Ian has informed me that he has a dirt bike and does not need to be grandfathered into my plan, thank-you-very-much! :P :D

AHHHHHH!!!!! I almost died but it was so much fucking fun I don't care! :D

Whooooo-hooooo! I just got back from riding around on the back of Paul's motorcycle. So much fun! We rode all around Westlake, Capital of Texas highway, and then down FM 2222 and then up mopac, and down all these twisty hilly roads - he went really fast on those and on mopac, ahhh! :D Thought I was going to die, but I survived. We saw deer.... ahhhhhh such a blast! I love motorcycles! Love love love them! I'm heavily considering making it a policy to only date guys with motorcycles from here on out. Ian will be grandfathered in of course.

Oh Ian... la la la... :D :D :D

Pale Blue Dot

I watched this video made by an autistic woman about how it is to be autistic and why she feels compelled to do all the weird stuff she does - like touch things repetitively and that sort of thing. She said she was interacting with the objects around her by touching them - like she was talking to them and they were talking back. Sometimes I wish I had a mental disorder so that I might be able to access certain parts of being human that other people couldn't. In this instance, I really wish I could interact with inanimate objects around me the way autistics do. I do connect with inanimate objects sometimes though. I was sitting outside just now touching this big leafy plant and it really did feel like a conversation. I touched it, like playing a piano, I was making a message with my fingers, and the plant was touching me in a way that was kindof like talking. And then I thought about all the ways we talk and interact with all the things around us, like how food feels in my mouth and how air feels in my lungs - we're all talking to one another.

I hate that people use air conditioning so much in the summer. I mean it's nice when you've been outside for forever I guess, but it's kindof like anesthesia during surgery. I hate when you're about to go into surgery and they tell you you won't feel a thing. It seems so unnatural to me. I was expecting pain. Aren't you supposed to feel pain when someone's cutting into you with a scalpel? Maybe I was even looking forward to it and had already accepted it on some level and now I'm not going to feel anything. How unhuman to not feel a thing. Summertime is supposed to be hot. So why does my room and the dining room and every indoor place I go feel wintery fucking cold?

Hey have ya'll ever checked out Google Sky? http://www.google.com/sky/ Eeep! This is one of my favorite new things. Doesn't it excite you how many worlds there are to explore? I mean there's the interpersonal world, like your world and my world and how we interact, and then there's pond water, those amoebas and protists have their own world going on, you can check it out under a microscope. You can travel to different countries, experiencing different cultures can certainly be other-worldly. Or, you can look through a telescope and think about the array of other worlds going on everywhere else. Between the stars you could see before, now you see even more stars, and more stars between those. Galaxies among more galaxies. Jesus Christ in a jumpsuit! Sometimes I get real hopped up just being alive.

And while we're talking about intense inspirational things that make Lauren cry like a baby in a stupid happy way about how beautiful it all is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

I think everyone needs to try out a book by Charles Bukowski

Glory be to the best motherfucking co-op in the whole fucking world. God I love this place. This is an incredibly happy time in my life, possibly the happiest I've ever been, and a lot of that happiness is due to living at 21st St.

This is the first time I’ve felt truly free in America, where I can go naked as often as I please, and do as many drugs as I please without anyone hassling me. I can say what I think and wear or not wear whatever I want without any real fear of reproach. I feel uncensored, unrestrained, like I can be my authentic self and have people see me for who I am and it is glorious. It feels good to my soul. I never want to leave.

The democracy ideal which I think is a crapshoot on a large scale, really works in this setting and I feel like I have the power to change things I care about. I especially love the way people voluntarily cooperate to get things done due to their own vested interest in this place. Occasionally I find some choice examples of why socialism is a shit show, tragedy of the commons and all of that, but I've decided that is healthier for people to live in close-knit groups taking care of one another and suffering the slightly squalid consequences, rather than to isolate themselves in an apartment and expend energy on having lots of nice things. Well, different lifestyles may just make different people happy, but I sure am glad I found what works best for me! :D Actually, living in this quasi-socialist cooperative living situation, is a testament to the free market in my opinion. The fact that people have choices in capitalism - to live as an individualist laboring only for yourself and family, or to live cooperatively, laboring for the benefit of the people in your surroundings - is really wonderful. It certainly doesn't work the other way around. In a communist country, you don't really get that choice.

People care about one another here. People here care about me. I'll give you an example. Yesterday I was taking the trash out of the Commons (where we have parties), and as I was walking by the back porch, my foot slipped off of my flip flop (freak accident) and a piece of broken glass stabbed my heel. I got cut really bad and started bleeding all over the place. Immediately like 5 people became incredibly concerned about my welfare. Alfredo helped carry me over to the mop shed so I could wash off my foot and my sandal which was covered in blood, and then 30 seconds later Garrett was there with his fully stocked first aid kit. They helped me to a bench and Garrett cleaned up my foot and did a first-rate job of dressing my wound. There was even an EMT present explaining how I would know if there was still glass in my foot. While all of that was going on, Alfredo hosed all of my blood off the sidewalk. (Garrett actually even re-dressed my wound again and also superglued me back together later after I busted my cut open hobbling around in Twin Liquors and HEB with Alfredo - I rode around in a motorized wheelchair. Yea! But Garrett - man, what a guy! :D ) Anyway, moral of the story: I'm so grateful to have such great friends watching out for me.

UPDATE: This is my foot two days after Garrett fixed me up. The cut's like half the size it was when it happened.

On another note, caring for one another in a cooperative living situation really fits with my made-up religion also. Like that there is divinity within all of us, and we have this collective consciousness because we are parts of God, which allows us to sense the suffering (or joy or peace or love) of others. This makes it such that when people pray, those who recognize their divinity and acknowledge that they are a part of God, those people can hear prayers and share in their joy, or love, or suffering, or render aid to that person, etc. You can't help others and be joyful with them and take care of them if you are isolated from them. So being around co-opers and helping out and sharing in people's experiences, is really... I don't know... divinity affirming I guess - it sits right with my beliefs.

This song will always make me think of the co-op:http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Kids_Album_Version_/23111624

In other news, I've found my calling - http://pornfortheblind.org/ I'm going to start doing voice descriptions of various porn scenes so that blind people can jerk off/buff the muff to things on the Internet like able-bodied people. It's a non-profit charity so I feel pretty good about lending my voice to making some great narrations. As it is, most of the contributors are male, which I think would kind of suck if I were a blind guy, don't you agree? Plus, I think I could do sexier descriptions - like here's a direct quote from one clip - hilarious in it's dettachedness, "... Gaping anus being stretched open, presumably after being plugged by a large European penis." More: "Another man in a soccer jersey is doing his part in the double penetration (hesitation) to a woman... who is also kissing another woman... The two men are wearing shirts, but the shirts have no sleeves." Haha. Oh dear! So I'm open to requests people - what are some favorite scenes I should narrations of?