Questions

Most people don't learn things along the way. Or if they do, they conveniently forget those things when it suits their need. Most people, given a second chance, fuck it up completely. It's one of those laws of the universe that you can't shake. People, I have noticed, only seem to learn once they get their third chance—after losing and wasting vast sums of time, money, youth, and energy—you name it. But still they learn, which is the better thing in the end.

Ask questions.

No.

Screech questions out loud—while kneeling in front of the electric doors at Safeway, demanding other citizens ask questions along with you—while chewing up old textbooks and spitting the words onto downtown sidewalks—outside the Planet Hollywood, outside the stock exchange, and outside the Gap. Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules that crystallize into question marks. Make bar codes print out fables, not prices. You can't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question mark stamped on it—a demand for people to reach a finer place.
Ask whatever challenges dead and thoughtless beliefs. Ask: When did we become human beings and stop being whatever it was we were before this? Ask: What was the specific change that made us human? Ask: Why do people not particularly care about their ancestors more than three generations back? Ask: Why are we unable to think of any real future beyond, say, a hundred years from now? Ask: How can we begin to think of the future as something enormous before us that also includes us? Ask: Having become human, what is it that we are now doing or creating that will transform us into whatever it is that we are slated to next become?

No one asks questions anymore.

Can you imagine the Nobel prize winner of 3120?
Can you imagine when they have to put spatulas on stamps because they've ran out of anything else?
Can you picture a future farther than 100 years from now?

You can't you?
There's nothing at the center of what we do...No center. It doesn't exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there's nothing else.
People appear confident, but when you start to ask difficult questions the confidence falters and fades.

Never stop asking questions.
Never stop changing.
Never stop asking questions ever.
Question your life
Question your job
Question your friends.
Question everything.

That's my assignment for you.
Question everything.

You're going to be forever homesick, walking through a cold railway station until the end, whispering strange ideas about existence into the ears of children. Your lives will be tinged with urgency, as though rescuing buried men and lassoing drowning horses. You'll be mistaken for crazies. You may well end up foaming at the mouth in a central Canadian drug clinic, Magic-Markering ideas onto your thighs, which are bony from scouring the land on foot. Your eyes will always feel as if you've been staring at the sun, your bodies seemingly aching to cool them by staring at the moon. There aren't enough words for 'transform.' You'll invent more.

We own this planet now.
It's ours.

A thousand years ago, five hundred years ago, hell even a hundred and fifty years ago, if all the humans disappeared the world could go on. Now that's no longer possible. If we dissapear, the factories remain, the evian bottles remain, the cola cans and the skyscrapers remain. Millions of years of rust and rot accumulate.
Millions of years to eliminate all trace of humanity.
We've reached a critical point in time.
Time is now the equivalent of human history.
If humans disappeared, time disappears.
It becomes irrelevant.
We're on the brink of something here.
Some change.
The only thing that will ensure it is a good change is a forging of human will towards a central goal.

So never stop asking questions.

Find the goal.

IT Class

I'm going to tell you a story.

It's called...

Max's IT Class

I'd been stuck inside my head all day, noticing things I don't usually notice. Like the dress code at Western. It seems that everyone wears basically the same thing, Jeans, some sort of t-shirt, and a hoodie. Well, the guys at least. It's funny, because I've come to recognize people by their hoodies. As if their hoodies are who they are. When someone goes out and buys a new hoodie, I won't recognize them for a week.
There's nothing more annoyingly creepy in the world than an unspoken dress code.

Anyway.

I'd been inside my head all day, sometimes that just happens. You get lost doing one task, and then suddenly you look outside and it's dark out and you wonder where all the time has gone.

Thats what it's like in IT class.

The shrill call of the Bell snaps me out of my reprieve, and I pack up my binders into my backpack.
I walk down the crowded and claustrophobic hallways of Western to... THE COMPUTER LAB.
Shuffling along the floor I sit in my spot.
There's no seating plan in IT, and every spot looks the exact same, but I sit in the same spot each and every day.
It's my spot.

