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.

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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

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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.

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Be Silent

71/101

Hush
Silent
Do not say a word
hush
be silent
do not say one word
not even
this
this
this
this
this
this
this
this
this.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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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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?

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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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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

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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.

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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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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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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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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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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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hour twentyseven on the graveyard shift

despite my oft-protested will to live, I seem to be trying to kill myself.

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maybe there's a tiny little machine inside the ghost

I am an automoton, a machine. My function is to feel pain.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).
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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?

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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"

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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'.

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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.

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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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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Revolutionary Propaganda for Children

Once upon a time there was an old white man named Mr. Crankypants. He ruled of a household of 93 stupid children and one smart one. Mr. Crankypants was very selfish and cruel. Whenever the children baked a loaf of bread, he would break off one end for all of them to fight over and keep most of the loaf for himself. If one of them, through working diligently, managed to earn a dollar, Mr. Crankypants would steal it and trhow a dime and a nickel among his many charges. Despite this, he would sigh endlessly at the trouble his children caused him, even though they did all the work and made all the money. Mr. Crankypants would complain loudly that he had to lend them back the money he had stolen from them so they could get clothes and shoes to keep working.

As if to make things worse, Mr. Crankypants coddled and pampered a dozen or twenty of his servants, giving them the least odious tasks and yet lavishing them with gifts... though admittedly most of the gifts were worthless trinkets. He trusted these children to stake a claim on their privileges when the rest of the children started to exhibit the signs of needing some skull-cracking.

Then the smart child finally realized that Mr. Crankypants didn't actually have any legal claim on any of the children. Each was an orphan, free to live as they wanted. So he spoke to all the stupid children and managed to convince the little idiots that THEY SHOULD VOTE THIRD PARTY FOR EVERY RACE IN THE 2000 ELECTIONS SO AS NOT TO KEEP THE SAME STATUS QUO RUNNING DOGS SQUEEZING US ON BEHALF OF THE RICH FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS.

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one world...

It would be funny if, as Christmas approached, a bunch of people swapped their credit cards around, went on a big Christmas shopping spree, and then reported their own cards stolen and just made the banks swallow it. As long as you stay away from stores with cameras you've pretty much got it made. Oh, and don't do too good a job forging the signature. If you're a real nut, I think signing a similar name in a decent handwriting match is a nice flair. Did you realize that Visa doesn't even its vendors to ask for ID? That's what interchange income - the tax such financiers have imposed on the retail structure in the form of a billed percentage of transactions - is for. Five days and then you tell them you lost the card and you aren't sure where or when. I bring this up only in that whereas most revolutionary calls to action insist that a great number must rise up for the cause, this kind of thing works best if only a few people do it at once. For those of you who get some kind of creepy moral frisson, try to remember that the corporate motto of Visa is "One World, One Currency: Visa." Honestly, who's side do you think they're on?

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we got problems

The techniques of making a large problem from a small one are simple and ancient, yet they may take a lifetime to master. Luckily there are six billion of us milling around this shrinking ball, all with exactly one lifetime to burn. Consider the depths of the shit we're going to be in this time next century.

Almost universally, the first step is to ignore the small problem. The smaller the problem is, the easier it is to ignore. Certainly there are cases in which premature panic and overcompensation are called for. But when in doubt, wait it out. Almost any small problem worth developing will certainly grow to respectable dimensions if just given some peace and quiet.

Now, the second step is the one everyone disagrees on. For my money, you can't beat spending phase two assigning blame. You can call it ownership or responsibility if you're that kind of perverse mind. Passing the buck feeds the problem and resentment simultaneously. It's a win win situation.

Now it's time for step three, misinterpreting the problem. Here you have some choices, and there's no easy way to learn what kinds of problems respond best to what kind of treatment. You can pretend it's still a small problem, persistent but nonetheless subject to any number of quick fixes. You can then put these off because they're really so simple. You can blow it way out of proportion, and detour a lot of resources you really can't afford into a overly complicated solution.

Now it comes to whether to stick doggedly to a clearly failing solution or change tactics so rapidly that there's no chance of judging the efficacy of any one. If the problem has grown beyond expectations it might already be time to call it self sustaining and let it go.

How to decide? Well, I say it's like golf. They're all good clubs, they'll all whack the ball around. The best way to learn the individual strengths of the components is to head to the range and hit some balls. They're all good techniques. Start ignoring all your problems right now, and see what develops.

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an authentic warrior kicks ass

In a world where knowledge is the only source of authentic power, intellectual property is the ultimate act of theft. So it is of the first importance to pay close attention to every loophole and scam in the grey sea of copyright protection.

