from here.

Oh well, a shame. But I suppose the Internet will quickly find something else for itself to get excited about, right? But there’s still us and there’s tomorrow and a little more juice to be squeezed out of whatever could be “the future” and there’s whatever could possibly come with that…

Mad linkage:

Here’s 10 other recent predictions for the End Times that didn’t come true either.

German insurance firm held orgy to reward salesmen.

Learn how to tie your shoes right.

Quite possibly our first look at Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises.

Kirk Cameron vs. Stephen Hawking.

Ricky Gervais on The Office‘s finale.

If you do go up in the Rapture, don’t worry, the atheists will take care of your pets… for a price.

An excerpt from Chris Adrian’s new novel.

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

-Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

by Beth Hoeckel, from here.

What really goes on in Area 51?

A volcano in Iceland called Grímsvötn has erupted.

Twitter shit about the Rapture from yesterday.

Inside the Robert Redford biography.

Stephen Fry joins The Hobbit.

New discovery about mosquitoes reveals why vampires will never exist.

Speaking of which, Joe Jackson is still a bloodsucking piece of shit.

from here.

“The future is already here… It’s just not even distributed.”

-William Gibson

David Lynch to release an album later this year.

The visual impact of gossip.

The story of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed/failed/totally fucking crazy would be adaptation of Dune to become a documentary. Here’s Dan O’Bannon talking about it a little.

Related: the team up between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.

Just checking: Still no Rapture, right? Whew.

NBC cancels Outsourced. Good.

The trailer for the new film by Miranda July.

Carrie is being remade and Stephen King suggests Lindsay Lohan for the lead.

from here.

This trailer/movie looks really terrible: Horrible Bosses.

This trailer looks so so, but the movie will probably suck: Another Earth.

It’s Pilot Season! Trailers for (just a few of the) new TV shows that were just picked up:

Awake. Which… looks good, looks interesting, but I just don’t see a TV show that I would follow/watch for years and years there. Funny how both it and Another Earth‘s trailer use that song by the Cinematic Orchestra.

Alcatraz. The latest from the J.J. Abrams camp… The 4400 meets Prison Break, featuring Sam Neill and Hurley from Lost. This looks ridiculous, and I’ll watch it and just hope that it’s not another letdown like Fringe.

Person Of Interest. Another from J. J. Abrams, although it seems like it’s mostly just his name on it and the real creative juice is from Jonathan Nolan, writer of The Dark Knight and brother of Christopher. Looks interesting-ish, but Jim Caviezel? Was that really necessary?

A trailer for the documentary on the showrunners of all your favorite TV shows.

And a nice guide to the shows that didn’t make it to the Fall 2011 season.

“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”

-Dennis Gabor

I had a dream a while back that the world was ending… It was an odd dream, but not a terrible one, I guess. It’s just not something you can prepare for, the end of the world. You can’t ever really be ready for it. You just gotta keep on living, don’t you? And loving and listening to music and dancing and pursuing impossible things and enjoying mundane moments and people and doing all kinds of stupid shit. Take things seriously but maybe enjoy the ridiculous things that surround you just a little bit more? I don’t want to tell you something terribly cliched, like… Live every moment like it’s your last!

No, don’t do that. You’ll probably hurt yourself trying to do that.

But maybe every once in a while, take a single moment and consider that it is your last moment on this beautiful, insane planet, and just really ponder that. And think about what you would do if it wasn’t. Beam yourself into the future and peek in on yourself and see what you’re up to. Take a vacation into the future and see who you are there. Interview yourself and find out what went right and wrong in your life in the moments/weeks/months/years between now and then, and take good notes. And when you come back to the present, remember that little trip. Remember that time you went to the future and appreciate that you’re back here, and now, and then go there again.

The anniversary of Bikini Atoll is coming up.

Chinese “dinosaur city” reshapes understanding of prehistoric era.

Brittany Julious is sexy.

The kind of guys who stay single?

The Cat Rapture for Caturday!

Neil Gaiman on Gene Wolf.

Grant Morrison to write a movie about dinosaurs vs. aliens, Barry Sonnenfield to direct.

from here.

RIP “Macho Man.”

The fashion of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fleetwood Mac to reunite in time for the end of the world.

The never before seen original ending to Alexander Payne’s Election, which is much closer to the book’s ending.

