snappy

{Day 4 sees me picking fights on the internet. No change there then.} Smoking smoking smoking. In 3 short years, I've shifted to actually caring what people think of my habit. And only because of this has duplicity entered the picture. I am a worse person because of the association (anti-smoking rhetoric; being on the one side and actively seeking the other, nobody knows the health concerns BETTER than a smoker - whilst non-smokers can act all smug and condemnatory. Lean people telling the obese how great it is not to be obese. Great not to even see them. No, not in public. No late-night fat people on your balcony please. Sir, you are fatting up my shopping experience. By gum, leanies are meanies!) and I've somehow accepted this identity. Hmmm. Poor troubled people of the world. Where was I? Being a « nictim »:

I do not want to call it quitting, but something like, 'regulating autonomy'. Here is what the newt few weeks' itinerary will likely look like:

- Sheer bloody habit I use smokes to package time, reallocate boredom. They are excellent for achieving 'deep' time. I find excruciation occurs when the immersion in other performances cannot be had because of the nicotine ITCH. But the itch will pass. Right!? Each of us has reasons (I have a few more), charting and reassigning them is part of the process.

 - Justifications Accept this this will be shitty. Savour this (sensually, not sensationally!) and find the nuances. Despite the discomfort, there's a lot of novelty going on here. Different muscles are tense, digestion is wonking out, moods are fluctuating rapidly and the external world is beginning to feel intrusive. I am already trying to trick myself into reverting - the T-1000 polymorphing into each stolen identity as it thrashes in the molten steel. What's tough to accept about addiction is that it is a preconscious need located just below the tideline of our cycling awareness. To be inspected, it's got to be dragged ashore. Being fair, it's pre-you and influencing your choices, and to relapse is to miss the opportunity of exercising self-respect: authentically acknowledging your powers [snotty way of putting it, I know, but ultimately it's true. 'will power' is an empty appointment, as everything could be ascribed to this, but the reasons behind will power are very valuable.]

- Substitutions Nicotine is an interesting drug. It ingratiates itself into the dopaminergic demand/reward loop, saturating the acetylcholine receptors, which affect all sorts of emergent skills but generally helps you feel aware. Thing is, there's no clean-up crew for nicotine, so the synapses simply create more receptors which will then demand more acetylcholine. What is shitty about this is that by satisfying this demand, we get the endogenous dope fix. It is about as classic and universal a case as conditioning can get. So substituting OTHER loops is ultimately using the same devious pathways. But for the express purpose of regulating autonomy, I am not addicted to junk food or exercise or compulsions to clean... so am likely safe to indulge while I deal with what I am addicted to.

- Philosophy There are not many occasions or events in life where one can directly apply philosophical experimentation, and better yet, expect to achieve a new plane of perception. But regulating autonomy is one: confronting illusion, diversifying the matrices of reward, exposing cognitive bias, examining your body's response to a sensation equal in force to starvation/asphyxiation/dehydration but without the deathy side-affects... Even barring success, this experience is directly transferable to all other psychological appendages of life.

[EDIT: Day 5 was sweaty and grim. With a very moderate amount of vodka, the romance of alcohol and nicotine had a violent domestic incident. Though one might accuse me of masochism, under heavy environmental controls (alone, isolated, Friday night) I had about 1 oz. of vodka and went into pronounced paroxysms of withdrawal. I would have had to have been tied up were I with my friends, which would've been the direct opposite of Stockholm Syndrome: turn your friends into assholes by publicly wetting yourself in self-inflicted agony. Upon a small amount of online clickery, I discover that their bond is mutual in that 1) alcohol's acidic metabolises flush alkaline nicotine out of circulation, this requires quicker nicotine replacement and 2) nicotine surreptitiously imposes its demand/reward pathways onto the enjoyment of alcohol, giving a sort of Happy Meal halo effect

Smoking is obviously bad for you in and of itself, but the true horror is through its association and the rest of one's lifestyle is impoverished. Exercise-reward dyad is corrupted. Taste reduced, so shittier food may be consumed. Outside is for smoking, not other pursuits. Self-enhancement mechanisms are ascribed to externalities. Drama is artificially induced so as to encourage the need for a cigarette, damaging relationships as a result. Hedonarchy reigns supreme.]

Sorry about the fatty thing from earlier, I was just trying to demonstrate how villainizing the smoker is as unforgivable as any other form of prejudice. Either be compassionate or mind your own fucking business.

the allegory of the cave painting

we've infantilized our origins as cave dwellers, becoming superior to ourselves - a N'itchy leap-over-your-father mentality, which is itself funny, as the immutable generational presence is evidence of its heritability.

i think it was in Wade Davis' Massey Lecture contribution, The Wayfinders, where he discusses petroglyphs as the subterranean nursery of the minds, the creches whence we dreamed ourselves awake. i've returned the book to the lender, else i'd pluck a plump morsel for you, but i recall Davis proffering another's interpretation of the cave painting: less as rudimentary alphabet, and more of a pining frustration. to draw the wild horse was the divisive act of an essentialist recognition, the animal-not-animal captured-released... ah, spelunked it out of the internet... here it is...


