12/30/05

The Ground of Being















This is actually Eureka Springs, the Nelson of Arkansas, where we stayed for a couple of days. And that is my stunning girlfriend who helps keep me sane, while maintaining just the right dose of madness.

Cubic Rubric

I'm staring at the screen again. And what's so wrong with that?
Why can't I learn to enjoy the void?

I used to have no problem with television. Now when I do allow myself near the box, it's an uneasy alliance. I watched more Larry Sanders tonight. It filled me, but this worries me because I don't usually need filling. To resort to my DVDs raises alarms or at least it would if I could muster up enough serotonin to flood a certain alarmist brainlobe. No, there's some starving regions up in me cortex, maddam. Speculate on the cause if you want, strip me to my synapses and put me on a poster. I'm pathetically apathetic tonight.

Got no time for civilization tonight.
And civilization's got no time for me.

"It's my party and I'll die if I want to" said the skeleton on the poster - guidance councilors in junior high. I never got high in junior high.

Now I don't care, about wrong or right, stoned or sober. And yet my nervous system isn't dullened and I feel the weight of living. But excessive analysis robs me of my allotted apathy, I wasted currency in self-imposed profundity.

I can't be bothered, to write my novel, to write my songs. I can almost be bothered to clean up. I will be bothered to go to work in three hours. I will.

The snow is so paltry this greenhouse winter, and yet it keeps me from taking my spirit walk, what would have been a writing walk back when... back when I was far stupider than now, and happier. Also more intellectually potent because I could focus – stupidity can be a problem solving aid – when you’re a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I was more useful then - I could have been reined in, trained in mathematics, my energy could have served something, I could have 3d rendered, I could have wrested power away from the plutocrat conspirators and designed the space colonies. I could have realized McKenna's dream of allowing humanity to live in our imagination - for whatever that's worth. I can't really dream anymore, except when I dream. My dreams have become nocturnal, the day is nightmare. Now I have self analysis and the extrapolation of this to... uh, whatever that thing is. You know, the thing. Do you know it?

Damn, this entry sucks. I've written suckier ones, but I haven't indulged in much self-flagellation for a while, so I thought I'd try it out.

I can't be bothered to read, and there's nothing I want to google. Ah yes, let everything I've ever cared about slip away, unclutter the neurological lattice - perhaps that is tranquility, an electro-chemical nirvana. Oh God, could I please shut up about chemicals already? But I can't, they seem so important, and I know jack shit about genes and sub-atomic particles.

Dez said I should be grounded, I'm guessing that's a great idea, but I'm also staring up at the winking blinking lattice and its black depatterning like it's the mobile above my deathcrib - I'm not exactly fascinated but it's something to look at. Not quite the void, not quite the void, not quite the void.

Whoops, this entry was supposed to be about staring at the screen. Well, maybe I'll lie down and stare at the inside of my eyelids instead. Catch you later, boys and girls.

12/28/05

Jonas Doll

Amid. Medi. T. Ation? Ration? Mountain. Named. Sensation.

Back. I'm back. Trying to bring back that vague image, a mountain scene. British Columbian forest slopes. I don't know the names of many flowers or trees. I can experience nature with the best of them, but when I write it's metaphors or just plain meta.

This is a lull. A kind of meditation, a distasteful kind to my current mind.

The image was a forest scene near Kokanee Glacier, one of mother nature's greatest gifts, frosted peaks to crown this valley. Staring up at the peaks from an already lofty altitude, a different breed of vegetation up here, short clingy trees with integrity - life, still below the tree line. The image was vague as it always is in my mind's eye, spotty with cataracts, but the feeling was so fucking strong. If I could synesthetically translate my thoughts to vision - well maybe that would violate some cosmic law. Perhaps it would be incompatible with this being the best of all possible worlds. And you know that in the best of all possible worlds, the best thing to do is to strive for perfection, or something perfectly imperfect. Ah, slipping through the mists of meta, trying to see the mountain peak in what I feel OUGHT to be the vision.

Let that fucker flood in photons, I want to SEE. I want to BE part of it. But for that, I must DO. I must do it, find the action. My value-primed impulses tell me life demands action. I've had dreams, I've been a connoisseur of sleep, but I can't sleep now, too angsty, too lacking something. What could I do, I don't build landscapes in Bryce or Vistapro anymore, I'm not going to let silicon simulate my imaginational riches. I could try to square the actual glacier with my daydreams but I'm not driven to do that. Life is about action, but what about drive?

Amid body atrophy. I don't feel the entropy, I'm distracted with nothing, a big neon nothing. Actually I'm writing because it's better than nothing. And nothing else will satisfy, not that this satisfies. Novelty is old news but perhaps it will make a retro comeback.

