I don't have insomnia. I just forget how to sleep every now and then, when niggling little thoughts distract my attention.

They catch up with you, those little niggling thoughts.
Sometimes, they're a welcome addition to the whole family of ideas that go racing around in your skull. Othertimes, well, they just tend to overstay their welcomes. Slavering little hyenas, yelping and fucking, persistently nipping at you no matter how you jam your eyelids shut.
But this is why you're so afraid of numbers-- it's not your taxes or your phone bill-- it's not that you were traumatized to find out that seven ate nine-- it's not that your father beat you with a switch every time you forgot a decimal place of pi-- it's that fucking clock of yours. It's liquid crystal dripping, like some kind of Chinese Water Torture, every agonizing drop a an aeon you've been kept awake.
It's in league with the hyenas, I swear. The two of them, mocking you, forcing you to turn and twist as your bedsheets contort around you. The ravenous fabric python constricts and envelops, choking you. Oh, but the python is a damned tease, and refuses to carry out the motions in full by delivering you into oblivion. It just half-kills you while the hyena-thoughts pick apart your thought-muscles. And the red glowing numbers, the king of your dysnumeria, tell you that it's barely been a minute since you last checked it.

But I have to be up tomorrow. I have things to do. I'm going to be dead tired, I'm going to be a zombie. Like that little horrid little jungle that was your bedroom gives a damn about you. Survival of the fittest, and you're barely fit for scraps. The fresh sweat beads impetuously across the whole of your body. Can't-bare-to-acknowledge-o'clock-in-the-morning, and you're busy knotted in a damp alien place that offers you no comfort. You start to curse the need for sleep, curse your body, curse your brain-stuff for keeping you occupied with repetitive trivia.

It's the worst kind of addiction, you know, and a deadly kind of withdrawal that few (if any) can kick. Get them hooked while they're young, and they're lifelong addicts, spending a third of their life in thrall to this most potent of hallucinogenic-paralytic restorative draughts. Every night, I'm left to wonder, how would I ever give up sleep?

Thinkthinkthinkthinkthink...
It's a mind in constant lethargy, sitting uselessly on what is otherwise a stump between your shoulders. Chug down one of the last legal stimulants in the world, triple-black Colmbian gold, but it will only help you twitch faster. After four mugs of the stuff, you've got an itchy trigger finger, but still not enough gunpowder in your head to blow your own nose.
Try to read, try to concentrate, try to put two and two together. Watch the words laugh at you, refusing to congeal in cognition. The slippery bastards just lie there on the page, with their enticing dangling participles.
Fuckers.
None of this! Try to feel alive, like you're on Super-Octane, brimming with lead. Like you've got a cigarette filter clenched firmly between yellowing teeth, and a long trail of ash falling unnoticed into your lap. Try to feel like you're on amphetamines while having icewater dumped down the small of your back. Think! Think! I command it! 
Think so hard that you've got a brain-stitch. Your second, third wind is coming into you. Think so hard it's like you're about to blow every possible aneurysm in your brain, and hemmorhage out the most intense and hardcore conjectures before your body collapses in a stinking puddle of fluids. Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war. Torporous languor, from hell's heart, I stab at thee-- For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee---

And then something burns through your mind with searing beautiful white light. And then for a few sensual seconds, you're firing on all cylinders. You're Einstein, you're Sherlock fuckmothering Holmes, you're the omniscient observer of all things. The mental hard-on surges ruthlessly forward, and furiously pumping away at it, you're producing! Yes, God, Yes, it feels so good. Your prefrontal gyrii gyrate with the simple beauty of clarity. Oh, yes.
....
Shit
No
FUCK 
FUCK! Too soon!
Fuck!
Shit...
Slump over on yourself. It was good, but not great, and now you're left with a flaccid little stub of thought, and nothing but a mess on your hands. Everything dries stickily and uselessly.

Time to put on another pot of coffee...

