i've been clear enough about this.

i'm cusp.

but, gen y, to me, is gen yawn - the kids are fucking boring.

mid 30s, right now, is that demographic dip. we kind of don't exist. so, i need to make that choice. and, you're more likely to find me at a 40+ event than at a 20-something one - even if i'm more likely to blend in at the latter.

so, i haven't been going out and doing much.

it's been cold and dreary. i don't want to go out anywhere until it warms up.

but, there's also not anything of interest happening around town.

it'll be a snap decision, but i'm probably going to skip gybe! next week. they haven't done anything i care about in almost 20 years. i'm holding out for another mt. zion disc...

it might be april before i head out again.

but, i said this last year: last summer was probably my last summer spent partying. i'm 37 years old. it's not even about my age, exactly, it's more about my interests. i haven't been shy in pointing out that i'm not exactly fond of the younger generation, and it's to the point that they've taken over all of the spaces - there's not a lot of places left for somebody my age to go, and not be bored.

i hate folk music. gen y rock culture is lame. and, even their techno is boring.

so, getting out to things is going to rely on recognizing an older band, or on identifying something going on at the dso, or finding a jazz band, or catching an aging dj. it's going to happen, periodically. but, less and less...

last winter, i skipped a few things due to the cold.

this winter, i'm just not interested.

we'll see if that opens up or not.

this is a more sombre, prettier piece of music that showcases glass at his best, which is when he gets into that dark, medieval counterpoint.

glass only wrote a couple of traditional orchestral pieces, but they're both pretty good - if you can get into the general style.

that cracked out tuba at the end of this always gets me...

it's just gotten to a crisis point.

if you're going to break the social contract in refusing to take care of yourself, why should society take care of you at the expense of taking care of others?

every second spent treating an obese person's third heart attack is a second spent not treating somebody else.

we're talking about 30% of the population, and rising. no health care system can accommodate this.

people have to take care better care of themselves.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/apr/28/doctors-treatment-denial-smokers-obese

this is a kind of american exceptionalism that americans don't seem to realize.

we're not quite here in canada, yet, but we might be fairly soon.

most countries in the world look at this rationally, and understand the need to preserve scarce resources; they don't tell their citizens it's ok to stuff themselves with cheeseburgers, howl that the world is wrong and oppressive to criticize them for their anti-social behaviour and then grossly maximize the profit from the catastrophe.

and, most citizens don't claim the right to stuff their faces with cheeseburgers, or uphold it as some warped concept of "freedom".

usa! usa!

https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/31/health/smokers-obese-no-surgery-nhs-uk/index.html

i guess what i'm getting at is that i never looked to punk rock as something that was fun, or nihilistic, or party-driven. i was attracted to it because it was "rock music for smart kids", and not because it was some kind of expression of rage or nihilism or angst.

it was nerd rock.

i got my angst from alternative rock, in the sense that it was an expansion of prog. that was the status quo. that was axl rose. i didn't like that; i wanted something different from punk rock...

i mean, you could argue that graffin & jello were the smartest of the bunch - with rollins & then the offspring appearing later, and that what i'm doing is pulling out the vocalists with viewpoints worth taking note of, while ignoring what was otherwise really just an aimless party scene.

but, i was just a kid. a smart kid. but just a kid.

the socal punk acts i really liked were the offspring, the dead kennedys and bad religion.

i didn't have much patience for the goofier stuff, like nofx. and, while i had a brief interest in green day when i was very young, it didn't last long. nor did i develop any interest in the "punk rock" that developed after '94.

i liked rollins' spoken word better than i ever liked black flag....

my primary concern on mar 17 has actually always been about avoiding cars.

i don't need an excuse to get drunk, if i really want to. but, i'd really rather stay inside on this particular calendar date.

a glass/shankar collaboration is going to come with a lot of baggage.

but, it actually sounds a little like the aphex twin, oddly enough.

this is one of my favourite records...

chopin ended up on the cutting room floor.

just didn't feel right.

so, i'm listening to glass this afternoon, instead.

it's the 1998 cd with the full version of the grid.

i remember picking up the cd up in high school, and everybody in my family thinking i'd lost my mind. but, it's great for reading....

https://archive.org/details/Koyaanisqatsi

for this occasion only, i'd be ok in letting some yanks play, too.

if they can make the team.

this is what we need to do.

we'll line up at baffin ellesmere island. they can line up at franz josef.

best five out of seven; winner gets the north pole.

you have to remember that, in canada, the cold war was so frigid that we fought it on ice.

and, i'm not even that young, but that's all i really remember.

lemieux.
to gretzky.
and back to lemieux....

that franco-polish connection.

so, maybe i'll listen to chopin this afternoon.

yeah, i know gretzky is polish.

but, it's going to take more than a symphony of sorrowful songs to get me to shoot the puck in my own net, here.

don't change the topic.

if you want chopin, listen to chopin. it's a free country. i don't give a fuck.

but, don't take away my rach, dammit.

this is why we can't go to war with russia...

i will not accept cheap, second-rate, polish renditions of rachmaninov.

ever.

sorry.

we're going with some classic rach, this morning.

but, i'm not going to insult you by posting some masturbatory, bourgeois americanized version of either of these.

