I hate to say this, but building a Noah's Ark-Themed Amusement Park in Kentucky to re-invigorate the economy really isn't really that bad an idea.
The Ark Encounter, a proposed theme-park brought to you by the same folks who brought you the Creation Museum has received encouragement from Kentucky Governor Steven Bashear, who proposes giving tax breaks to any investors, on the grounds it will stimulate the state's economy.

I think it's a good idea for two reasons:
1) Americans have always had a knack for creating good artificial paradises--from the frosted spires of Disney World to the post-modern Sodom that is Las Vegas. Foreigners flock to those places like pilgrims to Lourdes.
2) The Biblical Creation Story is really no less hairy an article of faith than the much more (ahem)"liberal-friendly" melding of particle physics with New Age models of consciousness--the kind espoused in a movie such as this one.

My lifelong intellectual battle with people who think Adam and Eve rode to church on the backs of dinosaurs ended with an argument that came from a carpenter, (No, not that one. An actual carpenter.) We were smoking cigarettes in front of the courthouse debating the nature of the universe and things immaterial as ex-stoners are wont to do. I spat something along the lines of "Why don't you hillbillies just look at the freaking trilobites in the fossil record?" He snorted and shot back, "Land-o-Goshen!" (O.K. he didn't actually say that, but once you start paraphrasing some people, it's hard to stop)"I often figured God just changes up the rules of the universe every thousand years or so just to f*ck with our heads."

In terms of paradigm shifts, it was kind of a stunner. I had never had it put to me like that. I actually like the idea of a deity who meets our advancing pursuit of knowledge by making the cosmos that much more complex and unfathomable. Providing he doesn't send us to Hell for buying into it--as envisioned excellently by the late Bill Hicks in this funny bit

However, as Heraclitus said (a mere 5,000 years after Adam and Eve left the Garden), "God is a child at play with little colored balls." It's personally kind of fun to imagine a host of seraphim and archangels painting those gamma bubbles just as the Fermi Telescope trained its lenses at the center of the Milky Way a couple of months back.

I had, of course, grown up in Appalachia a stone's cast from the Scopes Monkey Trial--where you actually had arguments on the playground and at church suppers about whether the universe was 12,000 years old or not, and sometimes I even had to read about those archaelogical uncoveries! where fundamentalist paleontologists find the remnants of Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's Ark, or the Tower of Babel at undisclosed locations near the Red Sea. The funny thing about that brand of Christian "Edu-tainment" (around which an industry has spawned) is that particular brand of Bob Jones science always seems glossed with this patina of Hollywood productions,particularly Stephen Spielberg. It's as though they want to convince us that while all those tweedy Harvard types are translating Greek in the library, the "real" scientists (with advanced degrees from Bob Jones University) are actually decked in pith helmets and bomber jackets looking for the literal Ark of the Covenant, coz that's what Indiana Jones was doing and imaginary archaelogy is a helluva lot more interesting than the real type.

You know, this may sound pretty snarky, but I'm somehow pondering whether many of the companies which produce that sort of dross, also shoot high quality pornography. After all, the production values are very similar (You know, leather thong straps and bad CGI), and there are only so many plastic totem poles and terrible special effects out in California for people not to have to share.

But, anyways, like many rural teenagers hammered with opaque religious arguments and shoddy, low-brow pseudo-science, I found solace in magazines like Discovery and Scientific American. I was drawn to the fractal-heavy covers and the spiky terminology which inspired eyeball kicks whether or not I could even get my head around them. Wormholes! Nth Dimension! Pocket galaxies! Buckminster Fullerene! Some mathematicians, like Rudy Rucker and Neal Stephenson, even wrote really amazing science fiction to accompany their ideas. I was also heavy into Pink Floyd at the time, which somehow seems relevant.

If you grew up in the Bible Belt during the early 1990's and made the decision to refute God, (He, after all, gave you terrible acne) there were four false idols to worship. For pagans, there was Jim Morrison (the Oliver Stone movie painted him as the resurrected Bachhus), for existentialists: Kurt Cobain (suicide's often the only answer when Hell is other people), for Satanists, there was Slayer (or Marilyn Manson if you were dealing with homosexual urges). Then there was Pink Floyd, whose music was a pastiche of astronomy, alchemy, and childhood trauma endlessly appealing those of us who spent many Saturday nights in smoky basements reading neon hieroglyphics in the threads of our Levi's and glimpsing spiral galaxies in our navels. Their aesthetic embodied all the weird mysticism of physics and astronomy, and it's no surprise that museum observatories frequently host laser light shows devoted to Floyd's music. Astronomers dig Floyd. Their seemingly endless resources and weirdness gave rise to arcane legends--(one I was reminded of recently was that the LED light on the Pulse album was engineered to blink for exactly 100 years).

