I finally pulled out the remains of the vodka from the ragged, bulky, green backpack over yonder. I’ve taken one drink and feel it already. For now, it is pleasant.

For the past few days, I have been studying Estonian vocabulary. As all of my faithful readers know, I am on my way to Estonia at the end of June. I must admit that at first I was very daunted from the lack of similarity in vocabulary to any other language I know (or even have an inkling of). Anymemo has done its best to rid me of this preposterous fear. Just this morning, whilst waiting for my father in a uncomfortable, meshed chair outside the bank, I was testing myself. After just a few days, I can remember phrases with words which are unlike anything I have seen before. Just a simple phrase like I am trying to learn Estonian:

Ma uritan eesti keelt oppida.

I apologize for omitting the diacritics, but I’m having a bit of a tiff with my keyboard layout. Meaning that I’ve been to lazy to fuck with it. Yes sir ee. Now for another swig.

The numbers are exceedingly regular and fit comfortably in my mind. There are no irregularities in the pre-teens, for example.

The Mennonites in this town seem oddly removed from the regular country folk. On my walk yesterday, I encountered a blonde and very Swiss looking girl in old-fashioned dress and out-of-place earphone getup. She must be around seventeen (seitseteist). She was aloof, walking as if the park was her own and paying attention to no-one. Her steps occasionally led her into the grass as if the path in her mind simply pointed that direction. It was natural. Perhaps I should talk to her next time I see her. Yeah, I know what these ultra-religious types are all about, in a sense, but the thought is still intriguing.

Peasants?

Peasants?

Oh, yeah. Cashews. They are tasty.

Please don't eat the striped thing with a tail.

At long last, I can post again to the Martenblog (formerly called the Sheepblog, but I have graduated (or gradiated) from sheep form to mustelid from, so…). Yes, lethargy did prevent me from reaching this state in recent months. My time in Hostivice, for example, was riddled with disillusion and fatigue - loneliness and depression. My time in Tuzla was much the same, with the additional slights of alienation and boredom.

But here I am in Seminole. Isn’t it interesting that when I am here, I am very productive both creatively and programmatically? It must be the lack of alcohol. Heh.

Goals for the remainder of May are to write copiously about the correspondence Christopher and I have had over the last nine months, and to get the Foundation Lutreola site up and full of content.

Regarding the second goal, there is this: lutreola!. It may no longer be extant when my dedicated reader comes upon this entry, however. It is simply a hastily patched together demo for what could be a lutreola site. The best thing about it, by far, is that it is done in Clojure/Noir. I’d happily never code in Ruby again were it possible.

(lutreola!)

So, at six o’clock in the morning… here we go…

This is a test post. If it works, it shall be the first time that my Clojure-coded martenblog will have been able to add new entries to the database.

I’m so tired!

Omegaman by The Police reminds me of Ira Cooper. He always touted it as the best song on Ghost in the Machine. I’d have to go with Secret Journey or Darkness, but the three make a nice album close.

Everyone go to their walkmen, place your tapes of Obscured by Clouds into the receptacle, close them, throw on your headphones, press play, and enjoy the song. Burning Bridges.

At the moment, I cannot recall the exact words of the piece, but they are most likely about nothing that I am feeling myself now, but the title seemed appropriate.

I am breaking out of something which is irreparable. It’s something which has been broken for years. It is broken because of me. I perpetuated it for all of this time because I am afraid of letting go. Yes, Christian, I am also afraid of letting go. And I am even more afraid of hurting someone, especially someone I spend or have spent so much time with.

It began with my mother. I used to have to tell myself, over and over again - harden your heart. Don’t let hurting her affect you so deeply. Don’t let the guilt tear you within. Don’t lose sleep over it. Don’t let it destroy attempts at creativity or work (or study).

Get past it.

I’m having problems getting past it even now.

I don’t like to compare the Smaller One to my mother, and she is nothing like my mother, really, but the same eidolon looms over me as when I was a child and a teen. My mother represented that eidolon then and the Smaller One represents it now.