you gotta let the russians do rach. they do it best. it's no comparison. unfortunately, the closest you'll find to somebody doing this right, online, is some polish tart using it as an outlet for teenage angst.

hope it paid off well, at least.

we're not even at war yet, and i have to link to amazon. fuck...

i've done a lot of sleeping, recently. hopefully, i last the day.

https://www.amazon.ca/Rachmaninoff-Piano-Concerto-No/dp/B000025LJW

with the singular exception of democracy, i do not have any attachment to the historical values of the west. capitalism, christianity, imperialism, colonialism - i have no attachment to these things.

but, what i do have an attachment to is the promise of a fully secularized, progressive society that the western vanguard once so compellingly aspired to - and that the old left rejected, beginning in the 60s.

if you're a little older, get used to being confounded. we're going to be calling each other regressive, accusing each other of being stuck in the past and convinced that we're each conservatives.

the difference is that i'm consistent, and you're a typical magical thinking baby boomer that thinks they can resolve contradictions through positive thinking.

i don't have a lot of trouble accepting the premise that the russians poisoned a treasonous spy; it's a reasonous position, on their behalf. i just don't think it's much to get upset about.

i mean, do you think nato forces don't kill double agents when they find them?

why do you think edward snowden is so afraid to come home? he likely faces a firing squad.

but, this isn't even really about not being a hypocrite. i really don't see much objectionable in the russians' alleged behaviour. and, i might suggest to intelligence agents intent on defecting that they think what they're doing through carefully, before they do it.

if i'm willing to offer up a criticism, it is to the british for failing to protect their assets. and, this is not the first time the british have failed at this, either.

like i say, i'd just drop 'em into the spaghetti.

i don't think that food sustainability should be conflated with veganism or vegetarianism; at it's core, this is an anti-science position, that ignores the reality that we evolved to eat meat, and cannot turn it off via a decision, whether we agree on the moral conclusions or not.

i'm empathetic to arguments about the kind of animals we eat. we eat advanced mammals, and advanced birds; the birds may really not be that smart, truly, but pigs and cows and sheep or not any less intelligent than dogs, and probably mostly far more intelligent than your average cat. these are animals that are advanced enough to develop personalities, to have independent wills and to have some fundamental concept of language. can't we be eating something a little less advanced?

i'd be happy to swap out the salami for some synthetically grown meat, and i think that's the future, rather than veganism. we can grow meat in test tubes.. i'd buy it.

but, another idea is moving to insects, who technically don't actually have brains. they have some concept of pain, but that bothers me less - pain is inherent to existence. i'm not going to sit around trying to prevent myself from breathing in flies. what about the paramecia?

insects don't have identities. some of them are literally clones that will kill themselves off to protect the queens. they're fascinating little robots, sure, but i don't feel bad about eating them.

i actually eat very little meat.

by weight, i'm guessing that my diet would be over 50% fruit, 10% dairy (cheese, ice cream), 10% vegetables and with the balance being mostly grains - including a lot of soy milk, both in daily smoothies and in the perpetually suckling cup of coffee.

i eat eggs once or twice a week, usually once, which works out to 4-8 eggs a week - usually four. it's about every five days or so.

at this point, i'm still technically a vegetarian. and, i kind of wish i was, but my doctor told me when i was a kid that i need a little red meat.

the idea that you can just take vitamins is wrong. the studies on this are conclusive; it's about absorption, and you just can't absorb a lot of what you get in the fortified foods, or b-complexes. see, and this is the fundamental flaw with veganism - they don't study what your body can actually use. they just look at charts and come to wrong conclusions from them.

take flax seed, for instance. it's actually useless to you - your body can't do a damned thing with it. there's lots of stuff in it that your body would like to be able to use, but it simply just doesn't understand the chemistry required to actually use it. so, it just passes right through. that's not what they told you, is it?

that said, i don't buy raw meat. ever. it's not allowed in the house, under any circumstance. so, you'll never see me buy anything like hamburger, or a ham - or even a turkey. the only meat i will ever purchase is pre-cooked, and i'll microwave it before i touch it, just to make sure.

i'll sometimes buy a pre-cooked bird around thanksgiving (i prefer pizza for christmas, and i generally don't celebrate easter at all). and, i'll get a burger at a fast food restaurant once in a while.

but, the only meat i buy habitually is salami - which tends to get groans. isn't that the worst?

it could be. you're not thinking about this right, though.

see, your body is concerned about total inputs, not relative ones. so, the only reason a tomato is better for you than a chocolate bar is due to the concentration of the sugar - the chocolate bar is just too much. but, you could flip it around the other way, too. a little bit of chocolate is like eating a lot of tomatoes, so if you could fortify the chocolate, it would be a wash.

this is basically thinking like an astronaut. that's what they do with their high tech space food - they condense everything into a few bites.

so, the question of whether salami is actually bad for you or not reduces to how much of it you eat. because salami is highly concentrated, eating a small amount of it is equivalent to eating much more of something else. it follows that if you're also concerned about calories, it makes more sense to eat a little bit of salami than a lot of chicken. you just have to be strict about it.

i just want to add that salami isn't hot dogs. it's not really a processed meat, in that sense. think of it like this: hot dogs are 70% corn starch, but salami is actually 70% meat.