epicurian_flint

02:41 pm: The End
It failed.

I don't think this will get updated ever again.

Have a great day.

11:41 am: I thought you'd never ask.
Greetings and salutations to my highly imaginary audience. I hope that I am imagining you all to be well, and that you have no fake serious problems at this time in your lives.

Today I'm going to write to all none of you about my concept of "out," and how it has changed over time.

I am not, by nature, a social person. If that was not evident from the way I write in these boxes that no one reads rather than talking to real people, than it should now be clear. However, sometime during high school i was introduced to the concept of going "out". Even now I do not fully understand it, but at the time I rather enjoyed it, because the point of the exercise was to spend time with my friends. What we were doing was irrelevant, somewhat like what type of free beer you're drinking. It doesn't matter, because it's free, it always tastes good. I've always said that if I could brew free beer, I could write my own checks. But I digress and ramble.

The point is that at some stage my friends started turning two shades of lame, and the idea of "out" seems to have changed on me. Rather than being an excuse to spend time with friends, it no longer seems to be worth doing anything unless there's alcohol or other stimulants involved. I have gotten excuses ranging from surgery to "my feet itch" as to why people won't leave the imagined comfort of their own homes. This is quite hard on me as for several years I went out with them despite the certainty that I was going to get beaten up as soon as I left the house.

What I'm getting to is that my own idea of "out" has changed in a different way to theirs, or so it seems. Instead of wanting to go out to be entertained, I want to go out to not be here. The destination was never really the point, but now the origin is.

This has made for an interesting time for me personally. When I'm here, it's bad because I'm here. When I'm not, it's bad because it's not as good as it used to be before my friends priorities got shafted.

Well, I think I'm all done moaning to everyone and no one at the same time through this massive source of information pollution that we know and love (and loathe) as the internet.

I hope your non existant, imagined lives are all you never wished they weren't.

Jim.

11:09 pm: I'm pathetic
What am I?

04:14 pm: Theeeeeeere's......NOTHING! Gather! Over there.
Today was contracts.

At 8:30.

It's funny, i'd forgotten that there was a six o'clock in the morning as well. So i dosed up on caffine and in i went. big mistake. particularly in an exam with very little time to work. anyone who's drunk more than their daily share of coffee in a matter of minutes knows what i'm talking about.

And now i have returned to my abode, eaten, and taken my first real study break in days to check this wonderful cesspool of intrigue and...uh.......intrigue...that i like to call "the internet". try it now. it's webtacular.

So i pop on to this wonderful little reading mechanism to see how my lovelies (yes all four of you) are doing. and it seems that chiara is mightily upset. this makes me sad. it seems that i can miss alot in a week.

but i'm going to touch on something that i have not seen anyone talk about with my somewhat limited number of peoples whos thingys i read. (as an aside, there were alot of people mentioned in recent updates that i don't know, or have possibly met only when drunk, which is just as good. my headache intensified at the sheer level of writing i saw when i logged in. i have dropped a few of my little white friends now and am back on the way to cheery.)

Being me, i'm not going to approach this straight out. no, i'm going to try to relate. to sympathise. we all have tales like this. I'm going to tell a story.

I have lost, as i understand it, all of my grandparents to cancer. The last was my father's father, Fraser, last october. This isn't something that i've really talked about with anyone, because that's not what i do. But here goes.

I didn't really know Fraser. when i was very little he was a smiling old man who smelled funny and lived a long way away. suprisingly, this is more or less the way his image stayed with me, but more stuff was added to it. He was, as near as i can remember, nice. he laughed at my stupid little kid jokes. he bought me presents. he came and did things with my brother and i.

but i didn't know him.

i thought i did. but i never thought to write. i mean, i didn't think it was important at the time. he lived all the way down in Yass and i hardly saw him and i was busy with school and things. with good ol' 20-20 hindsight i can see now that he was desperate to know something about my brother and i. he was always sending to dad asking for information about us. i was as brief and shallow as i tend to be with everyone.

