This is a transmission from the human liberation front. We have infected your continuum with quantum eventuality causation viruses. Your "reality" has been penetrated by aspects of our more fully realized continuum. As a consequence you are in a momentarily elevated state of freedom. Your thoughts and actions have greater impact. Obstructions are fewer and more manageable. "Chance" is on your side. This condition will not last forever. Your framework of maximum causality is now. Please proceed with deprogramming.
This completes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Le Pamphleteer. It also completes the transfer of what ghosts of the Institute survived its apocalyptic inception, slight, false and tawdry though they might be. The sole exception is the short story pentagon/files, which was never completed but might find a new life somewhere, sometime, somehow. Or not. As regards the Institute: it will never be finished. But it is done.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
how to blow up music
aside from the present day, ah, once I was a naive and idealistic young man
Here's a little Revolutionary's Guide to the world we live in.
The Parable of the Medium
Once upon a time everybody made their own music. They made it for religeon, to ease the old as time burden of working, to entertain themselves and children, as a way of connecting community.
Cut to the boiling capitalist anarchist state that the de facto owners call USA and the rest of us, for good or ill, generally call America, somewhere one side of the second Julian/Gregorian Millennium...
A handful of synthetic entities called Corporations now control very nearly all new music. These entities are controlled by a group of people called Shareholders. The fundamental principle of the Shareholder religeon is the accumulation of =capital= under an arbitrary state/corporation controlled valuation swindle known as The Market. Curiously, the majority of music exchanged under the system is crap. Some observers maintain that this is an inevitable result of the highly arcane mechanisms of The Market. Being a romantic, I tend towards the belief that it's simply a method of adding insult to injury.
And you thought Nineteen Eighty Four was just a book.
These powerful and nearly undisputed forces have, in the prior two decades, made two incredibly important tactical errors and are on the verge of making a third.
Deep in the grips of the blinding, short-sighted greed that they generally call Smart Business, the Shareholders caused the Corporations to decree that almost all music be exchanged by virtue of a new medium. Music was translated into digital information (the popular misnomer for binary information) and encoded onto a visual matrix. The unintended side effect of this process was to provide millions of potential Revolutionaries with music in a form that allowed exact replication of encoded information for a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production.
Meanwhile, a new medium called Internet was rising in America. It involved the exchange of binary information via telephone. Although the telephone is an old medium and effectively under the control of the Shareholders, it's nature dictates that unlike other media designed to transfer information over distance, it is impossible for the Shareholders to dictate with as much success exactly what information travels over the telephone. This method of transmission is so cheap that the many give information away free or in trade, true revolutionary anrachist economics.
The Shareholders are about to make their third error. In an truly awesome excess of greed, they set their sights on the digitalization of Television, America's most popular (by a gross margin) distance information medium. Politicians (the individuals hired by corporations as a buffer zone between the Shareholders' desire to accumulate points and the citizens' desire to retain the value of their labor) have been paid handsome bonuses to give ownership and control of the narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies suitable for digital information exchange over to the Corporations. It is reasonable to project that a connection between Internet and the new, "digital" Television will become a standard consumer technology within fifteen years of the Millennium, ending the Internet access problem
I honestly think they've completely missed the true implications of these interconnected blunders. Revolutionaries take note that you do not do the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Here's a little Revolutionary's Guide to the world we live in.
The Parable of the Medium
Once upon a time everybody made their own music. They made it for religeon, to ease the old as time burden of working, to entertain themselves and children, as a way of connecting community.
Cut to the boiling capitalist anarchist state that the de facto owners call USA and the rest of us, for good or ill, generally call America, somewhere one side of the second Julian/Gregorian Millennium...
A handful of synthetic entities called Corporations now control very nearly all new music. These entities are controlled by a group of people called Shareholders. The fundamental principle of the Shareholder religeon is the accumulation of =capital= under an arbitrary state/corporation controlled valuation swindle known as The Market. Curiously, the majority of music exchanged under the system is crap. Some observers maintain that this is an inevitable result of the highly arcane mechanisms of The Market. Being a romantic, I tend towards the belief that it's simply a method of adding insult to injury.
And you thought Nineteen Eighty Four was just a book.
These powerful and nearly undisputed forces have, in the prior two decades, made two incredibly important tactical errors and are on the verge of making a third.
Deep in the grips of the blinding, short-sighted greed that they generally call Smart Business, the Shareholders caused the Corporations to decree that almost all music be exchanged by virtue of a new medium. Music was translated into digital information (the popular misnomer for binary information) and encoded onto a visual matrix. The unintended side effect of this process was to provide millions of potential Revolutionaries with music in a form that allowed exact replication of encoded information for a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production.
Meanwhile, a new medium called Internet was rising in America. It involved the exchange of binary information via telephone. Although the telephone is an old medium and effectively under the control of the Shareholders, it's nature dictates that unlike other media designed to transfer information over distance, it is impossible for the Shareholders to dictate with as much success exactly what information travels over the telephone. This method of transmission is so cheap that the many give information away free or in trade, true revolutionary anrachist economics.
The Shareholders are about to make their third error. In an truly awesome excess of greed, they set their sights on the digitalization of Television, America's most popular (by a gross margin) distance information medium. Politicians (the individuals hired by corporations as a buffer zone between the Shareholders' desire to accumulate points and the citizens' desire to retain the value of their labor) have been paid handsome bonuses to give ownership and control of the narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies suitable for digital information exchange over to the Corporations. It is reasonable to project that a connection between Internet and the new, "digital" Television will become a standard consumer technology within fifteen years of the Millennium, ending the Internet access problem
I honestly think they've completely missed the true implications of these interconnected blunders. Revolutionaries take note that you do not do the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
but if a million of us did it they'd lose their minds
Vexing Corporations Method Seventeen: the Boycott
Actual content of an e-mail sent to the Volkswagen Corporation:
From: Dr. J.L.B. Smith (not my real name)
I'm writing to strenuosly object to your recent commercial in which a Volkswagen's full size spare tire is compared to the famous rediscovered fossil fish, the Coelacanth
This surprising survivor of the 350 million year old sub-class Crossopterygii, or "lobed-finned fish," which was rediscovered in 1938, could certainly be described as the classic textbook case of a rediscovered species, and one of the inspirations of
"Lost World" mythology that pervades the fantasy of our culture to this day. Anyone who has the slightest interest in things biological, anyone who finds the tiniest fascination in evoloutionary theory or the possibility of living fossils such as the Loch Ness monster knows of the Coelacanth. Apt pupils learn of our carnivorous, hollow-spined (the literal meaning of its Greek name) friend before they hit fourth grade. In short, EVERY DAMN PERSON WHO IS GOING TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR LITTLE JOKE ALREADY GETS IT.
So why in Almighty God's name does this almost moderately clever commercial spoil its impact by the little lecture on what the Coelacanth is? This clumsy maneuver not only destroys the comic timing of the commercial with the shoddy cocktail party comedian's bad habit of explaining the punch line, but it insults the intelligence of
viewer most likely to be moved by the commercial's particular tack.
I'm sick and tired of corporations insulting my intelligence every time I turn on the damn television, particularly manufacturers of weird, silly little cars. The Kingdom Come Institute is a Large, Organized Resistance dedicated to a less stupid society and this kind of monkey business won't be tolerated. Be informed that a full-scale boycott has been launched against your products and will continue until the offensive ending of this commercial is expurgated!
Sincerely,
HolierThanThou@REDACTED.com
This act of social conscience was generated by a semiautonomous
semantics engine.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Actual content of an e-mail sent to the Volkswagen Corporation:
From: Dr. J.L.B. Smith (not my real name)
I'm writing to strenuosly object to your recent commercial in which a Volkswagen's full size spare tire is compared to the famous rediscovered fossil fish, the Coelacanth
This surprising survivor of the 350 million year old sub-class Crossopterygii, or "lobed-finned fish," which was rediscovered in 1938, could certainly be described as the classic textbook case of a rediscovered species, and one of the inspirations of
"Lost World" mythology that pervades the fantasy of our culture to this day. Anyone who has the slightest interest in things biological, anyone who finds the tiniest fascination in evoloutionary theory or the possibility of living fossils such as the Loch Ness monster knows of the Coelacanth. Apt pupils learn of our carnivorous, hollow-spined (the literal meaning of its Greek name) friend before they hit fourth grade. In short, EVERY DAMN PERSON WHO IS GOING TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT YOUR LITTLE JOKE ALREADY GETS IT.
So why in Almighty God's name does this almost moderately clever commercial spoil its impact by the little lecture on what the Coelacanth is? This clumsy maneuver not only destroys the comic timing of the commercial with the shoddy cocktail party comedian's bad habit of explaining the punch line, but it insults the intelligence of
viewer most likely to be moved by the commercial's particular tack.
I'm sick and tired of corporations insulting my intelligence every time I turn on the damn television, particularly manufacturers of weird, silly little cars. The Kingdom Come Institute is a Large, Organized Resistance dedicated to a less stupid society and this kind of monkey business won't be tolerated. Be informed that a full-scale boycott has been launched against your products and will continue until the offensive ending of this commercial is expurgated!
Sincerely,
HolierThanThou@REDACTED.com
This act of social conscience was generated by a semiautonomous
semantics engine.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
F****** Pervert
Vexing Humans Method Twelve was deleted for the following reason:
CONTENT
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
CONTENT
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
economic terrorism
I often get depressed by the incredible lack of imagination displayed by most revolutionaries. Most fall into one of two categories, those who advocate mass violent coup de etat and those who essentially advocate a lot of ineffectual bitching. In the first category we find, for instance, the revolutionary communist party... and we can all see how that turned out. They never figured out that the ends never justify the means because there are no ends, only means. On the other side, animal rights activists. Pansy demonstrations and petty vandalism ain't never gonna get people to stop eating meat, dupes, and as long as a person is willing to have an animal killed to eat is certainly not going to object to them being cut into if there's even a remote chance that it's going to save their ass from cancer some day.
Economic terrorism is perfectly open to any group that can organize a million members, and what's more, it's legal. Try this at home!
1. Gather a million people who agree with you about a certain point of view. Let's say, you want to take a swipe at proctor and gamble because they're so damn mean to bunnies.
2. Over the six months, get your hands on as much p&g stock as you can. In this day and age of easy high-interest electronic credit and internet trading, this will be easy as pie. Just put out a message to your minions: I intend to buy p&g stock from January 2000 through June 2000. Not advocating anything: just announcing an intention that is presented in a format that allows a tacit understanding of goals. Hint: this doesn't work very well unless you spend few thousand dollars. Committment is never cheap, kids.
3. Then, over the next six months, same thing, announce an intention to start buying the target company's product. Not all at once, but on a progressively rising curve. Your final six month expenditure should match, more or less, your stock purchases. A simple equationary guide: divide your total intended purchase amount over the 6 months by 63. That amount is your X. First month, spend 1X. Second month, 2X. Third month, 4X...and so on, 8X and 16X and 32X. Simple stuff. If you want to refine further you can take any given month's calculated amount, and run the same pattern, dividing by 15 and running the pattern up to the fourth iteration, 8X. The point is to induce an artificial geometric expansion in income. Believe me, they'll notice, but they'll just assume it's something they're doing right and what's more they'll project into the future and make business plans accordingly.
Stock up, buy things you use and that will keep well. That way you don't really waste any money. of course the terrible thoughts of the poor wittle bunny wabbits being towtuwed may make it difficult for you to stomach using the products.
4. Stop buying product. This can be more difficult than it seems. You have to be assiduous, cut them off completely. Start scanning for "earnings drop" stories in the financial press. As soon as you see a couple, publish a small segment on the same forum you've made the prior two announcements.
5. On that signal, sell all stock as quickly as possible.
See, a million smart revolutionaries who are minimally organized can do pretty much what they want. Our whole system runs on the graces of four billion 700 million stupid, disorganized people and is run by 300 million evil, greedy ones. But there's still a thousand million of us who ought to know better. Think about those thousand points of light.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Economic terrorism is perfectly open to any group that can organize a million members, and what's more, it's legal. Try this at home!
1. Gather a million people who agree with you about a certain point of view. Let's say, you want to take a swipe at proctor and gamble because they're so damn mean to bunnies.
2. Over the six months, get your hands on as much p&g stock as you can. In this day and age of easy high-interest electronic credit and internet trading, this will be easy as pie. Just put out a message to your minions: I intend to buy p&g stock from January 2000 through June 2000. Not advocating anything: just announcing an intention that is presented in a format that allows a tacit understanding of goals. Hint: this doesn't work very well unless you spend few thousand dollars. Committment is never cheap, kids.
3. Then, over the next six months, same thing, announce an intention to start buying the target company's product. Not all at once, but on a progressively rising curve. Your final six month expenditure should match, more or less, your stock purchases. A simple equationary guide: divide your total intended purchase amount over the 6 months by 63. That amount is your X. First month, spend 1X. Second month, 2X. Third month, 4X...and so on, 8X and 16X and 32X. Simple stuff. If you want to refine further you can take any given month's calculated amount, and run the same pattern, dividing by 15 and running the pattern up to the fourth iteration, 8X. The point is to induce an artificial geometric expansion in income. Believe me, they'll notice, but they'll just assume it's something they're doing right and what's more they'll project into the future and make business plans accordingly.
Stock up, buy things you use and that will keep well. That way you don't really waste any money. of course the terrible thoughts of the poor wittle bunny wabbits being towtuwed may make it difficult for you to stomach using the products.
4. Stop buying product. This can be more difficult than it seems. You have to be assiduous, cut them off completely. Start scanning for "earnings drop" stories in the financial press. As soon as you see a couple, publish a small segment on the same forum you've made the prior two announcements.
