Obsidian Noise

Fall is peeking in and everyone exhales. After the overheated summer, we guessed if autumn would disappear, perhaps becoming what summer was supposed to be, and who could survive that tragedy.

I like summer. But I love fall.

Feeling autumnal, I made cookies last night. It wasn’t easy. I used cornflakes and peanut butter and butterscotch. No actual cooking needed other than to melt the butterscotch chips. Once that was done, I just sort of mushed everything together and refrigerated. They turned out good! Two bites will fill you up completely, but the taste and texture was nice.

I brought them into work to show off. They didn’t get the reception I was hoping for. Our newest employee ate a bite and it crumbled immediately all over her shirt. She was polite and said it tasted good. Our secretary, a large Puerto Rican woman,  said something like: “Who made it, Duck? I’m not eaten’ that!” So that got some laughs. And so far the rest are just sitting there untouched.

They really are pretty good. I wonder why no one wants to try them out.

These are the bluest skies of the year, over here in NYC, so anyone who’s here ought to look up when possible. Don’t waste them.

Jam in Hollow Way tonight. My friend got a new guitar, a 1991 Ibanez Universe “green dot”. The thing is hot. It was one of the first seven string guitars made for metal and is renown everywhere. Now that they’re over twenty years old it’s getting hard to find them and he’s psyched to finally own one. It does bring our collective guitar collection up to 13 now, which isn’t good. But to have a legendary Green Dot Universe in house is amazing. He spent two hours cleaning her up last night, and tonight’s communion with the metal demons will be brutal and righteous.

Happy mid-week and go hard in this perfect training weather.

9/11/12 08:07

The big meeting today, this morning, in 55 minutes. I’m still at home as I’ll head straight there from here.

It should be OK, save for any giant curve balls they can through. I mean throw.  It’s an update and proposal meeting for a two-year project. We’re about 5 months in.

It’s probably the highest-level meeting I’ve had here so far. Will wear shoes today. And a collar.

My brain seems to be working OK this morning. It’d be helpful if my eyes weren’t red.

9/11/12 15:10

Smoked it. Used the full hour. The group is thrilled. Lots of “nice job”s and “well done”s. I wonder if wearing a suit made me temporarily one of them. We were all suited, except for the women who were businessy with whatever you call those things. Not pant suits. The other thing.

Anyway.

We debriefed once the honchos left and all feel pretty good. I really like this project and really care about it. I think it has so much potential. We have 1.3 more years.

I headed straight from there to the gym to get back to my world. I trained on the heavy bag and pull up bar for about an hour and then headed for the showers to relax for a few minutes before getting back to things here in my office.

I don’t belong in an office and I’m lucky I so rarely have to be in one. It’s only when I’m here that I think about how much I need to not be sitting here, and how I much I should be out there, making shit happen. Not writing about the thing, but writing THE THING, writing reality into existence through action. Authoring a life.

Three days no coffee and I’m fine.

Saturday night, September 8th, 2012

I highly recommend watching Phantom of the Opera live on Broadway after smoking a significant amount of pot. The surround sound made everything luscious and amazing, and the pyrotechnics were mesmerizing. The character Christine Daae (the Phantom’s love interest) had incredible tits and I think everyone was hoping they would pop out at some point. A couple of her outfits/costumes were very clearly designed to make sure even the guy way up against the furthest back wall, the cheapest seat in the venue, would still be aware of the awesomeness of that rack. Probably fake. But nice on stage.

My date figured out I was high pretty quickly. “What’s wrong with your eyes?” And she wasn’t very happy about it. “What, you didn’t think it’d be interesting enough so you smoked up first? Sheesh.”

Here’s the thing– I tried early to explain that I probably wasn’t the best person to take to a show like that. It’d probably be a waste for me.  Someone else who actually likes that kind of thing would probably enjoy it more. You should take them. Maybe we could watch the Book of Mormon or something like that. I like ballet and modern dance very much. But musicals don’t interest me, at least so far. Miss Saigon was boring. Cats was OK. But if a person thinks the most successful Broadway show of all time is merely “OK”, then probably not a good idea to bring them to anything else. (Except for Book of Mormon).

But she insisted I give it a chance and still really wanted me to go– that one specifically. So I did.

I tend to.