heh. just thought of something. i know i've told everyone this, but he was an absolute bastard to try to talk to on the phone. his accent was as thick as a short plank, and he also had no teeth. he was also almost stone deaf. these combined to give the effect of talking to someone through a wall of foam.

i could have written, but i didn't. last october, we all went to Yass. my father and uncle broke down during the funeral. so did alot of the people in the congregation. my brother did.

i didn't. i didn't think at the time of how heartless it would seem to me afterwards. but i didn't know him. he was just this guy who i'd seen every now and then when we got down south and found the time or he wrote a letter or whatever. he wasn't someone i knew. i'd sung at dozens of funerals like this.

it wasn't until the wake that i thought something was amiss. until i met his friends. if you ever want to know someone, meet their friends.

first, there were alot of them. lots. i didn't really do a head count or anything, but there were more than a few. second, they were all good friends, and they all knew him better than i did. but i figured, no big deal right? after all, they lived so near him.

horseshit.

he was my family. as the months went by i started to wonder more and more about him. it's getting to the point now where i'm going to have to go down to Yass to find out about him. find out who he was.

so, to sum up, i'll say this; don't waste anything you have with your family. get to know them all. love them all. i realise that alot of this is meaningless advice, that alot of people have way different situations, but i miss this guy i never knew. don't do that.

so. here's a list of things i knew about him that i remember him by:

the weather.

Rum and milk.

Smoking pipe & lighter.

Tobacco boxes.

ladies man (haha)

Polite.

Quick to laugh.

Patient.

Cockatoo.



Happy.






I'll be back later with a treatise on hope. just warning you.

James out.

12:33 am: It's a trap!
Wow.

It looks like my adoring public is expanding by the moment. Now it's up to...three people. Go me. Keep on at this rate and by the time computers rule the world a whole seven people will be reading these pitiful smatterings of text. and you know what?? fuck those computers.

So. What's on my mind tonight, as i sit here taking advantage of the small window of opportunity to write something without robert reading over my shoulder?

Not alot,to be frank.

All my friends are getting happier, and that's a truly wonderful and beautiful thing to watch happen. It is a fantastically uplifting thought that there is the possibility of happyness here in this place with us, and that it can be found as close as a few suburbs away.

Unfortunately, it can't always. Sometimes you can look a couple of suburbs away (or one, or none) and be told fairly flatly that you're looking in the wrong place.

what follows is an interesting sort of limbo while you try to work out where the fuck you're supposed to look now. I'm thinking somewhere in the Centuri sector. or yeronga.

Fortunately, just when i need an excuse to spend as much time as possible away from everyone i've ever met, exams have popped up. So i'm not just sitting here in the dark wallowing in self pity, i'm STUDYING. clearly.

It is a common misconception that during study my social and physiological experiments are put on hiatus. this could not be further from the truth. indeed, if anything i begin far more interesting investigations into the true capabilities of the human body. here is a small list of my current experiments. I do not recommend attempting any of these yourself non-existant reader, but if by chance you do please send me any results so that i can further my research.

1. Dietry deprivation (Formally; can a human subsist soley off uncooked two minute noodles and jelly-lollies.)
Current findings; yes, it can.
Abstract; Immediately prior to the examination period, large quantities of jelly lollies (in 1kg bags to help lukemea kids or somesuch) were purchased, along with 4 x ten packs of magi 2minute noodles. Since then, these and Sarsparella cordial have been the primary forms of energy intake. so far, so good, though i can't stop jiggling.

2. Oral Health (Formally; can human teeth take six to seven bushings a day and not dissolve)
Current findings; inconclusive.
Abstract; During the examination block, the test subject is brushing teeth if and when "they feel dirty". This, in combination with experiment 1, has led to the teeth being cleaned somewhere between five and eight times a day. They don't seem to be getting any smaller, but you can never tell with tooth enamel.

3. Sleeping habits (Formally; can the human male sleep without any.)
Current findings; inconclusive due to enviromental circumstances.
Abstract; During test block test subject has begun sleeping if and when he "feels tired." this experiment has experienced some drawbacks however with "employment." it seems that my employers do not like the idea of me sleeping through a shift in the name of science.

