fast ramble

There's no point in trying to sleep right now, it's pointless. Look at the moon tonight: lunatic alert...

So I shouted "FUCK OFF!" down the phone and hung up. Talk about the wrong day to talk to me about the wrong things. But I couldn't get a grip - oh no, of course not - a session at the gym which should've left me begging for mercy had gone absolutely no way to towards taking my edge away, and it was clear I had more energy than was physically possible to use up, or mentally possible to tolerate. The last thing I needed was someone intentionally pressing the wrong buttons and seeing just how haywire they could send me.

I put on some extra layers to protect myself against the moon's chilling stare, grabbed my walkman, and went walkies.

The moon was just so bright, and there was no hiding from it. I can no longer remember exactly what I was thinking about, all I know is that there was a whirlwind of energy and emotion tearing up my mind, and the only thing that could support me was the music, which just drove me on. I soon found a song that managed to soothe me, and I then found the hill that would try to wear me out. But there's no way to wear me out when the moon shines like that - I start making my way up the hill and I just will for it to become steeper, it could become vertical but I'd probably still just steam right up it, oblivious to the laws of traction and gravity, lost in a heady mix of excitement and despair. There isn't a town big enough to challenge me when I need to walk off the mania: nowhere can beat me.

When you feel manic like this, the energy is without comparison. It just wants to break out of you - you want it to break out of you, you want to pull your skin off and let it all out, you can see that moon glowing, and you know that there's an equally bright glow inside of you, trying desperately to get out, you get the feeling that if you were to chop your hand off, an immensely bright light would shine out of the stump, perhaps bright enough to destroy anything it shone on; you get the urge to smash everything around you, but you can't, and you know that if you started you wouldn't be able to stop anyway, and you feel as if you've got enough energy to smash everything in the whole world, and then the world itself, just give me a hammer and the opportunity to do so and I'll do it, AND IT STILL WON'T BE ENOUGH TO CALM ME DOWN.

Eventually, you've walked so far and churned through so many thoughts that there's no option but to admit that you no longer know what you're doing, and you just have to start making your way home. Walk on the opposite side of the pavement in case you stumble across any of the thoughts you discarded on the outbound journey, try to find a tune that will help bring you back down, try desperately to control the mania before you get back to the confines of your home and you have to settle down.

It's futile: time will beat you. Time can tick on and on - it doesn't need to sleep. It will laugh at you as it watches you try to sleep. It will call you back from your bed, knowing that you'll need to check up on it to see just how desperate your situation is. While others sleep soundly, you'll be further tormented by horrible thoughts and fears, and you'll never tire of thinking of these ideas, because the moon's still watching you, and you're still full of manic energy. Thoughts fly past at an alarming rate, you try desperately to catch them but they're all fleeting, just teasing and tormenting your brain.

The only option left is to try and focus somehow and write things down, anchor the emotion to a blank page somehow... But the supernatural forces just laugh at your pitiful attempt to represent them.

And that's the story of my evening.

Document your life

Dubstep has now taken over my life so much that I struggle to spell the word "base", and even when I read the said word, I see it written as "bass".

Well, maybe that's an exaggeration... Anyway, shall we get to my point?

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Se fai il mio nome non ci sono più...

That is: "If you say my name, I no longer exist..." One for anyone who's seen La Vita è Bella there ;-)

Well, that's the quote that leapt into my head with a purpose towards the end of last year. I was sitting there trying to solve a coding problem, and getting nowhere. I wrote the problem down, and no sooner had I started writing than I saw the solution. My new technique for solving coding problems? If I'm stuck with a problem, then I write it down. As if by magic, on the journey from the inexistent world of my mind into the realm of harsh and tangible existence, the problem will be solved.

But it's not magic - I mean, clearly the resolution has a lot to do with the verbalisation process. Unlike silence, maybe saying the name of a problem won't make it disappear - forget the Italian riddler and all the Schopenhauerian bullshit idealist philosophy that forms the framework around which La Vita è Bella is based, and think of the words of Mr. Logic himself, good old Bertie Russell:

"The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution"

I'm getting carried away with quotes here; let me pull the focus back to what I was heading for...

DIARIES.

I've kept a running commentary on my experiences, emotions, dreams, ambitions, fears and philosophies for the past 7 years now, and what for? Mainly to just pass the time, because life is dull and writing is one of my favourite forms of entertainment. Partly as an outlet, to tell myself the things I can't tell anyone else. But my scribblings are more than just a log of a sometimes exciting, often depressing life. History books are written not just so that we can fantasise about the past, but so that we don't forget what happened, and so that we can learn from experience. We sometimes refer to diaries as being memoirs, and indeed these books also serve as very useful aides-mémoire. Language betrays the fact that memory and experience are inextricable.

