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.
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