I sit here looking over my time here in Hawai'i, and I can't help but think that I might not've wasted my time here after all. Though I lost what little self-respect I had for myself over the last year, completely stopped being everything I liked about myself, and lost everything I had, I feel like I'm coming away with a new sense of humility.
I learned that you don't need drugs or alchohol to destroy your life, all you need is a profound self-hatred that is almost metaphysical in scope, (catholic guilt about sin will work, but existential meaninglessness works too), too few sets of clothes, a couple failed attempts at something important (college is a good one), a good number of friends, (or family) who got burned trying to help you, and no job (or a degrading job).
I learned that really, all you need to succeed in the world is self-love. Real self-love, not self-indulgence. If you are worthy of your goals, you can achieve them, no matter how meaningless they seem to everyone else around you, because if you care enough about yourself, you'll do whatever it takes to attain those goals.
I have at least enough self-love to want to have some self-respect, therefore, I will attain that goal. I want to do right by my friends, but I can't do that if I only love them and not myself.
I learned that I'm not a great poet, nor do I have what it takes to become one. There's an obvious barrier: my soul-cup is only about 3 quarters full, and it takes one that's overflowing.
I learned that as far down as you can go, there's always a little farther, and that both of those are relative.
I learned that self-pity isn't self-love, and neither is masturbation.
I learned that Star Trek is probably the greatest franchise in television history, both for its insight into human ethics, and its unflinching idealism, and anyone who thinks differently really just doesn't get it.
I learned that Philosophy and the study thereof is mostly a chore, and not as profound as I'd always hoped. I invented an ethical theory, and, really, it can be summed up in two paragraphs. The rest of it would be just pointless work.
I learned that I'm just not cool enough for Hawai'i. Most people I know, (you know who you are), told me that Hawai'i sucks to live on. Well, I'll tell you now: It's not the place that sucks, it's the person. And that's anywhere. And a little less angrily, it's really like certain people fit certain places better than others. I personally thought I was this laid-back, pot-smoking surfer guy in a small mountain desert socialite town, but it turns out that I'm not. I'm just not simple enough to enjoy the things Hawai'i has to offer. I just can't be that cool. I need arts community. I need independent film everywhere, I need pretentious, self-important people all around me, so I can hang with all the people who are cool without actually trying, so I can feel that contrast every day.
Plus, I got really jaded here. I stopped believing in love. Well, I mean, I've been in love a number of times, so I know it exists, but I stopped believing I could achieve it. The people I'm interested in on that level are worlds away, physically and emotionally, and the people who are interested in me, I'm somehow not interested in. And thus the eternal dillema: Is it the fact that I'm not feeling it that they're interested in, or do I just attract the people I'm not interested in? Is it the fact that the people I could be in love with won't love me back, is it that fact that makes me want them? Or is it just that I'm attracted to the people who happen to not be interested in me? Regardless, I can't see myself falling in love with someone, but I can see myself BEING in love. I hope I don't stay this way. I want to have a family someday, and if I can't stand being around someone for more than a few months, or if I irritate people so much they can't stand being around ME for more than a few months, then the family dream is just that.
But, historically, people with my psychological makeup usually don't have families, and end up having a few god-awful marriages, or none at all (more likely in my case), and just dying early and lonely. Knowing your fate doesn't make it any easier to accept sometimes.
Well, I'm off to the Navy to try and become independantly wealthy so I can finish school, and do exciting things other than working shit-jobs, having intense romantic flings and playing video games between flings.
I used to be a Pretty Good Poet
Current mood: eccentric
Honestly. I browsed through some of my selections from these last two years, and honestly, I'm about 70% happy with my work. I'll write a poem in tribute to my previous occupation:
Many hours spent, Back hunched, Forehead clenched, Lip bit, fingers slick With sweat, But, Who cares? Only me, Looking past Something that mattered, Maybe. Fingers, now flacid, Intention, distracted It hurts, But I'll live
I'm not writing right now. Whenever I see the text that slips from my fingers, I'm filled with disgust at hearing my own voice speak the shit in my head. Gah. Even this.
I Want To Fuck The Girls in Guitar Hero
Current mood: focused
My lazy friend Jack insisted he was a writer. He'd start thousands of projects, but never finish them. His prose was as solid as silly putty, but it held shape, except in the sun. His lifestyle was mainly bummish, but he had some kind of dignification for which most considered him undeserving. I personally understood this struggle to maintain dignity, even in the face of one's own humiliation, as abstract, like a nobleman gone poor after a regime change from one that favored him and his. The reason he was my friend was because he was capable of the most intense compassion, forgiving me and all others our faults. He would almost cry at the sight of a particularly down-trodden homeless, and try and tell me all about the saving graces of a cold-hearted capitalist businessman or pimp in the next breath. His staunch defenses of whores and whoring put many people off, but endeared me to him, for who will defend the whores? His dreams were vast and wonderful, and his fears nightmarish. The man even told me he'd spare me the worst of them, lest they become mine as well. One day, as we were walking down the street, and he was telling me that he was thinking of becoming a Chinese medicine doctor, I became visibly bored. He took me by the collar and insisted on his passion for becoming such. I rolled my eyes and said, "Jack, look. It's not about your passion for doing such right now, it's about maintaining that passion, feeding it until it grows into a single plant. Right now you're spreading that passion water too thinly, and all your plants are starving." "You always were the best spinner of metaphor, James," he replied, but I knew he wasn't through. He'd spend the rest of the day convincing me that he had what it takes to become a proper and excellent Chinese Medicine Doctor, of which I had no doubt at the beginning of the lecture, but after a few pints and a basket of disgusting onion rings, I was even more sure. Jack is a very convincing fellow. One time, Jack and I were playing chess and drinking coffee on the sidewalk outside a 7-11, and I mentioned to him that he might want to play chess professionally, and perhaps he should consider it. "I hate people who play chess," he said. I left it at that, knowing that not only would he have some kind of reasoning beyond my comprehension, he'd positively insist that after a few hours of explanation, it wouldn't be. Instead, I finished the game, to my inevitable defeat, finished my large disgusting gas-station coffee, stood up, saluted Jack, and walked away, looking up now and then at the street lights, my hands tucked firmly down in my jacket pockets.
A Slice of Literary History
Current mood: adventurous
This is painstakingly exerpted from an old book, so you’ll have to excuse the outdated sexism, a bit of outdated slang and references, but I believe this selection to be one of the finer pieces of literature in recent history.
And now it is three o’clock in the morning and we have a couple of trollops here who are doing somersaults on the bare floor. Fillmore is walking around naked with a goblet in his hand, and that paunch of his is drumtight, hard as a fistula. All the Pernod and champagne and cognac and Anjou which he guzzled from three in the afternoon on, is gurgling in his trap like a sewer. The girls are putting their ears to his belly as if it were a music box. Open his mouth with a buttonhook and drop a slug in the slot. When the sewer gurgles I hear the bats flying out of the belfry and the dream slides into artifice. The girls have undressed and we are examining the floor to make sure that they won’t get any splinters in their ass. They are still wearing their high-heeled shoes. But the ass! The ass is worn down, scraped, sandpapered, smooth, hard, bright as a billiard ball or the skill of a leper. On the wall is Mona’s[ed. his ex? wife] picture: she is facing northeast on a line with Cracow written in green ink. To the left of her is the Dordogne, encircled with a red pencil. Suddenly I see a dark, hairy crack in front of me set in a bright, polished billiard ball; the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors. A glance at that dark, unstitched wound and a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had been laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labeled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pell-mell like ants pouring out of a crack in the sidewalk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the very nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, and evacuation that leaves me face to face with the Absolute. I see again the great sprawling mothers of Picasso, their breasts covered with spiders, their legend hidden deep in the labyrinth. And Molly Bloom lying on a dirty mattress for eternity. On the toilet door red chalk cocks and the madonna uttering the diapason of woe. I hear a wild, hysterical laugh, a room full of lockjaw, and the body that was black glows like phosphorus. Wild, wild, utterly uncontrollable laughter, and that crack laughing at me too, laughing through the mossy whiskers, a laugh that creases the bright, polished surface of the billiard ball. Great whore and mother of man with gin in her veins. Mother of all harlots, spider rolling us in your logarithmic grave, insatiable one, fiend whose laughter rives me! I look down into that sunken crater, world lost and without traces, and I hear the bells chiming, two nuns at the Palace Stanislas and the smell of rancid butter under their dresses, manifesto never printed because it was raining, war fought to further the cause of plastic surgery, the Prince of Wales flying around the world decorating the graves of unknown heroes. Every bat flying out of the belfry a lost cause, every whoopla a groan over the radio from the private trenches of the damned. Out of that dark, unstitched wound, that sink of abominations, that cradle of black-thronged cities where the music of ideas is drowned in cold fat, out of strangled Utopias is born a clown, a being divided between beauty and ugliness, between light and chaos, a clown who when he looks down and sidelong is Satan himself and when he looks upward sees a buttered angel, a snail with wings. When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder. Not the zero on which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum which balances the stars and the light dreams and the explosives that produced them. Into that crack I would like to penetrate up to the eyes, make them waggle ferociously, dear, crazy, metallurgical eyes. When the eyes waggle then will I hear again Dostoevsky’s words, hear them rolling on page after page, with minutest observation, with maddest introspection, with all the undertones