Monday, January 18, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
a stomach lined with the wax of a thousand paper cups
a mind a pail of clattering crabs. i wake up early, catching the future napping, knowing that noone dreamed of me last night, not even myself. that's ok, as somewhere in time there's a petroglyph of me. relive a relief! haven't quite got madness right yet. multiplicities keep collapsing and rendering themselves as one (how can you rip yourself whole?) it's pages like this, lost eddies and whorls of word-spittle, that are becoming the nascent-Being's dreams. not that It'll ever be satisfied with as insubstantial a moniker as 'Singularity'. but for now, i am still my own corpuscle. my monads my gonads. and today i place myself back onto the hungry caterpillar's saddle, armed yet with a lance made of incredulity and a shield of comedy-tempered ostentation. it'll be easier now that i know to let the decisions do the deciding, the revisions do the deriding and that it's ok to wear a scarf even when you're not cold. because you might be.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
zoos
no more zoos. just as well really, we've done some seriously sloppy work this last decade. an olimpdick effort. [un]just[ly] sequestered our human further from our animal. earphone cords looping from our ears round to our own asses. ipood: i'm listening to what i consume and it sounds like indigestion. aural coprology.
i'm to blame. you're to blame. for the good as well as the bad. take responsibility for the good! but still left feeling like a soggy shoelace in someone else's boot. slops sploshed from the vat we've used to churn the sun, into gods and saviour-science. i was in a bookstore yesterday and everyone was wearing black and suddenly there was nothing left to read. wanted to grab the nearest and yell 'hey you sepulchral fucker! tell me what you know!' but i suppose the nearest was me, and he's already admitted, under duress, that he's too busy shoveling information into his baby-bird personality to know anything much about the world.
and all this is not true. which is a relief. the kind of relief i bought earphones to hear.... thank you for listening, now go and let the animals out.
i'm to blame. you're to blame. for the good as well as the bad. take responsibility for the good! but still left feeling like a soggy shoelace in someone else's boot. slops sploshed from the vat we've used to churn the sun, into gods and saviour-science. i was in a bookstore yesterday and everyone was wearing black and suddenly there was nothing left to read. wanted to grab the nearest and yell 'hey you sepulchral fucker! tell me what you know!' but i suppose the nearest was me, and he's already admitted, under duress, that he's too busy shoveling information into his baby-bird personality to know anything much about the world.
and all this is not true. which is a relief. the kind of relief i bought earphones to hear.... thank you for listening, now go and let the animals out.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Thursday, November 05, 2009
there's no truth fairy
perseveres
perverse and sere
see here
you wee knights
of weeknights
all blood, bile and quicksilver
and bellies full of eyes
awful jaw-fulls of ornate lies
sucked on and plucked from
and worried out by your lover's tongue
placed beneath your pillowed font
whence from your pilloried dreams once sprung
perverse and sere
see here
you wee knights
of weeknights
all blood, bile and quicksilver
and bellies full of eyes
awful jaw-fulls of ornate lies
sucked on and plucked from
and worried out by your lover's tongue
placed beneath your pillowed font
whence from your pilloried dreams once sprung
Friday, October 09, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
sub/merge
striking in its grandeur, the West Coast resonates in and around me as holding its mysteries in its heights. the persistent reminders of altitude flattens the mid-lands, portraying promises as being 'over there'. this vertical hazes on nearly every horizon, creating a ciel-ing of great magnitude. the past and the future is up, and i often feel that i live in tomorrow's ruins (upon which i might survive to look down upon, hidden by roiling currents and revisionary stories of a pre-delugional world.)
this is much unlike my memories of the european mystery, which is locked down by water and sediment and buildings. it is hidden, and there is a prominent sense of 'down' - something beneath every surface, as if, like water, history abhors the steeps and instead collects beneath the feet. the stories are below, and in need of excavation. here, above, and in need of expedition.
in this vein, one might be able to extend the analogy to perception of memory. here it feels that memory for me is futural. as if i am nostalgic for something that has not yet happened, it could be the wide sky, the occasional murky weather, the high gusting winds, the mountain-locked microclimates... the history is thrown forward temporally. one just does not cast their mind to what lies beneath the ocean.. not truly, not in the way one would in the Mediterranean or English Channel. not in that inherited identity. identity here is created, not sought.
i now work at a bakery in dockside green. and as the construction guys and gals clamber all over their scaffolding (sometimes with a pilfered pastry in their bellies, the punks), it seems as if they are not so much building a new building, but preparing inevitable rubble. and due to the large amount of marketing and spin put onto this complex (immediated narrative) it is building its story right into it as it goes up. however, 'in these uncertain economic times' several phases of the complex have been stalled to wait for consumer confidence (aka best chances of return). so what this means is that the foundations that had been blasted prior to construction (so that residents would not have to suffer hip-rattling booms once moved in) will now be left fallow until the money returns. so it's now a ruin before even being built. i am very excited for this, as this will reveal this building community's true intentions: how will a self-proclaimed 'environmentally conscientious' for-profit PRESTIGE DEVELOPMENT/VERTICAL GATED-COMMUNITY respond to an unplanned open space on their lot? a market? a venue space? a temporary garden? racket sports? a reservoir? tent space for the city's homeless?
we'll see, we'll see.. either way, i'm going to step up and confront any corruption of ideal within the project (i suspect this corruption will occur, if not had from the original inception)
this is much unlike my memories of the european mystery, which is locked down by water and sediment and buildings. it is hidden, and there is a prominent sense of 'down' - something beneath every surface, as if, like water, history abhors the steeps and instead collects beneath the feet. the stories are below, and in need of excavation. here, above, and in need of expedition.
in this vein, one might be able to extend the analogy to perception of memory. here it feels that memory for me is futural. as if i am nostalgic for something that has not yet happened, it could be the wide sky, the occasional murky weather, the high gusting winds, the mountain-locked microclimates... the history is thrown forward temporally. one just does not cast their mind to what lies beneath the ocean.. not truly, not in the way one would in the Mediterranean or English Channel. not in that inherited identity. identity here is created, not sought.
i now work at a bakery in dockside green. and as the construction guys and gals clamber all over their scaffolding (sometimes with a pilfered pastry in their bellies, the punks), it seems as if they are not so much building a new building, but preparing inevitable rubble. and due to the large amount of marketing and spin put onto this complex (immediated narrative) it is building its story right into it as it goes up. however, 'in these uncertain economic times' several phases of the complex have been stalled to wait for consumer confidence (aka best chances of return). so what this means is that the foundations that had been blasted prior to construction (so that residents would not have to suffer hip-rattling booms once moved in) will now be left fallow until the money returns. so it's now a ruin before even being built. i am very excited for this, as this will reveal this building community's true intentions: how will a self-proclaimed 'environmentally conscientious' for-profit PRESTIGE DEVELOPMENT/VERTICAL GATED-COMMUNITY respond to an unplanned open space on their lot? a market? a venue space? a temporary garden? racket sports? a reservoir? tent space for the city's homeless?
we'll see, we'll see.. either way, i'm going to step up and confront any corruption of ideal within the project (i suspect this corruption will occur, if not had from the original inception)
Sunday, February 08, 2009
october
Stopping up short, I sat down on a wicket above the visual traipsery. Stretched below it all its blistering vertigo was the sea and creatures like me picking around its wavering borders. The sun was poised to strike the mountains, and Echospace's 'Empyrean' was thrushing my ears through headphones on-loan. The music pooled itself into milk, and ceased. I took off the phones and sat longer, waiting for the melting hues.
Behind me, a sister and her friend pushed a stroller, from which a wee imp-girl's face jutted with intent concentration. The motion of this trio brought my attention into their breathy conversation.
"...no, I'm serious. So VERY serious," the imp-girl laughed.
"Oh really?" Said the friend, "How serious are you?"
The imp-girl scrunched up her face even more, looked at her hand, then thrusting three fingers forward to her interlocutor enthusiastically stated the degree plainly and with confidence:
"400!"
Behind me, a sister and her friend pushed a stroller, from which a wee imp-girl's face jutted with intent concentration. The motion of this trio brought my attention into their breathy conversation.
"...no, I'm serious. So VERY serious," the imp-girl laughed.
"Oh really?" Said the friend, "How serious are you?"
The imp-girl scrunched up her face even more, looked at her hand, then thrusting three fingers forward to her interlocutor enthusiastically stated the degree plainly and with confidence:
"400!"
Monday, January 26, 2009
verticklarity
building big.. i'm not sure it's worth it. proponents claim that densification is the major objective of bigness, but some of the most densely populated areas of the globe barely have one storey, and if it weren't for the dire poverty and health risks of living there, it might be said that their existence and spread is proof enough that they work. no, i'd propose that the purposes of the big build are of very few things, far less noble: investment return, commercial floor space (rent money), prestige and arrogance. who really owns these buildings? silverstein owned the WTC complex to lease, which would've cost some hundreds of millions -if not billions- of dollars to clear of asbestos (recall the post-collapse respiratory problems locals suffered?), instead he received some 4.5 billion in the insurance bid (to which, due to poor phrasing, he was able to negotiate as if there were 2 terrorist attacks.. i forget the name for it, but there's a phrase for where a private institution lumps the health costs on the general populace.. good thing it wasn't intentional, or else it would seem as if the company benefited) that's an unimaginably large payout on what was technically 5 years away from becoming a nightmare of a white-elephant. but, i digress.
who owns the buildings? credit card companies!? yes, they do. they've got/had the best credit rating around for a while (self-regulation has its rewards, eh?). the nature of credit is that it necessarily swallows asset, and the only TRUE form of asset yet quantifiable is land (though potable water will become so in the next decade).. which the individual can't really own, as why then are they compelled to pay yearly land tariffs, especially if the government isn't distributing it as they see fit. no, most people 'own' through credit, so, to be frank, they are serfs working the land. but, i digress.
credit card/investment buildings have styled their buildings as 'sky-scrapers'. and they seem so intent on raising the sky's limits that yesteryear's sky-scraper is now this year's thigh-draper. they're towers of purposeful religious semblance: since their inception, you'll notice that no cathedrals are yet being built (barring gaudi's, but perhaps there are others). and for what the church lent in absolution, the credit companies can now lend in relativity. the spacious resonance of the cathedral dome has been replaced by hard, phallic, inscrutable presence. and further, the reflectivity of their surfaces are not just for the sake of pretty. they are one-way mirrors, and we're the captives. simply stated: you can't watch the watchtower. the panoptic prison has been developed on the metropolitan scale, and our depressions, our minuscule, compounded worries have been greatly amplified by this further estrangement from the hegemony. this effect, i'd readily argue, has been committed with the utmost of calculation. the reflective planes act as both as paring sheaths and urban[e] limit. you can't SEE the opulence anymore, just feel it, yet not know from whence that feeling originates. but, i digress.
i saw a film on manhattan island a few days ago. it said, that until the advent of the elevator, the most exclusive, prestigious commercial spaces were located on the lower floors. quite a concept in this present era. as the street level has degenerated, until now it is scorned and vilified, even by those who claim to act on its behalf. all streets are now alleyways, where the garbage, in various packages, is pushed, conning us into wanting it, needing it, feeling something about it. in the case of dumpsters, the effect is one of revulsion. in the gaud and bric-a-brac we're meant to buy, desire. but all the lightin and flashy signs, all that fantasy does not disguise the fact that the street has lost its political power: it has been relegated back to an alleyway of the body-politic, where people wander quietly in scream, marginalized on the one level at which they are ENTITLED to feel most powerful. but, i digress.
above all this, shining high, as if we all agree, are these looming symbols of power. but in a few quick months, as snickersnack as a vorpal blade, a few of these reflective windows have been broken and an awful stench has wafted out from what lies within: as symbols, they are not now crumbling as consumer/borrowing confidence has waned, but they've perverted, and twisted themselves to their true form: we are being watched, bullied and manipulated. and all it takes is an elevator to keep you away from stopping it.
who owns the buildings? credit card companies!? yes, they do. they've got/had the best credit rating around for a while (self-regulation has its rewards, eh?). the nature of credit is that it necessarily swallows asset, and the only TRUE form of asset yet quantifiable is land (though potable water will become so in the next decade).. which the individual can't really own, as why then are they compelled to pay yearly land tariffs, especially if the government isn't distributing it as they see fit. no, most people 'own' through credit, so, to be frank, they are serfs working the land. but, i digress.