I met her outside the venue. She had dressed up incredibly: super high heels and a tight blue dress, makeup and earrings. She wanted to test the shoes out before a wedding she got them for which is today. She got everyone’s attention just walking up the street, and I can’t imagine what the subway ride must have been like. Maybe she cabbed it. Even in the venue people checked her out for minutes on end. I hadn’t seen her done up to this extent before. Before the show she used the restroom and I leaned against a wall, waiting. A fat man, probably a tourist (you know how you can just tell?) watched her come out and quietly said to me: “Whew, beautiful!” not knowing she was coming to me. She walked over to where I was standing and I hate to say it, but it was a neat moment. The hottest chick in the room coming to me. But I killed the moment quickly. Shallow shit. “Nice piss?” She laughed.

I wore a Necrophagist t-shirt that has a rotting human corpse on the front, and black pants with black boots. I’m pretty muscular and lean right now, about 190lbs, getting ready for a big tourney in Montreal in a couple months. I fill my shirts out pretty well. She said I looked awesome and that was a relief since together we probably looked odd– a glamed-out super beauty and a violent-looking metalhead. But she digs it. I know from experience…

We were at a metal show a couple weeks ago and she mostly stood behind me to not get knocked over by the moshers. At some point during the show I heard her yell at someone to move away. When I heard her yell “get away!” again, I turned around and saw a shirtless meathead with really lame tattooes sort of half-headbanging and pressed up against her. The first thought that entered my mind was: what is a meathead doing at a Dying Fetus show? You just don’t see that very often. At most good extreme metal shows you get a good mix of people– hardcore metal heads, and also people who just dig the music, the sound–the extreme art. What you don’t usually see are the Bud-drinking fake-o tough guys. The sort that always seem to end up shirtless really quickly. You know, frat types. You know, football players or fans.

Anyway, I turned and was sort of surprised to see someone like that at the show. He looked at me looking at him and after a few seconds he took a step toward me and my heart went calm and glad. In those moments before fast, sudden violence of action, I feel more alive than at any other time, and my heart becomes glad. Justified violence is what I was made for. It’s in my genes, it’s the only way I can explain it. I yearn for it. I need it. It had been a couple years and I was so into something happening, my legs were springy and I was already so pumped from the heavy riffs. I was just about to make sure it would escalate, by smiling at him, but suddenly he put his hands up and walked back and into the crowd. Fuck. The one that got away.

That happens sometimes and you just let it go. Not everyone is looking for that kind of action when it suddenly becomes real.

My date, the same girl who took me to Phantom, was a little scared in the moment, but brings it up constantly now, when we’re with other people, and when we’re alone. She likes to thank me for it, and I think it turns her on. She’s mentioned it a few times, especially before intimacy.  But the truth is that I didn’t do it for her. I wanted the action. It’s tough to stay aware of being alive in the city, especially if toys don’t do much for you.

It’s not fair to be that way, to take people by surprise like that. Maybe he could sense it and that’s why he backed out. I need to hide the thirst better.

Enough of the tangent.

The show was amazing. Obviously I’m not sure how much of my enjoying it came from the sensory enhancements provided by the plant. But I hereby declare that they should make pot available at all Broadway shows, right at the door.

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Heavy training this weekend at the MMA gym. I screwed up my schedule and had sparring today, 3 5-minute rounds with helmet and shin guards, and I have almost the same tomorrow, with helmet, shin guards and sparring vest.

Some people call sparring vests “rib guards”, but that never made good sense to me. Yes it protects the ribs, but also the kidneys, solar plexus and abdomen, and those things are way more vulnerable than your ribs. Your ribs actually are a form of armor– a cage that protects most of your guts. But your kidneys, plexus, liver and intestines are outside the cage. Those are what you need the vest for, mostly. So, if it comes up, go with sparring vest.

Odd to be posting on a Saturday night, but I’m having the alone time I’ve been wanting. I cleaned up a bit, read Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein– highest recommendation btw– and am now taking some protein before catching up on some play station and falling asleep to a podcast. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :)))))))

I had a dream that earth was sending a craft to Gliese 163C, a planet recently found that is believed to be within the “habitable zone” for life– at least life as we know it. The planet is about seven times the mass of Earth and orbits a red dwarf, a small, relatively cool star, but because of the close distance between Gliese and its star it has a surface temperature of about 60C or 140F. That’s pretty hot.

