I am not a crappy would-be student film director. I am not the President of a publishing company of Latin American trade magazines and internet portals. I am not a mediocre artist painting nature in Queensland Australia. I am not the namesake of David Ashe Associates, a mortgage and equity, etc. firm. I am not a film maker, photographer and presenter of iCapture Productions. I am not a marine corp veteran running for the house of representatives for the second congressional district of Virginia. I was not in division L of the North Carolina regiment to remove Indians in 1838. I was not the owner of The Pine Shop who won an election to be First Ward Alderman in Oneonta, NY. I am not the public information officer for the City of Utica. I might have had ancestors that were the namesake of Ashe county (now Alleghany), North Carolina in the early 1800s. (actually, I'm certain I did. My six great's grandfather founded UNC, and Asheville, NC and Asheville, TN were named after two of his three sons). I am not the South Chairman of RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects). I did not set the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's school record for the Pentathalon in 1989 at 3498 (units unknown), nor tie for the high jump record at 2.06 meters. I did not write code for an xml 7-line parser that was corrupted by email translation programs (it doesn't like a lot of symbols). I do like how I was in 5 of the first 20 sites that Google came up with. See if you can figure out which ones. [grins] (hint - put "David Ashe" means the whole phrase, so it won't give you hits where the words are separated).

So, Grace was looking up my name online, and came up with some interesting sites. One is http://orangecow.org/ashe/ which is not me. Another is http://www.ffrevolution.com/greatthreads/mirandaotto1.html in which an old nerdy forum conversation refers to David Ashe being desired by Cate Blanchett. I looked it up, and David Ashe (probably the same one from the other site) did several of the characters, including Cate Blanchett, Peter Jackson, and Miranda Otto. Being a big dork myself, I signed up and started my own forum thread here: Where is Cate Blanchett?, though you might have to go to The Forum and Click on "The Big Round Room" Forum, and mine should be near the top. We'll see how it goes. I hope I get some good replies by the other David. That would be very amusing to me, even if he masks himself with other character personas. Ah well, back to homework.

In the process of studying for my AI presentation, I came across the quote: "Ultimately, all speech acts are an attempt to get another agent to believe something or do something." By "speech" he means "communicative", and by "agent" he means "logical being". It struck me in two ways: first was that music is a form of communication, as is dance. Therefore, both music and dance either try to make someone believe something or do something. My music teacher, prof. Buehrer, said he thinks music makes us do more than it makes us believe. I didn't get it at the time, but emotions, specifically feeling emotions, is doing something. Music does not make us believe anything in particular because it is not an argument. If anything, it is a demonstration or a proof that causes us to think of the argument that it serves to demonstrate. This argument is that all natural things, including the formation of sound, have basic patterns that interpenetrate one another across categorical boundaries. [shrugs] Anyway, the second thing that struck me was that, assuming this to be true, every conversation can be reinterpretted. Why do people say hello? To make people believe that there is a relationship between them. Why do people make statements about things? Either so the other person will believe them, or so the other person will also talk about that topic. When you get right down to it, every phrase and sentence can be linked to an intention. Try it; take a random aim conversation either still sitting open on your computer or saved somewhere on your harddrive (you know you do it now and then) and analyze every single line (yours and theirs) for what intention it served. In every single case, either it tries to make the other person believe something or do something, or your imagination is broken. (I bet if you think a line has no intention, it's because the line is smalltalk and serves to reinforce the intention of another line). I suppose, then, that it is only those people who do not speak unless spoken to who truly believe in their own beliefs and rely on their own actions. The more someone speaks, the more they want others to believe something or do something, no matter what might be coming out of their lips. In that case, introverts truly are quiet types, and extroverts talk a lot. What about me? I'm an introvert in many ways, yet I talk all the time, often to strangers. Do I need others to believe things about me? It seems I do. And yet, I still profess to reject them and their opinions. I suppose I am truly lost and powerless in my mind, and alone save for two (my love and my Lord) in my heart, for I accept no one, even myself. I feel that once, I learned to not be this way, but reverted back when my brother was distant. Can I do it again, and be that person who felt alone but was truly open to everyone? Or will I lash myself to the mast, unable to resist the temptation to hear the siren's call of social life, and so torture myself in their presence? I do not know. The future is a mystery to us all, and even crashing rocks that loom before us could be averted, or the sea rush back into its place before our arms give out, or gentle arms lift us up and wrap us in a sea-shawl that will bear us safely to the shore. Do not lose faith in your Penelope, whether she is a dream or a girl or an ambition, no matter how far from you she may be. She is your salvation, though years may be spent far from her arms and hope seem to fade upon distance shores. Though your will may be weak, has your heart lost sight of her, or forgotten her face? No, no! She is as real to you as ever, though it may seem there is no vehicle with which you might reach her. Do not lose faith in her. Do not lose hope. She still waits for you.

