'Paul Revere' is a terrible party song.

I said I wanted to write more about depression (see here, here, and here, for example), but between not being able to write, and not knowing how to extract anything significant from my grayer days, little has happened.

I often think about a pact of some sort, I think because I want someone to be accountable to, but also because I want someone to compete against. I am not sure how that might be compatible with accountability; it seems to make things harder. Or maybe it just makes it harder to find someone.

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.

Tonight Geoff and I were taken hold of by a Twista video as we waited for more of the shots of the mostly superfluous curly-red-haired violin playing girl. It's starting to get so that I become glued to the screen every time I come across the video.

Also, Geoff aptly pegged her not as some music major finally making some cash with her education, as I first thought, but better: as a Russian immigrant b-girl. (!)

Personally I think maybe there should be more u's there. Maybe some n's too.

The other day at the lesbian coffeeshop the cute girl* behind the counter was playing hip-hop and singing along to all the choruses and backup vocals; she had a nice voice, and there were like four 'soulful' songs in a row (including Kanye producing Kanye and Kanye producing Twista) that lent themselves to singing along. But then Bone Crusher came on, and he was barely done with his first line (and I quote verbatim from the archive: 'So I'm outside of da club and you think I'm a puuuuuuuunk') before she changed it to a Motown comp or something.

Dismay!

(*: whoever it is, she's always cute if she's playing hip-hop)

376
Chain-thinkers. - To him who has thought a great deal every new thought he hears or reads at once appears in the form of a link in a chain.

(Notice that he doesn't say whether this is a blessing or a curse, or when it might be one rather than the other.)

179
The great danger for scholars. - It is precisely the ablest and most thoroughgoing scholars who are in danger of seeing their life set narrower and narrower limits and, in the feeling that this is so, of becoming in the second half of their life more and more disgruntled and intolerant. At first they swim into their science with wide hopes and apportion themselves bolder tasks whose goals they sometimes already anticipate in their imagination: then there are moments such as occur in the life of the great discovering sea-voyagers - knowledge, presentiment and strength raise one another even higher, until a new distant coast dawns upon the eye. Now, however, the rigorous man recognizes more clearly year by year how vital it is that the individual items of research should be as circumscribed as possible so that they can be resolved without remainder and that unendurable squandering of energy avoided from which earlier periods of science suffered: every task is done ten times, and then the eleventh still offers the best result. But the more the scholar gets to know and practise this resolving of riddles without remainder the greater will be his pleasure in it: but the strictness of his demands in regard to that which is here called 'without remainder' will likewise increase. He sets aside everything that must in this sense remain incomplete, he acquires a repugnance and a keen nose for the half-resolvable - for everything that can yield a kind of certainty only in a general and more indefinite sense. The plans of his youth collapse before his eyes: all that remains of them is the merest few knots in the unknotting of which the master now takes pleasure and demonstrates his power. And now, in the midst of all this useful and restless activity, the older man is suddenly and then repeatedly assailed by a profound disgruntlement, by a kind of torment of conscience: he gazes upon himself as upon one transformed, as though he had been diminished, debased, changed into a skillful dwarf; he is harassed by the thought of whether his mastery in small things is not a piece of indolence, an evasion of the admonition to greatness in living and working. But he can no longer attain it - the time has gone by.

'Here I would like to make a general observation concerning the nature of philosophical problems. Lack of clarity in philosophy is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn't so. We can get along very well without these distinctions and without knowing our way about here.'