Read on Lycaeum today (italics mine)

"I think you need to get to know this plant first before you go exploring so deeply. Again, the mind is very powerful in its effects and control of the body. Psychic issues can manifest as physical discomfort and other physical problems." - gorfehttimrek

note to self

I'm sick of the patterns I continually fall into. Behavioral patterns yes, but mostly mental patterns. There's got to be a better way to interrupt them. I don't think over-analysis or chemical tinkering is going to get me out of the mess those things got me INTO in the first place, but that's not to say consciousness can't play a role.

I can barely be bothered to philosophize.

I've psyched myself into thinking I'm shackled to moods and mindstates, although I can also see psychosomatic tension for what it is. That doesn't really abate the discomfort of FEELING it, but I can be meta about it, mentally, semanticize it, keep it in the realm of metaphor while clenching my teeth and my soul and obsessing about puke and panic and how is death going to come and how will I deal and what does that say about me as a man, as a human being, as a piece of God, in increasingly tight feedback loops and having "sickness" resonate on every level, with every traitor cell. Maybe this is how cancer starts. Maybe it's how William Burroughs starts. One thing I know, I need to keep dreaming.

Read on Erowid tonight

New Experiences:

"I've also stopped paying any attention to the future, because it only makes one worry needlessly. Peace can be found in the present moment through acceptance of what is and by recognizing the amazing beauty that is constantly flowing through everyone and everything in the universe. "

The itch

The urge to solve the mysteries - to sort it all out - has always been with me. It's an itch that needs to be scratched. But now I'm weary and sick of the itch, and scratching it is just a response to the maddening persistence of what I see as problems and paradoxes on this level. My attempts at philosophy are so the itch doesn't drive me insane. It used to be that I liked the itch itself, as well as the scratch. Now I'd rather be numb, but no anesthetic really works for me.

Cradle Happy Face Holocaust Grave

Why do I bite my lip, when I get that sweet tension? Maybe I think I'll eventually get to some candy center, some omnikinetic salvia surprise with special sauce, served slightly chilled. A lack of relaxing paradox. There's no one I would really want to subject this mindstate to. Just my blog.

Ties in the woods, a webwork of dubious quantum guerilla ontoloshit for brains lattice of good hearted laughter at gotten-references on poetry night at that weird vibey restaurant.

Amplitude modulation. I'm listening to that long electrodelusional interlude in The Mars Volta's Cicatriz, and writing down random thoughts. Now it's heading back into the buildup to the recap - dueling guitars, but it's not squeedley versus meedley - it's omar vs frusciante. Totally different thing. From spacey delirium to this. Fucking genius. Makes me want to quit - everything. Too bad I can't extract much literary material.

Just debris, that's all I see. Just debris. Got no meta, out of meta, thank god. I don't see how tagged I really am though. That's okay. Blissful stupidity.

Entropy, yeah you know me

Trivialize, dramatize, ostensibly philosophize, because I can.

How To Manual

Retarded. Out of literature, on a different flow, flowing gowns of clichés. I don't know how to explain this. It sounds like some paisleyed gown of profundity. It doesn't make sense how much that makes sense.

How many iterations this phase of mortality? Once not long ago, in what might be themed a gasoline flavored peak, it seemed to me that complete understanding was present in all I perceived but out of order. The tragicomedy of my linear thoughts could not assemble the grand truth, maybe I should have taken that other hit of acid.

Just coughed, my hand is now spittle flecked. Sorry. For simple reality. Ah, the grand glut of senses that could encompass. Cryptic and lonely. Why are my egos so quiet? When did they get so humble? Bouncing words off the cold blank armor of others is a game for tundra dwellers, abominable snowmen. I only really connect to the work of the poets I KNOW, personally, and then only when we interface in those apropos motions of the ocean. Ah, assonance is trying to teach me something like McKenna's elf tykes, even in these carefully scratched up meta clauses, praying to buddha for a plastic rocket. The Shadow knows.

Could I have ever imagined novelty crusting like it did? It was a new crust, a new pattern of entropy. A half hard, not-totally flaccid bit of flesh responded, barely, through the haze of excess brain chemicals, to the pattern. Which means, to be less lonely and less cryptic, that thinking about lack of options and the running out of new things to say and see and do, led to a visual image of a transient drying out of a very limited mode of thinking. It was transcendence in cartoon form, ironically taking the form of a little plastic castle in a goldfish bowl. Oh great, Hippie Craque, a metaphor that only Raz will get. That's so very un-solipsistic of you.

At least I limboed under meta's mind. Mostly. Ah a dense hunk of useless meaning. Semantic scrapyard. Back in the control room of the Detroit Syndicate Club.

Okay, scrap that. There's doors I haven't opened yet. There's the silicon forest. Come on. Emotions in the canopy. There's a cool breeze, the void of adrenaline. There's bark with a button. The barkives. There's a swinging gunny sack, empty of extrapolations. Empty, all the better, to substance. Verbiage roughage foliage.

Tommy was a social animal. Sex drove him, as it drove everyone, in odd ways, up the walls, in to trees, into gutters, into tunnels, underground, out of the way, warsaw sewers. Cryptic, scenic route. I tripped a laser of liking my writing. For a split second, the alarm went off. It rang, reverbed axons, neurons firing, egos burning like lightbulb filament, eureka, a utilitarian use for a bundle of nerves.

Hippie Craque, what now? He's been Hector. He feels like he's flanged into third person, drooling genetic rifts off the tree of sonanmic syllables, taxonomic pools of twin slurs. He forgot to smell the roses. The scent surprised him. And daisies were in the distance, hardly suspected.

Hosebag, prosehag. Oh, the sweet gleaning of arbitrary meaning. Low-hanging fruits of synesthetic calisthenics. Yeah, I get it. Old paradigm fun, before I knew my cells by name. I still see the traps I'm in, even as I'm in them. People have defined the walls of my cage, as I have defined the walls of others. But I'm no guru. I probably make a difference anyway. Good or bad, who can say? We aren't chaos architects, we are leaves on the wind. How profound. Found.

Raz arrives to Hector the Crow

"And to my right here we have what appears to be a mountain...




Here we have a view of bob that Nelsontowne hasn't seen in quite a while.



Watch yer step. Or else it may mean doom - the doom of your coffee.



After spending mere hours with razberrychaos, Hippie Craque is already contemplating where to hide the blugeoned remains of her lifeless body. Throw it in the water, bury it in the earth, throw it in the water, bury it in the earth...Decisions, decisions.

MC Lars says

that Canada is America's Scotland.

Yeah, they may take our water, oil, actors, pot activists, dignity, and NHL teams…

but they'll never take OUR FREEDOM!

The Winter and the Hot Springs, remixed

"You’re driving too fast," she bitched. I glared at the speedometer and sighed, easing on the gas pedal. We crept down toward the speed limit. Then she brought up the cliff again and I decided I'd slowed down enough. We were almost there anyway.

I pulled in to the parking lot as the sun fell behind the valley walls. No one was around so I didn't bother signaling. I caught a nasty look from Dez in my peripheral. Oh well, the springs will steep the anger out of her, I thought. And mine, well mine was already overwhelmed by a thousand memories in a lattice of scent, sight, and sound. Ainsworth was always good for that. It was a magical place, built on a silly slope. It overlooked a glacial lake appearing oceanic with its far edge hidden by the evening fog.

We zig-zagged up the stone ramp to the office. Fourteen for two? Hell, that's a bargain, I thought. There are much worse ways to spend money.

Thankfully, the change room was empty. Shower? No problem. I left the room, fearfully exposed, and handed my bag of clothes to a woman in a window. Strange, slack job that must be, I thought. I wondered if she read paperbacks all day. Then I surveyed the pool. Absolutely free of competing personalities. Perfect. Dez was going to love this. Sometimes things work out when I least expect them to. Sometimes the universe conspires to give us comfort before a long separation. Or perhaps that was us, cutting with the woodgrain of the universe, synergizing through receptivity to this geothermal nexus.

I was getting cold though. I was doing alright with the psychology of being nearly publicly naked (a rare feat for me), but physically, my body was screaming at me. I wondered if Dez had wigged out in the change room or something.

