http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence

"Colours there seem rarefied, detached from all substance, diffracted into the air, floating on the surface of things. Hence the spectral, ghostly, and at the same time veiled, translucent, calm, and subtle impression made by these landscapes. And the mirage effect- a temporal mirage too- which comes near to total illusion. The rocks, sands, crystals, and cacti are eternal, but they are also ephemeral, unreal, and detached from their substance. The vegetation is minimal, but indestructible, and each new spring sees a miracle of bloom. By contrast, light itself has substance here. Floating like a powder on the air, it gives all shades of colour that pastel nuance that seems the very image of disincarnation, of the separation of the body from the spirit. In this sense, one may speak of the abstraction of the desert, of a deliverance from the organic, a deliverance that is beyond the body's abject passage into carnal inexistence, into that dry, luminous phase of death in which the corruption of the body reaches completion. The desert is beyond this accursed phase of decomposition, this humid phase of the body, this organic phase of nature." -Jean Baudrillard, America, p. 71.
We will evolve ourselves into a new state in the infinite vacuum of dazzlingly bright light and heat. Big Bend National Park was visited by astronauts in preparation for the geography of the moon.

Total disclosure of the facts!

It's very strange writing this blog I know only one person reads, because I end up writing letters to them without addressing them as such, like printing one copy of a book to lend to a friend. Here's that book, and perhaps someone else will stumble onto it later and say, jeez what a rare book, I'll go sell it on eBay or just read it. I've decided to write a full account to bore the absolute shit out of anyone who reads it, but it's as comprehensive on 'my side' as it gets and I've written it as entertainingly as I can, for a lengthy story reminiscent of Grandpa's best.
Anyway:
The last few months have been emotionally some of the stranger ones of my adult life. Maybe I'll explain in depth without presupposing that this is some cry for love, because not a few minutes ago I think it would have been that. I would have written it full of pathos, and you would have said, boy, too bad things didn't work out for this lovable but troubled young man. I feel that there's an element of that which I can't avoid, but I promise to keep it to a minimum.
I had a crush on her, a benign sort of 'she's cute and I bet she's smart because of the way she dresses and pays attention intently in class and has a certain engaged look in her eye', not anything transcendent, but certainly worth finding out if she was single since I was lonely and hoping that a new academic life would lead to some secret cache of women with big brains. The planet of the brain women. As the semester got going, I began to wonder, where are these women who are interested in academia and culture and understand that my taste culture isn't evidence of some severe neurological defect and are actually interested in it in the same detached intellectualizing way that I am, and who also coincidentally like really squirrelly little dudes with stupid tattoos (of whose rapidly swelling ranks I am one). Where? And of course this led to conjecture about the girl who would say nothing in class but it was made mention that she wrote a really good paper for my professor.
This made me think, since I not only respected my professor academically but she seemed really rad and to be the kind of woman who maybe one day I'd live in a house somewhere near Oakland with and we'd sit drinking tea and reading incredibly dense texts like they were nothing when it rained and have a garden and be pretty close to self-sufficient and be living the radical politics we both honed to a razor's edge in college. And thus, a sort of bizarre inner fantasy life sprung up almost full formed. We would not have children (we would adopt, since the planet can only support maybe one billion people and we were riding for a fall with this seven billion shit), we would have a killer room lined with bookshelves, blah blah blah blah.
Of course, concurrently with the beginning of this fantasy, I had contrived a sort of silly little line to send to her on myspace just to pique her interest in becoming friends for a start, myspace because I was massively chickenshit at this point. I had lived in Chicago for a few months now and had precious few friends. I was getting to be somewhat inbent and fearful that any human interaction would lead to painful rejection: "Hey I see you are in this class too." "What are you, some kind of faggot?" All told, I was sort of regressing to an elementary school level, when I was kind of a mess all the time because of precisely this vicious circle, not helped by my wordiness, irrational clinging to sweatpants as normal dress, and desperate need to be accepted as a class clown. So a girl who I was not just interested in fucking and toying with her body (and that interest as a distinguishing factor was rapidly losing the overwhelming appeal of lusty puberty), combined with general loneliness and a feeling that it was time to drop the casual sex I'd been settling for in all my previous relationships to date, created kind of a perfect storm.
One reason I was unable to commit to any of my prior relationships was in fact fallout from the painful experience of telling Laura Frizell I loved her in the fourth grade and being (in retrospect understandably) rejected in a supremely harsh way. I was so wary about the idea of love that even commitment seemed like giving up a part of yourself for review (it is), and since that had ended so badly last time, I just opted out in favor of intermittent shackings-up. Not to say that these were frequent.
