Shortly after I read a (very) abridged version of Don Quixote in grade school, I started noticing little references to the book everywhere: a favorite cartoon would do a takeoff on the tilting-at-windmills bit, I saw a Gustave Dore print in a history book (see image to right), a local high school did Man of La Mancha, the answer to a Final Jeopardy! question was Sancho Panza. I thought the all the karma of the world had colluded for a few days, until I mentioned this strange quixotic pheomenon to my dad, who introduced me to the concept of ‘topical sensitivity.’ I’m sure he called it something different and that it also has a different name in the psychological literature (with a degree in psychology, you would think I may be able to remember this sort of information), but simply put, once you’ve become attuned* to a specific topic or concept or so on, you become hypersensitve to its appearance.

I say this because the most recent culprit is the phrase ‘conventional wisdom.’ Apparently when super-economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term, he meant it in the most pejorative of senses, more in the vein of ‘we believe it because it’s easy and/or makes us feel good,’ though is not necessarily true. I’m currently reading Steven D. Levitt’s ‘Freakonomics’ and, while it’s a great read, the entire thing is a long, meta-data fueled attack on conventional wisdom: First instance - happenstance, as the military adage goes.

Today, the New York Times is talking about whether or not French woment are thinnner because they smoke more, right on the heels of French Women Don’t Get Fat and all its resultant hullabaloo, stating that ‘conventional wisdom … has long held that short-term weight gain is the price to be paid for quitting smoking.’ Second instance - coincidence.

I picked up an issue of Newsweek the other night - from June 13, 2005, the one with Deep Throat on the cover - and rediscovered one of its bite-sized content sections: Conventional Wisdom Watch. My parents had a subscription to the magazine, so I grew up looking at six red arrows that told whether or not Bill Clinton was acceptable, politically, socially or otherwise, that particular week. Third instance - enemy action.

Maybe I should stop noting instances of the phrase ‘conventional wisdom,’ as it’s becoming somewhat a) OCD-type behavior, and b) boring. Conventional wisdom, though, would dictate the opposite. Ha.

Newly-discovered old-skool classic album: ‘Yo! Bum Rush the Show,’ Public Enemy. This record has been on my radar for some time, but I’ve finally given it the listen it’s been due. Ed Rowlands from the Chemical Brothers once said in an interview that once he heard ‘Miuzi Weighs a Ton,’ it was like a switch was flipped in his head and, while I can’t claim the same, I definitely see the brilliance here. Beats are heavy, Chuck D is the anchoring gravitas and Flava Flav is just, well high-pitched and spastic - but in a way that keeps the album from being too topical or heavy at the hands of D.

*[Correction, 7:35 a.m., July 27, 2005: Incorrect word changed. See both post regarding said correction.]

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the above sentiment is true. Of course, such a statement is used only as a reactive justification, never as a proactive reason, and of course, such a statement is only used by the person who finds himself on the losing end of a deal such as a relationship, never by the instigator of a difficult action, but again, let’s assume for the moment that it’s true. The contrapositive, then, would read ‘if you do not set it free, then you do not love it.’ Suddenly it all makes sense.

I spend so much time at the office, thus not setting it free, because I do not love it. The reason I can’t come home from the office at a normal hour is because I do not love it. And, if we accept as true John Lennon’s postulate that ‘the love you take / is equal to the love you make,’ and we strip the latter of its erotic context, I must learn to either manufacture love, or somehow remove it from a source - a silo, maybe, or a safety-deposit box.

Thus, to get out of the self-destructive circle that is working until midnight, I need to find some repository of love - either within myself or without - or somehow manufacture this ‘love’ with crude hand tools, or with computers, maybe, and then, only then, will I be able to set the office free, because then I will have found the requisite love to break the bonds of cliche that tie me to my chair.

As Bill Murray told us in What About Bob?, it’s so simple, yet so brilliant.

Forward-thinking excitement of the day: Tomorrow (today?) we see Dressy Bessy at the Bottom Lounge. Check, well, the bottom of the Bottom Lounge site. Yes, it’s powered by Icarus Media, the parent company of sixosix magazine. Ah, the memories. And the poppy go-go rock that will ensue come 8 p.m.

