by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
© 2009 and beyond
Contact me.
A Free-Association Car Ride FICTION #
I can see now, from staring intently at the lines on the road, that we are increasing speed. Yellow dashes zoom by and when we reach a speed like this, they start to blur into one continuous line. I am sitting behind the driver’s seat of a 1994 Volvo station wagon, which my parents say is presently the safest car on the market. They have read these things in thick, heavy magazines with crisp pages that tear easily. Apparently, the thicker the magazine, the more trustworthy it is. They had some other magazines that told them to buy other cars. But they realized, from trusting the thick magazines, that these other cars do not have side curtain airbags and ABS (anti-lock brakes, from the German Antiblockiersystem – and I’ve read in a semi-thick magazine that the Germans, despite some ugly history, are quite excellent engineers.) My little brother is sitting in the backseat as well, but he’s asleep. His head is titled gently down and he is loosely gripping a juicebox in his left hand. The straw, which juts straight out of the box and then bends at a nearly perfect right angle, still has a ~one cm long bit of juice suspended at the mouth-end of the straw, not dripping onto my brother’s lap, but through some kind of physics I don’t understand, is just staying there. He, my brother, is nine. I am five years older than him. I have been on this planet for five years more than him. I have just learned that we are on the third planet from the sun.
Now I understand why there is a show called “Third Rock From the Sun.” I file these piece of knowledge away, somewhere, and something in my head shifts. My cloudy understanding of reality becomes a little less shrouded.
“Oliver, give me the chips,” my dad says. I look around for the bag, I look around for the bag.
“Steven, you’ve been eating chips the whole way,” says my mom. I think that I’m not supposed to like one of my parents more than the other, but right now I definitely like my dad more. He seems more fun right now or something. “Just give him a couple chips, Oliver.”
I reach into the bag and grab a couple chips. I’ve realized that it’s very hard to reach into a bag of chips without hearing that scrunching noise that plastic bags make. My dad, presumably cued by the scrunching, removes his right hand from the steering wheel and extends it backwards towards me, palm up, as if he were balancing a big pizza. I place the chips on his hand. He wraps his hairy fingers around them and puts them all into his mouth at once, crunching them loudly. He cocks his head towards my mom, chewing with his mouth open. She laughs.
“Keep your eyes on the road, honey,” she says.
“Owwww!”
I don’t know what’s just happened, but in the brief moment before my dad starts explaining why he just said ‘owwww’ and actually saying ‘owwww,’ I reason that he has either a) chewed one of the chips in an awkward way, such that one of sharp corners of the chip (they are Doritos) has lodged into his hard palate, or b) he did not chew one of the chips well enough, and swallowing it hurt because, again with those sharp corners, one of the sharp corners of the chip rubbed against the inside of his esophagus. Because of the way he was chewing them, you know, with his mouth open, I think that it’s probably choice A.
“What’s wrong?” my mom asks.
“I swallowed a big chip,” he says. Choice B!
“That’s what you get for chewing with your mouth open,” my mom says.
“Honey, can you pull over soon?”
“Now?” he says. “But we’re making such good time. I can’t stop now.”
“Well, I don’t understand why it matters when we stop,” she says. “If we’re making good time, I mean,” she says, then pauses. Her mouth his still open and her chest is – she’s holding her breath, waiting for the thought to come to her waiting for the rest of the sentence to take form and there’s something inside of her on the tip of her tongue and she just can’t get it out, and –
“Honey, Oliver, what I do I mean?”
“You mean that it doesn’t matter when we stop if we’re making good time because at some point we’ll have to stop anyway, we’ll have to stop anyway and the amount of time it takes us to stop would be the same if we stop now or if we stop later.”
“Would you listen to the mouth on that kid,” my dad says. “I’m raising a genius!”