I digress. Anyway, there was this girl who I was starting to get these couple-fantasies about even before I knew her (not coupling like sex, although those certainly happened a few times, lets be honest, but honest to god reading in bed together, cooking together fantasies), and as I got to know her, because my social skills weren't yet so ingrown that I drove her away, I found that she was really pretty close to what I was imagining. Smart, interested in art with the right aesthetics, understood that my subcultural taste was just that, taste. I mean, she wasn't exactly what I had imagined, which is good because I think the woman I created in my fantasy mind was a little too mature and sophisticated for me, and would have totally emasculated me because that fantasy was a just a little too good and I would have felt stupid and inadequate. But returning to the real object of my desires, she was very good, and I felt good about even seeing her ever at all, but I was starting to have a real problem with what an elementary school gifted program might call a "rich inner life" and what a clinical psychologist might call "extensive delusions". Because she actually had a life, she was about a hundred times busier than I was, and I would have these fantasies of actually having an intellectual and spiritual equal as a partner, and I was just a new friend to her.
I am not a fool. But I have certainly got a lengthy foolish streak, which shows almost the whole length of itself shortly. I had a party at my house, and there were a decent number of friends there, and I invited her, "and anyone else you want to bring." This included a few people who were tagging along for the night and... her boyfriend, which was devastating. I conducted myself admirably, a spirit of fun at the party, one might say. I always do, pretty much no matter what. But inside, I was frantically trying to decipher what I should do. The day after, my "rich inner life" was consumed with images of her and the boyfriend, the stand-offish, wary, bepony-tailed boyfriend, together in loving harmony, then contrasting images of the same couple, him sullenly watching TV and her biting her nails and sitting in the same head-propped on hand-propped on elbow on knee or desk posture I'd thought was cute but possibly a nervous habit. I was nowhere to be seen in my own fantasy life. I resented him immensely. His manner had been matter of fact, as if, of course! I'm with her! Now that I'm in recovery from this bizarre love story, how else could he have been?
Giving up was not an option. I felt about her more strongly, and more emotionally, than any woman since before I even hit puberty. I contrived to tell her, make an impassioned (yet of course reasonable) plea, and hope for the best- a far stretch, now that I think back on it. But this I did, after a night out drinking heavily with her and a few others. I was surprised at my relative success, yet overall I was a failure. She had broken up with him briefly and only recently had gotten back together with him, yet had a crush on me as well. I wondered the depth of the crush and went home to think. One of the prime lessons I gleaned from this period was a Hitchcockesque understanding of anticipation and suspense as a more painful sensation than the resolution of said suspense, no matter how that resolution ends up. There was drama via the internet, which left so much nuance out of the conversation I felt like I was dealing with a robot trying to predict the outcome. I had several signs that the conflict could resolve in my favor and my "rich inner life" would be realized. Ultimately, she decided to break up with him! Success! Sort of! I felt shitty for encouraging a break up and felt bad for the guy, but it was a step in my direction, and I thought my capacity for fantasy deserved a break.
This meant she was now free to pursue whatever she wished, which it was subtly implied meant a slow gravitation toward me. However, the period of conflict had led me to sort of divest myself so as not to be utterly crushed by the 'inevitable' rejection, and I was beginning to realize what a god-damn nut I was for not only having the lengthy fantasies about couplehood but acting on it, breaking up a fully functional relationship to pursue a dream. The dream being something which when I last fully indulged it I was ground beneath the boot of a callous fourth grade popular girl. The casual sex method of avoiding real intimacy suddenly seemed like a wise model for a relationship, since it avoided essentially constructing your partner in your mind, you understand that after you go eat you might watch a movie and have sex and that's all it is, not some shared life of the mind and possibly really truly erotic sex because you connect on a deeper level than boy-parts/girl-parts. No, that was such a cinematized understanding of sex that it was just not possible, maybe I've made up who this girl is and if we get together there will be more hollow conversation followed by unadventurous rutting in front of a movie like with the other girls so why spare the grief? I was kind of checked out in my mind at this point, and I had met this other girl, precisely the same kind of casual shared-interest justification of body-pleasure as all prior engagements, and I just couldn't pursue it. I was exhausted. The struggle to get the idea of couplehood even on the table for both of us had worn me out, and I'd have to tiptoe and be careful about what I said about her pony-tailed ex for at least half a year, someone who at the time was one of the simplest objects of dislike I'd ever had, especially for a cruel comment he made to me as he horned in on the internet discourse, confirming all my fantasies about his failure as a lover and so on and so forth. I also was about to leave for almost six weeks, six weeks being a geological epoch in 'new love time', and it would have possibly backfired almost entirely to get together and then leave her with the same group who knew her with her ex.
