Beaten by Entropy

My name has been stolen. Or at least my sites name has. Japanese cyber squatters made off with it while I was planeward bound to the tropics. This is why I don’t leave the country. The individual pieces remain, but feel somehow disconnected and unclaimed. The memories of a man erased. On a technical level my links are busted and google has forsaken me, but more troubling is this sense of a dispersed locus of being; an idea that somewhere in the heuristic tangle of bad punctuation, prose, angst and running jokes a vestigial personhood had formed and been lost. Damn.

I translated the front page of the new Beatsentropy [1], it felt very much like google stalking an ex’s new boyfriend. It appears to be an employment scam for aspiring Japanese sex workers. Or perhaps I’m being unfair and it’s a genuine recruitment center, I’d feel better about that.

An Exceprt

“Miss sex work

Speaking of high-paid jobs, sex is the best.
However, many of the girls’ work in sex is disgusting! “I think that.
So, what’s bad manners because of work.

“Nantes sex but not a boyfriend can” “do not want to touch a stranger!” I think that many people think.

Such feelings can certainly understand that, if you’re really looking for high-income part, this is not the better part.

For example, my friend has sex with Miss Gotanda.
And $ 10,000 in revenue each month in the city of Gotanda.
In the same college may be very bright child.
Gotanda is a city child is

Though I appreciate the absurdity and beat poetry cadence of my usurper I can’t help but feel wronged by Miss Gotanda’s hunger. While arguably classier than many of our posts, it lacks the wit and profundity of our profanity. And why the hell is a Japanese company stealing such an esoteric English phrase for their name? I shudder to imagine the context that Beats Entropy has been hamfistedly translated into. Jerks. I guess I’ll have to think up a new name.

[1] I haven’t felt so bad since that time I discovered my arch rival A.J. Valliant, the albino Irish soul singer. Though, maybe, in this time of deepest woe, we can mourn together. Take it creepy AJ

 

Things and such

This site began as an offhand remark in a weak moment. I had never written but always thought I could, so I tried. Five years, three jobs, and two girlfriends later the site remains, a testament to perseverance over punctuation. It was the first important thing I didn’t fail at, the first conversation where I was able to make my point.

That said, no matter the company, once the point has been made the conversation becomes halting. You can either retreat into silence, or, broaden the discussion. We here at Beatsentropy have decided to do the latter and then some, returning to the collective spirit that spawned it while letting the content grow up with us. The exact nature of this is still a matter of caprice and negotiation, but I dig where our heads are at.

A step too far: a moral examination of the limit

There is a game of sorts that my friends and I play: someone offers up a mildly offensive idea, another elaborates in an amusing fashion, and then someone takes it way too far and we are all forced to create as much distance from the original line of inquiry as possible.  There is a distinct tipping point where an uncomfortable idea transforms into an abhorrent one. In an effort to spare you, my childrens, from the lasting social censure crossing such boundaries can bring we here at Beatsentropy have decided to delineate the spectrum of acceptability in series we call: Fine, Borderline, A Step to far. Let’s get down to business.

Beats Entropy:Irony Scale

At some point clarity lost its legitimacy to subtlety, and ironic disaffection and apathy became the cultural currency of the hip. Never having been hip, or subtle, it is hard to say when which gave way to what (which actually is hard to say), but the end result was irony becoming the key social moderator. About the same time reading became not so popular, which is a bit of problem when your locus of cool is a fairly slippery esoteric concept. What are the retro clad and bearded masses to do?

In an effort to keep the smug barista and spoken word poetry industry from grinding to a halt Beats Entropy is going to drop a little knowledge.

Let us define our terms:

Irony= when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect or contrary to some intrinsic quality (real or inferred).

Things entirely devoid of irony

It gets dark at night

Surrender is a word of French extraction.

Ugly people are often sad

Now I could get all fancy and suss out all the gradations of irony through a series of complex logical syllogisms, but we both know that sort of academic hokum proves nothing. The only legitimate method of exploring such a topic is a peer reviewed, toast backed, scale from 1-20. Let’s get down to business.

Beats Entropy Irony Scale:

Logically unsupportable beliefs I have: Milk and coffee

While I am not a religious man I believe that faith is the largest part of self:  identity is pulled from gossamer strands of supposition woven into an assumptive web strong enough to suspend disbelief. An overstatement? Quite possibly. Overwritten? Most assuredly. But the point stands: Empiricism is the lazy man’s retreat. True understanding of the world must be derived first principle through a combination wit, intuition, and rhetorical hustle. Proof is artful transmission of belief, nothing more.

It is with this mind I present you: Logically unsupportable beliefs I have…and stand by.

Let’s get down to business.

The Claim: Coffee keeps milk from spoiling

An Apology

This girl once said that I could only see women as hopeful shapes on the horizon. That up close I saw too little of myself to hide my disappointment. I’m paraphrasing a little. A proper transcription would be artlessly and unfair.  It stung. I hated feeling solved and ordinary. I suspect she wanted me to argue. To push for something that left us less diminished.  And I would have, but I couldn’t understand that she was asking, tell me why I’m different. And she was.