This makes me feel good. When my dad calls me a genius, I mean. I’m not really sure what it means to be one, but I’ve heard that Albert Einstein was one. So was Isaac Newton, they say. I don’t like Fig Newtons, but my dad does. Yes, yes, yes! I’ve definitely read that Newton was a genius, definitely definitely read that, in a big thick textbook that they gave to us in class. Know is a funny word. It looks funny and it sounds like no. The more I say the word know, the more inclined I am to say no when someone asks me if I know what “know” means.
“What?” my mom says. She rotates her body at her hip, turning towards me.
“What did you just say?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I thought you said something,” she says, turning forward again.
I’m not sure where we are, but it looks very pretty outside. I do know for sure, I’m absolutely sure that, we are definitely heading west; the sun is setting in front of us. After all, I can see the sun – they’ll be no denying that. It’s hanging low in the sky, filling the sky with fire, its pure energy creating wavy lines in the air.
“I’m bored,” I say.
“Do a crossword puzzle,” my mom says.
“Or a brain teaser,” my dad says.
“Read that book.”
“We’ve got a couple magazines up here.”
“Did you bring your Walkman, Oliver?”
“Try going to sleep.”
None of the options seem appealing. More often than not, these “activities” are just distractions. Looking out the window, however, affords me temporary moments of enlightenment. I see something and make the connection in my head, and then I am aware. I am aware now, for example, that those grayish, red-splattered furry spots on the road are not moles, like the ones on my Uncle Morty’s neck (now you tell me! – why does the hair growing out of a mole get so thick and dark?) – they are dead raccoons. I am aware that my second grade teacher, Mrs. Potato Head, once called me “mouth” because I talked too much in class. In fact, one day in that class, I was reading my textbook and drawing in the margins. Using a pencil, I formed a Necker cube, a classic doodle in which two squares are drawn one over the other with one square up and to the right (or up and to the left, or down and to the left, or down to the right) so that connecting their corners made something that was like a 2D projection of a cube. But it didn't look right. The problem was that one of the squares was more like a lopsided rectangle, and the annoying non-cubishness of this cube was bothering me so I flipped my pencil around and rubbed with the (what colors are erasers anyway? I want to call it Pepto-Bismol, but I feel like erasers are so common, even more common than Pepto-Bismol, so that if the color of erasers really was identical with that of Pepto-Bismol we would have to start calling the color of Pepto-Bismol "eraser") eraser, deep into the paper, and I leaned in real close to the paper so that the tip of my nose was about an inch above the page and slightly to the left of the cube and I erased and erased, and the smell of the little pink eraser bits were smokey and spicy, and I believe that they were the direct cause of my sudden craving for bacon. I blew away some of the bits and realized that I had started erasing a little past the cube to some of the printed words in the textbook. And the words were faded, so I erased more. And I erased a whole paragraph right out of my textbook. I had erased history. What if there was a nuclear explosion or some kind of crazy flesh-eating virus epidemic and everyone had to hole up in rusty underground bunkers? And they, the survivors, stay in these bunkers for years and years to the point where they develop a new rusty underground bunker language and rusty underground bunker culture and rituals, and even the most classically religious of them forget the first commandment and start worshipping giant rusted iron statues? And anyway, the whole point of this is to say, what if they had eventually gotten out and come upon my textbook and it was the only book of record they could find and entire paragraphs would be missing! If I had started erasing some European history they might not ever know about the Defenestration of Prague! Knowledge erased – it might as well have never happened. And I could imagine two of these underground bunker people, their skin now almost bleached white due to the lack a need for melanin and a strange genetic mutation somewhere down the germ line, examining carefully the pages of my textbook. They'd be wearing bright neon clothes made out of nylon and spandex. If they were smart, one of them would say, look, a historical artifact from another era of human existence on this fragile planet. And they would have a good laugh. "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" Yes yes, if there's one thing you can count on these future-humanoids having, it's hearty laughs. It's the only thing that could keep them sane in their little rusty bunker rooms.
