poetry

poetry is like a photograph done in black and
white, makes life real and sweet like
fruit that's ripe, making trite and
useless things take on light and duplicitous
or delicious meanings, the meanderings of
mights and maybes taking on solid life
like sex makes babies. anyone can
do it and it's potent every time because
for some reason when you see it,
it's heavy like iron, heady like smelling
salts and slippery like teflon, it's tough
to put the book down and join the
living, it's the gift that keeps on giving
as long as you look down.

latiflearned.com - it's hard to put down

Warning to Prospective iPod Purchasers

This device will play music in your ears all the time. This is awesome.

However, this device will also insert more noise into your already noisy head. It will allow you to tune out by adding more noise pollution to your already crowded psyche. If you have no room in your psyche, we recommend that you meditate. Loser.

This device will distract you from your environment. It is not recommended to operate heavy, medium, or light machinery, computers, other humans, or farm animals while using your iPod. You stand a good chance of running over somebody's chihuaha with your Volvo, crashing into a pedestrian on your bike, or disemboweling your livestock with the hay thresher if you use your iPod in conjunction with these machines.

This device will also send a message to your fellow humans - "Fuck off." If you don't want to tell your fellow humans to Fuck Off, you should probably wait until you're alone to use it. Or on the bus. Anywhere but a crowded sidewalk.

This device will send a clear message to would-be muggers: "Hey! I'm not paying attention to you! You could walk right up to me with a gun and I wouldn't notice until you had it shoved up my ass! You could probably get a few swipes in before I even registered that you'd stolen my wallet! In fact, go ahead and steal my wallet! As long as you leave the iPod in, I won't notice or care!"

In summary, your iPod will make your life and your interactions with other humans more robust and satisfying. Please enjoy responsibly.

Latiflearned.com - where the wild things are.

The Cadence of This Language

the cadence of this lanugage can
bring you pain and anguish,
it can drain reserves and leave
you laying languid or it can serve
to uplift you, sift you through
the strainer, the gift of subtle
gestures, swerve you left and
right on the lanes of layers,
aim you to the central matter and
the smatter of random noise, the
mad-hatter mercury danger boys,
lay you gently after dark on
the scented mattress of reason, it
can move you through a season in
a second then retrieve you on a
lark and place you in harm's way
but protect you
these are just some of the ways
it can affect you.



latiflearned.com

Reply to the Poem I Never Read

don't you see that when you act
crazy
it doesn't matter how many grains of truth
fall from your lips
like crumbs of bread?
they slip through my hands
like grains of sand
when you act crazy. it's like you're
dead.
so if you want to scream at me, scream
yourself a higher hoarse because
the source of your action is losing traction.
you're the captain of a norse vessel
clad in bearskin with no need for psilocybin
and it fills me with remorse

Latiflearned.com - Go Listen

the unsung hero of Boston
just rung up your change
while you were lost in
thought: "isn't it strange
that no one here ever smiles?"
you ponder and frown;
your creases dig deeper down.

the unsung hero of Boston
just opened the door
to the gasp of the frost in
the air: "is it just the poor
who have to ride the bus?"
you think, and you frown,
and you leave it behind a while
after you step down.

Latiflearned.com - Go Listen

computer guy

The other day, I was asked what I do, and I responded "I work in computers." I neglected to mention that I'm a guitarist, or a musician, or that I build guitars, or record music. I completely left out the music element of things entirely. I'm worried because this may be the first step toward full-fledged "computer-guy"-dom, and it may be the last. I may already be a computer guy.
Let's take a look at the facts: I own several routers (for internet), but none for woodwork. I have very strong opinions on powerpoint presentations. I haven't gotten a gig playing music in many months. I get excited about databases. I haven't practiced guitar regularly in many months. My eyeballs hurt.
It's not looking good, folks. So I need you to do me a favor: if you're a friend of mine, and you think I should be pursuing music more actively than I appear to be, let me know. Force me to make new albums. Force me to write a song about you. Get gigs for me and then force me to go play them. And so on.
In related news, the guitar that I started building about a year and a half ago is nearing completion. I'll post some photos... maybe. Maybe I won't. It's got a body and a neck, and the shapes are all there. It just needs some hardware, some finish, some frets, and the baby's good to go. More on that later.