Finally she emerged, like Alice in Wonderland. A smile spread on my face. I was, however, not interested in waiting around to deliver some Carrolian non-sequitor. I waded right into the pool, rejecting an impulse to perform a racing dive.

Pleasure on the threshold of pain sprung through my nerves and plateaued to the opiate glow of thirty-seven degree amniotic bliss. I'd been anticipating this moment all day and wondering, as is my way, if the anticipation would ruin the consummation, but there was no fooling my body with contrived headtrips, the physical rush cut through everything.

I looked back to see if Dez had entered the oasis. She had and was, for the moment, lost in the same dynamic reverie I'd been in. Now I was open to the view, the sprinkle of snow, green ripples catching garish orange streetlights, and the stately conifers at the edge of the forest. And my beautiful, curvaceous girlfriend in a blue swimsuit. I walked toward her, neck deep in water. Her face seemed fresh, more open than it had been all day. Her hair dripped into the pool, spreading in an ostentatious display. Her body was refracted below in a riot of aqua-fleshtone - I wanted to touch every inch of it.

"Nice, huh?" I said inanely. She laughed at the understatement that was somehow just right, coolly under the line, like this water, warmed perfectly above body temperature. She reached out a bold arm to stroke my chest and I let her, loving her love my hair. It didn't feel like excess under her fingers. To repay her attention I kissed her lips which seemed to surprise her. Then I felt her body shudder in delight, under my hand, under the water, under the stars.

Dezidance

break

Clawing out brains

HST: It seemed like a good idea at the time

Bottomless pit of MSG-laced misery

I wish I could enjoy it as much as some

-

The crying I caused still rings in my ears. Well I do have free will. I could have been a paragon of virtue, a model. Instead I behaved like myself and only abandoned the pride when the tears started. I don't know.

Oh well. I'm not entirely empty this morning. Something's still rattling around in me, making tinny sounds, irritating sounds.

But I'm mostly empty, and extrapolating that to infinity. Nothing's worth stealing.

But the nasal fixation... still the nasal fixation.

My CPU overheated. I gave it a break.

Fair Use

Qutb ruined Islam, Phelps ruined Christianity, Stalin ruined communism. The past is a shitpile, there's no use clinging to labels.

Paul Fussell's introduction to Robert Grave's WWI memoir: Good-bye to All That

Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility," none of which we have got:

"In the Punch and Judy show of our century ... there are no more guilty and also, no responsible men. It is always, 'We couldn't help it' and 'We didn't really want that to happen.' And indeed, things happen without anyone in particular being responsible for them. Everything is dragged along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the sweep of events. We are all collectively guilty, collectively bogged down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers ... That is our misfortune, but not our guilt ... Comedy alone is suitable for us."

The hell with Mohammed

I hardly ever agree with the right wing, but the whole rioting over disrespect of the prophet idiocy makes me want to hurl. No, I DON'T respect the prophet. Can you deal with that? Maybe there are more important things to worry about - like, say, the fact that no one in power seems to give a shit about what we're going to do when the oil runs out, or the war in Iraq. Freedom of expression, it's the future, get used to it:


















Oh, and fuck Jesus too.

the life amplitude modulator

Did the aquafilter filter out the failure?

Somehow I don't think so.

No, you drink your floating white chunks of flesh failure straight from the paranoid pulse of your tesselated stroke cycles, strolling down the streets of a convenient ideal NY, dreaming of life's amplitude modulator.

The dealer of this excessively dandy device gives you a good sales pitch: haven't you ever yearned to control the amplitude of your life? Well now you can - OBSERVE! (Idle ideal NY alley transition):

Walking walking, fine and dandy, but the texture you thought a smooth sharp seamless searing painful pastiche of unrelenting emotionally-sinewed intensity... the edge flakes off in scratches, consciousness garroted into the void... you feel a twist in your spine, your nerves short - clik cliky clikkkkkkkkkkk k k kk kk- and we're back, WTF?

What the fuck was that, you think? You felt a twist in your spine and you were gone, dead in the head for millisecond intervals, several hundred of them, spread over a deadhead deca-second - your life's amplitude modulated, you felt, in superposition, a binary bedspread of deadhead, you felt the void in juxtaposition, a bankrupt yin purred across your wheel of fortune - you felt it, in and out, the life amplitude modulator...

