Seattle log.

I am back in Coeur d'Alene after a wonderful weekend in Seattle.

Seattle has much to recommend itself to a visitor. Multifaceted in the characters of its neighborhoods, teeming with a kind of San-Franciscan beauty and culture. Everything is misty and rainy, which gives one the sense of freshness and cleanliness, as if the city were in a state of perpetual self-ablution; I have used this description before, but it reminds me of Thales, who thought the world was composed solely of water. This is a view more easily held in Seattle.

Daniel's neighborhood of North Queen Anne comprises narrow one-way streets wreathed in branches and vines, curving up and down steep hills, each boxed in by attractively unusual houses. Daniel & Josiah's apartment is a fine, well furnished bachelor pad. Certainly far more put together than mine. It boasts an impressive view of hills and peninsulae, traced (i.e., obstructed) by a just recently blossomed jacaranda tree.

I arrived Friday night after my 5-hour drive across the stretch of Washington state, including a blood-curdling stint through the hazy dark of Snoqualmie pass. Daniel and I had tomato soup, grilled cheese, and amber beer.

Saturday was a shopping spree. I bought a table and 4 chairs at Ikea (pictures forthcoming) and gobs of clothes from Urban Outfitters and H&M. Joking with Daniel all the way! True fun. Josiah arrived home from his trip to Japan around lunchtime, roughly just before Daniel and I had skipped back to the homestead, so there was happy story-swapping. Though, truth be told, Josiah was vacillating between a state of long-flight sedation and guitar-playing passion. Later, he and I would play a brief yet thoroughly satisfying piano-guitar duet of Bon Iver's "For Emma". I think it was "For Emma"; Bon Iver songs are hard to tell apart. We played loudly and sang heartily. Saturday evening the three of us went to dinner with Jessica, Erin, and Chelsea. I cannot tell you how nice it is to encounter pleasant girls who can sustain conversation about things beyond their present line of sight. And what's more with creativity and wit! Other Saturday highlights include: spitting contests, an intense Ingmar Bergman film that is better to remember than it was to watch, a city park with old Oil Refinery machinery scattered about.

Sunday I slept in, then took the bus downtown to find Daniel at the hotel the desk of which he mans. Getting horribly lost in a pretty city, I have found, is not something to complain about. I enjoyed walking around downtown and into Belltown, half-heartedly attempting to get my bearings. Ace Hotel, where Daniel works, is "hip" in an intermittently good way. Some of the rooms have atria where you can eat breakfast! Very cool.
After then stalking around town looking for a cool, "local" coffee shop, failing miserably due to equal portions of high standards and bad directions, I settled for a franchise of a coffee shop chain local to Seattle. I flopped down and flipped through Quine's Epistemology Naturalized. Daniel and I went to the Seattle library, throughout which the clocking noise of my dress shoes unabashedly reverberated. We went to The Old Spaghetti Factory where we glutted ourselves and proclaimed our good taste to one another. We went home to rest, exhausted.

Then, the coup de grace: that night we went to see the Ratatat show. I get why one might want to go to a concert now; it's not just about listening to good music that you like (which you can do at your computer, as I do now), it's about feeling that music intrusively vibrate in your chest, it's about dancing without reserve along with a throng of other dancing human beings, it's about smiling while you dance at those surprisingly friendly hipster boys and those super-cute hipster girls with whom you now share the bond of sincerely enjoying something together, it's about bumping and grinding (!). Such concerts in such warehouse-like venues are closed systems in which one may give free reign to a blend of Orphic and Bacchanalian impulses without impugning one's virtue. I maxed out my fun level. Great time.

By way of denouement, we went to a greasy late night burger place afterwards.

The next day I would pound a large red bull and drive home, daydreaming the whole way.

Read.

I've heard about a famous argument between Corie and Max, and thought this might be informative:

AN ARTICLE DISCUSSING WHETHER AND WHY WOMEN AREN'T AS FUNNY AS MEN, WRITTEN BY A WOMAN.

Enjoy.

Joke.

If you've seen this twitter update, then you already get this joke.

Updates on Twitter Updates.

1. As soon as I started using Twitter, I saw that there was a user called THE_REAL_SHAQ. I went to read their twitter, and it was hilarious. Such a good parody of the Shaq. e.g., "I hate leprekons lol", "David stern said i dnt mind sounding trite, what does that word mean, any scholars out there", "Bout to get ready for the dunk contest, whos gonna win", etc. But then it got a bit repetitive--the joke got old. Suspiciously old. So, after doing some research, I realized it IS THE REAL SHAQ. I'm not sure if this makes it dramatically more funny or less funny, but I can't read them anymore regardless.