credit card/investment buildings have styled their buildings as 'sky-scrapers'. and they seem so intent on raising the sky's limits that yesteryear's sky-scraper is now this year's thigh-draper. they're towers of purposeful religious semblance: since their inception, you'll notice that no cathedrals are yet being built (barring gaudi's, but perhaps there are others). and for what the church lent in absolution, the credit companies can now lend in relativity. the spacious resonance of the cathedral dome has been replaced by hard, phallic, inscrutable presence. and further, the reflectivity of their surfaces are not just for the sake of pretty. they are one-way mirrors, and we're the captives. simply stated: you can't watch the watchtower. the panoptic prison has been developed on the metropolitan scale, and our depressions, our minuscule, compounded worries have been greatly amplified by this further estrangement from the hegemony. this effect, i'd readily argue, has been committed with the utmost of calculation. the reflective planes act as both as paring sheaths and urban[e] limit. you can't SEE the opulence anymore, just feel it, yet not know from whence that feeling originates. but, i digress.
i saw a film on manhattan island a few days ago. it said, that until the advent of the elevator, the most exclusive, prestigious commercial spaces were located on the lower floors. quite a concept in this present era. as the street level has degenerated, until now it is scorned and vilified, even by those who claim to act on its behalf. all streets are now alleyways, where the garbage, in various packages, is pushed, conning us into wanting it, needing it, feeling something about it. in the case of dumpsters, the effect is one of revulsion. in the gaud and bric-a-brac we're meant to buy, desire. but all the lightin and flashy signs, all that fantasy does not disguise the fact that the street has lost its political power: it has been relegated back to an alleyway of the body-politic, where people wander quietly in scream, marginalized on the one level at which they are ENTITLED to feel most powerful. but, i digress.
above all this, shining high, as if we all agree, are these looming symbols of power. but in a few quick months, as snickersnack as a vorpal blade, a few of these reflective windows have been broken and an awful stench has wafted out from what lies within: as symbols, they are not now crumbling as consumer/borrowing confidence has waned, but they've perverted, and twisted themselves to their true form: we are being watched, bullied and manipulated. and all it takes is an elevator to keep you away from stopping it.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
just twitching and twisting out the glamour vein... a cracked stain, like a tree-window's scattered strain... can one replace pleasure with the sheer absence of polished pain? what remains? depravity? a torn remembrane? light-drunk lives bored sane? what, when equanimity has orange pith neath its nails, and a chin sticky with juice, and has glutted itself equal, what can it protect anymore? what can it censure? who can it blame? it stays the same, until someone calls it so... its self-congratulations would drown its articulated spires of citydreams, dragging over itself a deluge of murky hypocrisy, grit and sand and silt and knick-knacks underneath and through the curlicued currents. you'd be there too, submerged, shapes of the known blurring and obscured by the spuming amorphia of dislocation. when all is stable, all becomes unknown. and our silent motives, the ones taught to us in the sun-drenched mires of childhood. the prejudices we osmotically somaticize, as easily as rising, as deriving, as deriding, as red riding. and so what's to want, knowing we are tethered by discrimination into mists of perpetuity?
we're a broke-down gasp, a crippled pleasure pier, licked by the froth as we cantilever ourselves further over the abysses... one a tall child of god, his cherubic hair tickling her nostrils. envying those myths as one envies the inevitable supplantation of us at the hands of our progeny. so, in the meantime, let our tongues dance, let us not plan, but engender casus bella. it is time for an ethos of beauty, as grounded in ecological reclamation, as grounded in partnership and not mastery, as grounded in you and me. now. embrace the dream immediate.
we're a broke-down gasp, a crippled pleasure pier, licked by the froth as we cantilever ourselves further over the abysses... one a tall child of god, his cherubic hair tickling her nostrils. envying those myths as one envies the inevitable supplantation of us at the hands of our progeny. so, in the meantime, let our tongues dance, let us not plan, but engender casus bella. it is time for an ethos of beauty, as grounded in ecological reclamation, as grounded in partnership and not mastery, as grounded in you and me. now. embrace the dream immediate.
Monday, December 22, 2008
you were there with me, all along, in the little emotion, not the big
i don't know how you contact me, but you appear
we're not-at-my-house and i'm concerned about the backyard
there is no lawn, just rust, but the small-life is growing as if by thought
and you ask me what colour it should be
and i say that i don't really care about grass, it's just for want of anything else that it should be. for lack.
a light green seems to make sense, not the dark verdant want i'd wish for.
you sense my distress and take me to a cork-board to show me a collection of red insects pinned to it by their latin names.
they are long antennaed and articulated, quite ugly-beautiful
you tell me that you birthed them. that they were of your boyfriends'. that you were ashamed but elated. i hugged you and said that i knew where to dance.
you said YES! and left. but i lingered to speak to my friend who turned up to tell me of a prank he'd played on a mutual friend. it wasn't a clever prank, it preyed on his alcoholism. but he did show me the telephone poles that he'd reassembled. bolting the pieces together. i was impressed, but i could see you in the distance. walking in a purple cardigan. and i missed you.
so i collected my urn, and sat astride it, as it could levitate. and it pulled me to you until again we were alongside.
but you were hurt by my absence, and laughed with others, and for the first time since i'd known you i felt jealous. and felt it tear us a little, my toes an inch from the ground, the urn never waning in it's power to fly.
when we arrived, all was well again, as if we'd remembered to forget. and while we danced, we spoke of your insects. i suggested that the next time they happened they would be butterflies and that you make a play out of the process and call it 'metamorphoses'.
you said i was dreaming. and i woke up utterly in love with you. and came downstairs to see if you had written. you had not, so i thought this important to write instead.
i don't know how you contact me, but you appear
we're not-at-my-house and i'm concerned about the backyard
there is no lawn, just rust, but the small-life is growing as if by thought
and you ask me what colour it should be
and i say that i don't really care about grass, it's just for want of anything else that it should be. for lack.
a light green seems to make sense, not the dark verdant want i'd wish for.
you sense my distress and take me to a cork-board to show me a collection of red insects pinned to it by their latin names.
they are long antennaed and articulated, quite ugly-beautiful
you tell me that you birthed them. that they were of your boyfriends'. that you were ashamed but elated. i hugged you and said that i knew where to dance.
you said YES! and left. but i lingered to speak to my friend who turned up to tell me of a prank he'd played on a mutual friend. it wasn't a clever prank, it preyed on his alcoholism. but he did show me the telephone poles that he'd reassembled. bolting the pieces together. i was impressed, but i could see you in the distance. walking in a purple cardigan. and i missed you.
so i collected my urn, and sat astride it, as it could levitate. and it pulled me to you until again we were alongside.
but you were hurt by my absence, and laughed with others, and for the first time since i'd known you i felt jealous. and felt it tear us a little, my toes an inch from the ground, the urn never waning in it's power to fly.
when we arrived, all was well again, as if we'd remembered to forget. and while we danced, we spoke of your insects. i suggested that the next time they happened they would be butterflies and that you make a play out of the process and call it 'metamorphoses'.
you said i was dreaming. and i woke up utterly in love with you. and came downstairs to see if you had written. you had not, so i thought this important to write instead.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
the one in which i use stereotypes to affectionately mock British Columbia
In July, I moved from Montreal to live in Victoria for a while. While that while has whiled from indeterminacy to determinacy, I find that my initial impressions of the people here have retreated from stark cardboard caricatures into full-fleshed, thoughtful and intentional human-beings. So in coming to meet these people (a relatively slow process) they've revealed, in discreet but poignant increments, the sense and sensibilities behind their social behaviour. So I'm going to undo all the empathy and compassion that's malignantly metastasized throughout my perception of these warm, sea-side folk with some good old fashioned lampooning...
2 months ago, in the Dupermarket...
A That's my favourite label..."
B What?"
A Soysters.. the product you're reading there... Maude's Homemade Soysters..."
B ...I wasn't reading it..."
A Your lips were moving... hmmm, denial... you've been in Victoria 3 months?"
B Yes, how'd you..."
A So, what do you think of Victoria?"
B Well the people are very..."
A ...friendly."
B Yeah.. But I find it hard to..."
A ...make friends."
B Yeah.... And there's lots of girls. Like, everywhere. Just yesterday, I saw one running across the roof of..."
A I had noticed that you were a guy."
B ...um.. I AM a guy, present tense I think, though I must admit that a fine mist of confusion appears to be..."
A Yeah, the blonde girl at the deli counter said there was one in here today..."
B Oh. I'm uncomfortable, can we talk about something else?"
A Sure! Victoria...?"
B Oh yeah, well, the only whales I've seen so far..."
A Are the tourists! Can I touch your genitalia?"
B Ye.. wait, what? Pardon, I mean..."
A I said I'd like to own a Westfalia."
B Oh? Why's that?"
A So I can extract your seed."
B I... er... I'm mostly done shopping now, and should go pay. Nice chatting with you."
A Creep!"
CHECKOUT GIRL Ooooh! Soysters!"
Last week, on a date...
A No way! I like coffee!"
B And dogs?"
A YES! LOOOOVE dogs."
B Cor blimey, I even HAVE a dog... Hmmm. Could we try a quick compatibility exercise?"
A Sure..."
B Ok.. Complete the following sentence: '...'"
A Broccoli!!"
B Wow... we are so alike! I would so give you a high-five..."
A ...if we weren't both recovering from a volleyball injury! This really is astonishing! So, what do you think of Victoria?"
B Love it! Though I'm still kind of caught on some of the lingo here..."
A Oh? Like what..."
B 'Postman'... is that like a male cyborg?"
A 'Cyborg', is that like a type of Polish Kale?"
B 'Kale'... is that like a type of dragon?"
A Dragons! I love dragons!"
B Me too! Let's talk about them..."
Time lapse...
B Wow, look at the time, it's 9.30!! In the PM!! So late! And I just realized that the time spent drinking these 2 coffees encapsulates the longest relationship I've had in 11 months."
A Yes. We should do this again soon! How does January sound to you?"
B Um, well, I.. I'd like to do something a bit sooner. Something social perhaps? Maybe with some friends?"
A Oh, we WILL be doing that, silly..."
B How do you mean?"
A We'll be hanging out in the meantime..."
B I still don't really quite follow..."
A In 'society', you know? Everybody hanging out with everybody!"
B Hmmm.. when you put it like that you sound like an idiot."
A You're funny! Wow, now it's almost 10! Want to do some cocaine?"
B Huh... but I thought you were a vegan?"
A I can't believe you just used that term! It's prerogative towards vegetables!"
B Pejorative? Towards... Wait. I'm confused again."
A I'd say, you're wearing slippers!"
B Yes, just like a typical BC person, right? Wear socks and slippers everywhere.. eat apples.. make obscure allusions to suffering from white-man's guilt..?"
A Er, it's socks and sandals, ok? Sandals."
B So, you're saying that we don't really have that much in common..."
A No, I was just going along with what YOU were saying."
B Wait. Have you been making fun of me THIS ENTIRE DATE?"
A What could you possibly mean by that?"
B You know, making shit up? Having me on...?"
A Of course not!"
B Then why are you...wait, you want some sperm? Is that it? I've got a mason jar here, I could..."
A Nope. No sperm... Thanks though."
B THEN WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"
A Well, I'm starting this petition against Reginald Howser, the local regional federal commissioner on How to Commission Federal Regional Local Issues More Locally -here's a leaflet printed on reconstituted potato- and I was wondering if you'd sign this...
B Listen, I've got to go now as I might get up tomorrow, but maybe we'll do this again in June, like you said...
A January. Yeah, ok. I could meet your dog!
B But I thought you were lying about liking dogs.
A Oh yeah. Well, see you!
2 months ago, in the Dupermarket...
A That's my favourite label..."
B What?"
A Soysters.. the product you're reading there... Maude's Homemade Soysters..."
B ...I wasn't reading it..."
A Your lips were moving... hmmm, denial... you've been in Victoria 3 months?"
B Yes, how'd you..."
A So, what do you think of Victoria?"
B Well the people are very..."
A ...friendly."
B Yeah.. But I find it hard to..."
A ...make friends."
B Yeah.... And there's lots of girls. Like, everywhere. Just yesterday, I saw one running across the roof of..."
