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Recent Entries
inspiration or enlightenment, or essenic jews or jain buddhism
It's All the Communist Blanket.
On Art, again.
I have forgotten, too.
New pboy.net page.
Another AIM Conversation
My blog is effxored up?
On Keyrings and Who We Are.
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March 31, 2005

inspiration or enlightenment, or essenic jews or jain buddhism

aaaaaaaah just kiddin, I got nuthin.

.....yet.

Posted by pedalboy at 3:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

It's All the Communist Blanket.

I love it when life comes together and makes sense.

I'm watching a documentary on Hitler and Stalin, mostly because I'm reading about Shostakovich right now who had to deal with Stalin quite a bit and they had a strange relationship and all that.... But the point is that things that I learned from the Shostakoich books line up, reinforce, and add to what i'm watching on TV. Not only that, but I can now extend the connection to the video "Frida" about artist Frida Kahlo, because her and her husband (artist Diego Rivera) harbored philosopher Trotsky for a while, who was was running from Stalin. Stalin's assasination attempt eventuallyl prevailed.

I can now connect shostakovich to frida kahlo. Amazing.

But wait, there's more. This all gives me a much better frame to put George Orwell's "1984" into. Stalin was an obsessive micro-manager. He took personal control over almost all aspects of Soviet life. He would dictate the arts, literature, the economy, the government, the people's lives (and deaths), and he would even control history. Varius figures (like Trotsky) were photo-retouched out of photographs, newspapers, posters... People's lives were erased, people's pasts were erased, people themselves were erased as they were sent to the Gulag. They were simply passed into the memory hole.

And so we come to the idea that has been dominating my mind an consciousness for the past few months - Forgetfulness. The existential kind. As i've said before, It will be a sad day when, long after your death, the last record of your existence is wiped from the planet, probably represented as a particular configuration of small pieces of magnetized metal in a hard drive that contains a database with your name and email used to send you emails advertising for canadian viagra. When that hard drive crashes and is thrown out, your life and all that you felt was important will be forgotten. With how the wonderful internet works, I sometimes get brainwashed to believe that every detail about life is accessible somewhere and you just need to know the right search term to get it. But the real world is not like that. You can be forgotten. Correction: you will be forgotten.
Some philosophers will say that this is a result of that ever-present, very real, but seldom-defined entity in all of us that we term "existential angst." Perhaps, but whatever this is has been in mankind since cavemen first put the realities of their existence onto a rock wall with blood and stone. (Incedentally, maybe science just confirmed what we knew all along, that something fundamental about our existence is in blood. If you are shouting to an unhearing world that you ARE, what better medium than blood?)
If anyone should be in charge of preserving my history, the events of my life, the thoughts in my head, it should be me. But I can't remember but a few isolated events from my childhood. An out of body image of my mother putting me to bed. Running up the white mounds of the badlands on vacation. Balancing on a limb of a tree in the forest behind my house. Playing a board game with my family and accidentally swearing and how deathly quiet it got. I can't remember the way I thought in freshmen year of high school. I've had to half-rember, half-fabricate the thoughts I had when i first met Kristin. I am a benign Stalin, reinventing my own past to suit the whims of the present.
And so I post blogs. And so I have a black book to write down my days in. And so I write songs, personal songs, that I desire to be heard by many people. And so I desire, like everyone else, to go out and "make something of myself," which is really just code for "do something that will allow me to be remembered for slightly longer than most."

Ooh man I think I could really get into the X-files. Back-to-back episodes. I was never allowed to watch them... If anyone loves me a rediculous amount, they should buy me the DVDs of these. Cuz they rule. Episode 2 Update: Shoot there's 5 minutes left and its pretty unresolved... They can't do TWO "to be continued"'s in a row, can they?? Oh the HUMANITY!! UPDATE #2: oh life is good. These shows are an hour, not a half. Peachy keen.

I've made a lot of connections to and from seemingly unrelated entities in this entry. I've put a lot of history and lives into a specific context. Only connections can transform history into people's lives. With all this forgetfulness going on, there are definite limits to how much we can know, to what we can understand about the past and consequently, the present. Oh schoot. This is where my info-freak nature really doesn't jive well with the world. I do not reaching the end of the line when it comes to what can be known. Of course i could never know everything that there is to know in this world, limited as that may be. But I can easily think of questions that can never be answered. These are the personal ones. The kind that may some day my great grandson will be able to answer about me, should he care to ask. And that's what this thought is about.