I am still sitting in the back of the car. I look right, at my brother again. The sun has retreated and it is dark out. What is it with dusk? You realize it’s getting darker, and then before you know it, you are exposed. Above your head is a vast sweep of black, and it is speckled with white shimmering bits. ♦
***
TV commercial volume #
Bill would turn down volume on TV ads:
Currently, TV ads can't be louder than the loudest peak in a show, said David Perry, the chairman of the broadcast production committee of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in New York. Ads often seem louder to viewers, he added, because a program's volume peak rarely comes just before an ad.There's hardly an argument to stop this from happening. Loud commercials are one of the most annoying parts of the TV experience - especially if you're one of those people who have a compulsion to judge a commercial's effectiveness and/or annoyingness.
***
The Tetris Effect #
I have recently got back into playing Tetris and Tetris DX1 on my Game Boy. I play with the original Game Boy -- there's something very satisfying about its weight and size, like it's perfectly made for my hands, and about the simplicity of the game itself; it requires just the directional pad and one button.
I'm reading now about the Tetris Effect, which is basically the tendency to mentally rearrange objects in real life so that they fit together nicely. What I'm experiencing now though, after about a solid week of playing every day, is that my mind is idly playing Tetris games in my head2. I'm seeing falling blocks and rotating them as they fall. All of scenarios I "see" with my third eye are very satisfying in a puzzle-solving type way, i.e. a 4-block line falling in for a Tetris. I seem to find it more satisfying, though, when an L-shaped piece drops in somewhere for a triple (3 lines cleared).
See also Bastard Tetris which uses a super-evil algorithm to take a look at your current block situation and give you the worst possible piece.
1. The difference between the main gameplay mode ("Marathon," in which the blocks keep falling until you run out of room) with regard to Tetris vs. Tetris DX is that in DX, you have a an extra couple hundred milliseconds to move and or rotate a piece once it touches the ground. This amounts to two advantages: one is that you're able to move a piece if you dropped it quick and made a mistake, as I am prone to do, and two is that you have a little bit more time to think about where you'll put the next piece. I average about 100 lines on Tetris and 200 on Tetris DX, so the change is significant.↩
2. Though I'm not experiencing the Tetris Effect, I have experienced something similar for Grand Theft Auto -- as in seeing cars and trying to find their videogame counterparts, as well as thinking about the quickest way I can get somewhere by driving over pedestrians and over medians and on grass. But I don't devote as much time to video game playing as I used to, for the benefit of society.↩
***
Reverse Psychology FICTION #
So, I go to my therapist. He says his current methods aren't working, so he's going to try something else. He lays down on the couch, and asks me to ask him about his mother. So I say, "What technique is this, doc?" And he says, "Reverse psychology."
So I say, "No, no, doc, I think you have that wrong."
"Do I?" he says. "I think you're right."
So then I think about it. "Wait. Maybe you're right." ♦
***
Lost season finale tonight #
The two part season finale for Lost airs tonight at 9pm EST. I'm a huge fan of the show, and there's a lot at stake in tonight's episode. It's called "The Incident" -- and most fans of Lost will remember the first mentioning of The Incident during the early part of season 2, when Jack and Locke first entered the Swan (known previously as 'the hatch') and watched the Orientation Video.
I have some predictions for tonight's episode, and I'll throw them down here for posterity, but I'm not making any guarantees: I'm just a fan, and I didn't come up with some crazy theory to explain every event on the show. I'm just going off what I know to be true regarding tonight's episodes. That said: in the official LOST Podcast, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the two head writers1 remarked that the season 5 ending would be reminiscent of the season 1 ending/cliffhanger, which if you don't remember was the opening of the hatch – but they don't go in until the following season. So my guess is we're either gonna be left hanging regarding what/who Jacob is, or we're going to see some new base on the island but not enter it.
Another awful prediction: The Incident is going to result in the death of the Losties who time traveled to 1977. (Yikes!) Certain characters seem to have the ability to change the past, while others do not; my guess is that Desmond is going to play a much bigger role in season 6 than he did in season 5.
