The Zen of Doing Stuff

I’m trying to write my novel. The chapter is called “Natura’s Incarnation”. Let’s see what YOU do with that if you’re so damn smart. No, let’s not see, you’d probably hamfistedly do something better, and it would shame me to the rodent-littered intestines of my soul.

It’s hard to take it seriously. Although it is serious. It’s nature. But what is the nature of nature? Is it in its nature to question? Is that natural?

Nature spilled out of its notes, the notation on itself, scientific. It’s conceptual, in a digital signal procession of fireworks. I wonder if I’ll edit that out as being meaningless enough when I take it upon myself to trim the fat? Fat is natural, but little Jack Sprat wouldn’t eat it.

I’m not inside the story today.

~

Where does dreading stimulation come from? It comes from writing without an audience. It would be different if I was on blogger. Where does that come from? Why is this impossibly alien? Avant-garde went away, like a lot of things. Innocence in ruins, lying under the conqueror, Cliché III.

So I will post, I will write FOR someone, bolt my hilarious pseudo-ego to that cryptic bandwagon. Writing feels so strange, like some lost childhood hobby, a fumbled art, an alien language I knew when awake and dreaming were the same, the place the Daoists point to. Meaning in words? What’s this? Perhaps I haven’t recovered from the aftershocks of the persistence of gravity well in feelings – such a clumsy unpoetic attempt at expressing that thing I so frequently profess is a self-created cancer. Okay, indulge me one little bit of self-censorship.

We got a brandy leak.

Another little chocolate nip
and I’m back, typing, feeling there’s some vague purpose behind it
although I’m so incredibly aware of how I’m caught up in the ridiculous pattern
of being a human being, sad and petty routines – I really need more sunlight, fuckdamnit.

Another little chocolate nip
and I feel like an aristocrat – now I got grand schemes in this grungy scheme of things – now merlin is a boy with a point to make in infancy – now I FEEL the infamy of forced rhyme and hastily latched onto incidental rhyme – now genius is pain whether attained or not –

When it’s your writing
it’s so easy to soothe into it, settle in, bask in the glow of ego
love the sound of your own voice, the one you know
but when it’s someone else’s
you’re looking for the formula, the easy pattern, you want to assimilate fast
and if it’s unforgiving, too on-its-own-terms, you crumple it into
the dustbin of your consciousness and move on
and is second person really necessary here?

Another little chocolate nip
okay, that’s too much brandy
oh, but I’ve had a hard night at work, fuck it
I’m a working artist man, and that’s such a bullshit title
I come back to writing and everything resembles bullshit
but what is bullshit? do I dare even answer that question?

If I wanted my horrific writing amplified to the status of “sickening”
I’d use the word “ramble” right now.

And in this ramble, I’ll start another stanza on another tangent:
where is the apple, waiting to fall on my head
did it rot on the zopiglonger ground, a metaphor I’m unwilling to explain
and will probably not even really get later?

I did write a song about transformers today
well not “about” transformers, but featuring a fractal shard of their existence
in the fragment of universe I happen to share
with the transformers (more than meets the eye)

And sometimes the only way I can express an idea
is by taking a tone that I hate, using language that makes me gag
because of my literary shortcomings

Pause pause, cadence, cadence
isolated coincidence
sacrilegious to flow
like subverting sacred geometry to
the proximity of assonant possibility
and remember jabberwocky? jesus fucking christ
did something die in me?

Maybe one day I’ll get out my graph paper, solve for X, and
FIGURE IT OUT

Maybe my poor moldy modulated mind
can’t get a handle on paradigm shift
cause I hit the ALT key instead, altered too much
and not enough probably, not in novelty’s negative nancy nunnery
heh, actually that last line makes a ton of sense:
the most musical meaning MEANS MOST!

Ah yes, where did that flow come from, I liked it
even in meta tags it had a nice reverbed ring to it
but writing is still alien, especially in meta tags
and even on blogger, in which I mine meaning every
political day, maybe some coffee could be good for me.

K, coffee’s in the mix now.

I wrote a chorus that’s been met with something of a lack of enthusiasm. I’d been feeling fantastic about it, but then I interfaced with the world and the doubts set it. I listened again today and thought, damn that’s cool shit - sounds just like I wanted it to, better than I thought it’d turn out actually - but some part of me needs external confirmation that it’s cool - ah this unsightly ego drags me to the brothel of validation to haggle over the price of the whores.

Now I have all these ideas darting around for a great new project: approaching song recording (yes not just writing but performing and recording, the whole shebang, I want in) with the intent to flesh out the musical/lyrical/conceptual ideas using three or four tracks, scaling it down, like recording performance versions, as demos, or maybe even as the finished product, to force myself into a more minimalist mode. It might save my sanity.