Deep guilt wells inside of me if I even think of hurting my mother. This includes even letting her know that I am in Europe. She would crumble. The endless emotional blackmail my parents put me through during the last year indoctrinated me with something that the bitterness of my youth fought off years ago. I’m not so good at sloughing it away now.

And now, walking to this tearoom, thinking about the Smaller One alone in the flat, crying. It destroys me. I cannot let it give up my plans to leave. I did the right thing by choosing the first place I went to and putting money down so it is mine. It is more difficult to go back on the decision. There will be bouts with this over the next months. It will consume me. Perhaps the waves will, on a larger scale, calm to mere ripples, then to nothing. On the quantum scale, so to speak, they will always roil with madness.

So - to Hostivice.

The point is to find a middle point … faith and rationality. Yeah. I wanted to say, at the first, ‘faith’ and ‘belief’, though I know it is absurd.

Disbelief in rationality scares me. Let’s take, for, example, the world in the music ‘The Matrix’. It is the end game of disbelief in rationality, because our species will not comprehend that anything else could actually be correct about ‘life’.

What do I mean by that?

‘Life’

When we let politicians who have no scientific background rule our lives, then we are random splayed effects of what happens. I must go underground.

They come; they fight; they destroy; they corrupt. It always ends the same.

I think that this the philosophy that Christian has been prayer to for a long time. He is the extreme knight of the feudal war.

This is my property. Do not come close or you will be … hm…

…tamed. He once accused me of sociapathy. I laugh at this now.

The subconscious may well be formed by belief systems buried and fertilized starting with youth and reinforced repeatedly by parents, peers and culture in general. This buried, fecund structure in our minds is the fundamentalism within all of us. All of our rational thoughts are filtered through it and mostly distorted. They are not rational anymore after this process, of course. It is the source of our emotional tides. Some may say that it is the manifestation of us and our moral compass.

Cormac McCarthy says:

What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can.

That dark monolith of belief conjures every fear which poisons our lives. It inspires worry. It has everything to do with self-preservation. But not self-preservation of our being, but our belief system. Of our fundamentalism. It is the root of narrow-mindedness and bigotry. It is where the inability to discuss any topic rationally comes from.

I’m aware this is not exactly what McCarthy was getting at. The quote is out of context, anyhow. But a brief glance at it (I had saved it in Eira several months ago for later perusal) brought to mind belief systems, fundamentalism and their effect on our interactions with others. I’ll set out my connotation of fundamentalism:

The inability to look beyond one’s own belief systems to see the relevance of other belief systems. The persecution of other points of views whether rationally or not if they are in contradiction in any way to one’s own points of view.

Fundamentalism is the antithesis of rationality. It is emotional thinking taken to an extreme. It is emotional maturity stunted at the level of a petulant child.

Our beliefs hollow out imaginary landscapes in which we spend our lives. They do not resemble the physical landscapes around us. They overlap others’ personal landscapes and we are on familiar ground. We feel comfortable. Landscapes which wildly differ from our own, when encountered, cause wild dissonance we attempt to resolve by any means necessary. Flight. Argument. Conflict. Punishment. Murder. Suicide.

A few weeks after I first recorded McCarthy’s quote, I wrote the following beside it:

Perhaps the wind around us is a weakened animal weary of its weakness and longing for old strengths. It does occasionally find power once again and wreaks.

I can equate wind here to our own fundamentals - our own base belief systems. And the wind, as an animal. The animal is weak because it has been worn down by another system of beliefs, by another form of fundamentalism. This usually occurs when a culture (and I use this is the broadest sense) oppresses an individual and twists him / her into conformity.

I was forced into religion when I was young by the culture which surrounded me. I was not just forced to go to church (though this was part of it), but I was also surrounded by belief systems (embedded in humans) which were closely aligned to the cultural norm of Christian Fundamentalism. In a sense, every waking moment spent in the presence of other humans was a struggle to throw off the twisting pressure of this encompassing fundamentalism.

My wind was weakening.

It was definitely threatened.

Perhaps when a whole culture is oppressed as I was as an individual and forced to let their base beliefs be subjugated by another system, the wind is nearly quieted. But, at times, and these times are the ones which spark revolution, or at least murder, the wind finds new breath and can rise to defend itself.