5. On that signal, sell all stock as quickly as possible.
See, a million smart revolutionaries who are minimally organized can do pretty much what they want. Our whole system runs on the graces of four billion 700 million stupid, disorganized people and is run by 300 million evil, greedy ones. But there's still a thousand million of us who ought to know better. Think about those thousand points of light.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The original 4 Track Mind Manifesto
Brain in about four tracks, feeling =dangerously out of phase with surroundings,= One track's the dull and narrow progress of the days, notes with displeasure that tomorrow brings, oh, fatigue likely, the dullness of being at work, churning out dull and distasteful fact sheets, mumbling and bumbling and futzing around, getting through. Just, it's not so bad right now, so nothing aching about it, just that part of my mind, aware that, truth be told, I would prefer not to.
Another portion concerned with her, and that is a godawful dead end, an unexemplary mix of feeble twitches, yeah... Just, it's very basic, the basic giving up, yet still wishing and hoping, yet so much there's just not a thing there. Nothing was solved. I feel right with the decision I made, not to spring the mine on her, I'm glad I omitted, learned my lesson, yeah, but there it is. I dunno even where it's coming from, it's senseless. And I feel foolish, and I do so hate to feel foolish. Can't help it, can't help asking, why isn't she thinking about me the way I'm thinking about her? Twiddle-dee-dum, anyway, not, that's that. If only.
a note aside from the present time: we're married now
One part tackles the eternal verities, considers thoughts. patterns, all the major questions that seem so remote from the majority of my day to day, and so, so much more interesting.
And yet one more, oh, flips channels on my personal history channel, throwing me a choice moment to ponder every now and then.
And then the evening is over and for a little while all obligations perceived and real (?) can be suspended and I can let these channels of thought loose, fret throught them and fall slowly asleep.
I'm not exactly unhappy, but I am still searching for a better way.
this ends the component of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Second Model
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Another portion concerned with her, and that is a godawful dead end, an unexemplary mix of feeble twitches, yeah... Just, it's very basic, the basic giving up, yet still wishing and hoping, yet so much there's just not a thing there. Nothing was solved. I feel right with the decision I made, not to spring the mine on her, I'm glad I omitted, learned my lesson, yeah, but there it is. I dunno even where it's coming from, it's senseless. And I feel foolish, and I do so hate to feel foolish. Can't help it, can't help asking, why isn't she thinking about me the way I'm thinking about her? Twiddle-dee-dum, anyway, not, that's that. If only.
a note aside from the present time: we're married now
One part tackles the eternal verities, considers thoughts. patterns, all the major questions that seem so remote from the majority of my day to day, and so, so much more interesting.
And yet one more, oh, flips channels on my personal history channel, throwing me a choice moment to ponder every now and then.
And then the evening is over and for a little while all obligations perceived and real (?) can be suspended and I can let these channels of thought loose, fret throught them and fall slowly asleep.
I'm not exactly unhappy, but I am still searching for a better way.
this ends the component of the Kingdom Come Institute designated Second Model
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
An inauspicious number, quoth Dr. Khan
thirteenth vision
Striving to avoid bad luck, I'll keep my mouth shut tight, and avoid telling tales of the scientists and what they don't know, of the secrets we've lost in our headlong rush into oblivion. I quote: the sage walks away from the answerless questions.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Striving to avoid bad luck, I'll keep my mouth shut tight, and avoid telling tales of the scientists and what they don't know, of the secrets we've lost in our headlong rush into oblivion. I quote: the sage walks away from the answerless questions.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
record of a thousand hours imagined, wasted
After, say, 5 years - realtime - 260 weekends, a thousand hours of play, in half a year the final adventure takes shape. They are equipped with some considerable power, the fate of the very world at stake, the dark designs of evil set fully out, the foe revealed at last, they march on. Minions assault, are destroyed, the characters face insane obstacles and must use every tool in their arsenal to overcome. Finally, at the great juxtaposition, they cross into the pits and darkness of the realms of evil, face a great and supernatural foe. For him, they must fight together with unimaginable precision, practically thinking as one, and by a fantastic effort, the expenditure of every ounce of strength and magic, the spilling of their life to the very limit of constitution they stand, battered, near death, resources gone... Yet triumphant. Some great evil foe lies, with some artifact of good, some great weapon buried in his chest, its last magic gone.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
bursts through the chest in a stunning eruption of gore
...it's all a waste: woke this morning with the grim knowledge of the alien within:
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
what dreams may come?
This nation is doomed, doomed by dumb ideas and bad choices, limited imagination, and a glossy veneer of can do insistence hiding the whole claptrap rube goldberg machine.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
UNPLUG
"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" - she always called me Elwood - "In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."
Mary Chase, Harvey
As a piece of meaningless aside personal trivia, I played Dr. Chumley in a stage production of said play when I was in high school. By my own estimation I was a mediocre actor.
The internets have been putting me in mind of that quote, frequently, as of late. I see the urge to be oh so smart everywhere, I feel it flowing through my own veins like bad cholesterol looking for a warm berth to set up shop and group for a future heart attack. And I realize a simple but very difficult fact: I have come to loathe and despise rhetoric.
And it seems to me like rhetoric is running this world, an engine fueled by an unending supply of human deficiency.
I gotta go. I won't be able to supply anything I implied, promised, or threatened with regards to this misbegotten writing experiment. Not here, not anywhere. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe someday, when I have become more pleasant, I will start something new. Right now I need to unplug.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Mary Chase, Harvey
As a piece of meaningless aside personal trivia, I played Dr. Chumley in a stage production of said play when I was in high school. By my own estimation I was a mediocre actor.
The internets have been putting me in mind of that quote, frequently, as of late. I see the urge to be oh so smart everywhere, I feel it flowing through my own veins like bad cholesterol looking for a warm berth to set up shop and group for a future heart attack. And I realize a simple but very difficult fact: I have come to loathe and despise rhetoric.
And it seems to me like rhetoric is running this world, an engine fueled by an unending supply of human deficiency.
I gotta go. I won't be able to supply anything I implied, promised, or threatened with regards to this misbegotten writing experiment. Not here, not anywhere. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe someday, when I have become more pleasant, I will start something new. Right now I need to unplug.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
wait for the call
I don't know if I believe I have a calling any more. I think some people are called to do something specific, at least in terms of their life's work, but obviously not everyone is. I guess you can argue that everyone has one and some people just never find or heed theirs. Like all these sorts of hypothetical absolutes, though, all sorts of troubling real-world concerns come up when you try to apply the categorical imperative (who's going to clean all the toilets?).
When I graduated from high school my biology teacher wrote something in the card he gave me to the effect that a person as smart as I was had an obligation to contribute something to the world. Such thoughts haunt me now, but at the time I just considered it foregone conclusion that I would go to the magic halls of learning and be exposed to all the far-out truth and the Path Would Become Plain. It occurs to me as I write this that I have really staked out college in my mind as the territory where this shift occured, and I would probably do well to somehow expurgate whatever hang-ups I'm managing to have left about those four years after a good 12 more have passed. Still: I can say that college was the last time I had that feeling - confidence, you might say, that that call was coming, inevitable.
But really what has it done for me? Today I was checking out the new central library, and I was browsing the whole "how to choose a career" section, and it just made me sick to even think of reading any of these books, well-intentioned though they may be. I've read so many books. But what book can tell you an answer that doesn't exist? You have to consider that possibility. Maybe some people are just wired that way and others are not.
In any event, today I felt like establishing my independence from it. I've second guessed my decisions enough trying to spot the Path hiding in the thickets of real life. Maybe there is no future, no goals, no Proper Place. Maybe it really all is just the moment we are in, and what we are, in it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
When I graduated from high school my biology teacher wrote something in the card he gave me to the effect that a person as smart as I was had an obligation to contribute something to the world. Such thoughts haunt me now, but at the time I just considered it foregone conclusion that I would go to the magic halls of learning and be exposed to all the far-out truth and the Path Would Become Plain. It occurs to me as I write this that I have really staked out college in my mind as the territory where this shift occured, and I would probably do well to somehow expurgate whatever hang-ups I'm managing to have left about those four years after a good 12 more have passed. Still: I can say that college was the last time I had that feeling - confidence, you might say, that that call was coming, inevitable.
But really what has it done for me? Today I was checking out the new central library, and I was browsing the whole "how to choose a career" section, and it just made me sick to even think of reading any of these books, well-intentioned though they may be. I've read so many books. But what book can tell you an answer that doesn't exist? You have to consider that possibility. Maybe some people are just wired that way and others are not.
In any event, today I felt like establishing my independence from it. I've second guessed my decisions enough trying to spot the Path hiding in the thickets of real life. Maybe there is no future, no goals, no Proper Place. Maybe it really all is just the moment we are in, and what we are, in it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The Hour that Stretches
Ah, I keep trying to forge ahead... with whatever this is, long neglected, with the fairly secret song of the day blog, long neglected, with the phree musique blog, which is pushing a month past getting back online from its summer vacation...
"I'm tired of waiting for the moment that never comes
while I watch you making millionaires of bums..."
Why write? I have my own reasons to write, right now, and I could sketch them out fairly easily, comprehensibly. I don't really want to, though. Because it crosses into the personal in a way I don't really feel like exposing, basically. Stay cryptic, stay safe, it all looks artier that way anyway, right?
I used to keep a journal. I guess I still keep it, in the sense that I still possess all of the books, thousands of all but illegible (to anyone but, mostly, myself - even I am baffled by my handwriting at times) but I don't write it anymore, haven't for a long, long time. Between late high school and early post college I wrote almost every day. I think I've gone over this before. A lot of recent postings are enigmatic extractions of those pages.
This is about the day I died.
June 24, 1994
"I've been half avoiding this for hours now, ever since I got the half assed notion (of the variety I'm prone to and find myself helpless to shake) that it was time to write the "big one," the mind numbingly accurate entry that would blitzkrieg the past seventeen years and mark the End of an Era.
Obviously that kind of thinking is setting yourself up for a fall: and I don't relish the thought of sitting down to that kind of task with the iron cast knowledge that within twenty lines I would have hopelessly mired myself in a sea of meaningless digressions.
Still, life is composed of these kinds of foul paradoxes: the fact that concentrating on the goal fouls the journey that allows you to attain it (the pustulent cloud hanging over this insane issue of my "purpose" in life), the problem of justifying gracious mercy with the need for justice (the final issue that has probably forever screwed my chances of finding a place in any acceptable religious group), relativism versus objectivity, the necessity of pain for the existence of pleasure... The list goes on and on..."
But not so much as I do. Honestly, I came here with the idea of transcribing the whole of that entry... but my god. It goes on. And on. And ON. Nineteen pages. Of course, this was during the brief hiatus I spent at my parents' (then) home in Montevideo, MN between college ending and my entry into "real life" that began with the move to the city I've lived in ever since, Minneapolis MN. I didn't have anything better to do with my time and I could sleep as long as I wanted to. Now there is this small human being slumbering peacefully above and over my left shoulder, who likes to get up around six thirty, seven, and the days of my staying up all hours and dragging my ass out of bed late late in the morning are done. I've got no problem with that. But though I question the wisdom of those long ago writing jags, and despite the relative surfeit of freedom that allowed them, I can't help admire a certain tenaciousness in tackling this sort of ill defined attempt at completion at all. Cockroaches and beetles are discussed, the break up of a relationship, college, many visitations and commentations of journal entries from the four years prior, and a long, long commentary on an episode of the British sci-fi comedy serial Red Dwarf called "Thanks for the Memory" (which I incorrectly remember at the time as "In Memory of Lise Campbell" - in which the crew of the titular space craft discover that they have lost a significant period of their immediate past memories. They follow a signal trace from their ship's black box to an alien moon where they find a grave with a marker stating "To the memory of Lise Yates," who turns out to be a woman one of the crew members dated when he lived on earth (which, given the premise of the show, was 3 million years in the past). It's not actually that important.
"In the end, the lost day(s) plot in science fiction has always gotten me, I don't know why. It has the capacity to give me a serious case of the willies. There is something about that scene when they come upon that inexplicable (at that point) tomb, commemorating a girl from Lister's memory, a grave containing memories. Something else, a scene after Rimmer has realized his memory is false - out on some kind of observation deck... but that eludes my memory
Maybe it's nothing. Anyway: so much for rambling preamble."
I watched the episode several times since, in this wondrous era where the most obscure rental DVDs are mailed to me upon request. But I could not pin down that feeling, whatever it was I saw and wrote about and then wrote about writing about. You can replay the tape, but you can never recapture the moments. When I first saw that, oh, yes, I remember those times very well. It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I was on fire. I'd earned a full ride to college and I believed in my heart that I would find all the answers there. Red Dwarf was something I happened upon, dwelling in merry obscurity (from my tiny town hick perspective, I know now it was well known and had quite a following, but in little Montevideo it was the sort of completely obscure thing I delighted in) on late night television, a weakly received signal of the cities' public television station (good old channel 2), gift of the ridiculous complicated aeriel on top of the house you almost never see any more in the era of cable and sattelite.
And I am here, now, thinking, oh man, here I go again.
But no, no, I can wrap this up right quick, there will be no nineteen pages here. The briefest sketch. I know that I am doing the same thing here, now, in this brave new century that seems to me to be going so badly wrong, but is probably not that much worse (or better) than the last, as I did some twelve years ago. I called it a "my character assassination and the final suicide of self-concept," I was writing under the influence of the introduction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 in which he engages in a similar sort of announcement of the end of his "first life..." like everything, that reads much differently today, now doesn't it?
Just this: the college thing didn't really work out for me and I was trying to deal with it.
All I was doing in that long spool of handwritten text was searching for a moment, and that is all I am doing today. I think I understand it a bit better now, but I don't know that the impulse is any less misbegotten.
"There is not much else to say.
Except this:
There is no use trying to describe the eerie sensation of coming upon that shallow grave where you tried for once and all to bury your past, your memories. At best, you may end up by discovering that nothing is ever really lost... and that the pieces were always falling into place, if only you knew. But that is another, longer story. The task for the moment, as always, is to close the box and get on with the first day of your New Life - which is every day."
So let it be written, so let it be done.
JMH #2, R.I.P. 6/24/06
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
"I'm tired of waiting for the moment that never comes
while I watch you making millionaires of bums..."
