Blast from the Past, part One
Feb. 14th, 2004 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI was sorting crap in my hard drives (actually, I was looking for my old ICQ number as I wanted to try Trillian's emulation) when I started reading some old Pot Sherds. Pot Sherd was what I did before LJ: a mass email that allowed me to ramble to friends and acquaintences. When my copy of Outlook Express fried my Win95 setup, I lost a lot of my address book. I started using an "emergency" email program, pine, which doesn't allow you to set up list groups.
I've been looking to restart the sherd and I found one of the major components: most of the email list. I've said I would start the Sherd again, but now I have a ready tool for the job.
While I'm sorting all of that out, here is an old Sherd. If you like it, lemme know your email address and I'll put you on the list.
Pot Sherd vol. 1.1 (originally sent 23 February 1999)
"So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. And [Job] took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes." -Job 2:7-8
Yeah yeah, I'm a heathen. I still like the book of Job: it nails down what kind of idiots most faithful folks are. Job is totally cursed, his friends tell him God wouldn't do such things, then God shows up to tell his doofus friends to shove off. God explains the most obvious thing: he's God, not some mincing benevolence. "Gird up thy loins" God says -- you gotta
dig any all-potent force that warns you to wear a cup before stopping by. If I ever fall back into a realm of faith (hey, it's possible but definitely not imminent), I shan't be a sucker about it. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes are best for signal-noise ratio. More in the next letter, if you want me to elaborate.
Okay, so I'd been meaning to mail all of you, and at the same time I tend to write these generic letters of 400-800 words to no one in particular when I mail. It seems asinine to send only one person a good letter every once in a while and nothing to rest of you, so I shan't rotate the stock as poorly anymore.
On one hand, I once felt pangs of guilt about setting up a mass mailing to my friends. Each of you are in the inner circle of my friends, not the 99% of chumps I nod towards and offer generic remarks (you're the top 1% of chumps! Chump on!). Still, I'm the gregarious sort and have met thousands of people in my life, thus I can't give all of me to each of you (especially when some of you never buy drinks when your turns come up, eh?) without
winding up in the mental ward or the casualty ward.
Then a couple of you started sending me the same reposts (not ripostes, either: these things had more greater-than signs on each line than a Soul Coughing song), so I realized such boundaries had been breached anyway. We are thus so far "through the looking glass" that I feel it's just to do this.
Consider these random mails as moments of art (yeah yeah, bad art). I need to feed the muse every few days or I'll go insane. You can put these posts in the memory hole or you can put them in your coat pocket. You can ask to be taken off the list and no harm is done. Some of you don't even know each other (there is a bias toward college friends in the numbers), and some of you don't even like each other. You can look at the names on the top of the page and bile will build. Still, I like you guys and I care enough to keep you apprised.
This is my way of keeping a diary. Some of you received my handwritten culling during the summers of college, and now technology allows me to do this faster. So, having put my excuses at the front of this expedition, I offer the fun bits!
I went up to Toronto this weekend and came home with many bags of Canadian groceries. Everything from Jersey Milk bars and four-packs of KitKat to a box of Shreddies. I really overloaded on the chocolate, so I am trying to ignore just how much of that fattening stuff is sitting in the bottom of the fridge in an innocent, white plastic bag. (Oh yes, Burnt Almond. Caramilk. Astros.) I have always treated the trip to the supermarket as a trip through the national psyche (hey, drugs are expensive but a roasting chicken is $1.19), so getting the chance to traipse drunkenly through a couple of Canadian supermarkets was like having a slice of Ontarian cerebrum on the slide. Ontario is unlike New York or even Quebec in that they cannot sell
beer in the supermarket, so the clean, 24-hour Dominion store on Bloor Street (downtown, squeegee territory) was a bit of a shock. It was a lot like the A&P off Union Square, except no toiletries were locked in cages ("You really going to buy that hair cream, sir? I need ID") and nothing seemed over-stacked. The standouts:
1) Far too much mayonnaise. I want to say "these folks are real medigans", but since medigan is a Sicilianization of American and they are North Americans but not Americans, it's not so fitting. I always wondered how white folks stayed so white...
2) Not as much bottled water as at home. I had always thought of bottled water as a yuppie trait, and yet I have found myself well-versed in the flavo(u)rs of water. I know better than to grab evian (not merely for palindromic reasons, but because it has this nasty taste to it) and to seek out Deer Park and Aquafina. to find none of these in a very trendy part of town suggested none of the trendy people lived near this store. Maybe in
Mississauga, the Paramus of Toronto, they have all the varieties in crystalline bottles... just like Ottawa.
