Obsidian Noise

Stories from the holiday weekend.

I’m not sure the last time I had aso much fun on consecutive days. Friday night, Saturday night and of course Monday night (New Years Eve). It’s all about who you’re with, and in my case it was with a small group of great friends from high school.

We had cocktails and caught up and that set the tone for the next few days. Saturday night we were a group of about 8, 4 of us friends from high school, and the others people they invited to join. We started out at my friend’s place and the conversation was good-to-great and I was having a good time. As usual, the group was dressed fairly nicely except for me in ripped jeans and black t-shirt. Sometimes when you’re the standout it makes it hard to merge consciousnesses. Sometimes it’s the opposite and it provides relief for others who don’t feel natural in prissy little booties and other fragile threads.

At around midnight the group decided to go to a club and I resisted. Why end a great thing? But I was the sole decenter and was dragged along. We ended up here at about 12:20. There was a long line for the night club on the roof, but we walked right in. My friend talked to a couple people and a hostess came down and led us to a private elevator that took us up. The elevator opened into a giant dance club completely packed with people, all dressed up and drunk. Lots of slutty looking women and douchey looking men who all looked nearly identical. Surprise Level: 0/10. Interestingness Level: 0/10. Desire to Leave Level: 8/10.

The woman led us to a table right in the the middle of everything and before I knew it there were two giant bottles of Grey Goose, two huge ice buckets and a stack of glasses.

The ice buckets were filled with Red Bulls. People danced around our table, starving looking babes and bouncing tits, gawking whorishly. It took about 4 vodkas for me to start to give in. Ater 6 I was plastered and dancing. At 8 I was flirting non-verbally with every chick who came near. There were way more women than men in there, which was nice. Our table had all the bimbos coming like an ant trap, and with 8 vodkas in you, the Interestingness Level starts moving up. Being the only metal guy in the dance club can work in your favor.

The music was absolutely horrible, though everyone I was with thought it was absolutely incredible. Stupid, stupid phat beetz that sounds like it all came out of a song maker program on an iMac. Utter, total hatred.

“Hey, I just met you,
And this is crazy,
But here’s my number,
So call me, maybe?”

No.

Go fuck yourself.

We left for a late night restaurant called Cafeteria, which at 6am was filled with clubbers, but I was too wasted to care.  There was a table full of hot black women that I sat down with, next to the table all my friends were at, pretending to have made a mistake. I told them all about how it’s nice to be able to just sit down at 6am after a night out and have a conversation with beautiful women before heading home. Believe it or not, we actually spoke for a while and after about 15 minutes I politely excused myself and asked them to enjoy the rest of their evening, and somehow made it to the table my friends were at. I remember a massive grilled cheese sandwich. Honestly, that’s the last part of the night I remember. I woke up at my friend’s place with the worst hangover over of my life at about 1p.

One more super highlight and then time to train.

New Years Eve I was at my friend’s again who was having a cocktail party, really low key, very good company and I had a great time. He hired a couple bartenders for the night and one of them looked a little familiar. We got to talking.

“Hey, my friend said you play guitar.”

“Yes I do.”

“Cool, what music are you into?”

“Metal.”

“Wow, that’s basically all I listen to.”

“Me too, what kind do you like?”

“Death, black metal, doom– most, I’d say.”

“Cool, I’m actually in a band. Maybe you’ve heard of us, ‘Melevolent Creation’.

“…”

And that’s how I became friends with the lead guitarist of this legendary death metal band. He’s in the top right of this picture:

And here he is with me in the kitchen at my friend’s place:

From that point on I spent most of my time back there talking to him. We got along extremely well. The next day he texted: “Hey, it’s me from last night. Let’s hang out this weekend.”

Fuck yeah.

OK enough updating, time to get on with things. Hope everyone had a great break, and for those of you still on it, hope you’re enjoying it to the fullest.

Hungover. It was Racer 5 IPA, a strong, hoppy beer at 7.0% Alc. I was home trying to get some work done and after half-accidentally finishing two bottles my interest shifted to music. As I went through parts of the collection and researched more, and while taking a couple phone calls, I somehow finished all the beers. I think drinking a whole 6 pack isn’t outrageous, but given the strength of the Racer 5 IPA, it definitely wasn’t a good idea. I woke up still partially dressed with an empty cup of water on my bed, phone nowhere to be found, mouth so dry I could barely open it. Gross. I’m lucky I woke up on time for work. Now that I’m here, I’m suffering. Headache and ill feeling, my vision isn’t great, and all I want to do is go back to bed. There’s one other person in the office with me today.

In the throws of beeriness I took a couple long phone calls. The first one was a general catch up and being a little buzzed made it great. The second one was shorter and included news that wasn’t great– a separation that’ll be divorce in a couple months. I was at the wedding, in 2010. Shocking, though maybe it shouldn’t be. I’ll be hanging out with him later tonight and the full story.

Onwards, may this morning go fast and may my brain return to normal soon.

It was all OK, on the 25th. Many people showed up and somehow I was able to change my attitude and ended up having a pretty fun time. The beverages helped. The nearly unlimited food definitely helped.