1. A lot of people think J.J. Abrams is still head honcho at Lost - turns out he stopped working on the show sometime during the early part of Season 2. All the best episodes were written by Damon Lindelof (the showrunner) and Carlton Cuse. ↩
***
Relentless Raining FICTION #
It had been raining relentlessly, maybe five days straight, and the whole thing had a very palpable air of expectancy. It all seemed to be building up to something. Most people sat in their homes, afraid to go outside, fearful that the rain would make their cars slide around freely, randomly, like a slick ice cube on a table. Or maybe the rain would make their kids ill, or worse yet, completely transform them; the children would go outside wearing some kind of brand new, shiny outfit, and when they came back in they’d be dirty and there would be grime underneath their fingernails and their hair would be tussled and unkempt, and they’d speak foreign tongues and hack all the living room furniture to bits with axes. Plus, there was the lightning and thunder – the kind of thunder that rattles your brain in your skull, the kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night, all hot and wet, and makes you pray for forgiveness. Even the telephone poles were freaking out. ♦
***
Review: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience #
The book: A Student's Guide to Cognitive Neuroscience by Jamie Ward1.
A review of any cognitive neuroscience textbook is likely to use a lot of esoteric or unfamiliar terminology – there is, of course, some requisite background knowledge required for devouring such a book. You will be surprised to find that none of that language will find its way into this review. There will be no talk of Ramon y Cajal's neuron doctrine, nor the center-surround structure of ganglion and lateral geniculate nucleus cells; no mention of parietal neglect, nor a discussion of early-attention vs. late-attention models. This is because I was unable to read a single damn page of this thing.
I want to focus on one thing only, and that is the olfactory nightmare in which the pages of this book are absolutely drenched. The book smells like shit.
Not actual "shit," per se - "shit" in this context (and often in a similar context, i.e. one where a person refers to the smell of something as "like shit," or "like ass," etc.) simply means awful, terrible, cringe-worthy, vomit-inducing -- smelling so bad that if you smelled the smell all the time, even the most persuasive crisis hotline operator would have a hard time convincing you not to kill yourself.
The book smells like used fryer grease. Have you ever smelled the back of McDonald's? I mean like, you drive around to the back, where the vents shoot out a noxious, airborne form of the thick yellowy grease that your french fries were cooked in. Have you ever gone to the McDonald's on the U.S.S. Intrepid2? Well, that's exactly what this book smells like. Every page. The smell is practically baked in. And it's totally inappropriate.
My score: Zero out of Eighty-Seven (0/87).
1. This will be the first of many book reviews to come -- so stay tuned. ↩
2. U.S.S. Intrepid: An Essex-class aircraft carrier built during World War II, now open for tourism, permanently parked in the Hudson River. A climactic scene in "National Treasure" occurs here, but I'll spare you a full description and just tell you that it involves Nicholas Cage. ↩
***
The David Foster Wallace Audio Project #
In before Kottke gets it: The David Foster Wallace Audio Project, a collection of mp3s of David Foster Wallace's voice. There's also a picture of DFW which looks like it was taken when he was in college.
Really, though, it's him reading his stuff, giving interviews, as well as some other people delivering heartfelt eulogies. The question is: who's bold enough to do an audiobook of Infinite Jest? (An idea: Have a bunch of nice folks from all around the internet read portions of it and post it online. It might be a nice tribute.)
***
Wii injuries #
Doctors are seeing increases in strains and swelling of knees and shoulders from overuse of the Nintendo Wii:
Dr. John Sperling, a physician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., called the aches and pains a sign of the times. “It’s a syndrome of injuries and people presenting with complaints that we couldn’t have imagined three years ago,” he said.
***
Time Cube #
The Time Cube has been around for a while. It's worth checking out again:
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBE
IN ONLY 24 HOUR ROTATION.
4 Corner TIME, CUBES EARTH.
An interview with Gene Ray, the Wisest Human (he owns thewisesthuman.com) on the short lived TechTV show Unscrewed with Martin Sargent*. I love the matter-of-face way Mr. Ray says "they're just paperweights."
*A show which I recall to be mildly entertaining, a little childish. It came on usually when I was about to go to sleep, which means I often fell asleep with the TV on, but missing over half the episode.