You like to carry that spine severing pattern around with you like a hole in your pocket, useful for dealing with meanies. You've accepted the fuckup money because you're not an idealist or a principled radical. You'll burn it up, put it into the economy.

You'll dream of crack again, and you could go for another klicking flick of that life amplitude modulator right now: klikkkk kkk kk kk kkkkk

kk

k kkklik Click, and we're back:

Wow, that was a long one.

The flotsam of failure still floats in your glass. But who cares, you've got the life amplitude modulator, you can klik yourself momentarily out of your value system... mmm, that's the lipsmacking klikfactor no one can lipsync to.

Cyclo'd - there are worse fates

Staring at the side of a desk, ancient woodgrain, carbon-dated back to the wildes of the child I was. I've gouged countless holes in the wood. My desk has character. He's a wounded, bitter character, still bearing a load that grows heavier every year.

When did I stop being a writer? When did I stop verbally improvising like I do on my fake-ivories? Maybe when I started trying to make sense. Trying to bring information across... to the others. That was the real quixotic mission, wasn't it? The lunatic escaped the asylum.

I think I'm still feeling that last hit of cyclobenzeprine. Don't worry folks, it's mild prescription meds and I've only got four pills left. I've been saving that stuff because they're the best downers I've ever had. They're for the sopoheads, the sleep connoiseurs.

I like being apathetic. I hate being dramatic. No, I don't deal with drama. I can't cope with it. I don't like extremes. I'm done with e, I know no good will ever come of that. I'm probably done with psychedelics, because they lead me to the same psychodrama every time and it's just no fun. I don't know if I can salvage any sense from this brain of mine.

"Behind closed eyelids" was a buzzphrase stiched into a well-worn mitten, insulating an arthritic hand. Who needs cutup when you've got introvision? I think I'm cyclo'd and I like that. Nothing is worth doing. I take the Dao's lardful lump of leisure where I can get it. The funny thing is I don't feel sick right now. Not very sick anyway, although saying that jinxes it like it always does - a little bubble of bile rises through my throat - but still, it's not all a malicious placebo malady - there is a calm I've been allowed to feel, remaining. If there was a drug that guaranteed this effect, I'd probably be hooked. Can I outwit my own brain? Maybe, he's not as smart as people think.

Fuckup Money

Well I got through another breadpacking Shakespearian drama. Five hours, but it felt like fifteen. I did what I had to do. I did it my way. Well sorta. With my style anyway. With a flourish, a flanged flourish. I wouldn't do it any other way. No way. No sir.

Now I've got some Fuckup Money.

Easy, hard, not exactly pointful. A symbol.

Nah, forget that. Who cares? Fragmentary.

Sedimentary. Elementary my dear. Nah. Nobody.

Cryptic dust desposits hardening to marks, brands of... nah. Forget that.

Music won't do it for me. Maybe cyclo will. Have I earned it yet? I can't decide.

No, I'm not far enough removed yet. Still seating in the serrated dealings of cycles.

Icy cycles, the whims of the sick cyclical centrefuge.

Some nostalgia might work. Erpland by Ozric Tentacles. Yes, a nice slice of the past. Hallucinogen remixed Pteranodon, that's how I got into this outfit.

I'm actually enjoying this. I feel no pain. No fevered ego flange. No, I absorb it and it absorbs me. The flavor of enlightenment nearly feels real again. Nearly.

But my agenda was to perhaps shut my mind off.

Life amplitude modulator. Maybe it's time for some modulation. Some hardcore blink. Maybe routines have grown ravenous, devoured reason. Or maybe not. I can't quite say.

Well I got through another breadpacking Shakespearian drama. Five hours, but it felt like fifteen. I did what I had to do. I did it my way. Well sorta. With my style anyway. With a flourish, a flanged flourish. I wouldn't do it any other way. No way. No sir.

Mario Circuit three, open for srelickintendure...

Soporiff cycle

I'm so tired all the time. When I talk to people I sound like I'm on a downer. I'm not really all that down though, at least not in a way that makes acute emotional pain bounce through my brain. I’m not quite happy, mentally nauseas, and still feedback looping, but short of depressed. Maybe just lethargic. I can't figure out what cycle it fits into.