And so I took up a casual thing with this other girl, who was sweet and willing and even shared the taste culture I was in with me. My taste culture is of course a traditionally masculine space and I didn't realize at this point that I didn't necessarily want 'one of the guys' to shack up with me and talk dirty to me at shows when I'm just trying to get sweaty and homoerotic and dumb with other males aged eighteen to thirty-five, as the demographic information would put it. And she quickly got kind of clingy and I began realizing she just didn't have enough going for her mentally to hold my interest and I went through the same process in divesting myself from her that I have gone through with every girl I have ever had sex with who did not hold my interest. I stopped talking to her and made sure to frame every talk about 'us' as just a casual thing, I didn't want anything too serious now, blah blah blah. There's another incident on New Years eve involving an even more casual and even less engaging girl (read:actually pretty dumb) who pounced on me when I was shamefully blackout drunk. This was at sort of the depth of my nihilistic pro-casual sex misogynistic/conquest mentality I had as a reaction to the exhausting ordeal of mental effort in divesting myself from my rich fantasy life. I was smoking a lot of pot and was with my old group of significantly less cerebral friends, and it seemed OK to do this horrible debauched "if you know I'm a jerk and you go ahead anyway, it's fine with me" thing. Really, in terms of the knuckledragger perspective, it's been a banner year for female attention, even if its in the shittiest way possible.
So I got back to Chicago, and felt the depth of the winter pressing in on me and didn't want to go out much and just felt shitty, and didn't want to see casual hesher girl, and just stayed in being a lazy hateful misanthrope, and I hated my roommates and even myself some. My fantasy life had been rebuked and I wasn't about to let it happen again, and I was just some haggard asshole who managed to get laid with girls he didn't respect. This was a caustic state of mind, and, dear reader, you should be able to tell that's not how I end up at the date of this writing.
I started going to class again for the spring semester, and she was there, the girl who inhabited a pretty large space in the "rich inner life" I was denying. I felt like things were fairly settled between us but every once in a while, I'd feel this intense forlornness for what could have been. I was relatively certain she was back together with the pony-tail (which is how I referred to him during the period of my deepest contempt), just due to the fact that she loved him and he loved her and it seemed natural. I had sort of been cleansed of my envy and hate for him and my "rich inner life" with her wasn't really happening anymore. But, I found myself just thinking about little things, like kissing her on the cheek or holding hands, really basic 'new love shit'. I also started to realize that she was developing her mind in really dynamite ways. So the crush returned, because I realized I really did like her, just for who I knew her to be, not as the fantasy intellectual babe of my imagination. This part's a lot more straightforward and, I think, more sane. It's also a lot more like the cry for love I promised I'd avoid at the beginning but bear with me. I'll be quick since this is getting lengthy.
So we start getting together with a group of other people whose minds I dig, and we're talking and of course it's fun, so we get booze. And like almost immediately, I get drunk and stupid. I don't get horny when I get drunk, I mean any more than when I'm sober, but I do feel sometimes like booze is a license, which I know it's not, but that's just a problem I have. And so we get together and have what I think is a really tender makeout/spoon thing which we both say we really regret and I do in a way but it gets me thinking, and I start thinking that this is what it is to develop love.
So almost immediately, the crazy sets in and I start bugging her to hang out even though it's obviously a ploy to develop a vocabulary of tenderness, and look her in her eyes, and be subtly complimentary and impress her with my mind and maybe get her to start thinking about it. And she knows. She wants none of it and avoids me and avoids me and I start understanding that she knows and wants no part of it but it sounds so good I can't avoid trying and thinking about it almost all the time, and finally I make some little hint intending to draw her out, and she says, in short: No way, I love my boyfriend, don't need this right now, friends can share a life of the mind and be intimate without sex.
It hurts, but this time I had this safety net of already having thought through the rejection thing, which caused me to develop this exhaustion neurosis about it and fail to follow through on the one real chance I think I got, and I know that was the only real chance, and I accept it. I think I still love her, but in a way that means I have to respect her enough not to be sexual if she doesn't want to. Sex was never a dominant enough part of it that the idea of really close friends who share their minds together is unappealing. So that's where we stand. Intellectual equals.
And that brings us up to the present day. I feel much better.