And on an unrelated (I think) note: I hate the term "coming-of-age" when applied to a work of art, i.e. a coming of age novel. It presents a false dualism, since almost all personal works of art relate to trying to explore some part of themselves - all personal art is "coming of age" so the label is useless, so stop selectively using it. /Rant

Oh and another thing. There's an awful lot of commercials these days that feature a guy-girl couple that have some sort of problem to solve (buy a new car, get over the intolerable boredom of broadcast television, etc...) and the men are the dullards and the smart sassy self-righteous women have already solved the problem. I guess this is payback for all the beautiful women on TV who have been paired up with ugly men, ala King of Queens. Can't we all just get along? /Rant2

Posted by pedalboy at 1:37 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

On Art, again.

"Science advances at the rate that technology provides tools of greater precision, while art advances at the pace that evolution provides minds with greater insight - a pace that is, for better or worse, glacially slow. Thus while the stone tools fashioned by cave dwellers an Ice Age ago are hopelessly primitive by current technological standards, their wall paintings remain as elegant and expressive as any modern art. And while a hundred civilizations have prospered (sometimes for centuries) without computers or windmills or even the wheel, none have survived even a few generations without art.

Art is art partially because it is constantly taking what has been done to the next level. Interesting in the context of art's timeless quality and "glacial" innovation. Please leave some thoughts. I am running low on my own.

Posted by pedalboy at 3:32 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

March 15, 2005

I have forgotten, too.

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.
She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they
forget?'"

-Howard Ikemoto.

Posted by pedalboy at 10:23 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 13, 2005

New pboy.net page.

there is a new pedalboy.net index page which features some new content i applogize for the non-functionalities of the features of "calendar" and "webcam" the "calendar" will be operational as soon as I fix it and the "webcam" will be operational as soon as I go home and turn the server back on in the meantime you have photos to amuse yourself with thank you and good day.

Posted by pedalboy at 5:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 6, 2005

Another AIM Conversation

Pedalboy007: thom yorke, elliot smith, jeff tweedy, johnny greenwood be darned
Pedalboy007: Beethoven ruled them al
Pedalboy007: He is the musical embodiment of the great black monolith from 2001
katesilvergirl: hahahahahahaha
katesilvergirl: that is cool
katesilvergirl: tolstoy said that he sucked though
Pedalboy007: tolstoy was a mitochondrion compared to beethoven
Pedalboy007: i mean, c'mon, what did tolstoy ever do??
katesilvergirl: hahaha
katesilvergirl: only write anna karenina, in my top five books of all time list
Pedalboy007: he's only top five
Pedalboy007: what a loser has-been
katesilvergirl: hahahahahaha
Pedalboy007: he never got any chicks thats for sure
katesilvergirl: that is relaly really good for me though
katesilvergirl: hahaha
katesilvergirl: did beethoven?
Pedalboy007: oh yeah man......
Pedalboy007: ummm
Pedalboy007: sure...
Pedalboy007: he had to beat them off with his baton
katesilvergirl: stop lying
Pedalboy007: you wondered why his hair always looked like that
Pedalboy007: cuz he was the original beatle
katesilvergirl: haahhahahaha
katesilvergirl: he looks more like albert einstein
Pedalboy007: ha
Pedalboy007: that too
Pedalboy007: albert einstein got tons of chicks too
Pedalboy007: at least before he wouldn't acknolege or study quantum theory
Pedalboy007: darn ol' einstein should have known physics wasn't ready for unification just yet
katesilvergirl: hahahahaha
Pedalboy007: oh man kate
Pedalboy007: i'm losing my mind
Pedalboy007: i wish i could just get it over with though
katesilvergirl: oh geez, matt
katesilvergirl: i know how you feel
katesilvergirl: what would it be like for you to go crazy
katesilvergirl: what form would it take?
Pedalboy007: i would jump in and out of consciousness... i would do things and do not know why or remember them when i regained consciousness. I would stare at my own actions like a tourist in a foriegn country. I would stare, eyes unfocused, making people uncomfortable when they think i am looking at them. I would have anxiety attacks. I would still be a creative being, but my creations would no longer make any sense to anyone but me, and then they would only make sense to me as I was creating them, never after.
Pedalboy007: i would take everything to its logical extreme
Pedalboy007: i think the last part is the worst

-----

I already take things to their logical extreme occasionally. Funny how sometimes I feel guilty about it. Doing this shows the absurdity of commonly accepted things. I do it mostly out of a fascination for Dada. Trying to "create paradigm shifts" and all that. But that only works when other people understand what you are doing, which is seldom, and if they are already aware enough to understand your actions, they aren't the ones that need to learn it anyway.

