binary religion

or was it electric? I've forgotten, but I haven't forgotten enough. Yes, I.

I'm bored enough to play a board game. But I haven't got energy to get one. Superhans is back on the rig. It means what I think it means, which is that he'll be away for a few weeks making money, but he'll be back for the crack. Which is not really worth it, or not even close, from a fact-based perspective. And emotions can't be trusted.

So, I need a goal that will seem worth it for more than a day. Something that will let me pretend that the last several years never happened. But, can't really think with this arbitrary food dissolving in my stomach, brain secreting thought like the liver secretes bile. Excess production of this and that. At the end of the Diamond Drill, after I've got the mogul maneuvers drilled into me, like the tenants of a spiritual program, I'll marry america's sweetheart, or someone like that, and it'll all have been worthwhile. But today, before even the start of any journey, I sit in the gutter, staring at digital pictures I took of the storefronts when I was high, all guilty by association. And secrete sarcasm, as a symptom of something.

exxpressiony fantasia

Why? Cause it's extra expressive, baby. Oh, did I say that before? Nevermind.

Homeworld for the bright eyes, is what I meant to say. What they told me to say, when they channeled their expressiony text through me, presto con fuoco, in a moment of weakness, weakness on my part, a garden variety seizure of foaming at the mouth, mixing with blood from a mauled tongue, a sublime seizure, a demonstration of mystic conduits - even a cosmogonic traffic crossing of the most mundane sort seems sublime, it's the kind of thing we came up with that word for, to express, us descendants of englishmen and women. Sometimes, with enough weakness, the whole works implodes and so the light can shine through, but it doesn't do much for me, as a being, trying to function in a human world, that deadlight. It was a garden variety mystic seed, that may lie fallow or sprout and flower, no one much cares. And the one who might ought to care, can't even conceive of what's happening. He just figures something ought to be said, about a homeworld for bright eyes. Like eyes that used to see things that made me feel things.

Cause he wasted so much time trying to please these foreign gods, and be a humanist, and play human games. And maybe it wouldn't have been a waste, if those gods had been pleased. But he was still bleeding into that other dimension he saw, when deep in the basements of dissociation. And it was always dragging him back to the beautiful void from whence he came, via strangles of entrails, winding him up, jokes of genetic code, you know, and leni reifenstahl propaganda. You can hear the rats in the walls. Now there's nothing in a void. That's why it's a void, it's like, a word, like sublime, it means something. But the void carves pretty pictures in this, and that. Nothing is sometimes something, by extension. X-philic iTard. Maybe that's part of the reason I wrote that story, about the wood sprites. Maybe that reason I wrote is part of the story.

Is this frustration, or meditation? Or biding time until the iron lung clamps down on my respiratory system? I'm sure that she who remembers will tell the negro god to let me know, when the time is right.

Narcisus blinked.

It's a long slog between enlightenments. Purpose is parsecs away. I didn't even get into that goddamn fucking skills link job search program. Like, as if I WASN'T one of the 10 out of 20 applicants that could really benefit (ie, get one measly low wage job) from some job search training, instead of applying under coercision or for gratuitous reasons - okay, I'll accept welfare instead. So, I will resume looking for work, and dress nice for interviews, and not "nice" in a gay way, but in the stupid normal way, that may tilt the odds slightly in favor of getting hired for a position where nice clothes will be ruined in the first five minutes. But I will not get my hopes up anymore.

I feel pretty sick tonight. This phase of guilt and depression is lasting longer than it usually does. But I've been here before, it's like artillery raining down on the battlefields, I'll just sit here in my wet trench and aspire to trenchant wit, and something will come down the pike that might offer a reprieve, eventually. Sounds like some of my Nelson friends are having their own crises. Well, folks, I can empathize.

I kind of put myself in a predicament, by getting into all this sobriety stuff. I told on myself. Now it seems kinda premature. Like I should have had to be told, should have gotten into real trouble, like near-death. Now all my fun must answer to the promises I made, although I try not to make promises any more, it becomes a grotesque parody. My fun – yes, it’s not that fun anymore. That’s the situation I meant to set up for myself, so I could stop myself from going any further down the path that could lead to near-death, or beyond it. Smart thinking, I guess, even though it necessitates so much guilt and drama, and not fun movie-style drama, but just white trash jerry springer drama, which is even worse because my friends and family are not white trash, but nice people, and the juxtaposition is so, bleh.

