I had pot brownies for 5 straight days, taking each about 8p, feeling the effects at around 9:30pm, and giving me unbelievably relaxing sleeps by midnight. The last two days I have been off of them… because I ran out. I still feel relaxed and last night I had a good sleep. I think THC might be an important molecule for humans.

The “stoned ape” theory is interesting. Basically, it’s that the reason we have our large frontal lobes and the ability to imagine, and anticipate, and visualize, and create, is because at some point in the distant past, our ape ancestors started eating psychedelic plants as part of their regular diet. Generation after generation of those apes would consume these plants– plants that have molecules in them that are highly compatible with certain neurotransmitter receptors in our brains. Over time, our brains grew in response to these special molecules, and eventually we ended up with the ability to imagine, visualize, be creative, etc. without needing to ingest that molecule that made it possible. Our brains changed to basically *have* have that molecule naturally, and thats the state we are in now. When we take those molecules now, such as THC or psilocybin, we have experiences that might be important– after all, those molecules are quite possibly what make us human to begin with. Maybe we’ve spent too much time trying to convince ourselves there’s something “unnatural” about them– despite the fact they’re more natural than the majority of other things we put into our bodies.

On the philosophical side, one theorist posited that in some ways, because the molecules in those plants and mushrooms serve no apparent purpose for the organism itself, and only seems to have a purpose when ingested by other organisms, they could be considered the way that plants communicate to us. In other words, lacking a CNS and a brain, this other form of life, plant life, actually communicates with us by literally going into our brains directly and telling us things- about life on earth, about the nature of life, the unity of life, etc.

I have never done psilocybin or anything other than THC, but I’m utterly convinced I should try it, or DMT. Event the science is behind it now. Check out this journal article out of Johns Hopkins. Or the rest of their work.

Anyway. I have to get my shit in order this week. Job search, job applications, resumes and cover letters. Also, my band Sunken is releasing a demo in June so we’re hard at work on that. Also, I’m seeing two girls at once right now and it’s getting exhausting. One is a tall, super hot chinese film-studies chick who’s as horny as I am. The other is an All American JD/MBA/PhD with a rich family and a great personality and who wants to come over every day. I need to choose one and I’m finding that idea extremely difficult, though necessary of course. It’s been 2.5 months since I started dating one, and 3.5 months since I started with the other.

Awesomely rainy day today. Tycoon Death Plunge practice tonight.

Have a great Tiews, my monkeys.

I’m surprised the world is still here. You should all feel very lucky.

Because last night the legendary Godflesh came to town and damn near destroyed this quadrant of the universe.

This was a rescheduling of a show that was canceled in the fall because of a visa issue that Justin Broadrick had due to the government shutdown. I was completely excited for this show and expectations were highest level.

The band came through. Godflesh is the source of all industrial metal. The band is two guitarists (bass and lead/rhythm) and a drum machine. The drum tracks are analog and warm and syncopated, and the guitars are crushingly low, muddy, sludgey and destructive. With singular sound, Godflesh started a revolution in metal. The distinctiveness of that bass guitar tone is legendary, and they even emphasized it during the show: the first couple minutes was just Broadrick’s guitar creating messed up feedback, and then slowly the bass play turned his volume knob up and BOOOOOOOM motherfuckers, Godflesh was suddenly on stage and the place erupted.

YOU BREEEEEEED!!!!!

LIKE RATS!!!!!!!!

Fucking amazing.

Have a great weekend.

Duck

Sorry for the delays, still getting slammed with things here, on and off, throwing me off, up and around.

My old friend came to visit last night. She flew in from LA and woke me up at 6a, damn late flight. She was here just for yesterday and to crash last night, then today up to Yale Law for an open house, and later this evening there’s Harvard’s open house. She got into every school she applied to: Stanford, UCLA, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Berkley. She’s narrowed it down to just Stanford, Yale and Harvard, and she has a couple weeks to decide. Now that’s an interesting and hyper rare situation to be in.

She had two friends come over last night, and I had the Serb over, and we made tacos. One of her friends did Harvard for undergrad, and now is at CUMC. The other friend is a third year med student at Yale. So both of her friends had connections to the two schools she’s touring today.

It was a little strange to be in my living room with that group. I enjoyed it. Great conversation, good people. The Yale woman was super tall, a varsity rower at CU as an undergrad, and super pretty. Obviously very smart. The other one, also pretty, ended up telling a story about how her great grandparents owned half of the Uahu, Hawaii, or something.

