Four and a half seasons after Australia — was it really such a short time ago? — I still drift into the inorganic and organic fusion of mother earth comfort. Surrounded by meaningless artifacts from a dead civilization, I drop my blood into the clear water of this music. AIR: Talkie Walkie. AIR: Premiers Symptomes. AIR — it's so elemental. Visions of the future should never be without it. Visions of the present can always benefit from it. And who needs visions of the past? 气. 真棒.
我很喜这种音乐. (I'm fairly certain that's correct.)
He will someday retire to the lounge with his guests. He will drink exotic teas and share his wisdom while a European woman in full Japanese dress expertly plays the harpsichord. A tall man with close-cropped hair in a tweed suit plays stand-up bass alongside. And maybe a drummer could join. Technology remains contingent while style and emotion remain eternal.
Keep plucking those zither strings, third man. Ya dig?
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Mental Stimulation; Food; Sex; Money
The "last man," a man bereft of creativity — by outward appearances soulless. An animal, doing what it can to survive, doing what it must to stay warm and, by any stretch, sane. A man without any grander purpose, without any drive to transcend his situation.
And so far, technology has offered no such transcendance. A cyborg living in virtual reality with access to millions of information and communication sources would be, and is, just as likely to become a "last man."
Than again, sometime's you're last and sometimes you're first. Cringer and Battlecat — we all shift and shiver between extremes. Encumbered by the titan of fatigue and insecurity, bearing his massive foot on your back, it's difficult to look up from the floor, from the stone and lichen that provide your daily meal and entertainment.
But is the titan really there, or have you just convinced yourself of his existence?
It's so refreshing to feel the breeze on the back of your neck and look at the stars creeping through the sun's fading curtain of light. But there's no such thing as a sensitive statue. Any being that's tasted its own blood should do more than wonder why the taste is pleasant.
Life is fantasy and more. Paracosm is omnicosm. There is only one truth, but that truth is liberty.
Whatever that means. I'll repeat myself only once: enjoy the stars while you can, because soon they'll all just be smoking bulletholes.
And so far, technology has offered no such transcendance. A cyborg living in virtual reality with access to millions of information and communication sources would be, and is, just as likely to become a "last man."
Than again, sometime's you're last and sometimes you're first. Cringer and Battlecat — we all shift and shiver between extremes. Encumbered by the titan of fatigue and insecurity, bearing his massive foot on your back, it's difficult to look up from the floor, from the stone and lichen that provide your daily meal and entertainment.
But is the titan really there, or have you just convinced yourself of his existence?
It's so refreshing to feel the breeze on the back of your neck and look at the stars creeping through the sun's fading curtain of light. But there's no such thing as a sensitive statue. Any being that's tasted its own blood should do more than wonder why the taste is pleasant.
Life is fantasy and more. Paracosm is omnicosm. There is only one truth, but that truth is liberty.
Whatever that means. I'll repeat myself only once: enjoy the stars while you can, because soon they'll all just be smoking bulletholes.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Tears From the Mind's Eye
Titles are such a bother. I usually title my posts with things I might use as titles later, for sci-fi or ghost stories, or for pieces of abstract art.
For example, "Tears From the Mind's Eye" could be used to title a story about a futuristic psychoanalysis method. Or it could title a trisected stone head with turquoise-dyed water flowing constantly through labyrinthine fissures.
I often wonder if I should have taken more art classes in college. I only took one — computer graphic design — and I've already forgotten how to give a disembodied head mechanical spider legs in Photoshop. Lately, I've taken pencil to notebook over and over without producing much of a result, too anxious about failing, even when only drawing for myself.
I used to draw all the time, and not just during Algebra I, but during almost every part of the day. I created paracosm after paracosm with little blue lines interrupting reality. I manufactured superheroes, monsters and pirates with personality disorders. I loved comic strips with sarcastic dinosaurs, misanthropic children, and booze-addicted cavemen. Yes, I once made up a character named "Drunky the Caveman."
I drew a lot of my inspiration from Bill Watterson. I remember vividly a notebook-filling comic strip I drew that involved my biggest character, Snyder (the misanthropic child), meeting up with Calvin and Hobbes. After being sucked into an interdimensional Christmas tree, they all went on a grand adventure that ended with them killing Satan. At least, I think that's how it happened. Great fun, that.
