Something that's been floating in the brain pan lately:

I'm reading the Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly. Scanner, like many of his other books, is an exploration of perceived reality. This already isn't going to sound right. It is a study of the symbiotic nature of criminal and cop. It reminds me of a book written much later, but I read earlier. That book is Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of World. My problem with having read Murakami's book within the last year of reading Dick's is that I keep confusing the two in my mind. Both of them work on the same premise. What happens when you separate both halves of the brain? What happens when the left begins to function independently of the right? What happens when you become two separate people living two separate lives?

To complicate matters, I've also been thinking of the separation, the utter disparity, between online personas and real life. I'm going to try to make a very tenuous connection between weblogs, IRC, posting boards, and the Dick and Murakami stories. Think I can pull it off? As I write this, I am listening to these songs by these artists:

• Hajime Mizoguchi - silence and wind
• Cabaret Voltaire - I Want You
• Roots - Thought @ Work
• Kings of Convenience - I Don't Know What I Can Save You From (Royksopp Remix)
• David Byrne - Marching Through The Wilderness (Charanga)
• They Might Be Giants - Everything Right Is Wrong Again
• Pink Floyd - Brain Damage
• Aerobitch - Steamroller Blues
• Ben Folds - fred jones part 2
• Warren Zevon - The French Inhaler

How do I know this? Well, there is the obvious method. I am sitting in my seat, in front of my PC, listening to Winamp with a pair of headphones that keeps losing signal in the right ear and I occasionally have to jiggle the cord to get sound, sometimes semi-staticy, to come through. I also know this because what I am listening to is currently being published on a page on Audioscrobbler (for more info, scroll down to the bottom of this post.) Two separations of the same me. The music I am listening to is a list, nothing more, that is uploaded to the Audioscrobbler website every time 70% of a song completes. The music I am listening to is coming through my soon-to-be-replaced headphones and keeping me awake at 4:40 am on a Wednesday night/Thursday morning, night classes are a bitch sometimes, I spend the first half of the week adjusting my sleep patterns, the indirect cause of posts like this one.

There is the me on IRC. I've been spending many an hour logged onto IRC lately, more time than I did when I was in my IRC heyday back in '95 or so. I am the me on IRC like I am Jack's liver. I am the me on IRC who speaks in plain text, hastily typed, badly misspelled, and commits action in purple preceded by a /me tag. I am the me on IRC waiting for my students to finish their work, shoulder cramping from typing for hours, too lethargic, despite the large Starbucks coffees and Mountain Dew Code Red, to get out of his chair and even stretch for a few minutes.

I am the me in the game, Neverwinter Nights lately, tonight a dwarven female fighter with a big sword and shiny silver armor. I am the me in my apartment, wearing a shirt that says "3v1l m1n10|\|" and pants that feature little devils thrusting pitchforks who has to get up every so often and relieve the nagging sensation that comes with drinking too much coffee and water too late. Also still dealing with tight shoulder muscles, or not dealing, however you want to look at it.

Reading Scanner and Wonderland, I imagine(d) my brain separating into two distinct states, owned by two unrelated drives. It's frighteningly easy to see it. I'm already pretty practiced at it. There are hundreds of me. Not just the me that are bits and pieces across the web, but the me that are physical pieces. The me at work, the me at home, the me with friends, the me with acquaintances, the me alone.

There's a physicality there too. As I sit here, typing this, keyboard separated in two halves, hands working in tandem to string words together, I can almost feel the differences between the two sides.

Other things:

Andrew Vachss has a new book out entitled The Getaway Man. If you've read this site for any length of time, you may have heard me mention a thing or two about my addiction to Vachss' books. If you decide to follow my recommendation and purchase one, I can't promise anything. Vachss has a very specific appeal. The part of me that likes the darker, meaner side of life is attracted to his books. His writing style, however, is an acquired taste. Vachss' prose makes James Ellroy look like Norman Mailer. Vachss' Baby Boy Burke series is hard boiled fiction at its most refined. It is brutal, masochistic poetry. I'm not recommending The Getaway Man in particular. (As of this writing, I haven't read it.) I do, however, recommend Flood and Strega. If you're still not sure, here's a freebie.

I am also playing with this neat little Winamp tracker called Audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler keeps track of your recently played tunes and compares you with other members. Good idea. I found some of the coolest stuff on Napster (and still do on WinMX) by raiding the hard drives of users who had what I was looking for. Scouring the shared folders of users who had something I already knew I liked proved to be the best way to use the service. At least then, I knew their taste was comparable and, usually, so were most of their selections. While Audioscrobbler doesn't give you links to the mp3's, it does let you compare and contrast playlists, giving you a something to aim for if you want to try something new. Here's my page. (ripped from the freshest post at waxy.org)

I see you jockin' me. (via Pretty_Generic, who tells me you should start here.)