I could tell the Serb wasn’t totally into the conversations, and I’m not sure why. She comes from a highly educated background, too– an JD, MBA and soon to be EdD– and her family seems quite wealthy, too. But she seemed shy around these brainy chicks, and that was weird.

She was the only one drinking wine and she did a whole bottle alone as no one else drank (I’m off alcohol for a while, mostly because I’m experimenting with edibles lately).

When the two friends of my house guest left, Serb left, too. So then it was just my old friend and I. She doesn’t think the Serb is a good match, but she likes her a lot.

Once in bed, I texted the TCG (tall chinese girl), the one with the incredible physique and large appetite and made a dinner date for tonight. Actually, I initially wrote “come over tomorrow night?” and I didn’t get a response, so then I wrote, “or go out for dinner?” and she then wrote: “I can do dinner.”

Probably going to lose her because I can’t spend enough time with her. She’s really amazing and that’ll be too bad. But I can’t do much about it right now. She told me last time we hooked up that she wanted a lot more, that she wanted to be a real part of my life. But there’s just not much I can do about that right now, and I tried explaining that to her.

The Serb says she’s in love with me.

RW sent me a picture of her tits last week and asked how I was. I didn’t go for the bait.

The TCG wants a relationship.

I want out of everything. California?

Have a great Wednesday.

I headed home after an annoying day at work and looked for jobs online. Many things around, all over town. But I’m excited about the idea of leaving my field and starting new, fresh, somewhere else. Leaving higher education, and into what. I have no idea.

I’m creative and reflective. I’m not an administrator, though I can pretend to be. My true strength is in creative thought and creative problem solving, not in meticulous administering of “operations”. I’d rather let someone else who’s good and interested in doing that have that role.

I’m just not certain in this weird economy where that puts me in the scheme of things, were I to stay inside of it.

night club. 

The weekend was fast and intense. It started at 3:30p on Friday when I had to race home to put on a suit to make it to a wedding in Central Park.

The ceremony was pleasant and the rain stayed away. The interfaith minister chanted a song in sanskrit and impressed everyone with his tone. My large Indian friend and his girlfriend of 2 years were suddenly hitched, and it was nice. I was pretty alone there. Everyone knew each other quite well, mostly family from both sides, and then there was me, the only white guy, and I was the only one from his old work circle he invited, and it was too early in the day to really bring any dates to the ceremony part.

After the ceremony and many pictures, we headed to an Indian place to feast, and it was great. That’s when I got to talk to people. The black couple sitting across from me heard me tell someone my favorite food was pizza, and they started telling me how it’s their favorite and they make it a special way at their place about once a month. They invited me over for one of those days and I can’t wait. He’s from Haiti, she’s from Brooklyn. She works at the Brooklyn museum, he’s an artist. Nice couple.

I did have a date for the evening part, and she showed up about 9, just as we were all leaving for a bar called The Whiskey.

The date was TCG, Tall Chinese Girl. She came looking amazing. Last week she took a trip to Puerto Rico by herself, and it sounds like she had an amazing time. She came back all tanned, which on her tight frame is super hot. She’s so thin that when my hand is on her waist, half of it fits in my hand like a handle. She wore a tight dress that showed her body off and it was hard to keep my hands off of her, though in my mind I was thinking a lot about another girl, someone I’m seeing a whole lot of recently.

After the Whiskey, people split up and TCG and I walked from that area on the east, over to the west side. Realizing I was close to my other friend’s place, I texted him to see if he was around. He responded quickly that we should stop by, so we did.

He lives in a penthouse on 19th, a gorgeous place with a certain stability you’d never expect in NYC. His space is completely sound proof in all directions. Sleeping there is like being in a sensory deprivation chamber. I love it.

Anyway, we get up and I let myself in like I always do and he’s standing on the side of his living room with his arms around this totally knockout asian babe with huge tits, a perfect face, big lips and a big ass. Her dress was almost as tight as TCG’s, but her tits were porn-star sized and she showed it. I wasn’t sure, but she really looked like a call girl to me. I wouldn’t put it against my friend if she was.

We all drank more and talked, many topics came up. She’s an animation student in California and my friend met her at some function, a wedding I think, a few months ago. He flew her over for the weekend and they sure were close… she was even asking me if I wanted anything to eat or drink, as if she lived there. That was weird.