I don’t think I’m all that crazy about these Odd Future guys.

Skeeter Davis and Henry Moore.

Tom Cruise is a lonely robot repairman.

from here.

How to survive a mass extinction.

Plot details from the upcoming Tim Burton/Johnny Depp big screen version of Dark Shadows.

Will the internet destroy academic freedom?

A history of bedwetting.

Bionic hands! The future is now!

A good prank for the Rapture.

Oh well, hopefully this one was good practice for the next time the world (supposedly) ends. Still plenty of time to get your Rapture Playlist just fucking perfect. No sleep til 2012!

Mad linkage:

How to be a retronaut!

Superman is no longer an American citizen. Deal with it.

The uncensored version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray to finally be published.

How to build a religion.

They might actually release Joss Whedon’s Cabin In The Woods.

Lars Von Trier and the apocalyptic whimper.

Unlike with Natalie Portman, don’t expect a post here called “Who’s January Jones fucking these days?”

Budget cuts curtail the search for alien life out there.

Also, Natalie Portman’s dad self-publishes a novel about severed heads, stolen presidential embryos, and mysterious clones.

May Day, 1871: The day “Science Fiction” was invented.

Emma Watson leaves Brown.

Speaking of which, the new Harry Potter trailer is kind of epic.

Ayn Rand’s first love and mentor was a sadistic serial killer who dismembered little girls.

Charlie Sheen and Chuck Lorre: Honestly, who gives a fuck anymore?

Mitt Romney’s bullshit is back and it’s not off to such a great start.

RIP Joanna Russ.

Bessel beams are cool, but don’t actually exist.

FYI: It’s Walpurgisnacht!

Before he retires Steven Soderbergh will make Channing Tatum’s male stripper movie.

I don’t know where you are but summer’s here.

Is Netflix helping to reduce movie piracy in the United States?

Giant black holes discovered in the nuclei of merging galaxies.

An interview with Chuck Klosterman.

Big Boi and Modest Mouse are finally working together.

How bacteria could generate radio waves.

Iggy Pop was considered for a judge slot on American Idol and Fugazi may actually reunite some day.

Scientists create stable, self-renewing neural stem cells.

The 10 greatest apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic music videos.

All living humans are more closely related than you might think.

Vigilantes band together to protect NYC sex workers.

What can we learn by comparing the old and the new covers for the Left Behind series?

Unemployed ninja for hire.

from here.

Last night I had the strangest dream…

In the dream, it was the end of the world, or, well, it was the last night on Earth, and the following morning it was all going to end. In fire and flame, buried and suffocated in ash, or via instantaneous evaporation into total nothingness… the how I didn’t know. Things are vague in dreams. They change moment to moment and you just feel things, just know them. And I felt like it wasn’t this year, not 2011, but maybe it was next year, or maybe it wasn’t.

In the dream, some people had known that the end of was coming for a long time. The crazy people, we called them and always had, but they were the ones who had been having the dreams for years now. That’s how we all knew, every living thing on the planet, I mean, that’s how we knew that it was expiring the following morning: we had dreams. Most of us started having them about six months before that final night. In the dreams we were told that our time was finite and we woke up with the certainty of it. The sad, cold certainty of it.

We knew from the dreams and from intuition that most wouldn’t accept this, that there would be fights and attempts to stop it and plans concocted to spirit away or just generally save the human race, and that every effort must be made. But from the dreams we knew that all those plans would come up with nothing, all those efforts would be ultimately fruitless, and in the end… it would come down to the simple question of how would you want to spend your last night alive?

In the dream I had last night, I had tried to get in touch with my friends, but they were all on the other side of the world from me. Whoever they were and wherever I was, they were somewhere else. They had lives to finish living and people to wrap their existence up with. It was just me, me by myself, just as it had always been. And I was thirsty with nothing to drink in the house, so I went to a bar. There were strangers there living like there was no tomorrow, which was fitting because there would be no tomorrow, and everyone was laughing and talking and loud and very, very drunk. A band was playing. It felt like a celebration. The band wasn’t that great, but for the occasion, they were amazing. The music was so loud, so perfect. It felt like it wasn’t just coming from their instruments and their speakers and souls, but that it was coming from inside me. And they were playing this song:

This morning I woke up and the sun was shining. Dogs were barking down the street, my neighbor was mowing his yard, and car alarms were going off somewhere. And I had to pee really, really, really bad. For the briefest of moments, beyond anything else that could possibly be going on, it just felt good to be alive.