Why write? I have my own reasons to write, right now, and I could sketch them out fairly easily, comprehensibly. I don't really want to, though. Because it crosses into the personal in a way I don't really feel like exposing, basically. Stay cryptic, stay safe, it all looks artier that way anyway, right?
I used to keep a journal. I guess I still keep it, in the sense that I still possess all of the books, thousands of all but illegible (to anyone but, mostly, myself - even I am baffled by my handwriting at times) but I don't write it anymore, haven't for a long, long time. Between late high school and early post college I wrote almost every day. I think I've gone over this before. A lot of recent postings are enigmatic extractions of those pages.
This is about the day I died.
June 24, 1994
"I've been half avoiding this for hours now, ever since I got the half assed notion (of the variety I'm prone to and find myself helpless to shake) that it was time to write the "big one," the mind numbingly accurate entry that would blitzkrieg the past seventeen years and mark the End of an Era.
Obviously that kind of thinking is setting yourself up for a fall: and I don't relish the thought of sitting down to that kind of task with the iron cast knowledge that within twenty lines I would have hopelessly mired myself in a sea of meaningless digressions.
Still, life is composed of these kinds of foul paradoxes: the fact that concentrating on the goal fouls the journey that allows you to attain it (the pustulent cloud hanging over this insane issue of my "purpose" in life), the problem of justifying gracious mercy with the need for justice (the final issue that has probably forever screwed my chances of finding a place in any acceptable religious group), relativism versus objectivity, the necessity of pain for the existence of pleasure... The list goes on and on..."
But not so much as I do. Honestly, I came here with the idea of transcribing the whole of that entry... but my god. It goes on. And on. And ON. Nineteen pages. Of course, this was during the brief hiatus I spent at my parents' (then) home in Montevideo, MN between college ending and my entry into "real life" that began with the move to the city I've lived in ever since, Minneapolis MN. I didn't have anything better to do with my time and I could sleep as long as I wanted to. Now there is this small human being slumbering peacefully above and over my left shoulder, who likes to get up around six thirty, seven, and the days of my staying up all hours and dragging my ass out of bed late late in the morning are done. I've got no problem with that. But though I question the wisdom of those long ago writing jags, and despite the relative surfeit of freedom that allowed them, I can't help admire a certain tenaciousness in tackling this sort of ill defined attempt at completion at all. Cockroaches and beetles are discussed, the break up of a relationship, college, many visitations and commentations of journal entries from the four years prior, and a long, long commentary on an episode of the British sci-fi comedy serial Red Dwarf called "Thanks for the Memory" (which I incorrectly remember at the time as "In Memory of Lise Campbell" - in which the crew of the titular space craft discover that they have lost a significant period of their immediate past memories. They follow a signal trace from their ship's black box to an alien moon where they find a grave with a marker stating "To the memory of Lise Yates," who turns out to be a woman one of the crew members dated when he lived on earth (which, given the premise of the show, was 3 million years in the past). It's not actually that important.
"In the end, the lost day(s) plot in science fiction has always gotten me, I don't know why. It has the capacity to give me a serious case of the willies. There is something about that scene when they come upon that inexplicable (at that point) tomb, commemorating a girl from Lister's memory, a grave containing memories. Something else, a scene after Rimmer has realized his memory is false - out on some kind of observation deck... but that eludes my memory
Maybe it's nothing. Anyway: so much for rambling preamble."
I watched the episode several times since, in this wondrous era where the most obscure rental DVDs are mailed to me upon request. But I could not pin down that feeling, whatever it was I saw and wrote about and then wrote about writing about. You can replay the tape, but you can never recapture the moments. When I first saw that, oh, yes, I remember those times very well. It was the summer after my senior year of high school, and I was on fire. I'd earned a full ride to college and I believed in my heart that I would find all the answers there. Red Dwarf was something I happened upon, dwelling in merry obscurity (from my tiny town hick perspective, I know now it was well known and had quite a following, but in little Montevideo it was the sort of completely obscure thing I delighted in) on late night television, a weakly received signal of the cities' public television station (good old channel 2), gift of the ridiculous complicated aeriel on top of the house you almost never see any more in the era of cable and sattelite.
And I am here, now, thinking, oh man, here I go again.
But no, no, I can wrap this up right quick, there will be no nineteen pages here. The briefest sketch. I know that I am doing the same thing here, now, in this brave new century that seems to me to be going so badly wrong, but is probably not that much worse (or better) than the last, as I did some twelve years ago. I called it a "my character assassination and the final suicide of self-concept," I was writing under the influence of the introduction to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 in which he engages in a similar sort of announcement of the end of his "first life..." like everything, that reads much differently today, now doesn't it?
Just this: the college thing didn't really work out for me and I was trying to deal with it.
All I was doing in that long spool of handwritten text was searching for a moment, and that is all I am doing today. I think I understand it a bit better now, but I don't know that the impulse is any less misbegotten.
"There is not much else to say.
Except this:
There is no use trying to describe the eerie sensation of coming upon that shallow grave where you tried for once and all to bury your past, your memories. At best, you may end up by discovering that nothing is ever really lost... and that the pieces were always falling into place, if only you knew. But that is another, longer story. The task for the moment, as always, is to close the box and get on with the first day of your New Life - which is every day."
So let it be written, so let it be done.
JMH #2, R.I.P. 6/24/06
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
33 Associates
I'm cleaning out all of the clutter but I couldn't just bring myself to delete 33 Associates entirely. This was the grand experiment wherein I opened magical instant publishing to all comers. A total of two people volunteered to participate. If either of these people ask me to take down either of their two entries each I will of course do so, otherwise, they can live here until the world ends, or Google goes belly up - whichever comes first.
Poems from the Past by Ruth Hamlow
ETHNOECCENTRIC
I wake up
in India
lying on someone else's iron bedstead
on someone else's bed of nails.
I go fire-walking
with complete faith
in the imperviousness of my flesh.
I lay my feet on petals of red coals.
Rosebuds blossom between my toes.
I begin to notice
that life walks
in the body
of some sacred cow
chewed like a cud
swallowed and digested
four times
fertilizing the tired earth
lighting cook fires
growing shapeless with time
ground down to a powder
a dust that millions of pilgrims
walk on
journeying to any
roadside shrine.
PAST LIVES
The lovesick novice
fanatic acolyte
penning the unsent
unread letter
in the flowered journal
velum leaves
dropping
where I tore those pages away.
The white-dress
posy-and-poem recluse.
The suicide
wrapped in her negligee
of see-through confessions.
The virgin virago
agnostic atheist pagan
drunken feminist
gin-and-tonic connoisseur
bloody barstool
vegetarian
plotting the ultimate
revenge fantasy
to win him back.
The temptress
astride her own power
two-fisted high priestess
sacrificing her own heart
to the idol
with feet of clay.
The midnight poet
autoerotic sensualist
fondling words
scattered across
the mile wide bed
cold comfort
three hours
until dawn.
TiVo and Commercial Skipping (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The beauty of recording TV is being able to skip the
commercials. There is a rumor that such activity will
become criminal though. As such rumors go, they
spread like crazy on the Internet. People "pass it
on" without actually reading anything.
First, Replay TV, like TiVo used to have a 30 second
commercial skip feature. The company was sued by
broadcasters and decided to remove the feature. This
lawsuit was only against the company, not the users of
Replay TV. It is still not a crime to FFWD.
There is a bill in Congress called the Intellectual
Property Protection Act (hr 2391). This one bill is
actually composed of eight different bills. Some of
the bills deal with piracy and file sharing. For
example it would be a criminal offense to bootleg a
movie (record a movie at the theater.) Another part
is called the Family Video Act and is designed to
protect people from watching the whole movie.
For example, if you are at home and want to skip a
portion of objectionable material, you may do so
without being a criminal assuming that you are doing
so with your legal copy. Manufacturers may also
produce censored copies of movies, where the
objectionable portion is removed or "made
imperceptible." This would be similar to buying a CD
at Walmart where the explicit language has been dubbed
over.
The reason that this got out of hand is that Senator
John McCain put a hold on the bill, and issued a
statement saying:
"I fear that the very exemption designed to achieve
this laudable goal simultaneously creates an
implication that certain basic practices that
consumers have enjoyed for years -- like
fast-forwarding through advertisements -- would
constitute criminal copyright infringement."
There is nothing in the bill that specifically targets
commercial skipping as criminal. In fact it would have
to be a BIG stretch to imply that. The bill proposal
uses this language:
"the making of limited portions of audio or video
content of a motion picture imperceptible by or for
the owner or other lawful possessor of an authorized
copy of that motion picture in the course of viewing
of that work for private use in a household..."
In other words it says you are not a criminal if you
skip any part of the MOVIE. That could imply that you
are a criminal if you skip anything that is NOT the
movie. Like I said, its a big stretch.
All the hype out there on the Internet has been
promoting this bill as that of a "police state" where
FFWDing your DVDs would be a crime. This idea is
almost an urban legend since the Internet has
converted a "potential implication" into a "probable infraction."
On Demand Video (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The worst part about TV is the commercials. The
second worst part is having to wait for a specified
time in order to watch a show. Now that most TV shows
are available on DVD, both of these problems can go
away, provided that you are willing to wait.
Imagine Growing up with no commercials on TV. The
goal of commercials is to convince you that you are
inadequate as you are, and their product can make you
better. This is especially true with children's toy
commercials. They make toys look way better than they
really are.
With a DVD library we can watch most TV shows older
than one year. We can watch them in the correct
order, and without commercials. We can share with our
families the classics from our childhood like:
Battlestar Galactica, The Dukes of Hazzard, The
A-Team, Knight Rider, and Star Trek. We can also
revisit serials that we may have missed such as Dallas
and Twin Peaks. Some classic shows are commonplace on
cable however they are actually cut down to allow more
time for commercials.
The main problem with serial shows is that they are
difficult to understand after missing an episode. A
modern serial is the show "24." Every episode is a
cliffhanger so the viewers will come back. All you
have to do is wait a year and the whole season will be
on DVD. Then you can watch it at your own pace. And
with episodes 42 min. long the time savings is
considerable. Screaming kids? Just hit Pause.
Poetry by Ruth Hamlow
BETRAYAL
Aroused
from its long hibernation
the lake opens
a wide blue eye
to meet
the unblinking gaze
of a clear sky.
After four days
of warm nights
lulled by the muted rush
of running water
I awaken
painfully curled
against the cold.
Reluctant
I pull out the winter coat
the cap and gloves
finally rejecting
their meager protection
as useless.
As I leave
I turn to see
the lake
laid out below me
a pale drowned man
the vibrant eye
closed
by the impassive hand
of winter.
Grief stricken
I am suddenly uncertain
of day and date
as if time
were moving backward
or had stopped
as motionless
as the stilled waves
frozen in their rippling return
to shore.
WINTER AGAIN
I am lying in bed
cataloging
my aches
with perverse enjoyment
undecided
if the pain
under my eyelids
might not be pleasurable.
My rough and
fickle lover
whines and hisses
outside.
He insinuates himself
through the minute cracks
around the pane
but I turn my back
to the window
refusing him admittance
beneath the covers.
Later
I will go out,
my body shrinking
in revolted anticipation
of the first slap
of wind and rain.
I walk
shivering
into his enveloping embrace.
Every nerve ending
is a brittle icicle
with a heart of fire
pumped out
from my protected core.
As I climb
the final hill
I tear off my cap and gloves
baring my stinging flesh
to the last frantic caresses.
Wrenched between
eagerness
and regret
I rush toward
the long-awaited release
of shelter
only to stop at the door
face uplifted
for the final dry kiss
of the first flakes
of snow.
MIDWINTER
I walk through
the dark apartment
turning on lights
as I go--
bedroom
bathroom
kitchen.
In the living room
I open the shades
to the implacable darkness
of a midwinter dawn.
Not enough light
to stumble through my
morning rituals.
Not enough jam
for the dry toast.
Not enough juice
for a full glass--
I drink it down
half-empty.
I walk to work
still in the dark.
The half-melted snow
isn’t enough
to cover nature’s naked frailties.
The grass
lies wet and matted
under a crust of salt and sand.
The river
is half-frozen
the open water
an oozing wound
in the dim halo
of a half-risen sun.
Poems from the Past by Ruth Hamlow
ETHNOECCENTRIC
I wake up
in India
lying on someone else's iron bedstead
on someone else's bed of nails.
I go fire-walking
with complete faith
in the imperviousness of my flesh.
I lay my feet on petals of red coals.
Rosebuds blossom between my toes.
I begin to notice
that life walks
in the body
of some sacred cow
chewed like a cud
swallowed and digested
four times
fertilizing the tired earth
lighting cook fires
growing shapeless with time
ground down to a powder
a dust that millions of pilgrims
walk on
journeying to any
roadside shrine.
PAST LIVES
The lovesick novice
fanatic acolyte
penning the unsent
unread letter
in the flowered journal
velum leaves
dropping
where I tore those pages away.
The white-dress
posy-and-poem recluse.
The suicide
wrapped in her negligee
of see-through confessions.
The virgin virago
agnostic atheist pagan
drunken feminist
gin-and-tonic connoisseur
bloody barstool
vegetarian
plotting the ultimate
revenge fantasy
to win him back.
The temptress
astride her own power
two-fisted high priestess
sacrificing her own heart
to the idol
with feet of clay.
The midnight poet
autoerotic sensualist
fondling words
scattered across
the mile wide bed
cold comfort
three hours
until dawn.
TiVo and Commercial Skipping (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The beauty of recording TV is being able to skip the
commercials. There is a rumor that such activity will
become criminal though. As such rumors go, they
spread like crazy on the Internet. People "pass it
on" without actually reading anything.
First, Replay TV, like TiVo used to have a 30 second
commercial skip feature. The company was sued by
broadcasters and decided to remove the feature. This
lawsuit was only against the company, not the users of
Replay TV. It is still not a crime to FFWD.