-----

Books you need to read, world:
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig.
Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut.

Posted by pedalboy at 4:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

My blog is effxored up?

Is it? I don't know....

For some reason, the archives aren't working right, they're showing you the HTML instead. how strange.

Posted by pedalboy at 1:57 PM | TrackBack

On Keyrings and Who We Are.

Who we are is a big question. It has the same effect on us that the psychological white of a blank canvas has on an artist lacking inspiration. Inspiration is a name we give to a small idea. Big ideas are suicide. Think small.

(Do not write about the world. Do not write about your country. Do not write about your locale. Do not even write about your hometown. You're still thinking too large. Where will you start? Your street? Your house? Your room? Your bed? No, none of these things helps you understand anything. Perhaps the chewing gum stuck to the top of your scratched wooden bedpost might begin to be able to tell you something about life. But you may still need to dig deeper.)

I've long ago given up on the idea of knowing the most about myself of anyone on the planet. I will, however and without a doubt, think the most about myself of anyone one the planet. This is to be expected. But individuals have far too great of a conflict of interest to be objective about themselves. But we want to know about ourselves, which is why we think about ourselves so much. A paradox.

We are forced to look outside ourselves to see into ourselves. That's not as deep as it sounds. Concurrently, we also are forced to look at the small to begin to tackle the large. That's what this piece is about... My keychain. Now I have something to talk about.

The keyring itself is not really a ring at all. It is simply a long metal rod that has been bent into overlapping circles so that you can pry them apart momentarily to insert a key (or any other object with a small hole in it) through the loops until it is through and mounted on the ring so that an entirely absurd and unlikely chain of events would be required to remove it by sheer chance. And yet, I, Matthew Conrad Good, Destroyer of Worlds, can bring the removal of the key about with such celerity that is no wonder that I find myself to be the Ruler of All that I See. Attatched to this not-a-ring are most of my keys, and another not-a-ring. I have a key to the office where I work, a key to the computer lab in Snyder that I used to go to for one of my CIS classes, my mailbox key, a house key for back home, and my precious car key. The other ring is affixed to a broken, anachronistic ram chip that really serves as more of a talisman and a constant reminder of my own faulty memory, and two other keys - my dorm key and my dorm room key. They are on their own ring because i use them more frequently. The whole conglomeration is mounted to my belt loop (typically) by the use of a non-load-bearing carabiner. Somewhat hypocritical, yes, but only in form, not in function. The carabiner is inscribed with the words "BLACK DIAMOND USA."

When I lost my keys twice in a 24-hour period a few weeks ago, I had to "sleep" out on the couch in the lounge. I really wondered if I my mind was slipping away from me. I was angrier than many worse things make me. I cursed. I was angry at God. What is so incredibly important about these stupid keys?

I haven't been home in a while. I haven't been to Wash U in a while. I haven't been anywhere in a while. I miss taking car trips. Its that feeling of leaving Greenville behind. Not just the school and the mess and work that it symbolizes, but also my friends and the person that I am around them. I really sincerely deeply miss the feeling of leaving that community behind and finding a new life, even if just for one short weekend. Being someone else for a while is uncommonly refreshing.

When I lost my keys, I was angry because I did not have the physical capability of leaving this place in the dust if it came down to that. I was marooned here. Now, of course, I have had these keys since the beginning of January and haven't left yet, so I am tied down by other factors, not just physical ones, but it is deeply psychologically comforting to feel my car key bounce against my leg as I walk to class and know that given the right (or wrong) whim, I could easily be on either coast within days with the money I have in my checking acount.

This is my form of homesickness.

(Side note: Do I plan things like my ram chip being a reflection of my sketchy mental state? No. But is it really random? Of course not. I have a wonderful life set up so that I can live on intuition almost completely and things will fall into place. Its Zen. Its cosmic. Its easy. Its surprising. Its wonderful. I make conscious decisions that allow my subconscious to dictate what conscious things I do. An elegant never-ending cycle of being. It is marvelous how it surprises even me.)

-----

We'll save the issue of why I feel naked without my watch for another day.

Posted by pedalboy at 1:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack