I don't like time. We never were the best of friends. Virtually always when I plan on writing a song, it's a smack at time. Villainous, life-eating time. I always tried to walk with it side by side, lethargically, lovingly, but it has always insisted on flying past me without the lightest care for looking back, like a methamphetamine-induced kitten, like an angry preacher speeding up his sermon so he can condemn his poor bastard congregation. But there's an added curse: it flies past me when I'm in the moment, waist deep in writing or guitar -- or You for that matter -- and (the kicker) when I completely squander my time. Boredom, you see, never hits me, but the loss tied with it does. Boredom at least slows the world down so as to make its normal uninteresting speed worth riding again.
It's been around seven weeks since I've been employed. Long story. The first three or four weeks were spectacularly slow, but more compacted with busyness than any other time in my life. I played music, breathed with nature, enjoyed the ones I love, and learned, experienced, grew. Twenty-one books were slain, even if most of them had already been started previously. The average lifetime book intake for the average busy-drugged or lazybones American, nota bene, is less than that. I'm starting to get ridiculous; there's literally no subject that doesn't attract me. I leap from macroeconomics to Heideggerian ontology, Nabokovian prose to Chomsky, theology to Neruda, like a four year old addicted to leapfrog. We all know children like to jump. Damn simple life, where leaping is fun.
And I've learned that I'm a bit of a coward. I have one thing in life that I could be doing constantly; something that could literally fulfill my calling, and my salvation, and I stall. Kierkegaard said becoming a Christian for the first time is easier than becoming a Christian once you are one. You always stall. God has placed me on insuperable heights, blazoned with a view of all the wonder of the world, and what happens? I look down. I fear my first step, and what I will do when I realize I need to step back and start again.
It's there, ringing in my brain, shattering the blurry lines between self-annihilating thoughts. Do it.
Do it. Don't think. Dance. You can't think. You can't be taught. You just respond. Life is fully lived beyond the skyline of thought. Trust. Trust me. I have my hand, now give me yours. This is who you are. You are meant to dance, and all dance their own incomparable ways. Dance yours.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Metablogging
In a fit of idle nerdiness, I pasted my blog to a Word document and technologically squeezed the blessed word count function. 34,374 words, titles included.
Critiques:
1) They're called paragraphs. And they're meant to be used.
2) Stop the pseudo-Kierkegaardian word choices. It's the twenty-first century. No need for "massification" or ridiculous repetitions of "infinity".
3) Slow the roll on Proustian endless sentences. This relates to 1).
4) Lessen the awesomeness. It might hurt women and children.
Critiques:
1) They're called paragraphs. And they're meant to be used.
2) Stop the pseudo-Kierkegaardian word choices. It's the twenty-first century. No need for "massification" or ridiculous repetitions of "infinity".
3) Slow the roll on Proustian endless sentences. This relates to 1).
4) Lessen the awesomeness. It might hurt women and children.
Friday, August 22, 2008
On Marriage
Funny how involuntary thoughts can be, even if they're the very opposite of what you really believe. This thought flashed through me like a maddened quark; a common precursor to an avalanche of unbridled opinions: I'm sorry. But I'm not sorry.
What set it off? You'll love this: marriage. Practice in selfishness. Aided egoism. As a rule? Nope, no sir, absolutely not. But how it allows for the potential, and how few couples actually come together to love the world beyond themselves.
I'm not sorry. It's about living for sugar lips or Mr. Right, eventually charming children, and with enough time an extended family. Neighbors and church friends over for coffee or beer. Shoot the shat. And the outside world is freezing. And you, with your warm-blooded selfishness, have all the fire to change things.
But it's love for other people. That it is. But not free love. The love that undermines, that brightens the world of another person, but not because you really choose it, not most of the time, and for many people hardly ever. The love that chooses you and therefore is at most minimally you. Affective, animalistic love, where the line between human and previous primates is blurred to oblivion. It's all exclusively about family for a pack of orangutans in Indonesia, but you, dear sir, dear madame, are welded with a bit of God. You're called to a higher living that you can't deny without denying your essential humanity.
So stop parading your selfishness through pictures of your committed lover, half bald or half insane. Show me that you know authentic love -- love with continuity, love beyond boundaries, the only love that you are in control of.
What set it off? You'll love this: marriage. Practice in selfishness. Aided egoism. As a rule? Nope, no sir, absolutely not. But how it allows for the potential, and how few couples actually come together to love the world beyond themselves.
I'm not sorry. It's about living for sugar lips or Mr. Right, eventually charming children, and with enough time an extended family. Neighbors and church friends over for coffee or beer. Shoot the shat. And the outside world is freezing. And you, with your warm-blooded selfishness, have all the fire to change things.