But now my creativity seems hermetically sealed, imprisoned in constant, infuriating fantasies that my ridiculous fear of failure won't set free. So many ideas engulfed in anxiety, so many dreams deferred. What can I do to cut this cerebral umbilical chord?
What a bizarre metaphor.
For example, "Tears From the Mind's Eye" could be used to title a story about a futuristic psychoanalysis method. Or it could title a trisected stone head with turquoise-dyed water flowing constantly through labyrinthine fissures.
I often wonder if I should have taken more art classes in college. I only took one — computer graphic design — and I've already forgotten how to give a disembodied head mechanical spider legs in Photoshop. Lately, I've taken pencil to notebook over and over without producing much of a result, too anxious about failing, even when only drawing for myself.
I used to draw all the time, and not just during Algebra I, but during almost every part of the day. I created paracosm after paracosm with little blue lines interrupting reality. I manufactured superheroes, monsters and pirates with personality disorders. I loved comic strips with sarcastic dinosaurs, misanthropic children, and booze-addicted cavemen. Yes, I once made up a character named "Drunky the Caveman."
I drew a lot of my inspiration from Bill Watterson. I remember vividly a notebook-filling comic strip I drew that involved my biggest character, Snyder (the misanthropic child), meeting up with Calvin and Hobbes. After being sucked into an interdimensional Christmas tree, they all went on a grand adventure that ended with them killing Satan. At least, I think that's how it happened. Great fun, that.
But now my creativity seems hermetically sealed, imprisoned in constant, infuriating fantasies that my ridiculous fear of failure won't set free. So many ideas engulfed in anxiety, so many dreams deferred. What can I do to cut this cerebral umbilical chord?
What a bizarre metaphor.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Beige Death
I know I’ve promised to never talk about myself, but promises and prose poetry are like llamas and ‘Nilla wafers -- they only have meaning in certain contexts, and they are almost totally unrelated.
I’ve been learning a new language, and I know that some of you who know me are thinking “Oh yes, we know you’re learning Mandarin. Blah blah blah. You think you’re so smart.” But no! That delightful yet horrifyingly difficult language is not what I’m talking about!
I’m learning the language of fear, and I’m learning it involuntarily.
Because I’ve learned that my main (at least overt) character flaw is that I hesitate in everything I do. I’m so afraid of failure that I’ve spent my life almost doing a lot of things, but never actually doing them. In recent years, I’ve become more adept at saying “yes,” but dissatisfaction remains.
And experiencing my own fear does not even account for my seemingly extrasensory education in the fear language. In every person I meet, every day, it seems that I can see their fear, then hear it -- though I must say I hope I never learn to smell it.
I’ve been noticing more and more the twitching of their eyes, the fiddling of their fingers, and the increasing propensity to stumble over words. Or in the silence and the sidelong glances that fail to be sufficiently furtive. I feel the fear of certain individuals as if it were crackling on my skin like so many small jolts of static electricity. In some encounters, the feeling is so strong that I feel I may resort to telekinetically imploding myself.
Then again, some encounters remain unbearably pleasant. Like Monday night when I helped a Chinese girl move a piece of Dumpster-retrieved furniture up to her apartment door. It involved a lot of tiny circumstances of limited embarassment, but those circumstances of shared fear and ultimate vindication of said fear resulted in us becoming quite open with each other. We laughed and joked a lot that night, though I could still see in her a lot of not-so-expertly-veiled insecurity. I’m sure she could see plenty of the same in me.
Thanks for the break, Ivy. I still need to know your Chinese name.
My brain should be whipping about in a centrifuge of dynamism, but I still have plenty of fear feeding me an overdose of ginger pills. Things will change, baby. Oh they shall.
I’ve been learning a new language, and I know that some of you who know me are thinking “Oh yes, we know you’re learning Mandarin. Blah blah blah. You think you’re so smart.” But no! That delightful yet horrifyingly difficult language is not what I’m talking about!
I’m learning the language of fear, and I’m learning it involuntarily.
Because I’ve learned that my main (at least overt) character flaw is that I hesitate in everything I do. I’m so afraid of failure that I’ve spent my life almost doing a lot of things, but never actually doing them. In recent years, I’ve become more adept at saying “yes,” but dissatisfaction remains.
And experiencing my own fear does not even account for my seemingly extrasensory education in the fear language. In every person I meet, every day, it seems that I can see their fear, then hear it -- though I must say I hope I never learn to smell it.
