1.20

The springwater flowed, smooth and even, over the canoe, which cupped the river and held it. The weight of the water rushed into the craft, wedging it down, farther, into the riverbed, against the oppressive bulk of the tree. The sky was clear and the air was hot. Philip couldn't hear anything against the rushing of the blood in his ears. The stillness was unbroken.
Beneath the surface, Katy thrashed silent, hips held down against a gravelly grave, air quickly running out. Afraid to scream, aching to cry out, she scrambled for purchase. The air was so clear she could see the bulk of my brother bend and disappear, and suddenly, there was a lifting. The pressure of the boat lessened, somewhat, then, altogether disappeared. The river sucked her out from the pinch and she bobbed, anticlimactically, to the surface, to hear an altogether new sound: Philip. Primal fear lifted that canoe, and he dropped it against the weight of the current. They both tried to free it. It took the two of them, a log for leverage, and even then my father to pry it loose and set it upright again.
I don't know who lifted that canoe. I hope it was Philip, but I fear it was God. I'm terrified that God had to intervene in my own sister's life because I don't want to admit how close I am to death every day. Each time I hear the whirr of my father's nighttime breathing apparatus, or when I see my mother's gouge in the neighbor's ditch, whenever I think about scraping my face off on the concrete of a humid Florida subdivision, I twitch. We're all living the width of a sheet of paper from crashing thrashing crawling death on the other side, and all he has to do is apply the slightest pressure from a knife and he can cut through to us without even leaving his ghastly haunt. I wish it were Philip who saved my sister, but I fear it was God.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014

Forty songs.
Forty two posts.
One year, nine days.
Fifty three weeks, three days.
Twenty three thousand, two hundred forty nine words.
Four thousand, two hundred twenty six unique words. 18%.
Two thousand, one hundred ninety six sentences.
Ninth to tenth grade reading level.
117 estimated minutes to read.
Twice as long as 2013.

13.1% "the"
8.2% "and"
6.2% "to"
5.3% "it"
4.6% "of"
Zipf's Law broken.

"Me" One hundred fifty one times.
"She" One hundred thirty five times.
"He" One hundred thirty two times.
---
"I" One thousand, eighty times.
"Wouldn't" Thirty one times.
"Buy" Forty eight times.
"This" Two hundred ninety times.
"Song" One hundred eighty one times.
---
I would buy three songs. I haven't.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.40

Wanna Be Cool
Chance the Rapper/Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment (ft. Big Sean, Jeremih, and KYLE)

[A respite of one month is too long in my endless quest through the year's best music, sighted down the lens of Stephen Barry's musical tastes. I have only a few quibbles with my methodology from previous years. Clearly, I have only a fledgling ability to reckon with the actual sound of a piece, but I feel I have been doing these songs an injustice by focusing so heavily on the elements with which I can clearly identify and intellectualize. Words and pictures are just distracting; they're not the music in the artist's heart. This year, I want to start by listening to the song, usually for the first time, writing words that describe the music as I do. I'll follow each tone poem (an inappropriate usage of the phrase, but still an apt description) with a forget-the-music, write-the-words section. I'll include my friends' thoughts, any lyrical analysis, or dissection of the music video. I think that needs to be after the music. I'll cap each song analysis with a single word to sum up what I think. I like some of the things I did last year and the year before, but as with all intelligently-designed projects, I need to wrack the edges of this one just to find out if my preference for my method was just comfort in the comfortable. And, as always, I might just change my mind on this halfway through and try something else. Neither of us signed up for this, but here we go.]

Acapella
Scat
Bare
Youth
Dissipated
Joy
Fresh
Speech
Monologue
Full
Constructed
Rhythmic
Old-style
Changeable
Morphic
Intelligent

Lyrics.
This is a way more intellectual piece of music than Firework by the illimitable Katy Perry, but it has the same message. In fact, it has the same message as a lot of music. Be yourself. There's nothing to be ashamed of. I just happen to look past the saccharine message because something in the music forgets to be Royals by the pretentious Lorde. It's like the guys got together and all accidentally wrote verses about how awful they felt trying to fit in, then they just kind of assembled them and somebody in the next room was dropping a needle on random records for five seconds at a time and they all thought "That's it!" Maybe that's not what happened, but I like to think it was.
You know, I like how seriously rappers take their lyrics. Other genres tend toward mediocrity and comprehension (from Billy Joel to Justin Bieber; from Johnny Cash to Blake Shelton), but hip-hop and r&b are a constant battle to see who is the cleverest in the land.

