Ride the sainted rhythms on the midnight train to Romford

slobonit @ 2009-11-23T05:48:00

2009-11-23T10:48:45Z

In the worst wa-a-a-ay

slobonit @ 2009-10-11T23:13:00

2009-10-12T03:13:30Z

slobonit @ 2009-08-15T23:45:00

2009-08-16T04:46:19Z

got contact lenses
learned that my grandfather was a nuclear engineer before he died
moved into dorm, 8th floor it's niceish my roommate is a boring guy
his only posters were football posters
etc

know almost absolutely no one here
i remembered that suzanna was here, so i called devin to ask for her number and talked to him for a bit, then called suzanna and we went to go get books but she did not have enough money in her checking account to pay for all of them so she returned empty-handed i however emerged from the university center bearing several large and daunting textbooks which i carried to my dorm
my roommate was in there so i and suzanna met him for the first time later he asked if she was my girlfriend and was bewildered to hear that she was gay
upon seeing the turntables on my desk around four separate people asked me if i was a dj, and i honesty replied "not really" "what do you mean?"
i don't do parties, i just mix records sometimes as a hobby
when asked if i intended to become a professional dj i replied no i intend to become a professional microbiologist and my roommates friend attempted badly to be humorous by analogizing the "mixing up [of] molecules" to the mixing of records, exhibiting a total lack of distinction between the various branches of modern science but hey at least he said something
suzanna invited me to go grocery shopping at food city in order to redeem coupons for free stuff with her and her roommate named caitlin who also attended white station
the free items offered were: AA batteries, bowls of processed fruit, easy-mac brand macaroni and cheese product, orange juice (remarkably not from concentrate), true value bathroom tissue, and some other less notable things
her car's global positioning system (named Diane)initially led us to a kroger on the other side of the tennessee river
after some minor geographical adjustments we ended up at a food city in the ghetto part of knoxville where i bought half and half, sugar cubes, potassium, and b-vitamins
as well as a can of off brand soda called Dr. Wow that was an irresistible purchase at only 35 cents
before i returned to my dorm to refrigerate my perishables suzanna invited me to dinner with her, caitlin, and their mutual friend from governors school jessica who is in my seminar class oddly enough
we went to chili's after waiting thirty minutes to get in where the service was bad but only because the place was packed and they may or may not have been understaffed so i still tipped appropriately
while waiting i unintentionally made fun of jessica by stating that i knew little about the other guy with whom i and my roomate share a bathroom other than the fact that he not very good at using the internet as he did not have a profile picture on facebook (he messaged me to confirm that he had a single room)
a few hours later upon seeing a comment left by some other pictureless facebooker on suzannas wall i noticed that it was her and kind of laughed aloud
oh well. despite my introversion, i like to be open about myself, or rather the heavily polished image of myself that i avail to all who use the internet. a lot of people don't, so it seems.
i ordered water at a restaurant for the first time in ages and thus was not too full of sugar to eat by the time our entrees arrived i had a chicken caesar wrap of commendable quality which was too messy to consume by any means other than using the traditional eating utensils they provided (which suzanna debated stealing)
various things were discussed mainly in the realm of academics, college life, and all that shit and oddly i didn't feel socially awkward at all

portishead - deep water

2009-07-07T02:32:58Z

oh, forgot these

2009-07-06T19:43:26Z

slobonit @ 2009-07-06T03:50:00

2009-07-06T09:46:57Z

pep talk

2009-07-06T08:14:54Z

stop worrying
stop worrying
stop worrying
your weakness is insecurity
that you allow other people to know your weaknesses
and insecurities
says to self
if you didnt let people know that you are constantly fretting over how you are perceived you might come off as a bit less egotistical
says to self
in hopes that awareness of this information and consideration of it when making social decisions will cause others to like self better

slobonit @ 2009-06-15T18:30:00

2009-06-15T23:31:54Z

okay so
somehow i ended up going to bonnaroo
massive update with pics later

bro

2009-06-08T19:44:41Z

facebook just significantly increased my understanding of the demographic consistency of the university of tennessee's undergraduate class of 2013.
to do list:
develop beer pong skillz
~~attempt to quell my raging hatred for dave matthews band~~

oh, wait...
the latter is impossible.