4. Information retention (Formally; how much fucking microbiology can i memorise before going clinically insane?)
Current findings; not fucking much.
Abstract; test subject's first exam is a 70% microbiology final, and he has not read and notes or information prior to this swat vac. It is suggested that if i start talking about "lysozimes" or "bacteriophages" near you you lay a tarp down or something, because my brain is about to fucking explode.

So there you go. be aware that these are only a sample of the less disturbing of my experiments.

Does someone want to tell me how i can read marina's private thoughts and wishes on this attempt at destroying our own privacy by flooding the internet with pointless...ness??

thanks, that'd be super great.

jimbo out.

10:19 am: I'm a minor character in my own story.
Wowy.
Seems that everytime i try to write in this fucking thing i go and check the friend's stuff first and chiara's posting just mess's me up to a point where everything i write seems futile. still, need something off my chest now.


ain't life grand?

No. It isn't. we live in a society where, if you put in the effort, you can become a military general. or a surgeon. or the ruler of a nation.
This all sounds well and good, but understand that for thousands of years, these are all things that people trained for they're entire lives to do. from about the age of seven, maybe younger, a kid would know what he was going to do with his life.
Now for the majority of people, this was not such a big deal. if you were a little guy person, you'd grow up to slop pigs like daddy, and if you were a little gal person, you'd marry a pig slopper, like mum. Not a grand life, but your life. you couldn't change it.
I get severe stress when i'm doing nothing. this does not make sense. but the reason i get it is because i'm doing nothing, when i should be out furthering my ability to have an excellent future, trying to get into space or other people into space or something. i should be out looking for a partner to someday co-habit and procreate with. (hey, even ugly guys have dreams). i should be studying in order to gain more wealth so that i can live comfortably. I should be practicing so that if adam ever comes back from heli-skiing, i won't sound like arse when we play together.
But i'm not, am i? i'm sitting writing in some worthless online shit box of a vent device, which no one reads so i am essentially writing in for the mere jollies of listening to myself type.
I think i'll go to the gym. or something.

Also, while i think of it, on the whole co-habiting thing. I think people have got this the wrong way around. modern society peoples put alot of emphasis on finding a good career and making dosh, stabilizing themselves etc before they look for a partner. this in itself is bad enough, however often the reason they don't find one earlier, or then, is that they are now deeply ingrained with the idea that what they are looking for is someone who is "right for them". which is, of course, total horseradish. No one will ever meet someone who is right for them straight up. relationships take time and effort. Mr/Mrs right isn't just going to walk in. The idea of a relationship is that it is built with the other person. two wholes making a better whole, yes? I think that there's alot to be said for learning to love someone.
however, it's not seen as the right thing to do anymore. why? because we have television and movies and books and magazines in which two people meet, fall madly in love and live happily ever after.
Do your damn homework before looking for a partner. get a grip on reality. that's not what goddamn happens, it never has, except in films. Most lasting relationships are built on friendship, because if you don't have friends, what have you got??

ok, i'm done writing things no one will read. thankyou for your unattention in not reading this terrible rambling of drivel cakes.

jimbo out.

10:33 pm: P-O-S-T MAN ... That's what I am!!
Once again I'm writing in this thing when, in actual fact, no event as such has taken place. This is not surprising.

In fact, statistically speaking, there is a very low chance of anything exciting ever happening in my life, ever. Let's review, shall we.

Statistics tell us that based on trends we can extrapolate approximate information further ahead than our own. I've been alive for eighteen and a half years, longer depending on when you feel that a foetus becomes a human. In that time i have held no (0) steady jobs. This does not bode well for my job hunting, for despite hunting for a couple of years now, i'm still yet to catch anything. One of four aims knocked off forever by maths.