It snowed last night and today it’s wintery raining. The walk down to work in these conditions reminds me how long its been since I was really outside. When I’m in San Diego the week after next, I’ll drive out into the desert and hope it gets cold at night, at least cold enough for a fire.

I’m wearing black tights under ripped jeans and it was perfect for outside, but I’m starting to roast in here, like that time I wore my pajamas under my clothes in elementary school.

Dissertation writing, man. This is it.

12/25/12/

In Chinatown for today. Was here last night, too. I helped peel butternut squashes and chop them up into cubes and cook them with carrots and onions and chicken broth and then, when they were good and soft, I helped put them in the blender and turn the large, soft masses into a singular liquid.

The older women in Chinatown wear dark coats, mostly just black or dark brown, and they walk with plastic bags, and they wear hats that are usually a little too big, or a little too colorful, as if they were gifted by a niece and worn ever since. Sometimes the hats are dark, too, with a single embroidered flower, and I think it looks a little sad. Why do they scowl all the time, those old women in the hats. It’s not cold out, so maybe it’s colder in the kitchen they made breakfast in.

Today there will be many people here, up on the 26th floor. It’s probably going to be a little tough for me. Last night was a lot to handle. Today will be lots of family, but not mine. Cousins and mothers and siblings. I’m pre-tired from it. It’s amazing to be fatigued by something that hasn’t even happened yet.

There are ballads from the 60s on the radio and I’m sitting here pretending to be comfortable. What am I even doing here.

Still racing around without time, uptown now. Have more. Will share soon.

And at the same time, I’m not a “people person”.

Busy today. I’ll be able to write more later.

December 19, 2:46am

Realization: Broaden your definition of self. There’s a social element to all of our thinking from the very beginning, necessarily. As I begin to realize this with more clarity, the connection between people becomes a crucial part of trying to understand even the most basic thoughts in our own head, and certainly in anyone else’s. We co-create everything we know. The language we use to communicate our understandings back to ourselves isn’t ours; it’s a shared language from a shared human experience that arose from all of us, everywhere. We literally are each other, in a cognitive sense.

Learning takes place by pathways of communication, communicating our experiences and realizations and understandings and more back to ourselves, and even more so by communicating the same to other people. In order to truly communicate, a person has to synchronize what they’re thinking and feeling to someone else in that moment. To hear someone,  a person has to synchronize their experience and points of reference with the other person’s– in a sense by being them, for that moment. This is the link: learning and creating and becoming and growing is an empathic act. We don’t learn by watching math being done, we must do the math, and experience the thing itself as an internal logical process that we will (as a verb) into action. We don’t learn by watching other people, or watching words fly out of their mouths at us, we learn by engaging with the source of the words, entering their experiences in that moment, possibly living them for that shared point in time. In that moment the existential space of one person is in reality a shared space. For me to respond to something you’re trying to communicate, I have to know what made you think or say the thing you did because that’s part of what you’re saying. You can’t take the person out of the idea, you can take the words away from the assembler because though the words have a shared meaning, my sunrise isn’t yours by word alone. You didn’t see the one I saw that time, the one in my mind when I conjure “sunrise” as a metaphoric description of a feeling I have. I have to walk through your logic to truly engage with you in a conversation, only then is our experience shared and the communication fully received.

That kind of interaction creates empathy. In today’s society, we don’t do that any more. We surround ourselves with people who already agree with us. We choose our news based on the spin we like. For empathy to be built, people need to have real conversations, and that necessarily consists of experiencing difference. When you engage and take the side or perspective of a person you disagree with, to see the world as they do for the purpose of understanding what they’re saying fully, only then can the communication truly take place. By not engaging with people different than ourselves, it’s easier to just say they’re idiots. It used to be the case that people lived with and experienced diversity of view on a daily basis. In the 50s and 60s there were 3-4 big TV networks and everyone went to the same public spaces and lived out there amongst each other. Today, there are 300 channels and it’s possible to surround yourself only with media and people who think exactly like you do, and it becomes a positive feedback loop that can shield against any chance of understanding reality. People today voluntarily build an us and them construct because they’re too weak to confront difference and too cowardly to build empathy with those whose perspective differs from ours. The prospect of entering the mind and world of someone vastly different from the self has become too terrifying and thus people avoid it, clinging to their various mechanisms for managing the terror, whether it’s religion, fuckface culture or politics. That’s why our entire society is divided as it is, and that’s what historically has led to even unthinkable chasms, such as brother vs. brother civil war such as we had 150 years ago.

The more we understand the value of what empathy is, the more reason we’ll have to want to create the kinds of interactions that build empathy– the taking of perspectives, and the temporary occupation of another person’s mind, and the broadening of our self definitions. Social diversity is valuable because it adds to our own understandings and gives us the opportunities we need to see the world from vantage points and understandings different from what we can achieve on our own.

When I’ve classified myself as you who are so different from me as we communicate together, helping you is helping us, because at that moment I am you. The more we practice empathic interaction, especially the difficult kinds, the stronger we all are in the face of everything else, because we’re all on the same team.