this situation might prove difficult.

photography at night

2009-06-07T09:01:16Z

okay

2009-05-28T08:23:41Z

so maybe i'm sometimes adequately successful at things
life is highly situational

slobonit @ 2009-05-23T11:41:00

2009-05-23T16:41:48Z

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse is one of a range of measures introduced by the Irish Government to investigate the extent and effects of abuse on children from 1936 onwards. It is generally known in Ireland as the "Ryan report"^[1] or "the Ryan Commission" (previously "the Laffoy Commission"), after its presiding judge. The Commission's work started in 1999 and it published its public report on 20 May 2009.

Though the Commission's remit embraced all forms of child abuse outside the family, the majority of allegations it investigated related to the system of residential "Reformatory and Industrial Schools" operated by Catholic Church orders, funded and supervised by the Irish Department of Education.

The Commission's report said testimony had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential, that church officials encouraged ritual beatings and consistently shielded their orders' paedophiles from arrest amid a "culture of self-serving secrecy", and that government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.^[2]

Those abused were, amongst other things, stripped, beaten and raped by nuns, subjected to naked beatings in public, forced into oral sex and even subjected to beatings after failed rape attempts by brothers.^[3] One person described how they attempted to tell nuns they had been molested by an ambulance driver only to be "stripped naked and whipped by four nuns to 'get the devil out of you'".^[3] Another described how they were removed from their bed and "made to walk around naked with other boys whilst brothers used their canes and flicked at their penis".^[3] Yet another was "tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side".^[3]

The abuse has been widely described as Ireland's Holocaust.^[4]^[5] The abuse was said to be "endemic" across Irish educational institutions.^[6] The Guardian newspaper, based in the nearby United Kingdom, described the abuse as "the stuff of nightmares", citing the adjectives used in the report as being particularly chilling: "systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary, endemic".^[7]

slobonit @ 2009-05-10T22:50:00

2009-05-11T03:56:52Z

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nice_guy

slobonit @ 2009-05-07T22:19:00

2009-05-08T03:20:35Z

it's not the least bit accurate to say that i dislike people, i just fear every single one of them

slobonit @ 2009-05-07T14:22:00

2009-05-07T19:24:11Z

today is a good day
after school i lit a black & mild
decided i didn't like it
and gave it away

the most cinematographically impressive thing i've seen in a few weeks

2009-05-02T17:53:38Z

the lame image below you doesn't do the video or the song justice and i wish that it could be changed to a different frame, but oh well. watch it anyways

ART

2009-04-21T07:11:50Z

slobonit @ 2009-04-13T20:58:00

2009-04-14T01:59:03Z

get thee to a nunnery

"Ah just cant quit thinking"

