More Motorhead today. I wish I could put the little umlaut above the o – there’s got to be some way to do it, but it will end up being a \647 in most people’s browsers or something. Motorhead, new leather jacket, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing at work. I should go out and steal a Harley.
I had a very intense dream where I was playing with a cigarette lighter for a long time and I couldn’t get it to spark or light. I messed with it for a long time, got it to strike, and started lighting stuff on this kitchen table, sort of as a joke. There was a piece of wood, or a box, or something, and it was burning with an immense but slowly wisping flame, like a scene from Backdraft. I tried to stomp it out, and freaked out because no amount of suffocation would stop the fire – it spread and hovered with a lazy precision over the surface of the whole table, and later the floor. I was screaming and trying to beat out the flames when I pulled myself from the ether and back to the real world. But when I woke up, I could only see in black and white, almost a posterized image. I looked at my window and miniblinds for several minutes, and couldn’t see any hues at all. I got my glasses, and started looking at other things in the room, and my color vision was fine.
I’ve begun reading these 20 year old encyclopedias (encyclpediii?) of mine, as leisure reading. It’s interesting to grab one and randomly browse through the pages, reading about countries you’ve never heard of. Most reference materials contain a certain political bias, but they also have so much useless demographical or technical data, that they’re better for me. I mean, you can’t find out about the Bahamas from travel agents or web sites or the media, because you’ll get this totally sterilized, promotionalized version of the story, wereas an encyclopedia will tell you the number of acres and average rainfall and chief economy and other items with relational values. Grated, they are all fucked up because this book came out in like 1973 or something, but ancient history doesn’t change too much. I mean, in recent years people might say that Abraham Lincoln fucked slaves or was a homo or smoked dope, but at least I can look up when he was born and died, and that hasn’t changed too much.
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On a logistical note, I started the first step of shifting everything around and getting it ready for html. I will eventually have a batch program that converts these text files to html. I don’t know entirely how I will do it – something with replacing blank lines and tabs, and slapping on a predefined head and tail, like I do with the index. We’ll see.
I subscribed and then unsubscribed from the Diary-L mailing list. It seemed like a bunch of chattiness and no real talk about the mechanics of journals. Just the “what time of day do you write?” sort of stuff. Who cares.