Filed under: Philosophy
I was bored, so I sped up time in an effort to get a better handle on the day. It wasn’t much of a success, although in terms of cigarettes smoked it was a very efficient operation. The cigarettes aside, there is something else in the air right now some leftover waft of a scent blowing from hundreds of miles away. The scent of chance and gunpowder, mixing with the freshness of a new season unencumbered by the past. The time travelling masses haven’t yet caught up to the essential fugue that hides the songlines that matter in a cloud of elaborate scams. The mind is confronted by manufactured confusion, the open interpration of symbols carrying meaning only to a closed group. Youth laughs, experience smiles, and beauty only wonders why speed only advances time in one direction. Crow’s feet aren’t a mark to be hidden away; and the music won’t stop for any of us.
In some ways, the search for meaning is more accurately termed a side trail that promises to be something that doesn’t exist. It is the quest for certainty, to be guided by purpose rather than the partial knowledge of the past and present. Admit it, because these subtle influences exert the same effects on everybody. The difference is the reaction. Talking to the southern beauties or my most steady muse tells me the same things, the same reinforced absolution awaiting the correct answers to age old questions. It flashes on and off for those developing awareness or raising a child with a future date with some moment in history. I question the use og all the mind-changing stimulants, but if you can persuade a large group of people that carpenters can come back as kings, then anything is possible.
Bullshit temporal games aside, it becomes a continuum consisting of everything possible rather than everything actual. Too much to count or quantify. What a drag. From the ashes, eh? Like that analogy ever applied to anybody. I wash my hands of it for now, there’s other things to spend time thinking about, for a change.
Filed under: Philosophy, the lost children of the bokonists, thoughtful trips
Tonight is no kind of night for plans or preconceived notions. For one thing, it’s hard to see with eyes that are closing like a cheap roadside diner after a visit from the health department. The week required more emotion than I prefer to expend on any one issue, having learned a long time ago that one defining attribute of existence is the omniresent possibility that it can end without warning. (Tumors and car wrecks. Not the same you say? Well, get diagnosed and roll a van into a hill. Wear your seatbelt.) However, that is completely off topic, not to mention immaterial for the time being. More pressing is finding some way to regain perspective, at least temporarily. Hence, the only plan is no plan at all. Of course, I’d be a total hop-head liar if I didn’t also tell you there are several of my most trusted compares here to keep me company and corkscrewed long past the last strains of conscious thoughts.
Still, with so much involved at the moment, tonight is an excellant night to remind myself how fucking lucky I am. The veins displaying sharp colors on a field of white tell me that another tirade about the luckiness of my life would be droll and misinterpreted, but without logic, all we are (you guessed it!) is monkeys throwing feces at each other. And I’m in no fucking mood for that. This aside, what is really required is a willingess to admit the lack of control, and come clean to the true meaning of dumb luck. Recipients of dumb luck have a real leg up in the race for the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. This is accompanied by a reduction in the ability to seperate conscious choice from coincidental occurence. Those poor bastards.
So while swimming through the clouds and shit, the innate leaning towards retrospective italization is understandable if philosophically deplorable. With that in mind, I ate a couple of really good chocolate chip cookies and polished off a diet coke. Jumping tracks of thought seems the side effect of too much mental masturbation. The mind reels both in horror and abject overload as images and ideation collides. Total chaos ensues, which is to say the meaning of symbols suddenly changes as context shifts from familiar to unknown. The characteristics are everywhere, expressed in the entire range of emotional outpourings; a host of subconscious triggers exerting the subtle influence on the chemicals of the mind. In other news, my hair got a little longer this week. There is always that.