I sit down in my chair.
It's very uncomfortable, even though it's cushioned. It curves my back forward and makes me stare at my computer even harder.

I log in.
Typically I don't visit D2l first.
Why the hell would I?
It's so damn easy to finish the assignments that I could waste half the class and still pull off an 83. Which incidentally I am.

I check my emails.
Some people really piss me off. Here's a quote from the end of one of my emails I received.
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. "
Thats nice.
Nietzsche incidentally.
Who the hell do you think you are?
Three years ago we were laughing our asses off at American Pie. Now suddenly you're Noam Chomsky?

Eventually I get bored.
I pull up a "skills exploration" project we're supposed to be doing.
Apparently this will help us with our resumes.
No ones ever been happy with a job they obtained by first handing in a resume.
Remember that.
It starts asking me all these questions.

1. What special interests or activities do you enjoy?
I thought about this for a while.
It doesn't really come out and ask you if you have a life, but at the same time.. it DOES.
I finally settled on..

I greatly enjoy repetitive tasks.

2. What extra-curricular activities are you involved in?
-N/A

3. What are your hobbies/talents
-Typing
-Writing
-Inputting Text
More come to mind.
I think I just ended up writing N/A

I became too angry with the questionnaire, so I ended up playing Tetris on some website.
Why is it than when you read a book by yourself, it's a marvelous, magical thing? Inventing your own world and getting lost in it seems to be wonderful, but when you play a game by yourself it's a socially damaging, fucked up activity.
I play games until the teacher catches me.
She doesn't care.
But she has to.

Next project is a web.
It's nice how they give you specific things that your web MUST have.
Must be blue
Must have yellow lines
Must have comic sans font.
Anyway..

Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that tachers determine our life’s routines. It’s the trade-off so that we don’t have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we’d at least make a show of not being fooled and draw pretty little pictures on everything. After a few years it just doesn’t matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of your classmates. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.

I think I nodded off at this point.
It's easy to nod off in IT class.
I think everyone does it at one point or another.

I started googling things.
Mindless things, things I've always wanted to know the answer to. I've made it a bit of a game, trying to find more and more complex questions to ask and get a good answer.
But after a week of intense googling, I've kind of burnt out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel this way all the time. I think that in the year 2020 people are going to be nostalgic for the feeling of being clueless.

Continuing on.
I go back inside my head.
Strange how no one really talks in IT.
I think only one or two people do.
And EVERYONE can hear their conversations.
There's no rule against talking... It's just that no one does it. How 1984.

I read Dr.Seuss.
I laugh at jokes no one tells.
People look at me.
I play some online racing game.
In New York, all the teenage boys are dying because they’re driving their cars using videogame physics instead of real-world physics. They turn too quickly and change lanes too quickly. They don’t understand traction or centripetal force. And they’re dropping like flies.
Thats about all really.

Sometimes I just stare at the blank monitor, trying to pick out dead pixels.
Then the bell rings and we shuffle like zombies out of the door

The hallway seems so so.. so Alive compared to IT. It's like emerging from solitary confinement after 5 years.
Everyone's talking.
I feel tired.
I'd really rather be sleeping. Or back in IT.
It's addicting.
I..
I..
I... need it.

Something Interesting...

Something interesting from a Douglas Copuland novel. It has given me a different outlook on life.

You exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species - you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species
currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of
these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of
hardware and software is where the species is investing its very
survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born
of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not
achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves
out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an
earthly paradise - the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line,
prevent humanity from going nonlinear.

We all had good lives. None of us middle class people were ever victimized as
far as I know. We have never wanted for anything, nor have we ever
lusted for anything. We've been dealt good hands, but the real morality here, is whether these good hands are squandered on uncreative lives, or
whether these hands are applied to continuing humanity's dream.

