I wonder how it is that such annoying and poppish music works so well. I suspect I’ll never find a satisfactory answer by asking the question out loud; that the only way to get it is to do it. Woah — five two-letter words in a row. (Oh my, no — if to do it in it is as to be of it or on it, go to it!) I guess pop is defined as what works most immediately, and the annoyingness is annoyance at its working so well.

Watching smoke rise from a thing of incense. The raw unknowable mathematicality of it is stifling. Getting too involved in this stuff — walkin’ around finding koan-like extremities of perception — is the intellectual equivalent of smoking everything in the medicine chest trying to get high: it works really well, but it can be a bit of a downer if you’re not careful. The smoke-structures are, in their specifics, quite unlike anything else we see, but they show the same subtext of being, the same liquid metaform of motion, the same — aww heck — tao as everything else everywhere.

People seem so taken with simple self-referentiality. What’s too great about the second hearing of avoid clichés like the plague? Contrariwise to that particular curmudgeonliness, I’m pretty cool with clichés, or at least set phrases; just like disgusting ad hoc words filling a need — automobile, radar, RAM — cliches (enough with the accent already) should be given a chance. After all, they’re just words with spaces built in, and a lot of words are phrases with the spaces taken out — see previous list. The words for just about everything under the heading of New Technology are pretty gross. For one, technology: it’s nearly synonymous with technique, and no one goes around twaddling about high-technique equipment or whatever. Input and output are, when you look at them for themselves, pitiable mutilations; sadly, they’re short and extremely useful — though, when you think about it, not really: you can talk about stdin (standard-in) and so on. Parameters or arguments to a function are also pretty gross. It’s depressingly hard to think of excellent replacements for most of these words, but they’re so arbitrary and puffed up that just about anything in the dictionary could nose them out.

Okay, let’s take random-access memory. First, there’s nothing nondeterministic about it. To distinguish itself from read-only memory, why not call it writable? Of course, that’s a pretty weird word too; let’s go with nothing — since the other kind is called read-only (and no one cares about it), it’s not a loss. You cannot access something, you can only have access to it — it’s a noun, not a verb. This sounds clumsier, but luckily there are a lot of situations like this one, where it means nothing anyway. (See? Already we’re down from three words to one.) A computer’s live memory (the stuff that isn’t on the disk) is not particularly like anything else called memory more than, say, a landscape is a memory to a deer walking over it. It’s more of a medium or a world or a state than a repository of experiences in ditto. What is and isn’t memory is a diverting metaphysical question, but whatever the answer, it’s sure that however much like memory RAM is, it’s not as much like it as disk space is. Things that get stored all together, cross-referenced and nonvolatile, are memories indeed, unlike the ultra-short-term patterns (derived from memories, to be sure) that pop up in the fast, hashed-up self-stuff used to do work. So we should stop calling RAM memory. Try state — but core, mind, reach (in reach sounds cutsie but works well), and store all work. Anyhow, random access memory should be called state. Oh, sure, tell me all about how you can’t imagine saying I’m gonna order another 128 megs of state or how much you love acronyms that spell something irrelevant; go ahead, ruin my little project.