The nice thing about an uninhabited planet being to too hot is that cooling it down is pretty easy. You can do things to the atmosphere to block a percentage of passable heat radiation and cool the entire thing.

Though one thing they can’t tell about the planet right now is what the poles are like. If the average temperature is 140 across the surface, there’s a chance the poles are very much cooler, like our own, which means there could be zones of human-sustaining weather.

Gliese 163C is 49 light years away. For me, that means one thing:  it’s definitely reachable. We’re definitely headed for other stars. If it turned out that the only earth-like planets were thousands of light years away, we probably wouldn’t ever reach them. Not without a Star Trek-like discovery in warp travel.

How fast can we go right now? Is 49 light years really feasible?

No problem. With low-to-zero friction of open space, even with our current technology we can get a space craft going really fast– mostly by using the gravity of our own sun. For instance, the Helios 2 probe, launched in the 1970s, reached a top speed of 157,000MPH. As you might know, the speed of light, which is the physical speed limit of all matter, energy and information in the universe, is 180,000MPH. So, we’ve been able to move our own objects at 87% of the maximum speed of all things.

So if we tried getting to Gliese 163C with our current technology, it’d take approximately 55-60 years.

If we can’t solve the problem of warp travel to make the galaxy smaller for us, we have another possibility: extend our lifespan significantly. Were we to live for 300 years each, then the journey to Gliese 163C would take about the same amount of relative time (relative to total lifespan I mean) as sailing to China used to take.

Based on how things are going right now, I think increasing the human lifespan is more likely than discovering how to “warp”.

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Tonight is Phantom of the Opera, I’m not sure where my expectations about it are.

Would sort of rather be taking off for Gliese 163C.

Have a great weekend.

Racing around today. Will update later. UPDATE. Still racing.

UPDATE. Still racing.

UPDATE.

still racing.

I walked home after training on the heavy bag and enjoyed the coolness of getting rain-soaked on a humid day. After showering and eating, I headed into Hollow Way.

The baritone LP produces an enormously rich, deep sound, especially with the Bareknuckle Warpigs in the bridge and neck. They’ve got to to be the hottest passive pickups in the world, generating insane amounts of feedback and producing the coolest random harmonics. I have my top string, the thickest one, tuned down to B. When you hit B and F# together you get a nice, dark dyad. It doesn’t matter if you’re running it clean or what– it’ll be dark and satisfying. If you pass it through some fuzz or grind boxes and really crank the gain, the resonance can take on a life of its own– and always a satisfying life. The dyad is set by the waves of B and F# synching into each other. When you add gain, the dyad remains intact but the edge of the wave flails, almost like it’s on fire. If you keep your treble down and increase the volume (literally the space being taken up by the wave) and keep the gain high, the dyad changes into rough-edged beam, ultra hot, perfect with itself. With some hard playing it becomes a hot bolt that you can aim, and overtones will fly off of it and wash over you. When I jam on the LP at high volume and ultra-high distortion, I stand in front of the cab stack and get the hugest, most dangerous erections imaginable. Were it not for the containment of Hollow Way, I’d be destroying entire cities at once.

For my playing style, I keep the LP in open tuning, and Open B specifically these days because it lets me keep auxiliary strings available for various effects and emphases. For example, if I’m riding on a B dyad chord, when it gets nice and full  I can include the third string at the 5th fret, the perfect 5th of the B chord, and it adds an edge that’s perfect and controllable. From that chord I can add the 7th fret 4th string, when needed, and that turns the edged dyad into a lava river with dangerous edges. If you jam on that 4 note chord for more than a minute, you actually start to float off the ground, so be careful. Make sure you’re at least pretty well boxed in or tied down before you start using that.

What you absolutely can’t do from there is add another, higher, B string, the 5th string. Don’t do it. If you add that last open B and let it ring out, you’ll risk everything you know. You see, that’s the porn chord of the drone metal gods. If you run it through a 212o with a compressor and have it cranked,  you risk your entire city getting fucked. So don’t do it.

 OK, do it.

But wisely. And wear loose clothing.

Ready for the group jam tonight with a special guest drummer– it’ll be 6 people in Hollow Way fo the first time. Hopefully the walls will hold. For your sake.

Enjoy mid-week.