Hi frequency, shrill, hummingbird sugarwater abuse. And I can’t write about this anymore. If I hear the word addict, I’ma gonna scream. I’m gonna do some more tidying up. I’ll sterilize later.

able was i, ere i saw elba

actually, scratch that, i wasn't able before.

And now, not so much either. But with the potential to perhaps not be publicly disgraced, if at least, I can avoid the public. Yeah, I'd say the odds are high that the possibility is low, of me making any kind of a grave mistake, for a good while - one can make it hypothetical, if that.

By the time the odds plummet to Vegas house rules, I hope to be well into exile. Maybe at least have a head start on solitude. Maybe I'll have jettisoned a few of these hospital monitors, and not be broadcasting my brainwaves and heartrate via EEGs. I needn't remind you, you needn't remind me. I talked myself outta words. Can't keep pace with how much I should hate myself. Muthafuck buckets.

fancypants

red herring radar

i'm taking another crack at denis johnson's "already dead - a california gothic" - i was almost ready to give up, admitting that i didn't get the point, but i turned another page instead of smoking a cigarette, and started to find the groove, the groove that "johnson hits... " according to one of the back blurbs, during the witch yvonne’s séance scene - and although i thought i was mis-remembering it as a “séance” in my cliche-ridden brain, it was actually referred to by that term through one of the characters! a scheming hippie's for-profit cosmology fictionalized with poker-faced poetry, and it was so startling, the resonance it made with me, that i had to keep reading for another thirty pages - i’ve seen a lot in alan watts, and owe him a debt as articular of eastern philosophy, one who can reach a sixty hertz mind like mine - but i also tired of his raps, rhymes, and reasons, too assonant, consistent - so i stopped thinking in that direction - so i stopped feeling that lucky charm, that i would call sacred at times, or profound, or whatever - so my progress in this path, whatever that could be, stopped dead

but metaphors take on new meanings in new times, sometimes inverting entirely like a figure-background transformation - assorted spiritual event horizons, that ol’ wheel of life rolling back to relevance - there was something modern and hedonistically-informed to yvonne's assumptions, shared by the dead-end californian "marks" at the séance - the idea of this journey through a billion lives - it encompassed reincarnation but it was less literal, more complete - yes, Complete, a word that felt important as i read - a bullseye word that sent shudders through me, bringing a giddy smile to my face - a private joke, the random stumbling on a "next step" i didn't think could exist - absurd but divine that my human mind, with its limitations, could handle a synthesis of borrowed folk wisdom, fractured textbook intellect, and pedestrian experience with ---... the Complete ness of...

it's hard to explain, it’s where language breaks down - the thing is in my head, still, a little, though dependent on the consistency of my hippo-campus - it's like, Complete - the sum of experience - not only that, it has a moral complete ness to it - which brings me back to yvonne: i imagine her character as a pretty zen woman - i think zen is good for the skin, if not skin product wholesalers - but maybe even then sometimes - cause, when hungry, eat, when tired, sleep, when watching the home shopping network for the third consecutive hour, when the products start looking sensible, pick up the phone and order now - so skin care, like anger at the scumfuck who stole your wallet, is within the grasp of a zen master - the wobbling grace your anger takes will recede like a tide upon discovery of a particularly striking sunset, and all things considered, it’s better on your skin than herbal extracts - yvonne tells her clients that in the sanctuary of the séance, morality is open-ended - relations between people are not of the moment, but of all moments - although... there are spirits, incarnations - and radar interferes with people's auras, apparently, that too - might as well go for the goblin bonus pack if you’ve come this far