Only class I'm passing is English and Math
I don't know, maybe because they both got commas
Maybe because my older bro was on the honor roll
And the other one was always up in front of the honor
So I'm in the middle like the line in the divide signs

There's so much to commend in these few lines, but my favorite piece is the very simple rhyme split to the beginning of the next line. It's not uncommon in rap, but I like it anyway.
They're the last popular poets, actually. Back in the day, Milton was on the shelf next to the Bible. Now, poets are the property of language fanatics and English teachers. Nobody's doing anything clever anymore, not anything that people will read. The last people pushing allusion and alliteration, hucking hyperbole and building with metaphors are the rappers. English used to be such a scrappy language. We wanted so badly to be like Italian and French that we fought wars in words just to be taken seriously. Chaucer was just imitating Boccaccio. Shakespeare was just stealing from Ovid, Xenophon, and Dante (and Chaucer).  Milton wanted so badly to be Homer. Now, English is on top, and nobody using it is taking it seriously.

Janelle
The dissection has more of yourself in it than I was expecting. It's enchanting, and it makes me want to have a similar structure? But I talk about myself all the time. I have a million billion stories that I share every chance I get, but I get the feeling that everyone who matters has heard them all at least twice. I talk so much about myself that I feel at the very least self-important and at the worst megalomanic. I want to change the very way I respond after the very first post. We'll see if I do.
Stephen--Father of Forties
I picked up on the youth. This song is pounding with it. It's a remembrance of times past when things were worse, and an exhortation to those in the same place. Do you really think, though, that a song would have helped you in your youth? Or is it really more about seeing your adult self and realizing "Oh. I survive this, thank God," that gets you through?

Yes.

1.16

I've been running from you, Yeti. I know you need me to survive, but I'll run just the same. Our relationship is complicated. The fear is secondary, and it isn't the driving force behind my running, but it does rush me onward without looking back. Yes, the fear alone is keeping me from looking backwards, at least, reevaluating the primary motive of my pell-mell speed. As far as I'm concerned I'm running still for the same reason I started. The claws and teeth don't distract me, Yeti, because the fear is secondary, as much as you think that's all I boil down to at the end of the day. Don't confuse me.
I'm running--not for fear, and not for some other primal animal instinct that boils up from my fervid intestines, but--because I crave the attention. God I love it. I hope I always outrun you, Yeti, for I've finally found the exact formula to perfect fulfillment, and to be eaten would ruin everything. You understand, don't you?

1.13

I've got cracker crumbs on my shirt front. I've fallen asleep on the bench in the park. My stuff has fallen off and spread out over the ground in a fan around me. If I knew how hot you were, I'd have the good sense to be embarrassed, but I sleep. Forgive me.

12.31

How much would I need to weigh to have the same waist measurement as height? I wonder if there's ever been a person who was bigger around than they are tall, and by how much? Is it possible for a person of my height to be as big around as they are tall, or would the skeleton rebel?

Hypothesis: because of the square-cubed law of mass, it is impossible for me to be as big around as I am tall.

I use myself not because I am a good proxy for all humanity (I am in the top 5% of males worldwide even if I can't find a source) but because I am most familiar with my own body. I am 74.5 inches or 189 centimeters tall. There was a time I accidentally claimed to be 200 cm and a German person laughed at me, but I'm not that far off in the grand scheme of things. Also: this puts the lie to all the height charts in manga with svelte Japanese high schoolers being 190 cm. I currently weigh 194 pounds or 89 kg. Essentially, I need to never change weight because 189 cm/89 kg has a nice symmetry. My waist size is 86 cm and my rump is 104 cm. I figure in a perfect world I would balloon out symmetrically and make my math simple.
So: is it possible? Casual Male XL sells pants for people of 190 cm height that are 182 cm circumference. If a retail chain sells pants that are nearly my goal circumference, I think we are in business. Hypothesis shattered. Now to figure out how heavy I would have to be.