3) Potato chips in Canada are something else. Many of you know I found a craving for ketchup-dusted chips on my last trip to Montreal, so seeing such other oddities as "dill pickle" and "the works" made me reel. How can there be such a mass of high-grade junk (junque?) food and yet nowhere near the prevalence of fat people as here? I have conjectured that the junk is so good that people can eat less of it and feel sated.
More later. Let me know if this first edition has left anyone wanting more...
-aisle of plenty, Dante
----
too: etymology
The second missive begins. It dawns on me that I hadn't explained the choice of "pot sherd" as a name for these missiles. After all, I've been an atheist since the Reagan administration, so my tossing around Scripture seems suspect at best. I had tried to compile my journals as legible treaties a few years ago and called the exercise "ratchet". The implication is that a ratchet tightens and loosens screws with punctured pauses, and since I have a few screws loose...
First, I like the obscurity of the word (as with missive). Pot sherd is the word used in the King James version, and thus it is pronounced "pot shard", just as British folks say "clerk" to rhyme with "dark". Job, a man in the height of fortune, is suddenly cast into what looks like punishment. He is
left to rediscover his own skin and must scrape himself clean. Note that the boil attack is the only part of Faith Test (TM) that Satan performs: the rest of the onslaught (all of his kids die, his fields go barren instantly, his Mastercard is denied) is God's work.
One of the reasons I stopped being a Christian back in 1988, while I was an altar boy and an eighth-grader in Catholic school, was that it seemed superficial. These people went through a series of rote motions in some attempt to keep themselves.. sane? Bored? I couldn't tell. It wasn't until I'd left the church that I'd found out the moment of transubstantiation was one of the most controversial in the history of Christ, Inc.. For those of you not raised with this spiel, it's when the priest says "hocus pocus" (no, really! The original Latin is "hoc est mon corpus", this is my body, from which we get the rabbit-pulling phrase) and bread and wine (well, more like wafer and Hornsby's) turn into a dead guy.
Of course, you learn nothing about the interesting parts of religious history until you're out of grade school. I think this is how many of the smart kids in school become heathens: they want answers, they get told to wait, and they stray. I was too young to notice girls, so I found out earth science class made sense. I think it helped that the nun that had been teaching earth science left the convent during our midterms, so any semblance of the tenuous hold religion and science might have held had dissolved. Soon enough, I was in public high school with all the other skeptics, and I was reading Bertrand Russell -- I'm sure we all have similar tales.
"Years ago, I was an angry young man, and I would pretend that I was a billboard." -Talking Heads, 'Nothing but Flowers'
I'm still torn about these issues, of course. I was a "positive atheist" at first, ready to pick a fight about the lack of god and quote the Dead Kennedys upon the slightest provocation. Madeline Murray O'Hare would have been proud, but time wore this out of me. By the eleventh grade, I'd found out that some people were religious and -- this startled me -- had working brains in their heads. I'd met some Jainists, Muslims, and even the occasional Christian with whom I could speak and find answers beyond the traditional "you're gonna go to Hell, you know."
Meanwhile, I should note that I think my parents planned it this way. They were both ostensibly agnostic, although my dad is presently observing Lent out of Pavlovian conditioning. They sent me to Catholic school, even though my mom was never a Catholic, to get me inoculated against proselytism (oh, and the public school across the street from my house was a rough one). They had seen how my mother's sister was never inured to religious zeal and thus joined the Maharishi Maheshyogi's gang in Iowa (since, she has relaxed and is now a landlord in the same town in Iowa) and wanted to avoid such problems.
Also, my dad is Sicilian: the men are not allowed to be religious in his family. They'd sooner accept a gay son than a priest in the family. Religion is a feminine attribute in that scene, and I've never really had the desire to probe that question too much. It made sense on a pre-rational level and it jives with the idea that the original faiths of humanity were matriarchal.
Still, I keep studying these cults and sects, heresies and tumults. I can't let go of the thought that the chasm of faith is burrowed by psychological disturbance. Man seeks answers, and sometimes comes up with an eternal version of leisure suits and carpenter pants.
Tune in next time, when I talk about something, scrape more off myself and turn it into words.
-abracadabra, Dante
Please note that I do not necessarily uphold all the same stuff I said back in '99, when I wrote all that and the ones to come. I was still living in Utica, after all.