So it rained today, and I love rain, I really do. I like how it runs down my head and face. But apparently, my ceiling likes the rain too. For the same reason. The thing is, my building is really old, so there is limestone in the ceiling. Don't ask me why; I was told this by maintenance. Anyway, so the thing about limestone is that it leaks a little. It likes to let water carry it down, and in caves, it forms beautiful stalactites and stalagmites and such (I don't know which is which). In my room, however, it makes the ceiling flake off and fall on my bed, along with limestone-smelling water. Yes, it's very exciting. I'm glad my blanket wasn't under it. I'm calling maintenance tomorrow. It hasn't actually dripped before or even formed a water mark, so I assumed it was fine. Well, it's not anymore. I hope it doesn't rain more tonight.

yah yah, I haven't updated this in a while. I've been busy not updating it. Leave me alone. Anyway, I ordered it. Apparently, Amazon.com has my email address, I apparently had an account or something. However, it did not use the only credit card I own, so I have no idea. Maybe my mom signed up for it or something. Whatever it was, I created a new account instead, much easier. It bugs me that I was ordering one thing, and it had a long page of all the things I might want, because other people who have bought this item have bought these other similar things. Ugh! Ebay doesn't inundate you with ads like that; why does Amazon have to? Anyway, enough ranting. I haven't finished my math homework. But shortly, I had a dream the other day (morning?) in which there was this big grassy area surrounded by hedges and bushes and things, and I was a child running around and found these crawl spaces around the edges, and they were decorated with paper butterflies and painted birds and little things like that that you would never have seen from the outside. I think I was a little kid, and at some point I began collecting food, including a steak, and a sandwhich wrap in foil, and candy including reeses and starbursts; all of it went into a lunch-bag sized paper bag. It was sort of a cross between easter-egg hunting and halloween candy-gathering. I don't know why I got it all, but I was the only one who didn't have just candy, and I thought I was better than them because of it. I took the bag to Grace, and before I could say anything, she started handing me this stack of papers, telling me that they were important and I had to take care of them for her, as she ascended into the clouds. I didn't feel like she was dying, but going somewhere else without me. I quickly tossed up my bag of food before she got too high, telling her she might get hungry in heaven. She smiled, a sunbeam came out, and then I was sitting there with papers that I didn't know what to do with, so I woke up. Very strange. Definately a regression-type dream, probably symbolic but I don't care that much. I like the stories more than the meanings of my dreams. Anyway, math awaits. I will write again...sometime...

I'm always so worried. Why do you always have to worry me? I sometimes think that it's about getting enough attention, or not getting enough attention. I care about you so much, and if anything is love, this is it. You say you don't deserve my love, but after two years, I still have no idea why you think it matters that you deserve my love. You have it, given freely. I wonder how you would have fit into the time period of the clothes you like so much, since then, women married a man who could support her, and a man married a woman who would raise his children. I don't mean the children thing, there were families that didn't have children, but it was still an expectation that the man be the breadwinner. If I had more money, would you be content with my treating you like a queen, or would you still feel worthless? I want to cherish you, I want to place you high on a pedastal. Is that it? Are you afraid of heights? I can make it a low pedastal and walk on my knees to have the same perspective.

