readin'ritin'ncombinatorics

I am constrained by conventional language in trying to write.
Any idea, inspired by what I've seen or done or read or a conversation I've had, becomes a cascade of parallel inter-referencing verbal and nonverbal thoughts. Often several of these lead to linear things I'd like to say or write out, but the feedback continues and I often find I've gone through an inner turn of phrase that may never recur. Sometimes I can bring them back. And sometimes I sit to write them down and find the perfect words aren't there anymore.

Thinking is like an abstracted drug.

Yeah, it's just another blogosphere-clogging post from a would-be writer on the topic of writer's block. Mostly. Sort of.

thoughtovthemoment

No task is beneath anyone. Subordination is beneath everyone.

noexitphoning

The Salt Lake City Weekly this week is carrying a repeat of the No Exit comic "Conflicting Constituent Groups of the Republican Party." It may be a testament to my poor googling skills that I can't find a link to the comic online (though the artist's website has a temporary sampler of the Democratic Party version.) Still, if you happen to be somewhere that carries CW, it's worth a glance. At least I find it pretty on-the-spot. "When I get rich, I'll want a tax cut."

At least a small measure of the difference between my playing with Libertarian economics and playing with Liberal economics (irrespective of the fact that in a pure ubercapitalist health care system, I probably died some time last year) comes of considering "just whose side am I on?" And the comic in part addresses that.

burstinginair

Aerial fireworks are very pretty. But there's a part of their beauty I found myself dwelling on in particular at Friday's show. After the carefully correographed explosion, the fading sparks drift on the air currents, curling around one another. The neat pattern loses its sphere or ring or whatever shape it was designed to have, and a new ephemeral pattern falls out and fades. It's the part of the burst that's not controlled, and I found it oddly fascinating.

ameander

I've been holding back on this because lately any writing ideas I've had seem to feed into a broader context and I want to work them into something that's a whole lot more than a blog post. Just one thought out of the big mess to entice you: Capitalism is not just, it is merely useful.

On more day-in-the-life matters, some degree of leg stiffness or soreness seems to have become a constant, as I bike more and more. I've not quite convinced myself to call one of the junkyards and sell my car (I've left my "for sale" signs in the windows, but I doubt anyone who sees/hears it in operation will be eager to buy.) Wednesday night I rode down to Best Buy on a whim after work, but determined their hard drives are too expensive (there is abundant evidence a buggy hard drive is behind my increasingly frequent windows and program problems.) So I splurged and got "The Simpsons Game" instead. Lots of fun.

"But I don't wanna go to chocolate bunny hell..."

recipenottopar

First point of the post is that it's best to put your contact lenses in before cooking with red pepper, not after.

So I made a chicken dish for lunch (and dinner, probably to last a couple days). Started out with a sort of chicken and pasta idea, shifted to more a cream-o-mushroom based thing. (I tend to improvise a lot when cooking.) Unfortunately the pasta is now extraneous (and didn't soak in the sauce properly, so it's crunchy.) Should go with some breading or potatoes or just ditch it entirely for next time. Also while I still think a spicy mushroom alfredo is a good idea, way too much red pepper poured out and I didn't have enough of the other sauce makings to thin it out. Still turned out not to bad. Just a bit of revision. Hope I remember it another time.

restaurantbitching

Restored from the brink, where lo these blogging fields have lain fallow for many weeks...

So nothing really new today, just some discourteous and probably unfair thoughts that recur to me sometimes at my job.

*Waiting at the restaurant is your just punishment for having so little diversity in your lifestyle that you actually get hungry at the same time as your neighbors.

*In a corollary, you'll find you're not the only ones who decided to wait for the end of the most popular television shows in the country to get dinner.

*If you hang up and call back twenty minutes later, that's not the same thing as being "on hold for twenty minutes," no matter how angrily you say it.

*If you've got your whole social circle together, and decide to call for take out, the one person in the group who actually suggested the restaurant and has been there before is probably the best person to make the call. The preteen child of the branch of the family who are visiting from out of state and who also is nervous talking to strangers on the phone is probably not the best person to make the call.

Really, the main point of this post is to communicate to the handful of people checking in that, yes, I'll be writing this thing again.

LTE "False Freedom"

The Salt Lake Tribune printed my letter the other day. Of course, they never bothered to send me an acknowledgment or anything. So I wouldn't have known except the people at the BMT unit brought it to my attention when I went in today.

So here's my letter on religious freedom and the FLDS.

User comments are mostly positive.

They edited it only a tiny bit. Their slight reconstruction of the first clause in the first sentence isn't any more or less awkward than mine. And there are a couple other slight tweaks. Also, where I abbreviated FLDS in all instances, they blew one up to the full church name. Though for some reason, in defiance of common writing conventions, they left the abbreviation on the first instance and wrote the full name on the second instance.

petheadache

So, if your beloved dog or cat had a splitting headache, how could you ever know? How could you ever be in a position to do anything about it? "Hey, Fido, need an aspirin?"

Just one of those little things that occasionally pops into my head. Although I'm pretty sure Milky cat isn't suffering any headache right now, given the contented demeanor.