It's no coincidence that as a species we invented the middle classes.
Without the middle classes, we couldn't have had the special type of
mindset that consistently spits out computational systems, and our
species could never have made it to the next level, whatever that
level's going to be. Chances are, the middle classes aren't even a
part of the next level. But that's neither here nor there. Whether you
like it or not, me, you everyone -we're all of
us the fabricators of the human dream's next REM cycle. We are
building the center from which all else will be held. Don't question
it, don't dwell on it, but don't ever let yourself forget it

I get this little feeling that we can all of us
speed up the dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream
together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

High River? Wait What?

Went to school yesterday. Fell asleep on the bus?
It was a rather interesting experience,
One minute you're awake, surrounded by several large and (to be frank) smelly teens and the next minute it's just you and an old man.
Not to say that the old man wasn't nice. He was just a tad... Odd.
It's not everyday you're prodded awake on a bus by an old man.

Bus-1
Kraft-0

I'd post something I'd written, but I'm fresh out. Plus my documents aren't on this computer...

Blending matches in a blender (where else?) right now. I'll post the video of the bomb later.


Thats about all.

Oh yeah High River = OMGWTFBBQ!?

Written in IT

While I was supposed to be "exploring exciting career oppurtunities!" I wrote this instead.

You forget how you got here

and the question pierces a fine tantrum through your mind.

Maybe the question is this:

Why are you here? Where did you come from?

But no, the question you're too afraid to ask is:

What happens next?

You have, after all, no idea what you've gotten yourself into.

You see some faces, and an instinct tells you they mean something to you.

But your ability to recognise their details is lost like you are.

Some voices cut through the intangible boom of a hundred conversations,

and though you've heard the words before,they tell you nothing you can use.

You feel a heat that's overbearing, but don't worry, you're not really burning.

That's just your superficial arteries dilating, flushing blood from your core.

The same thing happens with alcohol, but as far as you know

you're still sober.

Your skin's moist and one of these faces that seem so familiar to you points and stares,

saying "Your face!"

Somehow, you know what these words mean and touch your cheeks and your lips.

The touch of your hands feels so warm.Y

ou think you might be sick, and feel something coming up.

But it's not something inside you.

Your face meets with the floor,

and though the floor is cold and hard

you tell yourself it's like falling into the deepest, softest bed.

And suddenly, the question doesn't feel so real anymore.

Because cold and wounded,

lost in the crowd,you feel safe.

And the lie is more comforting than any reality.

So you tell yourself that you're home.

Introduction.

Hi.



The name is Kraft Singles.



Obviously that's not my real name.



I have a strange obsession for American Style dairy products.

I am a student at Western Canada High School.

Most people would agree that I am in fact a swell guy.

I will be updating regularly, seeing as I have nothing better to do.

I think I have more friends on facebook than I do in real life.

2 hours of Face Time is all I need each day. Thats all.

Oh here's a snippet of a story I'm writing.

"Once you know you’re going to die, it sort of narrows your focus. You begin to see triviality in what you used to think was importance, and you start to see importance in what used to be small and insignificant. My name is Dan Sturges; I work for the United States government in an underground lab. We examine deadly viruses and try to create cure. Last week there was an accident, and everyone was exposed to a lethal virus with an incubation period of three weeks. Three weeks to know if you’re going to live or die. However, I know I’m going to die, you see I was the closest one to the virus when it broke out. I literally breathed the fumes from the broken glass. If you really want to hear about it the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, and maybe even my whole autobiography. I really don’t want to go into that right now, to tell you the truth it kind of bores me. Besides, my parents would probably have a heart attack apiece if I told you anything personal about them. It’s not that they’re not nice people or anything, it’s just they’re very touchy. They don’t really like people talking about them. That’s why I’m just going to tell you about all the mad things that happened to me in the past three weeks. Let’s start from the beginning. "

That's all

For now.