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Re-Up

I just uploaded two months of new photos to the smugmug page. The additions include some New Year’s madness, a ton of pictures from my travels and travails on a show called Hitch Or Ditch, and a bunch of other random crap. I hope you people appreciate the love and effort that goes into all this uploading and organization!

Who am I kidding. I do it for me.

I’m about to leave to go snowboarding in France for 10 days. Expect some photos of that soon! Well… soonish.

Strockbot Out

Threads

Things move along. Time’s incredible inertia. I look back at old posts, at old pictures, at the realities they contain and how they diverge from now. And I feel overwhelmed at how much happens.

How much I try to capture, to contain. How much is left out. How massive that sum is. How strange.

We leave messy relics everywhere, details tucked away in the infinite places to leave loose ends. The endless logins, the forgotten fragments of thoughts and pictures and videos left randomly across RAIDED hard disks. flickrfacebookvimeoyoutubemyspacefriendsterimdblinkedingoingtumblrtwittersmugmugetc. Scraps of paper on my desks. Old text messages. Pictures of me and a girl I don’t date anymore, forever smiling in that frozen moment.

A happiness preserved, and a world moved on.

I try to reign it in. Catalogue, organize, tamp down. But it won’t inventory. There’s always more off the shopping list than on it.

And the only conclusion I come to is that I really have very little control. That control is a comforting illusion. Life will have its way with me, like it or not. I cannot slow its barrel roll, I can only try and run the rolling logs, keep my feet moving as the timber floats downstream. Listen for the roar of the falls. See the climbing steam.

The Tenth Muse

As he defied terpsichorean gravity by remaining on the show, he became an object of fascination for news columnists, academics, psychologists and others.

Terpishchorean? I stumbled upon this word reading a silly nytimes article about a stumbling British journalist on “Strictly Come Dancing,” a dance competition show in the UK. While my desire to read this article is somewhat obscure (I have a soft spot for underdog stories and British journalists), I was stopped dead by this heavily academic and oddly pretty phrase in the middle of an otherwise fluffy article.

Being already on the internets, I did the “cmd + t” thing and looked it up. Turns out Terpischorean really just means “dancing” or “of or pertaining to dance,” so it’s really just a fancy, showoff synonym. But here’s where it got interesting, at least for me. Terpischore is one of the nine classical muses, and the muse of dancing and choral song. Wikipedia gave me the full list.

Calliope = Writing

Clio = History

Erato = Love

Euterpe = Music

Melpomene = Tragedy

Polyhymnia = Sacred Song and Hymns (she’s kind of confusing… I read her as the muse of serious meditation)

Terpischore = Broadway Showtunes

Thalia = Comedy

Tumblore = Pointless trivia and spontaneous sharing

Urania = Astronomy (and by association, philosophy and/or thoughts of heaven)

Wait a second… who edited that article?

In summary, what’s awesome about Greek mythology is it literally gives words life, and I’m talking a face and a history and heroic children who die in awful ways. It’s a treasure trove for writers. Which is probably why they’re always invoking the stupid muses in their stupid writing.

So Long and Thanks For All The Howling Fantods

I just finished reading a great and long and extremely moving obituary on Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace, the writer who taught me the word anhedonia¹ and who sadly took his own life on September 12, 2008 after a long and brave battle with clinical depression.

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

The article is long in internet terms, but worth all 11 pages, and I highly recommend the commitment of reading it to the end, and then picking up anything by Foster did and doing the same. Many people can write, but DFW could flip a sentence on its head and make it do the windmill.

I had a sweat band kicking around on my desk that says U.S. Open, and I noticed about halfway through the day that I had put it on while reading this article and worn it most of the morning and afternoon. Whether it was an accident or an unconscious tribute to the one-time jr. tennis prodigy (see his massive and incredible novel Infinite Jest for more on this), I have decided to keep it on in memoriam of the bandana-clad braniac who was too damned smart for this world. I hope he has finally found some measure of peace.

1. It is amazing to stumble upon a word that basically names a feeling I’ve spent most of my life and vocabulary trying to find the words for, and to make the discovery in the company of a writer so sensitive to its nuances (not to mention the dark plains that lie beyond it).^a

a. Yes, this endnote and nested footnote are a tribute to DFW and his brilliant/infuriating use of them in his writing. The man basically reinvented the scholarly convention, using them like analog hyperlinks. Sometimes annoying, sometimes charming, and always fucking genius. I will miss him big time.