Hmmmmm... there are sleeping cycles. I can never maintain those. Surely that is fucking with my head. Not getting my melatonin at night, not getting my vitamin A in the day. And I feel like all possibilities are exhausted, but perhaps I've just crammed myself into a niche. Maybe I just don't realize that I hate my routines, my random, non-cyclic shuffle through these life scripts. I went off the major mind perturbating chemicals, but surely those pedestrian inebriants fuck with my rhythms as well.

Another barometric reading, the psychic weather report – how dull, but not quite as dull for me, because I am, unfortunately, at ground zero, trying to gather data, see the patterns. So much damned self analysis - analysis is an uber-feedbackloop. I should get back into literature, wrap my head around other people's analyses - of something resembling objective reality, an aggregate of subjective reveries - committed to pages, words deemed worthy, or screamed into the abyss, for something to do.

Dreams have always been my friends. They take me beyond myself. They are previews of ego death. They don't sour on me, even with analysis. Even with lucidity (though I can never sustain lucidity in dreamtime long before waking up) I can still escape the sickness. I'm happy, healthy, and sane in dreamtime. That's a thread, I loved dreams years ago, I still love them. They subvert all the philosophical bullshit.

Meaning is a mental illness, it seems to me.

The life of values

Let's bury the last post and talk about life for a minute, since I'm alive right now and might as well make use of it.

I was reading Jim Kunstler's blog "Clusterfuck Nation" today. His main theme is the immanent collapse of the western world in the wake of peak oil production. He fancies himself a hard-boiled realist, which is why he'll say that the United States is fucked in Iraq and the war has nothing to do with democracy, then he'll turn around and say that Bush is right to spy on Americans (because of the threat of America's enemies, who are obviously pissed off at America's not-so-subtle practice of dominating the world, particularly oil-rich Muslim lands).

And the reason I keep coming back to his blog, despite his odious democrat centrism, is because he IS something of a realist, even if the slimy prick won't come out and say whether or not he actually supports imperialism in the name of oil hegemony.

No, he'll just repeat his skipping record line, his attack on people (and he reserves his most scathing attacks for the war protesters) for being against the oil wars yet living their oil-fueled lifestyles. What I'd like to know is, what part of "no blood for oil" doesn't he understand?

Today, after quoting one of those dumbass head-in-the-sand utopian globalists, he writes:

An arresting fantasy, isn't it? A Beijing that resembles Atlanta, full of strip malls dishing out cheeseburgers and other interesting foreign foods to Chinese soccer moms hurrying back to Toll Brother's starter homes in Chinese knockoffs of the Ford Explorer.

Note to Mr. Reich and the rest of the people he is smoking opiated hashish with: you've got it backwards. Over the next twenty, thirty years America gets to be more and more like Chinese peasant life in 1949. Why? Because neither America nor China (nor anybody else) can continue running industrial economies the way we have been, or even a substantial fraction of that way, in an energy-starved world. Nor will anybody come up with a miracle technological rescue remedy to keep all the motors humming.

And this got me thinking... If we somehow find our way out of this chinese finger trap (and I doubt we'll be able to oil it off our fingers) and into what will most likely be a radically scaled back version of this contemporary clusterfuck (if not a post-apocalyptic wasteland) then perhaps purpose will be had in being forced to kick our novelty addiction and thus, slowly freeing ourselves from the bonds of historical time and the nauseas twisting paradigm slur.

My European descendents used to wonder what it might be like living in a world of magic (South American descendents wouldn't have to wonder, being familiar with mushrooms and ayahuasca). Well now we know. The power brought about by deep understanding of physics and chemistry allowed us to see infinity in a grain of sand. Now we see super strings in a vacuum. Now there are possible loopholes for time travel. Now there are barbarians banging at the gates of the universal light-speed limit. Pretty amazing. But then, why do I feel so blasé? Is it the disparity between what's on the cover of discover magazine, and the frequency with which my computer crashes? Is it the promise of nanotech, in juxtaposition with the fact that seeing one of the latest 3d game engines didn't impress me too much? Or is it the fact that I've already seen ten thousand science fiction films laying it all out for me, THIS utopian/dystopian drama brought to you by INFOGLUT incorporated?