Tuesday, Sept 4th, 2012

I don’t think I’ve ever slept as much as I have over the last three days, Labor Day weekend. It was great and felt badly needed. I also really pigged out, which was probably also badly needed. I still take advantage of free food whenever I can. If it’s good and reasonably clean, I’ll eat to capacity.

Eager to get back into training.

I need to work on my dissertation and I’m finding it hard to get into it. I have other things going on that are more interesting to me now. I was told this would happen and it’s interesting that everyone who said it would is right. At this time last year I felt very locked on. I need to make serious progress on that over the next couple of months or I’m screwed.

After sleeping long hours for three straight mornings it was hard to get up on time today. My eyes are puffy and heavy and it’s only been an hour since I left my place. I haven’t had coffee yet and I hope that helps. This will be a fast week with one significant document to work on. Exactly one week from today I will run a large meeting uptown to show and describe progress on the complex systems simulation. I’m working on a document to send around ahead of time and hope to have that reviewed by my project team the day after tomorrow. That’ll be in my face until then.

A friend asked me to see Phantom of the Opera this Friday. I didn’t particularly want to go but the tickets were free (or nearly) so I thought I may as well just check it out. It’ll be my second Broadway show. In about 2000, I was dragged to Miss Saigon by my second girlfriend after she moved to New York City. That was before China. I remember tickets were over $100 and at the time I was living off saltines, ramen and tuna cans because I was trying to pay off my undergrad debt as fast as possible. I wonder if I’ll like this one more. I remember when Miss Saigon was over I thought, fuck, that’s it? That was over two weeks of food gone in three boring hours. Yeah, yeah I know… “But they used a full-sized helicopter as a stage prop!” When you’ve jumped out of them before, it really doesn’t mean much.

No training today for lack of time but tomorrow it’s on. I have separation anxiety from the heavy bag.

I committed myself to a holiday weekend thing and I regret it. I would love to go home and clean my place and play with fucked up guitar tones and bust some pedals tonight. But instead I have a dinner in Seaport and then leave early tomorrow morning for a couple of days.

My place is such a mess after the last two weeks. It’s a wonder my plants are alive. I don’t have any clean laundry left and my fridge is empty. The cleanest room is Hollow Way, surprisingly. We destroyed it with high voltage metal just two days ago and it’s pristine already. I like to think that sound waves might still be bouncing around in there, cleaning everything up.

I don’t mesh with most people. When I do or seem to, it’s an illusion: I have to try hard and it exhausts me. I’m happier on my own where I don’t need to get involved in things that don’t matter to me. Small talk is like acid drops in my ears. Yet I want a pretty chick with hot body next to me. I want to feel her and take her and I want her care. But it’s difficult to get that by being true to yourself because chicks have been groomed to be attracted to candyass fuckfaces. They’re attracted to the lamest of the lame, almost as much as they’re attracted to money. So you have to do the dance if you want it. The thing is that it’s easy, and getting attention is easy if you just watch how to play it up. But it’s also annoying and weak to have to do those things. You see all the men playing along, learning how to be to win the affection they desire. But you don’t see the people like me who don’t play nicely and who’d rather stab themselves in the leg than put on the costume and rather die than do that job just to get the shiny object that guarantees your bedmate of choice.

Sometimes I don’t think I’m even supposed to be here. Wrong place, wrong time. I’m supposed to carry a big club and mate fiercely and righteously with my chosen one, and know that my offspring will be the only ones left standing when all is said and done.

Watching everyone trying to be and act like what they’ve seen on TV and in movies over the last 20 years of their lives is eery and terrifying. The only people I feel truly comfortable around, for the most part, are foreigners, and especially wild or tribal people. That’s why I love Nagaland so much. Why I love Arunachal. They who don’t make a habit of acting, speaking, thinking, looking and doing what they’ve been told to. They’re not easily impressed by simple things, like decorations or conformity.

I can’t live out in a crowd. For me, crowds suck.  I don’t even like groups for more than a couple hours. I’m the one who leaves the party first. Usually without saying bye, hoping I can just slip out without needing to explain anything. The thing about me is that I go sometimes, whereas other people like me don’t even do that. I think it’s better to check things out than write them off. When your biases are confirmed repeatedly, it gets harder to keep the curious/furious balance. It leads to furious. But I try. There are chicks out there who get that, right? Who’ll leave with me out the window while everyone else is busy gabbing?

