Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
In the last two posts, we’ve seen how tobacco smokers and anthropogenic climate-change deniers demonstrate a similar psychology.
Jack Shackaway now looks at a third such group — those, including himself, who take motorcycle taxis in Bangkok. Jack offers this as a follow-up to both my “How I quit smoking” and my “Immortality for Joe Atheist” posts.
He claims the following sketch has been sitting on his computer since back in a time (or a … Read more
The fix. Neil Young, in a Rolling Stone interview with Howard Stern, offers this treatment for weed-induced paranoia: chew some ‘black pepper balls.’ I’m thinking he must mean peppercorns.
On the off chance that peppercorns are the latest panacea, I tried chewing just two of them. Not because I’d been smoking dope, and not because I was feeling especially paranoid. Just because like, whatever, eh? And they were good. Not as good … Read more
So I’m sitting here on my balcony with this commanding view of rich folks’ gardens, assailed by birdsong from left and right, and I’m bonding with my Bali pig.
In fact I’m multitasking. I’m reading in the sun, improving my mind though not so much I know better than to work on a tan at the same time.
I’m drinking tea—my souvenir sencha from Japan—a rumored antidote to damaged chromosomes. I remain skeptical in this regard, but trust the placebo … Read more
Greetings. I’ve been away for a while, distracted by travel, a restive Muse, this and that.
Writers are notoriously perceptive, and so it is that, during my travels, I saw that drugstores were not the same drugstores I used to go to and say gimme some aspirin, or “I’d like a packet of those things, you know … Yeah. No, no! You don’t have to wave them around, for chrissake.” Like much else in our world, things have changed since … Read more
Bangkokians fall to their deaths from high-rise apartments with some regularity. These incidents are often ascribed to suicidal impulses, the next most popular hypothesis being accident, as in, “Wow! Look at that moon—it’s almost like you could reach out and touch…”
But read on, because I have a new, improved theory. Recently, in fact, I myself almost fell victim to an especially devious homicide attempt.
A couple of myna birds have taken to nesting in a cozy niche outside my … Read more
Bill the Mathematician—yes, that’s Bill of the unaccountably broken back—is not always fully recognized as the trendsetter he really is. Right now he’s in Phnom Penh, on his way to the Pasteur Institute to ask for a dose of hookworm larvae. “I thought I’d found a source yesterday,” he tells me, “as PP now has a National Parasitological Center. But somehow they can’t help because ‘it’s time for exams.’ But they did suggest I try L’Institut Pasteur, so I’ll … Read more
Caption: Our adventurer, with his new office chair, just after summiting the roof of his apartment building five times in a row without oxygen.
Breaking news on the old-crockish falling-apart front: I’ve just cured a rogue back, gone bad in the prime o’ me loif and all, by giving my office chair to the guard downstairs in favor of sitting on an exercise ball at my desktop computer, alternating this with standing at my filing cabinet with a laptop on … Read more
1 April 2011. I’m trying to beat a self-imposed but important deadline with The Proteant Enigmass. A few people have said they’d like to see the working ms., but I’m waiting till I get to a certain point in the story so they can get a better sense of what I’m trying to do. And I’d really, really like to do that before Tuesday’s operation. (As it stands, no one has seen any part of this thing, and I need … Read more
“Does this mean you’re going to live to be 125?” my Sara asks. Her voice remains carefully neutral, non-accusatory.
The good news: All I need to do is drop a few kilos, I’m told, and I’ll have an overall fitness age somewhere in my mid-20s with personal training in Los Angeles. (“Fitness age,” I have to imagine, refers to something like “health-span,” which is enjoying some currency among transhumanists and their ilk. More on that in a later post.)… Read more
This morning I had an interesting experience, one that I will now relate, sparing you any need to conduct your own field research.
… Read more
In short, don’t put namman muay (“Boxing Liniment”) in your eye.
I awoke with a sore shoulder and, in jockish high spirits, I splashed some of this fiery oil onto the offending muscles with such enthusiasm that quite a lot of it went instead into my eye. Both hands being already contaminated, I couldn’t rinse the eyeball