Hypothesis: I would be lethally obese, but I could definitely be as big around as tall.

I could get very scientific here. I could go and find lists of people and their relative height to waist size at various weights. I could construct a theoretical model and try to fit a projection to the data. I would want at least twenty examples of people roughly my height (Can I find John Candy's waist size?) to construct this model. This will only lead to bad places.

Walter Hudson
On the list not for his matching height (I don't actually know his height), but for his waist size even if it's probably an outlier. 302 cm at 545 kg. First data point!

Hugh Laurie
Hugh's height is 189 cm. I have no idea his pants size.

Lawrence Fishburne
The most B.A. man with a tooth gap is 183 cm and someone has promoted wild speculation as fact. Where are they getting their figures? Either way, it is reassuring to think that I might be able to share pants with Lawrence Fishburne.

Sidney Poitier
Sidney is 189 cm. I'm not actually finding any useful information at all, but I am enjoying myself immensely. Look at this woman who politely suggests that the director was an idiot for cutting out the raunchy Poitier scenes. Plus, Sidney and I are both Pisces!

Extra information:
Jon Minnoch, the heaviest man alive, lost approximately five times my weight while hospitalized and still weighed twice as much as I do.

I'm done looking at celebrities of roughly the same height as me. I'll never build my statistical model. I think my only resort is to find the density of fat and muscle and check my math using the square-cube law. So. Fat is 0.9 g/mL and muscle is 1.06 g/mL. I don't assume there will be much more muscle in a really heavy person than in a muscular person. This is partially conjecture and partially because I went to Bodyworlds one time and saw that under our skin and fat, we're all pretty much the same size? Besides, they had a thin slice of a fat man and he was normal with a load of adipose just like . . . layered on him? This is a perpendicularly-sliced man in a disturbing video. So all I really have to do is figure out how many ml of fat I would need to expand, like an prolate spheroid, to achieve a distance around my minor axis of equivalence with the distance of 2c from pole to pole on my z-axis.

Thanks, Wikipedia. So, I want to set 2c to 189cm and since a is the equatorial radius of the spheroid, I need (circumference) 2πa = 189 cm. Woaaaah 2c = 2πa, meaning that there's some magical relationship there that I am too mathematically inept to figure out. Guys, we're on a journey. A journey which started with me trying desperately to figure out what x and y are before realizing they're so utterly unimportant as to be laughable. If I'm treating myself as a simple spheroid, which I am, because I'm liking picturing my fat self as a football, the equation for volume doesn't care.

a is approximately 30.08 cm if my equator is 189cm. That would make c = 94.5cm and the whole volume problem easy enough to figure out. Let's plug it in to Wolfram Alpha. 358159 . . . units. What the heck is my units here? Cubic centimeters? I mean, I guess so? And cm^3 is actually just mL, so. Wait: crap! I have to figure out my displacement to subtract my basic human frame from the 358,159 mL estimate of my goal volume. Maybe I can estimate that, too, but we're getting really extreme in our estimations, here. No human is shaped like a prolate spheroid. I estimated I am roughly 88.1 liters in volume, which is extremely disappointing that I break my ~89 theme. Wolfram Alpha says the human average is 66.4 liters, which is 66 kg of water. Obviously, water is the closest estimate for human density? Meaning 88 L of human weighs the same as 88L of water? But I know this to be untrue for me because when I let my breath out, I sink to the bottom of whatever pool I'm in. I've tested to at least depths of 6 m. So. Actual height: 189 cm. Target waist: 189 cm. Estimated actual volume: 88.1 L. Target volume: 358 L.
If all I had to do was gain fat, this is how much I would have to gain.

From Wolfram Alpha

That's pretty intense, but there are loads of people who weigh more than 332 kg. That's only 730 lbs, and that's me as an oblate spheroid. I gain mass much faster than I gain volume, due to the square-cube law of mass.
My BMI would be something like 93. It's not even on a normal chart. Anyway, I'm excited I don't have to buy pants like this anytime soon, but maybe this gave you some small joy to picture me as a football-shaped humanoid.

