes I had been sitting here. She sat, and without any prodding, she began to explain her lengthly bathroom break; she spoke of some writing in the girls’ bathroom and how she was mesmerized by it, reading it over and over. I thought, this is a ploy to divert any unspoken, unappealing thoughts that she thinks might be arising in the minds of her gang. But the truth is, people in a group seldom think of these things unless they are a bored. So by calling attention to it, she calls attention to her respite, and seeds the thoughts she initially tried to divert.

No one suspects you until something provokes them to suspect you.

That statement is the point of this post, because shortly after the girl sat and spoke of her bathroom break, she said, “where’s my purse!?” and everyone looked around, and passing glances hesitated about my person–I was sitting closest to her once unoccupied seat–and I immediately felt like suspect number one.

Before it escalated to confrontation, she went to check the bathroom. Her gang watched me, no doubt expecting me to dash off quickly with my haul, or wondering where I disposed of the evidence. Of course, she returned from the bathroom with the alleged evidence and the gang’s focus quickly returned to their interrupted conversation. I couldn’t help but feel that an apology of some sort was necessary, for what undoubtedly crossed their minds about me and my character. Taking a cue from the girl, I said nothing.

It used to be worse, when I first moved to this town, barely in the northeast, I felt like I was the frequent recipient of unprovoked accusatory glances. As if I were to blame, merely on appearance, for some unsolved criminal act in the town’s collective past. Me, the cause of the decline of society. It manifested as women clenching purses, people crossing to the other side of the street, restaurant managers constantly hovering near my table but never offering help, or my favorite, those grocery store employees in charge of shrink (theft control) finding me, and asking me if they could help me, just to let me know someone was aware of my presence in the store in an effort to hinder theft–see, I used to work this very job at a grocery store in TX, and this bit of experience also armed me for an apt retaliation, namely, taking up their offer of help, and tying them up while they tried to track down some esoteric ingredient I requested, of course, they had no clue of its whereabouts, since they are in the security business not the grocery business.

My novice ex-psychiatrist, an Indian woman named Aktar, said I was crazy, yes, she said these kinds of things to me. She said I was imagining these things and that is was probably due to stress. I thought about this, although it is entirely possible, I could read too much into an event here and there, the frequency was too high to be due to a paranoid delusion. I could even tell others, “watch what happens when I get close to that person” and it would unfold as my paranoid mind anticipated. Aktar probably hung around with other international psychology students working on advanced degrees in other fields, because, lets face it, psychology is a farce. But it brings the next point of this post to light:

Surrounded by friends, the negative idiosyncrasies of your surroundings tend to fly under the radar.

However, in the intervening years, this town has relaxed quite a bit, as more and more non-white people have been assimilated into the town’s popular haunts–seriously, there would be weeks where I wouldn’t see any non-white folk in a town that is 50% black. I have wondered if this is possibly correlated with my own relaxing, general happiness, etc., but I am just as much of a loner as I was back then, if not more. I cannot deny the observations, but I also cannot deny, that:

Correlation does not imply causation.

So maybe, it is all in my head, the upside of which is that I’m less cynical now?

On a walk to Highland Park, I pondered a variety of topics.

At first, I thought about work, and a project that I am working on that has suddenly turned really exciting and has usurped all my time. It is a pioneering data analysis method that I’ve stumbled upon, but so many of my pioneering data analysis methods are stumbled upon because I always wind up with photon-starved data and am forced to wring out as much science from it as possible. Well this train of thought about work was derailed by a chaotic little swarm of gnats that came into view when they glimmered in the low lying sun.

You know the gnat swarms I speak of, you walk right through ‘em, some land on your face, and you try to simultaneously breath out of your nose and mouth, an impossible task, but necessary if you are to keep them out of your air passageways. But this time, I stood there and watched them dancing in the sunlight, and I noticed something equally disturbing and disgusting. I could clearly see, there in the air, poop, or piss, catching the sunlight as it dropped to the ground from the gnats. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I walked around them and wondered, Do gnats poop?. Yes, yes they do.

The gnat poop stayed on my mind, as I recalled how they seemed to fall smoothly, steadily, and I thought of acceleration due to gravity, 9.81 m s^-2, and wondered if these gnat turds had reached their terminal velocity, and that was why they seemed to fall so steadily, but then, while trying to reason the drag coefficient of gnat poop from first principles, I saw this:

and my thought train was derailed once again. For the next few minutes, after the ladybug porn photo shoot, I thought only of ladybug love, but more specifically, how emasculating the name ladybug is. However, consider the scientific name Coccinellidae. Sound it out, forgetting proper Latin pronunciation, and you get an obscene sexual statement about a ladybug named Ellidae.

I eventually found myself on a bench in the park reading Bolano’s Savage Detectives, with a strange sense of deja-vu as sentences and situations seemed more like recalling than reading. For some inexplicable reason, thoughts of deep vein thrombosis rose to the surface of my mind, forcing the book to close and initiating my psychosomatic limp home.