I'm coming to be obsessed with the problem of novelty. It seems that the flagship of this fleet of malaise is the running out of things to do artistically. The funny thing is, this is particularly heinous when extrapolated to all of society, but why should I care? "All of society" is a personal projection. I'm not obliged to feel the imagined pain of the universal chorus. And mind is a renewable resource, we keep churning it out. Why should any fresh mind care how many iterations I've been through? We've got the tips of the fractal pouring out of loins all over this globe.

It can be a real drag seeing everything in terms of civilization. What are we to do, grit our teeth in forced smiles and journey onward in a desperate and dirty search for new ways to laugh? Is this the new QUEST FOR FIRE? Ba dum ching! Thank you thank you, I'll be here all week.

Children are our future. Not me man, I'm not going back to school. I won't be responsible for the new blood. I won't be sending the next gen into the prehab clinics. Let Zoe enjoy her Jonas doll. I'm honored, quite sincerely, it'll be my immortality.

Most of us feel a horror of seriousness. Because we, yes I'm making broad statements about humans again, we invented seriousness, and we turned it into an artform, and then we developed comedy as a reaction to that serious stomach-churning canon. Now I wonder what the Greeks talked about when they drank their ergotized beer. A bear ate amanitas and Mr. X. loaded himself with blanks. As far as I know, "Barkivist" is an original word I came up with, at least according to google. But the trees own that word, really. Hey this is just a branch off the genetic tree. This scummy colony of humanity is using me as an agent for the metabolism of humour. It's a bodily function. Eat, shit, binge and purge. Shoot up, cut up, reference Burroughs. Where's a blade runner when you need him?

Did I really change my brain that much, or was this shift due anyway? Is this just the expiry date on childhood, or was it a bad chemical combo?

I needn't be this serious - I watched Larry Sanders episodes today, ones I'd seen before, and laughed a lot. It sucked me into that hilariously wretched world. Part of losing my identities has been me opening up to the idea of becoming, say, a Hollywood asshole. I've gone as far as thinking I'm due to play the devil. Not PAY the devil, PLAY the devil. For God's sake. But shouldn't I be a saint first? Or perhaps I've got another millennium to go through playing the middleman.

There were times when I would expend the energy to reorganize a ramble like this so it would make a pretty coherent package, perhaps even a poem. There may be more such times. Maybe. Linear. Linearality is a bitch goddess. One time I blew my mind and thought I was perceiving forward and backward in time at once. It's been a while since I've lived a good paradox and been aware of it.

Hmmm. I know there is more to be explored in meditation. This isn't meditation, this is rambling, interspliced with an occasional thought, and an even less occasional sensation.

Oh hell, I'm going to sleep now, and wait for a 1200 micrograms techno track to wake up me (it's my computer alarm).


12/27/05

12/24/05

Drearily Sane Sutra

"If you hate the taste of wine, why do you drink it till you're blind?" - Bright Eyes

My girl is working off her hangover
while I write off my headache
and the strive to betterment
feels natural and nasty

the shakes can be reduced
to the ballistics on the spasm
of this bundle of nerves

chemical reduction falls short
and electrons laugh as they
bind my four-dimensional thoughts
bundle humming the sonic sum waveform
chiseled into my system, THE system
laying out life's path as the paisley peaks
play out a nervous ringtone for the
four billionth untapped variation on the
music of the spheres, ringing the undone
unsung song because i can, because i must
because what else is there to do when you're
trapped in sartre's trip through mescalito's bowels,
trapped in the tract of aesthetic digestion
for the sake of, for the sake of, for the sake of
sake, and japanese spirits, and anime porn, and
the orifice woman who let, who let, who let her
hormones flow, discovered sexual secrets i'll never know, O,
at an age where i was still obsessed with psychedelics
and it's dizzying to think that gentlemen younger than me
in their gentlemen's clubs got their rocks off with sexual enslavement
but i don't care enough to play the devil.

Horribly fascinating to think though
that if this sutra kept going, crossed over into life
I would be cast as the devil cause
you can't be God forever but
you can play the game of holding out, standoff
in the cosmic crossfire flanging fever dreams.
I've still got my poker face on, i'm holding on
to something, i don't know what, what looks to me
like a royal flush, but reality says
the suit doesn't match.

Zastrozzi makes more sense to me every day and I identify with him because I'm sick.
I must commit evil to be well, pain is medicine, tragedy is health
where is victor, I will cut him into thirty-two pieces of equal size.

