It's the Daily Scream!

03.09.2021 “poisoned by castor”

I spend the last 6 hours or so reading about anarchism and political ideology. It makes me feel inadequately knowledgeable the more I read about political theory or really any theory in general. There is so much information out there I don't know where to start half the time. I crave understanding but for what purpose. There have been political uprisings non stop my whole life. There is always a political uprising somewhere in this world. There are people I am associated with who are no longer living that have devoted large parts of their lives to the work of making the world better. Be that teaching or documentation of social unrest. Challenging hegemony in oppressive systems. I remember so fondly the smile of Brad Will when they were much younger then I am now. They were a Xexoxial intern. They arrived after driving PLW from Naropa University to Dreamtime and ended up staying for the summer. I don't remember much from those times. I can picture Brad's glasses, they had broken and had been fixed by wrapping copper wire around the frames to hold everything together. I remember Brad taking off their glasses and letting me try them on. Many years later when I was just trying out being an adult I was in NYC and was at a rooftop film screening with Brad. I don't remember what the film was, I think it might have been at Rubulad. We were on the roof and Brad was telling me about their experiences traveling through South America. My cell phone rang (it must have been my first cell phone, I know it had buttons) and it was mIEKAL calling to tell me the news that Shiitake had died from being poisoned by castor beans. It was a short call but I was pretty sad. I guess this would have had to have been after Lyx had died cause I never had a cell phone when they were alive. I am going to stop there and write more tomorrow. This is probably the best sort of content that would make sense for me to write about. I have all these little fragments of memory hidden in my head here and there and the only way to make sense of them is to piece them out one at a time.

03.08.2021 “easy to spiral”

Collaboration between Lucia Moon and Liaizon Wakest

Heavy little dots interspersed in the gravel lining the pathway. Picking them up would require more energy then a fist fight with Jesus.

Have you ever considered the stone cold fact that guardian angels are actual narcs on heaven-ordered patrol sent here on planet Earth?

The second they see you eating shrimp they zap you. And it ain't a little zap its like a lightning bolt to the forehead. That shit hurts. We think its all chill to eat shrimp and heck even people that claim they are vegetarian eat shrimp quite often. But the angels, they see the shrimp like humans see a baby kitten or a human child.

Who could harm a kitten? You've got to be kidding. I must be, I'm a stand up comedian. Now, the second “Have you ever considered?” is upon us: Have you ever considered how god awful stand up routines are? Whose idea was that? Zap, zap. Tap, tap. Onomatopoeia, top that.

A sound that is described by making a sound. This is the essence of an onomatopoeia. It is similar to a metonym in that it is a second layer on the same thing. A rooster says cock-a-doodle-doo and a human says ok I will say that in a human way.

I had this joke once where I said “Do you know who a chicken's favorite composer is?” and the answer was Bach.

A chicken had this joke one time, it went “cluck cluuuck cluck... cluck.” and the other chicken was like “cluck” you know?

I know. It might not mean anything to you; meaningless nonsense and a good for nothing joke. Yet nothing and something are just two different sides of the same coin. Isn't that something else? We've digressed! Let's get back on the path – the path with heavy little dots interspersed in the gravel – where does it lead?

Full circle leads you into a circle. We don't want that. We want full spiral. But what end? Is spiral with no ends still a spiral or is it just a squiggly line being looked at in a weird direction.. I hope you ponder that.

It's so easy to spiral that the world, the universe, and...

03.07.2021 “all the skin and eyes”

I was contacted by an old friend named Mark whomst lived on the commune I grew up on today. We haven't talked in probably 15 years or so. I waned to try to write down some memories in my head that contained this person.

The moccasins

We had an issue with a stray cat who we were worried had rabies and Mark offered to be the one to put it down. They drowned it in a 5 gallon bucket. I remember watching Mark hold this cat down and after a while pulling it up and it still being alive and having to try again. It had long orange fur and I think a snaggletooth. Mark ended up skinning the cat and making a pair of moccasins with it. I remember trying them on. They were rather stiff as I don't think the leather was tanned quite right.