2. How can somebody as intelligent and funny as Stephen Fry have such a quotidian, banal twitter? I don't get it. I love Stephen Fry, but his twitter is just boring. As a celebrity, his life is like a perpetual vacation, and his twitter is like the boring comments people make about their vacations, only with the added bonus of his describing whatever technological difficulties he faces in so-updating. Baffling.

3. Daniel Walker is my hero.

2 addenda, to be included in the previous blog post.

Fifthly, a CONFESSION:

My parenthesis-usage in the previous blog post is inconsistent.

Sixthly, an INSTRUCTION THAT MIGHT STRIKE THE READER AS UNNECESSARY IF THE READER HAS READ THE TITLE OF THIS BLOG POST:

These two "things" are to be considered part of the previous blog post.

A blog post comprising 4 things, one of which is the blog post itself.

First, a WARNING:
Reader, I wrote the following blog post without creative foresight. After having finished it, I looked upon my works and saw they were mediocre, and I separated them from this WARNING. One might suggest that I simply not post the following blog, but the problem with that suggestion is that I spent a whole 5 minutes writing it, and I used html coding to italicize words and stuff, and would feel like my effort, thought spent on a blog not worthwhile, would be wasted. To quote a barista to whom I spoke yesterday, "I would rather do something bad that nothing at all". Now, while this maxim may not apply well to the ethical governance of one's own life, it may be a decent maxim for art. Think of Chesterton's permutation of an old adage: "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." Hence, I showcase the following not-very-entertaining blog. Read or don't. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Secondly, a SECOND WARNING:
It would be helpful for one to understand Hume's theory of personal identity if one desires to get a decent amount of the humor that follows. This is so because the back half of the post is just about Hume's theory of personal identity. For some reason in the following blog post I capitalize "Personal Identity".

Thirdly, the BLOG POST:

February, you were too short. I thought I had more time. I thought we had more time. I didn't think that 14 blog posts for February was all I had in me. I had more to give.

But no. You've left me. We won't really ever meet again. Our relationship has been sloppily abandoned, profitable possibilities left unactualized. Think of the times we could have had! The New York Times we could have had! The times we could have had had! "Had had" had had the better effect on the teacher!

Yes, yes, I know: you will be back next year. But it won't be the February 2009 whom I've grown to love, to adore, to nuzzle. It will be some new February. Nice, no doubt. Friendly. Attractive. Intelligent. I may even learn to nuzzle this new February. But it won't be the same.

Similarly, I realize that if I were to adopt a Humean understanding of Personal Identity (half-okay/half-asinine jokes to make here: "A Humean Understanding of Personal Identity is a Contradiction In Terms", "To Understand Personal Identity (or much of anything) from a Humean Position, Simply Omit", etc.) then all relationships are this way. I will never really be friends with Max again, once I see him, etc. I will be friends with some new person named Max who has a remarkably (though, of course, not "remarkable" [heh heh heh]) Max-like body, but who in fact is radically different. In this way, my social circle has a high turn-over rate. (Does anybody know the term in ecology meant to refer to an ecosystem's combined "death" rate and "birth" rate? So, example: the rainforest has a high rate of this kind, since things are born and die so frequently and quickly, while the desert has a very low rate of this kind, since very few things are born, but those that are last for a long long time. I keep grasping for this word in metaphors, etc., but don't actually know the word, and so I end up having to describe the concept itself in the rather long-winded way much like that which you have just experienced. This makes room for a nice argument as to why having a sophisticated vocabulary is helpful [in that it assists you in having sophisticated thoughts, and having them quickly] but it's a downright pain.) I have tons of friends named Max, but never any for very long.

But then, lets be thorough and comprehensive here kiddies, really I won't be friends with this person at all, but some me-like person named Jonathan Charles Wright will be friends with the Max-like person named Max. In this way, my social circle is very limited. And my social circle is very limited. And so is mine.

In this way, also, this blog post is an incredible, massive collaborative effort.

Also, on this view, in marriage, you can have adulterous thoughts about your "spouse", if we define "spouse" in the everyday sense, but retain Humean identity in a strict philosophical sense. This might be an inconsistency, to insist of continuous "spouses" but discontinuous (?) identities (?); but if it is, it's a kind of inconsistency that Humeans must commit if they are at all inclined to keep up with their mothers.

Fourthly, a POST SCRIPT COMPRISING TWO QUESTIONS:

Is the sentence "I wrote the following blog post without creative foresight" part of this blog post? Is this?