And all these years i've been making
a massive metaphysical mistake
thinking of infinity
as ALL
not the infinite
which makes all the difference in the world.

Mon deiu, the figure eight is just a figure of speech.

Hari krishna, hari hari
drop out, be in ~

I'm not an astrologer but I know the Age of Aquarius is over. The dawn is dead. This is the five thousandth mighty iteration of the fall of Rome. Wizards and Wise Women positioning themselves, rooks and kings castling, players planning mad moves as the bubbles drift by, the housing bubble, the boy in the bubble, the boy king.

It still feels like the last line. I should contrive a junkpile of lexical intent and claim it's a detelescoped summation of human history and myth. I should obfuscate to avoid direct drug metaphors. If I was a writer of Joyce's stature, I would imbed a mini-story in this paragraph that would say everything worth saying about the implications of chemical intoxicants without mentioning any substances but rather embodying their contours in context and subtext, characterized, anthropomorphized, stylistically tailored to perfection and fractally resonating through the rest of this writing. But I'm not, so I'll just lop off the line at LINE, since a reference to coke would make me puke.

John Lennon said, with great conviction it would seem, that GENIUS is PAIN. But he wasn't talking about the pain ostensible mediocrities deal with on a daily basis, since when you're a member of a supergroup with a legion of admirers, there are a wealth of options for blocking out conventional pain. No, I know what he was talking about, even though I am, ostensibly I tell you, ostensibly, one of the ostensible mediocrities, even as the stink of psychedelic shit caking the walls of mescalito's bowels has me gagging more than loling. Lennon was talking about the pain of the creator, the goddamned god, having to go on, the web that god gets into, and on the seventh day, He let the lilliputians devour Him slowly.

Even the geniuses are laughably, pitifully limited. Rock stars play their role like everyone else. I jumped into the middle of a Cobain bio today (the chapter was called: "wasted") and felt right at home. It's nice to have someone play the role of rock martyr for you - so you don't have to do it yourself. Kurt was right in his intuition, it was funner to watch him than to be him.

There are many ways to hollow out. There is genius and there is asceticism. They aren't mutually exclusive, but the archetypes I associate with them are.

Now I fiend for innocence, the novelty of novelty. That and tranquility. Innocent novelty, the desire for retrograde, is my upper - peace is my downer. Linearality feels so stomach-churningly profound and terrible. I want to go back. I know how pompous I sound as I say this. There's so much I haven't done, so much I don't know. But I don't know how to write my novel now, because I've sloughed off so many paradigms like snake skins. I might have to treat it as fantasy and not the reality it once was for me. Its dendrites have vapourized in the blast furnace of my brain. But get away from me with that drill, just because I boosted my production of serotonin with dodgy frankenstein molecules and set my neurons firing in maddening chain reactions doesn't mean I'm into trepanation. Not yet anyway. The devil has never been obvious to me, and I never trusted those cross-wearing ghostbusters.

Bright Eyes is singing about a "yellow bird" now, and I think he's sounding like an idiot, but intellect is strong enough to insist that despite my emotional flinch, one day I will fully appreciate the symbolism.

Ah my flawed goddess - she is a check on my mental illness - she herself is ill but we reflect each other, we compliment in sickness and health. Maybe one day we will be shamanic healers, accreditation from the spirits and not the alcoholic ones.

*

12/10/05

12/02/05

So many possibilities

Should I write the greatest novel since Finnegan's Wake? Should I take a walk down to the pizza shop? Should I sleep? Should I ramble with a stunted lexicon in an ezboard box?

Theoretically, there is novelty.

And somehow my mind turned on a dime, after I filled it with too many euphoriant chemicals - it had me questioning aloud - is the universe fundamentally a dull pointless place?

And I know there is the koan that will dissolve my riddles, but I'm riddled with the cancer of my Own Koan that cares not for dissolution - this Koan thinks it has the solution, thinks it IS the solution, sees itself, unity as deadly superimposition, nullspace crunch, gibbed out of the matrix.

And I know there is the moon, always the moon.

And there is still pizza - pizza is good and filling and I'm still alive and I can eat pizza. That is something that can be accomplished with only a little effort. I could have been a Cro-Magnon having to kill for my food, but in this glorious age, the fruition of novelty, I merely have to hand over three credits to the local merchant of my choice.