1. This:

from here.

“I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.”

2. This:

by Matt Bors, from here.

“I don’t think in any languages. I think in images.”

3. This:

and this:

and this:

and also this:

Cats quoting Charlie Sheen! from here.

“Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”

from here.

Are you optimistic about the future? What about just tomorrow? What about just tonight? What do you think when you look back on this year that just ended? Are things going according to your plans or are you finding yourself constantly delivered into new and different and exciting and altogether unforeseeable outcomes? Are we living in the future? Or are we just dreamers lost in our own magic spells and writing the story as we trip over the words and the lines and the chapter breaks?

Do you have more questions than answers, or vice versa? Which do you prefer more, sunrises or sunsets? Beginnings or endings? Or are they intrinsically tied together, just like all of us, in the grand scheme of things?

Just curious.

This was an interesting year. As much one full of little victories and joys as it was of big failures and sadness. For me, at least. Things happened. The players moved the pieces across the chessboard. The game continued. It was exciting, it was heart breaking, and sometimes it was just one or just the other, and sometimes it was both. The wheel kept turning.

from here.

Next year is possibly the year before the year the world ends, and that kind of puts everything into some kind of perspective.

If you’re reading this now or read it before, then some kind of contact was made. With you, with us, with it, with “the other,” with nothing and everything and anything that falls in between all of that.

It’s really up to you there, though. It’s all subjective. Just as you choose your own level of involvement in all things (but especially the future), you also bring your own meaning to the equation. In the end we’ll all be getting exactly what we what. The angels of tomorrow will all be speaking the same language: glossolalia.

Things can seem small in one moment and in one kind of light, and loom large in another. Understanding has to be unearthed and earned and meaning was to be extrapolated. We keep guessing, we keep surmising, we keep poking and attempting things and shining our torches into the dark.

And if there’s something out there, then have no fear, we’ll find it.

from here.

Right?

But here is a pretty neat time lapse video of last night’s eclipse on a solstice:

I tried to experience the journey of the moon across the night sky myself (I’m glad I was there and not, say, trying to catch a showing of that Spider-Man musical) early this morning but poor visibility became an issue. That and the general weirdness of the other moon worshipers. I guess my kind of people only come out at night.

from here.

As mentioned yesterday

via YouTube.

I keep seeing little shrines to and admirations of the man all over the internet too. That’s amazing to me. Amazing that we stop and think about that still, this musical and pop artist from decades and decades ago, that he’s still affecting us with his music and ideas and persona even now. I mean, I can understand why people like my mother are still thinking about Lennon but it shocks me whenever I notice people younger than me talking about or listening to the Beatles or the various members’ solo material.

It shocks me but it pleases me as well. It’s natural to dislike the music of the younger generations because most of it is, at best, loud raw bullshit. My generation had the 90s and the glorious music of that time (that’s what our memories keeping assuring us) but the kids these days have… what? Paramore? Justin Bieber. It’s a shame.

But it’s also natural, I think to dislike when the younger generation starts coming up on you, encroaching on your scene, professing admiration of the music you hold so dear, that has become a part of your genetic make up, and yet they don’t know the singer’s name or don’t know the title of track 3 on that band or artist’s second album or don’t know all the lyrics like you. It’s like when you would hear Avril Lavigne tell you that Nirvana was the greatest band in the world. She didn’t know what she was talking about and it made the things you like feel cheaper because of it, because she hadn’t earned it.

And yet we forget about the act of discovery that comes with music, both with hearing an artist for the first time on the radio, if that kind of thing still happens, or playing over that sad scene with lots of crying in your favorite network drama. Or discovering an older artist, someone before your time, quite by accident. It’s amazing to you. It shows you that this great big world that you finally felt like you had a handle on perhaps has a little more depth, a little more beauty and gorgeous weirdness in it than you could’ve guessed. And it’s time to explore all of that.

And yet, Lennon’s music should come with a history lesson attached. He wasn’t just an artist with a discography, his story was a fucking saga. There’s so many facets to his tale and his life that you feel like a fucking Star Trek nerd just for taking all those details in and holding onto them. Or, at least, I do.