I’m looking forward to next week and weekend when I plan to be alone and recharge for a bit before an intense fall begins. Late Sept. I’m in Colorado for a week of wilderness survival training with a Bhutanese friend. Then right at Thanksgiving I’m off to Bhutan and Arunachal to put the finishing touches on a side project with a friend, going way deep into the jungle. That’ll be about a month of intense life and I can’t wait for that.

I wish I could just be on the road all the time. If I could be in constant motion around the world, I would understand things better. That’s all I ever think about, all I ever want:  to understand things and myself better.

Meetings done. Back downtown. Two coffees in and I’m bouncing in the legs. I try to keep synchronicity but my right is faster.

I ran into a friend from middle school the other day on the train. I suppose it has been a couple weeks now, actually. It was an extraordinary experience. What happened was that I heard my name called and I looked around and didn’t see anyone I recognized. I heard it again and saw it had come from a man sitting across from me. As I looked at him looking at me, I couldn’t imagine who he was or why/how he knew my name. After a few seconds of confusion, I began to see a young face materialize from the ether, an image super-imposed over the man’s face, and it was that of an old classmate who I hadn’t seen in at least 20 years.

We were never close friends or anything but coming from a small school in the woods connects you to everyone from that space. The chances of such an encounter are improbable. Yet, it happened. I called out his first and last name and he grinned widely.

The speck of grey hair on his temples was highly concerning.

We’ll meet up to swap stories next weekend and I can’t wait to see what that will be like. I particularly want to hear how he describes our hometown, our formative environment, especially from this new vantage point of NYC. Maybe this vantage point isn’t new for him as it is for me, maybe he’s been here since 8th grade. That’s about the last time I remember him, before I left and didn’t come back.

I have two memories: his dad bought him a baseball glove by Raleigh that cost $135 when we were in the Babe Ruth league. I remember seeing the soft brown leather of his professional glove and feeling how different it was from mine, a cheap, pale glove that had to be Vaselined every couple of weeks to stay together, and was probably even only 50% actual leather. I remember wondering how it must feel to catch a ball in such a glove as his.

My only other memory is seeing him on a ski mountain, my first time skiiing, and watching how easily and gracefully he glided down the mountain, so confidently and skillfully. I remember how hard it was for me to turn on my non-dominent side and how tired my legs became from trying to be graceful. I remember when I crashed so hard, and all my rented stuff went in every possible direction, like an atom smashing, that it was he who came over. He said: “Wow, that was incredible! Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I was trying something. No big deal.”

When all I was really trying to do was the opposite of what I did do.

I’ll see if he remembers that.

Much writing this afternoon and I’ll get to it now before my black coffee wears off and I get tempted for another round. Enjoy this great day.

David Burke Kitchen

Food: delicious
Service: excellent
Atmosphere: urban bourgeoisie, boring with a bit of barf
Overall: go there for a good reason
Total cost: $160/2
Pictures:

For main courses we had Brick Chicken (me) and trout (she) but those pictures came out black somehow. I did grab a shot of the thrilling post-desert conclusion:

The background music sucked, like the soundtrack to a girl’s clothing store in SoHo. They kept the place pretty cold, probably so people can wear more things, like suit coats and scarves or whatever, and not get overheated.

The clientele were mixed. Next to us on one side were two old British ladies, and to the right side, four douchey fuckfaces who looked like TV characters talking loudly about “deals” and flirting with the waitress every time she came to the table. They sounded like they were trying extra hard to be what used to be called “goodfellas”, but now is just idiotic. They left after a while and it got better. Prior to that, they kept staring at my date, who was pretty dressed up, and I was hoping for something to happen just for an excuse to lay one of them out.

Aside from that temporary annoyance, it was great and I’m glad I went. My date was thrilled with everything. We walked back through TriBeCa and into SoHo and I recognized places I had been before– Cafe Noir and the ilk, boring places where… people go… for people. That will probably never change. From Saloons, to Dens, to Lounges to…

I crashed in Chinatown on the 26th floor of the Confucius building and came right into work wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday.

Wednesday. Training 5-6:30 and then jam in Hollow Way with a special guest guitarist 7-9:30, and then a conference call with over there.

Time is full.