Eventually my friend and I and TCG became engrossed in conversation and the big tits girl, who it turns out wasVietnamese, left at some point. Didn’t even notice. Meanwhile, my friend and TCG started intensely talking about movies, and since TCG was a film and media studies major in college, they really hit it off. She can really hold her own in any conversation, and the fact that she’s only 24 is really impressive. She has that artist’s perspective that I’ve missed.

We stayed about an hour and then got ready to leave. On my way out I realized I couldn’t find my keys– and I wasn’t sure if I left them in my friend’s place or if they fell out while I was walking around or at the wedding or dinner or bar or what. TCG said I could stay in her dorm room that night, so I did.

We took a cab all the way there and it was pretty fast at that hour. Once in her room, it was bananas. I’ve never really made out while wearing a suit, but she was so into it. Before I even knew what was happening, that cheap little zipper they use on suit pants was being pulled down, by her teeth, and it was on. I felt devoured and I liked it.

I woke up at 11a needing to scramble out and make sense of the night and straighten out my day. I called my neighbor to see about getting in since I lost my keys and she said I had about 20 minutes to get there before she left for the day, so I threw on my clothes and sprinted home, suit pants barely hanging onto my legs as they got pumped up from all the running.

My neighbor, a cute Mexican in her 40s, gave me a look of “naughty boy” while giving me my spare key. We didn’t talk much, but I think the suit works on her, too.

I stripped down and took a shower that lasted for probably 30 minutes, steam-blasting myself clean.

Saturday was relaxing at home. I cleaned, listened to a Bruins game, cleaned more, did laundry, made some calls to catch up with friends who are far away. I trained like a motherfucker in the afternoon and then got ready to meet up with the other girl I’m seeing.

Dinosaur for BBQ and beers, and it was excellent. The beers really knocked me out quickly because I was so depleted from training. Right afterwords we went to my favorite supermarket to buy supplies for what we decided was going to be an epic breakfast the next day, Sunday.

Sunday’s food turned out extraordinary. Truffle cheese eggs with artichoke garlic sauce on multigrain toast, plus coconut milk pancakes and homemade raspberry sauce. Also strawberry/blackberry smoothies.

She jokingly asked me to marry her after we ate because it was so good. So that felt nice.

My metal guitarist friend came over a couple hours after and we wrote a song called Death Fountain. It’s dark and eerie as hell. Just the two of us, and I’m listening to it now. It’s pretty good.

I had 8 beers during the recording.

The girl from the morning came back over after the guitar session was over. She thought my metal friend would still be there so she brought a six pack and pack of smokes. But she she came about 5 minutes too late and they still haven’t met. We opened the beers and I played her the song we wrote that night and she liked it, despite it’s gloom. At least she said she did.

3 more beers.

We slept around 3:30a, and I was blasted. 11 beers since 6p.

Still got it up, though.

This morning I am hungover as hell and I’d give many things to simply not be at work right now. I really hate it here these days, and it sucks. I have many vacation days saved up and I should quit, and then use those days to collect another month’s salary while I transition.

Risky, but I need to get out of here.

Apparently I’ve been saying this for years.

Have a great Monday, hopefully better than mine so far.

Ahem. “Woo-Woo.”

Almost done with The Pressure of the last couple of weeks. I’m running a staff-wide evaluation assignment and will present it at the staff meeting tomorrow morning. It should be OK, though it’s an extremely challenging task.

I’m not into my boss’s attitude lately– I find it concerning. He might know something we don’t about other pressures affecting our organization. Not sure. But it’s not very comfortable.

I was supposed to work late last night with coworker on the staff assignment for tomorrow. She brought beers to the office, though, at around 6. By the time we had two each, we basically stopped working. Before I knew it we were at restaurant eating burgers and drinking more beers. I got home at 11 a little buzzed and now it’s today. In the scheme of things it didn’t hurt, I guess. I feel a little out of it today, which isn’t great given the daunting task ahead of planning this presentation for tomorrow. But I’ll survive. More coffee needed.

The air smells like burning rubber outside. It’s from a building that collapsed about 10 avenues away on the East side of Manhattan. Gas explosion, they say. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how piped and connected everything is in a city. Everything connected to everything else, somehow. It’s like the city itself is one big circulation system, with veins and arteries getting everything everywhere– water, electricity, gas, roads, everything else. Actually, the metaphor seems extra accurate. Electricity  and power lines are like our central nervous system. Power flows from stations along physical lines, just like nerves throughout the body. Pipes flow to and from tanks and pumps and stations, just like our veins and arteries. Cars and trucks drive down roads, delivering stuff and people, parking and taking off, like our nutrients and carbohydrates and everything else that keeps us alive via circulation system. There’s the level of the city, the block and the building, with each unit wired and plugged in to a main building system, wired and plugged into a block system, wired and plugged into a neighborhood system, wired and plugged into a city system, wired and plugged into a regional system, that huge grid that overlays giant parts of the city. We’re wired and plugged into that, too. Those things I’m plugged into then enter my own body and flow throughout it. The macro the micro, my lung systems like a fractal of the city.