A I had noticed that you were a guy."
B ...um.. I AM a guy, present tense I think, though I must admit that a fine mist of confusion appears to be..."
A Yeah, the blonde girl at the deli counter said there was one in here today..."
B Oh. I'm uncomfortable, can we talk about something else?"
A Sure! Victoria...?"
B Oh yeah, well, the only whales I've seen so far..."
A Are the tourists! Can I touch your genitalia?"
B Ye.. wait, what? Pardon, I mean..."
A I said I'd like to own a Westfalia."
B Oh? Why's that?"
A So I can extract your seed."
B I... er... I'm mostly done shopping now, and should go pay. Nice chatting with you."
A Creep!"
CHECKOUT GIRL Ooooh! Soysters!"
Last week, on a date...
A No way! I like coffee!"
B And dogs?"
A YES! LOOOOVE dogs."
B Cor blimey, I even HAVE a dog... Hmmm. Could we try a quick compatibility exercise?"
A Sure..."
B Ok.. Complete the following sentence: '...'"
A Broccoli!!"
B Wow... we are so alike! I would so give you a high-five..."
A ...if we weren't both recovering from a volleyball injury! This really is astonishing! So, what do you think of Victoria?"
B Love it! Though I'm still kind of caught on some of the lingo here..."
A Oh? Like what..."
B 'Postman'... is that like a male cyborg?"
A 'Cyborg', is that like a type of Polish Kale?"
B 'Kale'... is that like a type of dragon?"
A Dragons! I love dragons!"
B Me too! Let's talk about them..."
Time lapse...
B Wow, look at the time, it's 9.30!! In the PM!! So late! And I just realized that the time spent drinking these 2 coffees encapsulates the longest relationship I've had in 11 months."
A Yes. We should do this again soon! How does January sound to you?"
B Um, well, I.. I'd like to do something a bit sooner. Something social perhaps? Maybe with some friends?"
A Oh, we WILL be doing that, silly..."
B How do you mean?"
A We'll be hanging out in the meantime..."
B I still don't really quite follow..."
A In 'society', you know? Everybody hanging out with everybody!"
B Hmmm.. when you put it like that you sound like an idiot."
A You're funny! Wow, now it's almost 10! Want to do some cocaine?"
B Huh... but I thought you were a vegan?"
A I can't believe you just used that term! It's prerogative towards vegetables!"
B Pejorative? Towards... Wait. I'm confused again."
A I'd say, you're wearing slippers!"
B Yes, just like a typical BC person, right? Wear socks and slippers everywhere.. eat apples.. make obscure allusions to suffering from white-man's guilt..?"
A Er, it's socks and sandals, ok? Sandals."
B So, you're saying that we don't really have that much in common..."
A No, I was just going along with what YOU were saying."
B Wait. Have you been making fun of me THIS ENTIRE DATE?"
A What could you possibly mean by that?"
B You know, making shit up? Having me on...?"
A Of course not!"
B Then why are you...wait, you want some sperm? Is that it? I've got a mason jar here, I could..."
A Nope. No sperm... Thanks though."
B THEN WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"
A Well, I'm starting this petition against Reginald Howser, the local regional federal commissioner on How to Commission Federal Regional Local Issues More Locally -here's a leaflet printed on reconstituted potato- and I was wondering if you'd sign this...
B Listen, I've got to go now as I might get up tomorrow, but maybe we'll do this again in June, like you said...
A January. Yeah, ok. I could meet your dog!
B But I thought you were lying about liking dogs.
A Oh yeah. Well, see you!
Thursday, December 04, 2008
- Modern Language Association of America unveiling new line of punctuation marks to help bolster recent decline in emoticon usage.
- Edible Soap finds fiercest competitor in McCain's new Deep 'n' Soapy dessert.
- Area New Zealander finally relents, sighing: 'Yes, I am Australian'.
- Dalai Lama files multibillion dollar lawsuit against N.A. kindergartens for retroactive royalties on hit song If You're Happy And You Know It..
- Ecologists find new species of newt living on Victoria Beckham's pout.
- David Bowie to make guest appearance on NASA Central Command radio-link.
- KFC launches new Buckets Made Out Of Chicken dinner option.
- Obama declares Domestic Policy of leading US through desert for 40 years in search for land of milk, honey.
- Somali Pirate stocks at all time high on NASDAQ.
- Psych Prof. Gary Weinhoff unveils latest wife at UCLA Psychology Department Christmas Party.
- Edible Soap finds fiercest competitor in McCain's new Deep 'n' Soapy dessert.
- Area New Zealander finally relents, sighing: 'Yes, I am Australian'.
- Dalai Lama files multibillion dollar lawsuit against N.A. kindergartens for retroactive royalties on hit song If You're Happy And You Know It..
- Ecologists find new species of newt living on Victoria Beckham's pout.
- David Bowie to make guest appearance on NASA Central Command radio-link.
- KFC launches new Buckets Made Out Of Chicken dinner option.
- Obama declares Domestic Policy of leading US through desert for 40 years in search for land of milk, honey.
- Somali Pirate stocks at all time high on NASDAQ.
- Psych Prof. Gary Weinhoff unveils latest wife at UCLA Psychology Department Christmas Party.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
organization
"Every resultant is either a sum or a difference of the co-operant forces; their sum, when their directions are the same -- their difference, when their directions are contrary. Further, every resultant is clearly traceable in its components, because these are homogeneous and commensurable. It is otherwise with emergents, when, instead of adding measurable motion to measurable motion, or things of one kind to other individuals of their kind, there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds. The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference." Lewes, 1875
Emergence... after picking away the rancid meat left putrefying in the jaws of summer, I've come to a state of dynamic equilibrium. Amidst life's noise, interwoven patterns have once again begun to come forth. Not to say that the noise has ceased, I would never want that, more so that ciphers now jut through the tangle of murky background. Pivot-points of life have reassembled themselves, reorganized themselves into forms indivisible, and they provide life to my presence on the mesoplane. It feels good. It feels fun. It feels empowering. It isn't without work, and does not arise out of independent action, but as a concert of many forces and consciousnesses acting for and through me.
Thank you world, I endeavor to repay you daily.
Emergence... after picking away the rancid meat left putrefying in the jaws of summer, I've come to a state of dynamic equilibrium. Amidst life's noise, interwoven patterns have once again begun to come forth. Not to say that the noise has ceased, I would never want that, more so that ciphers now jut through the tangle of murky background. Pivot-points of life have reassembled themselves, reorganized themselves into forms indivisible, and they provide life to my presence on the mesoplane. It feels good. It feels fun. It feels empowering. It isn't without work, and does not arise out of independent action, but as a concert of many forces and consciousnesses acting for and through me.
Thank you world, I endeavor to repay you daily.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
The Storm Project
I've started a photo essay over at of murk and sky. It's over there for a few reasons, but chiefly because WP's photo management is superior to this spotty outfit.
I won't say any more about it, it's a bit of a surprise, but if you guess (not too hard really), then I'll explain my intentions.
I won't say any more about it, it's a bit of a surprise, but if you guess (not too hard really), then I'll explain my intentions.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
forged textures
Today I burned the last vapours of a hangover on a photo escapade along the coastline. While I'd wanted to capture the root system of a huge gnarly old stump, some other geezer with a serious-looking tripod and lens selection was all over the thing, and I wasn't feeling especially social, so I gave myself another exercise. It involves an idea prompted by a sci-fi book I read about how people might live low-tech inside a massive interstellar sphere (here called a Fullerene orb, I suppose after Buckminster Fuller?). They have no natural gravity, so the rich among them create their own with centrifugal forces, whereas the poor grow fragile and spindly. The author plays with the concept pretty successfully, and my thought was that gravity is a discreet value that determines EVERYTHING we do, so much so, that we tend design our environment with it as a given. But what if we can trick ourselves to give the impression that it can be tampered with? Would our estimations of beauty change? Would we rightly know what we're even looking at anymore? So I thought I'd torture the camera to produce some textured pictures that play with our vernacular and reflexive reliance of gravity. Both as a determining force on our actions and also as a means of orienting ourselves. The outcome was pretty interesting. Many pictures almost produce vertigo, and the hidden patterns we might otherwise miss seem to leap right out. It's almost that as soon as the mind realizes it can't quick grasp the aspect, the imagination quickly creates a new possibility. Also, while taking the pictures, I found that in order to reject the referent force of gravity, I had to focus more on axes and weighted symmetry.
The first picture is from a set I took of the moon last week when I played with exposure, and then the rest are from today's late-afternoon/sunset. Hope they're interesting and not proof positive that I finally drank myself into idiocy last night.
The first picture is from a set I took of the moon last week when I played with exposure, and then the rest are from today's late-afternoon/sunset. Hope they're interesting and not proof positive that I finally drank myself into idiocy last night.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Friday, October 03, 2008
A Missive Long Overdue
I've written many posts lately and then let them age unposted in my draft folder. This one has been something I've thought about for ages, talked about for around a year or two, and only recently thoroughly committed myself to. I DID post it last Friday, but then went out on the town with an old, old friend and ray-gunned my sobriety into a soft gooey puddle; came home and read it and felt it seemed a bit taut, or idyllic, or manic, or vague, or immodest, or overcooked, or something. But now that I've revisited, I think all that's ok if it helps me get going on it. It's definitely assisted in that it's helped my see what parameters there are (or aren't) in the region. After this, I'll be ready for phase 2:
A recent article about Watt, a Rotterdam night club that literally generates energy from the motions on the dancefloor - an innovation several friends and I had talked about for about half a decade (except our version would also map and project the tactility of the dancefloor to a mad visual display for the dancers to see their rhythmic steps and cross-floor movements) - lends me the fortitude to know that I'm on the right track. While I feel slightly indignant about concepts reaching reification without me, I know that's just the irrational itch of feeling removed from the process. Logically, a dancefloor like that isn't too much of a leap of imagination, whereas the strategies of implementation really and truly are. Bravo to you, dancefloor revolutionaries! And thank you.
For years now, I've been spiraling around a locus that I can only really call landscape architecture: a transitional zone where disparate, and perhaps even incompatible behaviours, ideas and attitudes overlap and conflict, but also irremediably and necessarily coexist. Nominally, I think of this zone as liminal space, perhaps an overexertion of liminal's true meaning, but, for my purposes, it works. This space is far stabler than say a TAZ, as it is found everywhere, both public and private, purposeful or inadvertent, new and old, organic and inorganic, authoritarian or anarchist. For example, go now to the sea or a river embankment, approach the lip of wave rubbing its gums against the rocks and dip your finger in where land meets water meets air meets sunlight. Now extend that analogy to that of the human experience as it breathes through the manifold complexities of itself: sitting on your stoop is a liminal act, as you interact with the street from the vantage of your homelife; taking cover from the rain in an alcove; waiting in line for a slice of pizza... the list is simply only exhausted by the imagination's conception of intermediacy. Places like dancefloors, pubs, traditional marketplaces are but ritualized variants of such spaces. In essence though, you could simply host a party or political rally or just invite a friend round and your private habitat would become such a transitional zone (though there are many such spaces and artifacts already in your home, even when alone: doorways, office, bathroom, bedroom, windows, computers, radios, TVs, and, I'd argue, books).
Since its advent, architecture has shown that it can determine behaviour. Not only that, but reinforce ethical values. Take Haussmann's oft-cited tribute to baroque power through his reinvention of Paris. Or read the first few lines of NGM's timely Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran. And then relegate all this environment-altering power to the codification of built forms around you. The function of these composite landscapes are to project ideas onto mind: ideology, politics, philosophy, consumption and breeding habits. Except, it is the point at which your mind starts interacting with, toward and across this landscape at which the liminal space is formed, and wherein new function is wrought by way of innovation. Our built environment IS dialect, a stored wealth of perceptibly privileged knowledge, edificial and so directly manifest that it has the power to influence your thinking without you even noticing. Take the banks and credit bureaus panoptical skyscrapers downtown. They can see you, they can see all, but you cannot see them. Take old colonial buildings in Mozambique, and their neo-classical facades hiding, or even brassing, their criminal history. Take the International Style pervading and subjugating traditional stores of culture and identity in Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon etc. Take schools built as prisons, or malls, or sanitariums. Take condominiums erupting out of the ground near you, like beached cruise ships, choking vibrant street life and segregating the haves from the have-nots. Now while I'm not really a behaviourist, I do believe that the writing is not only on the wall, but also in it.