I’ve been noticing more and more the twitching of their eyes, the fiddling of their fingers, and the increasing propensity to stumble over words. Or in the silence and the sidelong glances that fail to be sufficiently furtive. I feel the fear of certain individuals as if it were crackling on my skin like so many small jolts of static electricity. In some encounters, the feeling is so strong that I feel I may resort to telekinetically imploding myself.
Then again, some encounters remain unbearably pleasant. Like Monday night when I helped a Chinese girl move a piece of Dumpster-retrieved furniture up to her apartment door. It involved a lot of tiny circumstances of limited embarassment, but those circumstances of shared fear and ultimate vindication of said fear resulted in us becoming quite open with each other. We laughed and joked a lot that night, though I could still see in her a lot of not-so-expertly-veiled insecurity. I’m sure she could see plenty of the same in me.
Thanks for the break, Ivy. I still need to know your Chinese name.
My brain should be whipping about in a centrifuge of dynamism, but I still have plenty of fear feeding me an overdose of ginger pills. Things will change, baby. Oh they shall.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
The next time you get the feeling you should indulge yourself in the prejudices of academia, take a pill.
Some of us chickens go through waves of obsession from week to week or day to day. This fowl often obsesses over science, mainly because he wants to fly the coop so badly. But in the political avenues of science -- as in the political avenues of mostly anything -- you'll find the egocentrism and megalomania of a hundred thousand mega-Skeletors per second, locked away in stilted journal articles that provide gaps between actual reports of findings. Or smashed into the rhetoric of quasi-religious debaters as they unyieldingly and unintelligently attack their opposition through narrow doorways of groundless accusation and generalization.
So many overused words in there. I apologize.
I saw a book at the bookstore called something like "The Best Unrequired Reading of (insert year)," a part of the "Best American Whatever" series of anthologies, and it was edited by Dave Eggers of "What is the What?" fame. Leafing through, I found answers to a question posed to scientists: "What are your favorite things that you believe in, but cannot prove?"
One astrophysicist mentioned his belief that time does not exist. Another man mentioned his belief that, as opposed to the doctrine of "original sin" and Freud's claims, human beings are not, at their base nature, "rotten to the core."
Reading this, and thinking about Russell's Teapot (because a friend reminded me of it recently), I realized that plenty examples of simultaneously unfalsifiable and unverifiable claims exist in this world. For example, what evidence is there that stealing ideas from another person is bad? Sure, it may be bad for that person, but it's good for me! What's in it for me to be fair, especially if I'm clever enough to never be caught?
Also, what's in it for me to risk my life to save another person? "Right" and "wrong" are unprovable conditions placed by moral dogmatists to reinforce that joke we call positive law, and it cannot be verified that I would benefit from such an action, or especially that being humble about such an action would be beneficial to me. Anyway, what if no one's around to see me? What if I end up hurt?
Mr. Autrey saved that man on the subway tracks because he felt it was the right thing to do. He didn't take time to make a cost-benefit analysis. He had so much faith in what he was doing that he even did it in front of his two young daughters. If he had died doing it, his daughters would have experienced the whole thing first hand. Read about it.
"Faith" has become such an ugly word to scientists who've wrapped themselves in prejudice. People were originally uncomfortable around Einstein's special relativity theory, because no one likes to be told that they can't trust their senses. And it goes further than that -- to a certain point, you can't trust anything. You can't even trust your precious mathematics, or your precious rules of language, your precious symbols. You can't trust your ideals of fairness or justice.
But the aforementioned astrophysicist (not Einstein; earlier) mentioned that he couldn't prove that time did not exist, but he had faith that he was going to get there. He saw a future of understanding, and isn't that the core of science? Or even the core of the whole human experience?
Without faith, or dreams, there are no hypotheses or grand goals in discovery and exploration.
So lighten up!
Some of us chickens go through waves of obsession from week to week or day to day. This fowl often obsesses over science, mainly because he wants to fly the coop so badly. But in the political avenues of science -- as in the political avenues of mostly anything -- you'll find the egocentrism and megalomania of a hundred thousand mega-Skeletors per second, locked away in stilted journal articles that provide gaps between actual reports of findings. Or smashed into the rhetoric of quasi-religious debaters as they unyieldingly and unintelligently attack their opposition through narrow doorways of groundless accusation and generalization.
So many overused words in there. I apologize.