Advice to a young lady: Generalities

Direction

Humility is more important than judgement. Stumble, fail with purpose, fight hopeless battles just to take the loss, but learn from it and don’t repeat the same poor choice hoping for a better outcome. If you keep doubling down on a busted hand the investment becomes so high the only out is to buy losing as winning. Be brave, be stupid, but keep moving forward.

The first night gone

Last night I reached and turned in a clockwise search for the borders of our bed, where soft skin and cold feet set the limit to my sprawl. But there was none, no limit and no center, so I spun and wondered at the space. The time it took to sleep and the rise of unfamiliar springs against my back; how light she must have been.

Last night I reached and turned in a clockwise search for the borders of our bed, where soft skin and cold feet set the limit to my sprawl. But there was none, no limit and no center, so I spun and wondered at the space. The time it took to sleep and rise of unfamiliar springs against my back, how light she must have been.

Last night I reached and turned in a clockwise search for the borders of our bed, where soft skin and cold feet set the limit to my sprawl. But there was none, no limit and no center, so I spun and wondered at the space. The time it took to sleep and rise of unfamiliar springs against my back, how light she must have been.

Bristles: Book II part 1

( BOOK I OF THE BRISTLES SAGA CAN BE FOUND–>HERE)

There were men more dangerous than Danny, heavy customers with flat eyes and the twitching hands of the habitually violent. One such man stood immediately behind him.

Still, there was something in the way he flinched and deferred that spoke of a brittle thing broken sharp enough to cut if mishandled. Danny stroked that edge as best he could and tried for menace.

“Could you please read this?”

Danny pushed a folded, glue stained, piece of paper towards the bank teller. The woman glanced at Danny’s note and slid it back to him.

“Sir, during peak hours this counter is strictly for deposits and withdrawals only. If you have any account inquires that require documentation to be reviewed you will have queue at the customer service window”

A man of questionable expertise

I rarely go out. The dictates of my gym job and domestic inertia keep me in a fairly tight home-work orbit. This Halloween, however, I grew a fine old-timey moustache for my Turn of the century Irish Strike Breaker costume and felt the need to show it off in unfamiliar confines. My buddy Ben suggested crashing a stranger’s house party, I obliged.

The first half of the night was pleasantly unremarkable.

Introduction.

Keg.

Banter.

Repeat.

The conversations were light, bouncy, and forgettable. Until I met Chris(1); a young man enjoying a brief island of freedom between recent and forthcoming incarcerations.  I learned of his legal woes in a fast moving five minute chat that began as workout advice, transitioned into recounting of his troubled youth, and culminated in the revelation that he was soon to return to the joint for continued indiscretions.

A better (or less lubricated) person would have taken that moment to bid him good luck and started up a less challenging conversation with the stocky lass in a cruelly unaware Strawberry Shortcake costume. But I was drinking. And I like to give advice. So I confided in him a largely fabricated criminal past and proceeded to advise him on how to survive in prison…which in the moment I felt wholly qualified to do.

It went as such.

False Horizon

I watched this thing on ADD. It’s long, and irrelevant for most, but it shook me.

Tree Killer

I’ve been asked to murder my tree on the grounds that it is too tall and a foreigner. While I could bring myself to fell a towering Dutchman, or Dutch Elm, this particular tree has done me great kindness and asked nothing in return. Sally, however, feels differently.

Empty Pages

A blank page is a threat borne on bullying formlessness. A disruption of things well construed, or thought to have been. A series of demands:

Where have you been?

Who are you now?

Show me the thread hasn’t broken.

Move me.

It’s worse with time. Your voice feels borrowed. My voice feels borrowed. There is no weight to the prose, no continuity. There is this sense of standing on another’s covered ground. Of needing to apologize. Of having inches to offer some proof of self or be emptied into the margins. You can’t get ahead of that game.

The trick is to accept the loss. You can’t fill a page or find a voice.  So divest, be empty, and say anything. It’s just a conversation.

Things I’ve learned from being a personal trainer: Equitable division of resources

I used to be pretty good at this. Writing, that is. The ability has atrophied a little these past few months. It’s not just that I’ve barely written or read; I’ve barely thought. I have been so immersed in the physical being of others and my own, whole levels of processing have fallen into disuse. I told a dude at the mall that a calliope was a word that sounded like its meaning…which I suppose it is, but not in the definitional sense he was looking for. A subtle error, but the sort of semantic minutia I used to excel at.

Great Unpunished Monsters of my Childhood: Dr. Bunson Honeydue

As children we are impervious to much of the world. Our sphere of influence is so small, and the information available so filtered, that our sense of the world is largely a fiction constructed by our parents and presented as truth. It’s thus unsurprising that our first awareness of the darker id comes in the form of hard truth disguised as fiction. The stories, T.V. shows, and movies of my childhood were sown through with characters that engaged in all of sorts of winking brutality that went unpunished (and often unremarked upon) by their hypothetical peers. Worse still my peers and guardians seemed unmoved by their cruelty and the plight of the fictitious victims. Often they laughed.

Long has this weighed heavy on my heart, thus I present this unlevening, this calling to account -The Beats Entropy: Great Unpunished Monsters of my Childhood.

Dr. Bunson Honeydue