Growing up I was that weird little kid who adored his parent’s Beatles records and would spend long afternoons and late nights just sitting by the turntables, which that thing spin around and being mesmerized by their music. I read all the books I could on the Beatles, delved into all the ridiculous anecdotes and bizarre peripheral characters in their tale.

I’ve always been an oddity at the party (though the attendees at most parties are all oddities, or should be, I know). While everyone else knows everything about what’s going on with some bullshit famous NYC hipster or what’s happening on the latest episode of Real Housewives Of Wherever, I was always the guy who had far too many factoids about the heroes of classic rock. Amongst many others, that was always just one of my things.

To their fans, either those who grew up as the band was growing up or those who discovered the much later, they felt like your favorite characters in a story that was happening in and around you. There were ups and downs and turmoil and laughs and joy and you escape into one of their albums and it’d become a part of your life. John Lennon died months before I was even born and I still took their break up hard almost 30 years after it happened.

But as for the band themselves, I always took the question “who’s your favorite Beatle?” to be a kind of basic personality test. It wasn’t just a matter of “the one with the pointy nose” or “the shy one” or “the cute one” or “Jesus, Ringo is fucking weird looking,” it was about who you identified. Who personified all your weirdness and abstract traits. Who managed to be as much like you, but better.

I guess for us John fans, it was the romantic idea of the intellectual rebel. That’s why we liked him. It felt like he was against something, but nobly. Through him our character flaws and quirks and all the ways we didn’t fit with others, all of that became just a part of our affectation.

Of course now I imagine, in a way, that John Lennon is more like Che Guevara…

He’s more of a symbol, an artistic flourish, than a real person who once existed. Or… is he?

from here.

John came off as an asshole perfectionist, not too different from Paul in that regard, but there was something more off putting about John. It felt like he’d rather offend you than make you laugh along with him. He wasn’t a chameleon like Bob Dylan, constantly discovering himself by changing identities and styles, but John seemed more interested in dealing with his issues by shaving away all the human parts of himself and becoming sharper, crueler. He found his issues and rather than making peace with them, he just become them, he inserted himself deeper into them. He could be charming, he could be disarming, he could be cruel, but it felt like he would never surrender to the working class sadness the world had seemed to be laying out for him. His personality was the perfect prototype for someone like Kanye West (or, to a lesser extent, someone like Billy Corgan maybe). His past was not a particularly great one, nor was he always satisfied with the present it seemed, so he kept pushing forward, never resting, never giving up the rhythm. He was a poet and a genius, and seemed to take the world about as half as seriously as it had ever taken him, and in that regard, I think he saw the world more clearer than most insulated, influenced musicians ever do. That’s why I think his songs can seem absurd sometimes, or like the work of a bored artist, but at times they cut deep, slicing into a vein that feels all too familiar.

But I think John was, in the classic style of British musicians, pretty good at selling you a lot of bullshit when he felt like it. And while I don’t think you could question or belittle his impact or his talent, I think I just gave you about 900 words of bullshit as well. Enjoy.

Three last things about this man from Liverpool…

Do you think you’re a genius?

Yes, if there is such a thing as one, I am one. When did you realize that what you were doing transcended — People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. . . . I always wondered, “Why has nobody discovered me?” In school, didn’t they see that I’m cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid, too? That all they had was information that I didn’t need? I got fuckin’ lost in being at high school. I used to say to me auntie, “You throw my fuckin’ poetry out, and you’ll regret it when I’m famous, ” and she threw the bastard stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fuckin’ genius or whatever I was, when I was a child. It was obvious to me. Why didn’t they put me in art school? Why didn’t they train me? Why would they keep forcing me to be a fuckin’ cowboy like the rest of them? I was different, I was always different. Why didn’t anybody notice me? A couple of teachers would notice me, encourage me to be something or other, to draw or to paint – express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fuckin’ dentist or a teacher. And then the fuckin’ fans tried to beat me into being a fuckin’ Beatle or an Engelbert Humperdinck, and the critics tried to beat me into being Paul McCartney.

That’s from Lennon’s 1971 interview with Rolling Stone.

This is me talking about May Pang and Lennon’s brief “lost weekend” phase. This is me talking about Lennon entering the world of comics as godhead/musical deity. This is me talking about mind games, of course.