But it's love for other people. That it is. But not free love. The love that undermines, that brightens the world of another person, but not because you really choose it, not most of the time, and for many people hardly ever. The love that chooses you and therefore is at most minimally you. Affective, animalistic love, where the line between human and previous primates is blurred to oblivion. It's all exclusively about family for a pack of orangutans in Indonesia, but you, dear sir, dear madame, are welded with a bit of God. You're called to a higher living that you can't deny without denying your essential humanity.
So stop parading your selfishness through pictures of your committed lover, half bald or half insane. Show me that you know authentic love -- love with continuity, love beyond boundaries, the only love that you are in control of.
Dreams
Sleep has always been the thorn in my side. During the earliest years of school, my mom would wrangle socks on my cold feet as I was still lethargically groping for sleep, half-saturated in a dream world. Even until high school I'd be dragged awake, institutional shuffle down the endless hall (mocking me with voluptuous carpet), the hollow, lifeless attempt to turn on the shower. At times -- not many -- I'd fall asleep on my feet, wrapped in warm water. Paradise enough. Then the smash on the door, reproaching me awake.
The worst association, which haunts me still, isn't the screech of some imaginary monster, the vegetarian terror stare from an alien-looking cabbage, or politicians. It was born of the ear: the light electric sound surge, infinitesimal, the overhead fan made as it was killed by my mother every school morning, before the useless, repetitive, slow, tortuously slow against-the-grain voyage to consciousness. My heart half-died with the decelerating blades. Time to get up and learn nothing, psychological abuse, and all shades of adolescent bullshit embedded in school. The explicit click of any light switch is still at times enough to make me cringe. It all signified the end of another world, the insulating security afforded by warmth, and the dreams were always lovely.
It's not laziness. I honestly can't help it. Between nineteen and twenty-two I lived for twelve hour marathons, not because I was seeking an escape, or because there was nothing better to do, but because if I didn't, I couldn't function. Gym and jogging cured this, yes, but only partially. There are still days where the snooze button is ruthlessly crashed for a two or three hour duration. My hypothalamus headlocks my frontal lobes, and any reason to rise never penetrates the sensate. Blame the brain; I am the blameless.
It all allowed me an incomparable wonder: I've learned to dream, and even dream to the end of a sort of earthly salvation. Bad dreams, I've learned, are the best. They shock you into life value; many times I would find myself hypnotically spooning my coffee the next morning, dredged in appreciative thoughts, simply because the gentle terror of a dream had, yes, taught me how to live. At least until the death of worldly worries and routine had drowsed me back into the quietly hellish, lifeless style of humanity.
And all these years the poor bumbling philosophers can't prove -- one bit -- the existence of an external world, or that our senses are feeding on anything outside of a neurological matrix of lies. Life itself might be a brand of dreams. A dream of God. And we have the miserable stupidity to take all of this seriously -- to grope and grasp and close off breathing until we're walking corpses. Are there any who have awoken yet?
The worst association, which haunts me still, isn't the screech of some imaginary monster, the vegetarian terror stare from an alien-looking cabbage, or politicians. It was born of the ear: the light electric sound surge, infinitesimal, the overhead fan made as it was killed by my mother every school morning, before the useless, repetitive, slow, tortuously slow against-the-grain voyage to consciousness. My heart half-died with the decelerating blades. Time to get up and learn nothing, psychological abuse, and all shades of adolescent bullshit embedded in school. The explicit click of any light switch is still at times enough to make me cringe. It all signified the end of another world, the insulating security afforded by warmth, and the dreams were always lovely.
It's not laziness. I honestly can't help it. Between nineteen and twenty-two I lived for twelve hour marathons, not because I was seeking an escape, or because there was nothing better to do, but because if I didn't, I couldn't function. Gym and jogging cured this, yes, but only partially. There are still days where the snooze button is ruthlessly crashed for a two or three hour duration. My hypothalamus headlocks my frontal lobes, and any reason to rise never penetrates the sensate. Blame the brain; I am the blameless.
It all allowed me an incomparable wonder: I've learned to dream, and even dream to the end of a sort of earthly salvation. Bad dreams, I've learned, are the best. They shock you into life value; many times I would find myself hypnotically spooning my coffee the next morning, dredged in appreciative thoughts, simply because the gentle terror of a dream had, yes, taught me how to live. At least until the death of worldly worries and routine had drowsed me back into the quietly hellish, lifeless style of humanity.
And all these years the poor bumbling philosophers can't prove -- one bit -- the existence of an external world, or that our senses are feeding on anything outside of a neurological matrix of lies. Life itself might be a brand of dreams. A dream of God. And we have the miserable stupidity to take all of this seriously -- to grope and grasp and close off breathing until we're walking corpses. Are there any who have awoken yet?
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