Hiking. Reading/storytelling. Travel. Jim's Wonderbrew Coffee. Old Fujitsu Lifebooks that feel like typewriters. Any music that brings about a sense of synesthesia or sounds like the whole history of music bundled up and stored in an overheated shed, preferably in the desert. Maximalism. Cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Microbrews,especially of the stout porter variety. Stout porters of the hotel variety. Mussels. Dabbling in obscure nether-regions of know-how, assimilating useless jargon. Minimalism. Zamboni drivers. Hobgoblins.
Members of species homo sapiens and macaca mulatta
Meat Puppets. Cul de Sac. Conlon Nancarrow. Can. Most Krautrock. Vintage SST (Minutemen, Huskers, etc.). Kristin Hersh. Peglegasus. Moonshake. Magnetic Fields. Sonic Youth. Stereolab. Music of the Southwest--Giant Sand, Calexico, Camper van Beethoven and their ilk. Sun City Girls. Earthlings?. Steve Wynn. Cecil Taylor. Sun Ra. Ornette. Marilyn Crispell. Blackalicious. Bluegrass renditions of non-bluegrass songs. Singer/songwriter Hannah Marcus is at the top of my playlist right now..."The landlord's son is a drunken bum/and he weed whacks weed whacks all the time." If you're gonna bother writing lyrics, that's good stuff.
Anything by David Lynch. The Saragossa Manuscript. Magnolia. Paris, TX. Run Lola Run. After Hours. Jesus of Montreal. Pulp Fiction. Reservoir Dogs. Blind Shaft. Memento. Annie Hall. Cheesey videos about Glacier National Park with extensive squirrel footage the mere viewing of which can lead to laughter to the point of puke.
The Sopranos. Arrested D. Blind Date. The Daily Show. Chapelle. Curb Your Enthusiasm. Sesame Street (minus "Elmo's World").
Mating by Norman Rush. The Atlas by William Vollmann. Visible Worlds by Marilyn Bowering. The City Builder and The Case Worker by George Konrad. Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto by Joshua Cohen. Calvino. Primo Levi. Jorge Luis Borges. Julio Cortazar. Paul West. Denis Johnson. Driving the Heart by Jason Brown. The Human Stain. The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan. Mimesis and the Human Animal by Robert Storey. Haruki Murakami. Alice Munro. Invisible Man. Charlotte Bacon. Alex Parsons. Rick Moody. Jonathan Franzen. Jose Saramago. Milan Kundera. Phillipe Sollers. Renata Adler. Gilbert Sorrentino. Guy Davenport. Flann O'Brien.
Norman Rush. Superhero Suggestion Man. Scheherezade.