And that's about where I want to step in. Though I've researched and perused and sketched and thought so very much about this, often having a tough time articulating this obsession to those others more politically charged, I hereby deliver my utmost in resolve to find immersion in this landscape architecture. When delineated in the fashion above, this field opens onto an immeasurably broad and deep scope. I do not wish to define myself within this purview, mostly as I really have no idea how to. However, I can say this: I want to help build a world that engenders self-awareness, inspiration, free-thought, egalitarianism, psychological well-being and ecological immersion, wherein the processes are transparent, educational, playful and stimulating. It will acknowledge change as the constant, and find the emergent planes to speak of the opportunities found within it.
And I will accept no less.
ON A BAD WORD
For me, the word 'sustainable' is flawed, and actually points to a turpitude that appears to carve deep throughout the building industry (the world's single largest industry, as our recent financial market crises have brayed): 'sustainability' is an arrogant and dismissive interpretation of a systemic problem. To underline that point, I ask you, haven't we always considered ourselves to have built sustainably? What really determines a buildings sustainability? Embodied energy? Psychological impact? Ecological principles? Economics? While sustainability grazes these ideas, it acts more as an apologetic syllogism for core building practice than helping stimulate the radicalization of building, nay, living tenets. I believe that the word sounds static, boring, and dangerously self-righteous: buildings are declared sustainable by reaching set conditions, but then are free to disrupt the environment in other, discreet manners, ostensibly hidden behind the noble mantle of SUSTAINABILITY. Look at the site plans of Dockside Green, found here in Victoria. Looks lovely, a sweet little bioremediation brook babbling between passively heated condo buildings and waterfront townhouses. In life though, the building are cramped, policed by design, and have missed vital opportunities to fully integrate nature (eg. by gradating the shoreline gently down to the water instead of dumping a cache of large boulders, or allowing a meadow area for nesting birds etc.)
Sustainability is a banner though, I give it that, and as long as it supports the dynamic evolution of dialogue around its procedure, I guess it'll be ok in the long run. I am afterall going to see about getting my LEED qualification over the next year, so who knows, maybe I'll be its biggest advocate soon.
S'Mat out.
PS> One more thing, this was all a peripatetic preamble for my other designs of starting yet another blog, a bit like Of Murk and Sky, but more informed. As soon as I come up with a sweet enough name, it'll be on. Was gonna end this post with a HUGE list of remarkable sites I go to whenever I can, but that'll have to wait.
S'Mat really out.
A recent article about Watt, a Rotterdam night club that literally generates energy from the motions on the dancefloor - an innovation several friends and I had talked about for about half a decade (except our version would also map and project the tactility of the dancefloor to a mad visual display for the dancers to see their rhythmic steps and cross-floor movements) - lends me the fortitude to know that I'm on the right track. While I feel slightly indignant about concepts reaching reification without me, I know that's just the irrational itch of feeling removed from the process. Logically, a dancefloor like that isn't too much of a leap of imagination, whereas the strategies of implementation really and truly are. Bravo to you, dancefloor revolutionaries! And thank you.
For years now, I've been spiraling around a locus that I can only really call landscape architecture: a transitional zone where disparate, and perhaps even incompatible behaviours, ideas and attitudes overlap and conflict, but also irremediably and necessarily coexist. Nominally, I think of this zone as liminal space, perhaps an overexertion of liminal's true meaning, but, for my purposes, it works. This space is far stabler than say a TAZ, as it is found everywhere, both public and private, purposeful or inadvertent, new and old, organic and inorganic, authoritarian or anarchist. For example, go now to the sea or a river embankment, approach the lip of wave rubbing its gums against the rocks and dip your finger in where land meets water meets air meets sunlight. Now extend that analogy to that of the human experience as it breathes through the manifold complexities of itself: sitting on your stoop is a liminal act, as you interact with the street from the vantage of your homelife; taking cover from the rain in an alcove; waiting in line for a slice of pizza... the list is simply only exhausted by the imagination's conception of intermediacy. Places like dancefloors, pubs, traditional marketplaces are but ritualized variants of such spaces. In essence though, you could simply host a party or political rally or just invite a friend round and your private habitat would become such a transitional zone (though there are many such spaces and artifacts already in your home, even when alone: doorways, office, bathroom, bedroom, windows, computers, radios, TVs, and, I'd argue, books).
Since its advent, architecture has shown that it can determine behaviour. Not only that, but reinforce ethical values. Take Haussmann's oft-cited tribute to baroque power through his reinvention of Paris. Or read the first few lines of NGM's timely Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran. And then relegate all this environment-altering power to the codification of built forms around you. The function of these composite landscapes are to project ideas onto mind: ideology, politics, philosophy, consumption and breeding habits. Except, it is the point at which your mind starts interacting with, toward and across this landscape at which the liminal space is formed, and wherein new function is wrought by way of innovation. Our built environment IS dialect, a stored wealth of perceptibly privileged knowledge, edificial and so directly manifest that it has the power to influence your thinking without you even noticing. Take the banks and credit bureaus panoptical skyscrapers downtown. They can see you, they can see all, but you cannot see them. Take old colonial buildings in Mozambique, and their neo-classical facades hiding, or even brassing, their criminal history. Take the International Style pervading and subjugating traditional stores of culture and identity in Iraq, Vietnam, Lebanon etc. Take schools built as prisons, or malls, or sanitariums. Take condominiums erupting out of the ground near you, like beached cruise ships, choking vibrant street life and segregating the haves from the have-nots. Now while I'm not really a behaviourist, I do believe that the writing is not only on the wall, but also in it.
And that's about where I want to step in. Though I've researched and perused and sketched and thought so very much about this, often having a tough time articulating this obsession to those others more politically charged, I hereby deliver my utmost in resolve to find immersion in this landscape architecture. When delineated in the fashion above, this field opens onto an immeasurably broad and deep scope. I do not wish to define myself within this purview, mostly as I really have no idea how to. However, I can say this: I want to help build a world that engenders self-awareness, inspiration, free-thought, egalitarianism, psychological well-being and ecological immersion, wherein the processes are transparent, educational, playful and stimulating. It will acknowledge change as the constant, and find the emergent planes to speak of the opportunities found within it.
And I will accept no less.
ON A BAD WORD
For me, the word 'sustainable' is flawed, and actually points to a turpitude that appears to carve deep throughout the building industry (the world's single largest industry, as our recent financial market crises have brayed): 'sustainability' is an arrogant and dismissive interpretation of a systemic problem. To underline that point, I ask you, haven't we always considered ourselves to have built sustainably? What really determines a buildings sustainability? Embodied energy? Psychological impact? Ecological principles? Economics? While sustainability grazes these ideas, it acts more as an apologetic syllogism for core building practice than helping stimulate the radicalization of building, nay, living tenets. I believe that the word sounds static, boring, and dangerously self-righteous: buildings are declared sustainable by reaching set conditions, but then are free to disrupt the environment in other, discreet manners, ostensibly hidden behind the noble mantle of SUSTAINABILITY. Look at the site plans of Dockside Green, found here in Victoria. Looks lovely, a sweet little bioremediation brook babbling between passively heated condo buildings and waterfront townhouses. In life though, the building are cramped, policed by design, and have missed vital opportunities to fully integrate nature (eg. by gradating the shoreline gently down to the water instead of dumping a cache of large boulders, or allowing a meadow area for nesting birds etc.)
Sustainability is a banner though, I give it that, and as long as it supports the dynamic evolution of dialogue around its procedure, I guess it'll be ok in the long run. I am afterall going to see about getting my LEED qualification over the next year, so who knows, maybe I'll be its biggest advocate soon.
S'Mat out.
PS> One more thing, this was all a peripatetic preamble for my other designs of starting yet another blog, a bit like Of Murk and Sky, but more informed. As soon as I come up with a sweet enough name, it'll be on. Was gonna end this post with a HUGE list of remarkable sites I go to whenever I can, but that'll have to wait.
S'Mat really out.
you betcha
All that Palin proved yesterday is that she had better committed her talking points to memory, giving her the latitude to be cute. I hate that word, but it's true. Cute: Hokie hometown USA vernacular; winking at the camera; apple-pie anecdotes... yuck.
There was no debate, though Biden (I still can't believe that there's a ticket bearing the names Obama-Biden... how much closer to 'Osama Bin Laden' can you get?) did try to start a skirmish or two. I wonder if he felt any inhibitory pressure from the spectral main-stream punditry poised to shoot charges of sexism at him had he cracked her veneer.
Which brings me to the part that sickens me the most: Palin being touted as a symbol for contemporary feminism. WTF?! I'm outraged by that charge. If anything, she reinforces all the traditional anachronisms and stereotypes that have ever stymied women's political emergence: she's evangelical; pro-life; sedentary, having received her passport just last year. She also endorses overtly patriarchal overtures of war (which is basically a means of holding 150,000 US children hostage for electoral purposes, among the myriad other profits looted), resource-dessication and a nonviable economic growth index. She's no champion for feminism, she's a cocktail waitress in a boy's club. Poor Hilary Clinton, as much as the dark side crackled around her, she had my respect. The Republicans swung the quick bait-and-switch on the US, expediting Palin's advancement through demographic, and photogenic, nepotism.
I'm sorry to say it, but McCain may as well have chosen a golden retriever for everyone to go 'aaawww' at, and then condemned those who decried the ridiculous choice as committing animal abuse. That's how insulting I think Palin is, both as a person and as a campaign idea.
Ron Paul for president!
There was no debate, though Biden (I still can't believe that there's a ticket bearing the names Obama-Biden... how much closer to 'Osama Bin Laden' can you get?) did try to start a skirmish or two. I wonder if he felt any inhibitory pressure from the spectral main-stream punditry poised to shoot charges of sexism at him had he cracked her veneer.
Which brings me to the part that sickens me the most: Palin being touted as a symbol for contemporary feminism. WTF?! I'm outraged by that charge. If anything, she reinforces all the traditional anachronisms and stereotypes that have ever stymied women's political emergence: she's evangelical; pro-life; sedentary, having received her passport just last year. She also endorses overtly patriarchal overtures of war (which is basically a means of holding 150,000 US children hostage for electoral purposes, among the myriad other profits looted), resource-dessication and a nonviable economic growth index. She's no champion for feminism, she's a cocktail waitress in a boy's club. Poor Hilary Clinton, as much as the dark side crackled around her, she had my respect. The Republicans swung the quick bait-and-switch on the US, expediting Palin's advancement through demographic, and photogenic, nepotism.
I'm sorry to say it, but McCain may as well have chosen a golden retriever for everyone to go 'aaawww' at, and then condemned those who decried the ridiculous choice as committing animal abuse. That's how insulting I think Palin is, both as a person and as a campaign idea.
Ron Paul for president!
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
It was nice that the hostages in Sudan all got a bouquet of flowers at the end of the ordeal. But I did wonder at the process of their delivery:
"Gutentag, I am making to try ze sending of ze flowers to Sudetenla.. bah, I mean Sudan."
"By all means sir, we assure same day delivery. May I ask who the flowers are for?"
"Hostages."
"Ahh, well then can I suggest a sunny brace of Asteraceae? Nothing says 'Get released soon' quite like meadow daisies."
"Zat is good!"
Sorry, but my thoughts are too itinerant to cohere into a post worth some time. And thus worth yours. I'll try again soon.
"Gutentag, I am making to try ze sending of ze flowers to Sudetenla.. bah, I mean Sudan."
"By all means sir, we assure same day delivery. May I ask who the flowers are for?"
"Hostages."
"Ahh, well then can I suggest a sunny brace of Asteraceae? Nothing says 'Get released soon' quite like meadow daisies."
"Zat is good!"
Sorry, but my thoughts are too itinerant to cohere into a post worth some time. And thus worth yours. I'll try again soon.
Monday, September 22, 2008
...and Chodaboy
Once there was the Unibomber. Then came the Shoebomber. But now we have the Obama. Dropping orgasms on mass congregations of people, getting them to ululate in symphonic joy. The Obama: his campaign commercial should just be a low-slung and gravelly "Oooo yeeeah". It's too bad that he only drops O bombs in the name of good, as he could probably stop McCain's heart with the simplest erotic blast. Though McCain likely only gets hot from Cindy flexing flayed bamboo canes threateningly and yelling Full Metal Jacket quotes at him while making bird spiders scuttle over his hog-tied form. What a creep...