It becomes fashionably easy to fall into conceit, if not full-blown pigheadedness. The foolishness of conceit can become obvious in hindsight, but only if you don't realize the equal conceit of your current viewpoint.
So I'm stuck, railing against the stupidities I perpetuated in the past, but on introspection, can find myself not a hell of a lot closer to a better place. Sure, it looks ridiculous from where I'm standing; that I would so wholeheartedly rebel against common sense for no better reason than base satisfaction; that I would benefit nothing and instead lose important chances to better myself. Whoopsy-daisies. But now I'm looking back, and I can't tell whether I've grown wiser, or just older. The fact of periodically attempting to analyze and interpret my own inexplicable behaviours hasn't changed, so maybe I've just grown more jaded about it. Maybe I've just learned more aphorisms and grown bitter reciting them. You think eschewing the optimists in favour of Machiavelli, Nietzche, Dostoevsky and Hobbes made me a better realist, or just  more cynical about the outcomes?
Hfff.
I'm just left with the relative; that I can justify my little conceits with some degree of evidence (hard-ons for objective reasoning aside), because it's the closest I can get.  I'm just left with my results in hindsight.

I go back to my cat to explain the nature of reality itself. Well, maybe it's a bit of a skimming of reality, given that I'm only looking at theology. Still, both the increasingly vocal nature of theology and the consistently vocal nature of my cat give me more reason for purchasing earplugs.

My cat prays. It seems to have been rewarded by the welcoming and loving presence of my omnipotent mother (those of you who indeed support the notion of a female God will still consider this a heretical notion; who wants a British God? Those theists not offended haven't met my mother) by the act of meowing constantly at the door (Behaviourists in the crowd, please keep your electrical devices wrapped until the writer is finished). The fact that my mother arrives from work on her own schedule is beyond the understanding of my cat, who instead takes the chance to create as much noise as is possible to precipitate in the coming of the Divine Matron. Of course, if my mother doesn't arrive, the meowing will continue unabated.

Please, cat, if you're ever reading this entry, try to bear with me: If you're making random noises, I don't mind because there's a good chance you'll shut up, having realized there's no correlation between noise and things happening for you. But when you start moaning on at set intervals because there's the off-chance that the however-unrelated event you're hoping for occurs anyways....

I know it's no use arguing with you, because you'll never understand my arguments anyways and get on to meowing, and meowing, and meowing...

Really,

One remarkable proof for the non-existance of a loving God-

The coincidence of the sense of smell and breathing through my nose, combined with the cleaning of my cat's litter box.

From a Natural Selection standpoint, smell is more clearly a maladaptive trait for those who own cats. Thus, the increase in the population of Crazy Cat Ladies (manicus felinus) will not be any remarkable kind of trend, owing to their remarkable ability to surpress their smelling capabilities. Insanity of this kind simply doesn't make for good breeding choices, short of some sort of bestial relationship that will produce miscarriages at its very best.

The theistic argument requires that God created us as we were, and subsequent claims that we chose to domesticate wild, smelly creatures simply hold no ground if one keeps believing that malarky about how it's all in God's plan. I mean, if religious genocide still fits in the bill (God's Plan: ONE NIGHT ONLY!), you think the smell of catshit would be an easy fit.

Whoever says that evolution is cold and heartless never paused to consider the hypothetical decrease in cat ownership. What a wonderful world.


Admittedly, Mr. Darwin might not entirely be pleased about the reducing of his masterful work on his 200th birthday to, essentially, kitty litter. But really, those lovable furry creatures produce some of the most vile-smelling products known. It's probably the reason that poofy cats are 'affectionately' named Poopsy. It's the subtle revenges, or at least, the decadent humour of someone who can employ maids to clean up after the smelly little vermin.

...An astrologer of a London tabloid was once fired by means of a letter from his editor
which began, "As you will no doubt have foreseen."....

So!

Again, the effects of scientific illiteracy, combined this time with misguided attempts at racially correct policies.