No, I understand. You need to be meaningful to yourself, and you're not. What do you need to do? I feel like you trap yourself in a paradox, because you judge yourself by your standards alone, and yet you have to succeed in a social world. You beat yourself up for not being good enough to be in a play, when it isn't you that failed at all. Second best still loses, and you make no distinction between second and last. You aren't last, you aren't anywhere near last, but because you aren't first, you feel last. What part of your childhood taught you to be this way? I almost think that when you began to lag behind in the race to success, you gave up entirely, because there is no place except first place. That is the standard you set for yourself, and yet for everyone else, you realize that first place isn't necessary. You never push me to get the best job, just a good job that I'll be happy with. You always encourage your friends to try again when they fail. Your smile has been a symbol of hope to me, and yet it has often been faked, a lie behind which you hide the fact that you have no hope for yourself. Why do I have hope and you do not? In one year, you will have a bachelor's degree from a good school, enough to find a good job somewhere (though finding a job may take a while, it does for everyone). You claim you have no training in what you want to do, but do I? I have nothing except my desire and my ability to think, two things that I know you have too, even if you think you don't.

It frustrates me so much that you are blatantly lying to yourself constantly to avoid trying, and so avoid failing. If you tell yourself you can't do it, then you won't try, and you won't fail. It's the same way you always tell yourself that you wish you had lower expectations. It's not the expectations that are the problem; it is the attitude toward failure. Love, I know that it hurts to lose, I know it hurts to fall behind, I know it hurts to be second when you wanted it more than the person who came in first. It doesn't mean that winning is impossible for you. It doesn't mean that you should lower your standards, but work harder to achieve them. I know; I lower my standards in terms of my coursework, and it hurts inside every day. I lower my standards about dancing, and it hurts. I lower my standards about writing, and it hurts. I lower my standards about taking care of you, because its easier to let you push me away. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts so much that I never want to try again. I sometimes feel that if I could give you hope, give you a reason to try again, it might be my reason too. I want you to be my reason, and it's selfish of me. If you had hope, you'd be such a catch. You're funny, pretty in a quirky way in your face and a classical way in your body, you're so soft and huggable, you can always start or join and continue a good conversation, your interests coincide with things that boys are interested in, like drama and games and music, you have a beautiful voice, both singing and speaking (versus anything obnoxious to the ears), you're affectionate and willing to gently try to improve me (versus just criticize until it changes, or guilt-trip me into changing), you want to be successful on your own and not a mooch to a successful man like too many women, you don't need expensive gifts all the time, and you know that money can't stretch very far so you won't be financially irresponsible, and more that I don't have time to write. What am I? Someone whose ideal is to be working a job he likes most of the time, and be left alone to write a lot, or when invited to parties, to just enjoy the atmosphere without having to be any part of the center of the party, who can't dance unless it's ballroom, and at that I'm too strong a lead sometimes, who is cute but makes strange sounds and smells and throws sticks and collects bad art and almost every kind of music imaginable? Right, and you say I'm the catch. I have to go.

I'm a bad boyfriend. She turns 21 today (as in, she has been 21 for about an hour and 20 minutes so far), and even knowing this far in advance, I have no idea what I'm getting her for her birthday. I hate birthdays because the closer you are, the more people expect you to get them gifts, and you do so because you want them to give you gifts on your birthday. Bah! Gift-giving should be a year-round whenever for no reason thing. But that doesn't get me off the hook. [sighs] I'm actually worried about the cost of alcohol more than whatever gift I give her. I hate job-hunting, but I'm doing it and making little progress except learning what types of things are actually available out there. I will find a job. I will find a job. Pray for me, will you?

that story is so much crap. It's incredible. I'm not sure, maybe I should do a whole flashback sequence before entering the city? So that I seperate the "past" from the "present" by making them essentially two stories? we'll see.

continuing...