I'll digress to give another work-related anecdote: last week, I took a problem to the team that was responsible for solving such problems. I said: "This problem cropped up a few weeks ago, so you must know how to fix it," and the guy said: "Yeah, I went out of the room, and when I came back, John had fixed it, but I don't know what he did, and he's on holiday at the moment." I laughed, and said: "Next time you solve a problem, write down the answer!"

Anyway, back to diaries as aides-mémoire... We write down our problems. Writing them down may solve them, but it usually doesn't: life problems, being trapped in the insanely complex web that is reality, are generally more complicated than simple logical conundrums, which stick out like a sore thumb in the smooth world of ideals. However, even if it won't solve the problem instantly, writing a life problem down is often the first step towards tackling it. Writing the solution down is the really crucial part. Why is it the case that most of us are more capable of remembering a problem (so capable of remembering the problem, in fact, that we return to it over and over again - that is, we repeat the same mistakes), than we are at remembering the solution?!

I'll put it together for you now. I was on my way home recently, and I felt rubbish. I was so tired and fed up that I couldn't even write to pass the time, so I just read my diary instead. And, bizarrely enough, among the entries that made me go "Whoah!", "Really?", "Oh yeah, I remember!", and "Did it really go on for so long?", I found a few pages that made me sit up and pay attention. There in front of me was the solution I didn't know existed. I found the answer last year - in fact, I must've found the answer many years ago, but I seem destined to forget it perpetually. Whatever, my little book of memoirs told me how to proceed. I went home and thought about what I'd read. I mean, I must write stuff down because it has some importance to me. Maybe last August's Pete was right - maybe I should take his advice?

Well anyway, I took that advice, and I got right back on top of things.

Still, you can take a horse to the water but you can't make it drink. And I'd probably never drink that water if it wasn't for some really special influences, who make me feel like it's all worthwhile ;-)


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(How long before I crash again?! Give it a couple of weeks... Questa vita è assurda! ASSURDA!!!)

Dolphins are gay sharks?

A bit more exploring in the world of facebook...

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It seems that whenever anyone on facebook does anything, all their friends are told... I think that's a bit obtrusive, but anyway... I will actually stop blogging if I find that every time I post something, everyone gets informed, because it's gonna piss you all off eventually. I mean, jesus, people get notified if someone comments on a blog too. Was this site designed for people with "big things" to say or something?!

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I love this "Poke..." option they've given us. It brings back terrible memories of a game they used to play called "Poke Pete!", whereby people used to just poke me for fun... Can someone poke me on here someday? I want see what it feels like.

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Am I in control of whose picture appears where on my page? The beauty of myspazz is that you can play with everyone by promoting or demoting them in your friends list. Here, I think that whoever was active last appears at the top of the list.

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I absolutely love the way that you can tell everyone how you know someone else. It's the option "We hooked up" that I like the best. Give the world a list of all the people you've slept with!

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Anyway, basta, I'm off to see if there are any settings I can play with. Heck, they've got a developer's guide for me to get my teeth into...

Yet another!

This is probably the tenth blog I've created in my short little life - well, maybe the fifteenth, actually. I just can't get enough. You know I write shit everywhere and anywhere, I just love to experiment with different environments, different spaces, different audiences...

Just wait until I get cracking on some homebrew apps, and I link up my phone to my ds, and link that to my blog, which will be linked to I don't know where, but we'll start with Facebook...

Facebook. Right, it looks a bit slicker than myspace. But it seems like this is where the grown-ups hang out. I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with mingling with serious types, I prefer wild and crazy youngsters who don't know where they'll be sleeping or working come tomorrow...

Still, the only real thing I'm not feeling about Facebook at the moment is that I don't get to see my little myspace honey when I log on...

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I'm not even going to think about defining different personas for my various online spaces - I'm pete, wherever I am, and pete is always changing, and he's always about 20 different people.

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More thoughts about Facebook:

It's a bit strange to see all these notes like: "so and so is now friends with so and so". Still, it might prove useful.

What I really want to see is shit like:

"So and so has just got paid, and he's happy"
"So and so and so and so reckon that so and so is a knob for what he did last night"
"So and so has just had a massive fight with so and so, and so and so says that they're not talking any more"
"So and so and so and so and so and so have got together to form a new boyband called SoAndSo"

That would make my day. Still, it would never happen. How many people have you ever met called "So and so"?

Maybe out in South East Asia, who knows?

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Know what else made my day?

Nada, bitches!!! We make our own days.

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I'm now going to check out how this blog links to Facebook. If it works the way I want it to, then the guys behind Facebook have succeeded in giving me the one feature I always wanted myspazz to have :-D