Seemingly unasked in all the torpid movement and momentary foci is the refrain accompanying any rapid change. When equilibrium returns, will anyone actually manage to remember that anything that starts with the speed of thrusting hips can stop with the suddeness of lightning strike? Like Vonnegut wrote; “Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”
We don’t require additional laws, more or less guns, or anything we don’t already have. Just acknowledging our shared humanity would probobly be a good start. In the end, that’s what passes for optimism these days, which is itself a topic for discussion another day. Still, this night without a plan has assumed the shape of of a dumb luck kid with grey hair and an abiding love of ironic imagery and situations. At the moment, my mind is totally consumed by the fight between appreciation and empathy, with no idea which side will win. As always, I’ll hope for a draw, because it would seem both are in short supply. Honor the dead, but love the living. Such a one track mind amidst all the questions.
The loss before the loss (again) is my comfort. “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
A break from the hard realities of the present moment brings the sweet relief of a cool wind on a hot summer day. What with the cool and collected long since departed for more fortunate climes, there is only a brief chance to assemble some kind of plaintative synthesis of the troubled minds roaming across grass and asphalt. In the short moments with hidden instructions is the desire to cry, or scream out, or even mumble the systematic admission that there is nothing to know, and all is quiet after a fierce storm. The variety is only a reminder that the many thousands of sense are all disturbed in a way that cannot be quantified or explained. It is in the experience that the vague reminders become a stark reference point against which we measure out grief and apportion sadness.
The classic symptoms of assigning blame as a method of assuaging the fierce desire to know the answers to every question announce their arrival without sirens or flashing lights, but with the slick tracks of tears that seem to drag this understandable quest for information off the mental tracks. Some small voice whispers that not knowing is okay, an unavoidable recrimination that resists the urge to catalog the pain. Every example of final summation proves to be temporary, yet another step down the path of honest assesment, tempered ride, and the humility to distinguish between fantastic thirst for retribution and peaceful acceptance of the notion that more death and destruction will never be the answer to any question. Ceremonial gatherings and attempts at bravado in the face of tragedy are only a quick fix, a desperate junkie craving for something solid, something unavailable at concession stands or podiums.
The charade being floated about as an emetic to expunge the truly fantastical proportions of abject terror is no solvent, nor helpful in determining the various schemata of a mind so fractured as to be unrecognizable to humanity. Without large quantities of seed and some powder to knock the edge off of the razor blade to the throat sort of spectacle rising from the wails of thousands of individual victims and mourners, it’s impossible to know how to feel. The music that provides cover for tight throats and wet eyes also masks the heartbreak of distance and time; of lost opportunities and the scrambled rant of personified solitude that couldn’t find a voice to speak with; the same word written in neon tubes of light reading only “why?” All of the spastic reactions are consumated by disjointed motion, as if the body and mind have become seperated. The magical elixir of the collective spirit is expressed by the tightening of the bonds of communal kindness. With a stunning urgency, the context and narrative demand that love be expressed in every conceivable way. Words, actions, the explosion of emotion, each voice admitting that we are all in this together; defying bullets or bombs to break the connections we will always share, the friendship, the self-knowledge that what is built by the intertwined love and kindness’ is the only fitting monument to the fallen.
What has been taken away by the brutality and violence is temporal. There can be no other possible path but to always apply the same love and kindness as a shield against the destructiveness of hatred and contempt. As those with a need to band together search for some way of putting a structure to the various happenings locked behind dead eyes, I can only hope that they too come to understand that this event is only a symptom, not the disease. The fetid stink of ignorance and apathy burns my nostrils, making me want to leave this place to find somewhere new, a place without gruesome history manufactured in the lunatic fringe, a place where it is not weakness to seak the help of a friend but the mark of strength and character. Someplace calm, without the hideous echoes of screams and reports, a place where friendship and love is the only rule of law.
