Dichot’s Manifesto

Dichot’s Manifesto
The Revelation of things revealed, from the wage-monkey to the ivory towers of The Man, and the bindings underneath.
(a treatise on life and the fuckitude of mankind)

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Monkeys! Monkeys! Monkeys everywhere, in suits, in blue collars! Wise up, lend ear, for there is this thing which must be known, for all things must be known sooner or later.

This thing, such as things that cannot be but still are, blinds us to the things we cannot see. And to see is good, for you may run into a wall. So, for the invisible strings that are pulled, I give plain sight, for knowledge of such damnable things is paramount, my brethren. For knowledge sent us out of the garden, and gardens are damnable, for when digging, you may accidentally touch a worm.

Of two things, I shine my light on, for light is good, for to be light would make your diet easier, and diets too are damnable, since no man can eat like a rabbit. So, these two things: the monkeys who break their backs, and the monkeys who drive them, are what I present to you. Seen, sure, these things are seen my friends, but who has seen what I have seen, the strings hidden and the kidneys disappeared? For where have all the kidneys gone, but into kidney beans. There are deeper forces than those apparent, for apparently we are all forced to close our eyes anyway, so why resist when monkeys is all we are?

No! Open, and see, that rich enslaves the poor, and that the poor, being too passionate, are sympathetic for the rich, for the rich are slaves too. For richer, for poorer, til death do we work, and work we shall, for that is what people do when they don’t go to school. School is work, yes, but diplomas do not mean jobs either.

So now, I, Dichot, present my Manifesto, for all to see and sneer, because to sneer would be a boost to your ego, and this boost is good.

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Glory be praised, that some should not have rich-man’s disease, the addiction to the best things in life, that insatiable desire to take two-week vacations to the slopes and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous mishaps. Tis nobler in my mind to get my ass kicked than to suffer by my own success. For asses kicked are asses bruised. And those who bruise wear them like jewels, in declarations of humility and pride, whereas such things and Lexus and Armani advertise such target-ness for those that inflict bruises.

To be proud is to hurt with reason. Pride doth come before the fall, so watch that first step. Stumble, trip, and land full brunt on your face, and know that you did that yourself, you oafish goon. Thenceforth, proceed to the public places and proclaim your undying affections for the cute girl at the office and announce your bruises were for her, and for her alone. Upon such bold prevarications, in a fortnight, you will “get a piece”. And Piece is good, for we all should give piece a chance.

So, to blue-collar wage monkeys everywhere, take heart. Tho bruised and raped and taken advantage of by The Great Beast, you may hold high your pride and display your bruises and scratches to all your fellow bruise-brethren, so that all may know you too are a wuss among wusses. Upon this, all may know who is to blame, the murderer of the human spirit and the creator of the low-income tax-bracket: The Man.

Take heed, though; you are the people of the world, the glue that holds the gears of this great society together. And together, all you may rise up and fight with pride, and then take it up your hindquarters like men. For men can only receive in the hindquarters.

Such things, such as these, are such frilly things that such frills are. To Lexus, to Rolex and to all things shiny: to hell and the inner rings consign them do I. The devils that burn taunt you, and the slithery Beast, which has large, flapping wings that draft the chills that freeze the wills of men, this Beast that stands itself freezing in the solid slush down below, shall use these things, Lexus, Rolex, to get around on-time. Remember, brethren: for Hades doth have a schedule too.

And schedules are of the devil, and from the devil they do come to us. Madness prevails for those who slave to the schedule. From whence the curse came, from the creator of such damnable things are emanations of laughter and jeers to all who seccumb. Crush them, crush them, those who listen to Dayrunner and Timex Datalink. For to be on time is hellish on your gas mileage. Take the family dog to get it’s testicles disconnected, then run swiftly to pick up the kids, who will indeed starve without their afternoon pizzas and Ovaltines. Afterwards then, on schedule, an hour at the AA meeting, and thus your day is done.