2009-03-19T06:14:39Z

Driving down poplar at 11o'clock towards home sleep and some vague notion of a future, slightly compromised by the revelation I received from my pediatrician earlier today that I have incredibly low blood sugar and need to come back tomorrow for follow up tests,
it hits me that most people will never appreciate the beauty of Faulkner's writing
understandably so, too offended by the complexities of his syntax and the according mental effort one must exert to digest it, and the fact that almost no one, no one these days reads faulkner by choice except the exceptionally curious
those who revel in the study of complex systems like the minds of human beings that most accept as too fundamentally disordered to try to make sense of
most people don't stop to think about why we all do the things we do and of course it's understandable
we don't have time
we have a homeostasis to maintain, we have reproductive urges to satisfy, we have to maintain our appearance of being evolutionarily superior to our peers, be it through a high grade point average, a low body mass index, fashionable clothing, or continual avoidance of the disliked and desperate persons whose honesty of desire for human interaction tells us that we can certainly do better.
Thinking is hard work and I am only beginning to discover this, as I grapple with desires that I am increasingly coming to believe that no degree of information processing no matter how in depth or accurate, will ever be adequate to fulfill.
the fact of the matter is that our thinking is rarely done for the sake of thinking itself, it is always, and I tell you always rooted in some underlying economic desire, and these days usually that's ensuring our genes safe passage to some kind of future where they'll serve as blueprints for the construction of enzymes that one can only hope will manage to catalyze some positive reaction on this planet
procrastination
the human brain, though its present degree of complexity may be a relatively new development in evolutionary history, emerged for a reason just like the vascular tissues of true land plants. It helps us reproduce.
I apologize, I seldom realize that to outside observers, I must seem like a total waste of atoms and high-energy bonds between them. I'm what they call lazy. I'm not that good at doing anything. If you watch my activity in the course of a day, you will see me eat sleep, read, smoke too much, maybe talk a little bit, and on top of all of it do absolutely no visibly economically productive work. Because, as I'm increasingly coming to realize, we cannot see people think, and as much of a handle on them as we think we might have, assuming honesty in all the words they choose to say, we ignore the endless streams of information from which they are carefully selected, in someone's attempt to either convey his or her superiority to others or to get something out of them, be it sex from a 20 year old felon because you're the terribly confused 14-year-old girl who tried to hit on me but failed and is probably trying to escape from something terrible, information such as the location of the nearest gas station because the needle's dropping below E and you are myself earlier today freaking out in a strange part of town, or tangible item such like a dollar because you're the 9-month-pregnant lady who asked me for one so that you could buy gas because you hadn't any around 11pm at the intersection of cooper and young where I had no business being but figured was a good a place as anywhere else to think myself to death.
I was born into a world that made so much sense that I never had to shut my mind up in order to not realize that no matter how many pieces of the puzzle I put together it would not solve all the problems of my life. I grew up without problems in the untainted confines of a housing bubble floating miles away from the disturbing extremes of human interaction, a sealed, highly antimicrobial environment and emerged clean, innocent, and ignorantly brilliantly curious about the world around me, glowing with the apparent fact that no I have not been through whatever you have
like how a worrying percentage of my female friends have been subjected to sexual abuse as children and how, somehow, their worlds manage to keep turning
by just not thinking about any of it
and I know that I don't deserve anything
my immaculate conception was all at the cost of further overpopulating the earth, and increasing the poverty of those in much greater need of money than myself
and who is to say that I'll even manage to make any positive contribution to modern understanding of anything. I could just be a waste of all the resources that I didn't ask to have poured into me along with these expectations that I stay within the confines of the socioeconomic bracket that I was born into from my family who all seem to consider holy this relative genetic connection that I see as largely superficial.
Existential crisis isn't something undergone by male teenagers in sentimental books as they wander the streets of a city they wished they could call home, hopelessly lost and hopelessly ignorant of how to combat this meaninglessness
it's the fundamental state of the human consciousness when confronted with the degree to which we are all holed up inside ourselves as the information we absorb and digest far outweighs the small percentage of it that we think we can actually put together and possibly export in order to effect some kind of change in our world
it's not a wonder that no one cares, it's a coping mechanism
oddly enough, I always assumed that doing anything else was a waste of time
because guess what
we have enough people on earth at this point, and no matter how well you set yourself up for an ideal life of being rich and being in love and having a happy family and making sure all your kids get the best lives possible, none of that is going to move the world forward. the only advances in human civilization that have occurred in the past century haven't arisen from two people being rich and just having really damned great genes, they've come from individuals who sat around and did what was apparently nothing, thinking about the world around them and how to make sense of it.
Not thinking might be very comfortable, but no matter how much you mask monotony and the deterioration of our sanity with the fact that it makes us better able to function as individuals, your function as an individual actually doesn't matter beyond the useful information about our common reality that you manage to provide to other people before dying. No matter how painful we may find everything we must face along the way. Maybe you don't care
but I do
and as the large poor black man named Rider states after having dug his wife's grave and subsequently trying to kill himself by alcohol poisoning
Ah just cant quit thinkin
but no pain can keep me from the terrifying suspicion that maybe in the wake of all these problems, all of this complexity, and our helpless lack of the information we think we need the most, when you remove your own desires from the equation, all of it actually makes a disturbing amount of sense
and no, it's not all in vain, if any of this ends up meaning absolutely anything to you
I don't want to be remembered by my children as the one to whom they owe everything. I dont even want to be remembered as an individual if it is even vaguely possible to erase my name from all of this, I just want to be heard by the world as someone who made sense. As someone who was worth listening to, because I secretly love humanity. And I believe that piecing bits of a complicated world together can somehow help people, if they choose to think about it anyways. It's a hopelessly selfish aspiration, but what better thing can one strive for? I do not claim to be God and accordingly my word is not infallible, do not take it as such. My only goal here is to make you think. Let me know if I'm in error.