The sheep head

Mark had been painting still lifes of stuff harvested from the garden. Kirk had gotten a sheep that had died from Bob Fred and someone at Dreamtime butchered it. Mark had kept the head with all the skin and eyes and such still intact and put it in a bowl of fruit to paint. I remember seeing the painting right after it was done and being impressed by how realistic the painting was. It was on the wall in the Hotel for many years. Probably still hiding at Dreamtime somewhere.

The swimming pool

My mother had been taking me to learn to swim at the Richland Center community pool for a few months. I was a slow learner in this regard. I already had a fear of not being able to touch the ground and had been going to the pool and using floaties there and slowly practicing. One day Mark came with us to the pool and after I practiced for a while Mark commented to me that they had learned to swim in a single day. I said “I want to learn in a single day!” and they asked “are you sure?” and I replied “of course!” and they threw me in the deep end of the pool and I sank straight to the bottom. My mother jumped in and pulled me out and had to push all the chlorine filled water out of my lunges. I remember riding home feeling the sting of chlorine in my throat. To this day I still can't swim cause of the shock of that day. I don't blame Mark for this fact. As an adult I could have prioritized learning to swim many times but never have.

03.06.2021 “today is the older version of tomorrow”

A sound resonates through a paper wall. Seventy tons of dirt. Reams and reams of wet moldy paper. Sirens continue for days on end. Reverberation in the trunk of the car. A hollow log just lays there in the path, ready to be tripped over. Gone is the numbers on the wall that no one remembered its relevance. A sad nod to sorrow. Inquisitive kitten always asking for attention.

A Sunday deity no one had heard of. House tales from forgotten eras. Reality has never existed in the way it was described to children. Or adults. Windows open while it rains. The puddle on the ledge drips down onto a notebook. Suddenly nothing new happens. Suddenly its still raining and the water has continued to fall from the sky.

A new day was yesterday. Today is the older version of tomorrow. A rock chips part of another rock while a car drives above. A radio DJ that should have already retired many years ago announces that the song you just listened is that song you already heard earlier. An advertisement informs you that if you ever need low priced car insurance just call this number you have already forgotten.

A bird feeds its young chick a fresh bug. The bug is now dead but the chick is happy. A whole lot of sea creatures move from one part of the water to another part of the water. They are now more comfortable. No one says anything. One person passes another person and doesn't look up. It happens again. The person is thinking about how misunderstood rocks must be. Everyone things of rocks as hard but really they are delicate.

3000 years goes by and not a single piece of matter leaves the dinner party. Green light from through the trees shines down onto a slip of receipt paper with the numbers faded. The numbers never mattered anyway. The numbers were all irrelevant. The numbers were all infinite. The Symbolic significance of the paper and the light is a larger fraction if you took the time to break it all down.

03.05.2021 “thinking about the immortality of the crab”

Suppose you saw a crab with three pincers crossing a small stream in while walking through a wooded area. Suppose the crab said “Good day friend!” as you were glancing in its direction. Suppose the ground started sinking under your feet as soon as your brain started processing such a strange occurrence.

You wake up in a very comfortable bed and wonder where you are and how you got there. The light hits your face with a slight sting to your skin but it feels good so you don't move out of the way even though its slightly blinding. An unknown amount of time goes by.

You are walking down a street with narrow shops on either side. The signs are all in a language you can't make out. You see a small shop with a glass front and stop to look inside. There is a single phone off the receiver. It is one of those old type of phones you see only in movies but you can't remember using in any modern time. Do you even remember a single number off the top of your mind? You notice that there is a faint sound of someone talking on the other side of the glass but you cant make out any specific words being spoken. You figure this is because you are in a foreign land. You reach to see if the door is unlocked to see if you can pick up the phone but then realize there no door at all. The store front has three panels of glass and you had assumed one of them was a door but you were mistaken. You think about how this must be some sort of artistic exhibition of some kind. You hate art. It feels like it is always trying to make you feel dumb.

