"What usually in the long run hampers men who think is a lack of buoyancy and vigor--they lose the elan vital, self-criticism paralyzes them, and they fail in the sheer driving-force that clears its way through the jungle. I think the habit of abstract thought tends to produce a certain oppression and timidity that leads to failure."

BR to OM, 10/30/1912

"Slept a bit better. Vivid dreams. A bit depressed; weather & state of health. The solution of the problem you see in life is a way of living which makes what is problematic disappear.

"The fact that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life's shape. So you must change your life, & once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear.

"But don't we have the feeling that someone who doesn't see a problem there is blind to something important, indeed to what is most important of all?

"Wouldn't I like to say he is living aimlessly--just blindly like a mole as it were; & if he could only see, he would see the problem?

"Or shouldn't I say: someone who lives rightly does not experience the problem as sorrow, hence not after all as a problem, but rather as joy, that is so to speak as a bright halo round his life, not a murky background."

LW, MS 118 17r c: 27.8.1937. Also: CV p. 27

"What usually in the long run hampers men who think is a lack of buoyancy and vigor--they lose the elan vital, self-criticism paralyzes them, and they fail in the sheer driving-force that clears its way through the jungle. I think the habit of abstract thought tends to produce a certain oppression and timidity that leads to failure."

BR to OM, 10/30/1912

"Slept a bit better. Vivid dreams. A bit depressed; weather & state of health. The solution of the problem you see in life is a way of living which makes what is problematic disappear.

"The fact that life is problematic means that your life does not fit life's shape. So you must change your life, & once it fits the shape, what is problematic will disappear.

"But don't we have the feeling that someone who doesn't see a problem there is blind to something important, indeed to what is most important of all?

"Wouldn't I like to say he is living aimlessly--just blindly like a mole as it were; & if he could only see, he would see the problem?

"Or shouldn't I say: someone who lives rightly does not experience the problem as sorrow, hence not after all as a problem, but rather as joy, that is so to speak as a bright halo round his life, not a murky background."

LW, MS 118 17r c: 27.8.1937. Also: CV p. 27

Fantastic two weeks off doing . . . well, not much of anything. Now I'm back to the grind, one class started yesterday, another tonight. Speaking of which, I need to get in the shower if I'm going to be on time--

"I play too hard when I ought to go to sleep
They pick on me because I really got the beat
Some people give me the creeps

"Every other week I need a new address
Landlord landlord landlord cleaning up the mess
Our whole fucking life is a wreck

"We're deperate
Get used to it."

Saw X last night. Second time so far, and it seems each time is the best. I was about twenty feet from Exene until the kids starting dancing, which pushed me back a bit. I wanted to hear a few songs that I didn't ("Delta 88," "The Have Nots"), but was pleasantly surprised to hear a few that they did play ("Nausea," "Breathless"). Of course, they played all the punk rock standards ("Los Angeles," "We're Desperate," "Johnny Hit and Run Pauline") and even cleverly dedicated "Adult Books" to those who work at Walmart.

Great show. N. enjoyed X also, but she was mostly there to see Rollins. Rollins Band were as expected--I never thought much of Rollins, nor his "I'm the Ubermensch" attitude; and I've always liked Black Flag better when Keith Morris was singing.

A few beers and some punk rock with someone I care about: perfect evening.

I spent the morning re-tooling the site, including a new title. For those that don't know, the title is from Wittgenstein, On Certainty s. 141.

I have been resistant to changing the title because I get so many hits from angsty youths typing "fuck the world" into google. However, I believe the time has come to start acting my age and re-forming this site to be in line with the changes under which I am undergoing personally. As I emerge from my three year 'prison' sentence, so too must the forum in which I communicate also re-emerge changed.

A little history for those newcomers: I began this little thing in 1996, when my HTML skillz had not yet been honed. I was "blogging" before there was a name for it. Back then it was called "All that's fit to shit," which--for those of you in the know--is a pun on the motto of the New York Times, "All the news that's fit to print." (I thought it was very witty when I was 18.) At the time it was a frames-based layout, and I hand coded every entry. Greymatter makes life easier, but the intent has always been the same: a little catharsis, in a semi-public forum in my little corner of the information super-highway, from which to pontificate and wax philosophical. Screaming at the nothingness, like a modern day Oedipus (minus the eye-gouging). This site gone through many incarnations--always at the same web address--and I have been planning version 4.0 this summer, which would involve lightening up the title, as well as the look and feel. Those that are interested in history can browse version 2.0 of this site, which spanned from 6/2001 to 11/2004. Warning: the views expressed there are (mostly) no longer those of the management.

This is the first few steps in several planned changes that this site will undergo over the next few months. Keep checking back, and pardon our dust.

Comments/suggestions of a constructive nature are always welcome.

"I went into the woods," Thoreau tells us in Walden, "because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential aspects of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived." I feel closer to nature in my new corner of the world than anywhere I have lived since I moved from New Hampshire. Tampa has neither the culture nor the intensity of large cities in the Northeast, but just now I am starting to understand its unique charm.

Urban sprawl leads to the paradox that I had to move further into the city to get closer to nature. Living a block from the river, I am surrounded by critters. Large grasshoppers, mosquitos, squirrels, butterflies, lizards, and all varities of insects live around me. This large, old house (which has had enough time to settle) allows convenient cracks and crevices for the smaller-type things to enter. I am used to non-paying roomates, but the large spider who was hanging out last week is not what I had in mind; it had the circumference of a cola-can, and despite having more legs, was less venomous than some with whom I have lived in the past year. I'm getting used to the mosquito bites, also. I was scratching, tearing flesh the first few weeks. Now I barely notice them; it's kinda the cost of doing business in my new home.