You know, I just realized this is sort of like the kind of letter I get from netinous, except I’m not writing this to him, I’m posting it in blogger. Heh, maybe I oughta reciprocate instead – well I do sometimes. I just remembered that I never write the kind of letters I used to write. They used to be soaked in artistic fervor, like a bomber laced with embalming fluid. I guess they still can be, but I can barely stand the word “art” anymore. And I’m EARNING my fervor nowadays, as I trade drugs for sunshine – keening on Sol. I’m starting not to care what kind of person I become. Even if I end up stinking of sobriety – so be it.

I got a song idea while improvising on the piano – images of gold mines came to my mind’s eyes. I called it: “Trying to mine the staked claims (and failing to undermine)”. I was thinking on many layers at the time, and the meaning resonated across several medias. The nexus point where the musical idea converts from the sublime to the secular concerns the territory that’s been strip mined by prospectors of olde, several generations and a century of recording techniques, an exploding population – decades back, the land was rich and good, but a century, a glut of novelty, and what’s left for us thinking newbies? Ah, that last sentence was so slick, so laden with privately-coded keywords, and so pretentiously unfriendly to outsiders. But the idea is ironically vital: it’s a tired time to be alive.

The goldmines and the staked claims. Reminds me of the Yukon kid who told me a story of how he proved himself the genuine goldpanner of the bunch while hanging with some locals at the Royal. Maybe he should be a character. Unfortunately my memory of him is tainted, scarred into my sad-sack circuits since we were on mdma when we met (I don’t type that chemical in caps anymore). Character hell, he should be the song. Remember when purging the pain through art was an intuited activity? Well, writing about something doesn’t preclude my doing it.

I should find melodies, a chorus and a verse (won’t be hard), keep it from ballooning into a sinfully gluttonous twenty minute epic, “orchestrate” it entirely with solo piano (use “colors” like prokofiev, exercise my atrophied impressionism), and be satisfied, call it DONE and move on to the next song on the album. Actually my wordwytch’s album takes precedence – and I won’t be satisfied with anything less than gorgeously produced piano-progrock-psychedelia (my latest hyphening of what I do in the “studio”) for her album. She deserves an ambitious collaborator. Hey, I think this coffee’s pepping me up a bit – took a while to kick in but hello!

Throughout the last two paragraphs I’ve been seeing the level E1M5 from the game Doom. The Phobos Labs. Interesting.

Had a very interesting dream that I could go into as well. Damn, my writing always comes in floods. My entries are always perverse pastiches of thoughts because they come in a torrent. I can’t write a little here and a little there and make nice neat packages – except when I drink enough cough syrup, but that’s another story.

I can’t post this right now though, our phones are fucked up and I’m confined to the offline.

See, that’s coffee beans for you: every stupid little thought seems REALLY NEAT and YEAH, let’s POST THIS, everyone will want to know! See I was happy and hyper and then I recognized the happy-hyperness, made the connection to chemicals, and now I feel the sickness shrouding that lovely little oasis of the ontology I used to take for granted. And now I further strengthen the shroud by writing about it as if it’s a reality – the prophecy fulfills itself. Nah fuck that. That’s that little drama queen wanking on coffee beans. Or something.

Well yes, it’s a chemical high, but it sure beats the savage beast they call ecstasy. I can see why so many people board this train and never get off – it’s a nice substitute. That’s one of the main reasons the drug war is so idiotic – I might be willing to listen to the drug warriors if they appeared to be sane. If they said that cocaine is deadly and destructive and then conceded that maybe it would be better if people chewed a little coca leaf and relaxed in the evening with a puff of ganja, well then I’d be much more inclined to listen to them. But the extremists are running things – Bush and Bin Laden fighting their cola wars. Maybe if we can learn anything from history, we can learn to moderate and hope the idea doesn’t become corrupted in the Orwellian manner, turned into another thought crime.

Now I’m plunging headlong into headstrong politics. Wonder if this will be of any use later? Ah, who cares? Wow, I’m feeling that weird gravity distortion again – my axis of horizon is tilting, my spatial dimensions are skewing. I thought this only happened on DXM, not this lite pharmacocktail I’m currency bouncing around on. Maybe all the neurocircuits are linked now, maybe my brain caved into a quivering sea of confused goop.

I still wouldn’t go back in time and tell myself to just say no. Although give me a few years and I might have him running down the tanned-textured corridors of the Phobos Labs with a chaingun as a lifetime distraction. Maybe I should have become the level designer I aspired to be, back when life was my crack, and the kootenays was an easily gamed-away distraction.