sick

2009-03-09T19:37:13Z

I met a lovely girl named Rose in a dream last night. She was organizing an organized labor rally in the dream city of Pittsburgh which I found strangely lacking in any urban qualities whatsoever, for being such a large city and all in the nondream world. Here it was represented by a large wooded clearing which instead of pine trees such as those of the surrounding wilderness was filled with thousands of large underpaid African American bodies acting out their justified discontentment in a concerted, unmoving silence that seemed to communicate the lack of socioeconomic equality in the dream future more passionately than the most moving speeches on the topic of which I have never heard a word save those that I unknowingly spoke to myself from the mouth of the aforementioned woman in this subconscious drama.

She seemed to emanate an unconquerable glow of optimism, the aura of an apparent righteousness, and the light of a probably legitimate belief that she was actually doing the right thing. We talked for a bit when I happened upon all this, because I had run away from home after not getting into any good colleges and was currently trying to figure out what on earth was going on per usual. In the course of our conversation I somehow managed to make her laugh a lot and it always makes me happy when I can successfully make people laugh, so I exploited this rarely encountered positive feedback loop with my sharpest dream-wits and ultimately won both her respect and her advice which was largely about the evil of being idle and apathetic about life. I knew it was something I needed to hear and tried to take it to heart.

Then I climbed up a tree and hid from the people in cars whom it was implicitly beneficial though not absolutely necessary to hide from.
In the dream.

I woke up manic, brilliantly reconvinced of my inherent potential for morality and my talent towards the goal of effecting it. I deleted the 8 page text message I had pitifully punched into my phone outlining the decline of my mental condition in the past however much time I have lost the concept of in the post-apocalyptic haze of a life I find myself presently acknowledging. And I boldly disowned my unpleasant habits of hypersomnia, avoidance, passivity, fatalism, sulking in the wake of past tragedies, and now silently admiring pretty girls I'll never bring myself to talk to.
I lied in bed for the next two hours reviewing this vision and trying to completely establish its relevance to my life, already cognizant of the general idea, brainstorming words fit to describe the strange dream. Sleep came upon me at about the same rate as the realizations that the scene was an adaptation of one from the book In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje and that it was Pittsburgh because my Dad is flying there today.
Then I smoked two bowls.
After I got to school I started rereading the aforementioned novel in Economics, and became infatuated with the epigraphs:

The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when
you have gone to the earth I will let my hair
grow long for your sake, I will wander through
the wilderness in the skin of a lion.
The Epic of Gilgamesh

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.
John Berger

Then I realized that I had a fever in second period, and the odd feeling that I woke up with was no longer such a mystery.

slobonit @ 2009-02-22T11:06:00

2009-02-22T17:06:20Z

Bloodhead scandal

From the early to mid-1990s a network of businessmen and government workers, known as "bloodheads", set up hundreds of official and unofficial blood donation stations in Henan Province to supply the market for blood plasma created by hospitals and manufacturers of health products. The common practice of reusing needles, not screening for diseases, sellers traveling from station to station with false records to maximize their income, and the mixing the blood prior to centrifuging and re-injecting the separated red blood cells back into the peasant blood-sellers guaranteed the rapid spread of blood-borne diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B.[115]

Particularly in the province of Henan, tens of thousands of farmers and peasants were infected with HIV through participation in these programs. The blood stations began to be closed down in 1995 when the scale of the HIV outbreak began to become apparent. The ensuing coverup saw government officials take credit for dealing with the crisis which they caused, the harassment of journalists attempting to cover the story, and of whole villages dying of what was to them a mysterious disease because they had not been informed that they were likely to have been infected.[115]

