Filled out another goddamn job application today. I guess there's little point in writing anything about one's actual life. At least if you're me. Hopefully at least some of my ideas are interesting to somebody.

Hit the darkroom a couple of days ago and printed up several takes of a single image. I drive myself crazy trying to match the beautiful tonalities that my pics have in a contact print. If you shoot tmax 100 in 6x7cm format and develop it in dilute XTOL for an hour you get completely grainless 8x10s but i can never figure out how to get the tonalities I want from any format smaller than 4x5. Whatever. The obvious solution is to shoot 4x5 but it's a lot cheaper and easier to shoot 120 rollfilm and develop it for the finest grain you can get. Most non photographers wouldn't see much difference in the various prints anyway.

COMPLETELY RANDOM STUFF

It's late right now as I type this. I love the feeling of being very tired when I have time to just enjoy it. A soft, weightless weight on me.

If I were the president of the United States I would cover the white house with grass seeds and glue and rename it the Chia House.

The term glottal stop could usefully remamed Glo'al stop.

Aspiration could usefully be renamed haspiration.

The Beatles song Let it Be does not work well translated into latin, as the hearer just hears himself being instructed to "sit sit sit, sit sit sit, sit sit sit sit sit sit sit sit," and so forth.

Absolutely Fabulous is painfully unfunny. I also don't like Golden Girls. I had one girlfriend who loved that show so much that I learned not to channel surf for fear of coming across it.

My cats feel that humans are emotionally cold because we do not lick one another's butts. I explained that that's only for very special friends.

If I ever get a life I guess I'll write about that too.

Love and Kisses

djv

Well hello. Today I've decided to treat my (largely) hypothetical readership to some more of my self-indulgent keyboard clicking. I did a bit of mountain scrambling today. The photographs I sought did not materialize, but it's all good, the mountain should still be there when the seasons tweak the photographic conditions a bit.

Nobody cares about me boo hoo hoo. I shall therefore compose a dissenter's list of seven random categories of my behavior.

7 States I've had Sex in.

Massachusetts
Connecticut
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
California
Montana
New York

7 people i've pissed off at some point

My dad
Lester Brown
My Mom
My younger brother
My other Younger Brother
My high school latin teacher
My boss at my second to last job

7 famous authors i met at my bookstore job

Madeleine L'engle
Jane Yolen
Gloria Steinem
Jamaica Kincaid
John Ashbery
Lenora Fulani
Kurt Vonnegut

7 whiskies I've actually finished a whole bottle of.

Glenlivet
Glenkinchie
Laphroaig
Highland Park
Old Grand Dad 114
Glen Deveron
Lagavulin

7 books I've read that you haven't

Hidden Faces by Salvador Dali
Mountain Record of Zen Talks by John Daido Loori
The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien
The Hunting Rifle by Jack O'Connor
Inside Relativity by Mook and Vargish
Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

7 species of fish I've caught

Yellow Perch
Carp
American Freshwater Eel
Chain Pickerel
Smallmouth Bass
American Shad
Brook Trout

7 political organizations or movements i am not affiliated with

The Khmer Rouge
Antidisestablishmentarianism
The Catilinarian Conspiracy
The Jacobins
The American Temperance Society
The Second Continental Congress
The Roundheads

Well, I've managed to figure out how to upload to a folder but not yet how to move them over into a journal entry, but it's progress. I'm a photographic dinosaur with two enlargers in my second bedroom and something like 20-25 cameras. Embarrasingly behind the times with respect to elementary digital behaviors.

Yesterday I went to a lecture about Cicero. It wasn't terribly exciting but maybe I learned a couple of things. I also put in an application at Yankee Candle and my back was acting a bit funky but is better today. Since none of this entry has been interesting so far, I shall tell you a joke from ancient Greece. It reflects Greek negative attitudes about the prospects for an afterlife.

Two workmen were moving some wood on a very hot day and one was complaining about their life situation. "Our life really sucks, we work hard all day under the beating sun and just scrape enough to feed ourselves; I wish Death would come for me".

They proceeded down the road, and coming around a bend they found Death standing there in the road. Death said, "You called for me?"

The workman replied "We were just hoping you'd help us move some of this wood."

Whereas this morning I was clicking around SG some and I came across Amanda's page, and read her highly amusing list of various things that annoy her, and whereas I am a wholly unoriginal buttkissing copycat sycophant, I shall now treat the matter of a few little pet peeves of mine. Or perhaps what I should say is now I will push out the frontiers of my online journaling career with some pathologically intense vituperation. I will refine hatred itself; my hair will become a terrifying mass of flames and venomous serpents, my canine teeth will lengthen and drip with acid and poison, my fingernails will become six-inch long claws of jagged black iron. No really. Just wait until I figure out how to get my goddamn photos uploaded.