but what hit home for me was this notion of a soul’s journey, even little ol’ me, through the whole of history - all lives, experience... flattening to imagine what that does to morality, mortality, time and space, matter and spirit - i know, it sounds shoddy and cerebral in these terms, but i'm writing about it because it was a feeling like i haven't felt in years, that seems to matter, still - even if it might be irrelevant to my life... maybe that's the point, that it is irrelevant to my life, but it's the bullseye! the Complete ness i can only glimpse through a network of associations in my brain, from a string of code that woke me, like a sleeper agent, to the deck of a ship in a vast sea - i was going to say "endless ocean" but that doesn't feel quite right, because if the ocean is endless then it wouldn't be Complete. . . see, it's tricky getting past semantics - "endless" does sort of fit, because essentially, i'm talking about a kind of immortality, through ego-death and real, but non-literal reincarnation - but there's more, and less, to it - complete is not infinite - the infinite is not complete...

"pedestrian," some techno-magician surely says, cause he’s heard it all before, “time”, “space”, whatever - but what else is there? there's this complete thing i can sense - it's not an endless ocean, merely huge, vast enough for me, i think - wake up, it whispers, politely - it's not urgent, maybe an alarm but i set the time with a shuffling algorithm, and the mp3 track it plays is something my subconscious can sing harmonies with that reference fellow musicians, and detritus from childhood - or maybe it was just the buzz of current - excitable electrons, silly

so this thing, when does it get its questions answered? or its purpose fulfilled? now? no, not in the next several decades - i don't think this is an age for heroes - maybe, but i doubt it - oh the potential is there, and it's so beautiful, like when my friend blake dismissed his "buddhist" friend for being a silver-spoon-fed empty head, and also said that hard work could get us out of this mess we all sort of sense, like as if any of this crazy bullshit is going as planned, "hard work" of a sort more weighted to good ideas, scalpels of reason, rigors of intellect, and the painful balance of this with empathy and pragmatism, and letting go of the rancid ideas that will get results right away, and get you your own state villa, or even just get you out of debt - a style of work more akin to that practiced by enlightenment thinkers, some of those good and nasty folks who paved the way for this casino cabaret health-food joke i say i enjoy even though i haven’t felt right since a lot of things - and that's heroic enough for me - at times, i wouldn't even hate myself for hero worshipping blake, but those were muonic moments, quickly swallowed up in green despair

so potential is there, like doesn’t jesus fit the bill, for instance? and ghandi was no slouch, you could even say he was closer than christ to the red felt bullseye, because he had to deal with the extra complexities of modernity - and how about this modern age, and how even the martyrs can't feel right, cause you're either schizophrenic or deluded or pawned, right? wouldn't a hero, in this age, have to take on some contortion akin to the folding of a hypercross? dali comes close, to me, cause he didn't have no heart of gold, but he had his thing, and he made paintings with titles like “crucifixus hypercubicus”, and intentionally wet the bed, and so much more! so much so that i heard a zany dali story just the other day that was new to me, even after gorging on so much wedding cake at the museum in st. petersburg - so, maybe dali could pay the piper by accepting all my sins, feeling all my self-hatred as emblematic of humanity's festering sore, and putting a brave mustache-twirling face on it, and converting introverted hate to extroverted joy, through his idiom - or maybe i just like the hypercube - it's a little of this and a little of that - but i could have made it better had i stitched in an aside from page nine of today's telegram

so i still marvel in new ways, these days, that despite how grave it's been, at times, wading through life in this interesting monkey’s paw epoch, and how gamely i've soldiered on, there's so many people, that i even know personally, that have suffered more, and even sought such venues of suffering, and have soared higher despite that - or, of course, because of it - they sought, while i sought to avoid, avoid suffering, avoid assholes - not smite them, or challenge them, or convert them - and i haven't tasted a fraction of all that's out there for even a person of my low caste

