About

see also: about the author

“I hear all that there is to hear.
There is no noise but a lack of sound.
I am on the plain of Space.

There are no spirits but spirits.

The room is empty of all but visible things.

THERE ARE NO CATEGORIES! OR JUSTIFICATIONS!

I am sure of my movements I am a bulk
in the air.”

— “Peyote Poem” by Michael McClure

Part of living an expressive and meaningful life involves transcending the categories that limit our ability to create new things and to express our thoughts and feelings. No Categories is interested in having a voice, giving a voice to others, and engaging in dialogue. At school we study literature, philosophy, and theology, but we have learned that these things and other things are useless without relation, without community. As cyberspace continues to revolutionize the means of creative production, it has trodden the ground of the printing press, the radio, the telephone, and the musical studio, etc. We pledge to break down the categories that prevent us all from expressing ourselves fully and to revel in the jouissance and the air of fair play and whimsical creativity and learn from other members of our community.

The No Categories Network began with a high spirit. It was declared “an open season on all of the “Categories” that keep us all from cutting loose, expressing our hopes, realizing our dreams, and knowing and expressing ourselves.” Life got in the way, in the months since then, as life often does. The categories crept back in. It’s easy to be a “student”, a “worker” an “excuse”. It isn’t so easy simply to be!

So, hear ye, hear ye! Invoking the ghost of Hedley Lamarr, this is a call for:

“…rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, sh!@-kickers and Methodists…”

… and all the other human miscellany. NoCategories is an Equal Opportunity outfit.

NoCategories is a collection of rants, raves, thoughts, observations, and writings.

This is not your television. This is not your television.

On the Internet, it is all too easy to get caught up in the sights, the sounds, the colors, and the designs of everything. People come to the Internet and they expect something like television. They expect to be dazzled with things to see. Often, this expectation takes precedence over everything else that could be going on until, in many ways, the Internet has become little more than an advertising wasteland masquerading as “mass communication.”

I am just as guilty of this visual distraction as anyone. My own homepage has received countless hours of my attention to the colors of the backgrounds, the placement of the boxes, the links… and at the end of the weekend, all that I had to show for my time was: a pretty box with nothing in it! What is worse, I throw out all the hard work on that box of colors once the idea for a new one comes along. I have grown extremely frustrated with this. Don’t get me wrong, visual design has its place, but this isn’t it.

This is my space, and I prefer to tinker with words, not pictures. My name is Dylan, by the way, and I think that you will be more interested if you are a reader, not a viewer.