Latiflearned.com - For when you're feeling a little too chipper

Back on MySpace

Seeing as how MySpace changed their policy from one of pure evil to one of basic evil, with an option for pure available for professional musicians, I've added myself back to Myspace. The link on the side of this blog will work again. And the links in my previous posts will work as well. Sweet. Sort of.
However! One can still go to Latiflearned.comn and get the latest news and show dates! The MySpace page is a necessary, basic evil.
Et voila!

hate dogs

Seriously, folks,
What's up with you all hating hot dogs? Why all the lack of love? What's not to like about tubular meat? Now, granted, the pig lips and rat tails that you get from an Oscar Meyer weiner (which, I think we can all agree, nobody wants to be) aren't what I'm talking about. Nobody in their right mind can get behind junk food. I'm talking about all beef, I'm talking about relish, I'm talking about gourmet, sesame-coated buns. Why can't we all get behind sesame-coated buns? Why all of this hate? Why can't you let go of your vegetarian, mildly homophobic neuroticisms and appreciate one of the greatest inventions of Person?
Speaking of hate, I've found out that I know people who have it! One person I know has hate for people who listen to reggae music. If you listen to reggae, this friend of mine automatically hates you! While I think this a little bit harsh, I can see the path one could go down to get to reggae-hating.
I also found out that I know somebody who is a spirituality-hater. You like crystals? Don't talk about them around this person: you will be hated! It must be something about Boston (cities?) that makes people want to enact that hating. Some sort of self-preservation mechanism that lets you transfer your rage at the driver who almost ran your bike over, the surly waiter, the drunken crazy person who accosted you, transfer all of that rage to reggae, or hippies.
The moral of the story is: don't let the city get the better of you! Tame that hate! Take Shaolin White Crane Long Fist Kung-Fu and feel better by punching! Punch-therapy, or as I prefer to call it: acupunchure.
Aaaaaaaaaand, I'm spent.

Latiflearned.com - Go Transfer your Rage

there i was
watching movies at my feet with my neck craned
while i should have been biking
jerking, the road bumps underneath
evading cars, but instead
there i was playing pool
when i should have been thinking
of a better way to describe
the way you make a tiny noise
when i accost you unexpectedly
and lift you off your feet, then another
noise, but
there i was trying to coax a rhyme
out of a vacuous phrase,
looking for a pattern or a meaning
when i should have been sleeping

Latiflearned.com - Go Listen

yesterday i spent a while choosing
the right shirt color
to go with the cranberry shade
of my stretchy pants

it's important, truly important
VERY important to choose the right color
because not a lot of colors
go with the cranberry shade
of my stretchy pants

not to mention the texture
which, given the corduroy nature
of the pants, should be lesser,
softer

i just woke up.
i can't move my head.
some malady possesses me,
and the cranberry shade
of my stretchy pants
seems less important
(i think i'll stay in bed)

Latiflearned.com has lyrics, not poetry.

machines?

Computers are like crops. In both, the rules of natural selection apply. For crops, you have predators such as insects, beetles and worms who contribute to the ecosystem by eating one specific variety of corn, of which you've planted 89 hectares worth. Damn! So, coat that corn in pesticide, kill the beetles, and call it a day! With computers, you've got viruses and adware/malware, which target specific operating systems and programs (which constitute "species" of computers for the sake of this argument). So, slap on some antivirus software and forget about the problem. Forget... It'll go away... Forget...
So the point I'm getting at is that we have a computing monoculture, which is bad for exactly the same reason that food monoculture is bad: it only takes one variety of beetle that wants to eat it for all 89 hectares to go to ruin. You don't have to learn anything new here, just universally apply my metaphor, and encourage computing diversity! You'll be more robust! Use alternative browsers! Try out some Linux! Try your best to stay away from commercial office software solutions!
This makes me think about living systems, and how they're different from human mechanical systems. The ideal ecosystem, for example, has many parts, often interchangeable or overlapping, held together by diversity. An ideal system in the "natural" world is the one with the greatest co-existing diversity of parts. An ideal system (in terms of robustness/longevity) in the human-designed world, however, is the most generic an heterogeneous one.
Take cars, for example. Is it easier to maintain a Bugatti or a Toyota Camry? Arguably, the Bugatti is theoretically higher performance in many ways. But a Toyota Camry can take the most abuse - there are a plethora of available spare parts should it break, and most mechanics know or can figure out how to fix one... Try getting Joe at JP Auto to fix your mint-condition 1963 Aston-Martin, and you may run into difficulties.
So human systems seem to be, in this respect, in direct antipathy to natural systems. The most robust human-designed system is the one most representing a monoculture, which in the natural world is the worst system. This implies to me that we sould possibly shift our way of thinking to be more like the natural world, and thus more robust in the face of calamity. Encourage diversity! Customization! Make everything you do unique, and when the proverbial shit hits the proverbial pan, you'll stand a greater likelihood of being able to tough it out.
At least, that was what I thought this morning.