There is a sound coming from the darkness tonight, and despite my isolation and weakness, it is the sound of love. Slightly warm, inspiring not fear but confidence, not anguish and loss but connections and kindness. Every part of me wants to fall in love with my humanity, to roll around in it, expanding with the joy of sated and satisfied hearts. There is no retribution to seek, no justice to be found, nor any chance to understand the events or to assemble meaning from a brutality such as this. There is no eye for an eye, but the chance to settle on the simple notion that whatever else may be true about our existence, our tragedies and comedies, and our bravery, we can love those around us knowing time may not be on our side. There will always be more death, more lives denied the chance for peace and prosperity and hapiness, but for me, there will always be more love, more recognition that no matter what happens to us as individuals or as a species, days like April 16th, 2007 call for best of everyone to do what they can with what they have. Kindness and love are all I can think about tonight.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Ah, the brief but wonderfully fulfilling grandfalloon of Friday superiority, long showers and calm, clean evenings. Eerily reminiscent of early childhood, before the first cigarette, before anything really. Us late bloomers don’t have much use for prehistory, owing largely to the fact that it’s mostly a patience expressed as lackadaisical desire for recognition. Sometimes it’s expressed as theatrics, plaintative methodology with a strong undercurrent of attempting to control what is essentially uncontrollable. All of this grows from some entrenched attatchment to the only creature that can offer the protection seemingly missing from this lack of control.
Faster faster, right? Rebuilt motor, rebuilt clutch? Past the harmony of reminiscence, something else that occasionally breaks past the guardians of the gates is the errant nature of relative thought. Realistically, there aren’t enough minutes in life for much of this to naturally occur, so shortcuts mutate into the natural path taken to asuage what remains when conscience meets hypocrisy. That’s the flipside to admitting that control is an illusion. It’s orders of magnitude away from being useful information, except in the bar bet kind of way, although it does heavily influence tendencies towards morality, behaviour and motivation. Clarity in this case only goes as far as what can be reasonably determined to be in the nature of the creatures we study. Within the parameters of the connection between perception and the flow of time being completely divorced from any intrinisic constant, it’s no wonder how the standard narrative gets grafted onto individual perception. You think heroin is dangerous? What do you think the end result of archetypical attatchment to blithely defined character arcs is? Feel free to draw you own conclusions. Temporal restraints aside, where does that leave things?
Walnut Street again lately. Still, imagine how the mirror must feel! Alls well that ends well until, from the back of the room, some tiny voice and screams out that maybe nothing is over, and maybe this time, it’s not me who has the issue to deal with. Funny how shit works out, but it’s even odds in favor of ttransferance, and pot odds against my blonde drug of choice. Still, seriously, there is the chance that this could work. (Of course, now I’m looking around for the large tank of barbeque sauce and a hose to stick up my ass. Where is my harairium? hahahahaha) Truth is, the person I most enjoy fucking over is me. How’s that for high comedy and a loss of control? That’s where it leaves things, until later, clean and ready to roll. Who wants to come get breakfast, on me? Nobody gets that? Please….
Filed under: talking pizza boxes
Ah, back in the arms of insomnia again. Late nights, crystal waters, the moon, the stars, and three drunken kids wandering the streets speaking at top volume about something. If this were a more normative situation, perhaps something more than manufactured drama expressly conceived as an emetic, it would be a more plausible “random” occurence, but it’s too late to play pretend. Wait. Wait. Holy shit. OK, I started thinking about Johnny Sacrimony in season five, and how for all of Carmine’s bluster, it was really the beginning of Sack trying to manouver Carmine into a box. I can’t help but imagine that somehow, he was laughing his fucking balls off when Tony sent Benny and the two nameless hoods to spray paint a penis on Fiorello La Guardia’s office painting. I know I laughed, really, really hard.
Now, other things that are crossing my mind are the hairs that hang down in my eyes and bother me mercilessly. It is the damndest thing, crazy motherfucking situation that came about with no warning. Well, in retrospect, the ever-lengthening hair might have been a warning. Of course, hindsight is usueless here, because my hair is longer in the back than in the front, and if my eyes were in the back of my head, my nose would look fucking weird. Except now I have more hair in my eyes, and I can’t see. Still, better this than short hair. Somebody feed my ego with a snack, like eggs and bacon and toast and shit, fucking hungry around here.
