quotes, page one

"When Hitler came for the Jews... I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned."
- Pastor Martin Niemoller, Congressional Record, October 14, 1968, vol. 114, p. 31636.

"Oh, this is going to be cute: meeting her parents half in the bag..."
- Shawn Darling, 9907.05

"Coasters, guys!"
- Eric Darling, 9907.08

"Think what you want, but say/do the right thing."
- Dad (Gil Fonseca), many times

"How long have philosophers warned us that autocratic, stupid, and gratuitous legislation- speed limits, gun control, alcohol and drug prohibition, confiscatory taxes, seizure decrees, environmental edicts, "health and safety" measures- nourish a people's contempt for law and order?"
- Culture of Harmlessness by L. Neil Smith Special to the Libertarian Enterprise

"If a girl doesn't like me because I'm not wearing $150 jeans, then Fuck You"
- Sean Glynn, 9909.25 @ 1:27

"...although I feel that I know a tremendous lot, I am not yet aware how much there is in the world to find out about. It will take me a little time to discover whether I am very wise or very foolish."
- Jack Pumpkinhead in The Land of Oz

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
- H.L. Mencken, quoted by Art Bell

"Only an idiot thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about!"
- The Hudsucker Proxy

"There is no gravity, the world just sucks."
- Player, posted on usenet

"Why, if you are angry because you want to do magical things and can't, and if you don't want to get angry at all, my advice is not to want to do magical things."
- the Nome King's chief counselor to the Nome King in The Emerald City of Oz

i like:

I like:

• being "flashed"
• A beer in a "coozy"
• Projects coming together
• Gray skies & light rain
• Black things
• Clean clothes

chocolate cake.

chocolate cake is the best. the absolute best. i'm not consumed with acquiring it, and i'm never "in the market" to buy some, so don't come calling. but once i've got my hands on it/ my mouth in it, mmmm!!!
i walk around every day, surrounded by vanilla, cherry, coffee cakes... i never look twice. sometimes i spy chocolate... get close enough... and it's clearly just a plain white cake with some brown-colored frosting :-( that's rare though.
occasionally i'll have a bite of plain white cake. it's often an i-was-drunk event, and i sometimes have regretted it: blood sugar and all. yeah, it might have tasted ok, nice and sweet or whatever, but it's usually been just a blaring siren calling my attention to the fact that there ain't any chocolate cake for miles around.
i've bought some chocolate cakes.
a few times, i've loved the first couple of pieces, then looked down to realize it was really half my imagination- i was really eating some kind of marble cake or something, and that really kills the pleasure. i've even (ridiculous as it sounds) felt guilty for losing my interest- it was decent cake... what? am i going to toss it out just because it isn't chocolate cake? yeah.
a few times, after the first few pieces, the cakes have gone bad! huh? how does a cake go bad? that quickly? never understood that. i could understand a cake going bad, if it's there for a long while. if it just sits there in the fridge forever, but damn! i was eating that! how'd it go bad under my nose?
but most times, the best cakes have vanished from the refrigerator. like, gone. i know i didn't finish those: damn, i only got to have a couple of pieces. what happened? fucking late-night-chocolate-cake burglars. bastards. well, i don't know. maybe it grew legs and walked off? maybe it dissolved into the atmosphere? that's been a possibility a couple of times, but a few other times, i know it couldn't have been the case, because i saw the damned thing, my teeth-marks and all, somewhere after the fact. and just try asking a fucking chocolate cake what the hells happened! they aren't very communicative ;-) damned inanimate objects and their lack-of-communication powers.
not that i've had a whole lot of chocolate cake. tons of other kinds, but only a couple of chocolate cakes. why is it so damned rare? am i the weirdo? (that's not a question! it's rhetorical!) why do so few love it?
i have seen pristine cakes. naturally, i've become a bit of a connoisseur of chocolate cakes, and, at least i think, i can tell a perfect chocolate cake from an imperfect something-else cake. don't bet on me though. but i've seen perfect cakes from a distance. sometimes, i'd even swear they were calling to me... "matt, come to me! i am perfect chocolate cake! consume me..." but it's an illusion, a mirage... or i get up close and it's behind glass, preventing me from getting at the damned thing...
once, recently- there was a really awesome-looking chocolate cake, like a chocolate cake i had some sort of ancient anamnesis about- i swear to gods, i'm not making this up: it had a little placard stuck in the top, saying "matt, this might just be the best cake you ever had!". and they wouldn't sell the damned thing to me. they even pulled out the little sign, when i asked about it. i can still see the fucking thing, in a window down the street, when i pass by. i can still see the little holes, where the stick with the little sign was stuck into the top of it. the door's always locked, and they don't answer the bell. well- once, they did, but i didn't really understand what they were saying. which is weird, because their english had been perfect, previously... that really sucks.
...
so i walked over to the store a little while ago, and there were a couple of  looked-like-white-bundt-cakes along the way. they looked pretty tasty, i guess. i'd have some, if i'd been served some at a table, i suppose, but i certainly wouldn't buy one. nah, i think even then, i'd say "no thanks". i've said "no thanks" to more not-chocolate cakes... don't remember any of them, unless they were really awesome-looking-but-still-not-chocolate cakes, or else really icky-looking things i can't imagine anyone would want to eat... why is there so much everything-but chocolate cake, in the world? and why do people keep trying to serve/sell it to me? jerks. no, i guess everyone's got their own tastes. i can't blame them.
it's not so bad, as long as i don't think about it much. it's not like i'm a chocolate-cake-oholic. i certainly don't need it. i'm pretty cool with cookies, i guess. they're available on the internet, pretty cheap.