The fact that belief systems can change and should be (in my opinion) open to change does not escape my mind. It just seems another, perhaps too broad a topic for this morning. The lethargy which is the fundamental of my belief system wins out.

Oh, and I promised myself last night, in my fit of insomnia, that I’d compose and / or record from my turbulent mish-mash of musical ideas which kept me awake.

Oh, Dresden. The middle of the night cradles me. It arms me. It placates me. What shall I do?

I am at Mc Donalds at the moment and waiting.

WAITING

Waiting for the train which will roll me far away to the place I would like to be because sleep pervades every thought. Well, perhaps the vodka does, as well, but I really don’t feel it.

I met a couple of dudes tonight. I forget their names, which is unfortunate. One was a music lover, as am I. We traded songs for a simple amount of time. Heh. That means two hours or so. He reminds me of Wayne. Wayne - the wayne I destroyed. Did I? Sadly, I believe I did. His autistic brother made me feel it intensely, though he denied it. It went like this:

Wayne should not rely on other people to give himself his life, to succeed. I have done it myself without anyone’s help. See this design on this fucking shirt? I did it! I fucking did it!

Wayne did nothing. He wanted into the IT business because it was a fashionable thing to do. He used you.

Wayne gave me his homework. We were stoned and drunk. We were listening to the MIX I had made for Brynn, which included Porcupine Tree and Stolen Babies, among others. That was one of the best nights of my life. I still have the scraps of paper on which I made Wayne write Haiku. Well, I did, too.

We were friends then, but we are not now.

Who knows where he is.

He gave me his homework to do for him. I was insistent that he’d do it in Haskell, but Java was his professor’s thought. I wish I’d know Clojure then, for I’d have tried to teach it to him in that moment. Of course, it’d have been impossible because of the immense amount of alcohol which pervaded the evening.

So, as the week progressed, I binged. Yeah, I binged. So Wayne’s homework was never done. I sat in the Thai place on that fucking street I cannot remember the name of. I regurgitated my knowledge of functional programming onto this laptop on which I am typing. None of it was about Wayne. I’d left his homework at Cranbrook.

Now, that homework sits in a box in Seminole, Texas.

I wasn’t aware, as most people aren’t when recovering from a fabulous binge, that what I had not done had destroyed a person’s journey into the world.

Nick (Wayne’s brother) told me that he thought Wayne shouldn’t blame me. I’m not sure who I blame now. I sit in McDonalds in Dresden thinking about it.

I believe it affected someone.

I just finished my contribution to clj-record, an open souhttps://github.com/inhortte/clj-recordrce wrapper around clojure.java.jdbc which imitates (rather meekly at the moment) Ruby’s Active Record. I added the has-and-belongs-to-many association. The code is here. Now I can truthfully add open source contributions to my CV. Heh

(clj-record)
(here)

Now a certain error is being an irritant. It looks like this:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Key must be integer

Here is the code spouting the error:

(defpage "/expand/:id" {:keys [id]}
  (let [e (entry/get-record id)]
   (normal-entry e)
   (expand-contract-link "contract" e)))

As any observant mustelid can see, there is nothing wrong with that code according to the Noir documentation. I shall pull out pieces of my pancreas for a few more minutes flummoxing myself about it.

(Noir documentation)

I dislike it greatly when a problem solves itself, and especially if it is just from tinkering a bit.

Here is the code:

(defpartial expand-contract-link [which e]
  [:br.clear]
  (link-to {:id (str which (:id e))}
           "#" which)
  [:hr.clear])

(defpartial ajax-hovno []
  [:script "ajax_hovno();"])

(defpartial normal-entry [e]
  (:entry e)
  (expand-contract-link "contract" e)
  (ajax-hovno))

(defpartial truncated-entry [e]
  (trunc (:entry e))
  (expand-contract-link "expand" e)
  (ajax-hovno))

; Ajax paths                                                                    
(defpage "/expand/:id" {:keys [id]}
  (normal-entry (entry/get-record id)))

(defpage "/contract/:id" {:keys [id]}
  (truncated-entry (entry/get-record id)))