Track Mangoes

In light of recent deaths all I can possibly say is this: NOOOOOOOO!!!

I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye in middle school and identifying with its broody protagonist, Holden. At the tender age I can remember feeling utterly kindred with him, contemptuous of everyone yet humored by the fact that no one could pick up on the fact that I was making fun of them all the time. Gosh, those were the days.

In college we seldom get time for pleasure reading. However, I made it a tradition to take The Catcher in the Rye with me every time I ventured into the sauna, the beating heart of Macalester's "Nard" center. There I would sweat out the day and all the frustrating elements that reviled me while reading about someone so molested by the world I could only feel better about myself.

Teenage angst. The ultimate detox.

Coming back to The Catcher in the Rye makes me realize just how wonderful the book really is. A middle schooler can pick it up and identify with Holden whole-heartedly, while the young adult understands that Holden is, often times, being ridiculously petulant, and the fully matured adult could reads it and is stricken with an emotion I have yet to know. Something tells me too that it's an emotion I wish not to know and that, I feel, is evidence that Mr. Salinger has done his job in becoming part of this troubled brain of mine.

With my ear pressed tightly
against a concrete wall
I hear my heart
as it puffs and purrs,
but when it's pressed
against my dear
I cannot tell
if it were mine or hers.

On testing the toxicity of LSD-25 on animals during the late 1930s:

Cats, mice, chimpanzees, spiders, all weathered massive amounts of LSD-25 without apparent physical damage, although there was considerable behavioral oddity. Spiders, for instance, created webs of remarkable precision at low dosages, but lost all interest in weaving at higher ones. Cats exhibited a similar variability, ranging from nervous excitability to catatonia. But the most prophetic test, although no one realized this at the time, was with the chimps. One day [Ernst] Rothlin injected LSD into a lab chimp and then reintroduced the animal to its colony. Within minutes the place was in an uproar. The chimp hadn't acted crazy or strange, per se; instead it had blithely ignored all the little social niceties and regulations that govern chimp colony life.

Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven

An apocalyptic note for the New Year. The following quote is from Jaron Lanier's (Founder of Wired magazine) You Are Not a Gadget. Here he is talking about facebook:

"The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up...The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable."

Before you call me pessimistic, I implore you to Check It--he was prophetic: Facebook's Great Betrayal