of misery now lightly, humorously touched, now swelling like an organ note until the heart bursts and there is nothing left but a blinding, scorching light, the radiant light that carries off the fecundating seeds of the stars. The story of art whose roots lie in massacre. When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to crate a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge. If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that is would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world. In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared, the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn’t a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? If anyone knew what it meant to read the riddle of that thing which today is called a "crack" or a "hole," if any one had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labeled "obscene," this world would crack asunder. It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater. It is this great yawning gulf of nothingness which the creative spirits and mothers of the race carry between their legs. When a hungry, desperate spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals. And he puts the live wire right between the legs; he hits below the belt, scorches the very gizzards. It is no use putting on rubber gloves; all that can be coolly and intellectually handled belongs to the carapace and a man who is intent on creation always dives beneath, to the open wound, to the festering obscene horror. He hitches his dynamo to the tenderest parts; if only blood and pus gush forth, it is something. The dry, fucked-out crater is obscene. More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis. If there is only a gaping wound left then it must gush forth though it produce nothing but toads and bats and homonuculi. Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust - are are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when the night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang whorl and star cluster.
At this point the author goes on a bit about his memories about his ex-wife who ended up leaving him in Paris and headed back to America, before getting back to the evening with the hookers and his buddy. It’s amazing to me how someone could be looking at the vagina of a hooker and be prompted into such thoughts. Are they thoughts, or are they just vomits, upon the waterfall of which some wisdom slipped out? I personally believe that this man’s honesty is his point. Instead of bottling anything, it’s all poured out onto the page. He speaks of courage/honesty (same thing to him) being crushed out of man (humankind) by man (humankind), and that only words and letters are left to a person who would want to be courageous in the face of such a dried up, fucked out world. His viewpoints are really not the reason I’m so fascinated with this writer. It’s more the honesty, the flying in the face of taboos, but not only for the sake of it, that interests me. I desire my writing to be so honest, my heart and soul left bare on the page. I know this viewpoint of writing as a refuge for honesty seems defeatist and cowardly, but it’s because the author, and myself, both believe that if someone were to act completely on their conception of truth, that the world would CRUSH them. Therefor writing is an outlet for that type of soul, the kind that seeks to be honest, who’s sick of hiding in shadows for fear of what people might think or feel. The page is a tyrant’s kingdom, where the reader is the willing subject, submitting to the whim of the ruler, but feeling and thinking whatever they want about it. None of this is to say that the author or I would actually like to rule over anyone. This type of honesty-made-for-the-page is more clearly for the execution of semi-perfect freedom in a realm that is yours and yours alone. (There are benificent tyrants also, the the author certainly isn’t one, and whether I am or not remains to be seen.) Sure both the author and I are resentful of the judgements of others, but we’re still attention craving ego-maniacs. (As are 99% of artists in my opinion.) There are many more similarities in viewpoints between the author and myself, however, I find neither them nor the differences that interesting. (The sexism, the desire to leave the United States in search of something better, the being poor, the being extraordinarily talented. Can you guess which I have in common and which I don’t?) The author’s name is Henry Miller, and this was excerpted from Tropic of Cancer, his most famous book. I still haven’t finished the book, as this chapter continues to haunt me. On the bus, while reading, I paused now and then, flabbergasted, looking around for someone who might’ve read Mr. Miller, and, of course, finding none, returned to my reading. I’ve only posted this here as perhaps a bait, to reel in potential readers of this strange, honest, amoral bastard of an excellent writer. I sincerely hope that at least one or two people I know read this post. What a slice of literary history this is! I only wish people were this impassioned nowadays. Now, the post-modern (though I’m sure Miller would’ve been considered a Post Modernist) disaffected ironies have taken over underground literature. (And film, and music, and fashion, and art.) And it’s not that I don’t enjoy irony and self deprecation, but I miss (and somehow never met) serious fuckers who saw their own REAL passions objectively enough to write about them, and somehow maintained sincerity, (without sounding cheesy). Fuck, where are the Beats? Where is Anais Nin, D.H. Lawrence, Bukowski, and others with such solid and passionate stances? I’m already disaffected enough... I’m tired of hearing the preaching, I’m the choir! I exist disaffection. Let me read about something that’s not familiar to me. Thanks, though, Chuck Pahlanuik, Christopher Moore, Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Echo, Christopher Buckley, Tom Robbins, Hunter Thompson, you are all wonderful writers, but no one’s giving me anything but a ’See? There are famous writers who think like I do!’ feeling. Reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road totally gave me a feeling of solid passion for literature, but as I browsed trying to find more of it, I realized how rare this genre is. PASSION, HONESTY, where are you? Perhaps it’s only in myself I can’t find these qualities, except when I read other peoples’ writings, turning me into a passion vampire who feeds on dead artists’ works! If so, there are only a few things to do about that: travel, suffer and make art. (Maybe love somewhere in there.) If not, then, fuck! people!, we need to find what our civilization is missing! (And I’ll still travel, suffer and make art.)
