by Josh Delman
I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"
If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.
This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.
2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September
© 2009 and beyond
Contact me.
January 2009
Some Things I Don't Understand #
This is a list of things I don't understand. Now, there's a tendency amongst somewhat snooty and pretentious people to say "I don't understand..." when what they really mean is "Anyone who thinks that ... is stupid." For example, when someone says "I don't understand how people can believe in god," what he's really thinking is: "Anyone who believes in god is stupid." (The statement also applies in the reverse -- religious people are perfectly capable of such snobbery.) But what I want to make clear here is that every case of "I don't understand..." here is explicitly using only the commonly denoted meaning of "understand."
In other words, I really don't understand it -- and in most cases, I also wish to understand it. This is a list of things, mostly, that I want to understand. But I'm phrasing it as "I don't understand..." because that more accurately describes the whole of the list, and I also want to point out (to myself, to you, to the world) my ignorance, my naivete, my awkward misinterpretations of the world, etc. Lastly, the order of this list does not reflect the importance of any particular fact.
I don't understand how people just decide one day that they're going to do something, something which usually goes against everything they're doing, or something that's so crazy that a movie gets made out of it -- and then they succeed (sometimes wildly.) I don't understand that kind of conviction. I don't understand that kind of devotion.
I don't understand my internal conflict over certain "mainstream" music, movies, TV: I don't want to like some of it, yet I do.
I don't understand why the song "Maybe I'm Amazed" is so moving. Is it Paul McCartney's raspy screams of passion? Is it the chord progression? Is it because Sir Paul himself was Moved to write the song?
I don't understand why I think "Teachers" by Daft Punk has the freshest fucking beat I've ever heard. (BTW, Check it out "Teachers" here, click the play button on the player to the right.
I don't understand how we can't make rules for some things ("what is funny?") yet we know it when we see it.
I don't understand what it means to be original, or what originality is.
I don't understand what it feels like to physically fight for your country. Or your ideals. Or for your family, your friends, or for people you've never met.
I don't understand why I feel like I have free will.
I don't understand how quantum randomness entails a non-deterministic universe; in other words, just because we don't (yet?) have the tools to predict some kind of super-small-scale interaction between really-super-duper small particles, does that mean we never will? Does reality ultimately ground out in probabilities?
I don't understand why some philosophy isn't taught in high school, or even middle school, or even elementary school. Isn't abstract thinking important sometimes, even in the "real world"?
I don't understand how at some point I stopped seeing a bunch of letters written together as squiggly lines and started seeing them as words.
I don't understand what it's like to be anybody else but myself. (This one I'll never really know.)
More will be added to this list later, probably.
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Shocking News About Joe Biden #
There was a big splash in the news world today when it was revealed that Joe Biden is actually a mutant from the year 2141. Researchers at a Harvard Lab found a piece of his hair and analyzed it with a special retrofitted SuperScope, an accessory originally designed for the Super Nintendo. They found that Mr. Biden had 92 chromosomes, double the normal amount of chromosomes in a human being (46, or two pairs of 23). Mr. Biden's second pair of chromosomes contained a massive amount of "junk DNA." Normally, pieces of the genome known as "genes" code for various proteins used by the human body. Junk DNA are those pieces that not used for anything. Amongst the junk DNA fragments on chromosome 56, however, were a cure for AIDS, and the history of the years 2012-2054 in binary. More to come later as the future is translated from nucleic acids to readable English, and then, hopefully, Braille.
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The Psychology of Google #
I think the people at Google have the hubris to know they're providing an essential service. Could you imagine using the internet without Google? Yeah, there's other search engines, but what if Google never existed? What if the bar was never raised that high? (I mean, it's a pretty fucking high bar. You used to have to actually READ the damn search results before you clicked on something. And they wouldn't always be on the front page, either. You'd have to teem through pages upon pages of search results, hoping that something worth reading would come up. There's a lot of bullshit on the internet today, but it's easy to avoid because there's enough [a quorum, I guess -- there could always be more] alternative websites with meaningful content that you can just go to these sites, these trustworthy sites, and ignore the rest.)
The whole "I'm feeling lucky" is the epitome of hubris, no? No other search engine ever did anything like that, because no other search engine company had the cojones to put that much faith into their first result. Granted, you have to know how to search Google if you really want to master it, to understand it.
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A comprehensive view of the future #
"And for the low, low price of $50,000, you can get in this virtual reality time machine and kill Adolf Hitler!"
***
Prayer FICTION #
Oh, god, make it stop. Make it stop. This is so annoying! Please, I’m telling you, I’ll do anything. I’ll spread the word of Abraham and Moses and Isaac and Jacob. I’ll become a good man, a pious man. I know I haven’t been very responsible lately. Leaving the kids by the pool the other day was a horrible idea. But I had to take that business call. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have blessed me with this Mercedes-AMG E63 (a station wagon with a five-hundred and seven horsepower V8!) Good thing you blessed us with our golden retriever, Cliff, who is an ample swimmer and an even better rescuer. And we did not even train him! And the other day, I know, I saw that older blind man struggling to pick up his cell phone, and I just kept walking. I’m pretty sure I was in a rush, because I was on my way to a date with Angela, that shiksa who I met at work. Oh, and I know I haven’t been too… faithful, either. My wife, she’s beautiful, but her voice sounds like Joan Rivers with a sinus infection. And if that’s not bad enough, lord, when I shtoop her, it sounds like an old fax machine. “Eeeh-ahh, eee-ahh,” you know? And she has to be faking those orgasms. Shit, shit, I know I shouldn’t be saying things like this.