I could start by saying what a trip of a weekend it’s been, but that’s just so trendy to say right now. So I won’t. Let me point out the interesting balance-counterbalance aspects of the last few days:

Balance: Drinks at the Holiday Inn hotel bar.
Counterbalance: Drinks - not two hours later - at a swanky nightclub on VIP couches in the Viagra Triangle.

Balance:Spending the entire day outdoors at a music festival, the last hour of which was in a mosh pit.
Counterbalance: Spending the entire day inside, either reading a book on my bed or sitting at my desk at the office, working.

Balance: Listening to Four Tet’s electro-synth bloops, drum loops and sampled sitar very loudly at the office.
Counterbalance: Listening to Jamie Lidell’s mind-blowing updated melding of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone just after Four Tet, causing my boss to remark, ‘just what kind of music do you actually like?’

All in all, however, it was a good time. I believe it was a Greek dramatist - Sophocles or Damacles or Heracles or whatever - that said ‘do all things in moderation.’ I’ve given that no thought whatsoever. All things to excess, I say, just as long as they cancel each other out.

Song that gave me the chills yesterday: ‘She Moves She,’ Four Tet. So this skinny olive-skinned guy stood in front of a sweating crowd and pushed buttons for 45 minutes yesterday, and by gum was I ever entertained. The song goes as follows:

Layer 1: Snare, standard 4/4 beat, bass kick.
Layer 2: Windchimes from grandma’s porch. Used sparingly.
Layer 3: Some freakily haunting sitar riff straight off a Ravi Shankar album.

Pretty straightforward. Sure, good stuff, and all, but aah! Then he hits you with this leftfield sonic jolt that sounds like you just scraped the needle across the face of a Scooby-Doo record. And he keeps hitting the button for that weird, out-of-place thing while the sitar player keeps playing, sitting cross-legged on a Persian rug. The rest of the song doesn’t change, it doesn’t notice that a garbage truck has just run over its groove. Oooh this man is good … lulls you into a false sense of groove security and then shakes his finger at you. ‘No,’ he says. ‘You can’t have that song. It’s mine.’

In the last few days, I’ve refined one of my models for classifying events. I’ve always thought that events seesaw back and forth between good and bad, strange and normal, like a pendulum. However, I’ve now refined this metaphor from one that uses a simple pendulum to one that uses a Foucault’s pendulum. Whereas a simple pendulum does what pendulums are wont to do, swinging back and forth in a two-dimensional plane, a Foucault’s pendulum uses a third dimension to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.

The point is that I used to conceive of events as bouncing from one extreme to another. Thus, given enough time during abnormal periods, things tend to not only return to normal but also to swing to the opposite end of the spectrum. i suppose you could also call this an example of regression toward the mean, but let’s stick with the pendulum metaphor for a moment.

This additional dimension has been helpful in sorting things out, since that third dimension can be a catch-all category for understanding the vagaries of things you can’t understand with the simple pendulum model. Try it with something as simple as going out for the evening: sure, the answer is either yes, you do, or no, you don’t, but what about all the ancillary factors? Shouldn’t you get to bed for work in the morning? But don’t you want to see your friends? Dammit, you were going to do laundry tonight, etc. Sure, it’s simplistic, but work with me. I’m still ironing out the kinks.

In any case, it’s been a great few days, but I’ll have to spend some time sorting out the long-term implications. Good party, tho.

Diversion of the moment: Describing yourself in five adjectives. It’s harder than you think. Thus far, I have one descriptor I’m satisfied with, and that would be ‘inquisitive.’ Not an easy exercise.

There was a theme running through the fabric of yesterday’s karmic space-time continuum (how’s that for mixing religious and scientific metaphors?) that, for some reason, put the idea of sixosix magazine back in my head.

Exhibit A. Verbatim quote in an e-mail, Friday afternoon: ‘i’m slightly disappointed 606mag is no longer in the works.’

Exhibit B. Verbatim quote from me, Friday evening: ‘You know, I … well, I just miss doing sixosix.’

