teh rawk

I'm not here anymore!

2010-10-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

Feel free to get in on the action at BriScoBlog. I blog there now.

In the Arms of Metis

2007-10-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

I was sitting outside with my dreams in tow,
wasting time,
cause I had no place to go.
Sitting next to me,
some one quite clearly insane.
She said to me,
"Things are about to change."

She said to me, that it's about to begin.
She said to me, it's just a question of when.
She said to me (in a tone I can't explain)
She said to me:

"Live."

She said to me, "others will vie
to control the things you feel,
and control the things you try,
dictate the god you serve,
and the ideas you buy."
Then she said to me:

"Live."

Intrigued though I was
of her point of view,
I was eager to get back to
my nothing to do.
Besides, what could I learn
from someone so clearly insane?
Then she said to me,
"just let me explain."

She said to me, that nothing stays the same.
She said to me, life is more than pain.
She said to me, in a tone I can't explain,
She said to me:

"Live."

Then she said to me, "it's about to start for you.
There's only one thing
that you can take as truth.
No matter what they claim,
no matter what they do,
they may have made themselves
but they can't make you.

Now Live."

© 2007 Brian Fuller

Rejected Band Names

2007-10-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

saturday morning mudbath
whiskey and mimosa
turbulent landing
arthritic mummy
politically incorrect joke
utter perplexity
sheer boredom
holographic objections
partial moodity
The fartknocking trumpets
Duke Ellington's BM.
Chester Nutz
Freelance Enablers
Chokes for Fun
Border Patrol Agents....ahahahaha
Pre-packaged pisswater
Dare-E-Air
ARSEnal
Motivational Delinquents
Dorothy Mantooth is a Saint

.xlsx owns you

2007-10-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

man of mystery

walks in shadows, quietly.

finishes spreadsheets.

It is, in fact, true

2007-09-27T21:31:00.000-07:00

Playing with blog layouts is much more fun than computing the break-even quantity for machine a vs. machine b

A Day at the Salton Sea

2007-09-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

From the day I first heard its story, I've been fascinated with the Salton Sea, the man-made oasis-turned-tragedy just south of Palm Springs, CA. What was once a vacation getaway for Southern California residents is now a dying system, the unintentional paradise having become known for devastating algae blooms, fish die-offs resulting in millions of rotting fish carcases, and once unpredictable water levels that have destroyed most man-made structures that once hugged the shoreline. According to some very optimistic people, it could be poised to make a comeback. As I prepared for my trip to the body of water once dubbed the 'California Riviera,' I wondered what I would find. Would I be greeted by the amazing views and peaceful tranquility that the Salton Sea Authority says still exist, or will I arrive to find millions of dead and rotting fish in a waterlogged wasteland that few outsiders chose to visit?

I discovered a sad and beautiful place. From the right angles, the Salton Sea whispered haunted poetry of its glory days long ago, but turn your head slightly and the rancid truth comes crashing down, your nose being the victim of an all out assault trouped by the legions of fish rotting quietly along the shore. Sometimes the smell would give them away. Other times, legions of houseflies eagerly announced your arrival upon the next 'school' of fish. Following along the shoreline, you'd sometimes see in the distance beaches of a beautiful porcelain white, beaches more reminiscent of the Florida gulf coast than most that California has to offer. But closer inspection yeilds a grim truth - that's no sand. The sun may have bleached them, and the weather may have broken them into millions of little pieces, but step in the wrong spot and you could find yourself knee-deep in the bones of fish from long ago. At least here the flies and the smell had had their way and moved on to fresher kill.

Just down the road from the Ace and Spades, there was of place of greater tragedy. That buildings should crumble in this deserted wasteland could be expected, but the state park, with its freshly blacktopped parking area and clean, well maintained facilities, looked like a bride standing at the altar, hoping beyond hope that her groom who just said 'no' would suddenly have a change of heart and coming running back down the aisle to reclaim his eternal love.

One could imagine just a few years ago the excitement of the place, the parking lots full of boatloads of fishermen eagerly awaiting launch into the fertile waters, kids playing along the shoreline. The place would have been an oasis nestled in the Imperial Valley. The reality of today is that the buildings not laid to waste by the salty brine of the lake have become victims to neglect. They have died; there was no grace.

Can the Salton Sea be saved? Probably. Will it? Probably not. The problems don't seem insurmountable, but they do seem expensive, and that may be its biggest problem.

More information:

Everybody's favorite knowledge base

The Salton Sea Authority

The Redlands Institute

Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea (a documentary)

A new definition of Dog Days

2007-09-10T18:43:00.003-07:00

Flea markets are popular in the south. A few years ago, progress was made. Amid much fanfare, the Limestone County Indoor Flea Market opened. As flea markets go, it's posh: good location, easy parking, clean restrooms (for a flea market) and the best counterfeit Tommy Hilfiger and Coach purses your 'g-Dubs' can gitcha.

But 'Dog Days' is something extra special. If flea markets were an aging rock band, Dog Days would be its return-to-form album. What started apparently as a meeting place for breeders of various livestock and pets has evolved, or devolved depending on perspective, into an orgy of useless junk, old junk, old useless junk, rifles, shotguns, toy guns, and the occasional goat or puppy.

I guess it's true that one man's trash is another man's treasure. For what it's worth, I did find two things I considered buying. One was a grill and headlamp assembly, liberated from an old Jeep (could be an awesome piece of wall art in the ultimate man room or fantasy garage), and some mechanical contraption that appeared to be one part dune buggy, one part quad, and two parts bad-ass...but then I'd have no way of getting them back to Los Angeles and no where to put them.