I remember the day when things started to click – or de-click – for me. When I started to think that you, lord, did not exist. It was during Rabbi Eliezer’s sermon on Yom Kippur. I was atoning for my sins. Apologizing for punching my little brother so much, for ripping the heads off of my sister’s dolls and then laughing in her face. For not listening to my mother when she told me to stop. For calling out in class without raising my hand. I didn’t understand that other people had interesting things to say, lord. You can understand that, can’t you, with an anxious mind like mine? But back to the sermon. Rabbi Eliezer was telling us how you had a list of all of us, with our sins. And in my mind, I pictured a large scroll, something larger in breadth and size than the Torah itself. And I saw my name, Daniel Benjamin Rosenbaum, and next to it were a series of dots. Like a menu, this list was. Instead of a price at the end of the dots, though, there was a list of all my sins, sorted by degree of severity. And right as that mental picture formed in my mind, right when the dots became crystal clear and I could see the crisp letters forming my name, the rabbi said with stern seriousness that you were probably using computers to sort everything out now. Computers! Are you kidding me! I did not understand why someone as omnipotent and omniscient and omni-everything (omni-omni?) as you wouldn’t have had access to computers before, why the lord would busy himself with quill and ink when he had an IBM with a floppy disk drive!
And yes, I still had a Bar Mitzvah, but I was more concerned about the party than the service. I was worried about who was going to show up, because my Bar Mitzvah was on the same day as Jenny Rappaport’s.
But I know I can count on you, lord. Because I remember when I still believed in you, when miracles did still exist. Remember when my aunt took me to the park when I was seven? She let me play in the sandbox. My world was a lot smaller back then. The only thing that really mattered was whether or not my tunnel would collapse if I made the mound on top larger. That was the first time I had ever seen the moon during the daytime; it was surrounded by a vast blue sky, not a puff of white anywhere. I remembered thinking, this isn’t right. Maybe the moon was feeling playful. Or maybe it felt proud, like the sun wasn’t the only agent of light that should be hanging in the sky. It didn’t make any sense to me back then. It still doesn’t make any sense to me, lord. Though I’m sure there’s a perfectly good scientific explanation for it. But no amount of science, it seems, could explain how my aunt knew that there was a fully-grown cottonmouth in the sandbox with me and how she knew that the damn snake was planning on sinking its teeth into my stubby little leg. I thought back then it was magic, but I realized that it had to be a miracle that you performed. I mean, I’ve never seen Aunt Remi move so quickly. You must have came down and intervened on your own creations. Isn’t that right, lord?
I really just can’t stand this right now. I’ve tried drinking Gatorade to balance out my electrolytes. Those electrolytes are supposed to be good for you. I tried eating some bananas for potassium. I heard that helps with this sort of thing. None of it worked. Please god, do something to get rid of this damn twitch in my eyeball. It’s pulsing, for Christ’s sake!
Oh, that’s funny. I know a lot of Jews that say “for Christ’s sake.” Are we doing it on purpose? Do we have some kind of inferiority complex to the Christians, or do we all secretly wish we were subjects of a triune god? I don’t think so. It’s a way of swearing to a pseudo-diety without violating the rules – the First Commandment. You have to admit it: you gave us that drive to break the rules without really breaking them. To find those loopholes.
I’m looking at my eye in the mirror now. Like a heart it beats. Dum dum, dum dum. I want to rip the damn thing out. I can’t fall asleep. I can’t concentrate on anything. I was trying to do something before, I don’t even remember what it was, but I couldn’t do it.
Please lord, I’ll do anything to get this pulsing to stop. ♦
***
My love/hate relationship with Times New Roman #
Times New Roman, the font that I employ on this website for all of its text, is ubiquitous. It's the default font in every web browser on Windows and Mac OS X. (I'm not so sure about various builds of Linux.) I've always been somewhat of a font-nerd, and as a younger kid who loved downloading and cataloging all sorts of different fonts (search Google for free fonts to see what I mean) so seeing Times New Roman, the basic, bland serif font that everybody used all the time meant that I could never use it. I swore that I would never use it for anything, and I went on to write a whole bunch of papers in elementary school, middle school, and high school with a whole bunch of stupid fonts. Then, in college, professors started demanding Times New Roman. I started to like the font again, especially in italics. I began to live in T.N.R. Land, where the content of my writing was more important than the font I wrote with. There's a reason why the font is everywhere; it doesn't particularly stand out, but it's pretty damn good for reading. So this site is in T.N.R., and I think it looks pretty fucking good.
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