"...clearly at some point we were all of an animal nature and at some point we were not and he viewed proto-shamanism as kind of an original attempt through ritual to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So he saw this art not as hunting magic but as postcards of nostalgia." -- Wade Davis on Clayton Eshleman

John Cleese on Creativity

shit shit says

been stewing this one for a few weeks. parody and highschooly group-identification in the otherwise amorphous, un-delineated web... the humour varies with the level of production, and lovingly scalds the archetype and its concept-regionalized esoterica. decentralized centralization is ingenius, if not utterly variable. identify yourself either through soft-satire of personal affiliation, or by teasing others' markers of confederacy.

- "what the hell ate me?"
- "i WILL stop you from jogging"
- "peek-a-poo!"
- "oh man, i've got such a hangunder"
- "ever notice that Hogwarts' house names reconcile with toilet experiences? Slytherin? Hufflepuff? Ravenclaw!?"
- "you'd do this in the same room that you keep your toothbrush?"
- "i don't care if you'll be late for the meeting, you decided to go public and i'm not coming out till there's noone else here"
- "where's your god now? bet she has the same determined jawline as Sigorney Weaver in Alien.. HAHAHA"
- "that's funny, the damage doesn't look as bad from out here... these aren't the 'rhoids you're looking for... you don't believe in the Force, do you?"
- "getting on the bus, are we?"
- "boobopbeebopbiddleybop - i'm a scatman"
- "soon i'll be touching the poos of countless others. does that freak you out a little?"
- "i've given you pins and needles. you'll get as far as the middle of the atrium before it'll hit. and there you'll wobble like a wally, rubber-legged, teetering to retain your balance. and all because you don't eat enough fruit."
- "hey everybody, we're going streaking!"
- "this is a reminder that what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas"
- "nope, today we're faster than it takes to read the headline"
- "do you like Celine Dion?"
- "k, i'm out. msg me on the Blackberries, or iSplat or Fecesbook or whatever"

Island of the Dead - Arnold Boecklin

stonyteller

'To write is to pull stones from a river' - a smooth weight to rub against your palm, but still, too polished to be placed in the story for which it was intended ===

sometimes I wonder at unintentional plagiarism, as copywrongs should at least reference the source... so i go-ogle [back when first using the new company, i though it was pronounced this way..!?] the phrase, and find a writer's blog

quite sweet really, but to see it rest there... why not go guerrilla? scribe the stone, and let it loose in a spot where it would be appreciated? glyphiti? petripoems? geodes!

Dumpstrep

What happens if you take dietary supplements that suggest you do so on a full stomach, on a stomach full of dietary supplements that suggest you do so on a full stomach?!

We're about to find out. Perhaps it'll grant me the energy necessary to enjoy Skrillex, a fartist with the power of turning all milk and cream and frappe you've ingested into bowel-cheese: Dumpstrep. He's like the conductor for a choir of tractors. Or an interpretive fiscal policy report for the US economy. If it weren't for the youth-market mills of the disaffected suburbs, he wouldn't have to produce vicarious screams.

Anyone else seen Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?

Wait, why I am being so cruel? Especially when complete and utter disregard is so much more effective. I know why: cause I'm getting SICK.

I'll make up for it now by injecting music that CURES instead:

slipstack : snowstalgia

IN the phantasmagoria that is Victoria, a rare element has graced us: SNOW. IT turns us further inwards, for which people here will never make apology. WE are the seashell mysteriously found in every other domestic bathroom.

OUR hedge cat, Hucklebetty, is stress-eating. AND he's right to do so: light's become dark and he's just a giant polar-bear's nose. A lonely, staff-less note on the music sheet.

THE diligent, the SCRAPISTS, are all outside, huffing and swearing as they defile her. I've some ruminating to be sating the demands of a project, but first the this (FROM WIKIPEDIA - yes, there's ways to still use the thing this day of SOPA-be-gone):

'The name Ranunculus is Late Latin for "little frog," from rana "frog" and a diminutive ending.'

One God Universe

funder and laughtning

Maybe it was about the 3rd or 4th round of the game of spitting over a wire just off my deck that I realized exactly how bored I am. Like a 12 year old boy malingering outside a slushie-mart, target-spitting for pleasure. And I recalled just how much fun I used to have with this blog, or how the blog used to enhance the fun I had in life. And then I shrugged and spat clean over the wire.

But it's true. Somewhere back in the misted past, I resorted to a sort of crypto-nonsense, binding words up within the absurdity I hold so dear until they could no longer lubricate the story. Like the sewn pockets of a new suit, or braile on a parking meter, or your ultrarich landlords who flagrantly dress down only when they visit you
'Nice wellies. Is your stubble mascara'd on? Pizza's held facing the other way up, you know. Otherwise I totally relate to you.'
(I hate the word landlord, I really do. What other title invokes such presumption? 'I'm the bus-baron, and don't you forget it.'
'I'm not a valet, I'm the car-tsar. The auto-crat. The fourwheeled Fuhrer. The...

And I didn't bother finishing... so what.. it's boring