***
"Corporation" fragment, circa 2007 FICTION #
I work for a large corporation. A very large corporation, in fact, located in Seattle, that specializes in overcharging for a commodity so addictive that overeager businessmen and college students alike are willing to shell out six dollars a day for twelve ounces of it – so addictive that they would probably have it intravenously injected if they could. Ten years ago, to the day, I also once spent three days in Los Angeles smoking hash out of an apple and mainlining Jack Daniels in the back of a rust colored Chevelle, so you can understand why a business meeting full of executives droning on about “corporate identity” would leave me bored. And when I’m bored, and I block out the endless monotony of my “esteemed colleagues” practically massaging each other’s prostates with their sycophantic ranting, my ability to observe what other people are doing increases dramatically. I notice how Steve, vice president of marketing, fidgets with his Montblanc Starwalker every time someone mentions the word “money.” ♦
***
Join Or Die #
Join or Die is a series of paintings by Justine Lai:
In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order.I rather enjoy these paintings (for their artistic value). She blows Lincoln!
By the way, if you didn't know already, "Join or Die" was a political cartoon by Ben Franklin. According to Wikipedia, Franklin's original intentions were to unite the colonies against a possible French attack, but later the phrase was used for (duh) the American Revolution.
***
We started traveling west on I-70 (fragments of a journey) FICTION #
We started traveling west on I-70 and we didn’t stop until Ted fell asleep at the wheel. He was drinking quite heavily, if I recall correctly, but his driving shift was mostly a straight shoot (and we planned this accordingly, given Ted’s love for Mezcal) so his actual driving abilities weren’t the issue. It was that Ted was practically narcoleptic until I leaned over and pushed his leg into the break pedal while steering us off the road from the passenger seat. We’d traveled one thousand, three hundred and twenty-eight miles through Missouri and some of the more geometrically boring states, like Kansas and Colorado, finally exhausted by a full day of driving and fighting and a brutal fucking stop (that will be further expounded upon later) in Denver. We stayed at Motel 8 in Monroe, UT.
The conversation in the car had been manic, as the flat and featureless roads of the Midwest tend to pry at that mental door of insanity. Around 700 miles in, in the middle of my driving shift, Ted and Varun started thinking every word “just didn’t sound right” or something like that. Post, post, post, Varun was mumbling, repeating it like a mantra. He had written the word down on a piece of paper over and over again, with a blue felt-tip pen, in different sizes and shapes and all different lettering — did I mention Varun is the lead designer at some font company in Silicon Valley? — and the two of them just couldn’t understand how a word like post could be spelled like that. I think it’s something about the “st” that was getting to them. I just turned up the radio and tried not to let it get to me, because I knew if the madness spread we’d have to pull over and cut our day short.
The next day I woke up when my cell phone started vibrating. I burped out a raspy hello — the first utterances after waking always sound a bit like you’ve been smoking cigarettes all night, even if you haven’t been.
“Hey maaaaaaaaaaan,” the voice said. “Guess where I am?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Maaaaaaaaaary,” Maaaaaaaaaary said. “Guess where I am!”
“Wal-Mart?”
“No way,” Ma(10x)ry said. “I’m in Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaaam!”
I hung up the phone. Amsterdam? They were maybe six hours ahead of us. She had probably already had showered, had breakfast — and I was in no state to communicate with someone like that. I did need to get Ted and Varun out of bed soon; we had to hit the fucking road. Ted was sleeping on the floor, but as I wound up to kick him in the side, he sprung up and blurted out “we need to hit the fucking road, hard!” There was now a majority and quorum. Ted and I packed the car, then we both kicked Varun awake and we took off. Our vehicle was a semi-reliable, Clinton-era Nissan Maxima, a glossy black box with a custom sound system that was so powerful the subwoofer’s vibrations could induce severe nausea. It was useful when we had to blast music just to stay awake during long night stretches, or drink lots of coffee (though this route was often avoided because of its diuretic properties — we didn’t want to stop every 30 minutes for a tinkle), or else take some of Varun’s Adderall, which in case you didn’t know is usually prescribed for attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and is basically speed with some other potent psychostimulants thrown in.