Thanks.

12.30

[Woah, I fell off the wagon hard. I was writing once a day there for a hot minute. I'll be around. Don't worry your pretty head about me. And if your head is ugly, you're not alone.]

You don't smell anything like me, or anyone else. You're distinctive. Intellectually, I know what makes a person's smell, but there's no poetry in salt and oil. I know there is romance in the smell of it; the memory of you walking by me far too close and tossing your hair. That brief intimacy is all I remember from the day we fell in love, but it's enough. I know, a deep bone-tied knowledge, the ache of that gasp of docks and pine and sea breeze you brought with you from the mountain's toes. It's not a fresh smell, not a clean one, but it's yours. For me, that's good enough.
Smell is so visceral. I wonder--when we're both dead and winter pushes the air out of the forest's lungs and the breath of the sea thrums through our cemetery--will my body shiver when the smell of you rushes over me? If anything can make my rotten corpse breathe again, it would be the smell of you.

12.12

The cardboard boxes have destroyed my hands. I have been folding and filling them for hours. I've run out of tape closing them up. I've been carefully stacking them and labeling the sides. I step back, now, and realize that postage will be monstrous. You'll have to do without.

I pull out my knife and cut into the first box. Its contents spill out on the floor, skittering across the tile, smashing against the grout and rolling, slowly, under the fridge. I tear the next box open with my hands, my ruined hands, and the contents softly plop onto the oozing remains of the first box's more delicate containers. I'm frantically slashing through boxes now, heaving the empty ones away into the living room. My heartbeat is wild and my breathing erratic.  There, in the bottom of the last prison I open, I find it. The shoebox with all your letters to me. I crawl over the jumbled piles of past neatness and good memories into the kitchen. I set this most precious box on the stove and set alight the burner tik tik tik woosh.

I snatch the box.
I swear.
I bash the flames with an open palm, half fanning, half smothering, until the fire chokes. The letters are singed, but the shoebox is ruined.
I put the shoebox back on the shelf and walk back to the pile to pick up the mess I made for you.

12.9

The dog twitches so much when he sleeps that I don't think I could ever be comfortable next to him. His claws are like buzzsaws on the end of his flailing paws. I still lay down next to him and wait for him to calm, not because I need to, but because I think he needs it. He sighs so much. Maybe he's lonely.

12.7

[My previous post was spurred by this thought: What would I think if I were this man, receiving this question? I think his response was wrong. So does he.]

Full disclosure: there are a few curse words I quote.