Can fancy graphics and animations improve the already questionable value of recorded lectures and the rest of the movement towards fully fledged online education?

I hate getting asked that question. Friday night it was the BBC asking about how Coursera and other fully online courses compare to classroom-based courses. Fuck that shit. You can’t compare the two because of the myriad variables unique to the circumstances. That might sound like a cop out, but think about it. The course itself matters a great deal– math online versus poetry online is very different. The instructor matters, of course. A superstar lecturer who can captivate audiences with carefully chosen words– carefully chosen in the moment– will have a very different educational impact on learners than what could be produced with a recorded lecture or a series of quizes or exercises. The implementation of the approach matters a great deal too. Some online courses that are designed carefully and facilitated well can be steller successes, and others can be abysmal failures. The point is that it isn’t about the format, it’s about the execution. Could I deliver a fully online course that changed minds and lives for the better? You bet your ass. Can everyone? Nope. And there are many who can lecture their asses off and accomplish their teaching and learning goals, but who could never do the same through the web. It all matters.

Random pic of me and a date. Oddly, this was from the first wedding in Flushing a couple months ago, but there was an exact repeat, same venue, same clothes, same everything, just different couple getting married, last weekend.

Things are going good for someone like me… someone who forces huge distance between himself and all women under any circumstances from now on. She’s been very understanding and for some reason still wants to date me, despite my fuckednesses. It’s been a few months. Her patience is probably wearing thin, but I can’t help it. Spending time with her is great, but when she’s out and about it’s nice to not have any expectations besides honesty. If I have to train and write and be alone and end up telling her to just stay away for a while, she’s cool with it. So far.

It’s nice to feel understood by someone sometimes.

My left eye is swollen and blackened from sparring full contact at the club over the weekend. Had a great time and did well. The other guy was just a kid, maybe 26, well conditioned and motivated, but he needs a wake up call on taking power shots from shins and fists. Both his eyes are swollen shut today, I’ve been told, and I’m pretty sure I fucked his elbow all the hell up pretty good, which wasn’t intentional, he just didn’t tap smartly.

They want me to compete this spring at big event, but as usual I’m over committed already. I offered to help prepare whomever else they’re trying to position in the string, and they accepted so I’ll be helping train some new blood this spring. That’ll be fun.

One year anniversary of the death of Hitch was Saturday. If he’d lasted one more day it would have been perfect– my birthday. Here’s a video of four of the world’s great thinkers and writers who had a personal relationship with Hitch talking about him after he died. Please check it out if you have time– these are sweet guys who really deserve to be heard, and their description of Hitch is everything I imagined he was.

RIP Hitch. In the year since you left us, I’ve read just about everything you ever wrote again, and I intend for that to be a regular habit for years.

Scrambling around. Time is always a few drops from depletion. Making it work, somehow.

Tuesday night I went to see Von play at Saint Vitus in Greenpoint. The show was excellent. Reputed to be the first black metal band in the US, they actually disbanded in 1992 and I wasn’t sure what to expect at all. They’re not on tour or anything– it was a one time, one night only, seemingly random show. After watching an utterly bizarre opening “band” that consisted of a chick playing with a voice synth and two half-naked chicks throwing eggs and food on each other for 45 minutes, I was tempted to call it a night. The video of that performance is up already:

But then Von came out and all was good.

The band emerged covered in blood and when they reached their comfort zone, it was fairly mesmerizing. Their video from that night is up already too.

I didn’t make it all the way to the end of the performance because it was going on too late, but the dose of pure black metal is still with me. I crashed in Chinatown and came in slightly late to 10a meeting yesterday morning.

Today is chaos. Early meeting straight to another meeting. I have a document to send off and need to be on the East Side for a meeting at a private school about taking students on a trip to Nepal. That’s at 3p and it’s with the headmaster, which means I need to wear a suit, which means going home to get that sorted out. When that’s done I need to race back to the office and make sure the document is sent. Tonight I need to prepare for a huge meeting tomorrow morning, 10:30-11:30, and I’m expecting that one to be a little contentious.

Out for now, more stories soon. Sorry for the rush and sloppiness– I’ll clean up my posting soon. It’s a perfect storm of activity these days so bare with.

Hot sauces. I’m not sure how this happened, but I now put hyper hot sauce on many foods I prepare at home. Occasionally it’s a few drops in a giant batch of this or that, but more frequently it’s actually bite-by-bite.

A couple years ago I bought a bottle of Muerte, a hot sauce with chipotle made by a company called Blair’s, based in Jersey. It had a little skull keychain and from when I first saw the bottle I knew I was going to get it whether I truly intended to use it or not. Well that bottle ended up barely used, until I rediscovered it a couple months ago. It has a nice smokey chili flavor and really augments anything meaty. As I began to use it with increasing frequency (leading up to a stunning quantity on eggs in particular) I picked up another kind, a sweet and deadly mix of habaneros and mangos, and that was the true tipping point. Fantastically flavorful and exciting to try on different things, that mango bottle transformed most of my diet. So that led to other discoveries, and what you see in the picture above is how my dining table now looks on a full-time basis.

The secretary is playing christmas music and I want to barf.