Surely everyone has a different reaction to the drug, but they all fall in a similar class: your brain feels like it’s been shocked with 100,000 volts of pure focused electricity. Your efficiency increases; new neural connections form at a quicker rate. This drug brings you closer to the image of God than He could have ever hoped for. At least these are the things you are willing to claim when you are on a drug that makes your mind work like a Swiss watch, with all the gears in line with each other, everything in sync and spinning, each part unaware of what its neighbor does, but still churning away indefinitely for the greater good.
The sky that day was the most brilliant blue I had ever seen. I stuck my head out the window somewhere on I-15 — we had started going north towards Salt Lake City when I-70 just ended and we hit one of those serious road forks in the middle of nowhere with two big signs pointing in either direction where someone has to say, alright, which way do we go? And Ted and Varun and I collectively know the answer before the question is even asked, because without a definite goal in mind, the idea is push as far as you can before you hit your own limits. So we went north. ♦
***
A.J. Gentleman's assessment of scientific progress #
Among the yellowed pages of my books,
I search for knowledge, universal truth,
Laws of nature, not divine, reasoned forth
From one generation’s fruitful tolling
Temporary enlightenment sought and found
- A.J. Gentleman
***
Higgs Boson #
A hypothetical Higgs Boson as would be detected by the Compact Muon Solenoid. The LHC is supposed to be back up and running September 2009.
***
It looks like an alien! #
“How would you know what an alien looks like,” I say.
“You know what I’m talking about. Those big eyes, the bulbous head and the tiny body.”
When people tell me that something looks like an alien, I reach for my phaser.
***
Haikus, Pt. I #
Comments now open
Refrain from douchebaggery
Click on the pound sign
Tommy Lee stood strong
His prodigious wang in hand
Wait, the wrong Tommy
On Television
The brain is rotting
Eyes tear up and vision blurs
When's Lost coming on?
Keeps my junk static
Lowers my sperm count to zip
I prefer boxers
On Elephants
Grey tough and wrinkled
Intelligent, prehensile
I mean, their trunks are
Five syllables first
Then add two more for seven
And we're back at five
On Diet Coke
First sip burns the throat
Second makes me burp up gas
Why do I drink this?
You're so proper sir
Hannibal Lecter Oscar
Please don't eat me sir
***
The Wrestler #
Weird: I've seen only two people watching movies on their laptops so far in 2009, and both people were watching The Wrestler, which isn't out on DVD yet. A quick check of The Wrestler @ Pirate Bay.
***
Scanwiches #
Scanwiches, a tumblr with scans of cross-sections of deli sandwiches for "education and delight." Some favorites: Bagel w/lox, Pastrami on a hero, and Chicken cutlet, bacon, and munster cheese. Don't forget to subscribe to their RSS feed!
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DFW in the New Yorker #
D.T. Max has published a piece in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace entitled "The Unfinished" and his life dealing with depression, writing novels, short stories, and nonfiction pieces (but mostly on his unfinished novel, The Pale King.) The piece mostly deals with DFW's relationship to his work, which was of course infinitely interesting to read about. A lot of post-mortem pieces on DFW seemed to focus on his aloof genius qualities which were of course interesting but I always felt like they were depicting him in a sort of robotic sense. Max chronicles Wallace's struggles to complete his work. Just reading about it makes Wallace seem less like a genius robot and more like a human:
Wallace began writing “The Pale King” around 2000. A severe critic of his own work, he rarely reported to his friends that anything he was working on was going well. But his complaints about this book struck them as particularly intense. Pietsch remembers being on a car ride with Wallace and hearing him compare writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” On another occasion, Wallace told him that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty are usable.” He had created some good characters, but the shape of the book evaded him. In 2004, he wrote to Jonathan Franzen that to get the book done he would have to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside.”
***