However, adolescence comes and goes, the chip one has on his shoulder against others' beliefs falls, as does the notion that one might be important in the cosmic scheme of things, and Pink Floyd's music seems ridiculously narcissistic when I listen to it now. I prefer the Statler Brothers nowadays because they're weird, narcissistic, AND spiritual. I bet the kind of people who would buy tickets to feed tamed camels in a plaster ark probably dig on the Statlers, too.

To be honest string theory seems kind of loopy,too. He really must be messing with our heads.

Anyways, here's to Disney World, Las Vegas, and the Ark Museum. Peacable, plastic Edens where well-fed humans dwell side-by-side with trained animals. Here's to the efforts of theorists, from both M.I.T and B.J.U., for making the world something more precious than a market, a zoo, and a battleground. And here's to our Creator, for breathing wonder into every facet of our ever-broadening cosmos--stranger not only than we suppose, but than we can suppose..

Well, let's write down what 29 year old Keith has to say.This is a journal from this past summer

Walking exerscises the imagination quoth Celine. All the rest is disappointment and fatigue. Our own journey is entirely imaginary. That's it's strength.

Stoners are highly organized houseplants.

A dispute between neighbors at ABC No Rio. The guy says "I'm a vampire. The time I sucked my brother's blood, I only regret it a little.

July 4th. Neponsit Beach, Listening to Television (the band). I feel music taking a renewed importance in my life following the Saturn's Returns, recoping with my new refocused personality.

Constantly, I'm floundering in the digital age, yet in many ways, I'm adjusting to it better than most. Missing my lo-fi analog Chicago days. It was rock and roll as fuck for a little while there. Rock and roll doesn't leave much time for creative expression or, let's face it, any aspect of organized civilization.

Grandchildren will read these words someday. Hello future! Are there flying cars yet?

The day bagan at 6:10 pm with a shirtless walk up 5th Ave. I'm the only white man who takes his shirt off in midtown Manhattan. Perhaps it will catch on and I will be a zeitgeist. Summer must be so uncomfortable for the old.

I'm at Galapagos listening to a Marching Band blasting in my ears. Life has reached the coolness of cinema at this moment. There's something miraculous about getting this amount of people together. The performers outnumber the audience.

It's been wonderful to watch the transformation of my friends into adults. We've inherited a hot and sick world. We're the good guys, or at least the good enough guys.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND 20 YEAR OLD

Happy Thanksgiving. Lacking creative impulse, but desiring to put something on my blog, I just pulled out one of my old journals from college and started typing some of the more interesting lines. Lots of references to classical works, so I assume this was in the Fall of 2001 when I took some classes on Dante and Homer. After the 9/11 attacks, so I was pretty bummered the entire year. In 2001, I was 20 old years and much more serious than I am now. I hope I'm a better writer, too. Anyways, here's to memory.

The Trojan War is regenerative. No afterlife is hinted in the Iliad. Dark Mist. Nothingness. In war, the process of living is stalled. Hades exists in the aftermath.

In the Odyssey, Hell is the deteoriation of society. Odysseus mourns the afterimages of used-up men. The dead know the past and future, but cannot know the present. A circular concept of time.

Human features are shaped by inertia and force. There is a mix of both qualities in the features of James and Harriet. Theirs is a life lived long. I don't know whether it is by ignorance, innocence, or creativity that country people's houses eviscerate the lives of their tenants-cozy and full of icons like a lady chapel

All this education has turned me inward to self-attention.

My computer came back to life today.

Sooner or later, memories of my ex-girlfriend, something I read in the paper about a winning Megabucks lottery ticket being sold from a small convenience store in New Jersey. Something about the memories of my ex-girlfriend, the lottery story, what my grandmother once said mixing in my head with a layman's knowledge of Sartre in my head giving a notion about the futility of even the purest intentions and soon I'm sitting on the stoop sobbing to myself just because.

I concede that the old downtown was gutted out before I was born. There is very little I can confess to sharing with my mother's memories as a child from the same town. Memories of Saturday afternoons on the street.

Without zoning laws or people resigning to be told what the can do with their damn land, the storefront face of the South seems malleable and messy as quicksilver. A Civil War battlefield can become a Wal-Mart, as quickly as a tanning salon can become a Living Gospel Assembly church.

I feel my worst quality is that I draw away from people I love while also needing them near.