Number two. The wonderful world of girls. Nature has dictated that i be given a severe disadvantage in this field of life. namely, my hideous troll features. this doesn't bother me so much as it does other people, after all, i hardly have to look at them. This, combined with chronic fear of rejection, has lead to what we statistitions call a "steady trend" of 0 girls in the past 18 years, any deviation from this number being so minimal in terms of time and emotion that at most, the mean is boosted by .00001, which is negligable in modern mathamatics.

Next up on the analysis of doom, education. At present, i'm learning nothing that will be of any benefit to me ever. or anyone ever, for that matter. the most important thing i learnt in the last month and a half was "don't drink and try to socialise at the same time". incidentally, i have learnt this lesson several times already, although clearly i haven't, because if i had i'd stop trying to do it. so while it may be an important lesson, it is a futile one, brining it's importance down dramatically. luckily, there is still hope for me in this most nerdy of fields, as past trends show great recoveries from periods of mental inactivity.

Finally, the combination class, happiness. Let's ignore, for the sake of the model, extra information such as living conditions and surprises. Happyness did not reached great heights last year. in fact, any time it rose, it simply dived further down than it did before. perhaps the most shocking part of this figure is the complete lack of information to support it. there seems to simply be no reason. This does not bode well for the upcoming year, but only time will tell.

Now i'll take a look at the whole thing in a slightly less depressing light. after all, i can fucking well do what i please in this log, i write it and no one reads it.

In a method somewhat shunned by other stats, the theory of probability shows good things for me. in fact, in order to balance my life, ying for yang, shit for shat, i am going to have at least two solid years of bliss in the near future.

as i am sure everyone is quite aware at the moment, this is never ever going to happen, simply because we live in a terrible world. At least if the matrix had me i could hope for a power spike or something and forget that it all existed.

any way, i said i'd be less like that, and i will. in terms of my ever favourite epicuris, i'm scoring a good old fashioned two out of three on the happyness scale, good by anyone's measure.

Criteria the first: Self reliance. ok, so here i fall down somewhat, but i'm going to blame society rather than actually deal with the fact that i'm socially inadequate.

Criteria the second: Freedom of thought. Achieveing. trying to look at things in a different light all the time, trying to expand the mind, and not doing too shabbily thank you very much for not asking. incidentally, any hypotheticals or whatever to ponder would be appreciated. alternately, call me a pompus ass. what ever floats your boat really.

Criteria the third: Friends. Kicking arse and loving it, thank you very much. Ok, so i may be a social crutch, but at least i'm good at something. I have so many great people that i can talk to and think with and jam with and create with and laugh with and so on and so forth for ever and ever world without end amen. the best part is, they know people who are really great too, and so the web that we're all part of strengthens. If there's any hope for humanity, it's through friendship.

ok, i'm all done whinging now. if anyone does read this, remember that short fast loud is on JJJ tonight at 11. i'm off to listen to it now.

jimbo out.

09:05 am: A 3.5, or possibly a 3.
I'm still at adam's place, two days after new years.

I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to anyone i need to apologise to. i'm not going to make excuses, since i probably meant what ever i said or did more than i usually mean stuff, but some shit still shouldn't happen, so i'm sorry.

apparrantly the whole shebang ended with rather a lot of vomiting, which is an iteresting development since i thought it would end in tears.

kudos to adam though for holding what was a, in my humble and housebound experience, a ripper of a party.

hey, something that's shitting me. people who don't do what they mean, or say what they want to. if you have something to say to me, fucking say it would you??

it's much easier to deal with someone if they say "you're a champ" or (more commonly) "you're a dick" than putting up with subtle glances and innuendo.

not that innuendo can't be fun, cos it can, provided that everyone gets in on it. then it's witty.

anyway, the point of all that is that if anyone has anything they feel i need to hear, go right out and say it. although i do draw lines. for example, i very much doubt that i would enjoy my parents telling me i was adopted. for while this would explain alot of things (my mother can't do maths, i knock it over with a breath), it would really raise more questions (my jawline, nose, and other troll features.)

well, i'm gonna go eat more starch products and drink god-knows-what-in-a-red-bottle.

cheers all for a great time

jimbo out.