I pray to Jesus, but I'm not a Mormon. I've eaten at Buffalo Wild Wings, but I'm still vegetarian. I live in a society that represses, but am I a racist? That's a really unbelievable thing to say--that "everyone is a little bit racist," (Schierbecker 2015) or that all people are sexists, or that everything is problematic in some way. There's a whole lot of troubling fallacy in that statement. If everything is problematic, every argument that disproves your position is also problematic and equally easy to discard. If every white man is racist and sexist(and no black person can possibly be), white men don't "deserve to be listened to." You can shout them down. Let me simplify: modern collectivism is unfalsifiable.
Mark Schierbecker cowers like a whipped dog. It's exactly what the questioners seem to want. You should watch his interview all the way through to find when people ask him why he's pressing charges against Melissa Click and somehow promoting white supremacist arguments. He tries so hard to support the movement he believes in, but the moment his personal motivations don't align with the group, he's targeted. Instead of being intellectually honest about his first amendment beliefs, he cowtows to the angry voices. He scrambles to say something that will make him likable again: "Fuck racists! . . . Fuck me too." His friend the publicist doesn't help him, and in fact left him in the lurch a few days later. Why did he say he was racist and go out of his way to acknowledge his white privilege? Why did she recant her support and actually accuse him of saying "indefensibly racist" things? I can tell you why: there are two main types of activists I can currently see. The first type are real humans who care about each other and are trying to fix the incredibly obvious social problems in the United States. The second type are members of a mob who don't allow themselves to see the humanity in the people they're lining up to crush. They've been given incredibly powerful weapons of guilt and shame and hate, and this poisonous second type of activist is so dedicated to the purity of their group that they're willing to destroy anyone who threatens its ideology.
The first activist is the kind of person I strive to be. I fail a lot, but it's not due to a belief system that holds "my type of people" as better than another. It's just simple human selfishness. It's because I think I'm better than everyone. Before you think you can disprove me, remember that you're not inside my head, and that I have no respect for when people think they know what other people's beliefs or emotions are. So you won't win that one. Regardless, when I fail to love other people in the same way God loves them, I am disappointed in myself. I recalibrate, and I try again. Today, I got so mad I yelled at a student because I'm awful. I will do better tomorrow.
The second kind of activist is the kind of person who wears pink on Wednesdays. I'm still trying to figure out how to sort these bilious mouth-breathers from the forward-thinking human-lovers they mix with. These are people who belong to a clique. Their social activism excludes others on purpose and often as a tactic for keeping the clique pure and the message dominant. White guilt is a really stupid side-effect of othering by activists. But the most disagreeable thing is that these sort of feel-good crusading activists tend to target their own supporters. A blog that tears apart conservative cartoons gets the treatment sometimes. So do people making beautiful comics about the cultures in which they live. So does Emma Watson. So does an autistic photojournalist trying to give an extremely difficult answer in front of people who hate him because he thinks they have a right to be heard. Schierbecker is me. He's you. He's every one of us who says anything problematic, which is, remember, anything. This isn't about being right. Not one of us has the whole truth. This is about not being the most spiteful, vitriolic, exclusive, victimizing, parasitic, selfish people on the planet. Mark Schierbecker, I stand with you. I don't care if that gets me in trouble. From what I've seen, it's a safe stance.

12.6

"Let me start by saying 'I am not a racist.'" Somewhere in the hall, a gasp. "Of course, I can't start by saying 'I am not a racist," because somewhere along the line the ability to label prejudice was taken from the individual and given to the collective. That's fine. I don't cry about that; no one has ever been able to control the labels other people ascribe to them. Billions of people live and die without being able to break from the mold others pour them into." The building is stuffy with people, the dense choke of breath recycled wafts its way up to me and slithers around my nose. The young woman who asked the question is livid, and I can see her emotion shake off her in waves, the crowd around her pulsing slightly with it, resonating her outrage.
"What I can say is that I can't comprehend racists." The mere mention of the word from a mouth--my mouth--of privilege strikes a note of discord in the gasps that filter to my pedestal high above the mob. Indiscretion! How dare he say such a thing! That word is ours; he can't know it like we do. "For my entire life, I have valued the viewpoints of others. I have worked to read and internalize the values and challenges of disenfranchised people. I seek the voices of race, of class, of disability, of youth, age, sexuality, and gender. I try to understand their viewpoints. I do my best, but I can only read so much. Every story is unique and can only add its melody to the hymn of humanity building in my heart. I have to try. But I'm limited to one slice of personal familiarity. I'm such a small thread in the tapestry of life that I only touch a very slim section." I can hear the creaking of their old ideologies now, trembling under the ponderous weight of my accusation: can A White Man be right? Can he get through a thought, a sentence, a word, without some twistable sentiment that can be turned and driven straight back, as a knife, into his gut? "How am I to understand the struggles and consequences of trans, gay, old, young, disabled, poor, or black? I am a white, cis straight man. And you know the awful truth? I don't even understand what it means to be that--how could I? Because some of us are racist. And I don't get it." Damn him, the packed humanity whispers. Damn him, not for what he's said, but for who he is. Racism is only practicable by the powerful against the weak. He'll understand what racism looks like when we're done with him. I knew I hadn't said anything wrong, but

12.4

She just walked past me and asked if it's three yet. I almost, reflexively, looked at my watch, which I do when people ask me what day of the month it is, or how long until dinner, or why I'm waiting for something, or when my birthday is. Instead, I just smiled and said "Yup! You can go home." We both laughed. There was an extreme bitterness in the laughter, since we shared this unspeakable resolve common in teachers, that no matter the monstrous thoughts we have between seven and three, we will retain our dignity just as long as we survive. We can then push through the shroud-doors and out of this voluntary mausoleum and return to a nearly human life outside. We can take again the mantle of humanity, living again outside these walls where we constrain children's minds to the exact pattern of their forbears.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.1

