intercalary

Although you wouldn't know it from Bac-Log's consistent level of precision and polish, I usually do not really plan out blog posts in advance. However, the other day I thought of something REALLY IMPORTANT to write about (probably something that I ate), and before I could even begin to put my keyboard-shaped pencil to my computer-shaped paper, the idea had branched and split and grown beyond any hope of containment.

Okay, I am going to steal this awesome idea from sports writer Joe Posnanski wherein I will do loosely-related asides in italics. These "intercalary" paragraphs are not necessary parts of the narrative sequence and serve primarily to support rather than interrupt the storyline. For example, I will here mention that my above pencil/paper, keyboard/computer metaphor does not actually make sense because I am typing this on a laptop-- unless there is such a thing as a pencil that is attached to a paper, in which case why are you reading this and not using your "penper" (papcil?) for the benefit of humanity?

Often people refer to things as "trains of thought", which implies that the progression of an idea follows a consistent linear pattern, and that a previous, um, "car of thought" can be revisited by simply moving backwards through the train car-by-car. (I guess this would only work if the train has those little doors at the end of each car. I don't think this would work for freight trains, which is probably why hobos can't explain how they arrived at their awesome ideas, no matter how many swigs of your malt liquor you bribe them with).

Speaking of trains, way back in the deeps of time my roommates and I used to say, "WOO WOO! Random train, coming through" whenever one of us (BRIAN) would interrupt a conversation mid-sentence to say something really random. We did this so much that we bought one of those wooden train whistles one day when we were in Oregon for some reason (a note for younger readers: in college, sometimes you wake up in a different state). We thought that we would use our "random train" whistle all of the time, but it turns out we were just too busy. Instead, we would only blow the random train whistle when one of us happened to randomly find it every few months, which I guess is actually a better story in the long run.

So anyway, my head was bursting with a cacophony [NEW FEATURE: word of the day] of disassociated ideas, and I decided to reverse engineer my thought process in order to pare things down to a manageable state. I tried to maneuver back through my out-of-control train of thought, but I couldn't find the door at the end of the car, or maybe there were too many doors, or maybe someone detached some of the cars for routine maintenance.

This metaphor is getting out of hand.

You see, the problem is that I had made an assumption about how my thoughts were arranged. When I failed at retracing a one-dimensional sequence, I realized that I was being much too close-minded. The reason why I could not structure my thoughts to create the second most amazingly earth-shattering blog posting of all time is that my ideas were not one-dimensional, which unfortunately is the only level of blog dimensionness that Google currently supports (out of Beta).

Here is a startling true statistic that I just made up about the word "intercalary": If you mention "intercalary" in casual conversation, 95% of people will think of Grapes of Wrath and how much they hated high school except hey--remember how awesome Senior Skip Day was? And also, I bet all of those cheerleaders are fat now.

A drawing of a cube is a way of visualizing a 3-dimensional object in a 2-dimensional space (similarly, an animated tesseract is a way of visualizing a 4-dimensional hypercube in a 2-dimensional space. You can't make this shit up). This led to me hope that perhaps there is a method by which I could "project" my n-dimensioned storm of ideas into a one-dimensional structure and finally be done with this stupid blog post so I could go get tacos. The problem, of course, is defining the question-- exactly how many dimensions are my thoughts in? 2? 3? Am I being too close-minded about the dimensionality being an integer? Or even a number? Maybe my thoughts are banana-dimensional.

Anyway, I don't really know where I was going with this.

Time for tacos.

* * *

My friend Ian [Ladies: Ian is in town this week! Get him while he's hot and in the same state as you!][disclaimer: I guess this applies only to residents of Seattle][disclaimer: Ladies: make out with Ian] came up with the best title ever for my mixed emo CD, one of the fabulous prizes of the spectacular X-TREME HAIKU CHARITY CHALLENGE 2008™, which is currently being judged by an outside agency (ZING! I just called Hillary an agency. Grant 1, Hillary 0). His title, "The fading day-old impressions of the snow angels we made that winter when we were five" obliterates all of my ideas so completely that I think we must have been playing entirely different games. I was still playing Sorry while Ian had moved on to Battleship.

In retrospect, I think that my titles were just too spot-on to be suitably ironic. I haven't been able to determine for sure yet, but I sort of feel that "accident knees" might actually be a real emo song or album title. However, if not, I may have finally found my calling in life, which apparently is to be an emo song-name consultant (which is where the real money is). Unfortunately, my savant-like naming skillz are of little use here in the present, and to capitalize on my amazing gift will require me to go back in time 15 years to the heyday of emo. While I'm there, I may as well also become rich and powerful using my knowledge of the future (in my spare time, when I am not naming songs).

Becoming rich and powerful using your knowledge of the future might seem easy, but have you ever thought about exactly how you would do this? Converting knowledge to whatever wacky form of currency they used 15 years ago might be difficult. For example, how exactly would I get the pastlings to give me rubies or credits or whatever for explaining to them that there is going to be a movie about the story of Batman, but not the movie that just came out for them, but a *different* one that is pretty much the same but the actor who plays the Joker in the future also is dead in the future? Also, how can I profit from bringing the concept of "Twitter" to the past? Are their tiny past brains even capable of processing this knowledge? I think this is why Future Biff gave Past Biff the book of sports scores in the seminal movie, Back to the Future II, because betting on sports seems like something people in the past can handle.

Kids, this is why watching sports is important.

And I guess that's the point here. [Psst, wake up]