If I was any more mundane and boring as I feel I am now, I would become tangible only in the form of pre-packaged lozenges sold in blister strips of ten at Walgreens.

I'm becoming unreasonably blameful at my family for being so grounded. I have plenty of room to fulfill my own Abe Lincoln-forged myth of rising above my rusticated roots. I don't know why, but I think about Abe Lincoln more than I think about anything else.

The Krystal commercials encourage you to take home a sackful of hamburgers today. I just drank a sackful of beers.

Readingthe recent article in the NYT about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a crafty $1.6 billion dollar Swiss clock which in addition to telling the time, also reads dark matter from cosmic rays, I'm struck with regret that I never paid attention in math class.
What sucks about being a liberal arts major is that scientists often invent things that promise to solve your lifelong search for meaning, but whose utility, function, and purpose sends you running to the bathroom for aspirin.
I can think of two specific examples. The first is the Large Hadron Collider, a device whose operation is so abstruse for the laymen, I couldn't even understand its function when Hollywood digitally spelled it out for me in Angels and Demons.
The second is The Super Kamiokande
From the moment I laid eyes on it, I couldn't help but want one for myself. A 3,200-foot deep cavern of photo-multiplier jellyfish bots surrounded by ultra-purified water and two little guys in orange jumpsuits rafting around. Why do I love it? Perhaps because the name and image alone conjures up the Crash Man stage in Mega Man 2.It's cute and eerie in the way that so many Japanese things are cute and eerie. But what, oh, what, does it do? Let's check their website

We have discovered neutrino oscillations by SK which was started its data taking in 1996. This discovery has revealed that neutrinos have finite masses, which was previously considered to be massless, --a clue to a new theoretical frame-work of the elementally particle physics. K2K experiment has confirmed the neutrino oscillation by using the man-made neutrinos.

Well, it doesn't help that the entire website is in Engrish, but I just don't understand what the hell any of this means or why it has to be so deep underground to discover why neutrinos have masses. Why is it important? What's the value of finding this information? And inevitably I always stumble across that spooky and confounding term one finds in every science article.

The 23% of them is found to be a dark matter which does not emit light, but can be observed by gravity. The dark matter is expected to be a new elementary particle. The direct observation of the dark matter will be a great help to understand the structure of the universe.

"Dark Matter." I feel it's important to understand dark matter, to grok this concept so as to understand what the hell is going on and why I'm sitting here, me, this self incarnate in a body. But then I realize that to understand dark matter, I would first have to understand matter, by which I would have to first understand atoms, which might actually require me to do some math which calls to mind Mark McConkey stabbing himself with a protractor in 9th grade and textbooks which had covers that looked like this, but insides that looked like this and I just can't go back there.

If I still drank, I'd be pretty bummed that Four Loko was being taken off the market. For a young burgeoning drunk in the mid-oughties, energy-infused malt liquors seemed to be the most interesting development in alcohol since. . . well, man first crushed grapes. At no point in its history has the sublime kick of booze been augmented. I spent about eight good years solely devoted to task of discovering what the quintessence of being drunk is, and I submit my findings thusly:


"It makes people wanna commit incest."

Of course, we've spent milleniae attributing a Willy Wonka grimoire of different psychoactive qualities to different distillations of what is simply a bunch of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules:

"Tequila makes you feisty." "Vodka is friendly." "Beer calms you down." "Jagermeister is liquid cocaine." "Pernod makes you hallucinate." "Scotch is nostalgic" "Whisky is spiritual" ad infinitum.
In truth, Sparks Energy malt liquor, with its tangy mix of guarana, taurine, Siberian ginseng, and caffeine, was the only beverage that actually delivered on it's promise of being a different headkick.
I remember one hot July Summer night in Chicago back in 2006, there was an outdoor concert, Intonation Fest, sponsored by Sparks and Vice Magazine. At the concession stand, a twelve ounce beer was $5 while a sixteen ounce Sparks was $4, so, you know, do the math. It was a ginormous amount of people in the dead heat and the entire body politic was hepped on energy booze. As the Boredoms began playing their catastrophic drum set, I remember a mania and insanity coursing through the audience like a Bill Haley and the Comets concert behind the Iron Curtain. The potential for bedlam was everywhere. By the time Ghostface Killah mounted the stage, the thousands of us had melted like ice cream into a sweaty, flesh-walled slurry of hemmorhaging pheromones. We were a stupid bull cow, like Katja Kassin being finished by a purple-polychrome centipede dildo courtesy of the mandingus general.
Suffice to say, the stuff was poison, but I ain't forgetting such days anytime soon.
I feel old as I actually find myself supporting the ban of a substance. Me, the libertarian who believes every home ought to have a marijuana crop protected by Smith & Wesson actually in favor of banning a substance or at least suing the bastards. Why? Because with its fluorescent urban camo can, I think you're marketing it to kids. It has the same wacky can that appeals to those in love with the acrylic, epoxy-gooey world of toy guns and Nerf. I'm sure the manufacturers were targeting frat boys and guys from New Jersey, and it's no fault of the manufacturers that douchebags are into the same color schemes little kids are into. .
I think of the way I drank when I was 19, and I'm sure I would have been the kid whose heart exploded on this stuff. The problem lies in that alcohol is the only thing substance that, for whatever reason, one occasionally drinks twelve of, without intention to. It's a trucker's speedball.
So, I say, take it off the market as a alco-pop and re-introduce it under a brand name geared towards men in their early thirties. Dress it up. Have Ralph Steadman design the label and emboss David Foster Wallace's suicide letter scrawled in tortured longhand along the sweet gleaming lip of the bottle. . . Give it a puzzling brand name like "Quantum of Chappaquidick." Then I'll buy it.