Unified Blinding Field

I wrote this a few years ago so be nice:

I walked out of the house. The leaves were still on the trees but they were covered with a thin layer of snow, undisturbed by wind or human hands. The pavement in front of the house was dusted similarly, a thinly visible series of footprints now looking like natural formations. Crystals winked at me and the smell of a distant wind registered in my brain. I left, stars twinkling at me from below more than above in the dim, unreal light of the streetlamp. The steady crunch of snow underfoot kept me company, occupying the spaces my mind didn’t care to fill. I was still half asleep. I had pulled on a pair of white sweatpants and my shoes and put on my heaviest coat and left, not bothering to check the clock. I was jolted out of bed by some half-remembered crazy idea which came to my mind, lucid, undimmed by sleep, even as I dreamed another dream. It muscled into the dream I was having, mixing with it as a spoon disturbs a swirl of cream in coffee. The dream recoiled and the idea was there, surrounded by the haze of cast off sleep and I was awake. I got out of bed as if I was getting ready for another day out of habit, the idea there, urgent, but too unintelligible to feel yet. I didn’t know what it meant yet. I put on my clothes.

My legs propelled me unconsciously through the night. I had some vague sense of my destination as not a place but as the deciphered meaning of my thought, which had no form yet and no shape but was there nonetheless. It gave me a gentle urgency, a constant push which never entered my conscious mind. It was subtle and insidious. My feet crushed the yielding snow like machines I didn’t know and I wondered where I was. After a while, I looked up from the constant rhythm of foot and snow and my feet stopped. I was at an intersection.

A car idled at a green light. It was a white, old model beater, one of the thousands of generic beaten up old cars I’d seen over the years. It blended into the scenery. The only movement was the exhaust swirling in the light wind, curled plumes spinning themselves into nothing. The night was still and I couldn’t hear the car from where I was standing. I breathed, staring at it. It was sitting right there, and I didn’t know what to say about it or think about it- it was neutral, held no value and no meaning to my clear mind. I was standing in the middle of the street, right in front of the car, and I looked down at my feet as if to ask what to do next. No sound. I looked up at the car. No sound. The white field of the car and the empty, dead intersection was reaching out a tentacle, a white smoking hand, faster than I could react. No sound at all. The idea curled in my head and dissipated the way the exhaust had and the space behind my eyes suddenly felt empty. I felt air rushing around me and then I could see no more. Black. The night stars probably twinkled down from their stretched black sheet and the snow-stars twinkled back up. I lay there, with a sudden awareness of things outside of the night and the secret machinations of my mind. Sound came back, a hiss too low to hear except for the fact that I had been hearing nothing, then everything. All the sounds I could conceive of, rumbling and screeching, closed like a huge falling cloth onto my ears, but I lay still. My body tingled and smoked and howled and an electric feeling, but more than that, an energy feeling, jazzed me up and made me draw my breath. My whole body breathed fire and spat electricity out into a surrounding void. I couldn’t feel the ground or the ice, and my eyes opened, and I was blinded by a sort of more-than-light. My body was numb but consolidating all the energy left in the cold world into itself. My senses failed me. I was awed into nothingness, my consciousness became a speck and I fell far away from myself, from time, from substance.

