Thursday 27 September 2007

the tired academic outsider who fought to relearn math to see slot machines in archaeology and paleontology

The man grown from the boy above is sitting in a room at another conference in another city. He is tired from jet lag, but also from opposition. He spent a summer as a teen studying game theory and switched his major. First he went back and had to relearn the basics after being such a poor student in high school. Math no longer was the enemy born of a mean little gnome of a man in tenth grade that punished him for not showing his work, the man that was for a decade a bit player in stress dreams, his derision floating past amidst failed tasks, breaking bridges, piles to clean.

He is tired because his ideas of using the methods to beat slot machines in Archaeology and Paleontology have been basically received as oddities, curios, bearded ladies of academia at best.
He spent so many years studying math to look at how if many people have similar hunches or outcomes and if they are fed through a program to look at pattern emergence, some sort of larger theory could emerge. He gave up the odd impulses to write long ago. It was too distracting, too easy and thus clearly of little value.

He is a youthful 37 in appearance but he sometimes jokes to himself that his skin is a pathological liar born of some one else's genes. He should be heading to room 206 for his panel, but he is in stasis by the coffee and cookies. It is safe here. He daydreams of some writer daydreaming about math that would have occupied these same eyes and lets out a small laugh, black and low.

And it all breaks...atom by atom......second by second......like ice cubes.....

this moment speculation veined and breathed by what would have come to pass....

the room breaks into geometry and away....filament by filament.....







his doodles in the conference break room while procrastinating





a photo of him presenting his lecture "the game within the bones: pattern recognition software, computer modeling and the fossil record" at Iowa State June 2004






Copy of his dissertation turned to page one with written note to then girlfriend

Monday 17 September 2007

a non-writer by the bay

He is not sitting on a bus packed across the aisles on his second part of his ride home. It is not another cool evening in San Francisco. He will not eat spaghetti in an hour or so before his small t.v and then call his friends to share anecdotes of their jobs that mean as much as a pair of socks or shoelaces and will see if the bitterness can stay in check when books or writing comes up. There are not a dozen or so notebooks of thwarted ideas for conceptual work, for experimental music and odd hybids that will never be made. The notebooks spill from a non-existent dresser with

a dent on the second drawer found on some illusory unborn corner on a Sunday...all forever to float like astronauts untethered.

He does not hate the noises of the city at night, which are not to him like the chassis of a car with all the pretty glass and upholstery removed, not at all tied to a life he sees as just the dull momentum onward, the little explosions.




photo of the pile of stories written about city transit and downtown mar 07








view out of the bus window toward the stop light as drawn by his friend who also never left

Saturday 15 September 2007

the life of a phd and lake effect snow....

The man grown from the boy above is not currently walking a nondescript section of hallway in Rochester, New York passing posters for campus events and frantic last minute calls for room mates. His stomach does not grumble with hunger from forgetting to eat again. There is not a meal of spaghetti waiting to be made in a package of pasta, sauce, some bologna left over from sandwiches and a paper plate to save money.



He is not thinking of snow on a break from researching syntax, punctuation, sentence constructions and the flow and erasures in meteorology while finishing his dissertation after all these years......passing a row of windows while missing a point about collapse in rain storms.....

He has not been there for 8 years now.

A non existent snack of some peanuts from a bag from his backpack is touching some alternate non-formed version of his lips in this unrealized instant,...diverted...unborn by a piece of paper in an envelope in 1998 rejecting him for a PHD at Rochester, in that instant a plane flight decoupling, its trajectory and
flight number unmoored of his single strand, a seat available that hadn't been booked yet, as a room on campus shed its details, colors , smells, the width of its walls and bed of him, of a million filaments to other moments in his then 29 years..





this is a still from a film he never made of lake effect snow clouds to compare to the ballast of years and seeming depth in the vagueness in old words like "sea" "Sky" "Grave"












this is a photo from an album of the outlines in the snow of him and his room mates at Rochester New Years day 2000

Thursday 13 September 2007

autobiography told in what could not be and never came to pass

The boy above does not have blonde hair now. It is not golden as the sun and he is not sitting in a lab studying cloud patterns in 3d models as atom by atom this was cut at the stem.



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There is not a man sitting reflecting on a life of science and wondering about what could have been in something in the arts (he was lost in 1987 in a teenage version of
the boy above in a struggle with math,possible futures and choices..). The man did not publish papers on hypothetical weather event models that are immersive and his phd vanished into vapor somewhere over Oklahoma one day while a boy in California applied for an English degree during a heat wave and a link of dull afternoons.

When the pieces are collected after the crash and pieced together as best as can be in recollection and collection of artifacts in a hangar is it there at all? or is it a constellation of tiny pieces and the concept and notion of what once was that makes it whole?



There is a photo here of several cities and college adventures never born collaged together.






















This is the exact measure of 12 journalistic articles, a 2 year professional bowling career's trophies and prize money on a shelf made of mahogany, the photo albums of archaeological digs as a grad student ....they all float astronautic in unsung molecules.........thwarted detritus...........near satellites clipped from invisible almost rube goldberg contraptions of small incidents, questions and perceptions in time






There is not a sense of measure here. There is not a sense of time and it is graphed above. The trajectory of all the paths unborn that tick of in seconds like clouds of arrows invisible

.......