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Day: Mar 12

By Paul Ford

4 intervals from 12 Mar 2001 (Irishizes Golding Ezra)

1:12 pm

Scott writes:

"You are not normal. You are not like the televised version of yourself. You have ideas. You are not a boring person. You read stories and tell them. You fall back on bad culture sometimes, on Friends and bad novels and the low kind of Internet porn, but it's only a small incident in a larger journey. There is a percentage that is revealed by standardized tests. You have a certain place in that percentage. You slide down the bell curve towards your own special genius. I know you. You wouldn't have found Paul's site if you weren't on the curve. And you are not normal."

"You have known always When you see them on television you realize your own. That is all of us. You are very, very normal. And it is hard, and I have no answer. Because I, like you, and very normal. The white eyes of their frames as they; for the ghosts; of the bodies."

The idea is to create an incantatory piece that moves from "You are not normal" to "You are normal," taking the reader from a feeling of being unique and disconnected to a feeling of connection with a larger environment. Like anything, it's harder to do than my wee wit allows.

4:15 pm

I've just been to Pittsburgh and Scranton, PA. Two of America's finest cities.

Ftrain-loving foreigners, especially you bastards from Finmark or the Dutcherlands or wherever: Scranton, PA is the center of America. It's where truth is, right by the bus station, waiting for nickels to fall out the sweatpants pockets of Greyhound travelers.

In Pittsburgh, I saw a good friend for a few days, and I paid a Mexican woman $30 to urinate in my mouth rented a few movies. Some student has spraypainted "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" onto the math building. This is a catchphrase inspired by a bad Japanese-to-English translation in a video game.

So that was Pittsburgh.

I was even less excited by what I saw in Scranton. As I walked to the Consolidated High Fat American Restaurant for a milkshake and hamburger, a giant half-man, half-octopus creature devoured all the "flags" in the East Scranton High marching band, then moved on to the drummers. Screaming, fire engines, etc.

Everyone around me is depressed. I feel great. What's my secret? I have a giant throbbing singing machine that is installed in my tongue.

10:07 pm

Q: What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? A: It is wrong to make light of domestic abuse.

Q: What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? A: A drummer!

10:08 pm

Right now most document design allows the hierarchy to speak to the document, but not the other way around - that is, the table of contents and index point in. What the Web should allow is a way for the document to point out and dynamically affect the hierarchies of content themselves. The documents need to be able to speak to the hieararchy, rather than just having the hierachy speak to the documents. Hence the recursive doc that knows about itself. This is the "conscious" document.