so, heroes, saviors, debonair devils, any of these seem right to me, if we're to avoid anything less than apocalypse - and i was thinking, during the bus ride to my narcotics anonymous meeting today, that the transition from what we have now, for even runty late-comers to the industrial party, to economic scarcity and the resulting violence - could be a kind of suffering never before experienced by such a sum of minds - i was thinking this as i reasoned how much it would suck to be a small woodland creature, somewhere in the middle of the food chain, always fearing attack - i hate stress - even the small amount i have to put up with makes me fantasize about performing EZ kamikaze through opiates - poor rodents, what small pleasures they get through food and sex (do they fuck? i guess so, probably really quickly) must be so cherished, but still, that doesn't mean the value of those pleasures being inflated through scarcity makes up for missing out on eight thousand hours of A-list stand up comedy available in digital video format for periods of boredom and depression - poor rodents, most of them probably don't even live past infancy, and the ones who do are mostly zeta males, or breeder females - and in the end, you get eaten by a bird if you're lucky, or tortured by a cat otherwise, but...

your nervous system is wired for this spectrum of pleasure and pain and is not expecting anything else - thus, it’s normal, not tragic, or hellish - bearable, in a sense - there's no need for religion, or blankies, or stand-up comedy - a warm burrow will suffice - there's no "tragedy", no need for samuel barber's weepy string adagio - no need for all those sanity-draining dramas

not to dehumanize people who are in what seem to me like hellish circumstances, but i see an analogue here - the idea that the spectrum of pain and pleasure has different focus levels - that said, i don't imagine the nervous system adaptable enough to spare us modern luxury items from massive malfunction, ie, agony, when our resources run out, and their toxic byproducts catch up with us - the sense of loss and the knowledge of what is outside the new narrow spectrum imposed by circumstance - that would never be endurable for me, i'm nearly certain - but i'm not certain i could self-administer an overdose, let alone pull the trigger of a gun inside my mouth

anyway, the hero won't be me - i can't even write heroically, except at that rare growth on the deepest trough of misery, the contour that winks at me, perverse with aesthetic righteousness, in B major? i could see us ekeing out the next century, crowded on the toxic precipice, white-knuckling it, everybody trying to hold onto their comforts - i could also see an apocalypse, not a Complete biblical-style thing, just a pedestrian apocalypse of the kind unseen in our history - not the complete erasure of humanity, just the collapse of anything worth living for

what i can't see very easily, even though i'm a wishful thinker, is space colonies, or a brilliant green ecological revolution, or a global coordination for the common good - i could see that if we started earlier, but it's too late now - this is a lesson that will only take effect if one of us spontaneously puts it together, that this alien world this being is living on that seems oddly familiar, could redeem itself through heroic insight and action, starting with me, the change she wants to see in the world, let's say feminizing at ground zero, empathizing beyond extremes

maybe this can only happen if the devil has his due - so what i say to myself, or you, or whoever is listening, or whoever wants to take ownership, as a compromised, hypocritical mediocrity, is: shit or get off the pot - make something happen - and yet, for all that, that hypocritical mediocrity, eating cow, not being proud, feeling guilty about the millions killed in my name, custer dying for my sins, suffused with dread, worrying about what's going to happen when the other shoe drops... for all that, haven't i had some good times? haven't there, maybe, been pleasures of a kind that heroes will never know? a style, i mean, that hamstrings the slickest ninja moves for power, profit, and alpha male orgasm - i mean, there was a moment, it's been said, in ancient scrolls, during which a man made doritos dust look cool, like he wore it well, on his face, and he even noticed it, in the reflection of his roommate's sunglasses, and laughed, cause he knew there was no one there to see it, except his roommate who wouldn't get it, but would be there to reflect it, and that's cool, and he was a pretty cool roommate anyway, and maybe one day, it would be his turn to get the pretty dukhabor girl instead of his roommate, or something of equivalency, plus or minus 17

i can never tell what denis johnson really thinks of his characters, i guess some would say that makes him a great writer - i sensed contempt for yvonne, but not enough to dismiss her entirely - and more importantly i sensed the absence of that killjoy stoic empiricism that infests online discussion everywhere because it’s easy to talk tough when you’re an avatar and you don’t have to back it up with action, that bravado that eschews anything other than the most mundane explanations for how, and why, things exist - yes, johnson has contempt and cynicism, certainly, but also an openness to possibilities - you're at least in the vicinity of mysticism when nietzsche quotes are your neighbors

i don't get outa bed for less than 25 million

but alright, maybe i will, anyway - i'm starting to dream of oversleeping - it's gonna take a lot of wretched under-caffeinated wake time to come close to catching up, on just the preliminary bullshit of getting myself back together to the point where i can be turned down for crappy jobs again - but i do like cleaning my apartment sometimes, a lil bit - it's not about the cleanliness and organization and sterilization - it's about keeping myself occupied - it's about sewing together a creepy-looking hopey doll from the excess stock of wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men, from a never-employed political campaign, now deflated - it's where the rubber meets the road, i guess

