Wednesday, March 11th, 2009.
Last night I slept with my cell phone turned off and outside my room, as the old man in my dream suggested. My sleep wasn't palpably different, but I brought it up to Miss Kay today at work. (A little background information on Miss Kay: she used to own Zenith, years ago. She's really my kind of gal - vegan, clever, extremely well-read, skeptical of almost everything, and yet still very open-minded and conscientious and forward-thinking. She's perfect, really. I often wonder what it would be like to go back in time and meet her. I bet she was beautiful. She still is; thanks to her healthy lifestyle she's aged very gracefully.) I told her that I turned my cell phone off last night and slept without it in my room - didn't bother to tell her about my dream several nights prior - and she said: 'Oh, yeah. My brother, Tom, has sleep apnea and they've done tests and found out that your cell phone actually sends, like, transmissions that can absolutely disrupt your brainwaves and your sleep.' Then we talked about the all too obvious, yet somehow widely unnoticed decline in the sanity of the masses. About that she said: 'Well, it's just like any other group of animal that becomes densely over-populated - they all start losing their minds. There's just too damn many of us.' I felt like she'd read my mind, or my stomach tattoo. Despite my being several decades her junior I think I might be developing a crush on her. There's something about her that's so alluring. It's as if she really has it all figured out. She's got this kind of resigned wisdom to her, it's very groovy, very attractive. Not to mention, at one point today she bent down in front of me and I was able to steal a glance at the depths of her cleavage and her breasts still looked quite firm, unaffected by age or the common stresses of daily life. Her vitality amazes me and gives me hope for my own eventuality.
****************
There's another man I work with - we'll call him Mr. Ron - I'd like to tell you about. Mr. Ron is a cuckold, or at least that's what everyone says. Apparently he lives with his wife and his wife's boyfriend. He looks it, really. He's a dish washer, has been for almost twenty years now. He can often be seen aimlessly pushing a gray plastic cart through the kitchen, talking with himself, with a broken gait, as if everywhere he went he had to drag this life of failure behind him. Black hair, despite his age; misaligned teeth, and a voice that sounds like Kermit the Frog's. Today Mr. Ron stopped his cart in front of me and, even though we'd never said a single word to one another in the past, said: 'Don't date a school teacher 'cause she'll grade ya at the end of every month. Don't date a policewoman because she can arrest ya for loitering. Only date big girls because they earn their keep.' And then he pushed his cart away, leaving me stupefied beside my overweight female co-worker, Christina.
****************
Today's Passage of the day is actually a prose-poem by Charles Baudelaire, not just a passage.
A hemisphere in your hair
From Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire
A hemisphere in your hair
From Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire
Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handerkerchief to stir memories in the air.
If you only knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfumes as other men's souls on music.
Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.
In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.
In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship's cabin, cradled by the harbor's imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.
On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic's blue infinity; on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.
If you only knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfumes as other men's souls on music.
Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.
In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.
In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship's cabin, cradled by the harbor's imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.
On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic's blue infinity; on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009.
I know this sounds crazy, but I'm beginning to think I can make things happen simply by thinking about them. Things as trivial as making certain people call me or text me exactly when I want them to; things as cosmic as thinking about people from my past and then seeing them within the next few days - people I haven't seen in years. What if everything that is around me, everything that is my Space, is dictated by my thoughts? And what if merely believing this is enough to control it? Kind of like self-fulfilling prophecies. My knee was hurt a few days ago; I was even on crutches. And I just thought about it. Really, I just sat on my couch and thought about my knee and I decided to myself that I didn't want it to be bothering me anymore. I made up my mind right then and there that my knee injury was bullshit; that the pain in my knee was a part of this material world and it could be easily transcended. And it worked. It absolutely worked. How is that possible? Was I just being a hypochondriac before? Hardly, my knee was swollen something fierce. But by the next day I was running up and down the stairs and zipping around as if it hadn't bothered me at all. Of course no one is going to believe me when they read this, but after I followed the rabbit down the hole that one fateful evening some of you may recall, I came to understand what pain really is. Moreover what my body really is. And it's fake. It's all totally fake. Granted, it was perhaps a little crazy of me to request that someone stab me in the heart to prove my point, but since that night I haven't encountered any problem concerning the body that I haven't surmounted easily using this knowledge. Simply by understanding that pain is merely a faculty of the body and the body is merely an object of the material world and our brains our imprisoned within that object, but our minds can escape, can transcend. I know this sounds like hippie bullshit, but it's not. I don't know what else to say. It's simply not.
Take LSD, try it. You'll understand what I mean.
Take LSD, try it. You'll understand what I mean.
****************
In my dreams I am nothing
In my dreams I am nothing
Bare existence, no longer anchored
To this futile search for a meaningful conclusion
No longer burdened by these biological restrictions
Free to just revel in my insignificance
In my life I am broken
Mass produced with contradicting parts
My senses disavow all logical reductions
Concerned only with avaricious reproduction
To this futile search for a meaningful conclusion
No longer burdened by these biological restrictions
Free to just revel in my insignificance
In my life I am broken
Mass produced with contradicting parts
My senses disavow all logical reductions
Concerned only with avaricious reproduction
****************
Passage of the day.
From The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious.
"If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the investigator's questions, "everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot."
From The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
The schizophrenic is a soul not merely unregenerate, but desperately sick into the bargain. His sickness consists in the inability to take refuge from inner and outer reality (as the sane person habitually does) in the homemade universe of common sense - the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures, from murderous violence at one end of the scale to catatonia, or psychological suicide, at the other. And once embarked upon the downward, the infernal road, one would never be able to stop. That, now, was only too obvious.