So those that can should prevail against Baracknophobia and elect the Obama!
So those that can should prevail against Baracknophobia and elect the Obama!
Saturday, August 23, 2008
there's safety in numbness
i think i'd fallen prey to parsimony there once again. forgotten that the good -of love, of skill, of friendship- is achieved only through practice. as enigmatic as it sounds, i just wanted to hurt less, to lay still until i could feel the power thrum through me. that old pit-trap. it's never worked before, what was there to make me think that perhaps it would this time? i was encouraging forgetfulness, i guess. how jejune.
strange, but it's because i love you too much, not too little, and recognizing that, i tried to play my instruments across myself and not others. i can't bear the fact that we all use each other so much. how can we disavow hierarchy when small-group politics are based on largess, and pointed significances of abundance, and condemnation of poverty in all its forms?
i swear. it's not because i've cared too little, i've tamped down on it because i care so much i feel unsafe to exhibit it. i swear some more.
that said, here's to writing! brut!
and sketching:
-disavowal: 'e, your mother was a diphthong!'
-speaking of mothers, my mum has a sudoku book in the bathroom. we complete each others' puzzles, sometimes writing expletives in the margin to comment on tactics. this is basically a conversation we have while exclusively on the toilet. i'm not sure how i feel about that, now that i think about it. she once asked how i played my sudoku and i said by process of elimination.
-i took up smoking again. i quit because i'd done some math and assessed what a waste of time it had been. the math came to something like 7.5 months or 225 odd days of having a cigarette in my hand/smoke in my lungs/being in a smokey room. this lump of time unbroken by sleep or breaks of any kind. health aside, this is a phenomenal portion of time that could've been directed at creating something truly wonderful. i took it back up after about a month because my anxiety attacks crippled me. and frankly, i didn't know how to direct the time to better uses (i was running 5km twice daily). the anxiety i was experiencing was tentatively nominated by a friend as agoraphobia, which literally means fear of markets. and taking market to mean a theatre of socio-political exchange, agoraphobia summed it up perfectly. the smoking has allowed it to subside somewhat.
-of smoking: i've been thinking of my uncle glynn somewhat recently. i'd meant to detail how smoking led directly to his passing, but still find the story overwhelming, and am afraid that my version would be from the vantage of a child, and thus apocryphal. i will try though, soon, and tell the story of how a single cigarette marked his death.
strange, but it's because i love you too much, not too little, and recognizing that, i tried to play my instruments across myself and not others. i can't bear the fact that we all use each other so much. how can we disavow hierarchy when small-group politics are based on largess, and pointed significances of abundance, and condemnation of poverty in all its forms?
i swear. it's not because i've cared too little, i've tamped down on it because i care so much i feel unsafe to exhibit it. i swear some more.
that said, here's to writing! brut!
and sketching:
-disavowal: 'e, your mother was a diphthong!'
-speaking of mothers, my mum has a sudoku book in the bathroom. we complete each others' puzzles, sometimes writing expletives in the margin to comment on tactics. this is basically a conversation we have while exclusively on the toilet. i'm not sure how i feel about that, now that i think about it. she once asked how i played my sudoku and i said by process of elimination.
-i took up smoking again. i quit because i'd done some math and assessed what a waste of time it had been. the math came to something like 7.5 months or 225 odd days of having a cigarette in my hand/smoke in my lungs/being in a smokey room. this lump of time unbroken by sleep or breaks of any kind. health aside, this is a phenomenal portion of time that could've been directed at creating something truly wonderful. i took it back up after about a month because my anxiety attacks crippled me. and frankly, i didn't know how to direct the time to better uses (i was running 5km twice daily). the anxiety i was experiencing was tentatively nominated by a friend as agoraphobia, which literally means fear of markets. and taking market to mean a theatre of socio-political exchange, agoraphobia summed it up perfectly. the smoking has allowed it to subside somewhat.
-of smoking: i've been thinking of my uncle glynn somewhat recently. i'd meant to detail how smoking led directly to his passing, but still find the story overwhelming, and am afraid that my version would be from the vantage of a child, and thus apocryphal. i will try though, soon, and tell the story of how a single cigarette marked his death.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
cadavre exquis
back in March, I received a dazzling Fa-bo transmission from Alain entitled simply: "story take it where ever you want". enchanted by both his high-arched concepts and his rich, sensorially transpositive but devastating descriptions, i gave to agreement that this would be fun. turned out that the exercise became a new way to discourse about how we were navigating -and venerating- our most recent wounds. a romantic bleed if you will. for what it lacks in cohesion it gains in bombast. the correspondence lasted for about 9 alternating segments.
Red dust on blue winds and she sifts for golden sea shells upon a seemingly endless coast...where the waves in delicious foam don't move...a small wooden table where she paints impressionist canvases of the sea ... with a bowl of oranges and pomegranates and cinnamon scented turkish coffee to fortify her...the wind still speaks in a secret language and sings children lullabies and operas and declares immovable prophecy. The birds call to an invisible paradise and small temples litter the coast and sometimes a putrid half eaten fish carcass washes up and she kneels and worships it and then casts it back into the waters...when the electrical storms come, warm and moody , they cast their secret shadows upon the glittering indigo horizon she breathes in the ozone and cries for what she knows and then shouts and does cartwheels and remembers what the world was before it ended...
These were but a few of her daylight activities.
He called his surveillance system The Eyectopus, a clumsy nominative approximation of its dendritic sensory network. He could leave it unchaperoned, allowing him to work his target from another vantage, and then review the tapes later. It eased the boredom of his job, though experts in his trade, many of them his peers, went to extremes to explain the critical and functional role boredom played in their profession. Boredom was thoroughness, they maintained. But he cared not a fig, and spent many wild and loose-clocked hours in activities meant to attract her attention. 'Survey this!' he appeared to be saying to her. From the breakers where he played in the surf, he could see her shape on the reed-rustled dunes, a singular point around which the creased skies and verbigerative waves accreted. She became like a radio to him, left on in a room otherwise devoid of human presence. From a wind-withered ridge, she'd overlook the waters, standing braced as if hunting fowl, and he'd tread water for hours, buoyed only by his dogged instinct to find the trophy for which she seemed to so hungrily search.....
...though he was wide eyed with hunger and demonic with godly love, eyectopus was his child , the immaculate starfish , the glittering gem of his precious techno emotional crown ... like a prism of divine light it expanded into a rainbow...eden like... in that it reminded him that the paradise of art and love that he sought was forever gone, and the technological nation of Yacmar would rise and rise but the precious source of creation, the soma of modern life...real emotion... had been usurped by the cold calculating monolithic...mind... and he wept in crowds of robots automated and listless and lifeless who looked on mute and dumb as if a lost tribe upon a wasted burning napalmed shore of a former lush jungle fertile with secret emerald magick...the muse of light...the beacon of life, the frequency of intimacy, joy and humanity faded like a blue sun...in ivory golden tones ...and the moan of the celestial winds and black angels lent their wavering voice to his search for a god to resuscitate...
He recognized his sickness in her. Every nerve that connected them had been pinched tight by hypermediation. Trapped in the segues of their carapaces. Cinched tight by their exoskeletal yokes. She had become more than him, but by virtue of their solitary communion, less. Yacmar, the nation that had homogenized to the point at which entire cities yawned awake, and ripping themselves from the ground, stood up on giant feet and roved the Earth in plunder. On occasion, these massive automatons would lock in combat, but this warring was only a disguised act of merging. It was designed to extirpate, for what other objective could there be? Simply disguise the grim future of mind, that of deindivuation, by the destraction of intractable war. Blame your foes for spiting your individuality by being not you. And forget that the only difference between soldiers and terrorists were that the soldiers got paid. She, daughter of the empire, knew this all too well, and one day made her terrifying decision: She opened a hatch in one of the creature-citadel's abdomens, dropped through, and avoiding the offal that spewed from its base, picked her way through the digested lands in search of the Water Gypsies. He, commissioned for what was mistakenly construed as obeisance by a thin-lipped Yacmar agent, was tasked to find her. And bring her back.
'bring her back'
the intention was with surgical precision, digitally implanted in his computer enhanced emotional network...the god voice...the priest therapist... looked at him with reservation and wondered why he had been chosen for this perilous journey after all was he not a 'skipper', did he not dream unreal irrational logics...was he not better suited to be a code breaker... such a low frequency spirit that enjoyed coasting like an opium addict in netherlands of no importance,a vampiric krishna! A low learner who still worshipped the moon and earth and stars even though fifty class m planets had been discovered in one month of old earth time...
'there will be no holy grails'
'you will eat and shit and stare ahead transfixed'
'god has died...magic is science...is power'
'your queen has abandoned Yacmar...we knew this would happen,'
a solitary tear barely perceptible formed like a cosmic star at his tear duct.
'you are expendable...you chose to love in this world...we reserve that duty for the next...so you have been chosen...now you will show us your love'
little orbs of pink and green energy clung like weightless water to his eyes and heart region...
'you do not know how to surrender and for this we are grateful...bring Oshea to the edge of the luconian desert where all the rovers congregate and let her hear the voice of recreation...
he knew the voice would erase all her memories and make her a child again...so she could begin the reconditioning process...'may she remain damaged forever!' Are we not all wayward children.. are not angels bound to abandon us eventually...so we can each experiece the god moment...the weightlessness of being completely primordial and alone again?
he scattered his thought in symbols and let them reconvene in his heart, this was how he produced arbitrary visions ...and the stars moaned, and the sun smiled, and the deserts broke down and fish crept near the shores and leapt into heavenly light because they knew the inevitable truth that love itself was on the verge of expressing itself through
imperfection...
His expendability was that of a solitary indivisible in an infinite series of spines vomiting more spines. For all he was supposed to know he was just an operative. The meat casing for the delivery of an idea. Nothing special. Everything normal.
But he'd 'skipped' to get here, recanting time so that his present became the past, and his memories the unformed future. He'd spent a month in cerebral quarantine in an attempt to ready him for the skip. The isolation breaking his attachments to a phase of a world he'd never return to. Or so it was supposed, for the notion of time-travel altered all measurement of valency and left conventional ethics with the boatman who casually disposed of them in the river Lethe.
'Bring her back,' they'd said. 'Bring your mother back to Yacmar.'
'o mother'
'god preserve my soul for what i do'
The Luconian desert glittered in specks of crimson and gold as the sun set and the slivered silver faded crescent moon shone luminent over the long horizon.