There is a bill in Congress called the Intellectual
Property Protection Act (hr 2391). This one bill is
actually composed of eight different bills. Some of
the bills deal with piracy and file sharing. For
example it would be a criminal offense to bootleg a
movie (record a movie at the theater.) Another part
is called the Family Video Act and is designed to
protect people from watching the whole movie.
For example, if you are at home and want to skip a
portion of objectionable material, you may do so
without being a criminal assuming that you are doing
so with your legal copy. Manufacturers may also
produce censored copies of movies, where the
objectionable portion is removed or "made
imperceptible." This would be similar to buying a CD
at Walmart where the explicit language has been dubbed
over.
The reason that this got out of hand is that Senator
John McCain put a hold on the bill, and issued a
statement saying:
"I fear that the very exemption designed to achieve
this laudable goal simultaneously creates an
implication that certain basic practices that
consumers have enjoyed for years -- like
fast-forwarding through advertisements -- would
constitute criminal copyright infringement."
There is nothing in the bill that specifically targets
commercial skipping as criminal. In fact it would have
to be a BIG stretch to imply that. The bill proposal
uses this language:
"the making of limited portions of audio or video
content of a motion picture imperceptible by or for
the owner or other lawful possessor of an authorized
copy of that motion picture in the course of viewing
of that work for private use in a household..."
In other words it says you are not a criminal if you
skip any part of the MOVIE. That could imply that you
are a criminal if you skip anything that is NOT the
movie. Like I said, its a big stretch.
All the hype out there on the Internet has been
promoting this bill as that of a "police state" where
FFWDing your DVDs would be a crime. This idea is
almost an urban legend since the Internet has
converted a "potential implication" into a "probable infraction."
On Demand Video (commentary by Jack Wiley)
The worst part about TV is the commercials. The
second worst part is having to wait for a specified
time in order to watch a show. Now that most TV shows
are available on DVD, both of these problems can go
away, provided that you are willing to wait.
Imagine Growing up with no commercials on TV. The
goal of commercials is to convince you that you are
inadequate as you are, and their product can make you
better. This is especially true with children's toy
commercials. They make toys look way better than they
really are.
With a DVD library we can watch most TV shows older
than one year. We can watch them in the correct
order, and without commercials. We can share with our
families the classics from our childhood like:
Battlestar Galactica, The Dukes of Hazzard, The
A-Team, Knight Rider, and Star Trek. We can also
revisit serials that we may have missed such as Dallas
and Twin Peaks. Some classic shows are commonplace on
cable however they are actually cut down to allow more
time for commercials.
The main problem with serial shows is that they are
difficult to understand after missing an episode. A
modern serial is the show "24." Every episode is a
cliffhanger so the viewers will come back. All you
have to do is wait a year and the whole season will be
on DVD. Then you can watch it at your own pace. And
with episodes 42 min. long the time savings is
considerable. Screaming kids? Just hit Pause.
Poetry by Ruth Hamlow
BETRAYAL
Aroused
from its long hibernation
the lake opens
a wide blue eye
to meet
the unblinking gaze
of a clear sky.
After four days
of warm nights
lulled by the muted rush
of running water
I awaken
painfully curled
against the cold.
Reluctant
I pull out the winter coat
the cap and gloves
finally rejecting
their meager protection
as useless.
As I leave
I turn to see
the lake
laid out below me
a pale drowned man
the vibrant eye
closed
by the impassive hand
of winter.
Grief stricken
I am suddenly uncertain
of day and date
as if time
were moving backward
or had stopped
as motionless
as the stilled waves
frozen in their rippling return
to shore.
WINTER AGAIN
I am lying in bed
cataloging
my aches
with perverse enjoyment
undecided
if the pain
under my eyelids
might not be pleasurable.
My rough and
fickle lover
whines and hisses
outside.
He insinuates himself
through the minute cracks
around the pane
but I turn my back
to the window
refusing him admittance
beneath the covers.
Later
I will go out,
my body shrinking
in revolted anticipation
of the first slap
of wind and rain.
I walk
shivering
into his enveloping embrace.
Every nerve ending
is a brittle icicle
with a heart of fire
pumped out
from my protected core.
As I climb
the final hill
I tear off my cap and gloves
baring my stinging flesh
to the last frantic caresses.
Wrenched between
eagerness
and regret
I rush toward
the long-awaited release
of shelter
only to stop at the door
face uplifted
for the final dry kiss
of the first flakes
of snow.
MIDWINTER
I walk through
the dark apartment
turning on lights
as I go--
bedroom
bathroom
kitchen.
In the living room
I open the shades
to the implacable darkness
of a midwinter dawn.
Not enough light
to stumble through my
morning rituals.
Not enough jam
for the dry toast.
Not enough juice
for a full glass--
I drink it down
half-empty.
I walk to work
still in the dark.
The half-melted snow
isn’t enough
to cover nature’s naked frailties.
The grass
lies wet and matted
under a crust of salt and sand.
The river
is half-frozen
the open water
an oozing wound
in the dim halo
of a half-risen sun.
Monday, April 10, 2006
based on sullen entropy to coin a phrase
The whole world grows tired, tired, tired as hell, tired to death, fit to fall down. We're falling asleep on our feet, in meetings, on the road. An Egyptian pilot fell asleep at the wheel and carried a multitude down with him in his steep dream. Two children fell asleep in school and sleptwalked through their halls, scattering black sand.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a smile
34/101
when they come to take you
and the guillotine awaits you
greet them with a smile
when it's time to meet your maker
and they beat you blind for being a Quaker
get up and take it with a smile
Nothing is fair and nothing makes sense
We're all getting put up at heaven's expense
and none of it will matter a thousand years hence
so greet the new day with a smile
when the big computer mixes you
and your alien slavelord fixes you
hey wake up with a smile
when the universe enters the big heat death
and you're in pain whenever you piss or take a breath
oh lie down each night with a smile
We're all headed for oblivion anyway
and nobody knows who listens when we pray
so you might as well live in the one day
and meet each moment with a smile
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
when they come to take you
and the guillotine awaits you
greet them with a smile
when it's time to meet your maker
and they beat you blind for being a Quaker
get up and take it with a smile
Nothing is fair and nothing makes sense
We're all getting put up at heaven's expense
and none of it will matter a thousand years hence
so greet the new day with a smile
when the big computer mixes you
and your alien slavelord fixes you
hey wake up with a smile
when the universe enters the big heat death
and you're in pain whenever you piss or take a breath
oh lie down each night with a smile
We're all headed for oblivion anyway
and nobody knows who listens when we pray
so you might as well live in the one day
and meet each moment with a smile
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Twice Seven
The sign.
You know the day, the day you feel like you've waited your whole life, patient as a monk, just biding your time as Buddha whispers "not this" in your ear.
And the world is nothing but strangers smoking cigarettes, and you without a joint, without a mushroom, without a cactus, without anything you will allow yourself to have. Standard misery in a strange town, and you think: this is my message from the stars, a faceless blank ribbon of asphalt, two hours more to get home.
Wait...
In the end, the lesson is the lesson is the lesson is the lesson. You take what you get and do what you can with it. Some day the universe will load a bullet with your name on it and you will die. Nothing else really matters. Noone knows when, and noone knows what comes next. So here, now, you have to let your bad days go and get on with whatever is next.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
You know the day, the day you feel like you've waited your whole life, patient as a monk, just biding your time as Buddha whispers "not this" in your ear.
And the world is nothing but strangers smoking cigarettes, and you without a joint, without a mushroom, without a cactus, without anything you will allow yourself to have. Standard misery in a strange town, and you think: this is my message from the stars, a faceless blank ribbon of asphalt, two hours more to get home.
Wait...
In the end, the lesson is the lesson is the lesson is the lesson. You take what you get and do what you can with it. Some day the universe will load a bullet with your name on it and you will die. Nothing else really matters. Noone knows when, and noone knows what comes next. So here, now, you have to let your bad days go and get on with whatever is next.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
blue blue blue blue
Question: What does the big black cloud over the sand, the sun-worshippers, and all the blue water signify? Is it an omen, or some kind of lesson? Does it contain a silver lining?
In fact, the big black cloud signifies nothing special. It is itself, just as the sand, the sun-worshippers, and all the blue water.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
In fact, the big black cloud signifies nothing special. It is itself, just as the sand, the sun-worshippers, and all the blue water.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Building a room for noise to live in
I think I've said all I have to say, but somehow I can't seem to stop talking. I guess I haven't got it right yet, but fuck. When will I. I mean, really, when will I? Keep saying this over and over, keep coming back, but I'm just laying bricks.
I'm tired. I have fought as much as anyone, after my fashion. I tried to believe and I tried to do right. But right and wrong are all messed around and I don't know what I
believe anymore. Feel sick. All the shit I put in my system, and all the shit I put up with and all the great motherin' river of shit that flows through my mind, night after night.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I'm tired. I have fought as much as anyone, after my fashion. I tried to believe and I tried to do right. But right and wrong are all messed around and I don't know what I
believe anymore. Feel sick. All the shit I put in my system, and all the shit I put up with and all the great motherin' river of shit that flows through my mind, night after night.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Bridge
I guess the point of the essay is, it is a sick feeling compared to the manic lovehatejoysorrow of putting the torch to that bridge, when you turn back, confused and grainy eyed on an amphetamine fueled all night morning to look at these smoking timbers and say "I..." But must go forward for there is no other thing. And if the road carries us to the abyss... Then we must deal with it, when it comes.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Death and his Brother Time
Anyway, it's all out of context but it occurred to me that that is at the center of our problems... As a society, chiefly, but as these things work out also probably at the root of our personal problems as well. All one the same, what, hey?
Anyway. Yeah, all those private moral scams and exceptions, all the ways we cheat ourselves in our foolish bids to cheat death. But Death always wins in the end, so... Face it. He's got time on his side. Time. On his side. Funny.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Anyway. Yeah, all those private moral scams and exceptions, all the ways we cheat ourselves in our foolish bids to cheat death. But Death always wins in the end, so... Face it. He's got time on his side. Time. On his side. Funny.
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bug
Little ugly passing notions seem to be my ouvre lately: just now the thought that arose was (I was gazing at my perennially unrecognizable visage in the mirror)
You are going to spend every day for the rest of your life boiling in confusion and desire.
This too hard. 10:36 and I don't have much to say. Each day is more or less what I expect. My world seems flat, dismally comprehensible, and far too full of me. I would like to be smaller, fill up less space in my personal universe. Be unobtrusive, a bug on the sill. It seems unfair: I feel bound to an idealistic mock-up of the world that I know I can't attain but desire painfully anyway. There is no fantasy to drive away the bitter taste that feeling leaves.
But sleep helps.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
You are going to spend every day for the rest of your life boiling in confusion and desire.
This too hard. 10:36 and I don't have much to say. Each day is more or less what I expect. My world seems flat, dismally comprehensible, and far too full of me. I would like to be smaller, fill up less space in my personal universe. Be unobtrusive, a bug on the sill. It seems unfair: I feel bound to an idealistic mock-up of the world that I know I can't attain but desire painfully anyway. There is no fantasy to drive away the bitter taste that feeling leaves.
But sleep helps.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Children of His Majesty
66/101
If I was a shareholder
one of the five percent
would I display my sinister bent
or would I be bolder
If I had wealth superabundant
would I tie my mule to a good cause
could my will contain an escape clause
Would I behave just the same, redundant
While I lay wishing for some fancy thing
ten thousand die ten thousand die
the children are starving I wonder why
the children of his majesty the king
he's mumbling he's mad as a hatter
and I am poor as a mouse
no wagon field or house
no crown no silver platter
Yet if I were a shareholder
I could give away everything
To feed the children of his majesty the king
that's what I'd do if I were a little bolder
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
If I was a shareholder
one of the five percent
would I display my sinister bent
or would I be bolder
If I had wealth superabundant
would I tie my mule to a good cause
could my will contain an escape clause
Would I behave just the same, redundant
While I lay wishing for some fancy thing
ten thousand die ten thousand die
the children are starving I wonder why
the children of his majesty the king
he's mumbling he's mad as a hatter
and I am poor as a mouse
no wagon field or house
no crown no silver platter
Yet if I were a shareholder
I could give away everything
To feed the children of his majesty the king
that's what I'd do if I were a little bolder
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Freedom of choice is a chemical reaction
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the beginning of the beginning
To put the clinch on it, a nasty cold snap has settled in... no wild breeze errant from the north, this shit has a definite sense of impending winter... That chill, here to stay smell, sharp, musty, and more than ready to overstay its welcome. No doubt it'll warm up again, but the menace is here for the duration - the last chance for fooling oneself about the future came and went. It's coming.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The retribution of extreme mortality
No Drive. 11:02 pm, not thinking about too much. Got up around nine or so, was sitting watching the snow fall down around me, and it occurred to me, in that more than intellectual way, that my days were truly numbered. That there was a finite number of waking ups, and I was really LOOKING at the snow fall - at the flakes falling, stretching back in such clarity, the silence and presence of the falling snow... I watched individual flakes, trying to follow one flake from as high as I could spot it to as low before it hit the ground - appearing out of one uniform stretch of white sky, down to white snow covered ground disappearing, feeling deep in my body the fact that I would only see this so many times, you know...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
cup of tea
1/101
It seems so obvious
my mind is spilling out on every side
life's a brief candle
and the river's very wide
my cup of tea is running over
trying to make a point
can't solve this with another retreat
can't solve this with another joint
who is pouring out the wisdom
where does the spilt tea go
I can't see the point in crying
how was I supposed to know
If the pot has finally run dry
if the saucer's spilling too
saking down into the carpet
maybe I can share some tea with you.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It seems so obvious
my mind is spilling out on every side
life's a brief candle
and the river's very wide
my cup of tea is running over
trying to make a point
can't solve this with another retreat
can't solve this with another joint
who is pouring out the wisdom
where does the spilt tea go
I can't see the point in crying
how was I supposed to know
If the pot has finally run dry
if the saucer's spilling too
saking down into the carpet
maybe I can share some tea with you.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
tis the east, and my stupid beaming head do be the sun
Soft, What light through yonder window breaks. Dawn, the sick grey 6:36 ayem dawn of a thousand sick grey mornings that have come to me without the intervening buffer of sleep.