I could work on Original Sin, but my passion is somewhere else - intersecting that aforementioned novel in nodes - oh, my moldy metaphors, whatever shall I do? Would it be right to contrive a larger vocab or would the forcing of that upon myself sully the product - some corrupted manifestation of following bliss

and

I'm surprised I still have the ability to ramble on. There is some dubious energy in me. I'm still mentally ill, I wonder if there's any going back - who knows if it has anything to do with chemicals - maybe it isn't even the brain - maybe it's the timewave, because it's definitely ducttaped together with time, a mortal temporal piñata (hey, there's a nice word, too bad the context is so shabby). It. Yes, I'm rambling, but there is a solid block of IT here, and there is snow outside and there is pizza on a rack and I'm hungry and I have ill-gotten money.

I have very little structure, that's why I call this rambling.

I just had a revelation - I can either do elaborate virtuosic structure, or I can do finely-textured from-the-heart, quintuple-adjective detail. But rarely at the same time, they don't interlock like they should, like they would in a Joyce novel, like my beautiful theories led me to expect in literary synesthesia.

Maybe I have to start fresh. If the universe just collapsed, perhaps it's time for a new novel. How about a 500 page novel using only 500 individual words? Maybe then people would get the point.

Or maybe I should learn biology. Maybe I should learn how chemical bonds work. Maybe I should learn how to program in C. Maybe I should learn some Irish drinking songs – besides the Ballad of Tim Finnegan. Maybe I should learn how to solder so I can get a job at Pacific Insight and make money 12 hours a day and sleep 9 and watch TV for 2 and masturbate for 1. Maybe I should remember how to ski. Maybe I should remember what the capital of Slovenia is. Maybe I should move to Slovenia, learn the language, join a side in a civil war, die for my adopted country. Maybe I should study economics, sociology, history, political science, actual science, ecology, geology, geography, psychology, systems theory, chaos theory, game theory, mathematics, and quantum physics, and finally prove to the skeptics why communism is kewl.

But I know deep in my heart of heart of heart of hearts, I'm going to get some pizza. The question is, will I walk down and re-connect with nature, even if it's cold snowy nature, or will I operate the gas-guzzling autokinoton to accelerate the end of this greasy civilization?

I expect my happiness quotient will increase in aggregate by walking, even taking the chill into account, but still I'm tempted to reach for my technological addiction, something we still have no word for. Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay called “Cold Turkey” which seemed diffuse at first. Then I noticed the brilliant connections he was making with his cigarette habit and his car fetish. I'm a little different. I'm no car fetisher. They symbolize the alpha male bullshit I scorn, being karmically cast off the primal dungheap’s pinnacle. No trains, no planes, no motorcars, I’m the karmic caste-away. Not king of the hill. I can't even sell propane accessories, a skill that symbolizes success in certain Texan subdivisions: the power of persuassion for the purpose of propone purchase. A lot of oil money funds energy cowboys, rootin’ tootin’ salesmen, lawn-lovin’ Dukes of Cul-de-Sac, securing domestic perimeters, a pretty housing bubble, watch it float through the warm winter air.

Hey, now I got a flow going on. Too bad there's no structure. Perhaps there's promise in my ideas, my marginally novel take on things, my neologisms, but the discipline is so sorely lacking and I'm pitifully intolerant of the criticism that could theoretically bootstrap me to heights of genuine literary value perhaps even lip-smacking market value, mmm, print media, mmm, New York Times Bestseller List, mmmschmack, do your balls need licking Mr. James R. Bantam, is your house really so random?

I've never felt a need to be Joyce. But I haven't accepted being Jonathan. It feels fundamentally wrong - to accept. Or maybe I'm saving acceptance. Saving it for a rainy day. Saving it for an opium reverie, pinning it on the dragon’s tail. Or did I spend it on synthetic ecstasy? I don't know, I never made a great accepter and I'm not proud of that.

Nobody knows what their place is. Some people believe in karma but karma doesn't solve anything really. Karma is cryptic and complex in this society. Jennifer said the world was fucked up which pleased me with its simple truth. A cliché that hasn't gotten old - we're fucking ourselves up and I don't know about you, but I can't quite muster archaic nostalgia - no, non serviam, I will not serve nature, I will not serve God, I will not serve man a big mac but I'll pack your bread, man, for 9 bucks an hour. I'll write a novel and some of you will read it, and that's cool. I won't read your stuff unless it catches my eye, which is rare. Sometimes I'll look, even with sore, sleepy peepers, since I think I ought to. Hey, it's contrived but I should get over that hang up - it enriches anyway, lets me glimpse lives in American panhandles, long-winded academic exegeses of Carolina lawyers, motivation is motivation. Artificial is natural. All that jazz.

Someone once told me theft was theft, to shame me for "stealing" MP3s. I told him I wasn't going to argue with someone who could only flay me with tautologies.