The shrubs and fauna glowed a radioactive green like some mythic reptile
and he held her by the hand and all that could be heard were their shallow breaths as they ran...no historical exodus could match the breathless love of these two lovers united...was she a mother, a sister , a lover, or simply a god materialized from another dimension, it did not matter no barrier from the present life could take away the urge to run together, to escape into the dreamlike mist, to become absorbed in the golden fields of immaculate lotuses , but she was already reprogrammed he had failed , the Yacmar systemizers had found her three earth seconds before he could commune with the central all knowing eye...he had been recruited and all had progressed as planned ... but who was the hero, he who knew all and tried to change it or those who enforced the strictest rules of time to the atomic millisecond? Oshea had always been a renegade and double agent and deeply flawed in some mysterious divine manner , she was a fallen queen but all empires had to fall and this was the crown jewel of Yacmar that they needed their queen to bring their own knowing to an end, to silence their own evil and ingenuous plans to break the back of time, like a dying sinner they knew the light all too well when the dying breath beckoned them to the otherside they cried for renewed life through surrender...but Icmot was beyond the eternal dance of devil and god , of sun and moon, of life and death...time was a figment of some sentient race imaginations but beauty, love and unity stood above like an demonic god, or beautified lucifer who refused to follow the heavy conventions of the gods of the absolute, yes there was no hope the struggle was endless, the love of the conqueror must fade and the father will always reign supreme but for the moment when two twin souls pierce the veil of the forever with the unending laughter of having known and the clear song of victory of having overcome all others then...somehow something would transcend and so they ran like refugees into the still silence of the desert and with the magnificence of two suns they shone...immovable and infinitely devoted...
the hiss of sidewinding sands covered their tracks as they strode in the wind-shadow of the pack mule. the clank of the pots and the occasional sigh from the beast were the only perforations in the madness of quiet fury they willed themselves into. the sand was red with rust from the oxidized iron of weapon dust, and their landmarks were the harrowed buildings of a people lost, standing broken and lonely, like corpse fingers apportioning blame. they seldom spoke. she seemed to be a dream within a dream, her self-assurance and autonomy possible only through willed ignorance. he kept his attention drawn to practical gains: feeling the mule's muted ability to find water and cropped greenery; the collection of desert jetsam as fuel for their night fires. they saw noone on their haphazard path, though once heard the scream of engines in combat high above their ordeal. at night, he'd lie awake and attempt once more to please her with stories. of her future majesty, the mystery of the father she would choose for him, her breath of life that would be celebrated by the entire empire. and then, exhausted and embarrassed by her silence, they'd drift into the scrabbling sounds of the desert as the timid, big-eyed animals arose. neither of them could fathom the true danger of the ruins that provided their bivouac. that this mutated landscape might have horrors that muttered in the lost corridors beneath its sands was unguessable to either, until one particular night....
the sky was a breezy one hundred and ten degrees, an algorithm of skull and bone really, dry deserted heat, heat so hot that it made frying pans scream like tea kettles and lizards sing like chameleons on fire...a chamber chorus of high sharp symphonic alien like trance goblin rock played by trolls in lutes screaming 'stop the revolution' stopped in celestial perfection and a crimson gem was brought forward by two elvish creatures...there obviously was a little psychedelic property to this place...the stars spread out like dancing starfish in an aquarium of black n gold and sirens with pinkish hued skin chanted songs of blue... of water and sky and communication... and the trinity of two was accomplished in an instant...the love making broke out like a southern lynching everybody new it was coming but in hindsite no one could stop it...and never had the musty brown and auburn shadow streaked craggily ruins looking slightly orange at dawn been so pink with afterglow!The image of an empire hanging by a thread loomed over the passing days...they were merely termites, gnats, lice or even dare i say mosquitoes in this sodom and gomorrah which made the eastern wind that graced there cool dewy skin at dawn even more gracious and there escape even more blessed...their brown skins moaned with hot red pangs of heat burn but they would cut cactus and use the soft melon like interior to salve their wounds and even in this there was small glories ...
they found desert fruit...buried several feet beneath the surface of the parched earth and enjoyed it's tough leathery peel...with juice running down their faces like upon a child's cheeks they began to laugh and dream of the sea...'if only this sea of stars could rain every day' she said and he of course dreamt of wine which quickly deteriorated into pitchers of beer then of course water...clear cool and clean...the only liquid man has every needed truly began to impinge upon this romantic interlude...'what is an empire to a queen, when i am neither a worthy king nor prince...we may actually die of thirst' a buddhist sun set was taking place, one twangy flower red and green hung low and smiled like an emerald at the crow of silence that descended in the sardonic face of the sun...they ought to have known that beneath the surface there was not only water but they would soon discover the city of Oshante which translated from the desert rover language simply means 'floating water lotus'...
Red dust on blue winds and she sifts for golden sea shells upon a seemingly endless coast...where the waves in delicious foam don't move...a small wooden table where she paints impressionist canvases of the sea ... with a bowl of oranges and pomegranates and cinnamon scented turkish coffee to fortify her...the wind still speaks in a secret language and sings children lullabies and operas and declares immovable prophecy. The birds call to an invisible paradise and small temples litter the coast and sometimes a putrid half eaten fish carcass washes up and she kneels and worships it and then casts it back into the waters...when the electrical storms come, warm and moody , they cast their secret shadows upon the glittering indigo horizon she breathes in the ozone and cries for what she knows and then shouts and does cartwheels and remembers what the world was before it ended...
These were but a few of her daylight activities.
He called his surveillance system The Eyectopus, a clumsy nominative approximation of its dendritic sensory network. He could leave it unchaperoned, allowing him to work his target from another vantage, and then review the tapes later. It eased the boredom of his job, though experts in his trade, many of them his peers, went to extremes to explain the critical and functional role boredom played in their profession. Boredom was thoroughness, they maintained. But he cared not a fig, and spent many wild and loose-clocked hours in activities meant to attract her attention. 'Survey this!' he appeared to be saying to her. From the breakers where he played in the surf, he could see her shape on the reed-rustled dunes, a singular point around which the creased skies and verbigerative waves accreted. She became like a radio to him, left on in a room otherwise devoid of human presence. From a wind-withered ridge, she'd overlook the waters, standing braced as if hunting fowl, and he'd tread water for hours, buoyed only by his dogged instinct to find the trophy for which she seemed to so hungrily search.....
...though he was wide eyed with hunger and demonic with godly love, eyectopus was his child , the immaculate starfish , the glittering gem of his precious techno emotional crown ... like a prism of divine light it expanded into a rainbow...eden like... in that it reminded him that the paradise of art and love that he sought was forever gone, and the technological nation of Yacmar would rise and rise but the precious source of creation, the soma of modern life...real emotion... had been usurped by the cold calculating monolithic...mind... and he wept in crowds of robots automated and listless and lifeless who looked on mute and dumb as if a lost tribe upon a wasted burning napalmed shore of a former lush jungle fertile with secret emerald magick...the muse of light...the beacon of life, the frequency of intimacy, joy and humanity faded like a blue sun...in ivory golden tones ...and the moan of the celestial winds and black angels lent their wavering voice to his search for a god to resuscitate...
He recognized his sickness in her. Every nerve that connected them had been pinched tight by hypermediation. Trapped in the segues of their carapaces. Cinched tight by their exoskeletal yokes. She had become more than him, but by virtue of their solitary communion, less. Yacmar, the nation that had homogenized to the point at which entire cities yawned awake, and ripping themselves from the ground, stood up on giant feet and roved the Earth in plunder. On occasion, these massive automatons would lock in combat, but this warring was only a disguised act of merging. It was designed to extirpate, for what other objective could there be? Simply disguise the grim future of mind, that of deindivuation, by the destraction of intractable war. Blame your foes for spiting your individuality by being not you. And forget that the only difference between soldiers and terrorists were that the soldiers got paid. She, daughter of the empire, knew this all too well, and one day made her terrifying decision: She opened a hatch in one of the creature-citadel's abdomens, dropped through, and avoiding the offal that spewed from its base, picked her way through the digested lands in search of the Water Gypsies. He, commissioned for what was mistakenly construed as obeisance by a thin-lipped Yacmar agent, was tasked to find her. And bring her back.
'bring her back'
the intention was with surgical precision, digitally implanted in his computer enhanced emotional network...the god voice...the priest therapist... looked at him with reservation and wondered why he had been chosen for this perilous journey after all was he not a 'skipper', did he not dream unreal irrational logics...was he not better suited to be a code breaker... such a low frequency spirit that enjoyed coasting like an opium addict in netherlands of no importance,a vampiric krishna! A low learner who still worshipped the moon and earth and stars even though fifty class m planets had been discovered in one month of old earth time...
'there will be no holy grails'
'you will eat and shit and stare ahead transfixed'
'god has died...magic is science...is power'
'your queen has abandoned Yacmar...we knew this would happen,'
a solitary tear barely perceptible formed like a cosmic star at his tear duct.
'you are expendable...you chose to love in this world...we reserve that duty for the next...so you have been chosen...now you will show us your love'
little orbs of pink and green energy clung like weightless water to his eyes and heart region...
'you do not know how to surrender and for this we are grateful...bring Oshea to the edge of the luconian desert where all the rovers congregate and let her hear the voice of recreation...
he knew the voice would erase all her memories and make her a child again...so she could begin the reconditioning process...'may she remain damaged forever!' Are we not all wayward children.. are not angels bound to abandon us eventually...so we can each experiece the god moment...the weightlessness of being completely primordial and alone again?
he scattered his thought in symbols and let them reconvene in his heart, this was how he produced arbitrary visions ...and the stars moaned, and the sun smiled, and the deserts broke down and fish crept near the shores and leapt into heavenly light because they knew the inevitable truth that love itself was on the verge of expressing itself through
imperfection...
His expendability was that of a solitary indivisible in an infinite series of spines vomiting more spines. For all he was supposed to know he was just an operative. The meat casing for the delivery of an idea. Nothing special. Everything normal.
But he'd 'skipped' to get here, recanting time so that his present became the past, and his memories the unformed future. He'd spent a month in cerebral quarantine in an attempt to ready him for the skip. The isolation breaking his attachments to a phase of a world he'd never return to. Or so it was supposed, for the notion of time-travel altered all measurement of valency and left conventional ethics with the boatman who casually disposed of them in the river Lethe.
'Bring her back,' they'd said. 'Bring your mother back to Yacmar.'
'o mother'
'god preserve my soul for what i do'
The Luconian desert glittered in specks of crimson and gold as the sun set and the slivered silver faded crescent moon shone luminent over the long horizon.
The shrubs and fauna glowed a radioactive green like some mythic reptile
and he held her by the hand and all that could be heard were their shallow breaths as they ran...no historical exodus could match the breathless love of these two lovers united...was she a mother, a sister , a lover, or simply a god materialized from another dimension, it did not matter no barrier from the present life could take away the urge to run together, to escape into the dreamlike mist, to become absorbed in the golden fields of immaculate lotuses , but she was already reprogrammed he had failed , the Yacmar systemizers had found her three earth seconds before he could commune with the central all knowing eye...he had been recruited and all had progressed as planned ... but who was the hero, he who knew all and tried to change it or those who enforced the strictest rules of time to the atomic millisecond? Oshea had always been a renegade and double agent and deeply flawed in some mysterious divine manner , she was a fallen queen but all empires had to fall and this was the crown jewel of Yacmar that they needed their queen to bring their own knowing to an end, to silence their own evil and ingenuous plans to break the back of time, like a dying sinner they knew the light all too well when the dying breath beckoned them to the otherside they cried for renewed life through surrender...but Icmot was beyond the eternal dance of devil and god , of sun and moon, of life and death...time was a figment of some sentient race imaginations but beauty, love and unity stood above like an demonic god, or beautified lucifer who refused to follow the heavy conventions of the gods of the absolute, yes there was no hope the struggle was endless, the love of the conqueror must fade and the father will always reign supreme but for the moment when two twin souls pierce the veil of the forever with the unending laughter of having known and the clear song of victory of having overcome all others then...somehow something would transcend and so they ran like refugees into the still silence of the desert and with the magnificence of two suns they shone...immovable and infinitely devoted...
the hiss of sidewinding sands covered their tracks as they strode in the wind-shadow of the pack mule. the clank of the pots and the occasional sigh from the beast were the only perforations in the madness of quiet fury they willed themselves into. the sand was red with rust from the oxidized iron of weapon dust, and their landmarks were the harrowed buildings of a people lost, standing broken and lonely, like corpse fingers apportioning blame. they seldom spoke. she seemed to be a dream within a dream, her self-assurance and autonomy possible only through willed ignorance. he kept his attention drawn to practical gains: feeling the mule's muted ability to find water and cropped greenery; the collection of desert jetsam as fuel for their night fires. they saw noone on their haphazard path, though once heard the scream of engines in combat high above their ordeal. at night, he'd lie awake and attempt once more to please her with stories. of her future majesty, the mystery of the father she would choose for him, her breath of life that would be celebrated by the entire empire. and then, exhausted and embarrassed by her silence, they'd drift into the scrabbling sounds of the desert as the timid, big-eyed animals arose. neither of them could fathom the true danger of the ruins that provided their bivouac. that this mutated landscape might have horrors that muttered in the lost corridors beneath its sands was unguessable to either, until one particular night....
the sky was a breezy one hundred and ten degrees, an algorithm of skull and bone really, dry deserted heat, heat so hot that it made frying pans scream like tea kettles and lizards sing like chameleons on fire...a chamber chorus of high sharp symphonic alien like trance goblin rock played by trolls in lutes screaming 'stop the revolution' stopped in celestial perfection and a crimson gem was brought forward by two elvish creatures...there obviously was a little psychedelic property to this place...the stars spread out like dancing starfish in an aquarium of black n gold and sirens with pinkish hued skin chanted songs of blue... of water and sky and communication... and the trinity of two was accomplished in an instant...the love making broke out like a southern lynching everybody new it was coming but in hindsite no one could stop it...and never had the musty brown and auburn shadow streaked craggily ruins looking slightly orange at dawn been so pink with afterglow!The image of an empire hanging by a thread loomed over the passing days...they were merely termites, gnats, lice or even dare i say mosquitoes in this sodom and gomorrah which made the eastern wind that graced there cool dewy skin at dawn even more gracious and there escape even more blessed...their brown skins moaned with hot red pangs of heat burn but they would cut cactus and use the soft melon like interior to salve their wounds and even in this there was small glories ...
they found desert fruit...buried several feet beneath the surface of the parched earth and enjoyed it's tough leathery peel...with juice running down their faces like upon a child's cheeks they began to laugh and dream of the sea...'if only this sea of stars could rain every day' she said and he of course dreamt of wine which quickly deteriorated into pitchers of beer then of course water...clear cool and clean...the only liquid man has every needed truly began to impinge upon this romantic interlude...'what is an empire to a queen, when i am neither a worthy king nor prince...we may actually die of thirst' a buddhist sun set was taking place, one twangy flower red and green hung low and smiled like an emerald at the crow of silence that descended in the sardonic face of the sun...they ought to have known that beneath the surface there was not only water but they would soon discover the city of Oshante which translated from the desert rover language simply means 'floating water lotus'...