You start walking home, home, home. What does that mean? You know without a doubt what direction to go in this city. You make twists and turns along the narrow streets. But you cannot remember what your home looks like. It was only hours ago you were in a bed so that must be your bed.

You see a bike leaning up against a newspaper box. You instinctively reach for the combo and unlock the bike. It must be your bike otherwise how would you know the combination to the lock. This logic checks out so you are not scared that you are stealing the bike, but you still don't know where you are going.

The air hits your face as you are riding in a way that makes you feel very alive. You have just made it outside of the city. You realize you are getting hungry. You keep biking anyway. You are starting to have a harder time biking because the road you were taking has turned to dirt and sticks and small plants. It is now almost impossible for you to bike and you dismount. You lock your bike to the nearest tree and head into the woods. There is much less light with all the under brush around you. You come to a small stream. “I have missed you!” says the crab.

(Seemingly inspired by reading this wikipedia article I had just come across on the fediverse.)

03.04.2021 “had chicken puppets for wipers”

Today started out on a pretty dark note. I woke up and was making coffee half asleep when I heard Lucia crying and walked in their room to find out that Lucia's friend was just murdered the day before. I had met Pawel three times before. The first time I met them was a few months ago. Me and Lucia had just met and I was going to meet Lucia and Erica for breakfast at Satsuma. I was trying to leave the house to get there in time but I had lent my car to Alison and Effy the night before and they were taking their sweet time getting back. So they said take the Reality Breaker which was parked outside my house. I had driven it before but only with the Poncili twins in the van with me. On top of that it was pouring rain and the Breaker had chicken puppets for wipers. I made it to the cafe through the rain but then I had to figure out how to park the thing. There was a large spot in front of the cafe and I started parallel parking wrong but realized everyone in the cafe was watching me park this massive ridiculous thing. I walked in and Lucia and Erica were already sitting. I said hi and then went and ordered a coffee. While we were sitting there a cook leaned through the counter and said hi to Lucia. They talked for a minute and when we were all done at the cafe Lucia introduced me to Pawel as their favorite neighbor. I met Pawel two more times very recently. When we were in the final phase of moving Lucia out of their place Pawel came over and was very sad to hear that Lucia was leaving the neighborhood. I was out on the stoop chatting with them and then Pawel came in to look at the apartment in case any of their friends were looking for a place. They had a very sweet demeanor. They were talking about how they had 4 cats now and how that wasn't intentional. The third and final time I met Pawel was when they brought over some of their special sauce a few days later. And after writing the above paragraphs me and Lucia ate a special meal with some of the sauce. Death is such a strangely remote thing to me. I feel somehow disaffected by it. I wonder if I have been this way since my mother died or if it was just a part of me internally since birth. I hope Pawel finds all the infinite expanse of the afterlife glorious.

I don't know how to transition this written document out of talking about death. The most obvious thing to come next is the fact that I hung a mirror on the wall today. It needed a long screw and a coat hanger.

I read this article about the horrors of NFTs written by a fellow fediverse person and then was doing research into them and saw Quasimondo posting about a new NFT platform that was using PoS instead of PoW and then saw that they had made a free NFT on this platform for people to play with so I installed a Tezos wallet and exchanged 12$ of Litecoin for some tez so I could “buy” my first NFT. Quasimondo posted a free edition of 500 of a piece of their work and collected one. I then minted my first NFT and posted it for free as an edition of 1.

Back in real life land we went to Harolds and bought two plants. A rosemary plant in honor of Pawel and a pansy for Lucias aunt. Afterwords we went to the free store and organized for a bit and I took some canning jars and Lucia took some clothes with patterns they liked to sew together for a curtain. On the drive back I stopped to pick up a rusty can for my room mate to paint on.

