The Ultimate Blog

I've recently been accused of not blogging enough. Looking at the stats--four blogs this last week with sixty-five views--I'd say that that's just not true.

With that said my title is a little misleading, although entirely applicable.

My grandmother on my mom's side is moving from La Crosse to live with my parents this weekend. Awkward sentence structuring aside, I don't mean to imply that she will be a resident of the Beadle household for one weekend, but rather that as of this upcoming Saturday they have a new resident joining the cast. And--much like a sitcom--she just so happens to be the elderly, religious republican moving into the house of youthful, wiseass liberals. 

Cue your laugh tracks. 

Needless to say, the household is in a bit of turmoil over this. My mom has kept my old room pretty much my old room (with the exception of the addition of the unfamiliar term cleanliness) with the hopes that I would completely fail at life and move home. That might not be an entirely fair summary of her master plan, as she more hopes that I would make the decision to move home and live rent free while I go to school either at UW-Madison or MATC, but the bottom-line is that my mom is NOT against the idea of having a son in his late twenties living in the basement. I told her to keep dreaming and that Sorry, but I'm going to be homeless on the streets of Milwaukee before I'd consider making that fateful downtrodden return to Stoughton. And I mean it. I'll go the vagrant route before reversion.

A step forward might be a step down a declining path but it's still better than walking in reverse.

So, being the thoughtful sonuvabitch that I am, I used my day off yesterday to drive home and visit for a bit. I also used it as an excuse to get a free haircut, filled tank of gas and an oil change. In thoughtfulness. I then wished my mom luck on preparing for D-Day and told her they'd have to make more Milwaukee trips now that I won't be returning home for visits. But, you know, thoughtfully. Now--don't get me wrong. I like my grandma. But, as I stated, my grandma is the religious conservative. I can handle this on small-scale visits (once each christmas) and keep my tongue bit. In my parent's house, however, for a day or two at a time... well after a brief exchange of unchecked words I don't think my grandma would any longer be too fond of me.

She has a framed photograph of Bush hanging on her wall.

Now I'm as anti the anti-Bush folk as I am against the administration, because I think you have to judge individual actions and stances in the proper context. But there's a certain mindset that would lead one to frame a picture of this man and hang him next to where you sleep. I don't know what this mindset exactly is--I'm not a profiler.

So I visited the folks and played some Croquet against the little sister. I dominated and rubbed it in her face. We then played a game without rules where you just kept taking shot after shot without waiting for the other player. This I also won. She complained that it wasn't fair for me to win a game with no rules. I said that you'd have to be an idiot to lose at a game with no rules and that with a bit more imagination or flexible perspective her loss could've easily been a win. In her voicing her concerns to my parents my mom instantly responded the former point of view of unfairness, whilst my dad jumped to the same conclusion I had. Without rules, how could you lose? Just change how you win. Column A/Column B. X versus Y. At least I see a pattern in cleverness.

My dad plays on an Ultimate Frisbee team--has in some form for many years. The incarnations--as I've known them--have been SNARF! (think Thundercats), Non-Smoking Giraffes (with a dynamite logo of a giraffe diving towards a frisbee with a cigarette-in-mouth), and now Sparkler. All on the MUFA league. His team has at times been one of the best ranked, they've placed in the top groups several times, he played on the Men's Masters team and when they won could've gone to Florida to qualify for the ESPN tournament but couldn't get out of work to do so. A few summers Mike and I were able to go with my parents and my dad's team on a canoe outing which required us to drive to the end point and get bused 40-50 miles upstream so that we could spend two days canoeing back down. It was good, tiring times. You stop at sandbars as needed, cookout, camp at the end of the first night. There's a nudist beach you canoe past that I was completely oblivious to each trip, and while I was teased for my ineptitude towards noticing naked people it was also conceded that the beach was full of old naked men and as such I took it as a built-in skill to be proud of; a predisposed blinder that filters out old naked men. (With this in mind when we were kids and my mom would take us to a beach off of Willy st in Madison without realizing that it was also a nude beach I completely failed to notice the lifeguard going topless. I was also like 12, so I suppose it's forgivable, but I'm well aware that at 12 I was pissed when I heard I missed a setup of such magnitude) We are doing this trip again come the last weekend of August. This will be the first time it's been done since high school and as such the first time I can get drunk while canoeing down a river. I'm not going to lie--I'm excited. And okay that it may be the worst idea I've ever had.

For the past few weeks I've been working at assembling an Ultimate team of my own, as some of you may be well aware. We are sitting at around 8-9 people who are committed enough that I can count them in. We need to get up to 12-15 and we need a few more girls on board as you have to have at least 4 and 2 have to be playing at all times. 7 on the field at a time, it's mostly hanging out and drinking and we are starting our own team so that it isn't a competitive thing. Usually you get a sponsor doled out to you and certain bars will offer post-game free pitchers of beer. If anyone from the Milwaukee area wants in on this get ahold of me and we'll talk shop. And after we talk about making terrific birdhouses and wooden bongs, we'll talk frisbee.

Odds and Addendums:

We saw A Scanner Darkly last Friday and it was damn good. Check it out if you get the chance.

I'm a lying bastard for mentioning anything on this, but sometimes I put cords into inputs from outputs and flick strings. The last result of this is a track called solipsism that I put up at the appropriate location. What I'm curious about is that when I tried to play this at my parents house I only got the repetitious rhythm and the alternate parts came through really quiet if at all. That's not what I get on my computer and on one other computer we have, but I'm hoping I can get some feedback on if it just sounds like the same damn thing for 3 minutes or if you can hear the other parts kick in (at about 30 seconds. 1 minute and 2 minutes, respectively).

Solipsism is a philosophical POV that I've been musing on and reading up about over the past few weeks. The idea is more or less that your own perception of reality is more important than what the "true" reality actually is. It's the sort of idea that historical fact and historical recollection are usually different (IE winners write history from their point of view) and/or the idea that you can never truly remember a moment as it happened but merely as you choose to recall it. You can take this further to as far as you are concerned your POV is reality, you are God and nobody else truly exists; they are solely your manifestations. A common explanation of a solipsist is the Brain in a Vat example, which is like The Matrix. It's basically postulation of what if you really were just a brain in a mad scientist's vat, and the world as you know it is a false projection you've created or been fed. How would you know?

My take on this is that your POV of reality is all that really matters for you and should be your primary concern. On one hand it seems like this might free you from notions like being concerned about how others see you, inhibition and so on... but really you need to still be concerned about how you perceive others perceiving you. Self-image really just is your idea of how you are seen, and it may be not even close to the truth, which is going to vary individual to individual. I've also for my own personal philosophical view been working this in with Pragmatic Theory, but that's another blog for another day.

Or at least one hell of a pretentious drunken conversation.