Day of completions this seems: but this is out-and-out lies, for to begin a day brings not the end of another. Such days as such are passed still wear themselves on your back, for nostalgia runs high when times are not as good as once upon a naive time they were. For naive times are of the god of good tidings and Twinkies, and the Great Beast has most certainly kicked his ass.

The Great Beast comes in the night, when you are not looking, and takes away your toys, whenceupon you become a man. And, upon becoming a man, you forget all ideals of toyness and what toys are like. That’s why you give your kids airport souvenirs and ballpark inflatables. Then, after such forgettings, proceed you to the Adults-R-Us Auto Store on the Auto-Mile in your town, for all towns have an Auto-Mile. There, you beg deals with the gods of Lexus and thusforth with the blood of your pinky finger sign your kidney and your firstborn away. You have no arm or leg to sell, for they have been ripped-off in the night by the Great Beast; toys weren’t enough for him that night.

Toyless and parapallegic, you drive away with your new Suit Pride. Upon such things being done, as such things are done, you proceed to the Day Care, where you pick up your firstborn and hide him away in a crackerbarrel, such as was done the day your parents bargained with the gods of Lexus. So, upon your son’s head, you acquire life insurance, and thou shalt be the sole benefactor. Such things, when pondered, bring a laugh to your face, where in your adult pride you revel in the notion that you one-upped those laughable Lexus-gods. Upon such things, as such things have been done, with laughter receeded, you have been granted status of The Man.

Wear your suit, old child. Wear your monkey-suit, for of monkey-suits the Man is made. Flesh and fabric; a symbiosis of bone and fiber. Bone, the puppet; the master: fiber. Lips a permanent smile, for of such things is the fruit of Man; golf, shiny things, and eternal smiles over business meetings and mountain retreats with champagne caviar nights there, as well as in Bermuda and Las Vegas and the other places where Elvis lives. Because, Elvis is loved by The Man, for the Man enjoys music too.

Upon the attaining of your Manhood, stocks and bonds will be earned, but fear, for they are the kind that hold thee to the wheel and grind your nose to a fine point, where if you should perchance run into a wall, you would get stuck! Such things, as such things are, are your fruits and chains.

With them, in your Man ways, trusts will be funded, and with them, you will bequeeth oodles of cash to universities whenceupon they will build incredibly obsolete computer writing-labs and plaster your name upon them. Then, all shall know that such wonderful gifts, as such wonderful gifts are, are because of you, you cheap bastard. At least get them Pentiums, for God’s sake.

Of all these things, the Man is. As the Man is, such is as the Man does. For in promoting wage-slavery, he himself is a slave. Armani owns him; and upon the occurence of such horrors, the Man dies, leaving a smiling husk with fine tweed wrap and silk tie…and silk is good, for it is made by worms.

So, fair ye, children. Avoid such things, for of such things is the unhappiness of the world and the complete loss of any clue whatsoever. Wage-monkeys of the world, untie! For, such tyings are laced up, like so much shoestring on the feet of The Man. Should the Man go barefoot, the curse shall be broken, and all will be saved, at least until the gods of Nike and Reebok sponsor him in a golf tournament. Then, all shall surely be fucked, for of getting fucked is the heart of sponsorship.

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So it is. Be ye forewarned then, brethren. The Bruise and the Suit; two things of which we want not, but of either one our destiny is made. We all must choose, well, except for those guys who live down near the tracks. Decide, decide dear monkey, because the Great Beast may come tonight. Maybe he’ll come tomorrow night. Who is to know when the Great Beast will come, I mean, he DOES have a Dayrunner.

Fair thee well.

01/14/1997 03:38:26pm

Belly In My Beast

I feel you.
I stretch and reach, push forward
And straight for the gut you punch, pinch, jab.
I completely feel you.

Once, we were in harmony.
Now, you complain of my years of abuse.
Feed back the pain I fed to you.
Harmony went dissonant.

The moment I think of our unsteady peace,
You strike out at me.
Relief comes in waves; hope, in unsteady moments
Punctuated by twists, pangs.

What can I do to make things right?
What can I take?
I bow down, double over, hug you in some kind of embrace.
Will you accept my apologies?