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
"The Heat"
Anjulie is the daughter of one of my mum's close friends, and I think she lives in the Toronto area. While I've not heard any of her other songs, this one gives me shivers.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
euphrenia - live here now
So I am now in BC. I live here.
Somehow the public parts of me got tanned without going through the stage that usually makes me look like a blob of mayonnaise that was held down and pink-bellied. Somehow I am buffing up. Somehow my mind is enjoying itself. Somehow I can see past myself to the greater caravan. Somehow I ate sausages every day for 10 days. I just ate one, and it tasted like bad breath, so I'm done with them till Beerfest.
I went on a wine tour on Sunday. It was my birthday. On it, it occurred to me that:
1. 'debauch' finds itself from Bacchus. well, obviously, but it'd been a tacit connection for me until then.
2. white, heterosexual cliques are not much fun in confined spaces. when sober.
3. a lot of wine sucks, but the people who make it are rich so the tasters are nice about it all. it stays freer that way.
4. due to their environmental sensitivity, rose bushes are planted amongst the vines and used to detect potential plagues or diseases before they occur in the crop.
5. people hide their most egregious infidelities behind their most cherished and celebrated values. the universality of this both horrifies and fascinates me.
6. everyone else here finds the story of feet washing up on beaches interesting too. though i still think calling the foot-falling-off-and-floating-away process 'disarticulation' to be a bit abstruse. 'yet another case of anaquapodischism has been reported upon disarticulately.'
Yes, I'm still unemployed.
Somehow the public parts of me got tanned without going through the stage that usually makes me look like a blob of mayonnaise that was held down and pink-bellied. Somehow I am buffing up. Somehow my mind is enjoying itself. Somehow I can see past myself to the greater caravan. Somehow I ate sausages every day for 10 days. I just ate one, and it tasted like bad breath, so I'm done with them till Beerfest.
I went on a wine tour on Sunday. It was my birthday. On it, it occurred to me that:
1. 'debauch' finds itself from Bacchus. well, obviously, but it'd been a tacit connection for me until then.
2. white, heterosexual cliques are not much fun in confined spaces. when sober.
3. a lot of wine sucks, but the people who make it are rich so the tasters are nice about it all. it stays freer that way.
4. due to their environmental sensitivity, rose bushes are planted amongst the vines and used to detect potential plagues or diseases before they occur in the crop.
5. people hide their most egregious infidelities behind their most cherished and celebrated values. the universality of this both horrifies and fascinates me.
6. everyone else here finds the story of feet washing up on beaches interesting too. though i still think calling the foot-falling-off-and-floating-away process 'disarticulation' to be a bit abstruse. 'yet another case of anaquapodischism has been reported upon disarticulately.'
Yes, I'm still unemployed.
"It's the sick oyster which has the pearl"
Previously, on whomunculus, S'Mat! mentioned that he'd peel back his onion and, through some sort of exegetic exercise, recall some of his more emotional memories in a series of blog posts.
Well, now he will not.
I spoke to him and advised him against privileging a liminal plane such as this with images of such tender import. Emoting is one of the few distinguished human arts, and should either be portrayed to friends, lovers and diaries or be written for the stage and then optioned into a Sir Ben Kingsley movie. You see, while shouting your more mulluscoid moments into the noisy, brassy internet has buckets of cathartic value, it readily becomes grandstanding. S'Mat! will speak into this medium one day, perhaps when it is palpably the greater neocortical reticulum, but meanwhile he will return to the first person for more post-narcissistic rambling.
Well, now he will not.
I spoke to him and advised him against privileging a liminal plane such as this with images of such tender import. Emoting is one of the few distinguished human arts, and should either be portrayed to friends, lovers and diaries or be written for the stage and then optioned into a Sir Ben Kingsley movie. You see, while shouting your more mulluscoid moments into the noisy, brassy internet has buckets of cathartic value, it readily becomes grandstanding. S'Mat! will speak into this medium one day, perhaps when it is palpably the greater neocortical reticulum, but meanwhile he will return to the first person for more post-narcissistic rambling.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
when anorexia is autophagia
Once, between breakfast shots of rakija -a very potent homemade Serbian plum brandy- my friend turned to me and remarked that I was anorexic. I tried to parry the diagnosis by mumbling something about finding his humour fatuous, but he pressed the point: "No Tom, I don't mean you have a body-image problem. I mean emotionally. You're emotionally anorexic." I don't really remember the rest of the conversation, I believe he moved onto Goethe's poetry, but his statement has haunted me for several years.
It hasn't been the only statement of that nature that I've received, but perhaps the most colourful. Others have made analogous analogies, and have given sweat, blood and tears on my behalf, but I've remained dumb. And numb. And indignant. Their techniques have varied from honey-coated lozenges of compassion, to blunt-force coercion, to baiting, to ultimatums, to attempts at conducive self-exposure. And I somehow rebuffed them all only to feel even more disconnected.
The shortest version as to why is that I hate myself. I like myself less than the people I like the least. I've hidden this from others for the several reasons. Those of not wanting to be subjugated by their judgment (related to pervasive feelings of inferiority, of fear of abandonment, of fear of loss of control and autonomy). Those of not wanting to influence others' already burgeoning emotional spectra. Those of attempting to hide my pessimism, my paranoia, my hurt. Those of simply not knowing what to do, what the source is, where this ceaseless bounty of pain comes from. Those of ignorance.
So instead it has constricted my movements ever tighter. Ruined or at least stymied the emotional growth of my relationships. Hindered my greater powers of memory, of accomplishment, of self-respect and empowerment. It's forced me to hide from people I adore; lash out like a petulant child when I've felt manipulated by others' emotions; and horde any positive thoughts for fear of letting them go. I've been cutting off bits of me and swallowing them for fear of poisoning others.
The one source I can find for all this is my first memory of experiencing how people validate their emotions: they were writ so large and full and real and overwhelming, that I couldn't bear to administer mine to them. If I felt so bad when it happened to them, how could I do the same to them? So I think I told myself a simple phrase: "I don't care". I couldn't be let down if I didn't care. I couldn't be hurt nor hurt others in turn. I tried to become emotionally moot. Instead I've practiced just as much violence. Just to myself.
I've been aware of this deleterious condition for about a decade. In conversations, I've tried to nullify this by practicing non-judgment for about just as long, indirectly judging them via my own emotional chokes. Though we live in a society that rewards positivity, it is as much a judgment as negativity, acting to subsume and punish and inhibit just as much as its antonym. In a way, I've viewed is with just as much suspicion (and, of course, with much envy). So I've argued against people, not for the sake of arguing, but for the sake of suspending judgment and advocating plurality. I've abhorred peoples' arbitrary codes of judgment - only because people hide their mistakes and sense of guilt behind them. It took me a while to apply this heuristic to myself: I've hidden my own hypocrisy behind my loftily stated mandate... all that time I have been judging myself so very harshly. Cruelly, in fact. Today, I try to begin again.
For the next 5 entries, I will endeavor to extrapolate further on my emotional states; memories; previous attempts at healing; my involvements with people I've loved and respected and failed; a soothing yoghurt salve with a diverse mixture of feeled berries. And I will hopefully have the courage to cite a few more recent conversations and personal involvements that have helped me come to realize this much-longed-after need to emerge.
Thank you for listening to me.
It hasn't been the only statement of that nature that I've received, but perhaps the most colourful. Others have made analogous analogies, and have given sweat, blood and tears on my behalf, but I've remained dumb. And numb. And indignant. Their techniques have varied from honey-coated lozenges of compassion, to blunt-force coercion, to baiting, to ultimatums, to attempts at conducive self-exposure. And I somehow rebuffed them all only to feel even more disconnected.
The shortest version as to why is that I hate myself. I like myself less than the people I like the least. I've hidden this from others for the several reasons. Those of not wanting to be subjugated by their judgment (related to pervasive feelings of inferiority, of fear of abandonment, of fear of loss of control and autonomy). Those of not wanting to influence others' already burgeoning emotional spectra. Those of attempting to hide my pessimism, my paranoia, my hurt. Those of simply not knowing what to do, what the source is, where this ceaseless bounty of pain comes from. Those of ignorance.
So instead it has constricted my movements ever tighter. Ruined or at least stymied the emotional growth of my relationships. Hindered my greater powers of memory, of accomplishment, of self-respect and empowerment. It's forced me to hide from people I adore; lash out like a petulant child when I've felt manipulated by others' emotions; and horde any positive thoughts for fear of letting them go. I've been cutting off bits of me and swallowing them for fear of poisoning others.
The one source I can find for all this is my first memory of experiencing how people validate their emotions: they were writ so large and full and real and overwhelming, that I couldn't bear to administer mine to them. If I felt so bad when it happened to them, how could I do the same to them? So I think I told myself a simple phrase: "I don't care". I couldn't be let down if I didn't care. I couldn't be hurt nor hurt others in turn. I tried to become emotionally moot. Instead I've practiced just as much violence. Just to myself.
I've been aware of this deleterious condition for about a decade. In conversations, I've tried to nullify this by practicing non-judgment for about just as long, indirectly judging them via my own emotional chokes. Though we live in a society that rewards positivity, it is as much a judgment as negativity, acting to subsume and punish and inhibit just as much as its antonym. In a way, I've viewed is with just as much suspicion (and, of course, with much envy). So I've argued against people, not for the sake of arguing, but for the sake of suspending judgment and advocating plurality. I've abhorred peoples' arbitrary codes of judgment - only because people hide their mistakes and sense of guilt behind them. It took me a while to apply this heuristic to myself: I've hidden my own hypocrisy behind my loftily stated mandate... all that time I have been judging myself so very harshly. Cruelly, in fact. Today, I try to begin again.
For the next 5 entries, I will endeavor to extrapolate further on my emotional states; memories; previous attempts at healing; my involvements with people I've loved and respected and failed; a soothing yoghurt salve with a diverse mixture of feeled berries. And I will hopefully have the courage to cite a few more recent conversations and personal involvements that have helped me come to realize this much-longed-after need to emerge.
Thank you for listening to me.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
something sneaker afoot...
I was going to write about who I think would win in a beach volleyball tournament between the Romo-Greek and Hindu gods. Or about how the new Death Starbucks' completion date is worryingly slated for 2012. But then I saw this news-piece on how disembodied feet have been washing up on BC shores. It's a case I've been watching since I first read about it here.
Please help generate some puns with me here people, cause I'm stumped!
Please help generate some puns with me here people, cause I'm stumped!
Monday, June 16, 2008
As I lay flying
6am Sunday, supine under my dual-action ceiling-fan light, it dawned on me that we were deep in conversation. Me and my static ceiling-fan, that is, you weren't around.
