I freaking lay in bed awake, and all i can think about is how fucking insane nuts all the systems around us are. How complex traffic grids are, for instance.  Do you have any idea how complex the system is that can get a fresh grown tomato onto your dinner plate when you live in Alberta, Canada, in the middle of winter? Or how complex your cardiovascular system is, how all it is doing is transfering molecules of oxygen to little machines all over your body that somehow use it for fuel? Or how languages develop and are taught, how our eyes work, how are you reading the words on this screen right at this minute??  It is just little up and down lines and curves that make little shapes, yet words and phrases and meaning pop into your head. You couldn’t look at these words and NOT read them if you tried.  Why?  I think about what a computer has to do to scan an image, i think about how Monet sees an image in his head and he puts it down on paper and then your eye sees that image, and in a large way, both monet’s brain and your brain interpret the same meaning, even though he has been dead for 400 years. but if you give that image to a computer, it could describe every little thing about every little pixel but it couldn’t tell you what it MEANS. how is it that i could scribble a picture of a horse on a paper with a crayon in 5 seconds, but i could also show you a 10megapixel picture of a real horse, and BOTH THOSE images say “horse” to you? what the FUCK. why the fuck are most of the planets in our solar system on the same basic planar axis? have you ever seen what satellite weather patterns look like when sped up 100x times? They look like smoke in a wind tunnel, and i bet if you could speed up the movement of the tectonic plates 10000000000 times it would look the same. how the hell do they know electrons exist but they can’t say precisely where they are at any given moment in time? what the hell IS a moment in time? why do we feel time going forward? why can we not go backwards? how would we even know if we were? how do we know if our own conciousness is nothing other than a byproduct of how our brain interprets information… which in and of itself is simply another highly complex system? how do we know that all systems do not posess their own sort of conciousness, and how do we know that a computer could not creatively create a novel abstract that another computer could derive meaning from, but that we as humans would never even understand or detect?

So as a little subconcious trickery that I’m pretty sure won’t work, I’d like to address the following message to my brain:  Don’t get me wrong, I like being a scientist or whatever.  I like thinking about the world around me and figuring out how it all works.  I also like SLEEPING.  When 11:52ish rolls around on mondays, I apologize to the great mysteries of the system in which I live, but I gotta wake up and i’m cranky when I wake up with no sleep, so just shutup you silly little brain, let me pretend i’m in control for a bit, and i’ll let you think about this stuff more tomorrow.  Or hell, keep thinking about it, just let ME go to sleep.  We all know you can keep doing whatever you want without me being involved, so just leave me out of it and when I wake up tomorrow, report to me with your findings.

Screw it.  I’m taking some melatonin and removing all doubt.  Mmmm the sweet, sweet cloudy curtain of the sleep.  Let’s see what kind of crazy shit my hippocampus can come up with when its not limited by the dulling realities of concious inputs.

Lauren, myself, and a couple friends woke up early this weekend and made a trip up to the north georgia mountains. The loop of roads formed by US348, US17, and US19 have been described as “the most curvacious in the united states”. I didn’t really know what to expect. Would it really be so ridiculously curvy that you had to go 20mph? Or would we have to be going 90mph to even make it exciting.

It wasn’t either of those, really. There were several stretches of the route that were absolutely ridiculous. Like quadruple S curves with 200ft elevation differences. It’s really rather quite boring to describe it in words, so I’ll just post a few pictures of the trip.

We did happen to take the same route as the GT Ride & Drive takes every year, so we’ll probably go with them again in march.

Got lost point #1. Thats justin in his GTI.

The stop after the first section of the route. There was a nice little rest stop area, I think it was the trailhead for the appalachian trail. A couple bicyclers were just pulling up… keep in mind this was at the TOP of the mountain thing. I laughed at them.

Lauren, myself

Second time we got lost

Georgia can actually be somewhat picturesque sometimes… who knew

That entire side of the cliffs were covered in huge sheets of ice. Good thing we hadn’t gone the day before like planned

Curvy. 85% of the time I was on this road, I was driving by looking out my side window, because thats where the road was going

Going about 50 here or so

On the absolute curviest stretch of the route, we get stuck behind this guy. He couldn’t have broken 10mph for the entire 5 or 6 mile road. It was miserable. Oh but then it got better!

10mph too fast? Lets just add some bicyclists to the mix, whom the old man in the truck would refuse to go around

We got pretty high up there

So, thats it. It was definitely a blast, I’m sure we’ll do it again.

Sometimes when I ride the elevator down the 20 flights of stairs to the lobby, I pace around the perimeter of the elevator car as it is descending.  Maybe my presence is creating indelible impressions on the fabric of space time, and someone else in some other dimension will find the resulting spiral interesting.  Perhaps they will jump on it at the top and spin down the tube I created through time and space and think, “well isn’t this an interesting abnormation of nature, as if it was made just for me to slide down.”

I am really getting tired of this crap.  Every morning I wake up and its in the low to mid 20’s, barely gets into the 40’s during the day.  Yeah I can put on shirts and sweaters and coats and gloves and hats — but they don’t make hats for your legs, at least not any that I’m going to bother wearing to work.  So I have to walk outside and get into my freezing cold car in these stupid slacks and these stupid black socks and it absolutely sucks.

I remember back when I lived at Collier Ridge, during the summer it was so nice.  Despite what people think about Atlanta, it really rarely gets above the low 90’s even on the hottest days, and even then my apartment was in a heavily wooded area so I had lots of nice shade.  On sunday afternoons with nothing to do, I would go around the house and open all the windows, letting in this delicious amber breeze that settled in and sank onto everything.  I’d be able to hear the trees rustling outside, the occasional car driving by that would be muffled by the rising heat off the asphalt.  I’d sit around on the couch in a nice patch of sunlight and turn the HD to some final round play of a PGA championship of some sort, sit back with the laptop and a tall cool glass of freshly made sweet tea, and just relax like they were gonna ban relaxing tomorrow.  Hobbes would pad around softly for a while until settling down next to me to take a nap and eventually I’d slouch over next to him to do the same.  Both of us dreaming of who knows what, until being awoken by my cell phone with someone on the other end telling me to get my butt up and come down to the pool for a cookout.

You can’t beat that, you simply can’t.  Thats my definition of a perfect day.  I realized today that I had almost lost all memory of days like that, as if this continuous stream of dreary, cloudy, miserably freezing days had beaten the very idea out of my head.  Maybe I’ll spend one last summer here, then come December when it gets cold again, I’ll pack up and move to phoenix where it is warm all the time.

Living on the 20th floor of a highrise you would think reception of radio waves would be superb, but unfortunately that is not the case.  Our alarm radio has a serious case of schizophrenia, in that it doesn’t particularly care what station you set it to at night; by morning, it has chosen something else, something it perhaps felt would be more fitting for wake up music.  This usually means the crap they play on WREK 91.1, which is some kind of eclectic string percussion peices and rattling chains tied to screaming babies.

So, considering I haven’t done anything cool with a computer in quite a while, I decided to build us an alarm clock.  I had an older IBM Thinkpad P2-366 sitting at work that I’d intended to sell, but even at $50 it didn’t have any takers.  So I’m going to hook a cheap pair of speakers, put a fresh copy of xubuntu on it, and stick it in the bedroom with a chron job set to 6:50 am monday through friday I’ll fold the LCD back over onto itself and prop it up like a picture frame, then just turn on a screen saver that flips through my catalogue of digital pics, or perhaps just cycles through some kind of waving psychadelic pattern of lines and shapes.

This way I can set it to play anything I want at 6:50 am… it’s going to be glorious tomorrow morning.