I awoke. I felt first the wind blowing hairs on the back of my hand. Some biological circuit was sparking and short circuiting in the follicles. I reconstructed the hand in my mind and felt it clenching as I willed it into existence. From there, I felt my arm, knew it as one with my hand, and built myself back up. I was sweaty. I opened my eyes. There was the same white field, untrampled and unchanged, occupying my field of view. My eyeballs twitched, and I could see the variation in the dominion of the white. A horizon appeared, and the street. The same desolate wasted street. It was light out, the dim thin half light of an overcast winter day. I was dusted with a snow that was taking an insistent hold on my body, pulling me into the white. My sweatpants added to the illusion of being overtaken by the cold snow. They were spotted with blood, and I tried to move my legs. They responded to my command, quickly, overeager. I stood up. The dimly sparkling whiteness slid from my coat. I wasn’t cold. How long had I been there? I looked down to appraise myself. There was a droning pain in my left knee and the dark dried blood covered the leg of my pants. I listened to myself breathe and found a rattle lying in wait in my lungs. A hand clenched at my chest and wrung out the blood which had seeped there. I coughed, and a black-red lump the size of a human fist landed steaming in the snow. My back felt wrong, like someone else had been walking around with it. I tested my left leg and found it to be stable. I walked haltingly and gingerly on the leg but I didn’t know where I was and there was nowhere to walk. The knowledge of the idea was gone, and what remained was a hollow awareness that it had once existed. I wondered how I got there. I was in the center of the intersection. The intersection was like any other intersection, the kind of intersection driving instructors and car commercials like, an idealized place for the meeting of machines working in systematized time. It began to snow lightly, white particles brushing the cloth shoulders of my coat. I tromped through the snow, and listened to the broken rhythm of my feet, now syncopated, as they beat their march for a little while in the cold floor of the world. I decided to go down the road the car had been on, and in the decision, realized there had been a car. A dull memory bobbed to the surface of my mind. The wheels left nothing on the road and I wandered toward where I remembered the car stopped, humming there before the green splayed across the road. There was nothing. No trace that a car had been there since the snow. I replayed the incident in my mind but it was but a dim impression of something that happened to someone else, a movie which I had seen once. I walked onward with the knot of some intangible unease tying itself in my mind.

The white chaos of floating pixels continued to silently come down from the sky as I beat the rhythm of my feet again incessantly down the road. I couldn’t see much, and for a long time, there was not much to see. The cold vastness of the day made me expectant of the settling of cold in my bones. I had not wondered until then why I was not cold, but it was true: I was not cold, not warm, not even numb. There was simply an emptiness of the nerves in my body. I looked down and rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. They sparked together inside and the electric tingle in my hands gave me a sudden vertigo. It was as if the only area of my body with real feeling was in the juncture of those fingers. My body tensed, and I looked around with a sudden doubt about the reality of the world. I reached down and felt the snow. It felt wrong, all wrong, not the snow of childhood sledding and snowball fights, but a uniformly manufactured white sand, cold and wet. I handled it for a while, rubbing it in my hand and thinking it over. It was undoubtedly not real. I shook off my hand, leaving some of the stand-in stuck to it, and leaned down to pick up more. I came up with a handful in the other hand, and realized the fake snow had melted while I was not looking. I raised my gaze to the horizon and began to walk, instantly wondering about the host of other things that had been wrong, wrong in my head, I wasn’t thinking straight, I was lost and hurt and scared more of what I knew would happen than what had.