Here's a simple one: damn near every book published in America gives the reader explicit permission to excerpt at will as long as the excerpt occurs in the context of a review of the work cited. That's a pretty bad presentation of copyright law, but the following quotes are still legal.

Consider the following excerpt from Carlos Castaneda's semina work, The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge:

" 'Are you angry at me, don Juan?' I asked when he returned. He seemed surprised at my question.
" 'No! I'm never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don't feel that way any longer.' "

Copyright 1968, by the Regents of the University of California Press.

Consider this, from a much later book by Castaneda: The Power of Silence: Further Lessons of don Juan:

" 'The modality of time is the precise bundle of the energy fields being perceived,' [don Juan] answered."

Copyright 1987 by Carlos Castaneda

Years ago, when I expressed admiration for the former book, some people felt a great need to disabuse me of my naivete and inform me that Castenada was just a shyster who made the whole thing, or at least most of it, up. I already knew this, and I always told people that they didn't understand the book if they thought that was important. The line from the second book cited, nineteen years down the line from whatever decisions led Castaneda down the path he took, is from page two of the introduction, which is exactly how far I got before I had to put that worthless piece of crap down and vow never again. I bought the first don Juan book at my favorite used book store for one dollar a couple of years ago and I do believe I've filled my essential Castaneda shelf with that single purchase. I do not have room in my head for dialogues on the spirit that start with phrases like the modality of time. I'm trying to discover something in this life.

Mr. Castaneda? Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Mr. Castaneda, it's time to go out into the desert and eat a whole bunch of peyote and try to figure out at what point in your life you went terribly, terribly wrong and started retching out this odious new-age pablum. Jesus, as if the world wasn't complicated enough, without this sort of money-making shyster rip-off being sold to unsuspecting tourists on the weird side of the street. Repent, Mr. Castaneda, repent!

There, my duty done for another day. I don't even know if the man is alive. I don't pay very much attention to the news. Someone at work had to tell me that Captain Kangaroo was dead. It ruined my day.

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censored for your pleasure

I have a job: eight hours of my day are dedicated to being a wage slave. Now, I like my job, and the people I work with, and I like to think that the work I do has a larger societal value. But a wage slave is what I am. This is because I do not posess an ownership stake in my business. I work for CENSORED.

CENSORED recently published a typically cranky salvo against CENSORED. One of his key arguments was that CENSORED was created in a time of fear of a monopolistic control of television by the major networks. He put forth that in this era of one hundred fifty television channels, this was no longer a justifiable concern.

You know, I'm CENSORED astonished at the vileness and fantastical filth that continually spews out of the wealth class controlled media engines of this wealth class controlled nation. CENSORED should take a good look at his corrupted visage in the bathroom mirror when he gets up in the morning and then CENSORED himself in the CENSORED. Are you people insane? Are you telling me you honestly can't see what's going on? Our entire main stream media, the whole enchilada, is owned by a handful of corporate players. This is television, radio, movies, music and books. Innumerable tie-ins. If anything, the media universe is more exclusive and incestuous than ever. All these old white men, do you dig? It's just your typical inbred monoculture. Which perhaps explains why it is so sick, sick, sick and wrong. Now the internet biggies, CENSORED and CENSORED and CENSORED and the portal people, CENSORED and CENSORED, are cozying up to the networks, it's CENSORED and you handle the content, boys, we'll handle the access and we'll all whistle a merry tune forevermore. This is Spider Mating Season we're observing, and the only question is who's going to eat who. They're sizing each other up, believe me, and making dark plans in their dark souls. If we allow this to happen, this unholy alliance of the information machines and the entertainment, that's it. We're done. Too much economic power in one place. Listen, antitrust laws exist not because we're so crazy about fairness in the free market. They exist because a company that gets big enough is a threat to liberty.

So, briefly, CENSORED can CENSORED his CENSORED CENSORED. CENSORED is a temple prostitute for the religeon of shareholder value, and he pays fully for his whorish perversions, I have no doubt. Nevertheless, it is the will of the people: you get what you buy. I, meanwhile, will do my work, keep my home, vote the responsible third party and support CENSORED privately as well as in my employment. I kind of like there being a different voice in the fray from time to time.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Mother

15/101

I don't care if people laugh
and whisper to each other
I don't care what people say
I'm a mama's boy
I'll always love my mother
I love all my family dear
Dad and sister and my brother
I know where I came from
I'm a mama's boy
I'll always love my mother
This life gives you just one chance
you cannot buy another
I know where my heart belongs
I'm a mama's boy
I'll always love my mother

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

The song it sang to me

The Big Song is calling to me, telling me to seek it, to strive for it, whispering strange and conflicting messages in my ear. It tells me to embrace the big all. Worry not for tomorrow, and do not worry what ye shall eat and what ye shall drink and wherefor thou shalt be clothed...