Okay, this is ridiculous. It's like I'm in year 15,645,298 of my paradise retirement package (maybe I AM, and my snooze alarm went off on heaven's night table, and I'm waking up to the bored God cycle yet again, and I'm saying, no goddamnit, gimme another fifteen millennia). But surely this is extrapolation and projection.

And I know the folly of romanticization. The post oil age could be very hard indeed, and where do I get off embracing hard times? I've never known truly hard times, unless my theory is correct, my guestimation that the existential emptiness is fundamentally harder on a mind then the substance I won't name for fear of tainting it, the substance that, for all its pain, would provide the energy/life-force/unnamed-purpose necessary for supreme satisfaction. The amino acids would never taste better, the fifteen second fuck would be endorphintastic. (I've failed to give this much grit or texture, I haven't mentioned tilling the soil, or slaughtering pigs, or raising a barn, have I?) But this can't be the answer, I'm not wrapping up the riddle of consciousness.

Nonetheless, purpose in sustainability - maybe that's the domain consciousness must move in to - mind moved to embrace ecological harmony. How's that for an expansion? Sustainability, cycles restored to their luxury, in the light of modernity-honed mind.

What we've done with the industrial revolution, and then the information age, is jumped headlong through hoops of increasingly tight cycles, a million megahertz and shrinking shelf-life. Information accumulates, patterns aggregate, we become hyper-aware of the cycles, an awareness I (don't know about you) could do without. Too much awareness spoils the broth, I don't want to know that this is the HAPPY PART OF THE CYCLE, it throws a wrench into the gears, my wheels spin in futile thought loops, purpose spoils the party.

Is novelty a renewable resource? McKenna would have thought so, the elf machines seemed to contain enough in a glossolalic thimble full of self-transformation. I have yet to smoke DMT but I've listened to his trip report so many times, I feel like I've been there/done that. The VR people I used to be in such kinship with, like Mark Pesche, would probably assume with enough ingenuity, we could squeeze novelty out of the lunar soil.

I was raised to be a dynamics addict - unless it's in my genes, and then human evolution really is the ultimate dead end, unless I'm just being like that sad-sack who said, in 1900: "everything that can be invented has been" (and maybe he wasn't even sad). The egg laid the twitchy chicken, itching, sketched out and pecking the bedrock for a new rhyme in common time, and I'm just not cut out to be in the same game, no longer the cutting edge of evolution, past my prime with new ideas left to the modern tip of the fractal still pouring out of life's vaginal doorway.

My obsession with novelty, the running out of things to say and do, depleting the resource of novelty like we deplete our material resources, burning out as an individual and a civilization - this is based on being trapped in historical time and having my paradigm dependent on constant re-contextualization. My paradigm itself has been a verb, a paradigm slur. But can re-contextualizing run indefinitely? It's like folding a piece of paper in halves, then quarters, and so on - the first fold is effortless, the next easy, but by the time you get to six or seven folds, it gets to be hard slogging. It gets to be end game.

But if I could escape from historical time... Because I see what McKenna and Joyce and those people meant by "history" now. Escape from history. But rebuilding civilization after a catastrophe would be fairly "historic", wouldn’t it? I'm seeing it as the transitory period to the clearing at the end of history's path - the gateway to Eden...

Yeah, I know, you can't talk about Eden without sounding like a bliss ninny. But I'm not really, because I'm not really talking about a blissful Eden. I'm talking about redefining Eden, redefining bliss, shunning this nervous, twitchy bliss we're searching for and instead, finding the bedrock, the ground of being, the regaining of purpose in losing the same.

The most shocking statement I'll have to make is that this probably eschews a great deal of consciousness. I can't see consciousness as an end anymore, except maybe that the greatest revelation is to come, in profane, linear history. Oh hell, it'll have to surprise me, I mean I'm building up this great vacuum, this chasm of boredom, talking about endgames and the death of the new age. Isn't it obvious I'm setting myself up for - I wish, I wish I was setting myself up, but wishful thinking, doesn't that jinx it? Heh.

Purpose and the death of values

I can't even call this a paradigm slur. It's a shift, a definable shift, where values invert.

Purpose is what we're striving for.