And lastly one of my absolute favorite of John Lennon’s songs…

…the sadly underrated “Look At Me.” I point these kinds of songs out whenever I see them but if ever there was a song about bloggers, that’s definitely one of them.

And we all shine on.

We’ll see. But in the meantime, this is a picture of Betty White and Jon Hamm:

This is funny ha ha:

And this is just the truth, no matter how you try to fight it:

Look, I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but we’ve been hanging out for a while now, right? Well, here’s the thing…

In all that time, we’ve really gotten to know you. We know what you’re thinking…

You’re thinking, “Where did this blog go? I love this fucking blog and it practically disappeared into thin air!”

Calm down. Don’t be so dramatic. Take in a deep breath. Do not shit your pants please. Everything is going to be just fine. Trust us.

This is just a blog. And we are right here. And this is a picture of what looks like not only a completely unnecessary “remake,” but also something that is terrible:

Only slightly related, this is a video featuring a guy hitting on a girl at the beach:

This is a lot of yogurt:

This is a picture of James Cameron in the Amazon:

This is a picture of an average day in the life of yours truly:

This is a picture that I found mildly humorous:

This is Dwight’s perfect crime:

This is just a few search terms used to find us (as of 3 PM EST on 09/16/10):

And here is just a few from today, as of 1:28 PM, EST:

This is a picture of Thom Yorke wearing a headband:

from here.

Here’s Jack and Juliet’s fake kid totally checking out his mom’s rack:

from here.

This is both a picture and a “meta statment” about Counterforce:

This is what Bjork’s house looks like:

from here.

This is a picture that just  plain confuses my penis:

And this is an infographic about important distinctions that need to be made about some of the content on the internet these days:

This may be (but hopefully not) the only Counterforce post this month – so sorry! – so I hope you enjoyed it.

This is what I wish you and I could be doing right now:

And this is “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire:

He pulls over and stops the car by the side of the road. He gets out of the car, he walks around it, inspecting it for a moment. Did he stop the car or did something happen that caused him to pull over for safety’s sake? We don’t know. He sits in the street, his back against the driver’s side door. He begins to cry. He tries to cover his face as he surrenders to an emotion that rises up from within him and takes him over.

A short time later he’s standing, looking around. His eyes look worn, slightly red from the crying. He looks forward on down the road. That’s where he’s going. He looks back, down the road in the direction he just came from. They look identical. He’s confused for a moment. Is he going forward or backward? Had he gotten turned around at some point and was heading in the wrong direction or was he now at a moment of potentially getting himself turned around and could he now leave this place and head into the wrong direction?

This moment, right here, right now, was so important. It could mean everything about his future, and have a major effect on his past, on how he defines everything that has defined him, and he’s long since past all the road signs that could give him any hints. What will he do? Where will he go? What lead him to stop here and ponder all of this? He doesn’t know. For a moment or so, he doesn’t care. He pulls out his cell phone and uses it to check his email. Then he plays a game online and listens to some music on his Pandora app. The he watches keyboard cat videos or looks at pictures of Sad Keanu (now wearing a helmet).

from here.

With all the benefits of the internet, with the way it connects the whole wide world and brings us knowledge and the potential or understanding and stock quotes and pornography and enthusiasm, and for all of it’s negative components as well, this is also for what it’s for. The stupid shit. The mind numbing and the mundane and the ridiculous. It normalizes us in some regards. It can devour your time and occupy your thoughts and put a smile on a face where previously there was no hope for one.

My original intent for the direction of Counterforce in the month of July was something along those lines, but somewhere in all of that, it got away from me and it got fucked up. Or, I did. A member of my family fell incredibly ill, and looks to only be getting worse. I just didn’t have time put any thinking into the blog nor really any ability to organize it. I’ve spent most of my days and a good deal of my nights in the last few weeks in hospital rooms and waiting rooms completely disconnected from the world except for a phone that is smarter than I am.

I’m not sure what I had planned to do in this past month with the blog had none of this IRL trauma and drama come up, but whatever it was, I had high hopes for it. The internet is, of course, a world unto itself and we got our apocalyptic prayers answered when Prince announced that this month that this world was over. This was also the month in which this blog would’ve had it’s second birthday (this is the first ever post, and this is the post celebrating Counterforce’s first birthday, and this is another), as well as this nation. It’s also the month that started with my own birthday, a fact that I largely try to ignore.