03.03.2021 “division between creation and exploration”

Waking up in a warm bed, thinking of the coffee that I would go make, only to remember that there was construction being done outside that required the power to be turned off for the first part of the day. The only solution was to put on all our clothes and drive to St Coffee. It was actually quite sunny out and I was already overheated by the time I got there. I tried to explain the evils of intellectual property and the importance of the free software movement to Lucia. I don't know how well I did, I got sidetracked making analogies for what part of the body the kernel would be.

We finished coffee and then a my room mate hit me up about grocery shopping and we all went on a mission to Trader Joes. We ended up spending 155$ on groceries but I think it was about a month ago the last time we went shopping so that's not bad split between two people for most of a month of nourishment.

I have been thinking about what direction I am trying to take my life lately. I want to get more active in the free software movement and also help in pushing standardization efforts in places adjacent to such culture. I was really excited about the stuff Precious Plastic was doing and have been wanting to get involved with that project since I found out about it originally. When I was in Puerto Rico the idea of getting involved with the squat and maker/hacker space that was potentially getting set up there was really exciting to me. And meeting the kids who were involved with PP there made me feel pretty psyched to jump-start that process. I do really want to build out a space with tools and equipment for community use. Maybe I should try to go help out at St Roch Metal Works again and get involved with that project.

The division between creation and exploration of physical and of the digital needs to have an even balance. I desire constant stimulation of the creative process and I have not done enough to encourage that part of my life in recent years.

In the process of procrastinating writing this post I texted two people about meeting for a hack night sometime. I have been wanting to do that for ages and if that can happen here in New Orleans maybe that will make me feel better about being here. The main thing I really miss about Europe is more conversations with people that are super knowledgeable about stuff that I don't know about. I find myself thinking about things I have no one to talk to in person about on a regular basis and that starts gnawing away at me after awhile.

I need to figure out if I want to have an audience or not. What is my point for posting publicly?

03.02.2021 “cybernetic organs”

Scrolling the horrors of Instagram and came across the newest video by my friend Nathan Oglesby about the etymology of the word government. Kubernetes from is the Greek word meaning pilot or steersman which is how we got the word cybernetics. Cybernetics just happens to have the word net in it which is a euphemism for web but which has nothing to do with the etymology of the word network

“Finally, it should be noted that cybernetic organs replace man's in the performance of mental operations: they are 'thinking machines.'” -Louis Couffignal

The idea that networking and even social networking doesn't actually need to have anything to do with computers. That the act of interacting with people through mediated forms of communication is in it self a networked act. And by mediated I mean any time there is something passing information from one point to another with something in-between.

I started my day off feeling behind. I had looked at my phone first thing and saw there was a message from Zenna and I instantly remembered I had had a meeting that I had forgotten about. We are in very different time zones and had been having trouble aligning our schedules. By that I mean I sleep in most of the time till noon where ever I am for some strange reason. Probably because I stay up reading the internet till I pass out from exhaustion. Anyway I jumped out of bed and messaged Zenna back and said I could meet in 30 minutes. I had also promised my landlord I would let them into my studio to install new sprinkler heads. I quickly dressed and grabbed my laptop and a rain jacket (it looked a little damp out) and jumped on my bike. I felt pretty good about how quickly I had managed to get from sleeping position to almost at the bridge. There is a bridge about 5 blocks from my house that must be crossed for me to get pretty much anywhere in New Orleans. I made it to the bridge exactly in time for the bridge to be pulled up (it's a bascule bridge, which I did not know until I just looked it up cause I was writing draw bridge which didn't feel right) and as I was waiting at the mouth of the bridge it started pouring rain. I didn't know how hard it was going to rain and I almost turned back but felt the pressure to not let anyone down (mainly my landlord whomst I have a fear of) but by the time the bridge came back down I was already soaked so figured I might as well keep biking. It continued to downpour more and more. My shoes and pants were at maximum saturation, and I felt as if I were underwater. I was almost to my studio when I thought about how I don't a change of clothes there at all and the thought of spending another extra minute in my soaking clothes was unbearable. I decided to bike to Lucia's house with the thought that that would be the quickest way to get out of wet clothes and into dry ones.