We must have purpose.

We mustn't be purposeless.

We mustn't exhibit purposeless-ness.

We must be purposelessness-less.

- Rowan Atkinson


There's something about the idea of purpose that undermines itself. By thinking about, or talking about purpose, we conceptualize it. When it becomes a concept, it becomes contrived. I still haven't learned how to deal with contrivance. What do you do when you come to understand the purpose of Zen and Daoism, but you can't make the leap from conceptualization to practice, because purpose itself gets in the way? I can see these eastern thoughts as potential saviors, not rivals to a hellish breed of existentialism, but techniques to get around the claustrophobic vacuum of seeming to know too much and see too deep. That still sounds pretentious, and yet I feel it with every respiratory rhythm and circulation of blood - the chemicals slosh through my brain, reminding me of every past cycle. I have no problem anymore with saying it outright: I want to forget. I want to forget all this shit it seems I've learned. Unless there's a way through but I can't see one.

Because after all we don't want to end up, do we?

Like the blind man.

In the dark room.

Looking for the black cat.

That isn't there.

- Rowan Atkinson


If I thought business as usual was possible, I'd vote for it. I'd live in the shallow suburbs and bitch and moan and fill my life with toys and trinkets - I remember the joys of materialism, and I'm surely forgetting the joys of my own materialism, what still keeps me going, flowing, typing on blogger, mostly maintained, with a little fix-it list, and a FUBAR future.

True intelligence is being able to empathize with people you don't know, and situations you're not in. I've never been in a war, but I think this extrapolation sub-routine that so plagues me with purposeless angst is good for allowing me to see that war isn't worth it, except maybe if you're fighting the nazis. If there's any true sign of social enlightenment, it's figuring out what's important before they start the goddamn war.

Once I had a daoist revelation that the inevitable forgetting of that ultimate bliss was the benign cycle of the universe - so I could learn again. That was purpose. I can't trust my "enlightenment" trophy any more because from my current perspective, it seems tied to a rate of change, the dipropyltryptamine delta, propelling me into rapid nirvana. Tranquility was tied to acceleration, accelerating freedom from - whatever bullshit plagued me at the time. There was nothing eternal or infinite about it, my "revelation" was enabled by the time and the place, and even then I sensed that.

Do I even believe in infinity? I'm not sure. Mind expansion means learning every language, travelling the world, seeing inside an atom, seeing Christ die on calvary, historical tourism and society's destiny. Surely that would have to alter my paradigms too. But I can't honestly think how. The burden of purpose seems too heavy, like the bedrock I broke through to. Salvia's still a novelty, since I only smoked it twice.

Now there's something about consciousness that seems overdone, overcooked to me - was it the acid, was it the E, is it getting older, or is it this ridiculous feedback loop? Maybe it's this culture that's played itself out with its glut of novelty, its coke-binge mentality, its market mania, its information age. The information age sounded great to me four years ago, now it sounds like post-modernity's punchline.

Consciousness is a good thing if there's anything good. It creates the good and the bad, but substance beats absence, that still sounds algebraically sound to me. Unless the substance becomes so sick, you wish for absence.

I try to be clear enough to factor wishful thinking into every probing I make into the universe. I wanted, nearly demanded some sort of continuity to consciousness before the paradigm shift. Now what seems like wishful thinking (nevermind what the truth is) is a break in continuity. Dare I even say it, a permanent break? Oh why not, who's God am I offending, what demon am I conjuring? Only my own.

I'm not so far gone I'm really wishing for the void. Hell, wouldn't I like to have the option anyway? But who says we get options in this cosmos?

What comes closest to bringing me the peace of mind I crave is the idea of the death of values. Who knows what death is? But one thing that seems reasonable to suppose is that it's the death of values. Necessary slaughter and the agonizing ennui of tranquility - these could be expunged from the equation - in theory.

Ego is still the great mystery. The death of ego could be the great gateway, the next novelty, or at least true tranquility. This is positive thinking, and wishful too perhaps, but it doesn't sound out of bounds to me, and it doesn't smell like religion or bullshit.

The thing that overrides everything is that I'm fairly certain I probably don't know what I'm talking about. If there's clarity, it's in the fog - agnosticism.