Exhibit C. Random encounter, 20 minutes after Exhibit B’s occurrence: Guy I’ve been looking at all night, trying to remember how I know him, comes up to me and actually lived upstairs from the sixosix office. Proceeds to tell me how great the magazine was and how we need to get it back up and running, et cetera.

Sometimes you have more power and influence than you realize. The only thing keeping you from realizing this potential is your own fear. For clarificaion, substitute ‘I’ or ‘me’ for ‘you’ in the last two sentences as needed - there ya go. Now we’re on the same page.

Song of the day: ‘Just One More,’ Dressy Bessy. I broke down and bought Dressy Bessy’s self-titled 2003 release. The same one with ‘The Things That You Say That You Do’ on it (reference how I fell to my knees in worship of this song in the post from two days ago). And this first track, ‘Just One More,’ is the same way, full of infectious three-chord power pop. The chorus of this song is like aural freebasing, complete with semi-rhyming, nonsensical lyrics of ‘It’s too much / but oh well / if these walls, they could tell / they’d say what’s the fuss / well you worry too much / well you worry too much / from what I, what I can tell / there’s enough space up there / though in time it’ll disappear / I enjoy being here.’ The drum break from Phil Collins’ ‘Sussudio’ excluded, I don’t normally dance like this to jangly bands.

Marx was wrong: Tongue-in-cheek power pop is the opiate of the masses.

Episodic memory is a powerful phenomenon, as it is the way that you remember specific life events, and further allows for a way to categorize those events temporally. What makes this phenomenon even more interesting is that you can typically recall most events given the proper stimulus, but when you experience ‘flashbulb memory,’ you remember exactly the sequence of events, the feeling you had during those events, et cetera – in effect, you’re back in that moment.

What’s been strange about the last few days has been the frequency of those flashbulb memories. I can think of at least three or four moments of clarity – a strange, almost impersonal commentary of ‘this is actually my life; this is actually occurring’ feeling – coupled with the knowledge that yes, I will remember this moment, feelings in such a short time frame. I think this is mostly due to the fact that I was externally validated for things important to me, mostly by people that aren’t particularly close to me.

Sounds convoluted? It is, slightly. Charlie and Jessica, thank you both.

Song of the moment: ‘Telephasic Workshop,’ Boards of Canada. Describing the straight-up electro-computer-synth-sampled beat of Boards is nearly impossible, so listen to it yourself. This is the sort of track that puts the jones in your bones. Like a reviewer wrote of the second track off Common’s new album, ‘If you aren’t nodding your head by the time the chorus hits, you have negative soul,’ this track shows you that never before has sterile computer crap been so, well, funkily sensual. Never mind there’s really no chorus here, but that characterization fits the bill.

So we’ve all had problems that, despite our best efforts, can’t seem to be solved. Things like ‘What do I want to be when I grow up?’ or ‘is there life after death?’ or ‘is it time to stop playing Tiger Woods 2005 to be a social human being again?’ And these problems take on lives of their own, so much so that we personify them. We humanize them and sympathize with them. So we have said problem, staring us in the face with those cold, accusing eyes, all but saying ‘you can’t live without me; I’ve become who you are, how you define yourself,’ and we can’t say no. It’s like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube: the pieces keep shifting, and while the patterns change, the root remains the same. You just can’t solve the thing.

At least I can’t. I did date a girl once who could solve a Rubik’s Cube without looking - apparently there’s some Cube-to-hand algorithm or something - but that’s a different story.

When you have those moments of clarity, though, that allow you to see the root of the problem - the actual cause, not the displayed side effects thereof - you have to hold on to those thoughts as long as possible. And the mantra I need to remember is simple.

I can do better.

If I can stick to that, maybe a magical skeleton key to all my questions will pop up. Maybe in that fortune cookie I picked up at last week’s Chinese buffet? ‘You will get what you want through your charm and personality … in bed,’ it said. My lucky numbers didn’t help, though, unlike these lucky schmucks in New York.

Excerpt of the day: From Black Book: ‘Like a Friendster profile, their list is an example of studied eclecticism, its primary purpose to demonstrate list-making proficiency, and therefore little else.’ That magazine rocks.