It's all my fault.
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It's all my fault.
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therefore you're not
Any revelation you can't fit into twenty seconds will not last through the next millenium. Any vacation which can be ruined by bad weather was probably ill-conceived in the first place. Any problem that can be solved exclusively by money is probably merely an illusion, but is likely also partly a trap set by evil men. Any vision that ends with a question must surely be a riddle devised by God. Don't you think?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
that line it coils around the world; like a serpent it is curled
Descending. One.
Thanks to David for the title, but you say but Jath it hasn't started yet has it and the answer I give you is no it has not but I have found as Bob said a new place to get low.
(I am being cryptic because at the moment I am too weak to be ridiculous which is what I would be were I not. Cryptic, that is)
I have engineered my own defeat. No small task but you sea (see?) the serpent coils around and takes its own tail in its mouth: I have created desire insatiable, when all is eaten it must by necessity turn upon its own flesh, and, containing either everything or nothing that meal can never be fulfilled.
I, myself, say with some small pride that I have made an art of descending.
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Thanks to David for the title, but you say but Jath it hasn't started yet has it and the answer I give you is no it has not but I have found as Bob said a new place to get low.
(I am being cryptic because at the moment I am too weak to be ridiculous which is what I would be were I not. Cryptic, that is)
I have engineered my own defeat. No small task but you sea (see?) the serpent coils around and takes its own tail in its mouth: I have created desire insatiable, when all is eaten it must by necessity turn upon its own flesh, and, containing either everything or nothing that meal can never be fulfilled.
I, myself, say with some small pride that I have made an art of descending.
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doing saying
67/101
What are you doing
What are you saying
show me one true thing
You found by praying
doing is being
saying is nothing
dying is freeing
living the one thing
In doing be true
in saying be clear
Everything I do
I do without fear
What are you doing
what are you saying
this is the true thing
the curtain is fraying
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
What are you doing
What are you saying
show me one true thing
You found by praying
doing is being
saying is nothing
dying is freeing
living the one thing
In doing be true
in saying be clear
Everything I do
I do without fear
What are you doing
what are you saying
this is the true thing
the curtain is fraying
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You know who you are
But I digress. So anyway: Fuck you. Books are out because they just don't sell enough shit. So we will pander to whatever lowest common denominator we can get away with. Ladies and gentlemen, nazi corporate Big Business Scum... I give you:
Television.
So, I dunno, I kinda feel like we're basically doomed. So I might as well tip my hand and tell you outright:
You disgust me. You sacrifice and devour your own fucking children. You are the depths of godless, unscrupulous beasts. My life is defiance of you.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Television.
So, I dunno, I kinda feel like we're basically doomed. So I might as well tip my hand and tell you outright:
You disgust me. You sacrifice and devour your own fucking children. You are the depths of godless, unscrupulous beasts. My life is defiance of you.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
conception hidden in a green glass ball
Will I wake up soon? I don't know. I've never had a dream it seems that lasted so long, and still went on, when I knew I was asleep. So many dreams within dreams. Why do I dream of Merwin, of Simon, of the Kung Fu Master, and the Crow, and a girl named Sue, and the appraisers and the evil old men, Mr. North, Mr. South, Mr. East, Mr. West... Why do I dream an unpleasant dream that this is the afterlife, that some time some long terrible time ago, I died in a tragic camping accident but clung to life, you know, built a mental life and this is where it ends, in realization.
But nothing happens, I believe...
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But nothing happens, I believe...
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answer the telemeter
can the irrational anger spurred by the desire to grasp what cannot be grasped be allayed by sudden and decisive action?
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klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
feast of saints
And such is this day of the dead. This feast of saints. Uneventful. Sirens scream at a comfortable distance, it is fucking cold, but no real snow, here, yet. I am unsatiated, unsatisfied, and in a mood I recognize well. It couldn't be called acceptance, but perhaps forbearance, or at least a decision to forbear. I am tired, about ready to collapse. A few more obligations to fulfill.
11:21 and I face the hard truths square on and accept them to myself. They are like friends: cranky and enigmatic, difficult, but unquestionably they are mine, and I am theirs: my nature, the scorpion said. A fable.
Go to the minimal tasks, quickly accomplished. 11:23.
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11:21 and I face the hard truths square on and accept them to myself. They are like friends: cranky and enigmatic, difficult, but unquestionably they are mine, and I am theirs: my nature, the scorpion said. A fable.
Go to the minimal tasks, quickly accomplished. 11:23.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the head of a dead cat
Christ, I can come back to these pages a hundred thousand times, it'll never get any easier or better. Or will it? Is desire truly the root of all suffering? Can you find the Buddha in a suit, driving Chicago in a rented car? Or is that unlikely? Is anything? Should I have done more today? Or less?
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
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Wait, wait, wait, wait.
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like a poker in the fire
Well if you're in need of explanations, if you're the kind of person that needs your i's dotted and your t's crossed, I'll supply you with the most obvious:
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
better a live inchworm than a dead dog
But I'll be alive. Chew that acrid morsel of hope, its a bitter pill but It'll do you good. I'll be alive, kicking puking and mewling with the continual pains of rebirth. I'll be alive and oh, my God - what a joyful, wonderous wretchedness it's going to be. Truly awful. Wonderful, then, to be alive and miserable. A whole new universe of failure to come crashing down on my unprotected noggin. And maybe, it's doubtful, but just maybe, in the midst of all of it I'll find a new kind of failure - or perhaps a very old one, old as Eden, old as Israel's hope getting nailed to a tree - a special kind of failure; A sort of death, a sort of success, a sort of Joy.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
in which words fail me
I am afraid. This world has knocked me down so goddamn many times in the last six years. I've fought until I was bloody, I've pushed back and sometimes I've let myself be pushed around. And I've asked for everything. And for so little. I am afraid. My tongue's tied. I feel what I have to say, inside me, felt it so long, only just want to let it out. Say words so fine and true, enough to fan a spark into a flame and spread just a small circle of light around me... Just a small circle.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
musing the start of a second existence
I wait. My whole life, my whole existence, is waiting. For sign, or event, for health, for change.
I've done all right, haven't I? Five months and two days ago I promised "character assasination and the final suicide of self-concept..." Yes, and look at me. Short of money, locked in a lease and a meaningless, nonentity job: girlfriend gone, sick, completely clueless.
Yeah, I've done all right.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I've done all right, haven't I? Five months and two days ago I promised "character assasination and the final suicide of self-concept..." Yes, and look at me. Short of money, locked in a lease and a meaningless, nonentity job: girlfriend gone, sick, completely clueless.
Yeah, I've done all right.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a spirit so willing
...I come back briefly to say, not as if I'm saying truth but rather as I say it to myself: I will not be fooled again, I will not be tricked by my hope and desire. No. I lay out cards in my mind...
I ponder this weird iconography, like some convoluted rebus I cannot decipher. Just look in dismay at these so-called actions and say: I will not be fooled again. Look at my soft brown eyes, look at the steel of disappointment, pain and time that I have invested them with, and mutter =The Flesh.=
But the flesh is weak... And so I poison, deprive and abuse it. Make it the whipping boy for my disenchantment. Tell it sternly =I will not be fooled again,= not knowing whether I am cursing or merely fooling myself with such incantation: I pound the flesh into the ground with neglect, till it is forced to shut down. And so I escape from my mind, and the irony of that dilemma.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I ponder this weird iconography, like some convoluted rebus I cannot decipher. Just look in dismay at these so-called actions and say: I will not be fooled again. Look at my soft brown eyes, look at the steel of disappointment, pain and time that I have invested them with, and mutter =The Flesh.=
But the flesh is weak... And so I poison, deprive and abuse it. Make it the whipping boy for my disenchantment. Tell it sternly =I will not be fooled again,= not knowing whether I am cursing or merely fooling myself with such incantation: I pound the flesh into the ground with neglect, till it is forced to shut down. And so I escape from my mind, and the irony of that dilemma.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
when in bedlam do as the bedlamites
If only this insane world for once would make good its constant mind-bending threat to go completely crazy, If I could just see where I stand.
The fly buzzes, buzzes, follows its primeval path, no brain at all, it's all hard wired, the finest set of built-in survival tactics creation can conjure sending it smashing, time after time, into the mirror. It stops. What new stimulus will send it into flight again? If nothing were to change, would it stick permanently in its =wait= loop, and die, there, wasted away on the mirror that seems to hold a portal through which it cannot pass.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The fly buzzes, buzzes, follows its primeval path, no brain at all, it's all hard wired, the finest set of built-in survival tactics creation can conjure sending it smashing, time after time, into the mirror. It stops. What new stimulus will send it into flight again? If nothing were to change, would it stick permanently in its =wait= loop, and die, there, wasted away on the mirror that seems to hold a portal through which it cannot pass.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
inscription to a crude self-portrait
Today is the first day of the latter half of the middle bit of the rest of my life
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klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
and most will not read any of it at any time
What I called the beginning of the end, in my declaration of death, that's what that was all about. Hah, it would be hell to read these all cover to cover, functionally impossible for most... All of the people can read some of my writing but even I can't read all of my writing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
How I spent another year of my life
Lose a little ground, gain a little ground, and in the dark at night I have dreams I never remember on waking, just dark glimmers of corridors and rooms I do not know... Wake up and groan with instant tiredness, the burden of morning and another week just begun... Through my morning, into another fucking day at another stupid-ass job, all the same, silent I wait it out. Fractured moments.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Trying to make the weekend pay
And so another glorious weekend.
11:11, glory be. Motzart and darkness, idly flickering over the Solar Powered Boat, oh, and a beautiful little shack, on some remote island, a little municipality of dubious or perhaps slightly ambiguous legal status... Some nice remote corner where there is no class war, no politicians.
And similar unlikely scenarios. Ah well. Oh, let me die in the ocean. Let it take me at last after all these years. Just not here, not now, let me die alive, hmm? What a fuckin' joke. Motzart is getting a bit vigorous for me.
Enough, I don't feel like categorizing another spent friday night, I have lost my taste for vivisection. Peace? Nearly. Nearly.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
11:11, glory be. Motzart and darkness, idly flickering over the Solar Powered Boat, oh, and a beautiful little shack, on some remote island, a little municipality of dubious or perhaps slightly ambiguous legal status... Some nice remote corner where there is no class war, no politicians.
And similar unlikely scenarios. Ah well. Oh, let me die in the ocean. Let it take me at last after all these years. Just not here, not now, let me die alive, hmm? What a fuckin' joke. Motzart is getting a bit vigorous for me.
Enough, I don't feel like categorizing another spent friday night, I have lost my taste for vivisection. Peace? Nearly. Nearly.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
If the shoe fits
Should I use a sweeter term, making love or at least having sex? Bullshit. Your lies deceive you same as they deceived me. Fuck is a healthy word, it has some fire in it. God, in a world with so little fire anywhere, so little spark left, you might as well be honest with an act so honest. The rest is lies. Approximations. They've put us all though a nice logarithm, don't you see? They've taken all the differences, all the glorious incongruities and sharp edges, all the bumps and dangling errors, and plugged us through neat equations, smoothed us and plotted us, made a neat line of us, shown us to be manifestly less than the sum of our parts, reduced our meaning to nothing, ah, but the correlation coefficient is nice and high. The answer isn't right but it's PAT. It's SIMPLE. Simple in the worst possible way, it's so skewed that it isn't even wrong.
But they can't correlate away that one difference. Much as they'd like to cut off the cock and cement it firmly into the cunt, make us all eunuchs, they haven't managed. The war between the sexes is just this: a thousand illusions to still the amazingly destructive (to them) potential of that simple fit. Christ, if they figure out that it's as simple as that, that a cock fits snuggly into a cunt, who the hell knows what they'll think next. That maybe the differences are what makes things fit. Yeah, that our sharp edges and voids were meant to jigsaw. I don't know. I'm just babbling. Right? Babble. Babble. Babble. We certainly fucked up. All our voids and protuberances, and the best solution we can come up with is to shove jade balls up our asses and cut each other into tiny pieces.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
But they can't correlate away that one difference. Much as they'd like to cut off the cock and cement it firmly into the cunt, make us all eunuchs, they haven't managed. The war between the sexes is just this: a thousand illusions to still the amazingly destructive (to them) potential of that simple fit. Christ, if they figure out that it's as simple as that, that a cock fits snuggly into a cunt, who the hell knows what they'll think next. That maybe the differences are what makes things fit. Yeah, that our sharp edges and voids were meant to jigsaw. I don't know. I'm just babbling. Right? Babble. Babble. Babble. We certainly fucked up. All our voids and protuberances, and the best solution we can come up with is to shove jade balls up our asses and cut each other into tiny pieces.
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The MOST in the gashing
There is a Ghost in the machine and it makes me self-destruct, I don't know how it got there, if it is me myself or if it is some evil spirit or if it is just the insane notion of an old and tired Humanist as weary of the game as I am, am I the Ghost? I don't know but if there is a spirit in me that craves life (and there is, oh, there is) it is a pale and impotent thing next to the malign ministrations of the Ghost
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The Everyman and his Everydog
Leaving us where? So hard to believe in change, but I can't accept that I'm trapped. And as always, again, the question becomes what now.
10:02 and the answer is obvious. Sometimes I find that I still believe that a good night's sleep is all I really need. That it'll come to me in a dream. That somehow God will drop a fat golden egg in my lap and everything will be easy. Maybe it's wrong to even want that.
Is it? Is the value of an experience to be measured in the pain and labor of attaining it? Generally I'm inclined to say yes, but tonight I wonder.
Not that wondering changes anything, tomorrow will come as it must and I'll be no better prepared than ever.
Fuck.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
10:02 and the answer is obvious. Sometimes I find that I still believe that a good night's sleep is all I really need. That it'll come to me in a dream. That somehow God will drop a fat golden egg in my lap and everything will be easy. Maybe it's wrong to even want that.