Well, until next time, remember kids, a lot of people will tell you that smoking doesn’t make you cool, but they are wrong wrong wrong. Cigarettes do indeed make you cool, and I know, because ever since they took Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man for some cranial-lead massage theray, the world has just gone to hell in a handbasket. Buncha bullshit really, if you ask me. I mean, what the fuck? Joe Camel is dead, and I have to remind kids to smoke? Someone should take this into account when they tell little Johnnie or little Jenny that smoking isn’t cool. It turns out that not only is it cool, but it really takes the edge off of trying to understand how we ended up with Peter’s wrong sounding mupets. Now who wants to hear a funny ss joke? Wokka Wokka.
Day six of talknig to an empty phone, and the only inspiration in sight is the foreknowledge that something is seriously wrong with me. The conversation is so one sided and pathetic I can only imagine what must go through the heads of anyone trying to figure this all out. Hearing the crowing voices, resplendent in the debates of the day and cruising across the shared space with smiles and relaxed atmosphere while being locked away as useless and unecesary can be hard to take. As if proof meant anything more than opinion, as if everything could be washed away with cruelty, as if nothing matters except the task at hand. I’m not against taking any kind of responsibilty for the fix, but for fuck’s sake, would it be too much to ask if things quieted down at least a little?
For some unknown reason, I am eminently replaceable. I guess this is true of all humans, but being reminded of it on a daily basis is a constant reinforcement of every hidden fear and untold psychosis under the sun, and this is only day six. Motherfucker, vaccillating between anger and remorse is no way to walk through life, and if it doesn’t change, then I can only assume that the little territory under my control is so worthless as to be a complete waste of time and energy. Nothing is ok in the empire today, a situation that would be liveable if only for the explanation that doesn’t seem forthcoming. Confrontation isn’t really my style, and considering the cold stares that seem to watch every step I take waiting for the opportunity to laugh, it wouldn’t work anyway. Empty phone, remember?
Seems a waste to keep contemplating the same voice and angry words when away from the territory. Truthfully, I know it isn’t doing myself any favors to keep falling into the same fucing oubliettes time after time, but the familiar is comforting, even if it is harmful. Someone like me should be long gone by this point, laughing all the way south on the interstate and looking for the first NEW PLACE that seems welcoming and friendly. There is an awful dearth of both of those emotions here, just pity, haterd, anger, and sadness that nothing seems RIGHT. Under no pretensions of being a good person, let alone a valuable one, the whole dog and pony show just becomes a clusterfuck. Beneath the reams of opinions, emotions, and philosophy, the vacancy signs all read the same way, just want ads for existential attributes. Seconds from screaming, wrapped in the tension of losing something I never really had, the total lack of empathy is stunning. Where do you go when you need a timeout?
This has been repetitive for what seems like decades now. Tomorrow will be more of the same, and the day after that will be the same as that. This might be a good time to reconsider what my options really are. There is the status quo, something that simply won’t last much longer. Alternatively, there are other paying gigs that could be found, but that doesn’t solve the underlying problem of my own constant inability to sell myself as more than a target. I suppose there is also the direct confrontation route, but cracking ice might be more than I’m capable of at the moment, and let me tell you, ice is exactly what I’m up against. I’d be impressed if I didn’t feel like jogging across a highway to play human frogger.
Realistically, it would be better if I was nearly as cold hearted as I pretend to be. When us wannabe’s come u against THE REAL THING, we usually lose, unless there is some mitigating circumstance. The hard hearted may be better equipped for combat, but that is no way to act, and the world has enough carnage without me adding anymore. Christ, I can’t see straight in the darkness, and without a guide or even a friendly face, taking the next step seems to require something I ain’t got. How’s that for fucking honesty? Want more? Wanna really see what a blank face and half of a goatee can cover up with the help of sunglasses and a hat?