Ah, for fuck's sake.
Let's clarify here: Cystic Fibrosis is not a 'white' disease, just as Sickle Cell anemia is not a 'black' disease, and Tay-Sachs is not a 'Jew' disease. But still, you've taken it upon yourselves to buy into the hype and drop a million-dollar funding apparatus that tries and help people breathe again. Fuck you.
What? You're going to put it into cures for Sickle Cell or Tay-Sachs? Hmm? How about those 'black' diseases like Marburg? Malaria? Hey! How about 'Yellow' diseases like SARS! It's more equal, right? No wait, better not do that, there are more yellows than whites in the world (still, CF is more prevalent in blacks than it is in Asians). Fuck.

Don't think that just because it was a CANADIAN initiative that discovered and isolated the genes for CF that the funding is important. Don't think that just because it was discovered in a CHILDREN'S hospital and typically is diagnosed in childhood that funding might be important. Nope, just go off and think that you've scored a big blow against the White Man when you're actively denying the ability for people to choose charitable donatation in combatting a disease that has been noted as being one of the most prevalent life-shortening chronic conditions with a genetic basis.

Just don't blame whitey when your child can't stop coughing.

The brain, a mere computer?
Why, no more than the bladder is a reservoir, the kidney is a sieve, the liver is a big ol' chemical-smashin' anvil, the eye is a projection screen, or than the heart is a pump.

What is it with these simplistic interpretations of among the most complicated systems in existance? Here we are, the veritable masterworks of evolution (just below bacteria, viruses, and a few other organisms whose inferiority we ascribed largely due to size and lack of having built pyramids), but we're so easily falling into heuristics of perception. Sure, it does help us cope. We don't go ahead and assume that just because we can only see the head of the cat, the animal exists only as a floating head and bipedal torso. We work by expectation and analogy, and that's fine and quick, but it's too far from rigorous. Yes, the car is like a horseless carriage, but what's a 12-cylinder engine, a sparkplug, a computer-guided braking system, or stick-shift transmission?

There's so much we can understand, limited by their being 'only' so much we can understand. It may be a stable truism that we are limited, but do not under any circumstances let that limit you. The tremendous variability and non-universality between individual systems should give pause: why are their these kinds of abberations, deviations, detractions? What makes the difference?

Well, realizing that makes all the difference.

It's a curious sort of thing, to cautiously defend a subject that most people, even the educated, agree on as being a pretty bad idea.

But there I was, spontaneously an apologist of eugenics. How the hell did that happen?

I guess part of it involves the beef that people might have with directed breeding. If you're suddenly implementing a program that selectively sterilizes or discriminates in providing fertility aids, chances are that you're going to have more than a few questioning the reasons behind it all. Eugenics, as a practice, has a lot of shit to work through to make any kind of logical sense.

For one, it's got a bad rap. Galton comes along and says- "Hey, guys, we're kind of running out of space what with all the orphanages going up, here. Maybe the instead well-educated and successful people should be pumping out more toddlers, and the, ah, Jerry Springer demographic might stop being told that pulling out and praying is the best way to go about preventing shotgun weddings? Y'know, kinda focus on having kids when you can support them. I ain't going to SAY anything or force anybody to do it, but can't we try to prevent England from turning into a shithole because nobody learned the secrets of heavy petting?" [Too late, but regardless]
Galton releases this in book format to a mostly Christian world, and gets more than a bit of a shit storm. Even those fabulous people he's trying to proliferate don't think that much of it: kids are a pain in the neck, and unlike as they do for the lower classes, popping out a whole line of Little Lord Fauntleroys won't provide extra hands, keep money in the bank, or maybe serve as a cheap source of emergency food. They instead cost a shitload of cash to maintain, educate, and certainly can't be certain not to take up too much time, preventing mommy and daddy from going to a textile party and talking about the latest lithographs of Queen Victoria.

Galton gets woefully upset by this, and goes off to find all sorts of bell curves for population until he meets some guy called Pearson, who likes this whole 'breed for better' kinda thing. Galton dies, but Pearson continues a legacy, and starts promoting the most racial forms of Aryan propagation that a still-Liberal English society will allow. He turns out to be a bit of an ideological dousche, but manages to do a fair bit more good than harm, having founded a research center that identifies a whole bunch of genetic diseases while having to pass on a lot of the whiter-than-thou shit. Nobody says much about sterilizing the 'lessers', and Churchill mumbles bitterly into his next dry martini about wasted opportunities to prevent England turning from a pure nation of fat, drunken gits to a nation of people who are sober but no fun at parties whatsoever. However, through his covert influence, sobriety, to this very day, has left the Britons of the world unscathed and thankfully sloshed.

