I recently stumbled across this video: ten hours of Darth Vader’s wheezing. Hypnotic! Weird! Fabulous! But then things got even more hypnotic, weird and fabulous when I discovered that the “ten-hour video” is a bona fide Interwebs phenomenon. People are looping together short clips to make ten hours’ worth of all kinds of ridiculous things, [...]
Archive for the ‘Mind & Brain’ category
How’s that fugue state coming along? *
Last week Swells mentioned a tune she’s currently digging so much that she claimed, “I might need to ease up on the rotation soon so I don’t forget all the other songs I know.” That got me thinking a lot about repetition, particularly as it concerns art and our experience of it. How and why [...]
How I came to be the last man on earth
It’s usually in times of emotional distress (like December through March, for example) that I start thinking about what it would be like to be alone on earth. I should say it’s functioned as a fucked up escape fantasy for me for a long time, an alternative to stepping into the street and knocking men’s [...]
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
Because of a family medical history predisposing me to cancer, I have an MRI screening at least once a year, sometimes twice. Most people I mention this to express a claustrophobic terror of this experience, but I find there’s something perversely peaceful about it. Getting tucked into a heavy double layer of blankets, I start [...]
Pedagogy of revision
No one’s students are sadder than mine right now. Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in [...]
Being there
I’m falling for Tara. Tara Brach. The woman who combines Western psychology with Eastern spirituality. I’ve alleviated the boredom of my morning physical therapy for back pain by listening to her Radical Acceptance audiobook. It’s kind of awesome. She has ways of dealing with life, the universe and everything. It’s an ideology, but not one [...]
Yes, I’ve made it.
As one who considers 35 to be middle-aged (I’ve been past this milestone for seven years now), I’ve wondered when I’d start really feeling it. Sure, there are the physical symptoms, but I’ve had the creaky joints and bad back since I was about 30. What I mean is, I wasn’t quite sure when I’d [...]
Travel summery pt. 6: New Jersey, the dream state
I was a scared little kid, and since NJ is where I grew up, the state still holds a greater degree of creepiness than any place I’ve since been. Even if I weren’t from there, however, Jersey would likely put me ill at ease. I shot these during a walk on the beach. The fog [...]
Unwarranted exercise
It seems like my new friends here are determined not to let me go gently into that good fall of keeping chin-stroking office hours and toddling back to my house for a grilled cheese and soup. Let’s hunt down a new dive bar! Let’s go see a play rehearsal! Let’s join a local meeting about [...]