First – Maid Merrian was totally right. She warned me, twice, if I remember correctly. Her strange words about tread on the tires make a lot more sense in hindsight than they did at the time, ditto the words of the suddenly silent super-hero sister. Is that it? That long ago conversation with those partially ignored advice? Holy shit, it makes me think there might be hope for all of us, because this little effort at personal detente, this furious and partly fake image of the shield, all of it suddenly coming together in beautiful synergy that must be deciphered and distilled into meaning vacant from my former beauty queens eyes. Ahh, surreptitious conclusions, I knew that y’all would never let a poor fool down.
Let me explain. In the midst of wallowing in what must read like a shower of self-pity, I made a connection that might just help put this situation past. A long long time ago, right after migrating to my present position of limited influence (that’s a joke, no more pity, I promise) I was talking to a tall blonde next to a dumpster. She mentioned that it was almost always a bad fucking choice to shit where you eat. Turns out, several months later, someone else would do me the favor of furthering my education by letting on that all bullshit aside, the whole shebang was really a cover for something a little more demure, as well as a lot more financial than was commonly admitted. Having long suspected this was the case, I didn’t take a lot of convincing to come around to this line of thinking (tread on the tires…wow, that was a nice image MM!) For some reason, I failed to consider some of the side ramifications of this line of thinking. For instance…most people only tell the truth when they have more to gain from honesty than from those little, harmless white lies. Most people will naturally accept a given situation as permanent and behave accordingly until and unless something changes that alters the balance of power bewteen relationships. (Thanks Michel Foucault, how’s the panopticon working out?) When this happens, behavior will change, but after the change, the philosophy of forever will again be reinforced by the failure to publicly acknowledge that power relationships do change. What does that look like to you?
In my humble opinion, a clear sign must have been posted that was completely missed. Naturally, that sort of changes the dynamic, as wells as my resultant reaction to the sudden presentation of a changing climate. I mena, I’m still a little pissed, but I got plenty right here to keep me in high spirits, and Sam Cooke tunes out the wazoo. Fuck it, I’ll try harder next time, and I’ll be a more discriminating consumer, wiser from the whole bullshit symposium provided free of charge. I’m so fucking lackadaisical in how I go about life, but it feels really good to throw off some of the craziness and just laugh my fucking head off at the rest of the world. I gotta say, these one-sided conversations are more practical than first thought. There is a potency to all of the chicanery, and not only that, there are pins at the alley waiting for me to take out my energy on.
So, to recap;
We started very negative, whining like a fucking four year old bitch with a skinned knee. We moved right down the practicality scale from anger to depression to sadness, and then picked up with cautious optimism that soon became joy and self-assuredness. Besides, how fucked up can I get after two hours of long distance therapy and actualization followed by a long day of work? Wait, that was bad phrasing, because I intend on getting wasted with a capital A tonight, but you get the idea. Strikes and gutters, and abiding. Just enough time for a shower and shave before the lanes take over occupying my thoughts for the evening. this might even be a night to bust 200 and dance like an epileptic. Is that bad?
If you know my number, call me, you can come too. But I’m warning you now, if we get in an accident, I’m telling the cops you were driving. Just so you know. Love to all of you rotten fuckers!
They gave some lethal cocktail to the middle managers, and now control has been lost. The paradox, heretofore uncritically accepted as the Gordian Knot instead became symbolic to a small group of people all wheeling around the same axis, begging for the same scraps of attention and affection, slowly succumbing to the barren landscape and martial times. With a wail reminiscent of Masada, the individuals fused into a POPULATION, expendable because of its lack of individuality. Someone even had the temerity to remind Bob Dylan that just because times are a changing doesn’t always mean they are changing for the better. Like many misanthropic principles, this too would collapse when reality began to overwhelm desire and expectation.