Is it? Is the value of an experience to be measured in the pain and labor of attaining it? Generally I'm inclined to say yes, but tonight I wonder.
Not that wondering changes anything, tomorrow will come as it must and I'll be no better prepared than ever.
Fuck.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
grass trees enlightened
streaming enlightenment 0.0
46/101
I have a notion
I'm gonna be all right
come what may...
just look I'll have
escaped to paradise
within another day
grass, trees, enlightened
bees whisper
secrets as you dream
insensible
to the notion
of your own silent stream
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
46/101
I have a notion
I'm gonna be all right
come what may...
just look I'll have
escaped to paradise
within another day
grass, trees, enlightened
bees whisper
secrets as you dream
insensible
to the notion
of your own silent stream
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Head space soliloquy
Diffuse throughout the that majority share of mental capacity that pop science claims the "average" person does not utilize is an attenuated electrochemical tracery of the shadows of every dream, notion, bright idea, vision, connection, realization, scrap of poetry and idle daydream that strikes us sufficiently that we think we ought to dig up a piece of paper and write it down, though we never do. The distilled essence of these lost enlightenments form dreams that wake us soaked in sweat, heart pounding, completely disoriented and remembering nothing. This small cautionary note stands in stead of a vision lost in just this manner.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
heat death
Lost, lost, twisting in the dark ocean, unable to tell what is real and what is imagination, memory. It's all going to hell around me, I can't control anything, can't rise or descend, impotent, causeless, I'm not regenerating, slow entropic decline, heat death, everything settles to a uniform mediocrity, the lance of action is lost, I am lost, all is lost, I just want to dissapear, stop feeling and hurting and hoping god I just want it to end. Just for peace, for oblivion.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a copy of a copy of a copy
Mark 34 hours without sleep. It, and the back, now sans aspirin, because of the stomach, which hasn't been fed since noon, the libido, which hasn't been fed since New Years, the Spirit, which hasn't been fed in...
A mass of hungers, you might describe me. Yes, a mass of starving desires, but it ain't for holiness I fast. Dunno why it is. But being sleep, food, sex, love, fun, joy-starved is taking its toll in me (refer back to sentence 2, now completed - - - - I'm not, so to speak, on the ball. In fact I think you could safely say I'm right off it. And if I don't sleep tonight, well I guess I may perish.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
A mass of hungers, you might describe me. Yes, a mass of starving desires, but it ain't for holiness I fast. Dunno why it is. But being sleep, food, sex, love, fun, joy-starved is taking its toll in me (refer back to sentence 2, now completed - - - - I'm not, so to speak, on the ball. In fact I think you could safely say I'm right off it. And if I don't sleep tonight, well I guess I may perish.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
hour twentyseven on the graveyard shift
despite my oft-protested will to live, I seem to be trying to kill myself.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
maybe there's a tiny little machine inside the ghost
I am an automoton, a machine. My function is to feel pain.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
now available in a convenient pill
Listen, I was there, I have returned to tell you that it may all be a madness, a jigger in my electron flow that prevents me from thinking in a more harmonious pragmatism. Regardless, I felt it. I am me and real is real and if only dark nothingness comes after I won't know. For my madness, I lived my madness or will live to live it to the full and gloriously mad extent, and just because it is right, or seems so to me.
This may seem unsure or even blasphemous or god forbid help me Jesus a wishy washy God is in us all our glimpse of the great Kah The great spiritual pudding pool Agnostic shit philosphy. It ain't. 'Cause whether you believe it or not, I travelled where something not me existed and touched my mind and told me it was it was God and I believed in that. And I'm laughing 'cause it's such a cluttered thought.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
This may seem unsure or even blasphemous or god forbid help me Jesus a wishy washy God is in us all our glimpse of the great Kah The great spiritual pudding pool Agnostic shit philosphy. It ain't. 'Cause whether you believe it or not, I travelled where something not me existed and touched my mind and told me it was it was God and I believed in that. And I'm laughing 'cause it's such a cluttered thought.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
thumbody loves me
Somewhere, up there, someone is playing a rather amusing game with my head, cause, though some extremely good times are ahead, I'm currently residing in hell.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The sighting of the lost dream
Itemize - where does this need to itemize come from. What is wrong and what else is wrong and and what is the root the cause the fountain... The fountain of this evil, is it me?
I've lost sight of whatever it is I had sight of... I've lost my desire to learn, at least to learn what seems to be out there, I engineered my preference too closely, ignored my essential dissatisfaction too completely, it is no wonder that so few cataclysms were required to turn me upside down.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I've lost sight of whatever it is I had sight of... I've lost my desire to learn, at least to learn what seems to be out there, I engineered my preference too closely, ignored my essential dissatisfaction too completely, it is no wonder that so few cataclysms were required to turn me upside down.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I was sorry I had no toilet until I met a man who had no asshole
If there is a point to this particular excursion, perhaps it is that even paradise has its toilets, and even the toilets of paradise have their graffitti, and even the graffitti of the toilets of paradise may present one with the occasional gem of wisdom. When I see one, I'll let you know.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the third aspect of judas
So, this is the journal supplement, which future historians of my rise to Godhead will no doubt be directed to in a note in the real journal.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
surprised by a savage kicking in the teeth
Joy defies memory, and without the occasional infusion, you don't know what to trust. I seriously doubt whether my heart ever resonated to that secret song, whether the world ever seemed so momentarily, inestimably brighter. Whether I ever truly cried in deep sorrow. Whether I ever experienced anything. Whether I ever truly dreamed that I could fly. The memories seem so pale, and I cannot distinguish them from things that I read in books, from scenes in movies. From stories told by friends.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
A Strategic Vision of Extreme Clarity
(The Kingdom Come Institute, in that it does not genuinely exist, is regretfully unable to accept any responsibility for the effects that particular arrays of patterns of light and darkness may have on your mind. By reading further you are implicitly accepting the responsibility for all possible consequences of reading further. Not Responsible for Advice Taken. Read further for more details.)
The Kingdom Come Institute has no legal or economic presence. Hence in the cultural paradigm it does not genuinely exist ("There is no such thing").
The Kingdom Come Institute may be viewed as a work of fiction in progress or a multidimensional narrative construct exploring speculations on the possibility of a worldwide personal transfer of collective power from the few to the many, mediated by text interchange technologies and a variety of commonplace social control gambits
In a sense the Kingdom Come Institute exists only in a mind. From one point of view, it devolves into a mere coincidence of interacting physical events. From another point of view it is the only event of genuine meaning (Trees, Forest).
The Kingdom Come Institute is a conceptual/perceptual extension of an identity which is contained within a physical being. Yet in observing it, become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute.
This concludes the briefing. To those who seek a deeper knowledge the answers to many questions begin in the dim corridors of the F.U.Q.s
All that ye may discover herein is protected by the magic sacred rune of the small letter c enclosed within the mystic circle. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
this concludes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute Home Page designated The Kingdom Come Institute (and left unnamed, its ghost).
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The Kingdom Come Institute has no legal or economic presence. Hence in the cultural paradigm it does not genuinely exist ("There is no such thing").
The Kingdom Come Institute may be viewed as a work of fiction in progress or a multidimensional narrative construct exploring speculations on the possibility of a worldwide personal transfer of collective power from the few to the many, mediated by text interchange technologies and a variety of commonplace social control gambits
In a sense the Kingdom Come Institute exists only in a mind. From one point of view, it devolves into a mere coincidence of interacting physical events. From another point of view it is the only event of genuine meaning (Trees, Forest).
The Kingdom Come Institute is a conceptual/perceptual extension of an identity which is contained within a physical being. Yet in observing it, become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute.
This concludes the briefing. To those who seek a deeper knowledge the answers to many questions begin in the dim corridors of the F.U.Q.s
All that ye may discover herein is protected by the magic sacred rune of the small letter c enclosed within the mystic circle. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
this concludes the portion of the Kingdom Come Institute Home Page designated The Kingdom Come Institute (and left unnamed, its ghost).
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
get a stupid answer
Frequently Unanswered Questions
Is there something else I can look at instead?
Does this mean something besides what it seems to?
Who made this?
How much is this going to cost me?
Did you say something?
Why is everything so boring?
What the hell was that all about?
How do you spell that?
Can I help you?
How long have you been doing that?
Is this some kind of trick?
Was that the end?
Who is paying for this?
Have I seen this before?
Did something change when I wasn't paying attention?
How do I make contact with someone in charge?
Is there something I'm forgetting?
What happens now?
Is this done yet?
How do I open this?
Does that mean anything?
Is someone standing behind me?
Are you listening?
Should I keep doing this?
Am I asleep?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Is there something else I can look at instead?
Does this mean something besides what it seems to?
Who made this?
How much is this going to cost me?
Did you say something?
Why is everything so boring?
What the hell was that all about?
How do you spell that?
Can I help you?
How long have you been doing that?
Is this some kind of trick?
Was that the end?
Who is paying for this?
Have I seen this before?
Did something change when I wasn't paying attention?
How do I make contact with someone in charge?
Is there something I'm forgetting?
What happens now?
Is this done yet?
How do I open this?
Does that mean anything?
Is someone standing behind me?
Are you listening?
Should I keep doing this?
Am I asleep?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Whether you like it or not
Many people ask me, "how do I become a member of the Kingdom Come Institute?" The more sophisticated ask how they may become a member of the set of the Kingdom Come Institute. The answer is simple: Although I cannot assign anyone membership of the set, I can provide this simple test to determine whether or not you are already a member without yet realizing it.
1. Am I going to die? Y/N
Welcome Aboard. As our newest member you are now Captain.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
1. Am I going to die? Y/N
Welcome Aboard. As our newest member you are now Captain.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
pathology: there are no ends there are only means
Where does it begin? Does it begin with the unwholesome realization that capitalism represents nothing more than the latest chapter in the timeless battle between the many and the few? Does it begin with the contemplation of television, a device designed to encourage normal people to exchange the way their time was spent (and in this day and age of synthetic value, increasingly the way their time will be spent) for pieces of a dream that was spent and useless a hundred years ago, all for the sake of the five percent of humanity who have the audacity to insist that it all belongs to them? Does it begin with the painful apprehension that there is a mighty schism in this world between ends and means, and ten thousand starving children and ten thousand smoke and pollution and toxic chemical choked cancer victims and ten thousand ignorant peasants who know nothing of the high powered politics that mean fire must rain from the sky and ten thousand wise fools like me who know something about the politics but are nonetheless powerless to do anything against them, and ten thousand and ten thousand more fall into that chasm on a nightly basis never to be heard from again? Does it begin with me writing or you reading or with all the reading and writing in the world? Perhaps it begins with just another grim late night (or very early morning) when the distractions I blame it all on must inevitably slip away one by one into the quiet into the dark and I am left alone with these thoughts that circle endlessly in this powerful impotent mind the Lord has cursed my path with.
There are no beginnings in this world, no places where you can place your hand and say "this is where it began." There is only the procession of the event that never ends, which is sometimes the dim doppelganger of an event that it seemed once was, which is sometimes the dim recollection of an event it seems might be. There is always a history, always a precedent, always a reason that never fully explains what's happening now. In short, and to quote my friend Most, "Everything has a pathology."
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
There are no beginnings in this world, no places where you can place your hand and say "this is where it began." There is only the procession of the event that never ends, which is sometimes the dim doppelganger of an event that it seemed once was, which is sometimes the dim recollection of an event it seems might be. There is always a history, always a precedent, always a reason that never fully explains what's happening now. In short, and to quote my friend Most, "Everything has a pathology."
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
im hacking your mind right now
What is the power of text? It's no simple question when you start to think about the biological realities of perception and cognition. When you read, the patterns of letters, more specifically the light that bounces off the pages of books or emanates from the textual substrate of electronic media, hits your eye, is focused through an ingenious jelly lens onto the highly specialized retinal receptor cells that transform that light, (that very same sunlight that came erupting out of the unimaginable blinding inferno of nuclear fusion that is the sun, not ten minutes before, right off that page after tangling briefly (we're not equipped to understand how briefly) with the outer electron configuration of the generally tree-manufactured cellulosic infrastructure. Or, for you electronic technoscentii out there, gets generated by firing streams of electrons at the inside surface of a vacuum tube. But screw the screen, man, that's just more tricks with static and magnets. That light hits those receptor cells in your retinas; they convert that light into a chain of chemical reactions that relay the visual impression of the patterns made by that light (that same light!) into the mass of gelatinous tissue in your skull that translates text to words and words to ideas: because of the energy in that light and because of the shapes of those words, those letters, that text, a change occurs in the mind. Text hacks the human mind. It can lie quiescent for a hundred years and still be good to go just by turning a page. It retains its power after its creator is dead. A particularly influential pattern of text may be reproduced endlessly at a tiny fraction of the cost of its original production (running a human being costs a lot of energy). With the advent of computerized information interchange the energy "cost" of reproducing text is ludicrously small. It would seem that the creation of a piece of text has a lasting value. What other fire can a human being light that lasts that long? Or at least has the potential to last that long... Sometimes I fear that text, the written word, is responsible for the downfall of the human race. When language becomes text it is rendered static and thus can become law. It is then hindered from changing appropriately to address the realities at hand. Nevertheless it is the highest technology human beings have achieved and I can't resist tinkering with it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Less is less but I like it like that
Constructing a visionary hypercontent experience
so far out of date but not so bad for 1999
There are a million ways to do anything. Here's how I did it.
Materials:
1. Macintosh LC III personal computer
2. basic word processing and FTP software (I use SimpleText and Fetch)
3. a domain (it helps to have fine friends like mine at gumption.com to host)
4. a dozen diskettes
5. a working knowledge of 5 html tags and their antecedents (have you started noticing the fives everywhere?): I use html, head, pre, body, and href.
6. a wild mind and a penchant for self-punishment
8. about a year of heavy thought and three years of heavy labor.
"Ain't we so bloody clever, then"
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
so far out of date but not so bad for 1999
There are a million ways to do anything. Here's how I did it.