Crashing Halt. Numbing Pain.

I noticed that my journal has been really quiet this year. So far, 9 entries total since January. Nothing in the past month and a half. And you’ve most likely noticed too; I apologize.

You see, I’ve had a bad month. Really bad. July started with a wimper, went out with a sigh. The 4th of July wasn’t kind to me; it was raining pleasantly, but I stayed inside instead of watching the fireworks downtown. Had coffee, got a migraine, went home early. The rest of that week, I started hurting in my lower abdomen; thought it was gas pain, so I lived on a diet of simethicone and wheat bread. No luck. That friday, I started hurting worse at work. I went home after work and stayed home instead of going to the usual friday night gathering I do. Tried laying down, sitting down, standing up, walking around, nothing I did could alleviate the pain in my lower-right abdomen. It was then that it struck me: that’s where my appendix is. I knew I needed to go to the ER, so I cleaned up, prepped some things in case I needed to be hospitalized, and my roomate took me there.

A urine test, blood test, CT scan (complete with having to drink a half liter of barium sulfate on a nauseous stomach), a prostate check, and two shots of morphine later (because of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced), the doctor sent me home with a prescription of Ciprofloxacin (an antibiotic) and a treatment plan for…prostatitis. I had a prostate infection. How? I don’t know. But it hurt.

My fever came and went that weekend, and the infection started going away. In my followup appointment with my regular doctor, he cut my four-week prescription regimen down to three, stating that the extra week is really just overkill. So, after experiencing the bad side effects for a few days, I didn’t argue the point.

Well, the side effects are thus: stomach pain, depression, fatigue, susceptibility to tendonitis and tendon damage, and in some extreme cases, paranoia. Basically, I sat like a lump from the time I got home from work until I went to bed, where I laid like a lump and had fitful sleep broken up by extreme dreams, another side effect.

I knew I had stuff I could do. I knew I could have been writing about it, getting it all off my chest, putting out the painful personal truths that I was seeing in my lowered state. But I lost my motivation, lost my drive. Nothing mattered, nothing meant anything. I just sat there at my desk and watched TV. Tuned in, dropped out. For a month. I knew the depression was due to the Cipro, but at times I could not be sure.

Well, my last dose was the last friday of the month, almost a week ago. I felt fine and was glad to have finished the regimen. Except I felt a tenderness in my middle back, near my kidneys. A secondary infection? I dunno, but by monday I was fine. Until this morning when I started feeling more pangs in my lower abdomen again. So, I’ve been taking it easy, pushing the fluids, taking the cranberry pills, loosening my belt. I put myself back on the Cipro tonight; already feeling the twisting of my stomach. If nothing is better by monday, then I’ll see the doc again.

Seems every time I make a journal entry, it’s bad health news. Maybe I’m turning the corner at the old age of 34. It’s all downhill from here. I dunno, it’s just that I have things to say, but no will to post them for the world to see when really they’re kinda personal thoughts. I have some further issues to deal with there, and now that I’m back on the Cipro, it won’t get any easier.

Projects, Distractions

Haven’t been doing much with the site lately, as you may notice. Got several projects going on, mostly just development work. It’s all hobby, so take it for what it’s worth.

One thing I’m working on / was working on is a simple note tool called Raganotes. It was intended to be a tool to allow me to take quick notes, give them a title, and make them available. It’s a small experiment in pulling together some functional Perl building blocks: CGI::Application, Template Toolkit, Class::DBI, and Apache::Session. It’s a way to get my head wrapped around using these blocks in the assembly of a larger Content Management System for my site, a way of getting experience in doing so, finding methods that work, dipping my feet in the pool. It started from my overriding frustrations in building my CMS, a fast-and-loose attempt at coding something before I lost interest. What resulted was something that was kinda quick, I mean in the grand scale of things the month of building time was quicker than my past years of working on my site. I lost interest a few times, got stumped many, but I got it functional. Just not complete.