narcissism

i've been consumed, this last week or so, with how damned good i've looked. walking down the street, i've been genuinely getting a little anxious for any upcoming glass windows in which i know i'll be able to see my reflection. i just spent 5 minutes, just looking into the mirror in my bedroom.
i feel no shame!
but, damn, my standards are low!

why i like numbers

with numbers, everything sums to unity... even if the unity is irrational, it's still a unity.
if i do a problem, i can retrace each step and see exactly whether i got it right. if i fuck it up, i can review and find my error, and even fix it.
in the walking-down-the-street world, with people and music and thoughts and old-friends and wants and drunks-at-the-bar and roommates and bosses and pretty-girls-downtown, it's so often almost impossible to tell... did i misunderstand the input? were the premises the input was based on wrong? did i perform a step, in the "formula", incorrectly? was the "formula" itself just inappropriate? is it the left pocket? the right pocket? no pocket at all? did i leave it on a rock, twenty-something years ago? is it under a pillow, waiting for me to find it if i look hard enough?
maybe the universe needs more psychedelics?
i'll just fix a martini.

wanna-be

several times this week, walking up Newport Avenue, i passed this:
and thought i'd come across some rather disgusting roadkill. once i got within a few feet, i could tell i hadn't. :-(
oh well.

sometimes, i...

sometimes, i

1. look at someone's computer, but can't find anything wrong with it (heyyy, that's an easy fix!) [@A. Heidi]
2. look at someone's computer, then look in my bag, and realize i brought everything but the one thing i need to correct the problem :-( [again, @A. Heidi]
3. get jealous- i'd really like to hear the conversation that went along while the girls made, say for example, a penis cake [@Smeg/Melissa]
4. want to smack someone for (inadvertently) teasing me with cadbury eggs. mmm. when i die, in a sugar coma, just after Easter, the culprit's initials were SJH [@Shay]
5. volunteer to work a night, half an hour before i get a facebook notice that a dear friend has a show, that night [@Tania, @Greg (>Douglas)]

sometimes, i...

sometimes, i

1. make plans, forget to journal them, forget what they were, and send out a torrent of messages the next day saying "when were we gonna _?", and "hey, were we gonna _ today?" [@Shay, @Meg, @Rob, @A. Nancy, ..., ..., ...]
   
2. long for pancakes, but i've never made them, so i go to the breakfast place, a block away- and it sucks if it's a Sunday, because, then, the place is packed and noisy-in-a-not-so-good way [@Shay]
   
3. drink too much too early, and later regret it: if i were capable of "embarrassment", i'd feel it: wtf did i say? did i really do that? (the tech era is both a blessing and a curse: in times past, i could've hoped i just misremembered, and maybe suffered some friends' reminders. whereas nowadays, there's often a txt msg/email msg/call log/somebody's cameraphone record- ugh.) [@Semple, @(most of the O.G.), @Angela, @John, @Laura, @Steven, @Heidi, @Lyndsy, @Diane, @Meg, @(who am i kidding? @everybody!)
   
4. switch too quickly between three books during a day- i'm always reading some fiction and some non-fiction, and then there's the audio book for when i'm busy walking/riding/cooking/etc. maybe i'm easily muddled? do people who watch tv feel that way, when their stories change each hour? [@Rae]
   
5. can really dig spending an entire day, sitting on the porch reading a book (or three, as previously mentioned :-P), listening to music.
6. can be made to feel really nice, because of what i know is completely irrelevant self-brain-teasing. [@Rick M., @the dark-haired chick at Murphy's (name? haha, q.v. #3)]
   
7. deliberately lose pages with names and phone numbers. [q.v. #3, #5]
8. wear headphones and pretend not to hear strangers trying to talk to me. [@everyone who rides the bus, especially]
   
9. sit at the computer for a little while on a beautiful day, when i ought to be out accomplishing some fun-ness, because there's something i've got to record before it slips my mind, then that something turns into a monster list of somethings before i can stop myself, and the