At last I reach the first place different from the endless vacant waste, and the pain comes at once. A jarring rush of feeling makes me aware that my shoe had filled with blood, and the caked dry blood had rubbed my foot raw. The vacuum pain of cold down to the bones pulls me taut and shakes my body. I had just arrived at a gas station, pushing through the swirling snow, the only solid thing around. It was sudden. I was scanning the horizon one second for a speck, anything at all, and I realized that I was already somewhere, a lonely country gas station and convenience store appearing out of white gradient opacity and threatening to pass me by on my left. There is a car parked haphazardly next to the little bunker of a building, out of the light, the first colored light I’ve seen all day. The car is white. The light is yellow, spilling out like a pat of butter onto the snow. I could eat it up, and I go inside.

Advertisements scream incoherently at me at the windows and I realize that I cannot read them. The letters are garbled, or wrong, or reversed or something. I mumble to myself, “I can’t put my finger on it.”, and the words don’t come out clear, and I make a mess of the syllables, and realize that I just can’t read it. There’s nothing wrong with the letters, it’s that I’m not right or something, that I’ve forgotten how to read. I walk inside and find familiar color schemes, motifs, pictures of things I know, but I am unable to put a name to them. They are objects, ideas which exist apart from their names now. There is no one at the counter. I stumble, my knee giving out at last and buckling out from under me. I fall into a rack of plastic-wrapped pastries and lie bleeding and spent on the floor. I look over at a pastry and it is white. I reach over, realizing my hunger, and tear into it, whipping off the wrapper in one quick gesture, disintegrating it with a touch. The cake goes into my mouth, an apparatus which I had forgotten in the course of the day and I instantly realize that what I have in my mouth is the same white sand substance from outside, the stand-in, the filler, the default. The cake comes apart in my hand and its pieces turn into particles, and then into nothing in the air. The same rushing vertigo numbness behind my eyes as before comes again, stronger and stronger. I look at my hands and I have no fingers, there never were fingers. The racks of the store empty and the light becomes the same grey light of the snowstorm. I realize that there has not been silence all day, but a low, skin-crawling hiss, an oscillation sound made by nothing in nature. It ends and silence shakes my mind. A jowled man stares down at me with detached benevolence, the perfect model of the general store shopkeeper from every movie, every book, any home-town convenience store I’ve ever stopped in. He avoids my eye contact and I cannot see his eyes.

“I need help,” I said, pleading with him to understand my speech.

“You doin’ alright there, buddy?” he asks as if greeting a customer.

“I need help,” I croak again.

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Please, please,” is all I can say, with tears streaming, creating lines of feeling on the numb mask of my face.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

As he opens his mouth this time, I see into it, see the white ceiling of the place past his lips. He makes eye contact and I see that his eyes are empty, white, that same idea which stirred me in the night, the same Gnostic vision of my death and the white field behind everything. The light grows and grows past his open mouth and his shining inhuman eyes and I know that what I’m seeing is real, no vision from the deranged brain of an accident survivor, but the white fire of a universal background, the light of death and truth. His face whistles past mine and I can’t turn my head because there’s nothing behind me to see, and the shelves dissolve like the exhaust from the car or white cream in coffee and the ceiling is the sky, which is now just the light. There’s light that I don’t see with my eyes anymore and I don’t even see it with my brain or my mind, I see it with my soul, the pixels of snow pulling me into them, into the colorless blinding field.