Oye. All the magic and mayhem all around, all the time. And me, I DON'T know, not to beat the same old saw. But that's what I'm doing. Lacking guidance, I pound on my rusty ol' saw with a rubber mallet, trying to get a clear tone. Oh, lyrical, rhapsodic: Just so. Perfect example.

It just makes me want to scream, sometimes. But if you could see me now, flat on my back in bed, everything but my arm immobile, my aperature making this messy, just legible tumble of marks pass for some semblance of of meaning, and it does, I think. My face is mild, my eyes impassive, merely tracking the page, and this is what I'm doing... I don't know, man, is this the way? What's the WAY, I mean, what is my function, my calling, my action, right NOW.

So I asked myself what must be an old question... If the world were about to end, right NOW...

What would I do?

And I pondered it... Very difficult question. If I had one action left... Should I finish this? Wake up Jennifer? have a last cigarette...

I don't know what I would do, and that doesn't really surprise me, because of course the question I'm REALLY asking is what I SHOULD do and there's no fuckin' answer for that. People couldn't tell you what they were going to eat for breakfast tomorrow... Most probably couldn't say what they had today (I'm one of the rare exceptions, I can tell you both: cigarette).

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

reading between the lines

Don't matter, you can read between all the lines and fill in the blanks. Don't matter that nothing happened. Nothin' ever happens. For the best I suppose, realizing with a kind of grim surmise that I am in no state to respond to any kind of romantic notion, so starved am I by solitude that I'd fall for just about anyone just to not spend this night alone... But that you can't buy, no... You can buy an image, or a voice, or a body for an hour or two... But you can't buy the night. Not for the kind of money I've got. That you have to earn. And I don't have the goods.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

No attachment to dust

77/101

There is nothing that will last
there is nothing that I must
No moon in the water
no attachment to dust
There is no one I'm afraid of
There is no one that I trust
I see nothing that's alarming
In a handful if dust
All my treasure has to perish
All will fall to moth and rust
I live without assumptions
or attachments to dust

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Femiwhatsis

(The Devil demon of mine strife und woe tries to get me to play video games by modulating the dull sounds of evening television through ceilings and possibly walls. On resistance it settled on making me think about how liberals could secretly take on society. Men should be meeting right now in secret rooms, and they are, god knows, though alarmingly few of these characters are what seem to bear the slightest resemblence to what a man would call the good guys. And I can't even remember which of my brackets I've failed to close and this all came out of some mental tinkering with a quasi-feminist revisionist masculinist meta-commentary.

My my.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Prior to the redacted confessional

Then I see some sixty year old guy wiping tables in Burger King and think about the reversals of fortune that wait out there for you, think about the way anything can go sour, or right, for reasons just and reasons meaningless. Wonder what I deserve and can't see meaning in the question. Wonder what I want, what I need, most of all what I'll get.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

no water, no moon

29/101

No water, no moon
No water, no moon
at last I understand
not one minute too soon
no more water in the pail
no more moon in the water
I've uncovered my fate
after years that I sought her
after years on the search
after years on the path
there are waves in the water
and moonlight in the bath
there is light in the water
and light in my eyes
there is light everywhere
it should come as no surprise
and the light spills down
from a bamboo spoon
no water, no moon
no water, no moon

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

Obedience

4/101

Called by anger called by dismay
called to the left side watch me obey
called by anguish called by pain
called to the right side see what you gain
called to obedience and discipline
called to the carpet ready to begin
called to gentleness meek as a lamb
I guess I'm finding out what kind I am
I don't mind the sleeplessness or the hurt
I'm rising to enlightenment just keep on your shirt
obedience is hard for me I'm trying hard to change
Guess that I'll just have to wait and see what you arrange
Call me to sit and learn I'll curl up at your feet
the vinegar is bitter but the lotus flower's sweet
the simple truth is there's a truth you can't write down
if you trace it in the air you get to wear the Buddha gown

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.

stoned to the bone

Hmm... OK, back in High School, it used to be when I was baked I'd get this dreadfullest feeling. It wasn't an isolated incident, OK, it was relatively real, as in, it happened often. Very basically, I'd be stuck in school, and I would get tunes locked in my head, and y'know I'd feel so good but there was just this harshest edge, to be free - out, cruising along in a car, smoking, listening to real music. Freedom dreams, pot dreams, nothing special. Now that feeling's back, but I'm not stoned - I'm trapped in another cycle, though. I've got enough freedom, as much as I want, but I'm afraid to appropriate it. School locked me in, it was OK to want out, but now it's my life that's got me locked in, and that's not all right...

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.