Latiflearned.com is far less pesudo-intellectual than this page.

Song of the Day/Week/Month?

Since Latif Learned is me and I'm Latif Learned, I'm going to be posting his songs here. I often make songs for people to send them in the email when I'm thinking about them, but why not post them here, too?

for sara - 09242006

Latiflearned.com has more

My "So-Called" Friendsters

... asked me "why not just delete your account?", if I have such a problem with Friendster's message. Well, I thought of that, but it doesn't really send any message back. In fact, it's exactly what I did with my MySpace account, and immediately regretted it. I want to be able to send a message to the world at large about the way I feel about Friendster, and there's no way you can convince somebody of the way you feel by being absent from a place where presence is voluntary. Once I deleted my profile from MySpace, the fact that I had a problem with MySpace was lost, because I just became, from the eyes of the internet, another person without a MySpace account.
And so on. Have a nice weekend.

Latiflearned.com is far less preachy than this site. Well, a little less preachy.

Friendster, Friendster, Why Are You So Wack?

I've talked about this before, so I won't belabor the point, but I'm accumulating problems with the social networking sites (friendster/myspace/blah blah blah) at an alarming rate. First, I was just worried that advertisers would see my friendster profile, and use my favorite bands against me by putting them in a Volkswagen commercial. This has been done, granted, but it doesn't stop there. Now we can all safely assume that if you're applying for a job, you're going to get Google searched, which means that anything posted online about you (with your real name attached to it) is going to be found. So your MySpace profile that professes your love for 311 and has naked ladies in a y-repeat pattern in the background? That's going to keep things from happening for you.
So I've deleted all pertinent information from my friendster profile, and left in its stead a message to the future... I reccomend that you all do the same.

Latiflearned.com is less paranoid.

Catch 22

I'm a big fan of public transit. I think that we should all use it. We should have rail! More trains! More buses! Fewer cars! More personal interaction. I think that the car/highway system is arguably one of the worst things to happen to American culture. That combined with our culture of rugged individualism turned us into the bunch of fuck-you cowboys that we are today.

Boston is trying to kill my love for public transit. The MBTA hates people. Take, for example, when I tried to go to work on Friday. To get on a bus at Forest Hills, you need one of two things: cash, or a weekly pass. Lacking cash due to an oversight, I simply figured that I'd get some cash out of the ATM, break it up by buying a bottle of water or something, then get on my bus with time to spare.
Unfortunately, the ATM at Forest Hills doesn't work. Bummer. I'm staring at my bus, which is going to leave in about two minutes, a bus that if missed will mean that I get to work half an hour late, and I can't find any way to get cash. So I go to the "Charlie Card" terminals, thinking that there *must* be some option there to allow me to get a pass so that I can ride the bus. I even go so far as to consider purchasing a weekly pass, just so that I can ride the bus on Friday. Unfortunately, the machine doesn't let you buy this week's pass, you can only buy next week's.
There is literally no way that I could get on that bus legitimately.
To rub some salt in the wound, I have a Charlie Card that'll work fine on the subway. So I tried to feign innocence and get on the bus with that. The driver says "those don't work on this bus." So I'll have to get cash? Yep. But the ATM doesn't work, how am I supposed to get cash? I dunno, what do you want me to do? All I'm saying is that I would love to pay you to get on this bus, but I have no way of doing that.
So she let me ride the bus for free, after I swore that I'd try to remember to bring cash from now on.
I'm just going to ride my bike from here on out. Seriously, folks. You can't even pay the MBTA to ride their buses.