What you’ve seen on the site in the past month is mostly old used up partial posts or little trinkets of curiosity that I found on the shelves of the internet and threw up onto the blog (vomiting will always be a good verb to describe a large amount of the content that lines the walls of the internet). I did this as people were sleeping or getting treatments around me and it gave me something to do when I felt powerless and confused. It was my one thing to do as part of a larger world, the only access to the world I wanted to have since I was trying to avoid everything (except for taking a break during two moments of stabilization to watch Inception and to watch the Mad Men premiere since August Bravo texted me the day before to ask if we were blogging about it).

Somewhere in there I think it became a metaphor for how I wanted to escape hearing bad news upon bad news.

I was tired of hearing doctor’s estimations of survival (of one’s “chances”) decreasing over time and tired of hearing the confused statements of a person heavily medicated. And I was tired of trying to make feel better as they were coming to try and make me feel better in my mire of ever increasing grief.

from here.

I want to thank my friends who tried to seek me out in this time and will probably continue to do so as this all continues. I want to thank the ones who tried and then respected that I might need some space and some quiet and I want to thank the ones who hit that wall and kept going, kept trying to reach me in some way. And I want to thank my self centered friends, both online and IRL, who either didn’t notice my absence or didn’t care. I appreciate the ones who, when they saw me pop up on gmail late one night, wanted to talk on gchat about some small, petty problem of theirs. They’re small, petty, terrible people. And really, that’s not so terrible. It’s actually kind of nice and I enjoyed focusing on other people’s stupid problems for a time because, well, other people’s problems are always easy, aren’t they? You hear someone’s sob story and you see how devastated and damaged they are because of it and you have that instant God-like feeling of, “That’s it? Oh, that’s easy. Here’s what you have to do…”

Basically, I want to thank everyone. For everything. In so many ways, the internet just makes us worse, doesn’t it? You always hear people – myself included – talking about how typing skills have seemingly gotten more fucked up due to internet/instant messaging. We become dumber in real life because we don’t always have wikipedia or an online dictionary just a touch away. The internet can screw with the way we interact with people in the real world, but sometimes, it can make us better. Or at least reveal aspects of ourselves that we had no clue about.

When I get out of this period, if I get out of it intact, I might need to reevaluate. Maybe I’ll be the same, but different, and hopefully better. Maybe I’ll just be different. Either way, I’m going to take a little more of a break than I have this past month. I’ll be in hospital rooms and waiting rooms again, riding this thing out and hoping for the best, and I’ll be reading the internet when I can. And I’ll post things every now and then and hopefully still be able to do Mad Men posts with August, but I guess we’ll see?

Three things before I go:

1. A shame about that thing with the date in Back To The Future, right? At least, fortunately, tomorrow is the wedding date from that old classic episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa marries a British guy (voiced by Mandy Patinkin) who, understandably, hates her family.

from here.

2. This quote:

“The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything.”

-Douglas Coupland, from here.

3. That quote kind of ties into a sort of thinking I’ve had lately about the internet…

The internet seems nicer when it’s reduced to metaphors to describe it, to deconstruct it both as a place and a thing that has a kind of varied meaning in our lives. In the birthday post for Counterforce last year we talked about the blog as a kind of spaceship drifting through the wild dark abyss of the blogosphere, but I think I prefer to think of the internet more as a journey or a road.

On this road/journey, you start at one point and finish at another. Along the way you see things and experience things and you take a little of them with you and leave a lot of them behind. Only, in this journey, being that it’s the internet, nothing ever disappears. Nothing is ever left behind. Things just accumulate, as if the road is bending back on itself over and over again. Or crashing into itself. Think of a 20 car pile up on the interstate as a metaphor for your very public life on the interwebz. I’m glad that Inception finally came out and that I saw it because it’s shown me that, in this kind of hypothetical sci fi landscape mode of thinking that my brain usually slides into, the internet is both linear and, at times, operating on some kind of bizarre dream logic in which up is down, left is right, and colors have smells, and people can find having sex with just about anything as erotic as can be.

It’s a strange world out there, as the internet has shown me time and again, and I hope that never changes. Full on double rainbows for everyone. See you soon.

More fireworks:

The father of our country:

Patriotic music:

Girls in patriotic bikinis:

Founding fathers:

Even more fireworks:

“Fireworks” by Animal Collective:

Happy 4th of July.