What Compels A Person

2007-08-31T23:21:00.000-07:00

The "Person of the Year" according to Time Magazine is you, the people who make web 2.0 a reality. Since I only know of one other person who regularly reads this blog (and my pageview count confirms my suspicions that noone else does), I'm not sure if it's safe to list "Time Magazine's Person of the Year - 2006" on my resume just yet.

What compels a person? My guess is that there's as many answers to that question as there are people blogging. You could group these reasons into tidy boxes for sure. But just as there are no two people exactly alike, there are probably no two reasons exactly the same. So, every time I get the urge to post a new blog entry, I wonder: why? What point does it serve? Is it a diary that other people could see if they chose to? Do I spill my deepest most intimate secrets here and derive a little excitement from the fact that these things here, people aren't supposed to know?

It's not so much that I'm asking "What am I supposed to do?" or "What do I want to do?" The question is "Why should I do it?"

Once a philosopher student, always a philosophy student, I suppose.

This was supposed to be a blog entry about the feeling of sitting at a Delta terminal at LAX, waiting for a flight home, an itinerary carefully planned:

Work a full day Friday. Take the red-eye to Cincinnati; catch a connecting flight to Huntsville and be at my brother's house early enough for brunch...well, 'brunch' is not something we do in Tanner, Alabama, but I'd be home around that time nonetheless.

Instead, I'm sitting in at a Delta terminal in LAX waiting on a flight that's been delayed two full hours. This means I WON'T be catching a connecting flight to Huntsville. I'll be catching a connecting flight to Atlanta...and THEN a connecting flight to Huntsville.

So, what started as a blog hastily written to describe the butterflys dancing around in my stomach in anticipation of my first trip home since Christmas has morphed into a labor of boredom, courtesy of Delta Airlines.

I'm done, and I still have two hours to kill.

A Truth, Borne of Summer

2007-08-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

The languid days of this southern summer month bore down on me. I thought of you. Maybe it was the memories of you that bore down on me; it's hard to say at this point. It was damn hot nonetheless, and the parallelism was quite rewarding.

I sat there reading, trying to concentrate on the words. I couldn't keep the sweat from blurring my vision. It's kind of like crying, I thought, but the sting is more physical. The words, they stung. For years, you said, we were a masquerade, but there was no ball. Our true selves were hidden from each other, from ourselves. The space between the masks we wore and the souls they concealed wasn't vast, but it was effective. The physical a poor equivalence of the metaphysical.

The heat took its toll. I couldn't read any more, so I closed my eyes and tried to understand your words. The stinging went away. I understood.

You pretended to love. I pretended to care.

The Best Part of Waking Up

2007-08-06T09:17:00.000-07:00

The best part of waking up is NOT folgers in your cup. Wanna know why?

It's because there's no good part of waking up, at least not this morning. Sure, there are varying degrees to the suckage that is waking up, but to say there's a 'best part' implies something non-suckage related.

Although Folgers is fairly suckage, so it's theoretically possible that the best part of waking up is the suckage of folgers in your cup because its suckage eclipses the other suckages invariable intertwined in the waking cycle.

I don't know if any of this amounts to a hill of (coffee) beans. What I do know is that the best part of waking up this morning would have been waking up to an extra sunday, a real sunday, not a mad-dash-to-finish-your-third-assignment-in-two-days sunday.

Since that clearly did not happen: Fahk Folgers.

Whiskey...Comedy...Guitars

2007-06-17T19:55:00.000-07:00

(Good things that come from Canada)

He Must Have One Helluva Sales Pitch

2007-06-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

So yeah. What does your average Welsh mobile phone salesman do for a hobby?

NEWSFLASH

2007-06-05T23:36:00.000-07:00

Accounting still sucks...

Although I can proudly claim that I kinda understand the material from week 1, finally. Too bad it's already week 4.

meh.

Sara Silverman, GET OUT OF MY BRAIN

2007-06-01T18:19:00.000-07:00

Simultaneous arousal and nausea is strictly forbidden.

Confessions of a Former Republican Voter

2007-05-31T12:33:00.001-07:00

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." - Robert Hanlon

Okay, so the title might be a little deceiving...I've been a card carrying member of lots of things in my life: the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the U.S. Air Force, REI, etc., but never a political party. I have, however, generally voted for Republicans.

Some people might find it odd that a person who majored in philosophy in college could be a conservative, Republican voter. My main area of philosophical studies was moral and ethical systems as they are applied in governments, and I was actually quite successful in defending conservative arguments. This, I felt, gave me a strong reason to believe that the political party which publicly prides itself on conservatism would be the party for me.

Mind you, I was never enamored with the the social aspect of the GOP. I in principle would classify myself as a libertarian. My social beliefs tend to be more liberal. I am, and have been for quite some time, against the whole concept of the 'moral majority'...a contradiction if there ever was one. Sadly, libertarians never gained enough traction to be considered a serious contender on a large scale. So, I would end up voting for a Republican. The fiscal issues would win my support every time; something just seems right about the small government philosophy.

My philosophy hasn't changed, but my view of who can better deliver on that philosophy has.

Something happened. That something was the Bush administration.

There's No Accounting For Fun

2007-05-30T22:03:00.000-07:00

So you think YOUR life is fun?? You can't top me.

Exhibit A : I never thought falling asleep at my desk with my head dangling in awkward positions could feel so good, but I now know exactly how good it feels. Booyah!

Exhibit B : You haven't lived until you've meditated on the statement: "Firms using the purchase method must allocate this aggregate purchase price among each of the assets and liabilities acquired and the subsequently amortize them." Just TRY to top that one!

Blech.