Materials:
1. Macintosh LC III personal computer
2. basic word processing and FTP software (I use SimpleText and Fetch)
3. a domain (it helps to have fine friends like mine at gumption.com to host)
4. a dozen diskettes
5. a working knowledge of 5 html tags and their antecedents (have you started noticing the fives everywhere?): I use html, head, pre, body, and href.
6. a wild mind and a penchant for self-punishment
8. about a year of heavy thought and three years of heavy labor.
"Ain't we so bloody clever, then"
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
it's the next logical step from flat
Putting the sub back in suburbia.
I recently came across a diatribe someone published on the net that contained an argument for blowing up the suburbs. Now, while I like to think that every right thinking hip urban youth shares a healthy contempt for the city outside of the city and the general cowardice, conformity, and shallow addiction to having cake while eating cake, I think this kind of wild talk needs to be addressed. If we just start blowing up things we don't like, well, gosh- where's it all going to end? That's like, I don't know, Nazi talk or something. And anyway, someone's gotta work all those office jobs in the city. To me it represents an unfortunate trend in rebellious youth, of simply rushing to an unworkable and untenable extremist solution in lieu of really thinking the problem through.
Does anyone really support the mandatory modification of behaviour to fit a supposed societal ideal? Well... yes, of course. But not the kind of person who generally advocates blowing up suburbia. I say, you have to accept all forms of deviance, even one as wierd as suburban living. Our goal shouldn't be to eliminate the suburbs, since there is a constituency who just want to live that way, and like heroin users and dog fuckers, prohibition only leads to a nasty black market situation, another cash cow for violent criminals.
I advocate a simple solution: out of sight, out of mind. Why not put the suburbs underground? What these people want more than anything is to be seperated from the city entirely, and yet still have useful access to it. Subterranean suburban living is the ideal solution. Instead of driving through a wasteland of decaying strip malls, each suburbanite would simply exit the freeway and follow a circuitous route to their own personal secret underground access (think Batman teevee show). Imagine, a vast underground complex of fast food joints, sports bars, grot merchandise emporiums, dry cleaners and health clubs, and of course ugly and inneficient split level dwellings.
The trick, of course is getting them down there... Although one imagines if they experienced a sufficient amount of antisocial urban incursion, why, they might just head on down by themselves! Imagine a wave of skaters, goths, anachronistic punks (God knows they need something to keep themselves occupied), and whiny college protesters, descending into the wunderbread kingdom... Night after night after night after night...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I recently came across a diatribe someone published on the net that contained an argument for blowing up the suburbs. Now, while I like to think that every right thinking hip urban youth shares a healthy contempt for the city outside of the city and the general cowardice, conformity, and shallow addiction to having cake while eating cake, I think this kind of wild talk needs to be addressed. If we just start blowing up things we don't like, well, gosh- where's it all going to end? That's like, I don't know, Nazi talk or something. And anyway, someone's gotta work all those office jobs in the city. To me it represents an unfortunate trend in rebellious youth, of simply rushing to an unworkable and untenable extremist solution in lieu of really thinking the problem through.
Does anyone really support the mandatory modification of behaviour to fit a supposed societal ideal? Well... yes, of course. But not the kind of person who generally advocates blowing up suburbia. I say, you have to accept all forms of deviance, even one as wierd as suburban living. Our goal shouldn't be to eliminate the suburbs, since there is a constituency who just want to live that way, and like heroin users and dog fuckers, prohibition only leads to a nasty black market situation, another cash cow for violent criminals.
I advocate a simple solution: out of sight, out of mind. Why not put the suburbs underground? What these people want more than anything is to be seperated from the city entirely, and yet still have useful access to it. Subterranean suburban living is the ideal solution. Instead of driving through a wasteland of decaying strip malls, each suburbanite would simply exit the freeway and follow a circuitous route to their own personal secret underground access (think Batman teevee show). Imagine, a vast underground complex of fast food joints, sports bars, grot merchandise emporiums, dry cleaners and health clubs, and of course ugly and inneficient split level dwellings.
The trick, of course is getting them down there... Although one imagines if they experienced a sufficient amount of antisocial urban incursion, why, they might just head on down by themselves! Imagine a wave of skaters, goths, anachronistic punks (God knows they need something to keep themselves occupied), and whiny college protesters, descending into the wunderbread kingdom... Night after night after night after night...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
go hold down that dog while I fuck that pig
Speaking of Dog Fuckers...
I kind of like the old internet. Internet teevee is coming faster than anyone realizes, a horrible thing to contemplate. We're talking about twentyfour hour, totally self determined (sort of) access here. You wanna watch seventyfive straight hours of star treck reruns, well by god you will. I fully expect to see round the clock death sports in thirty years: this culture is on the skids, greased by the infernal pap of the magic box, and there just ain't no way we'll have the resistance to overcome the apotheosis of television refracted through the lens of the microcomputer.
And I suppose this nifty little kludgemachine, the internet, invented and constructed largely by crazy visionary malcontents like myself, will fall by the wayside with the advent of a truly commercialized network. The Network, no doubt, an unholy alliance of the mediaopolizers, with good ol' disney leading the rapacious pack.
And there won't be anymore crazy text side alleys, like the archive I stumbled accross the other day and came across a detailed manual on dog-fucking. Now, I'm sure this is all very evil and wrong, but I confess a soft spot in my heart for the demented intelligence that produced that bizzarity. What struck me most is that this person was not wasting any time apologizing or justifying or trying to dredge up examples of really super nutty behaviour as an excuse for dog fucking. Quite the opposite. The author positively advocated fucking your dog, he really insisted on it. He immediately put the nay-sayer on the defensive, insisting that non-fucking dog owners were denying their pets the sexual release their natures demanded. He was quite vehement. This is not to say that I am an advocate of dog fucking or that I really have any interest in it. His argument was passionate, but it failed to convince. Me, anyway. But only on the old internet, you know? In a lifetime of paying singular attention to the various emergences of text in my world, from breakfast cereal boxes to library books to pamphlets I've found on the street, I never in hell came across anything quite like that. It goes without saying that on disnetwork inkorp, this sort of thing just simply won't be allowed.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I kind of like the old internet. Internet teevee is coming faster than anyone realizes, a horrible thing to contemplate. We're talking about twentyfour hour, totally self determined (sort of) access here. You wanna watch seventyfive straight hours of star treck reruns, well by god you will. I fully expect to see round the clock death sports in thirty years: this culture is on the skids, greased by the infernal pap of the magic box, and there just ain't no way we'll have the resistance to overcome the apotheosis of television refracted through the lens of the microcomputer.
And I suppose this nifty little kludgemachine, the internet, invented and constructed largely by crazy visionary malcontents like myself, will fall by the wayside with the advent of a truly commercialized network. The Network, no doubt, an unholy alliance of the mediaopolizers, with good ol' disney leading the rapacious pack.
And there won't be anymore crazy text side alleys, like the archive I stumbled accross the other day and came across a detailed manual on dog-fucking. Now, I'm sure this is all very evil and wrong, but I confess a soft spot in my heart for the demented intelligence that produced that bizzarity. What struck me most is that this person was not wasting any time apologizing or justifying or trying to dredge up examples of really super nutty behaviour as an excuse for dog fucking. Quite the opposite. The author positively advocated fucking your dog, he really insisted on it. He immediately put the nay-sayer on the defensive, insisting that non-fucking dog owners were denying their pets the sexual release their natures demanded. He was quite vehement. This is not to say that I am an advocate of dog fucking or that I really have any interest in it. His argument was passionate, but it failed to convince. Me, anyway. But only on the old internet, you know? In a lifetime of paying singular attention to the various emergences of text in my world, from breakfast cereal boxes to library books to pamphlets I've found on the street, I never in hell came across anything quite like that. It goes without saying that on disnetwork inkorp, this sort of thing just simply won't be allowed.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a pointless observation
Have you noticed the way that eighty-five percent of us make the goods, purchase the goods, and elect (or more often than not, passively observe the election of) the officials entrusted with the oversight of the manufacture and distributin of goods (the business of america, good old Ronald Reagan pointed out, is business)? And yet who feels like they're in control? Who's in charge at your job: you or your bosses? Are your politicians, even the ones you voted for, doing what you hoped they would? Do you control the quality of the goods you get? Do you ever feel fucked over by a transaction you're involved in? Are you satisfied with the means of recourse you are supplied with when this situation occurs? How much control do you feel like you have on interest rates? How much control do you exert over the stock market? If you've ever been layed off, chances are you were sacrificed on the altar of Shareholder Value. Do you have any idea what that means? Nearly every time politicians propose a tax cut, they try to sneak a capital gains cut proposal in too. Have you ever experienced a "capital gain?" Do you know what a capital gain is?
I'm sorry, it's pointless to go on, but if you want to paint yourself a revolutionary, you better get used to this sad rap. Y'all are so damn stupid it just makes my head spin.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I'm sorry, it's pointless to go on, but if you want to paint yourself a revolutionary, you better get used to this sad rap. Y'all are so damn stupid it just makes my head spin.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
a radical proposal
So there it is again. As a failed (or, from another point of view, liberated) chemist, I couldn't help but take notice of the latest killing spree in Atlanta. What's the secret with these guys? 'Cause it's always the same. Kill a bunch of people who have fuck all to do with your problems, then kill yourself. Evil or mad? Who knows. You'd have to be mad, you'd think, to want to be immortalized in history as a cowardly asshole. Or maybe evil enough not to care...
Listen, if you're feeling up against it, why not do everybody a favor and just kill yourself? I mean, seriously, what difference does it make to you? You're done, game over. You're gonna end up killing yourself, they always do. Why not skip the middlemen? And on the off chance that Somebody's running this whole sad show, I'd have to call it a decent bet on a loophole around that ol' suicide damnation problem.
"Well hell. You did kill yourself... But I see here that you were about to go on a killing spree! Ah, what the hell. Get on in there, have some fun. No, seriously, go ahead. You're due."
I guess it's what I would do... But then, that's probably why I'm not out killin'.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Listen, if you're feeling up against it, why not do everybody a favor and just kill yourself? I mean, seriously, what difference does it make to you? You're done, game over. You're gonna end up killing yourself, they always do. Why not skip the middlemen? And on the off chance that Somebody's running this whole sad show, I'd have to call it a decent bet on a loophole around that ol' suicide damnation problem.
"Well hell. You did kill yourself... But I see here that you were about to go on a killing spree! Ah, what the hell. Get on in there, have some fun. No, seriously, go ahead. You're due."
I guess it's what I would do... But then, that's probably why I'm not out killin'.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
One shock of recognition
The lesson is discipline in the face of no reward.
The actions are simple but the consequences are uncertain. The question, what then shall I gain, puts the action in peril, because the principle of the action is the abandonment of the gaining idea and the severance of attachments. There is nothing to be gained and likewise there is nothing to be lost. When this action, in any circumstance, is carried out for the first time, there is an enourmous show of seeming consequence: anxiety, anger, a sense of loss of self. Carried through, there is the sense of meaninglessness or senselessness: the action carries no gain or reward and so seems without point. Frustration and disillusionment follow. Carrying the action through these irrational deceptions is the final enactment of discipline: once undertaken, an understanding develops that the action proceeds without gain, justification, attachment, or any outside meaning: this is the proof of the action, even when it seems to be its condemnation.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
The actions are simple but the consequences are uncertain. The question, what then shall I gain, puts the action in peril, because the principle of the action is the abandonment of the gaining idea and the severance of attachments. There is nothing to be gained and likewise there is nothing to be lost. When this action, in any circumstance, is carried out for the first time, there is an enourmous show of seeming consequence: anxiety, anger, a sense of loss of self. Carried through, there is the sense of meaninglessness or senselessness: the action carries no gain or reward and so seems without point. Frustration and disillusionment follow. Carrying the action through these irrational deceptions is the final enactment of discipline: once undertaken, an understanding develops that the action proceeds without gain, justification, attachment, or any outside meaning: this is the proof of the action, even when it seems to be its condemnation.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
They changed the questions
With knowledge comes the inexorable sensation of falling behind. You can learn a lot but the first thing you learn is how much more there is to know, and how much more than that that is as yet unknown and so potentially unknowable. Learn about sleep and you learn that your whole life you've been falling behind, building a debt that in the end can only be cancelled by the big sleep. Learn about Motzart and find out how far behind your genius is already.
And so it goes. Learning is a fool's game. Lucky are the masses toiling fruitlessly in the happy fields of their ignorance.
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And so it goes. Learning is a fool's game. Lucky are the masses toiling fruitlessly in the happy fields of their ignorance.
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the briefest possible moment of time passes unnoticed as if in a dream
Despite some rather obvious ommissions (it really is a rather lean overview) it's done which at the moment is what I care about. C'est la vie.
And other cliches on a similar vein
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
And other cliches on a similar vein
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
living christ
86/101
Hey living Bhudda
Where are you at
won't you give me audience
you're one elusive cat
If I were a tubmaker
at least I'd make some sense
have a reason to hang around
on this side of the fence
I need a mentor
to lead me on the path
I need some guidance
and an abacus to do the math
I need a metronome
to keep a steady beat
I need a stiff one now
to keep me on my feet
hey living Bhudda
try and help me out
I really want to learn the way
to live beyond my doubt
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Hey living Bhudda
Where are you at
won't you give me audience
you're one elusive cat
If I were a tubmaker
at least I'd make some sense
have a reason to hang around
on this side of the fence
I need a mentor
to lead me on the path
I need some guidance
and an abacus to do the math
I need a metronome
to keep a steady beat
I need a stiff one now
to keep me on my feet
hey living Bhudda
try and help me out
I really want to learn the way
to live beyond my doubt
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
fpc
Nothing I can promise. I suppose. Nothing I can say. It's been too long, I've lost faith.
God. The waters are too deep, too vast. I got so lost, I'm floating...
Bullshit, fucking poetic crap!
