More Ditloa and Some Other General Stuff Including Bloodmeal

southwest night view from the sky bar
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I am still trying to figure out which 15 pictures from my DITLOA set should be submitted for judging. You can help me with this arduous task by looking at the damn things and commenting on the ones you like - actually, my one remaining reader (hi, Haskell!) has already done this but there's no reason that all you fictional nonexistent people shouldn't do it as well. Yes, I know that it's cruelly boring to look at a whole bunch of pictures in a row, some of which are damn near indistinguishable from one another (I'm looking at you, dismembered couch under the highway) but remember, if I get picked then it just further adds to my sense of incredible photographic genius and I become insufferable, but if I don't get picked it will erode my already fragile self esteem and I'll also be insufferable but whiny with it. Therefore, you want to shore me up.

Anyway, I keep looking at them myself late at night ("Can I use the computer yet?" "No. No, you cannot." "Are you looking at your pictures again?" "Why yes. Would you like to look at them?" "No way. Why don't you just let me play counterstrike? You know, if you moved the computer downstairs I could play counterstrike all the time and never bug you and hey, I know where you can get a sweet deal on a laptop, only $200, seriously.") and I think there is a real aesthetic going on here. A dark, gloomy aesthetic, an aesthetic of ruined things and doom, of decay and the slow, insidious and constant fall into entropy which we all experience, yes, but an aesthetic. Not that I've thought about it or anything. Except, that is, for the picture in this post, which bugs me, since it is neither dark nor gloomy nor metaphorical of a deep issue in our society but which all you cheerful types seem to adore. So I stuck it in the judging pool just in case the judges are shiny happy people. One never knows.

In other news, if I don't go home immediately after work to eat everything in the house (back on diet. Diet sucks. HUNGRY.) then I'm going to Lowes to buy the bloodmeal I've been planning to buy for days now. Bloodmeal. Yes. A meal of blood. I am picturing a bag, perchance, of clots or something horribly gory with a big old biohazard sticker on it and it's both fascinating and repelling me. Which is, hey, aesthetic in its own way, but the whole blood thing has been way too exploited by vampire porn, alas. Do you know that I grew up in a world without vampire porn? And yet, I managed to be sadly maladjusted anyway. Go figure.

In other other news I got a phone call last night from a friend who had a bad dream about a plane crash and was worried about flying the next day. I trotted out my best half remembered Psychology 101 (you are worrying about some deep issue and externalizing it into a tragic event to give it a visible shape; that will be 5 cents, please.) to reassure him that it almost certainly was not one of those creepy clairvoyant visions you hear about but I was a bit unnerved myself. Not, I'll grant you, as unnerved as he was, but still, uneasy. Or, well, I was last night and then today I totally forgot about it for most of the morning. Oh shit, I thought then, what if there was a plane crash and I didn't hear about it? No, I thought, it would be on Metafilter or Twitter, wouldn't it? And then I checked my igoogle page and decided that if there had, in fact, been such a crash than the new justice of the supreme court and the inception of glowing monkeys for use in SCIENCE would totally not be taking up all the space there.

But then they could be using citizen-journalists these days, so who knows? Citizen journalists (I am one myself, witness this blog) are fascinated by glowing monkeys. Yes, yes, we all are. So I do not know if they have preempted a plane crash but it is possible. As a responsible citizen journalist, I will say that when my evil self saw the Mountain Xpress asking us to report on the Mountain Sports festival (for free. Remember, the best thing about citizen journalists is how extremely cheap they are.) the very first thing I thought of was not citizenly at all. However, despite my evil brain, certainly I would never tweet the wrong results of a completely made up contest or just fill up the stream talking about how I'm not going to the festival. Or would I? Mwah ha ha. Okay, okay, I probably won't. But mostly because I'm not only too lazy to go to the damn festival, I'm even too lazy to tweet about it. That's the 21st century for you: more ways to embrace the lazy.