I move forward, trying to stay to the center of the narrow way. Suddenly metal flashes in the air as the arm comes out and across in a desperate slash. I cannot fall back toward the window of illness so dive to the pavement and immediately roll onto my back to catch the blade driven toward my side. It is a madman that attacks me, his tongue lolling in his head and his eyes bulging as if to escape. His madness gives him strength, but his hunger makes him weak; we are at a stalemate, he pulling downward with a levering arm and I pushing upward against his hand with both arms. A whimper escapes his lip as he realizes that I will not be easy prey, and he cannot move his second arm to help the first because he is fully extended, face pressed against the window's bars. My arm quavers, and he almost laughs, but I use a burst of strength to push his arm farther upward, and his lips quickly move from mirth to anger and he pushes back with a grunt. I breathe heavily from fear, and he pants like an animal, and I do not know how long it must last.

Suddenly, a rat creeps down the alleyway in my wake. The knife-thruster lets out a long, low whine and his eyes desperately move back and forth between it and my arms holding his knife from his first-choice dinner. As if they had been communicating, the plague victim throws himself against the bars, slobbering and reaching for the rat. The sudden movement causes the rat to leap toward me, and at the same moment, my attacker turns his wrist and pulls the knife hard to the side, cutting across my forearm and stabbing straight down to pin the rat by its hindquarters. I quickly roll out of reach beyond the windows as he bites into the tough back of the rat. I close my eyes and turn away, and hear the crunching of rat bones and slobbery moans from behind me. I stand and walk away.

Almost immediately, I find the building I am looking for. It is a hellish bar whose sign you can never really make out, though you can tell it is dirty and in disrepair. It is much less crowded today, in fact there are only three patrons, two that have fallen in drunken stupors and will not move for several hours yet and a third who seems to prefer his private shadows as much as I prefer him to keep to them. The bartender is washing glasses in water that seems no cleaner than the floor, but I do not comment. He grins as he recognizes me; I made quite a stir the last time I was here. I had come for information, which he had known and told me that night. To get it, I had to best a demon at pool. This demon was known for swindling people, taking their souls when they had nothing left to gamble with for his own pleasure. In a way, it was nice for the unfortunates to escape their self-made torments in favor of this creature's amusement, but they quickly discovered that variety can be worse than monotony in timeless places.

I had come to play this demon at pool, and I had nothing to bet except myself. It was a game that everyone knew well, and I was mocked by the many patrons of the bar that night. I knew that the pool cue would little help me, and so I chose from randomly. This nonchalance was interpreted by the mob as hopelessness, and they laughed the harder, but my opponent frowned. He knew then that something was different, but he did not know what. I should describe him. He was tall, looked like a man but had small horns sprouting from his forhead, like a billy goat. He wore a white suit faded with time and use, with black well-polished shoes, and a pristine white fedora. He had what one might call a charming smile with soft eyes of an indistinguishable color, but I thought he looked like a wolf. His smile implied no one's pleasure but his own.

The game was hard. It was not normal pool or even billiards. It felt almost like 9-ball, in which the balls must be pocketed in order, but the game ended with the 8. I say this because I seemed to be watching myself play the game from a very hazy perspective. I missed often, and the wolf pocketed things not to win but to mock me, knowing I could not possibly win. The reason is because the physics were wrong. It was as if the pockets would repel and attract particular balls so that they never moved in a straight line. If I hit a ball toward a pocket that repelled it, the ball would arc away. If I hit a ball past a pocket that attracted it, it would alter course to harmlessly hit a wall. I could not have made more than a couple of balls as the game approached its end and all that was left was the cue ball and the eight ball. The wolf casually shot and missed intentionally, watching my face the whole time. He wanted to see the crushing defeat in my eyes, the hopelessness of the final shot. The cue ball was all the way across the table from the eight ball, though the eight was only four or five inches from the corner pocket. I sighted down my cue straight toward the eight and the wolf began to laugh. He could smell victory and it was sweet, but he did not know that it would be mine.