Fuck this, oh, FUCK this. This goddamn book of lies. Everything but what I am, everything but what AM I? Everytime I look, it's never sure. I'm such a fuck up, Lord.
I'm tired of writing this I'm so tired of not saying anything new. Ought to burn it all... The end of all illusions... Hardly... Nice wish, Dorkboy.
Losercore.
This isn't going much anywhere, now IS it? Fuck.
Just been a shitty fucking new life so far.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
God. The waters are too deep, too vast. I got so lost, I'm floating...
Bullshit, fucking poetic crap!
Fuck this, oh, FUCK this. This goddamn book of lies. Everything but what I am, everything but what AM I? Everytime I look, it's never sure. I'm such a fuck up, Lord.
I'm tired of writing this I'm so tired of not saying anything new. Ought to burn it all... The end of all illusions... Hardly... Nice wish, Dorkboy.
Losercore.
This isn't going much anywhere, now IS it? Fuck.
Just been a shitty fucking new life so far.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
finding them is a scavenger hunt of sorts
Me. Yeah, Me, being the subject of this ongoing monologue, extensively littered with interesting quotes from better authors.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Midnight Excursion
94/101
Daytime the extended version
Me still pondering the midnight excursion
station to station day to day
channel to channel hell to pay
when it's all done and it doesn't matter
anymore just more dust to scatter
the answer is hidden in a recursion
M.C. Escher version of a midnight excursion
If the master catches me scaling the wall
I'll never go out at night again at all
No more midnight excursions of pleasure jaunts
No more to revisit these old haunts
Rewriting the aspect in new designs
rereading the roles the sun assigns
Living in the day in the noontime sun
So this excursion day version begun
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Daytime the extended version
Me still pondering the midnight excursion
station to station day to day
channel to channel hell to pay
when it's all done and it doesn't matter
anymore just more dust to scatter
the answer is hidden in a recursion
M.C. Escher version of a midnight excursion
If the master catches me scaling the wall
I'll never go out at night again at all
No more midnight excursions of pleasure jaunts
No more to revisit these old haunts
Rewriting the aspect in new designs
rereading the roles the sun assigns
Living in the day in the noontime sun
So this excursion day version begun
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
miracle
80/101
It's a miracle I'm breathing
That I'll probably survive
through to the next tomorrow
It's a miracle I'm still alive
I'm eating when I'm hungry
I'm sleeping when I'm tired
I'm writing every chance I get
Look at the strange procession I've sired
look at this foolish rambling mess
it's a miracle heaven knows
it's a miracle I'm still around
it's a miracle my eyes can close
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
It's a miracle I'm breathing
That I'll probably survive
through to the next tomorrow
It's a miracle I'm still alive
I'm eating when I'm hungry
I'm sleeping when I'm tired
I'm writing every chance I get
Look at the strange procession I've sired
look at this foolish rambling mess
it's a miracle heaven knows
it's a miracle I'm still around
it's a miracle my eyes can close
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
mom
And I came back and here I am.
"Cleared up," I said to Mom. "You can see the stars."
"Well, I thought it was, before," she said. "You just have to wait - it takes time."
Yeah
"I hope it lasts a while this time" she said.
"So do I," I replied.
And the thing is - I don't feel any different. I feel just the same. That's all I can say, there's no but. I feel just the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
"Cleared up," I said to Mom. "You can see the stars."
"Well, I thought it was, before," she said. "You just have to wait - it takes time."
Yeah
"I hope it lasts a while this time" she said.
"So do I," I replied.
And the thing is - I don't feel any different. I feel just the same. That's all I can say, there's no but. I feel just the same.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
bred in the bone and then some
There is a moral to this madness. Grand definitions spawn lack of meaning, grand viewpoints breed relative minisculity, and over-examination breeds insanity.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Can hearing it later change someone's mind?
Consider this: if we attempt, having had no experience of it, to cultivate a plant, it is likely we will fail. At the least we will fail to make the most of what the plant could be. If we then read a book on gardening and make the attempt a second time, we may still to some degree fail but we will fail more intelligently and the knowledge contained in the text of the book will change our behavior in cultivation. What happened there? We uploaded some software. By mulling over pages of ten thousands of black marks, each bearing only the most minimal meaning as a phonetic building block, we have realigned our neural networks in a manner that causes our behavior to change. More importantly, it causes or catalyzes us to choose to change our behaviour, if you're still optimistic enough to believe we have free will. I think that's crazy: it blows my mind. It gets wiggier when you bring the electronic media into the picture: now this information is stored in arcane codes deluxe on a sea of silicon and wierd trace elements and copper printed green circuitboard, (just what the hell is that green board made of?); it exists as a billion billion series of quantum electron states, tricky and bewildering things if you know anything about quantum mechanics and the electron, believe you me. If text has the capacity to alter the human mind and if the human mind has the ability to alter physical reality (as everyone still optimistic enough to believe in free will believes it does, whether they realize it or not), then what sort of potential energy does this information contain? What is its form? Does it have anything to do with the configurations of the electrons marking places on the big boards in that computer off somewhere in my friends' house? Obviously the patterns of those electrons are relevant as they are specific to a particular piece of text (or in the case of my writings generally a peculiar piece of text); nonetheless we cannot begin to relate the energy represented in a piece of text as a motivator of change to the rather better understood phenomenon of electrons and silicon and germanium and other wierd transition metals and semiconductors and how they interact. They are obviously connected but we cannot sensibly relate them. Begging the question: how does the information retain its meaning when noone is looking at it? It's just hanging out there in "cyberspace," unobserved (and so in some quantum questioners' minds in a highly ambiguous state of being)... Where is the meaning? It's not in my mind anymore, at least not in a form I could readily communicate. It's not yet in your mind. But it's out there... Behaving like perfectly normal electrons. Not to be cliche but if the tree falls in the forest...
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
tu chingada madre
I have seen the problem addressed by the usual divisions, the material and the living and the sentient and the divine. Nomenclature and classification run into the usual problems, to perfectly describe reality there is no recourse but to treat each individual as the special case, but at this extreme the utility of of the system comes into question. Meanwhile down the paths of futility forged daily by the materialist reductionists, it is all reduced to some single principle, there is no division between the quick and the dead. We can dismiss this view as being self-evidently false, but viruses and even wierder beasts like prions call it into question. So it remains: might the earth be an organism?
I say why not. There's no point trying to apply the principles of conventional species centric evolutionary biology in any but the vaguest sense. Nomenclature is no use: in this case we're compelled to address the single individual because as yet it's all we've got to study. There follows the sticky question of whether or not the ability to reproduce (at least in theory) is a prerequisite to the definition. It's a valid point, considering that reproduction is sufficiently basic function of the living that we allow viruses and prions and the rest to come under consideration solely on the basis of their prodigous abilities for self-replication. I think that, in theory at least, a planet could reproduce, using it's sentient species as the germ cells... It could probably happen with our planet if we weren't all such a bunch of selfish, troublesome, violent, hateful, ignorant, short-sighted, small-minded, lazy and uninvolved assholes.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I say why not. There's no point trying to apply the principles of conventional species centric evolutionary biology in any but the vaguest sense. Nomenclature is no use: in this case we're compelled to address the single individual because as yet it's all we've got to study. There follows the sticky question of whether or not the ability to reproduce (at least in theory) is a prerequisite to the definition. It's a valid point, considering that reproduction is sufficiently basic function of the living that we allow viruses and prions and the rest to come under consideration solely on the basis of their prodigous abilities for self-replication. I think that, in theory at least, a planet could reproduce, using it's sentient species as the germ cells... It could probably happen with our planet if we weren't all such a bunch of selfish, troublesome, violent, hateful, ignorant, short-sighted, small-minded, lazy and uninvolved assholes.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
the bastards that control our lives
I get asked this a lot: who is this They, the mysterious They who hike taxes, sell build insane freeways, buzz my home in night-silent black helicopters. We all talk about the they, but when most people ask it's always as if it were a rhetorical question. The implication is that there isn't an answer and that noone's really in charge, noone's really to blame. I'm not like most people. I'm referring to someone specific: They are responsible and they are to blame.
This is not about the Antichrist, the Beast of Revelation (which some say, will come in the form of "an Amazing Super Computer Robot"), Atlanteans, Illuminati, Knights Templar or an incredible race of Super Salamanders that dwell in the indescribable heat and pressure of the Earth's molten core. It's not even about more garden variety conspiracies of government spooks and chemical magnates meeting in darkened rooms to plan the assasination of JFK Jr. (you think that little plane went down by accident?)
"They" are, quite simply, the majority shareholders in the world markets. There is nothing secret or mysterious about Them. Their names are public knowledge and much bandied about, likewise Their tactics. In a recent article about layoffs in the chemical industry, I heard Their primary tactic referred to as the "Shareholder Religeon," which I thought was a very appropriate phrase. The question of money versus value versus wealth is another file's tale, but the name of the game and the god of the religeon is wealth. Because shareholders control corporations, all corporate actions are meant to result in shareholder wealth. When a business talks about corporate citizenship or customer or employee satisfaction, they're full of shit. It's all lies. Sometimes these things occur, but only as a means to an end. The sole purpose of business on the cusp of the twenty-first century is to see Trickle Down Economics actualized: their job is to make sure that by the time it gets Down to us, it's just a Trickle. That's what profit means. The whole point of a profit motive is that you extract the greatest possible value for the cheapest possible product.
Sure, they buy off politicians, they own the media, they probably occasionally kill enemies or perceived enemies. But for the most part what they do is right out in plain sight, unambiguous financial transactions. They do not control the media through some secret shadowy conspiracy where Tom Brokaw gets encrypted orders through a pneumatic tube that connects Zurich to the bathroom in his dressing room. They control the media by simply owning it. They don't care how their posessions behave, good or ill, as long as they practice and follow the Shareholder Religeon. Once the End is established, They trust the Means to take care of themselves. And they do, they do.
And there aren't a whole hell of a lot of Them. Check Forbes and you'll see Them nicely listed. Nothing clandestine about that: their best trick is getting half of us to believe that some crazy shadow conspiracy is running things, while the rest assume that noone is running things at all.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
This is not about the Antichrist, the Beast of Revelation (which some say, will come in the form of "an Amazing Super Computer Robot"), Atlanteans, Illuminati, Knights Templar or an incredible race of Super Salamanders that dwell in the indescribable heat and pressure of the Earth's molten core. It's not even about more garden variety conspiracies of government spooks and chemical magnates meeting in darkened rooms to plan the assasination of JFK Jr. (you think that little plane went down by accident?)
"They" are, quite simply, the majority shareholders in the world markets. There is nothing secret or mysterious about Them. Their names are public knowledge and much bandied about, likewise Their tactics. In a recent article about layoffs in the chemical industry, I heard Their primary tactic referred to as the "Shareholder Religeon," which I thought was a very appropriate phrase. The question of money versus value versus wealth is another file's tale, but the name of the game and the god of the religeon is wealth. Because shareholders control corporations, all corporate actions are meant to result in shareholder wealth. When a business talks about corporate citizenship or customer or employee satisfaction, they're full of shit. It's all lies. Sometimes these things occur, but only as a means to an end. The sole purpose of business on the cusp of the twenty-first century is to see Trickle Down Economics actualized: their job is to make sure that by the time it gets Down to us, it's just a Trickle. That's what profit means. The whole point of a profit motive is that you extract the greatest possible value for the cheapest possible product.
Sure, they buy off politicians, they own the media, they probably occasionally kill enemies or perceived enemies. But for the most part what they do is right out in plain sight, unambiguous financial transactions. They do not control the media through some secret shadowy conspiracy where Tom Brokaw gets encrypted orders through a pneumatic tube that connects Zurich to the bathroom in his dressing room. They control the media by simply owning it. They don't care how their posessions behave, good or ill, as long as they practice and follow the Shareholder Religeon. Once the End is established, They trust the Means to take care of themselves. And they do, they do.
And there aren't a whole hell of a lot of Them. Check Forbes and you'll see Them nicely listed. Nothing clandestine about that: their best trick is getting half of us to believe that some crazy shadow conspiracy is running things, while the rest assume that noone is running things at all.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
Filed under shameless self-promotion
Once I realized that I had no place, part or parcel in this culture, this society, this dialectic of dismal ages, it all became so much easier. The degree to which I have tried to bend my mind down to the level of ordinary human endeavor is precisely the degree to which I have induced madness, trembling, fear and loathing, mania, consternation, foul temper, excess of bilious humors, blind rage and not a little melancholia in my abused mind. I just wasn't made for this world and that's not the half of it.
I have thrown down all the old paradigms like so many dice, exited the system entirely and declared a new day, a new taste, a crystal perfect uplink to the Big Sound that informs all. I am a visionary genius, a new order of mind, a harbinger of the Second Organization. It's all here, it's all real, it's all happening right now and you are part of it for as long as you choose to bask in the solar wind of my superior semantic epistemology or until you figure it out yourself and become one with the rest of it.
There's no more time for trying to decide what everyone else should be doing, so that your imagined perfect world could finally be actualized. Either that world is in you or it's nowhere and at any given moment what choice do you have but to choose which of those two positions you choose to take. My only commandment is Go Forth. I follow my light, the consequences are not my concern. The future is not mine to see.
Are one million fellow Visionaries waiting to be born from the crucible of Text?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
I have thrown down all the old paradigms like so many dice, exited the system entirely and declared a new day, a new taste, a crystal perfect uplink to the Big Sound that informs all. I am a visionary genius, a new order of mind, a harbinger of the Second Organization. It's all here, it's all real, it's all happening right now and you are part of it for as long as you choose to bask in the solar wind of my superior semantic epistemology or until you figure it out yourself and become one with the rest of it.
There's no more time for trying to decide what everyone else should be doing, so that your imagined perfect world could finally be actualized. Either that world is in you or it's nowhere and at any given moment what choice do you have but to choose which of those two positions you choose to take. My only commandment is Go Forth. I follow my light, the consequences are not my concern. The future is not mine to see.
Are one million fellow Visionaries waiting to be born from the crucible of Text?
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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