But as the Moody Blues tritely sang, to jaunty psychedelia: “we’re all looking for something”. The stupidest clichés seem the most profound, they hammer into me with their nails of truthiness.

I’ll end this entry on a happy note, because there’s one to be had in this minor key symphony. I re-discovered sunshine. I’ve always taken a ridiculous sort of pride in thinking myself immune to the emotional effects of seasonal change. I’ve always loved the supposedly drab aesthetics of overcast days and winter landscapes. I still retain that love. But I also have to admit that my night shift, in conjunction with this being tilted away from the sun thing, has probably contributed to my sense of sickness. I can’t blame it all on drugs and self-created headtrips.

When I went out grudgingly, at my mom’s request, to shovel snow, I caught a glint of sunlight peaking out of the concretized atmosphere. Real unfiltered sunlight hitting me directly for the first time in what felt like years – I remembered it, vaguely. It was looking into me, like the void, but substantially – quite unlike the subtracting eyes of Mephistopheles. It wasn’t the night to deal with the devil and trade decency for a quick torching of all that was left to do. It was the star of infinite possibility and eternal radiance. It was a deja-thread day, a day that did not need to be seized but merely lived through. It was the kind of thing I would rave about in the rhapsody of tryptamine ecstasy but it was not the product of an artificially-administered chemical passing through the blood-brain barrier.

It was pure, simple sunlight.

It reminded me that if I never got to realize my most desired dreams, there was still a bountiful future ahead. It was the relief of seeing the void in relief, brilliant contrast, the beauty of black against white. It was shirking my existential duty and being allowed to love the Dao once again – the coincidentia oppositorum was no longer grating but harmonious. It was a light of reason. Only my headtrips, those negative reality-creation routines, would make these unfilled desires “horrors”. I would still go on to write original music and quirky (if unpublishable) stories that would give me a warm tingly feeling when re-reading them in the right frame of mind. I would learn to enjoy strange foods, I would discover the genius of a school of film I’d previously thought to be bullshit, I would discover a school of thought that would reshape my view of the world, I would watch empires fall, and maybe, if the universe allowed such madness, even see a third party take power in the US. I would go to the dentist to get my wisdom teeth out. I would get pain, and self-pity, and codeine. I would wonder whether to use any and risk re-connecting to the garishly reductivist neurocircuits of up and down that any kind of euphoria, fake or real, activates.

These thoughts would bubble up, but the sunrays shouted over the hissing self-conflicting headtrip with a unified message: I’M HERE! I’M WARM! I’M BRIGHT! I AM THE SOURCE OF LIFE! Then it told me: LOOK HOW I COLOR THE VALLEY! And I looked, and it was good. It brightened up the valley and it brightened up my thought process – I could finally see enough to rebalance my fears. I strung them all up on an abacus and made logical deductions: not ALL my worst anxieties could be real, and if the void was real, that made what novelty was left to consume all the sweeter. It wasn’t like the last line of blow after all. It was like Sisyphus found out this trip to the top of the mountain was going to be his last. Then he found a stick on which to prop his rock. Then he laid down in the dandelions for a while and looked up at the clouds.

I looked up at the clouds and I saw the light. The light saw the bleakeries, the angst, the emptiness, and reflected it all back at me, but I felt the light anyway. I FELT it, warm on my face and bright in my eyes. I nearly heard it since it was a high level gestalt, subtly synesthetic. It was like the good half of the universe. The screaming voids I’d come to FEEL as universal truth were RIVALLED at last. They would not go away but there was finally something to challenge them.

It was just sunlight doing this to me and in some sense I’m not doing it justice, and in another sense this is a gross excess – but I basked in that light for what felt like five minutes (probably thirty seconds). Then I walked up to mountain station, and across the forest path, and down to Gyro park, and back to my house. The light faded but I’d been recharged – a little. I felt a kind of vitality I hadn’t in a while.

Okay, I may have reached a state of rapture remotely like that for a second or two. But in another sense, I can’t touch that former state of mind now that I’m firmly lodged in another, except through the opiate haze of nostalgia. So what can you do with state boundaries? But rip through them in your off-road vehicle and muddy their jagged borders with trackmarks.

I need to get more sun I think. My organic gestalt craves cosmic vitamins. It might not all be drugs and self-created headtrips, but it might all be chemical. The chemical level is an interesting one for sure. It’s between biology and physics. It’s where the enzymes meet the protons and the carbon chains of deoxyribonucleic acid intimate Bohr’s quantum mechanics, non-local organics, the possibilities of a sea of realities and information sum reveries. It’s got enough action to warrant a God’s eye view, and it might in fact be the avatar of God we humans, with our electron microscopes, can best appreciate.

And I still think I’ve thought too much.