Today is Canada Day! Some of my favorite extant artists and musicians are Canadian. The NY Times has a handful of Op-Ed Contributions from Canadian’s living in the US. My favorite has to be from Malcom Gladwell:

In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.

couple his sentiment with the fact that I often listen to the BBC World Service in the late hours of the night, which constantly reminds me just how much our own national news outlets lack basic reporting skills, comprehensive coverage, etc. etc., this is not to say BBC World Service is the bees-knees, it simply reflects on the state of the US news media, which given the past week’s events, is trending towards comprehensive reporting of sexual or political scandals, with composite sexual-political scandals taking priority and with glorified, rushed, scooping (?) obituaries peppered throughout–I mean, Billy Mays, seriously, did I need to know that?

Oh, on the topic of the New Yorker (Gladwell is a writer for the New Yorker), you should really be listening to the New Yorker Out Loud podcast, especially if you’re like me and don’t have enough time to read the magazine.

Oh, and t h i s !

First a note, for Rube (my sis’): stop reading my blog, that’s all I’m gonna say about that. Please, thanks.

In the June ‘09 issue of the Believer, there is a bizarre article on the wing chair, I kid you not–the Believer has the strangest topics, but that is what I like about it, not to mention the music issue coming this month(!). The article goes on about the everything wing chairs and their sinister symbolism throughout the ages and, most subtly, in films. However, I bet there are just as many, if not more, innocuous and innocent portrayals of wing chairs in films that are not considered. But post this isn’t about wing chairs, it is about a footnote in this article about the Simpsons, of all things. Here is a part of the footnote:

The wing chair also appears in many TV shows, most notably and quaintly in The Simpsons. The wing chair is the favored seat of Charles Montgomery Burns, the owner of a nuclear power plant in the town of Springfield, and one of the richest, oldest (104 years), and sickest men in the US, carrying the chair torch as signifier of wealth and decrepitude… But Burns also embodies the vague though resonantly propaganda-tinged concept of evil. In the episode “Last Exit to Springfield” (1993), after watching a movie depicting a man laughing after witnessing a massacre, Homer Simpson, a worker in Burn’s plant, tells his son, Bart, “There’s nobody that evil in real life.” Cut to swellhead capitalist Mr. Burns, laughing certifiably from the seat of a red, cushioned, buttoned, high-backed wing chair.

The description of the show is so passive, so dry, so matter-of-fact-ly, it forces you to imagine an audience that is not familiar with the Simpsons. I’ve never thought about such a person before, but I suppose they exist.

Have you ever played Chrono-Tron? It’s a time travel game wherein you have to use time traveling copies of yourself to achieve a task. Timing and order are key, however, making sure future copies do not interrupt past copies of yourself as they go about setting the scene is of the upmost importance. Such a disturbance can effectively destroy all the careful work achieved before the interruption. It gets hairy fast and playing this game continuously begins to effect your perception of reality.

On one such perturbed perception of reality, I came upon my bike leaning against the mailbox outside of my house, and I thought, “Oh, how did this get here? This is just what I wanted.”, then I had to think for a second, “How did this really get here?!”, and I looked around for a time traveling copy of myself. Of course, I had merely forgotten that I had left it there when I absentmindedly ducked inside to retrieve my jacket, but anyway… this trouble with time traveling copies is what Time Crimes is all about, albeit a little more macabre and absurd (a good absurd).

Spoiler Alert!

Time Crimes is Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo’s¹ first first full length feature film, and its a terrific one at that. The film is thickly laden with suspense. I was both glued and trying to look away from the start of the film. It carries this ominous feeling so well because of the setting in a remote country side with dense and dark woods and it keeps you filled in on a need to know basis. For instance, you don’t know who the man in the bandages is and he cuts a terrifying figure. Once he is revealed to be none other than our unwilling time traveler, Hector, this suspense slowly subsides and is gradually replaced with absurdity. Hector begins to self-mutilate, so to speak, in an attempt to restore his life to normal. At each time-traveling iteration you begin to wonder, “Oh boy, what’s he gonna do now!”

Despite this propensity to wander into the absurd, the film manages to deliver unforeseeable events that retain continuity (in the film sense), are entirely plausible (given that you’ve accepted the ability to time travel), and deliver a helpful dose of surprise. The main point of contention possibly lies in the need to suspend belief that Hector would have the wherewithal to both, understand his predicament after the brief explanation given by the scientist, and not interfere with his time traveling copy. I saw a few moments where Hector 3 (as the third copy of Hector is called) could have interfered with Hector 2 (who is already aware of the time travel and its predicaments) with minimal effect in the continuity, but tremendous effect on the disastrous outcome. In other words, two time traveling heads are better than one.

The film ends is a deluge of quasi-comical tragedy and conquest, in so far as, time conquers all, and sometimes you have to know when to sit back, relax, and wait for it to pass.