Article I. I have entirely had it with people who drive SUV's. The one incident which clinched this for me occurred last winter. I was pulling out onto route 20 in springfield on a very snowy morning and the roads were covered in snow and treacherous. I drove by this interesting accident scene. An SUV, a pickup truck, and a buick parked on the other side of the road. The pickup had damage on the side of the bed, and the buick had had it's driver's side front corner get crunched. It was obvious what had happened. The SUV owner had decided that he didn't need to be careful and go slow in the snow like everyone else, and had tried to go around the pickup truck, his rear end got away from him and he started fishtailing. He stove in the side of the pickup he was trying to pass and tagged the buick that was coming the other way. And then they all had a nice conversation. But what really got me was the I didn't even get a quarter mile further down the road when I saw another SUV driver attempt the exact same thing and also start fishtailing. Fortunately this second driver was able to regain control of her vehicle without hitting anyone. I hate the psople who make and sell these vehicles, I hate people who are selfish enough to own them, you waste fuel, you endanger other drivers who are driving more environmentally friendly vehicles. There are some who will object that it's driver and not the vehicle that's to blame. Thes people can basically kiss my ass. But let me not descend to the level of self-serving hypocrisy. I too am guilty of this sin, I too was once on a snowy highway behind someone who was going too slow for my liking and when I tried to get around that person I lost control of my girlfriend's neon. I had it fishtailing to 90 degrees right and left. Fortunately I was able to get it back under control. I am forced to concede that I must chain myself to the SUV owners when I push them over the precipice into the Fires of Hell. But I shall eat a lot of beans and garlic beforehand so I can fart in their faces on the way down.

Article II. As a motorycyclist, I have had entirely enough of people turning in front of oncoming motorcyclists and then telling the police that they hadn't seen them. If you can pass the eye exam to get your licence, you can see a object five feet tall and two feet wide across an intersection. Motorcycling publications often recommend that motorcyclists wear bright high visibility clothing. I have a feeling that the truth of the matter can be found in an informal experiment I read about. I guy presented himself on his bike in three ways. First, on a dark motorcycle in dark clothing. Then on a brightly colored motorcyle in bright clothing. Then on a very police-looking cruiser, wearing kneehigh boots, a blue shirt with badgelike patch on the chest, aviator sunglasses and a white half-helmet. You can probably guess the results. People violated his right of way just as often with the brightly colored bike as with the dark bike. But they never did so at all when he looked like a policeman. Which tells you that people, whatever zone they're in when they're driving, have an internal process keeping an eye out for things that can get them in trouble, like a cop, but a motorcyclist's life is not worth paying attention for. One I get my ring back and I'm running the show again, all legal proceedings against persons who have turned in front of motorcycles and then claimed not to have seen them will be juried exclusively by Hell's Angels who shall have the authority to exact punishments up to and inclucing requiring the guilty defendant to bend over for them.

Article III. I have entirely had it with the metastasis of the suburbs out into formerly wild areas. There's a mountain out in Whately were I got a deer in 1998. On the east slope it has a cleared area with a christmas tree farm at the base of the mountain. Over the years you could watch the houses advancing up the dirt road toward the base of the mountain until they finally got to the tree farm. People living in these houses were walking their dogs and driving 4X4's around the tree farm. The tree farm owner got angry at people walking their dogs there as his hired hands were stepping in the dogshit and now he's posted the whole area and you can't hunt that mountain any more. I despise the builders who put those houses there and the bourgeoisie twits who live in them so intensely I make myself sick. To lay the matter aside, the prescription for these parties will be something along the lines of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Article IV. I hate the deep negativity that my brain/mind has been stuck in for most of my life. When I was a kid I was really unpopular and picked on in school, my father beat the crap out of me did not pass up too many opportunities to verbally berate me and abuse me, the Catholics did a fine job of persuading me I was hellbound. Over the years there have certainly been plenty of people who have tried to get my out of my funk and to believe in myself, but I have always tended to think that people who think positive things about me are just wrong. As I've said before, I'm working though it. But it's tough to do; I really feel like something like a gosling that imprints on the first thing it sees and follows it with unshakeable loyalty. In my case the people who wanted me to hate myself got to me first, and did a very thorough job, and I imprinted on them. I hate the resistance that the human mind, at least in my case, has to to healing itself. because of the importance of "first impressions", so to speak.