Habits
Tove Lo.
I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't use. I don't hook up. I'm not familiar with the particular vices of this song, but I love listening to it. It hurts more now, though. I may not love the words, but it's more painful to think that maybe she does.
This is Delight's favorite song from the Top 40. She listened to it on loop for days. She liked a couple other Tove Lo songs Of course, her favorite was the un-remixed version, but we're looking for the Hippie Sabotage remix that Stephen liked better. It's good. I'm done playing.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.2

All Eyes Are on You Now
Deas Vail. Adolescence practically requires each person to see the world as a vast Truman Show, an endless multitude of people all constantly judging your every movement. Each and every person you meet sees every mistake you've ever made and has incisive knowledge of your inner foibles. When you've got a zit on your jawline, everyone can see it and thinks its disgusting. When you forget someone's name, they hold on to that moment for years. When you open your chips and they spill out on your lap, everyone's laughing internally, cataloging your idiocy to tell all their friends later around wine and cheese. "Do you remember in sixth grade when Hannah called the teacher 'Mom?' That was truly her lowest moment!"
All eyes are on you now.
Except that's not true. Nobody notices; you're background material. People aren't constantly searching for your hidden problems. They're all so focussed on themselves that they don't have time for you. And thank God for that, because this song is a horrorscape if it's true. Actually: nobody cares, and it's wonderful.

Why do we all think such awful things about ourselves? This is the stuff of nightmares! This is as terrifying as the implications of the Hymn of Acxiom, but broader and less modern. It's the omniscience of the priest, the gossip chain of the village ladies, the seeming judgement of the schoolchildren in the other desks--the oldest fear since society formed. This is what you wake up to at three am and worry about at quiet moments. It's not true, but that doesn't stop our phobia from building to an all-consuming emotional "Show us what you're made of/What you are afraid of/All eyes are on you now."

I like the song. It makes me feel bigger and lighter, even though it has such a heavy message. It makes me feel like shoving my hands deeper in my pockets and walking faster, getting where I'm going so I can win whatever I'm doing. I know the music doesn't match the words, now that I've read them. I don't think it matters. There are songs you listen to because the music blows you away, songs you listen to because the words move you like a bird on the wing, and songs that have both. This song is not both, I think. I wouldn't buy it, but we all know how useless I've made that metric. It just tells you if I want it, not if I enjoy it or find it worthwhile or think it deserves to be the penultimate song of a list of Stephen's best from 2014.

One more. Delight's song.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.3

Marlboro Lights.
Natalia Kills.
The Internet at home is so slow I could walk to down and take a course on lockpicking to break into the library and look up the information I need before Google would load. That might be an exaggeration. Still, as long as I'm here . . .
For my use, this song would be called Fireball, and no mistake. I'm tempted to stop writing there and just let sleeping dogs lie, but that's not why I'm here. Marlboro Lights is about a relationship that's ending or has just ended and the narrator knows why, knows it won't be anything but over, but clutches the pain to her breast and quaffs it like medicine. Her lover is gone, but somehow, she gets better because of it: "And I lie here on the bedroom floor/Where your feet walked out and your daggers fall/And I, I get a little bit better." It's hard to death if "A rooftop ledge/Could just fix everything," but she's fixated and it's fixing her.

I don't know if I'm projecting myself on this song like the thin light from an overhead projector on a hot classroom wall, fading in sunlight and aching for the final bell to ring and the referee to just call the match. Maybe I'm not, and it's just resonant in me like shook foil, terrible and fragile, a connection so tenuous that it shatters my illusions with a single strike and lays waste to my imagination of "okay." Maybe it's exactly my story and maybe I'm playing human and pretending I'm important, but either way I'm not okay, and my thoughts of Fireball whiskey doesn't make me feel a little bit better.

Would not buy.
Done thinking.