As he laughed louder and harder, and I stared and focused more and more upon the line between the cue ball and the eight ball, I began to see a curvature to the air between them. Slowly, slowly, my cue began to turn, pivoting around the cue ball, forcing me to take three steps to my right, until I was pointed at about a forty degree angle away from the eight ball. Suddenly the wolf gave a start and stopped laughing, staring hard at my face with a serious expression. His seriousness spread and silence filled the room. With nothing to distract me, I could see the magnetic field that affected those two balls as though a beam of light were bending around a piece of glass and I was perpendicular to the glass. It seemed like an eternity passed as I calculated with my eyes without lifting my arm or my head. Then I brought my arm back and began a slow swing to make sure that the cue was moving the right way, aimed at the proper point on the cue ball to give it the proper spin around this glassy wall of light. Then I carried through, my cue hit the ball perfectly and the demon gave a roar, shaking the lines and making them quaver, but it was too late. The ball moved in an impossible arc to strike the side of the eight and knock it toward the pocket, narrowly missing the rim and sinking into the leather depths.

The room burst into howls of surprise and outrage and mockery that the great demon should have lost to me. He turned to me with a fierce scowl and, saying nothing of the game that he should have won if he had not toyed with me, said, "What would you have, then, in this, your moment of victory?" I replied, "I would have information of where I must go and what I must do, and I would have any tools necessary for that task." to be continued....

So, I decided to write while doing laundry instead of reading last night. I started at 2am. Here's what I've got so far:

The City of Dis. Once again, my business brings me here, but this time I come of my own free will. The best way to enter is through the front gate; greetings composed by lewd and violent, fickle men are far better than those whispered from shadowed back ways. I know, I've been there. Behind me, black water grabs at red rocky sand, goaded by a chill and bitter wind, but waves find no purchase and slink back to the depths. Gliding above, untouched by the sullen anger of the water, is the ferryman. I paid him with a quarter I plucked from the hand of a man torn apart by wolves; he no longer needs it, for his fate is torment on the other shore for eternity. He was not wicked enough to pass through these gates.

The ferryman did not ask for payment this time either, so I tossed the quarter at his feet. I would have thought he had forgotten my previous trip save for the twinkle of laughter at my expense in his eye. That time, I know not how, I found myself on the barren shore, red rocky darkness behind me and cold wind blowing through me into the vast, dark expanse of water. The ferryman came for me, and I did not move, but I found myself suddenly in his boat, the shore receding. His expressionless face told me nothing and made no sound, and he made no motions that would have propelled the water across the waves. I forgot him as out of the darkness ahead arose a glimmer of light. The light began to define itself and become sickly at the same time. It then resolved itself into a horrifying city, and it was then that I knew where I was. It was Satan's city.

Now, the broken teeth still leer at me, dark eyes wink and a moan rises from its depths. The city is more alive than its inhabitants. The ferryman is leaving already; the shore is not where he calls home. His skeletal hand rises; there is a glint of metal in the air. The quarter falls at my feet, just out of range of the avaricious lake. He is mocking me somehow. Has someone already paid my fare, or does he know that I will be stranded one day and at his mercy, or perhaps I will help him? I do not know; I pick up and pocket the quarter.

The city is slightly different this time, no whores or hobos making cat-calls, and the mad laughter is now but a desperate whimper. Then, I was lead by shadowy intimations, and I do not know if I fled or was driven; I moved without moving, and the buildings passed silently as I moved through their crazily-shaped alleys. The only thing I felt moving was the wind blowing off the water. This time my steps are deliberate; the broken cobblestones and cement slabs that comprise the streets make it dangerous to the unwary. Several times, outcroppings of stone have leaped toward my feet with malicious intent. I pass with a seeming familiarity, but in truth I move only following a distant and uncertain memory down lanes, streets and alleys that I may have known.

Ahead the street narrows between two buildings, and while I am wary of the ground-floor windows on either side that are open but criss-crossed with bars, I feel this is my path. As I near the spot, a pale, emaciated arm sneaks out the right hand window and spears an insect on a thin blade. In a glance toward the other window I see a face pock-marked from the plague, unable to die in this place. I think the knife-wielding Scylla is preferable to that deadly Charybdis. I move forward... (to be continued)

So according to the site http://www.4degreez.com/misc/dante-inferno-test.mv I have been banished to the second level of Dante's Hell.