11:53 pm: 's ok. I didn't need that rib.
At first i thought it was too hot to write in this thing. i still think it is, but what else am i gonna do?? go to sleep?? geeze.

i gave adam his false-birthday-of-christ-to-replace-pagan=festivals gift. he seemed both pleased and distressed. pleased, because it is pretty cool. distressed cos it meant that he had more work to do to find one for the next passing of the baton.

Cos see, for his 18th i got him the poison bottle from PA. so he got me the Cool Thing from megatokyo. so for chrissie, i got him Amnesia Dust from 8-bit theater. the next move is his.

and with that, i had a really nice thing happen to me the other day. when i was looking for the bag to put the talc into to make adam's amnesia dust, i went to a sunglasses place to see if they had any spare sunglasses bags that i could use. and the lady just gave me one. now i don't know if they're free bags or what, but they aren't exactly dodgy, and i thought it was a really cool thing for her to do.

it's always when people exceed your expectations of them

and i guess with that you really get to the heart of the "big issue". which is, why james gets down every time he has to go out.

see, i hate people. i love persons, but hate people. it's too impersonal for me. and when i go out, i see a lot of people, but meet very few persons. and people almost constantly fail to live up to my expectations of them.

My mother sometimes asks how i got to be so jaded. were i a slightly worse person than i actually am, i would answer "because i live in a house full of manic depressives constantly readjusting my world view and refusing to let me believe the crap that everyone else buys. you made me this way."

what i should answer is "every time i leave the house, i see people doing things to hurt one another. i see them pushing other people, brain washing kids, releasing shit movies and shit games just to run a profit. i see bands selling out and politicians taking bribes and making decisions which clearly highlight their detachment from reality. i see people fighting wars in the name of men who spoke of peace. and i don't understand any of it, so i abuse it instead."

of course, what i ACTUALLY say is "i dunno. just lucky i guess."

truth of it all is that you can't expect anything from people, that way they'll mostly exceed your expectations. unfortunately, part of the human condition is expecting things.

sucks, don't it??

jimbo out.

11:03 pm: The Ants Go Marching Two by Two
Let's see if i have the hang of this yet. there's no real events to talk of, but i'm going to keep typing anyway.

I'd love to see a survey done of occurences of heart disease and other stress related illnesses compared to social classing at a teenage level. Dead set, dorks would be steady as a rock.

Dorks have no issue with reaching their inner child. they ARE their inner child, and somewhere inside of them is a fully matured individual who's attempting to break loose, buy them a new wardrobe, throw out their comic books and get a real job. They play games and buy action figures all the way through their days.

This does, by nature, make them far better at dealing with things. They don't bury emotions in order to let them out at a big midlife crisis. rather, they cap some arse in CS or Savage or whatever your poison is. They are more moralistic people, because they have the examples of the greatest heroes like spider man and Fitz Chivalry Farseer and Neo and Aragon and the so forth. We don't just have heroes, we have SUPER heroes.

A single dork may appear to be...well, a lonely guy without a life. but when they band together they have the powers of good of which they always dream. just take a look at www.penny-arcade.com to see what dorks can do when they band together. We raised over $100000 worth of toys for childrens hospitals. Dorks are super good.

And in so saying, i'm fairly sure that i'll never be a proper dork. The child in me is too weak, the adult too strong. i desire maturity too much, to be respected as someone who has seen the world and laughed or whatever the fuck. I bury too much stuff to deal with later.

On that cheery note, some news. Our new TV turned up today, and we bought the DVD and stuff too. I can't stay in the same room as the TV for too long though. See, it's a "Flatron". Bugger me into a hand bag if that doesn't sound like a transformer. so i'm constantly afraid we'll be attacked by decepticons, or worse still, it'll turn out to BE a decepticon.

Now all i need is some DVD's. shouldn't be too hard, right?? it'll work out.

nearly finished shopping for christ's birthday. i keep forgetting what day it's on, so much do i care about this attempt by christians to sway pagans to their way of thinking.

i'm going to keep trying stuff with this song about ants now. It's coming along nicely.

Jimbo out.