Long time. No post. I've been writing a screenplay which takes up the one hour a day I can commit to writing at the moment. I-Pod has been on the fritsz. How about just a quick walk in Chelsea with me and one of the finest painters in New York City, Devin Powers?. I find myself badmouthing European tourists on this day. Rememember that I work on 34th St. though.

It just gets weirder on my Madison Square Park tour as I descend the island to the southwestern quadrant. One building which always grabs my eye is the Met-Life Tower, not to be confused with the taller, newer, and more well-known Met-Life Building which announces itself in great white letters in the city's skyline. The tower fits importantly in my early impressions of New York City because of a film of a worker scaling to the top of the bell-shaped spire and waving at the camera with his hat (I can't find this footage on Youtube, but I would advise all interested parties to check out Ric Burns' "New York" documentary which does have the footage). The monolith held the title of World's Tallest for three years until it was surpassed by the Woolworth building in 1913. One feature of the tower peculiar to New York is a grand round-faced clock. In a city that has embraced wristwatches and more recently, cell phones, I doubt the Met-Life Tower ever had a chance at becoming as iconic as Big Ben in London or the Old Town Hall Clock in Prague. Before the days of individual timekeepers, clock towers were communal devices signaling the end of workdays and calls to worship. In New York, each person is his own island, a complex of occasions as Charles Olson would have it. Placed in a collectivist European city, the Met-Life Tower might have been a great locus to which people made pilgrimages towards like the Camino de Santiago. But here in New York, it hardly warrants a glance upwards.
Skipping past Shake Shack and William Seward (who is not related to William S. Burroughs), I come to the most occultishly interesting phenomena at the tip of the Flatiron Building. I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, 23 Skidoo. This was a fad expression printed on pennants and arm bands in the 1920's, much in the style of "Don't Have a Cow,Man" or "Where's the beef?"
I've looked this term up in various slang dictionaries and found it to basically mean "get out while the getting's good." It was a meme which can be found in numerous pieces of pop culture of the era and even in the transcript of the Titanic sinking. Allegedly, the term comes from the wind tunnel effect created on 23rd Street famous for lifting up ladies' skirts. Crowds of layabouts used to lean on the building for the sole purpose of catching a glimpse of ankles and bloomers. The cops got in the habit of shooing them away and the code for it became "23 Skidoo."
The whole term carries some occult weight for the mere usage of the number "23" which ties it into the whole "23 Enigma" (first identified by William Burroughs!). Way back in 1912, the intellectual warlock Aleister Crowley published a poem entitled "23 Skidoo" in his "Book of Lies"--(Read on page 55, here).
The term was also used as the title of Otto Preminger's 1968 LSD-inspired film which starred Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, Slim Pickens, and Groucho Marx in his last film role playing "God." The urban legend surrounding it is that all the cast and crew of this bizarre film were taking LSD during the filming--funny to imagine Gleason from "The Honeymooners" tripping. I've watched bits and pieces of the film--(available to watch here and if you can make it through the whole thing, your patience is greater than mine). I can attest that Carol Channing's pupils seem dilated as dinner plates, but they were always kind of like that, right?
Well, finally, just to add to the weirdness of Madison Square Park is the Pentagram Building across the street on 5th Avenue. It's just this building that says "Pentagram" on the front, see? Does anyone else think that's weird or is it just me? Hello? Hello?