Dig up, stupid

Profligate is my new favourite word. Quasi-toxins bleed into many sense apparati. Sometimes quasi is enough to kill a man, and ten women, even if it don't avail you of nothin. It's all half-measures, it won't pan out to pleasin dionysus. Chief Wigum's axioms also speckle in my head, for the record. The night is too young to be this old, ya know?

Welcome to Frosty's bunker. Yeah, his hand is a few meters to our north. Just kinda lies there. There's no pun in that. It was tres accidental. But it's fodder for conversation. It was a landmine accident, we think. But he don't need no saving, I'll tell you that right now. And I'll also tell you that.

There's a pirate that drowned. T'was a battle at sea, and'e was filled with so much lead, tha man just sunk like a stone. We believe e's residing at the bottom o' the atlantic, very much inert. At least his shell. We believe e may've made a pact, not with God, surely, and prolly not the devil, cause that cagey bastard wouldn't have trusted that great deceiver as faras 'e'd've thrown im.

But once a millenia, us lucky few who've been arounded up in this scurvy century suddenly remember, in the dawn

I might have tintinitus. Which is okay, because I'm just a cog in B. F. Skinner Jr.'s experiment. There ain't no cure for a cog - except something I can't remember far enough back to, cheap chinese axle grease.

And now to lighten things up, some pictures of beautiful latin babies, and the music of tito peunte.

fingersnafu

from fingersnapping to fingersniffing

wonder what will come next?

some botched miracle, i imagine…

from absurd to absurder to absurdist

novelty begat habit

this belt situation is so retarded, it's paranormal - what is this thing, a mobius strip? who designed it, space elves? ah god, and the damn thing is too loose anyway - i guess i'll go with the usb midi cable - oh usb midi cable - people may scoff at you, because you're a usb midi cable - but i'm not trying to impress nobody - least of all, those that would stare at my crotch area

spring time - and the living is queasy
i like chatting with chels
especially during my trans-human delusions
but anytime is fine, makes me feel like less of a scumfuck

the meter took a plane to summer
the reason ran off with the rhyme
but i'm glad there are people out there who think of things besides the void

philosophical boredom

the rainy 5:18 sky feels like a hostess potato chip truck passing south nelson elementary school on the dirt road that was decommissioned in the early '90s - so much depends on that - empires of oblivion - or is it oubliette?

it's a good thing i can see a little sky, and a sliver of house - it's a good thing most of the view is obscured by the window curtains

dreams of heaven, dreams of women, dreams of drugs, dreams of persecution, dreams of revenge - the menu never really changes, but there's new flavours, foreign spices brought in every month or so - can't read the labels

there was a good bit in that improv, something i should turn into something - meandering soul, is where the solid detritus lies, honest injun, but structure and artifice is where something better is, something i would want to listen to - therein lies the dichotomy - soul don't sell - otherwise it wouldn't be soul, no, it'd be something worth writing about - although the effort to describe the feeling of the hostess gray association was more than token - worth at least fifty funbucks, yessir - now if i could only turn that improv into something, turn a screw, something borrowed and blue -- for lack of anything, better to do --- no, this won't do

the only purpose is in improving, heh, in both meanings - there's a platonic paradox, in no meanings - river bathing, digital ganges: you take a mortal man - and put him in the producer's chair - watch people's heads'a roll (the multidisciplinary studies arc): it doesn't happen by magic, but it does happen - you can make a great mensch out of a slack mediocre hypocrite - just prop him up with your god-like powers, god, tell him the one thing he needs to say to the one person he needs to say it to, to get his big break, get mad respect, locally, and subsequently, globally, be one of the elite, the ones who're still standing up st. pete, voltaire's immortal bastards - he'll still be a hypocrite, but no longer mediocre, and with a schedule full of things to do, like throw first pitches at baseball games, and speak on panels - and since everybody's a hypocrite except for the mute, it's the best a body can hope for