I live in a wild pocket within an urban environment. Busy Florida Avenue is but a few blocks away. The city zoo is a stone's throw as the crow flies. But the Hillsborough River--the defining geographical feature of the little city that couldn't--is closer. Having neither the magnesty of the Mississippi nor the power of the Niagra, it has its own mundane pace. And in a little cloistered bend in the river the critters and I call home.

I've decided that I hate the suburbs. "The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining after effect in the style of his dwelling." The marketing tactics buried deep within our ideology-laden collective unconsciousness, which actually make one think that moving outside the city--for the 'security' of gated communities, sprawling strip-malls, soccer moms and all the trappings of bourgeois existence--will claim my attention no more. I'm glad to be out of the super-concentrated apartment life, where my landlord is a fucking corporation, and whose leasing agents--'just following the rules,' as in shades of Nurenberg--complicated my existence with unresonable demands and expectations to keep their 'curb appeal' up to these bloated American standards. I now live in a neighborhood, not a complex (the term is itself telling). To hell with the sprawl! To hell with the SUV's! To hell with the neurotic products of the hedonistic pleasures of this existence!

I am the postmodern Thoreau: awed by the splendor of the natural, and contemptful for the artificiality of concrete and steel. We live in a world where prime-time sitcoms and drive-thrus mask the simple pleasures of every day existence. It is not that I heretofore have avoided the natural due to any intrisnic defect, but rather the culturation of my existence in Tampa has led me to disregard the splendor of the simple for the trappings of our culture. I used to walk alot--for fun. Since I moved here I have enjoyed the air-conditioned nightmare than is my existence, focusing on the 'in' and chastising the 'out.' My apartments previously have been a removal, a small place of comfort in an otherwise uncomfortable area. I have blamed my sedintariness on my lack of transportation, on the oppressive summertime heat, etc. But is only now that I am realizing that these were just so many excuses, and such a realization brings me greater joy than I have known in this sordid wasteland.

I have spent the last six weeks reading Marx almost exclusively. Now I begin the difficult transition back to my dissertation research. I got what looks like an interesting book on Russell and his contemporaries, and took out the library copy of Principa Mathematica (henceforth referred to as "The Bible.") Unfortunately, the library has only the second edition of PM, not the 1910 edition that Wittgenstein would have studied. Most unfortunate!

I went this morning and got a new stereo in the car. Previously I have been using my mp3 player through a tape adapter to allow for some versatility to adjust music to my given taste (which often varies from hour to hour), but the tape deck was starting to be fussy with the adapter. Now I have a brand new CD deck, one which will allow me to play mp3's from a CD-RW (how cool is that!) and which includes an auxilary 1/8" input to allow me to use the mp3 player still. It's the first time in my life I've actually had anything other than the factory deck installed im my ride (thus pimpin' it, as they say) despite the fact that I sold many while I was working sales in high school and college.

I plan to knock off the rest of my weekend grading for Monday, helping N. paint and reading a bit of Russell. The FPA deadline is Monday, but I doubt I will be able to edit an old paper in time. Perhaps next year.

Two weeks off until the new semester begins. I will not be able to make it up to Chicago as planned, but instead plan to occupy my time by (gasp!) maybe finishing off a chapter.

I sit in my office staring at my pile of grading. If by some fluke in the law of conservation of matter, my pile were to suddenly decrease in its present volume, I would be more than happy (albeit a bit confused). When moving I managed to fall behind in my grading and I haven't been able to catch up since. Usually these response papers take about 15-25 mins each, and I have well over thirty. The simple math means that I could finish them up in a week with plenty of time to spare, were that the only thing I do. Unfortuntely, after about half a dozen I need to do something else, for I begin succumbing to the monotony. Not that each individual paper on its own is frustrating to me (athough some are); but reading the same argument, justified by the same quotations, expressing the same concepts, thirty times over--my brain begins turning to mush.

I can't really complain about my job. I love it. Grading (but perhaps also the low salary rates for adjunct faculty) is one of the only downsides of an otherwise perfect situation, especially at the breakneck speed that these summer courses run. Every week I have a new batch. Which means if I take a bit more than a week to grade the previous stack, I'm already behind.

This is the last week of my summer class. I have two more lectures to prepare, and another batch of papers coming in tomorrow. After that, I'm thinking about nothing but Wittgenstein for a few weeks. And also perhaps drinking some beer, and getting back in contact with some people I have been ignoring since the beginning of the summer. Sorry, everyone! I'll be picking up my phone again next week.

I have had so much fun reading and talking about Marx. I think my epistemology class this fall will actually be a letdown by comparison (not to mention having to go back to grading freshmen-level writing--its/it's, their/there/they're, etc.)

Oh, well. It's a living.

Car's back. $480.

I finished and sent out my book review today. I also spent a good deal of time in the library tracking down work on Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell.

'Freakout Friday' tonight.

Apparently when the timing belt went, so too went my water pump and the belt pulley. $500 is the estimate. Fortunately, my Escort is a 1.9L engine which is a non-interference engine (unlike the same year 1.8L engine) so there's little possibility that I bent a valve or anything. It would suck to get it repaired just to find out that the engine is toast.

So, this week's paycheck is going to fix the car. In the next few months I'm going to get some mainantence things taken car of (transmission fliud replaced, plugs and possibly wires) to ensure that my investment will not be in vain!

My car broke down today. Fortunately, it was coming from work and not on the way. Unfortunately, it happened in the middle of rush hour on the busy dragstrip known as Fowler Avenue. Hud was to meet me for dinner, so fortunately I was able to get him over to the intersection rather quickly to push the car out of traffic. I had it towed to a place up the block from me--hopefully they're honest. So, it ended up alright. But (of course) it had to happen a week after I move away from my old apartment--which was within walking distance of work.

Here's to money I didn't need to spend right now.