Wow, I'm still writing. I guess I CAN write, if I can be bothered. But it's just a ramble. So many possibilities (see, I'm keeping that theme alive - there's a kind of backbone to this ramble but its splintered). Possibilities, like taking certain splinters that resonate, ideas that rhyme (thank you Ashberry for that line) and gluing them together to form some consonant literary craftwork.

See,
I still see novelty and yet the flooding fulfillment of categories sickens me. Does that come across? I thought I could express it best poetically, but I'll try a straight forward form since I'm in the mood for insulting your intelligence (whoever you are - does anyone check in here? I'm spread thin on this line and that's fine):

Possibilities...
I can see so many possibilities - novels that haven't been written. I know there are things I could do musically that haven't been done yet - I could squeeze out some novelty, cram in a genre

but,
seeing this saddens me. It feels empty to fill these spaces. It feels like the last line of blow.

Will there be space colonies in the future? I'd like to see space colonies. Yes, maybe one day we'll live in glorious space colonies. So many possibilities.

But so what?

Oh, but the tortured optimist in me says, you wouldn't be so-whatting if you lived in a SPACE COLONY! Silly boy.

But I'm not won over, optimist. Space colonies, they look great in the mind's eye. But they also look vague there. They look suspiciously like the dragon’s tail, like the unending end of an opium reverie. Mushrooms never showed me space colonies, and if they did, I have the feeling they'd be tied to tryptamine tension and I'd be clutching my soul for fear of being unworthy – unworthy of the mighty space colony, the last orbital vestige of human vitality, the terrible profundity of hyper-humanity strung out on technology.

So many possibilities.

Is it that God is everything and nothing but a self-clutching horror, Oedipus tearing out his eyes for eternity?

Now I see, with a demonic cackle, why atheists can be as subject to wishful thinking as the religioids.

What a strange loop.



But there's still pizza, waiting for me. Damn, that almost makes me forget the horror of the horrible God. Food therapy. Quit your drugs and your philosophy, become a fat buddha feasting on the slaughterfruits of overdriven society. Oh my, what a fucked up world, but we make the best pizza, the best pizza in history. I will travel back to the Italy of 1764 to sample an obscure enclave where they supposedly embodied the wabisabi surety of the pie's purity, but I'll tell you in 2046 when we're standing before the tsunami and chatting amicably in the brotherhood and sisterhood of victimhood: the best pizza is right here, right now, and that is a mystical truth I can walk downtown for and end this entry with, a wikipedia stub, and a stunted novel hub, begging for misspoken spokes and a wolf on a leaf.

And it's cool that some lovely little Nelsonites will be trying to heal the world through thought and bond and energy, channeling the manna of this enchanted valley, creating a reality? And if so, is it indecent to say so? Lakeside is the play, yo, the play's the thing to catch the consciousness of the King of the PostCorpal WebRing those HiGhEr DiMeNsIoNaL bEiNgS gnosed into my hosed mind with a hyperdopaminal laser-scalpel, 21st century schizoid man, fulfilling Tippler's omega-point prophecy, describing it all in math I could finally understand, cubing the square of novelty, unlocking the lingual prison with a wordkey and beckoning me to a passing boxcar of possibility, another trainride for the head-hollowed hobos, a pillow car with black-tar hookah and moldfruits for breakfast, loops of industrial cereal health to blame on our tombstones when we rot next to the masons and the mayor.

And Bush will rot under Arlington Cemetery next to Laura in clawed upright position, eye-sockets filled with molten gold. And I'll be in a dream state in a Columbine Killers' limbo video game where aborted mass-murderers hobnob with the winners of level 17, in the year of our Churchillian Devil 1999, and I'll be forced to admit, in juxtaposition with a blood-crusted April, that a couple of Littleton maniacs got the jump on me, but neither lived it up as well as born-again Crawford Boy who never dreamed of being president when he was content to snort coke off the urinal of a Boston Bar's bathroom, sexual snacks and a celeb sample-pack smacking themselves back in the sadomasoch sockets of the Republic of Planet Earth's VIP chamber, in the pockets of Prince Machiavelli’s Mafiosi, important enough for Arlington, important enough for a gilded karmic notch, and a pyramid two feet taller than King Reagan's, and me, uncapsed, the archetype of the mediocrity, the dead mediocrity with my adjective garments clinging to my skeleton, a stitch out of time saves none, and who will I haunt? So many possibilities...

And God has no mirror, yep yep, sure
and brooksy photographs the implications of abandoned headwear
and the wordwytch abandoned her blog

and hey,
that was an okay ramble, it filled some time, some headspace.

29












Build your own meat - it brings meaning to LIFE!

The Twin Gears of Cringe and Cling

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