september 9, 2001. Today is Mr. Shoreleave's birthday. Not that I care. But I'd like to think that there's a Beta-Amoret in another dimension/time track who is happy that one of her best friends is turning 16 today. My brother is scaring the life out of me these days. Last week he started a mailing list to keep in touch with the people he left behind when he moved to Winnipeg. He invited me to subscribe, and of course I did, because it's one of the only ways I can stay in touch with Nic. He spends so much of his energy on friends & bandmates that there's hardly any left over for family (or for gratitude to our parents, but that's a whole other rant). Is it sad and pathetic that I have to feed off of this energy to stay in touch with my only biological sibling? I dunno. Anyway, I've received about 5 different single-spaced rambles from him to date, and they've been getting progressively scarier. Last week he decided to give up cooked food entirely, which should nicely tie-in with his 3 years of veganism and his unconscious goal to starve himself to death. You have to understand that my brother is basically unable to cook for himself: he can do rice & pre-prepared stuff and that's it. The concept of mixing and preparing food is more or less an undiscovered country. I have no frigging idea how he plans to live his stupid, hectic punk rock life and still spend hours mixing raw food to sustain himself. Boxed chicken cutlets may not be the pinnacle of civilization, but I still believe that there's a reason that the human species developed cooking. But wait. It gets better. If you follow the link, you'll find a whole series of fucked up food philosophies, from Milk: the Deadly Poison to Breatharianism, a doctrine that instructs you how to live on light & air so as to give up the whole dirty cycle of eating & excreting altogether. Now, is it just me, or does this sound like the writings of people who are severely out of harmony with their bodies, not to mention their culture and their anthropological histories? And what do the Milk-is-poison people feed their babies? Love?? This site is not just a clearing house for the dietary loonies, however. No, it holds all kinds of strange conspiracy theories. Nic is presently espousing the AIDS is a CIA conspiracy theory, which honestly makes me fear for his sanity. I think the problem is that he was a late-comer to the intellectual garden party, and he doesn't really know how to read texts critically. He lent us a book called The Covert War Against Rock, which is an absolute dogs-breakfast of inferences, paranoia & shoddy research. (It implies, among other things, that Bob Geldoff had a hand in the death of Michael Hutchence.) I can't imagine that the AIDS conspiracy book represents a higher level of logical thought. (Besides which, if AIDS was really a conspiracy, why would the powers that be allow this book to be published in the first place?) Like I said, the whole thing is scaring the pants off me. More on this as it develops. this time 3 years ago: hit on at the Dance Cave? I blame the beret