Article V. I have had enough of people saying oh, SSSSSugar, instead of oh, shit. If youwant to say shit, say SHIT! Like, shit shit shit. See, that was easy and no children were corrupted.

That's enough hate for an evening, I spose.

Hello there, expansive readership of mine. Today was a milder day in the winter of my discontent. Once I asked my shrink if there was a named neurosis, corresponding to such deep pessimism as I get rather bogged down in. She said no, which was disappointing. But today, for no particular reason, was a milder day.

Had to throw out a musty old mat I was using to catch the water under my dish drainer. The smell of it made me think about my tendency to accumulate various categories of old stuff. I cannot physically walk by old or antique cameras on display at a tag sale or in an antique store and I have a bunch of them. I've done a little shooting with them but not an extensive amount of it. I actually screw myself up quite often when shooting newly acquired old cameras in that I will experiment with some film/developer combination I hadn't tried before and screw up the negatives, which might have been ok If I could just bring myself to stick with normal film developing.

I also have rather too many old guns, and a lot of old books. Recently I picked up a 1920-30's Gretch pathfinder clarinet off of ebay. It's ok but needs new corks. It really stank with age when I first opened up the case, but the smell has now subsided.

I don't formally collect anything; I just accumulate stuff. I suppose if you reach the point that your residence smells like musty antique stuff you've carried it too far. Somebody's got to keep the estate auctioneers in business I suppose.

A long time ago I had a dream wherein I walked through this abandoned old new england town, the sort where you have several builings on the main street, the firehouse, city hall, church, and a red brick library. some had taken all the books out of the library and put them all outside. So I came across this wall or fence that was made of books stacked about four or five feet high, just sitting on the ground, they were all water damaged and moldy. I also dream about trees a lot, monstrous gigantic exciting ones, and the next day I come back and they've been cut down for the sake of someone's making money off the lumber or because bourgeoisie thinks they're a safety hazard and they're going to fall down.

I spose if i'm really to call myself a buddhist i should have no problem with letting old things pass away; everything changes and is impermanent, everything in the universe commingles without distinction, but still I feel badly about how indifferent a lot of people are about the beauty of things that are lost to the world sooner than they needed to be. There are people in this world, maybe even a significant fraction of the population, who would cut down the last giant sequioa if there was a dollar to be made doing so.

This thought process doesn't necessarily lead anywhere, but it's characteristic of me.

cheerio, and pip pip.

Well, today I've easily spent at least two hours tryijng to upload a photograph. Been switching back and forth between the help page and my update page, have gotten my photo uploaded to a couple of differnt online image hosting services and have not been able to get my image transferred from either one. Best I could manage was to get a picture of the image hosting service logo with an error message.

I like SG but I really fucking hate computers. This is exactly the same reason I dropped out of engineering all those years ago and started reading latin and greek instead.

Tried to upload a pic of me and one of my cats. Unsuccessfully.

Didja ever notice that the Vices bar on your update/profile page is one of the widest bars they give you? You get just a single line bar for your favorite movies or books, but three lines for your vices. The builders of this site must have had high expectations of us.

Greetings, hypothetical reader of my journal, thank you for stopping by.

Today I hung about umass after my class this afternoon to see a guest lecturer who's trying for a position in the department I'm taking a class in. I'm trying to get a position in that department myself, as a grad student, therefore I go to such events as this to make myself visible, to show an interest in departmental goings-on.

Between class and the lecture I headed over to the library to read a bit from a book that's on reserve for my class and entirely failed to do so because I got off on a random floor to sit down a few minutes to eat my lunch, and I noticed a stack of bound editions of this old newspaper; the one I picked up was from 1930. I opened it and leafed through the pages, read a couple of little articles, but what really grabbed me were the cigarette and car advertisements. They were really clever and had great design. Despite the virtuosity in design that's possible today with computers, we've really missed the golden age of design and are now really in the age of the photograph.

When the lecture was over I went back to the library to get that book, and as I could only have it for two hours I just photgraphed the whole thing with my digital camera. Took about 20 minutes and my camera hand started to cramp up a bit. I felt kind of like a Russian spy stealing classified information with a Minox camera, worried just a little bit that a couple of guys in uniforms might show up and give me a "come with us please, sir" but really there's no reason why that would happen, as it's no different really than copying a bunch of the book with a xerox type machine. Occurs to me that this might be a good solution for students who can't afford their textbooks. Buy it photograph it return it. But the big publishers are working hard to shaft you in that respect, they shrink wrap their books and include useless software that their sales reps persuade professors to order. I was in the college bookstore industry for much too long and I could tell you stories.

don't have a cow, man.