Mirrored by a tremendous pseudo-collapse are the dagger eyes that burn on contact. Who does that anymore? Such hatred is hardly unknown in these parts, but you were caught, own up to what you did and let it go. How fucking complex does it need to be? OK, seriously, we all know the rules are not the hard and fast Gary Cooper portrayal, but is a little decorum too much to ask? Of course, that kind of anger and negative desire doesn’t come from nowhere. Without the many textured theories representing a multilayered deposition into what really happened, we won’t ever really know. What do you call the equal mix of hurt and disappointment? I’d use your name, but that would violate one of my founding principles, and to be honest, I can’t quite recall what it was. Memory is a bitch, but so is anything built on perception instead of understanding.
Part of me really wonders where this whole game was meant to lead. I’m perfectly willing to accept that logic has nothing to do with the movement from here to there, but with a silent partner, unable (unwilling?) to say “you did this you fat cocksucker,” all we have is supposition. Again, right back to where we started with theoretical physics and ignoble suggestions. All I can say is that without Terry Reid, the last two plus weeks would be a total washout. Remind me to check on the arrival time for the Hindenburg, its way overdue, and the respective families are probably worrying themselves sick.
Mostly, these walking dreams are just the manifestations of how sudden realization follows the same laws of unintended consequence as anything else in this world. I just know fighting and harsh words are tiring, and gifts just make the last angry denial seem that much more out of place. This is exhausting in the same way. I wonder what is going on in places west of here, where they hopefully haven’t woken up from what I assume is a fitful night’s sleep. Fucking allegorical templar hostesses; one with a knife and one with duct tape, while who the fuck knows who else carrying who knows what with matching intent. When, exactly, did I forget which side I’m on? Loyalty is so hard to figure out in blowing sands and driving rain.
Flux and movement kids, that’s the ticket to redemption. Well, that and taking few minutes to consider what’s actually happening. Well, we’ll deal with that later, the answer would just be fodder for foolish justification and a bad attitude, and aren’t things fucked up enough for the time being?
Well my friends and neighbors, it’s a busy day today. The rubberband man is coming and he wiggles something fierce. I will be waiting until midnight. After that, we’re like dykes and dogs, so you’ll have to do the math.
Filed under: love n' luck
Trepidation and the surrounding climate of dearth and plenty. I’m getting the picture that it doesn’t always take too long to find a free lunch, as long as you don’t mind using means other than cash to pay. Purchasing someone’s time is an expensive way to find out the knives were sharpened for the right mix of back turning and distraction. The momentary recognition, turining to stark realization that even if we could describe the state of movement from history to present to future, it wouldn’t matter, because nobody would believe it. Getting over the duplicitous rationale (that on’e for you my angel) that supplants anything remotely connected to logic takes forever, and I’m starting to wonder if it is an expectation worth having or if it makes more sense to give up. Needless to say, I’m leaning towards a philosophical retreat, i.e. just giving a really shitty effort until someone calls me out on it, and then I’ll quit. Hows that for mistaken rationale?
With so much going in so many directions, some guidance would really help here. Of course, in a stunningly inept reaction to reality that mirrors the ascension that nobody ever saw, there’s nobody here to ask. How imaginative, right… There’s the work thing, of course. Though a rather “one sided” affair, I can’t imagine there haven’t been at least a few dirty words thrown my way, if only because of the batshit crazy method for dealing with those that I can’t understand. With no explanation forthcoming, the implication seems to be that my prior judgement was correct, and despite assurances to the contrary, have been borne out by circumstance and independent confirmation. Dontcha just love the internet age? Small wonder more people haven’t spent more time trying to figure out this riddle, though for all I know, maybe someone has.
Lovely to sit here sick, demarcating the various plots, advisors, potentates and memories that influence the wind. To the older face that’s been missing for a while…I can barely see you from here. You know that moment when someone reappears, becoming solid in everything except existence? And to think, I told you not to come back unless you were fucking positive. Well, are you? I would leave tomorrow, but you’d excuse my rudeness I’f I told you that I’ll need proof. You can’t trust just anyone these days, some of them will tell you anything you want to hear.
ON STRIKE. GOING TO BED. HEAD HURTS.