A MACHINE THAT DISEMBOWELS WOLVES

So I played music again with Aaron and Mike. We're going to get heavier before we get lighter. We're going to fucking crush them all. We're going to steamroll people so hard their minds will pop out of their brains popping out of their pressurized skull cavities. We played through the 'ripper' song we had with southern riffage and stuff and then got to what I'm so stoked about, which is some of the ugliest, noisiest, most evil sounding fucking sludge I've ever played. Samothrace was great but more structured, and this was fucking black. I think I'm going to use the lyrics I wrote for "A Machine That Disembowels Wolves". Mike and I both do vocals, him on a high pitched rasping desperate scream and I on a gut-punched horrible demon's bellow of pain. The song is the sound of being pressed to death with ashen wastes on every side for five thousand miles, with only hungry wolves between you, trapped under rock, and the decimated cities of mankind. The lyrics are about the technology which will kill our species outliving us and being reduced to hunting the resurgent wolves that roam the dead cities. So pretty much, I'm happy with the direction we're going. I want to make the ugliest shit we can, but Aaron and Mike are such cheerful guys and I guess I am too, so we're going to have to smoke a lot more pot until all the pleasure chemicals in our brains have been fully depleted. Maybe do some acid in a completely dark room full of rats. Well, this post is the grimmest shit I've ever written. Suffice to say I'm stoked about this project.

unending sophistry

Do you know what sophistry is? It is being paid to represent a position and argue it as if it were the truth. It's like being a lobbyist, but it has more philosophical connotations. Sometimes I feel like a sophist, because I represent myself as an intellectual without being well read, and sometimes I feel like a sophist because I know that simply reading enough to parrot the positions of others is a false education. What turns you into an intellectual is new thought, yet the influence of others on your own position is sort of intellectually castrating. Sometimes I worry that there's no education which is truly enlightening but of course that's the case. The moment of true education is the termination of the narrative of one's life, when there is no more to be learned because there will be no more problems to examine. Only then is one enlightened. I think that's the Buddhist idea of satori, when the mind which naturally wishes to examine and analyze situations has been fully silenced and everything is rendered irrelevant.
I am coming to grips with the fact that I am not the rational being I wish I was. I have lengthy periods of moodiness, anxiety, fear that my early 20s will be entirely wasted (alternatingly by not having enough fun by partying or by not being serious enough because I abuse substances too much), and complete laziness which causes intense guilt. The reason I've come to realize that I'm more emotional than I had assumed is suddenly feeling something I'd supressed since I was very young, too young to understand its implications. In the melancholy romantic intellectual idiom this post seems to be in, I will say no more. Maybe that's not romanticism. I don't know shit about movements in art (see: sophistry). Moving on- the stoic fights the romantic.
I played music with some dudes I met through craigslist the other night. It was pretty bad-ass, and now I need to get my cymbals shipped up here. I played on Jesses cymbals, and its just scary as fuck playing on some dinky little jazz cymbals. I couldn't hit as hard as I like because I feared to break them. Of course, that meant I didn't have nasty blood blisters and tendonitis the next day, either. They were on this whole noisy heavy riff thing but got a killer Bolt Thrower-esque groove going on later on in the jam session. I'm going to introduce them to the real HEAVY shit and get things moving that-aways. I think this project could rip, and the guys involved are real nice and professional (except get more pedals and heavier amps, dudes!)
Well, that's all the brainsterbation I feel like doing tonight. Hopefully everything works out for the best, which I don't even know what that would be.

Secret channels

I wish this blog could be a series of notes written and placed at drop points around the city with contact info for responses but it doesn't seem relevant like it would have during the 1880s. There's not enough magic in the city but I feel like it's fighting the tide to try and reintroduce a sense of mystery. What is relevant now is to embrace the total visibility of the self in the city, and make that presentation powerful. I think that's one reason why I respect really extremely gutter rat crust punk style, is that it understands the idea of the self as spectacle in public and just takes it to its logical conclusion. When you have totally ridiculous fucked up dreadlock mohawk-mullets and tight pants basically made out of shitty looking home screenprinted band patches and a whole bunch of nasty homemade tattoos, its sort of a reversal of the tradition people have in the city of dressing up in a very considered way for work or school or whatever their daily business. It's not just not giving a fuck, it's hating giving a fuck, which is of course a mere reversal of the code of dress but it's at least incomprehensible to the mainstream, for the most part.
Man, Canadian whiskey sucks.
I'm glad my roommates got these cats, they're beautiful little creatures. Well, Bruno is, because he's so nice he blows my mind, but Toots is a little bitch.
I don't want to go anywhere in these long winter months. Fuck it.
If you read my blog you're my favorite.