On August 24, 2002, the prominent HIV/AIDS activist, Wan Yanhai, was arrested in Beijing and detained for a month for leaking an internal government report on the Henan AIDS crisis.

work

2009-02-14T01:34:22Z

wow

2009-02-05T00:35:35Z

[By comparing the sizes and shapes of its fossilized vertebrae and ribs to those of modern snakes, researchers estimated that T. cerrejonensis was around 13 meters (43 ft) long, weighed more than 1,100 kilograms (2,400 lb), and measured about 1 meter (3 ft) wide at the thickest point on the snake's body.]

slobonit @ 2009-01-31T21:12:00

2009-02-01T03:08:37Z

http://www.wikihow.com/Lie

Pink noise

2009-01-31T00:25:08Z

and in study hall:
abortion abortion is terrible
oh my god
god
it's like murder
yeah
i mean like it's a person and everything
it has fingers
it's terrible
i don't see how they can do that like
they give someone five years in prison for like abusing their dogs but like they're not even people
>
but guys it doesn't have any thoughts yet. it hasn't absorbed any information from its environment. it's just a cell that has divided a lot.
you can make an infinite number of potential people. it's not like we're running out. you could say that a guy performs twenty million half murders every time he masturbates.
>
oh my god
are you serious
it's like different when the egg and the sperm come together
do you really mean you think that it's like the same when they're all like
that's ridiculous
i would never get an abortion
tyler! what do you think
i don't have an opinion!
yes you do! tyler!
yes! but i'm just not going to say anything because I hate it when people fight!
i know what you think already
I know you and thomas and your atheist propaganda
what about when someone gets raped?
they should keep it at least and put it up for adoption
why? to keep it as a fucking reminder
i'd keep it
no you wouldn't, vicky.
i grew up in a very christian household my parents would make me keep it
vicky that is ridiculous, you're fucking fifteen
well that's what happened to my mom with nick
vicky... you're fucking stupid.
no i'm not! tyler!
you are so fucking stupid, vicky...
if i am it's just because i'm younger than you
a girl could take care of it with her parents' help
yeah and have her life ruined.
tyler is probably like the smartest one here i think
yeah
actually thomas is.
wait thomas are you smart?

so uh i got my car keyed today
shit!
what happened?
uh i don't know, i just came back and someone had fucked it up
that sucks!
fuck why would somebody do that?
well uh see i think it was probably because i had keyed her car so uh yeah it wasn't that bad
like she didn't get mine anywhere near as bad as i got hers
haha what!??
so uh okay well you guys can't tell anyone this but i was like really barred out right and it was friday and it was sixth period and i was making up this test and then my friend ally was just like hey lets go out to the parking lot to go key this girls car and uh well i don't remember who it was but she was telling me all about her and about what a bitch she was and it just seemed like a really good idea so i was like uh okay yeah let's go do it and uh yeah
she was like that's the girls car and we got out our keys and we keyed it! and uh she just keyed it a little, but i like took it and like pushed it really hard in there and wrote SLUT in like really big letters
and uh yeah
i keyed it pretty bad

[disyllabic indistinct native american? word now absent from memory]
what
[i expected more information
but it's second repetition also failed to register as anything to me]
oh
yeah so uh
can you like explain it?
yeah
so
they take you to like these old indian burial grounds right and they have this medicine man guy right and there are all these guys like chanting and dancing around and they have like this big fire right and they take these really hot volcanic rocks and like hold them in the fire until they get like glowing white hot and then they pick them up right and they like move it towards your face and you just like breathe in the hot air from the rock and it's just so hot that it like makes you suffer so much that you basically accept that you're going to die and and it like scorches the lining of your nasal cavity then after just a second of this you start having like a near death experience and you just see everything it's ridiculous with all the people chanting and your body just goes into this mode and you sit down and you start to see all this shit like have the most intense spiritual experience of your life

oh