I saw a book at the bookstore called something like "The Best Unrequired Reading of (insert year)," a part of the "Best American Whatever" series of anthologies, and it was edited by Dave Eggers of "What is the What?" fame. Leafing through, I found answers to a question posed to scientists: "What are your favorite things that you believe in, but cannot prove?"
One astrophysicist mentioned his belief that time does not exist. Another man mentioned his belief that, as opposed to the doctrine of "original sin" and Freud's claims, human beings are not, at their base nature, "rotten to the core."
Reading this, and thinking about Russell's Teapot (because a friend reminded me of it recently), I realized that plenty examples of simultaneously unfalsifiable and unverifiable claims exist in this world. For example, what evidence is there that stealing ideas from another person is bad? Sure, it may be bad for that person, but it's good for me! What's in it for me to be fair, especially if I'm clever enough to never be caught?
Also, what's in it for me to risk my life to save another person? "Right" and "wrong" are unprovable conditions placed by moral dogmatists to reinforce that joke we call positive law, and it cannot be verified that I would benefit from such an action, or especially that being humble about such an action would be beneficial to me. Anyway, what if no one's around to see me? What if I end up hurt?
Mr. Autrey saved that man on the subway tracks because he felt it was the right thing to do. He didn't take time to make a cost-benefit analysis. He had so much faith in what he was doing that he even did it in front of his two young daughters. If he had died doing it, his daughters would have experienced the whole thing first hand. Read about it.
"Faith" has become such an ugly word to scientists who've wrapped themselves in prejudice. People were originally uncomfortable around Einstein's special relativity theory, because no one likes to be told that they can't trust their senses. And it goes further than that -- to a certain point, you can't trust anything. You can't even trust your precious mathematics, or your precious rules of language, your precious symbols. You can't trust your ideals of fairness or justice.
But the aforementioned astrophysicist (not Einstein; earlier) mentioned that he couldn't prove that time did not exist, but he had faith that he was going to get there. He saw a future of understanding, and isn't that the core of science? Or even the core of the whole human experience?
Without faith, or dreams, there are no hypotheses or grand goals in discovery and exploration.
So lighten up!
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Le soleil est pres de moi
It's finally January, and I gladly embrace the advent of the thick windscreen frost. This is only the second time it's come in the past 30 days. How tragic and meaningless this lower-temperate foothill/flatland region is to me.
Well, not tragic. That's a stupid thing to say. I have a life sans obstacles. My only real obstacle is myself. And though the cheery bulbs and tinsel strings of Christmastime are casually drifting away, and the trees, lights, and tacky inflatable snowmen are being taken down, I feel no justifiable despair. My longing for dynamism outweighs all my television-bred sentimentality, even when coming into this so-called "new year." I saw no parades and participated in no countdown. I just played at step aerobics to unintelligent dance music with other house-dwelling chunks of skin-wrapped goo. At the time, and even now, I still wonder: Is Dance Dance Revolution really all that good for you?
But despite the wars, rumors of wars, and warring movie sequels that will surely come about in 2007, my top desire remains. I must go to Zhongguo. I want to go now, but I can't. Why must I need money? Why can't I become a cloud of energy, floating where I wish? Or why can't lightning strike me and just make me disappear, like that Powder guy?
And now that I've reminded myself of Powder, the spirit of loathing has sprung forth, and I must quit writing for a time.
Well, not tragic. That's a stupid thing to say. I have a life sans obstacles. My only real obstacle is myself. And though the cheery bulbs and tinsel strings of Christmastime are casually drifting away, and the trees, lights, and tacky inflatable snowmen are being taken down, I feel no justifiable despair. My longing for dynamism outweighs all my television-bred sentimentality, even when coming into this so-called "new year." I saw no parades and participated in no countdown. I just played at step aerobics to unintelligent dance music with other house-dwelling chunks of skin-wrapped goo. At the time, and even now, I still wonder: Is Dance Dance Revolution really all that good for you?
But despite the wars, rumors of wars, and warring movie sequels that will surely come about in 2007, my top desire remains. I must go to Zhongguo. I want to go now, but I can't. Why must I need money? Why can't I become a cloud of energy, floating where I wish? Or why can't lightning strike me and just make me disappear, like that Powder guy?
And now that I've reminded myself of Powder, the spirit of loathing has sprung forth, and I must quit writing for a time.
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