The universe is like that. If you look at pictures of deep space, it’s not all that different from deep brain. 

Back to presentation planning for me. Have a great Wednesen Daeg.

Full weekend, worked most of Sunday with a colleague to get ready for a potentially disastrous staff development meeting on Thursday. I’m designing an assignment of the whole staff to do that involves qualitatively evaluating student work inside of one of our hallmark technologies. Each staff member will be assigned a course to evaluate. They’ll be asked to enter the course and actually read through all student work and, based on a rubric we give them, evaluate it.

The tool is a project I manage that lets people collect and annotate media from the web, either videos or images, and then use them in essay writing (in a writing space we built into the site).  I have some skepticism about what students are really doing in the tool. Rather than make the case that a great deal of student work isn’t very effective– that their use of multimedia in their writing is pretty unsophisticated and of questionable educational value, I thought we could invite the whole staff to go in and have a look. One course per staff member, and it’s theirs for evaluating.

The potential disaster is just that it doesn’t go well. That they go in there and have no idea how to go about scoring student work (“Was this embedded piece of media effective? How the hell should I know? I’m not the teacher!”) despite having a rubric to use.

We’ll see. But it’ll be stressing me out until then because I have a few other pressing things to do between now and Thursday as well. So it’s concerning. But I’ll get through. I always do, somehow.

Have a great start of the week, monkeyholes.

The data analytic meeting yesterday was a mixed bag. I made one fairly obvious error that I needed to talk my way around, but the rest of the data seems to have gone over pretty well. My recommendations are being taken, so that’s nice.

Last night two very strange things happened.

First, I was home around 5 after the analytic meeting, and just starting to unwind. I decided to respond to a couple more emails. While sitting at the computer, my door suddenly opened and a guy walked in.

“Hey man, how are you.”

I just sat there, sort of dumbfounded. The intruder’s face wasn’t visible because he was silhouetted from back light coming from the hallway.

“Hey man…” he said again. I had my green organic vegetable delivery bag on the floor ready for the delivery guy who usually comes about 6p. I noticed the guy who walked in also was carrying a green bag and that made me think it was just the delivery guy. But then, of course, I realized… “Did the vegetable delivery guy just walk right into my living room??”

The person walked in further and I could see it was an old friend, someone who had left here pretty recently, who lives in the Motherland.

“Hey, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, everything OK? Is now a bad time?” he asked.

“Hey, no, it’s fine. It’s just, I wasn’t expect you. Hey, was I supposed to know you were coming back to NYC today?”

“Of course, I wrote earlier this week– and you even wrote back. Everything OK?”

“I honestly had no idea you were coming today– somehow this completely slipped off my mind. But yes everyhting is fine, come in. Guest room is yours.”

And that was that. I’ve been so overwhelmed with work lately, especially late nights and weekends, that somehow I completely forgot that I was expecting a visitor this week. He’ll be here for about 6 days, it looks like. That whole encounter was weird, and probably a sign of how overworked I am and have been.

The second thing that happened was that I got a text from someone I’d stopped seeing because I realized I wasn’t in a good place to do relationship-type things. She knew this, and knows this, and decided to be edgy, or something, and sent me the sexiest text message I’ve ever received. I mean, it was completely explicit and hardcore and I was dumbstruck she’d write something like that. It turned me on immediately and I didn’t know what to do.

But I kept it all under control. I didn’t invite her over. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote back, “you’re such a flirt, but sometimes too subtle”, just to make her mad. She wrote back she was serious, that her mouth was watering for me and everything else she said. I didn’t respond.

That’s my life right now. Probably making all kinds of mistakes by not acting. Unnecessary frustration. But it still seems right. I think my dick as grown because of lack of intimacy, though, because it’s just raging every night, every morning. Not sure if that’s healthy or not.

I’m very glad it’s Friday and I can’t wait to catch up on sleep tonight. I’m so wiped. After training, after the astronomy lecture, home and to bed. Yes please.

Have a great weekend Monkeys, see you tomorrow.