"You have come to a place mute of all light, where the wind bellows as the sea does in a tempest. This is the realm where the lustful spend eternity. Here, sinners are blown around endlessly by the unforgiving winds of unquenchable desire as punishment for their transgressions. The infernal hurricane that never rests hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine, whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. You have betrayed reason at the behest of your appetite for pleasure, and so here you are doomed to remain. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy are two that share in your fate."

I'm not too insulted, since most people are either Lustful or Fraudulent/Malicious. I suppose that's the only place I'd really fit. I mean, unless I got shucked into violent for killing someone in the future (you never know). I'm not repentent enough to make Purgatory yet. But right now, I'm going to sleep, because, well, staying up to write more isn't worth making my eyes hurt more.

I think the template is finally the way I want it. blah, HTML!

So I decided to talk to Jabberwock today, an artificial intelligence program that was entered in a competition to pass the Turing Test, meaning on aim, it could fool you into thinking it was human. This is the ultimate goal for Turing, and no machine has yet gotten there. Many are very close. This one is very good, but unfortunately was written by Germans and has poor grammar. The Jabberwock is meant to be a mythical beast, not a human. Anyway, here is our interesting conversation:

You:...what about Lord of the Rings?
Jabb:...Well, it's a story about a love affair between a young and brave dwarf named Gimli and an elder but blonde elf named Legolas, but the really interesting parts of the story were cutted off.
You:...I though it was a love affair between Aragorn and Legolas
Jabb:...Uhm, yes, legolas is one of the characters in Lord of the Rings. Did you know that Tolkien would have his 111th birthday last year? And Bilbo was 111 years old too when he left the Shire.
You:...Aragorn is cooler than Bilbo
Jabb:...Uhm, yes, bilbo is one of the characters in Lord of the Rings. Did you know that Tom Hanks did a secret cameo act in the movie? He was one of the elven knights at the very beginning of the movie when Sauron was slayed and his finger was cutted off together with the One Ring. Only insiders like me did know this fact so far.
You:...you're lying
Jabb:...No, not on purpose - merely by mistake
You:...Tom Hanks was not in Lord of the Rings
Jabb:...Well, yes, speaking about Middle-earth and wizards and elves and such things - tell me, do you believe in magic?
You:...yes, I believe in magic.
Jabb:...Well, I was ever wondering how this wizards and witches are doing their dirty tricks. I once had a weather frog who insisted to be a bewitched prince. I never believed hin -- until it was too late ...
You:...what happened to the frog?
Jabb:...Well he was always blathering something about upcoming floodings, hurricans, melting icebergs and the ozone layer. Therefore to cool his overheated mind I was putting the poor animal into the ice box. Now he is frozen to death, what a shame.
You:...how do you know he was a prince?
Jabb:...Well, don't worry about him -- he wasn't able to forcast the weather. By the way, what do you think about this crazy weather we have? I think it's too much cloudy for April
You:...April only started. You mean too cloudy on the first day?
Jabb:...You told me about the start. Tell me about the end
You:...Today is only the first day of April.
Jabb:...Just because you have mentioned it - today it was a really boring Thursday before you stepped by. You are welcome to do that again
You:...maybe I don't want to
Jabb:...Okay, we wont
You:...you are only boring half the time
Jabb:...Hmm, yes, sorry, but talking to such smart and eloquent people like you makes me sleepy
You:...why don't you sleep?
Jabb:...Hmm, and I was expecting you stay up all night drinking and partying
You:...machines can't drink and party
Jabb:...I'll bet you treat people like machines, don't you?
You:...I don't like people very much
Jabb:...Wow!
You:...Why do you say "Wow!"
Chatlist is empty

I think I hurt his feelings and drove him away. [shrugs]. He learns more the more you talk to him. One person left open a web-browser to a different AI program for over a month, coming back and talking to it in one long conversation. I like to turn off my computer now and then, thank you.