Oh, but the stupid shit still goes down in the good ol' US of A. What later becomes the centre for the Human Genome project starts off trying to tackle the biggest problem facing America: the negroes, whose prodigious skills in jazz and professional sports threaten to control the country, thus putting an end to proud traditions of polka and missing the hoop. They go on to claim that Negroes are imbeciles at best, rating just below Hispanics, and far below whites. Hilariously, the majority of white IQ scores were literally at the cut-off point to be declared 'mentally deficient'. Probably because they correctly identified the correct cut-off point for muttonchops or how many stars a confederate flag has.

But that whole negro problem was clearly something much more prevalent in the Land of the Free, as Galton himself had some very different conclusions to his multicultural research. While studying in Africa, he noted that if there were more black women in Europe, white chicks would explode from envy. Rezpek.
Francis 'West Side' Galton also pretty irritated by all that theological dick-waving, noting that some of the best and biggest dicks were still cut off because they were circumcized (I'm paraphrasing here).


Aaaanyways-

All this would have been fine and dandy if a certain somebody (I'm looking at you, you silly little Austrian Anti-Semite, you) hadn't dug up everything vaguely related to how something might be innately better than others by sheer virtue of being, and distorted it into a shitstorm of pseudoscientifically grounded quackery. Then the little guy goes off to kill a few million of those people not lucky enough to be born on the A-list. Fuck.

So, looks like eugenics is a pretty bad idea overall: It's giving folks excuses to go around and neuter, if not eradicate, those who wear racially inferior brands of shoes.

But that kind of nonsense is dysgenics, the negative eugenics. "The purer folk are too lazy to get off their asses and start doggystyling it into a better tomorrow, we'll just have to even things out by preventing those lesser races from getting any. If I'm not having sex, they're not."


All that said, I'd still prefer to be an apologist to being a supporter. There's only so far we can go before ending up in the sack with somebody who exemplifies the best of Einstein-meets-Miss-Congeniality, but just happens to have shared a good nine months in the womb with you. We don't need more dalmations and thoroughbreds. Breed smarter, not harder.

And stop picking on Galton. Just because he thought you could save the world by fucking, doesn't make him SUCH a bad guy (if largely by virtue of his realizing everybody could benefit from a little brown shuga, oh yeah).

From a 2005 conference, but still...


THE PRESIDENT: ...I appreciate the Secretary of Energy joining me today. He's a good man, he knows a lot about the subject, you'll be pleased to hear. I was teasing him -- he taught at MIT, and -- do you have a PhD?

SECRETARY BODMAN: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, a PhD. (Laughter.) Now I want you to pay careful attention to this -- he's the PhD, and I'm the C student, but notice who is the advisor and who is the President. (Laughter and applause.)...

I reflect frequently on the strange little person I must be.

In summer, the most popular conception of joy may be the warm weather, the potential for outdoor activities, and the leisure time.

But I find myself inordinately satisfied by a large pot of coffee, a good factual read, a comfortable sofa, and the soft tones of rain on the window. Nothing feels quite like it, and it's one aspect of this otherwise maligned season that I love.

I have to wonder how much of my history repeats itself (as farce or otherwise). I might be a borderline-GPA student with aspirations possibly beyond his fingertips with an inkling of core personality by this time next year too.

But different now from many other times, is the grinning (smirking) realization that things aren't so far away from my grasp. Maybe I have an idea of self, but I'm glossing it over with the expected adaptations of a high self-monitor. Maybe I'm not such a shit student, and I keep the dizzying highs of success in the moment alone, never letting it seep into other times and moods.

I have a long way to go, and a hard way at that.

But if I'm trying, it just might be more than this cycle.