-still signing off with these puncture lines, Dante
I've been looking to restart the sherd and I found one of the major components: most of the email list. I've said I would start the Sherd again, but now I have a ready tool for the job.
While I'm sorting all of that out, here is an old Sherd. If you like it, lemme know your email address and I'll put you on the list.
Pot Sherd vol. 1.1 (originally sent 23 February 1999)
"So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. And [Job] took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat down among the ashes." -Job 2:7-8
Yeah yeah, I'm a heathen. I still like the book of Job: it nails down what kind of idiots most faithful folks are. Job is totally cursed, his friends tell him God wouldn't do such things, then God shows up to tell his doofus friends to shove off. God explains the most obvious thing: he's God, not some mincing benevolence. "Gird up thy loins" God says -- you gotta
dig any all-potent force that warns you to wear a cup before stopping by. If I ever fall back into a realm of faith (hey, it's possible but definitely not imminent), I shan't be a sucker about it. The books of Job and Ecclesiastes are best for signal-noise ratio. More in the next letter, if you want me to elaborate.
Okay, so I'd been meaning to mail all of you, and at the same time I tend to write these generic letters of 400-800 words to no one in particular when I mail. It seems asinine to send only one person a good letter every once in a while and nothing to rest of you, so I shan't rotate the stock as poorly anymore.
On one hand, I once felt pangs of guilt about setting up a mass mailing to my friends. Each of you are in the inner circle of my friends, not the 99% of chumps I nod towards and offer generic remarks (you're the top 1% of chumps! Chump on!). Still, I'm the gregarious sort and have met thousands of people in my life, thus I can't give all of me to each of you (especially when some of you never buy drinks when your turns come up, eh?) without
winding up in the mental ward or the casualty ward.
Then a couple of you started sending me the same reposts (not ripostes, either: these things had more greater-than signs on each line than a Soul Coughing song), so I realized such boundaries had been breached anyway. We are thus so far "through the looking glass" that I feel it's just to do this.
Consider these random mails as moments of art (yeah yeah, bad art). I need to feed the muse every few days or I'll go insane. You can put these posts in the memory hole or you can put them in your coat pocket. You can ask to be taken off the list and no harm is done. Some of you don't even know each other (there is a bias toward college friends in the numbers), and some of you don't even like each other. You can look at the names on the top of the page and bile will build. Still, I like you guys and I care enough to keep you apprised.
This is my way of keeping a diary. Some of you received my handwritten culling during the summers of college, and now technology allows me to do this faster. So, having put my excuses at the front of this expedition, I offer the fun bits!
I went up to Toronto this weekend and came home with many bags of Canadian groceries. Everything from Jersey Milk bars and four-packs of KitKat to a box of Shreddies. I really overloaded on the chocolate, so I am trying to ignore just how much of that fattening stuff is sitting in the bottom of the fridge in an innocent, white plastic bag. (Oh yes, Burnt Almond. Caramilk. Astros.) I have always treated the trip to the supermarket as a trip through the national psyche (hey, drugs are expensive but a roasting chicken is $1.19), so getting the chance to traipse drunkenly through a couple of Canadian supermarkets was like having a slice of Ontarian cerebrum on the slide. Ontario is unlike New York or even Quebec in that they cannot sell
beer in the supermarket, so the clean, 24-hour Dominion store on Bloor Street (downtown, squeegee territory) was a bit of a shock. It was a lot like the A&P off Union Square, except no toiletries were locked in cages ("You really going to buy that hair cream, sir? I need ID") and nothing seemed over-stacked. The standouts:
1) Far too much mayonnaise. I want to say "these folks are real medigans", but since medigan is a Sicilianization of American and they are North Americans but not Americans, it's not so fitting. I always wondered how white folks stayed so white...
2) Not as much bottled water as at home. I had always thought of bottled water as a yuppie trait, and yet I have found myself well-versed in the flavo(u)rs of water. I know better than to grab evian (not merely for palindromic reasons, but because it has this nasty taste to it) and to seek out Deer Park and Aquafina. to find none of these in a very trendy part of town suggested none of the trendy people lived near this store. Maybe in
Mississauga, the Paramus of Toronto, they have all the varieties in crystalline bottles... just like Ottawa.