take me, please - for example: sure, i'm brilliant and talented, but never qualitatively or quantatively at the same time, dig? maybe sometimes demi-semi-hemi-quaverly, in a special limited-edition issue of gentleman's quarterly, but that's neither here nor there - so, watch you do is, you take the good, you take the bad, you take the rest, and then you have, the facts of life - which you use to contrive charlie's knot, which is a particular path for a lab-rat to get to the cheese a little quicker than fifty thousand out of fifty million vying for a similar style of journey

it's a lock, i tell you - you and me, we'll fix the world, or at least make a series out of it - it's like, i can't make morals out of this game anymore - yeah, i'll disappoint some people, but they're statistics, not tragedies - so, the fix is in, right? just don't tell nobody - swim a lap in AQ delirium, shower, killing policemen, it's not loaded, it is words and slides

XII:

Black Box static immunity. Mother mother refracted me with sexy demon vocals. Let the devil play it. Fuck music. The only thing that's good is to relax. The more peace, the better. I guess it's okay to say "zeigheist". For lack of anything else.


Mint-flavoured meschikles. Print-makers pollock template. Quality. Jump in dialog. That'll be useful. The old man, hell, Shaq, the genesis. Hey, was that an exclamation mark I deleted?


Lit mode should be good. How about controlled? Give slack. Reap results. Not all that mysterious. The mystery is an illusion.


XIV:


If I sleep when I'm alive, can I wake up when I'm dead? This is the only way, the only direction. The return of the curse of the creature's ghost. A spoonful of medicine helps the sugar dissolve. Yeah. I can see the value, vaguely.


No silly lists. Only the silliest grist for the mill. Vallie low lull lolliswallow. Sostenuto. There isn't one. Maybe there is a remainder. Climes. I can say this is halfway. One foot in, one foot out. Spartan stupor. Makes me think that one day, the sublime zen fractions of a life moderately well-lived will be mine. Righteous.

protein pills

king narmur was the uniter of the first nation in history

hot, cold, itch, spit
i should do this, that

should throw away this

could i do that?
a reasonable routine?

i don't feel artistic
i should make art out of that

selfish
should devote my life to others

swallow, shiver, swallow, save
band practice in three days, should work on the songs
but i don't want to
don't feel it, like i did then

cold hands, hands always cold
i should do away with all chemical aids
this "medication" i take when i'm "clean"
uppers, downers, most of all, the
ANTI-DEPRESSANT, i'd love that out of the mix
but it's so awfully pragmatic right now

cold hands, i'm going to turn on the heater
the dust is burning
don't want to swallow, the roof of my mouth feels weird
i'll spit on my dresser, i don't care

could i warm my hands in front of a fire, and listen to bob brier
forever? would that be okay?
eight glasses of water a day
i don't want to hear that my room "smells" or "stinks"
or whatever is wrong with it today

i want to fix all or nothing
i'll fix it with valerian

it's such a stupid problem
this excess saliva
should i spend all my charity
on a visit to the dentist? yes, no, let's keep it all in theory
till the next distraction

IV:
should i save this? myself? others?

half a catharsis

VI, VIII:
now we're basting with kerosine

remember when the princess was a toadstool?

my hair still grows, oh, so long, everywhere
flat flattens out, elastic pancake, the world is flat
the universe is flat, we're all one, one plane
i'm a line on the plane

X:
that'll do for now....

i need to stop caring about not caring
too much energy for apathy

i'll drink more water, that's my activity
that's what i'm rousing myself to do, drink water

food is poison, i don't need more chemicals
complex molecules mucking me up, just h2o
that's alright

taste is obscene

this is my genre, i stumbled upon it
tomorrow i'll get a daytimer
step one (everybody love the clientelle)