Latiflearned.com doesn't talk about buses at all.

Represent

You might think that your high school mascot was pretty cool. Well, I've got news for you. The Cougars, Wildcats, Oscelots, etc. of the world have nothing on my high school mascot: the Sandstoners.
Now, being the Sandstoners would be unremarkable, except that that's not what we call ourselves. We call ourselves the Stoners. Parents call us the Stoners. Newspapers call us the Stoners. It's official. Think you can top that?



Latiflearned.com is basically the bomb.

that's right. i've got it and you don't.

Today at lunch, my coworker Dave came in and asked me if I'd be down
for some free indoor skydiving in a wind tunnel. The only catch is
that I have to leave work a couple of hours early to do it. I paused
for about one second and said

"Okay!"

It turns out that a former coworker of mine (or rather, a former
employee of my organization) is a champion skydiver, and his team
gets free shots at the new indoor skydiving center they're building
in Nashua, NH, a mere hour from Boston. The organization is
called SkyVentures, and I'd link their web site if I was writing this
post with internet access. Alas! I'm writing from my new apartment,
and there's no internet here.

So I and a coworker left work early, hopped in the truck, and drove
to Nashua, NH. The people there were all like, "Are you ready to pay
us a ton of money?" and we dropped the name of our coworker, and they
were like, " Oh, go right in for free."

It turns out that a camera crew was coming that day to do some shots,
so our class and subsequent "jump" was me and my coworker, some lady,
and a TV anchorwoman for a local news channel in New Hampshire, with
her cameraman. We did a brief class in the basics, suited up in the
incredibly flattering newby air gear, and headed into the chamber.

The entire building is built around this massive chamber, that can
reach vertical air speeds of up to 190MPH. When it gets that fast,
the whole place starts to shake, and if you're sitting in the benches
inside, you kind of bounce around. When they started the air up, we
bumbled around in the air for a while, with our instructor pointing
out cryptic hand gestures like "relax" and "bend your knees" at us
while we caromed off of the walls for a while. At one point, I gained
enough balance that he let go of me, and I flew about ten feet in the
air. When I got back inside, I realized that I'd been drooling over
my face the entire time. Classy.

There was a fellow there who was a veteran of the Orlando wind
tunnel, up to teach everybody the special wind tunnel tricks. He gave
us a show of the crazy shit you can do in a wind tunnel, and suffice
it to say, the guy is an air ninja. He can walk on walls. He can
levitate. He can disappear. It was the most amazing thing I've ever
seen in real life.

So the point of my story is that if you want to drop $50 on half an
hour, several minutes of which are in a wind tunnel, you should drive
to Nashua, NH. I'd recommend skipping work to do it if you can.

it's best to alienate everybody with too much distance between posts, and then an obtuse, somewhat offensive reference to an unpopular social phenom

Latiflearned.com - Go Listen

sometimes everything breaks at once. that's the way it's been at work recently; inevitably, the moment you really want to use everything you've got, it's flaws become apparent. we've never taxed our shit quite like this, and it's always a bit disheartening when it doesn't quite stand up.
all of that work-related heartbreak got me feeling really tense, like i have a knot right in the middle of my chest. now, the knot's a new feeling to me, and new bad feelings are typically scary, so i consulted a couple of friends. "yeah, that'll happen." they all tell me, like this was something to be expected, and as though it were miraculous that i'd never felt this way until now.
which got me thinking: why haven't i felt this way until now? my brother calls it the pain of being human. in what way am i more "human" now than i used to be? what's effecting the transition? the positive side benefit is that these feelings create in me a greater sense of empathy for my fellow people, which is probably useful in a time of such generally low empathy.

when you always make promises or resolutions that you can't keep, does that mean that you're a bad person, a failure? or might it mean that you should just stop making promises? or stop resolving. it's a good thing that new year's is so far off, so we don't have to really think about any of that right now. just keep 'er in the back of your mind.

latiflearned.com is pretty nice.