What made me dizzy wasn't that I was spinning while it was tranquil, or that it alternated between looking like a giant but genial albino mosquito, or a prototype sheep with rocket-trotters that had lodged its head in the plaster whilst showing off, or even an intergalactating heli-udder come to administer cosmic anti-bodies to brains paranoid of growing hair on the concave surfaces of their skulls,
but the ceiling fan's astonishing capacity for conversation (and, eerily enough, prolonged eye-contact) cut through all my delirious codswallop (such as my 'normalizing' joke about this all just being a trick of the light, to which it responded that the only lights turning tricks were red ones). It suggested that the pursuit of control actually inhibited self-determination, interrupted receptivity to detail, and mugged curiosity by luring it down the gloomy alleyways of preconception. I've long known my empiricist tendencies towards mapping my dendrites first through the material plane, deferring to the candor and impact of others, holding myself beholden. Exhausting these roots/routes/routs quickly, I then took to traipsing through the muck of self-deconstruction (which is pretty silly, because who yet has constructed a self?), and observationally-assisted entropy.
I've had blushes of intersubjective experience. They were events that occurred as bursts of moral and emotional elevation, culminating at an ephemeral arc at the thin-aired crown of the parabola, and then plummeting earthward again. These occasions instilled within me a profound sense of love, but never before toward a dormant but polymorphous air-circulator. At no point that morning did I find myself lonely, only quietly and blissfully alone. And so evidently connected with all the other unfinisheds that I've been afraid of receiving feeling from for so long. The rubble has been cleared, my political candidacy is restored and I can yet live!
If that didn't interest you, then these tidbits will:
- Click the 'video' icon to initiate the AMOEBA. A couple of minutes in, it gets really drippy.
AND
AND
What made me dizzy wasn't that I was spinning while it was tranquil, or that it alternated between looking like a giant but genial albino mosquito, or a prototype sheep with rocket-trotters that had lodged its head in the plaster whilst showing off, or even an intergalactating heli-udder come to administer cosmic anti-bodies to brains paranoid of growing hair on the concave surfaces of their skulls,
but the ceiling fan's astonishing capacity for conversation (and, eerily enough, prolonged eye-contact) cut through all my delirious codswallop (such as my 'normalizing' joke about this all just being a trick of the light, to which it responded that the only lights turning tricks were red ones). It suggested that the pursuit of control actually inhibited self-determination, interrupted receptivity to detail, and mugged curiosity by luring it down the gloomy alleyways of preconception. I've long known my empiricist tendencies towards mapping my dendrites first through the material plane, deferring to the candor and impact of others, holding myself beholden. Exhausting these roots/routes/routs quickly, I then took to traipsing through the muck of self-deconstruction (which is pretty silly, because who yet has constructed a self?), and observationally-assisted entropy.
I've had blushes of intersubjective experience. They were events that occurred as bursts of moral and emotional elevation, culminating at an ephemeral arc at the thin-aired crown of the parabola, and then plummeting earthward again. These occasions instilled within me a profound sense of love, but never before toward a dormant but polymorphous air-circulator. At no point that morning did I find myself lonely, only quietly and blissfully alone. And so evidently connected with all the other unfinisheds that I've been afraid of receiving feeling from for so long. The rubble has been cleared, my political candidacy is restored and I can yet live!
If that didn't interest you, then these tidbits will:
- Click the 'video' icon to initiate the AMOEBA. A couple of minutes in, it gets really drippy.
AND
AND
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
consciousness as brain damage
Constipotatos.
There, a landscape of riffled nerves.
Which is best: to accept the manifest as intended, and bear the weight of responsibility for your felt world? Or proclaim inadvertency, and become the opportunist you secretly suspect everyone else to be?
In trying to heal, I have hurt myself more. I forget that everyone talks about what they remember, and studies show that studies show that people prefer to remember lies.
Sometimes I wish I lied more, especially to myself. Err on the side of treason.
I know so many people who are mediocre only to themselves.
Did you know that an 'acre' is a unit of exertion? The 43,560 sq. feet (or 44,000 - 1%) is as much as one man and one ox can plough in one day. They say.
Did you know that famed futurist Buckminster Fuller was going to kill himself, but then decided to view his life as an experiment as to how much a human can accomplish in one lifetime?
Is it strange to be more afraid of life than death? I'm through absorbing the pain of others. Empathy is shit when it's only working in one direction. That's the willful depreciation of the self, direct and unmitigated.
Here's to physis. Here's to the lemon-oil spray that freshens the mind. Here's to recombinant happiness. Here's to the collapse of identity as the greatest perpetrator of all the world's ills. Here's to remembering, remembering that all is learning and learning is practice and practice is play.
There, a landscape of riffled nerves.
Which is best: to accept the manifest as intended, and bear the weight of responsibility for your felt world? Or proclaim inadvertency, and become the opportunist you secretly suspect everyone else to be?
In trying to heal, I have hurt myself more. I forget that everyone talks about what they remember, and studies show that studies show that people prefer to remember lies.
Sometimes I wish I lied more, especially to myself. Err on the side of treason.
I know so many people who are mediocre only to themselves.
Did you know that an 'acre' is a unit of exertion? The 43,560 sq. feet (or 44,000 - 1%) is as much as one man and one ox can plough in one day. They say.
Did you know that famed futurist Buckminster Fuller was going to kill himself, but then decided to view his life as an experiment as to how much a human can accomplish in one lifetime?
Is it strange to be more afraid of life than death? I'm through absorbing the pain of others. Empathy is shit when it's only working in one direction. That's the willful depreciation of the self, direct and unmitigated.
Here's to physis. Here's to the lemon-oil spray that freshens the mind. Here's to recombinant happiness. Here's to the collapse of identity as the greatest perpetrator of all the world's ills. Here's to remembering, remembering that all is learning and learning is practice and practice is play.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Why I called but hung up when you answered.
"So what's your tattoo of?" You lean over the table, your finger finding a sinuous path through the dinner's debris. Your elbow almost touches the baby-corn that I pushed off my plate over an hour ago. I'd left it there, hoping you might perceive it as erotic, or mildly provocative, or at least very casual of me. Back when freshly lubricated by black bean sauce, it had seemed a tad more tumescent. Now it just looks RE-vocative. Like a rolled up post-it note in a patch of dried beer. Or a giant Lego-man poo.
I gulp as the tip of your index finger grazed my bicep. I've been told that I gulp frequently. And loudly.
"I think I can just make out the edge of it..." you continue. "Is it a wisp of smoke emerging from a bullet hole? Or... hmmm... would one follow it to find Tacitus' refutation of Nero's incendiary solo?" Your finger jumps as you hiccup, catching the edge of my shirt. I gulp again.
"Um," I break eye contact. "Actually, I sneezed in the ashtray when you were in the bathroom. I must've scratched myself, my armpits have been so itchy all day. I think I'm allergic to my new antiperspirant. I hope I don't get hives, my aloe plant died last week. I'm not very good with objects. Physical objects. Er, ones that live."
Armpit hives? Somewhere I'm sure a Happy Elf falls off his Happy Branch. Dead. Or at least hemorrhaging quite badly from the ear.
"So it's kind of like dermography? I wonder what word is written?" I have no idea what dermography is, so I default-laugh and look frantically around for the manifest inspiration of a witty word.
"HA! I think it would say... fortune nookie. COOKIE! It would say fortune cookie."
You smile your crooked smile, a good, winning smile for the tail-end of a dangerous second date. Your arm is still stretched across the table, playing with my cuff.
"That's a far cuff for you!" I give you what I think to be the flirtatious frown of admonishment. Your smile falters slightly.
"What...?"
"Oh, no, I didn't mean. Er... you know, I am thinking of getting a tattoo though. Yeah. A big one of the life-cycle of the lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dentriticum. Breeds in the digestive tracts of grazing ungulates, the eggs of which are eaten from the dung by slugs, which then cough them up in these slime-plaques which are subsequently consumed by ants. The eggs pupate and form these cysts in the heads of the ants and then control their brains, making them climb grass-stalks so that they complete the loop by getting eaten again by cattle."
I pause.
"Now that I think about it, that might actually be the single most repulsive idea for a tattoo that I've ever heard. I think I'd rather get a portrait of Dick Cheney water sliding naked. Or one of that baby corn by your elbow there. With syphilis."
You retrieve your hand so quickly, you clink your bracelet against a bottle, thankfully disguising my latest gulp.
"Nakedly," you correct me. "I think I'm going to take my fortune cookie with me, if that's OK with you? And I'll call a cab. It's only a $30 ride from here........"
And it is THIS line of deleterious imaginative projection of how our second date will go which prevents me from mustering up the courage to ask you out again. I wish I could instead pretend that you are an arsonist or that I find your elbows too flabby.
Actually, we didn't even have a first date. I thought all this in between glances at you in the candy aisle at Blockbuster.
It's why I didn't smile back. Sorry.
I gulp as the tip of your index finger grazed my bicep. I've been told that I gulp frequently. And loudly.
"I think I can just make out the edge of it..." you continue. "Is it a wisp of smoke emerging from a bullet hole? Or... hmmm... would one follow it to find Tacitus' refutation of Nero's incendiary solo?" Your finger jumps as you hiccup, catching the edge of my shirt. I gulp again.
"Um," I break eye contact. "Actually, I sneezed in the ashtray when you were in the bathroom. I must've scratched myself, my armpits have been so itchy all day. I think I'm allergic to my new antiperspirant. I hope I don't get hives, my aloe plant died last week. I'm not very good with objects. Physical objects. Er, ones that live."
Armpit hives? Somewhere I'm sure a Happy Elf falls off his Happy Branch. Dead. Or at least hemorrhaging quite badly from the ear.
"So it's kind of like dermography? I wonder what word is written?" I have no idea what dermography is, so I default-laugh and look frantically around for the manifest inspiration of a witty word.
"HA! I think it would say... fortune nookie. COOKIE! It would say fortune cookie."
You smile your crooked smile, a good, winning smile for the tail-end of a dangerous second date. Your arm is still stretched across the table, playing with my cuff.
"That's a far cuff for you!" I give you what I think to be the flirtatious frown of admonishment. Your smile falters slightly.
"What...?"
"Oh, no, I didn't mean. Er... you know, I am thinking of getting a tattoo though. Yeah. A big one of the life-cycle of the lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dentriticum. Breeds in the digestive tracts of grazing ungulates, the eggs of which are eaten from the dung by slugs, which then cough them up in these slime-plaques which are subsequently consumed by ants. The eggs pupate and form these cysts in the heads of the ants and then control their brains, making them climb grass-stalks so that they complete the loop by getting eaten again by cattle."
I pause.
"Now that I think about it, that might actually be the single most repulsive idea for a tattoo that I've ever heard. I think I'd rather get a portrait of Dick Cheney water sliding naked. Or one of that baby corn by your elbow there. With syphilis."
You retrieve your hand so quickly, you clink your bracelet against a bottle, thankfully disguising my latest gulp.
"Nakedly," you correct me. "I think I'm going to take my fortune cookie with me, if that's OK with you? And I'll call a cab. It's only a $30 ride from here........"
And it is THIS line of deleterious imaginative projection of how our second date will go which prevents me from mustering up the courage to ask you out again. I wish I could instead pretend that you are an arsonist or that I find your elbows too flabby.
Actually, we didn't even have a first date. I thought all this in between glances at you in the candy aisle at Blockbuster.
It's why I didn't smile back. Sorry.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Hickeys on the Moon
3 totally unfounded theories:
1) Pedestrians that walk on the right side of the street perceive themselves to have enhanced right-of-way compared to those walking on the left side.
2) Increasing oil prices (and subsequent food prices) will cause overweight people to be perceived as sexy again (or would that be 'overweight people to be perceived as the body-type ideal'?)
3) Since the muscles controlling the tautness of the eardrums relax when presented with persistent loudness, the aural perils found at a raucous concert or such like event occur only when someone tries to speak to you, when you are most likely to willfully tense the eardrum in order to hear what they say. Peril!
1) Pedestrians that walk on the right side of the street perceive themselves to have enhanced right-of-way compared to those walking on the left side.
2) Increasing oil prices (and subsequent food prices) will cause overweight people to be perceived as sexy again (or would that be 'overweight people to be perceived as the body-type ideal'?)
3) Since the muscles controlling the tautness of the eardrums relax when presented with persistent loudness, the aural perils found at a raucous concert or such like event occur only when someone tries to speak to you, when you are most likely to willfully tense the eardrum in order to hear what they say. Peril!
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
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