3) Potato chips in Canada are something else. Many of you know I found a craving for ketchup-dusted chips on my last trip to Montreal, so seeing such other oddities as "dill pickle" and "the works" made me reel. How can there be such a mass of high-grade junk (junque?) food and yet nowhere near the prevalence of fat people as here? I have conjectured that the junk is so good that people can eat less of it and feel sated.
More later. Let me know if this first edition has left anyone wanting more...
-aisle of plenty, Dante
----
too: etymology
The second missive begins. It dawns on me that I hadn't explained the choice of "pot sherd" as a name for these missiles. After all, I've been an atheist since the Reagan administration, so my tossing around Scripture seems suspect at best. I had tried to compile my journals as legible treaties a few years ago and called the exercise "ratchet". The implication is that a ratchet tightens and loosens screws with punctured pauses, and since I have a few screws loose...
First, I like the obscurity of the word (as with missive). Pot sherd is the word used in the King James version, and thus it is pronounced "pot shard", just as British folks say "clerk" to rhyme with "dark". Job, a man in the height of fortune, is suddenly cast into what looks like punishment. He is
left to rediscover his own skin and must scrape himself clean. Note that the boil attack is the only part of Faith Test (TM) that Satan performs: the rest of the onslaught (all of his kids die, his fields go barren instantly, his Mastercard is denied) is God's work.
One of the reasons I stopped being a Christian back in 1988, while I was an altar boy and an eighth-grader in Catholic school, was that it seemed superficial. These people went through a series of rote motions in some attempt to keep themselves.. sane? Bored? I couldn't tell. It wasn't until I'd left the church that I'd found out the moment of transubstantiation was one of the most controversial in the history of Christ, Inc.. For those of you not raised with this spiel, it's when the priest says "hocus pocus" (no, really! The original Latin is "hoc est mon corpus", this is my body, from which we get the rabbit-pulling phrase) and bread and wine (well, more like wafer and Hornsby's) turn into a dead guy.
Of course, you learn nothing about the interesting parts of religious history until you're out of grade school. I think this is how many of the smart kids in school become heathens: they want answers, they get told to wait, and they stray. I was too young to notice girls, so I found out earth science class made sense. I think it helped that the nun that had been teaching earth science left the convent during our midterms, so any semblance of the tenuous hold religion and science might have held had dissolved. Soon enough, I was in public high school with all the other skeptics, and I was reading Bertrand Russell -- I'm sure we all have similar tales.
"Years ago, I was an angry young man, and I would pretend that I was a billboard." -Talking Heads, 'Nothing but Flowers'
I'm still torn about these issues, of course. I was a "positive atheist" at first, ready to pick a fight about the lack of god and quote the Dead Kennedys upon the slightest provocation. Madeline Murray O'Hare would have been proud, but time wore this out of me. By the eleventh grade, I'd found out that some people were religious and -- this startled me -- had working brains in their heads. I'd met some Jainists, Muslims, and even the occasional Christian with whom I could speak and find answers beyond the traditional "you're gonna go to Hell, you know."
Meanwhile, I should note that I think my parents planned it this way. They were both ostensibly agnostic, although my dad is presently observing Lent out of Pavlovian conditioning. They sent me to Catholic school, even though my mom was never a Catholic, to get me inoculated against proselytism (oh, and the public school across the street from my house was a rough one). They had seen how my mother's sister was never inured to religious zeal and thus joined the Maharishi Maheshyogi's gang in Iowa (since, she has relaxed and is now a landlord in the same town in Iowa) and wanted to avoid such problems.
Also, my dad is Sicilian: the men are not allowed to be religious in his family. They'd sooner accept a gay son than a priest in the family. Religion is a feminine attribute in that scene, and I've never really had the desire to probe that question too much. It made sense on a pre-rational level and it jives with the idea that the original faiths of humanity were matriarchal.
Still, I keep studying these cults and sects, heresies and tumults. I can't let go of the thought that the chasm of faith is burrowed by psychological disturbance. Man seeks answers, and sometimes comes up with an eternal version of leisure suits and carpenter pants.
Tune in next time, when I talk about something, scrape more off myself and turn it into words.
-abracadabra, Dante
Please note that I do not necessarily uphold all the same stuff I said back in '99, when I wrote all that and the ones to come. I was still living in Utica, after all.
-still signing off with these puncture lines, Dante
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-02-14 10:35 am (UTC)-steve
p.s. och, ye lummox!
pine, which doesn't allow you to set up list groups
you shut your filthy mouth. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-15 07:16 am (UTC)