new house

Laura and I are officially in the new house. Call us at (six one four) two six eight - four nine five seven to casually chat or vehemently argue.

Torture? OK!

NYT article on the White House/McCain torture bill compromise. Note: it's retroactive (November 26, 1997) so all the good old-fashioned torturing we've done is excused! Thank goodness we won't have to take responsibility for THAT.

carnuba tax evasion

Laura and I have been getting excited about Freecycle.org, a site coordinating local listserves of free items people would rather someone else have than thrown away. We managed to pass on a rocking horse and an old chair we no longer used.

I cooked homemade flour tortillas for the first time today. It called for lard and a lot of it. I cheerfully obliged.

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie

Blaise Pascal's Pensées

I finished As I Lay Dying today and it comforted me. It's a stark and bleak novel and it was uncomfortable at times experiencing what's left of this family and all the mistakes they keep making. I had the idea that each event as decribed by the narrators, when pieced together to form a wider perspective, appears locally like a tragedy. However, the overarching narrative doesn't seem to have that form. It's hard to tell who the book is about, in a traditional sense: for an hour I entertained the idea that the character who dies at the beginning is the protagonist. But as disconcerting as the novel was it, having pitied and feared as much as I did over the course of it, the end of the novel was a kind of cessation of stress more than anything else. The relief from terrible emotion was enough to make me appreciate simple reality free of it.

On a less (?) suicidal note, I am teaching myself 'forcing', a technique of mathematical logic that has intimidated me for years. You won't have Landon to kick around anymore, forcing!

sleep comes to the worst of us

I am drying copious peaches in my food dehydrator. Hopefully I will can pear relish tomorrow.

Spare time: moving into the new apartment one carload at a time.

Music: Mozart's Concerto For Bassoon And Orchestra In B Major, K. 191

Lost a great game of go today at the North Market.

It will lie for you, and it will never stop

from
REFRESHINGLY HONEST
CRATE AND BARREL
CATALOG DESCRIPTIONS.
BY KYLE KILLEN on
McSweeney's

Spiral Carved Bowl
$89.95

Freeform lines and top-notch craftsmanship combine to bring you this hypnotizing item that will not only fill that empty space on the table but the one in your life, too. That's right, you probably didn't realize how unfulfilled you were until you saw this catalog and realized that your problem is not that you hate your job and are dissatisfied with your familial situation—it's just that your shit doesn't match! You just need a cohesive design scheme! What you need is this motherfucking bowl! This bowl is going to love you like your parents couldn't, like your wife no longer does, and like those ungrateful hooligans who sprang from your loins never will. This bowl doesn't want anything from you except $90, and in return it will sit on your table and it will tell people that you are not a failure who spends weekends watching E! True Hollywood Story and drinking wine from a Gatorade bottle. It will say that you have a worldly appeal and an international pedigree! It will scream that you are sophisticated and wise! It will lie for you, and it will never stop, and probably that will go a long way toward making you whole again. Isn't that worth 90 measly dollars, you cheap bastard?

Hand wash. Black stain. Food-safe.

---

Off to watch the Black Dahlia this afternoon and think about Martin's axiom.

toward a better past

我死なば墓守となれきりぎりす
ware shinaba haka mori to nare kirigirisu

when I die
guard my grave
katydid!
Issa



Spam Poetry:
"When labring still with endless discontent
matter which is far more importanthaving been appointed one of the
Stung with despite and furious with despair"

product placement, melodic debasement

Police beat opposition leaders and activists during a protest on a street in Dhaka September 12,2006. Bangladesh police fired tear gas and used batons to stop thousands of opposition activists trying to march to the prime minister's office on Tuesday to demand electoral reforms, witnesses said. (BANGLADESH)



I think I'm going to see the new Michel Gondry movie tonight. You probably remember his work from Eternal Sunshine, Bjork videos, and the White Stripes-as-Legos video. Incidentally, must every movie that aims to be hip or semisensitive employ Ben Gibbard? It seems like so many movie trailers use a Postal Service or Death Cab For Cutie song (The Science of Sleep: Your Heart Is an Empty Room). It's as if movie studios are paying a tithe to Gibbard's voice of sincerity and in return he lends credence to the emotional potency of their drama. Let's cut that out. If everyone goes to that well it runs dry pretty quickly.

This Week in Landon

Listening to: Anathallo's Floating World

Making and canning salsas.

Reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner.


A man jumps in the air and grabs hold of the the neck of a goose during the fiesta in the Basque town of Lekeito, northern Spain. The geese, already dead, are strung up on a line and the revelers try to rip their heads off.

the People's Republic of Lumps in My Oatmeal

I'm back! Thanks to John Copic for his incredible donation of one kick-ass laptop and some neighbor of mine for not securing their home wireless network.

What's new?
- I'm running the Columbus Marathon on Sunday, October 15. I'll finish a little bit after 11AM outside Nationwide Arena, if anyone is interested.
- I signed a lease for a new apartment with Laura Wies beginning October 1^st.
- She and I have been making large quantities of tomato sauce and canning it.
- I got a food dehydrator and have been going to town on apples, but I'm starting pears this week if I have time.
- Classes start October 20^th.
- I have been reading Topoi: The Categorical Analysis of Logic for the last two weeks.
- Kendra's papillomas were removed successfully (again) yesterday and she's doing well, but can't talk for two weeks.
- my mom finally had her VNS surgery last month. They are slowly turning up the intensity and she still finds it uncomfortable, but everyone is hopeful.