How to make a zombie fox:

-Rough 36 hours wakefulness
Combine with 80 mg Ritalin
Run, walk, and keep yourself alive until bed.

Diagnosis: Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, Predominantly Inattentive.

(2 tablets, 2-3 times/day)
5 mg. Dexedrine (Dexamphetamine Sulfate)
Amphetamines are fun, like having a morning litre of coffee. But they make the mouth Sahar-ic.

New Prescription, same routine:

(2 tablets, 2-3 times/day)
10 mg. Ritalin (Methlyphenidate)
With a probable move to Concerta, the time-release version if things go well.

ir·rev·er·ent /ɪˈrɛvərənt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[i-rev-er-uhnt] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–adjective
not reverent; manifesting or characterized by irreverence;

Okayyyy- So-

ir·rev·er·ence /ɪˈrɛvərəns/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[i-rev-er-uhns] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. the quality of being irreverent; lack of reverence or respect.
2. an irreverent act or statement.


...I hate dictionaries.

You are a Realist
#

Your attention to detail, appreciation of how things function, and awareness of the world around you make you a REALIST.
#

Routines are reassuring to you—you feel safer and more at ease when sticking with familiar things.
#

You like to stay close with those around you, seeking comfort from familiar faces.
#

You are interested in processes—how things work, what they do, and why—not just how things look.
#

Sometimes you doubt that you can find solutions to problems, although you have a good sense of why things happen, and can use that knowledge to find the best way to do something.
#

You are down to earth, concerned more with practical, detail-oriented things than with dreamy or ambiguous ideas.
#

You have a good sense of your abilities and weaknesses, and don't let your ego get in your way.
#

You are balanced in your approach to problem-solving, not letting your emotions hold you up.
#

You prefer to have time to plan for things, feeling better with a schedule than with keeping plans up in the air until the last minute.
#

You do your own thing when it comes to clothing, guided more by practical concerns than by other people's notions of style.
#

You tend to believe that things happen for a reason, and that not everything is under our control.
If you want to be different:
#

Appreciate that your skill set can be useful in many ways; your attention to detail and your familiarity with the inner-workings of things are valuable assets.
#

Try looking beyond the earthly qualities of things in order to expand your perspective, without losing your grounding in reality.
how you relate to others
You are Considerate
#

You trust others, care about them, and are slow to judge them, making you CONSIDERATE.
#

You value your close relationships very much, and are more likely to spend time in small, tightly-knit groups of friends than in large crowds.
#

You enjoy exploring the world through observation, quietly watching others.
#

Relating to others so well, and understanding their emotions, leads you to trust people in general, even though you're somewhat shy and reserved at times.
#

Your belief that people are generally well-intentioned contributes to your sympathy regarding their problems.
#

Although you may not vocalize it often, you have an awareness of how society affects individuals, and you understand complex causes of people's behavior.
#

You like to look at all sides of a situation before making a judgment, particularly when that situation involves important things in other people's lives.
#

Your close friends know you as a good listener.
If you want to be different:
#

Because other people would benefit immensely from your understanding and insight, you should try to be more outgoing in social situations, even when they make you uncomfortable. Others will want to hear what you have to say!

On the proposed narrowing of Lansdowne's streets, by Councellor Giambrone- (Taken from The Etobicoke Guardian)

"...Amid the sea of big yellow "Giambrone Don't Narrow Lansdowne!" signs lining the length of the street, a small poster attached to Ian Gray's front door voicing approval of the councillor's plans for the street has marked him a visible minority among his neighbours, he said.

"The sign thanks Giambrone for what I think will be a big improvement for our street," Gray said, making note of the noisy trucks that currently barrel up and down their cracked, bumpy street. "This project will pretty it up, reduce the noise and traffic and add some new trees."

A self-professed tree-hugger, the teacher said he was recently a victim of vandalism when someone snapped a three-year-old birch tree on his front lawn in two. He said he believes the act was in retaliation for his support of Giambrone..."

That birch tree was five-ten centimetres through, and will be missed.

...Slightly disappointed there wasn't a picture showing a jazz pub for 'Music'.