After drying off and feeling my fingers again I was able to reschedule with the landlord and call Zenna. The call went really well and I found out there was a likelihood I could get paid for my time working on the festival we were discussing. More on that later as it materializes.

I feel content on the amount of text I have put into this here page and think I am ready to move onto other tasks.

03.01.2021 “formulate the ethereal”

The written word is a way to formulate the ethereal nature of my inner self into a from that is more tangible. Having a sense that I am doing what I am doing for a reason and not just flailing about through the chaotic sea of the present moment. I don't really understand what makes writing so daunting for me. There are so many things I want to learn about. So many places to go and people to meet. How do I start prioritizing the minutes of my day and the experiences I seek?

Take stock of what I have, what my responsibilities really are in this world.

In the spirit of trying to write and not knowing what I am trying to get across I will list the things that I have accomplished today in the order that I think of them in. I worked on cleaning the back room at Des with Damon, we moved all of Julian's tiles into the abandoned bathroom. Finally moved all of the flammable liquids into the metal cabinet outside which we should have done a year ago. Me and Damon started having sort of a hard conversation about working together and the concept of 'we' in collective spaces and how hard it is to work on projects together when we all have such different ways of working on things.

I watered the fig trees my father sent me, and they started leaking water onto the floor so I had to put them into an extra bin because I didn't have enough trays for them.

While I was throwing something away at Des a person drove by and asked if I was selling my Datsun, I responded I would sell it for 2000 which is double the amount I was thinking of selling it before I had it working. Maybe that's a bit capitalistic of me but I do really love that car. I really have no idea how much its worth but when they said that was way more then their budget I lowered my “price” to 1500 and they still seemed that was too high. They introduced themselves as Carlos and asked about the other cars, I showed them Juliens car and gave them their number. They seemed interested in it as well and the idea of getting rid of one of the cars in the yard would make us all feel better. I ended up trying to start the Datsun and said I could go down to 1300 but they still seemed to think that was more then they wanted to pay.

The Honduran folks who bought the house across the street had been using our power to do construction there and offered to pay for the electricity bill for the month. I also asked them about fixing our roof but they said they usually only redo the whole roof not any type of patches and told me they spent 8k on the roof of that house which seems crazy to spend that much on a roof for a house that was bought for 45k but I degrees.

I was woke up at Lucia's house (which is sort of my house too but I haven't figured out what exactly that means) and biked to Des. I noticed that Shake Sugary (a cafe that I used to go to quite often) has now been turned into a taqueria. On the topic of food I made a tasty egg sandwich which was really very good.

Oh the reason I biked to Des this morning in the first place was to show this person Kenzi the garden and explain the dynamics of Lobelia Collective. They were very nice and I seem down to work on the garden collectively in the near future. Hopefully something comes from that garden project.

This morning I beta tested Metatext and sent some feedback to the developer. It seems like finally it might be a really good simple fediverse client. The dev mentioned that they are in the process of open sourcing it which is always a good sign. It was strange to me to recommend Toot! to people after explaining that the whole fediverse is free and opensource.

I think I will end this post now. The only real reason I was writing this was to get myself to write again. Hope to do this tomorrow as well.

August 1st 2020

Its been a number of months since I dropped off blogging every day. I want to get back into it. And a new month is a good excuse.

I woke up in CJ's shack at 6:30am or so getting bitten by tiny mosquitoes. I dreamt that the mosquitoes had something to do with cutting dowel rods out of some woodworking I was doing.

(I just logged into scream.today on October 13th and noticed this was never posted)