I think what I ended up with was something with way too much functionality to it. Instead of letting the user log in, make notes, add titles to them for quick browsing, publish them, search, edit, delete, undelete, copy, etcetera, what I got was a mashup of features that overall seem really cludgy. I had a vision, lost it during development, and then gained a vision that was hazily similar to the original, and now I’m stumped again. It’s mostly a user interface thing. So I’m letting it rest for a while.

My most recent project is my game, Chrontium. I started this back in 2004, some time before AJAX was an internet buzzword. It uses some advanced javascript, images, and realtime communication with a server to provide gameplay for users. At the time, it was fairly groundbreaking, yet I had only shown it to a handful of other people and promptly sat on it for months, years.

I’ve since gotten a new fire for Chrontium, and now, in the past 2 weeks, I’ve polished up the engine, redone the graphics, went from using GIFs to PNGs for true transparency (and much faster rendering in Firefox, et al). I’ve also done some cleaning up and changes elsewhere in the game code, I’ve rearranged the development file tree, and I’ve optimized the stylesheets and code to work in IE and Firefox (others forthcoming). Things are working rather nicely, but there’s rough edges. I also still need to build the server-side stuff, the database end, the user management, the scorekeeping, the game parameter controls, the message boards (which might come later), and all that. If it’s worth a damn, and gets popular after I post it here, I might relegate it to its own domain. We’ll see.

An associate of mine asked me why I didn’t simply use Flash instead of Javascript. My first answer was simple: I hate Flash. Really, I seriously do. My second answer: I want to prove to the internet community at large that Javascript, and the browsers they run in, are coming of age for realtime gaming applications. Anywhere you can use sprite graphics, you can use Javascript and images. I can’t wait until my first public release to see what issues, comments, or praises come my way. Will be interesting to stir a buzz.

But I’m not even finished enough to be concerned about these things. Really. Until then, I have my head down in the work.

Speed Bumps

Last night, I stayed home. I do that on occasion, and last night was such an occasion. Mostly watched TV; it’s becoming my new hobby of late. Something tells me rigging up a ghetto antenna for my TV tuner card was a bad mistake. Let’s watch my productivity drop, shall we?

After a few hours or so, I got bored. Decided to open up my installation of Acid Pro 4; first time in over a year. Loaded up and listened to some of the rhythm loops I built, loaded up some songs, watched them play. One of those songs was “Tripoli” (those of you who’ve heard it will know what I’m talking about). As it played, I decided that it was finally time to attend to it, fix a few problems that cropped up during my migration from Acid Music 3.0 to Acid Pro 4, most of which involved editing and repair of volume and pan envelopes. I had a chunk of work to do, but I got it done. Even tweaked the mix while I was at it.

At the end, I started wondering to myself why I ever quit, why I stopped writing music, why I folded up the keyboard and stashed it away, why I let Glass Door rot. It’s good stuff, and it’s fun to do, at times it’s really fun. So what’s the problem?

Frustration, really.

Got tired of a lot of the technology. Seems funny that the impediment to hammering out a melody, a lead, a bassline, and a rhythm is high technology. Funny, that. No matter what kind of software I was using, it did little but stand in my way. The very tools I used made my work of creating music that much harder.

Actually, the problem I have is a little deeper than the tools I use. While there is space for improvement in that regard, I think what’s really at issue is the high cost of creation. It takes a lot of energy, determination, focus to get it all out, put it down, and make it work. Damn the polishing. Damn the fine-tuning. Just get it out and create it from nothing. It involves the whole of my attention and a lot of energy.

Music, programing, writing. If there’s the least little distraction, the whole effort is wasted – nothing gets done. I need to be alone. Need to be disconnected. No IRC. No IM. No people talking. No girls walking by. Which means no coffeeshops during the creation process. But that’s a problem, isn’t it? It is.

The work of editing, polishing, revising – that requires not as much attention. I still need to pay attention, but I can afford to function among distractions. It’s then OK to clean up code, manipulate volume envelopes, fix grammar. It’s already been put out there. But the initial challenge of creation and its requirement, the abolition of the environment, is the hardest part. If I could do that, then I can build the world.