"If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the investigator's questions, "everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot."
Monday, March 9th, 2009.
Be a working contradiction.
Be a conscientious hedonist.
Be an open-minded nihilist.
Be an optimistic cynic.
Be a tolerant misanthrope.
Be selfish. Be selfless. Be selfish.
****************
Be a conscientious hedonist.
Be an open-minded nihilist.
Be an optimistic cynic.
Be a tolerant misanthrope.
Be selfish. Be selfless. Be selfish.
****************
Anymore, I find it difficult to manifest a thought longer than 160 characters.****************
Last night I had a dream and in it there was an old man with a long beard. He resembled what I used to think God probably looked like. He told me to not leave my cell phone plugged in and beside my bed over night. He told me it was sending barely audible noises that were disrupting my brain, fucking with me in my sleep. 'You have an internal alarm clock,' he said, 'use it.' I don't know if I should take that dream seriously or not.****************
It's becoming increasingly harder to dispute the evidence pointing towards a Dutch-centered universe. As much as I love and respect all of you as wonderfully unique individuals capable of shaping life in any way you wish, I also believe you all to be nothing more than extremely well-developed manifestations of my own consciousness; nothing more than tributaries branching from a river. Yet, that river leads somewhere. Perhaps we're all part of this giant, cosmic ocean of thought and some bodies of water are larger than others. More on that stuff later. . . .****************
In my dreams I am nothing
Bare existence, no longer anchored
To this vain search for a meaningful conclusion
No longer burdened with these biological restrictions
Free to just revel in my insignificance
****************Bare existence, no longer anchored
To this vain search for a meaningful conclusion
No longer burdened with these biological restrictions
Free to just revel in my insignificance
Passage of the day.
From Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. He would finish that poem presently. He could finish it whenever he chose. It was queer, how the mere prospect of going to a literary tea-party bucked him up. When your income is two quid a week you at least aren't jaded by too much human contact. Even to see the inside of somebody else's house is a kind of treat. A padded armchair under your bum, and tea and cigarettes and the smell of women - you learn to appreciate such things when you are starved of them. In practice, though, Doring's parties never in the least resembled what Gordon looked forward to. These wonderful, witty, erudite conversations that he imagined beforehand - they never happened or began to happen. Indeed there was never anything that could be properly called conversation at all; only the stupid clacking that goes on at parties everywhere, in Hampstead or Hong Kong. No one really worth meeting ever came to Doring's parties. Doring was such a very mangy lion himself that his followers were hardly even worthy to be called jackals. Quite half of them were those hen-witted middle-aged women who have lately escaped from good Christian homes and are trying to be literary. The star exhibits were troops of bright young things who dropped in for half an hour, formed circles of their own and talked sniggeringly about other bright young things to whom they referred by nicknames. For the most part Gordon found himself hanging about on the edges of conversations. Doring was kind in a slapdash way and introduced him to everybody as "Gordon Comstock - you know; the poet. He wrote that dashed clever book about poems called Mice. You know." But Gordon had never yet encountered anybody who did know. The bright young things summed him up at a glance and ignored him. He was thirtyish, moth-eaten and obviously penniless. And yet, in spite of the invariable disappointment, how eagerly he looked forward to those literary tea-parties! They were a break in his loneliness, anyway. That is the devilish thing about poverty, the ever-recurrent thing - loneliness. Day after day with never an intelligent person to talk to; night after night back to your godless room, always alone. Perhaps it sounds rather fun if you are rich and sought-after; but how different it is when you do it from necessity!
From Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. He would finish that poem presently. He could finish it whenever he chose. It was queer, how the mere prospect of going to a literary tea-party bucked him up. When your income is two quid a week you at least aren't jaded by too much human contact. Even to see the inside of somebody else's house is a kind of treat. A padded armchair under your bum, and tea and cigarettes and the smell of women - you learn to appreciate such things when you are starved of them. In practice, though, Doring's parties never in the least resembled what Gordon looked forward to. These wonderful, witty, erudite conversations that he imagined beforehand - they never happened or began to happen. Indeed there was never anything that could be properly called conversation at all; only the stupid clacking that goes on at parties everywhere, in Hampstead or Hong Kong. No one really worth meeting ever came to Doring's parties. Doring was such a very mangy lion himself that his followers were hardly even worthy to be called jackals. Quite half of them were those hen-witted middle-aged women who have lately escaped from good Christian homes and are trying to be literary. The star exhibits were troops of bright young things who dropped in for half an hour, formed circles of their own and talked sniggeringly about other bright young things to whom they referred by nicknames. For the most part Gordon found himself hanging about on the edges of conversations. Doring was kind in a slapdash way and introduced him to everybody as "Gordon Comstock - you know; the poet. He wrote that dashed clever book about poems called Mice. You know." But Gordon had never yet encountered anybody who did know. The bright young things summed him up at a glance and ignored him. He was thirtyish, moth-eaten and obviously penniless. And yet, in spite of the invariable disappointment, how eagerly he looked forward to those literary tea-parties! They were a break in his loneliness, anyway. That is the devilish thing about poverty, the ever-recurrent thing - loneliness. Day after day with never an intelligent person to talk to; night after night back to your godless room, always alone. Perhaps it sounds rather fun if you are rich and sought-after; but how different it is when you do it from necessity!
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