-Lex
Currently
listening
:
Talking Timbuktu
By
Ali Farka Touré
Release date: 29 March, 1994
There's fields and fields of shit out there, in east LA, with regular roads: the shit fields are city-block-sized. Then, out of nowhere, on one corner there is a gas station and a hotel. The hotel houses many lovely girls who charge for their company, and lonely shit-field workers who barely speak english, but who make enough daily cash for the company of the girls. I know this because apparently, one of the roads to a family member's house runs between these shit fields. If you look west, you might see the ocean, but LA is just far too dirty, and you can't see through the air there. It's about as rural as LA gets, and really, my family member's house is nowhere near the shit-fields, but on the way there, the corner gas station-hotel combo is the only place to stay, at least within financial reason. I remember loving the way the shit-processing buildings stood off from the vast plains of human feces. I wondered what it might be like to live in a trailer-park that I was sure existed somewhere around, but that I'd never see. Everybody knew everybody in that trailer-park, I was sure. Everyone's parents had something to do with the shit fields. Even that one kid who lived in the really nice trailer at the very end of the main trailer-park road, whose father was some kind of regional supervisor over all the shit-fields, and everyone else's father worked under him. I'm sure the land-owner didn't even live in California, but that's just speculation. Everyone in the trailer-park's mother probably kept the trailers clean and cooked up spectacular meals of strong-scented barbecued meats; the meats would have to be strong smelling to overwhelm their neighborhood's general smell, not to mention the smell of the men of the trailers. The trailer-park mothers probably hopped-to once the shit-smelling men came home from work and gave to their grateful husbands cold beers and secretly hoped that, just this once, their faithful husbands would just take off their work clothes and shower before sitting on the freshly cleaned sofa- Oh! Of course not, but maybe next time. I imaged the tv sets these people had as quite outdated small things with advanced sattelite dishes for tv stations hanging from the trailers outside, in standard size competition with the trailer neighbors. The cars they'd drive would vary, but every one of them would be of American make and be very old, and make more noise than a car should, except, of course, the shit-processing-manager's car, which would be a large newer American truck, probably of Chevy make, since Ford was for Texans and people in the city who probably didn't even need trucks. Most houses would have dogs in the yard, but they'd either be tied up and forgotten, or let loose and forgotten, since the trailer-wives would be busy making sure that everything was in order for the kids and the husband once they returned home; the barking, I'm sure, would drive anyone, without their small tv's blaring, nuts. I remember wondering what it would be like to get used to that smell. What the beach, so far away, would smell like in contrast. I imagined the school being an all-grade school, throwing all the rural shit-field kids together, and since it was such a small community, they wouldn't even need a big school. At the school, kids from one trailer-park would probably stick to other kids from the trailer-park against others from different trailer-parks and have fist-fights. I always imagined people who work shit-fields living in trailer-parks. But I never imagined it as anything bad, but more glamorous, free. They could always pick up and move to another trailer park, ANYwhere, but most likely no one there could afford to quit their job, or rent a truck, or gas a truck to move such a thing, but when I was young I didn't know those limitations. The Trailer was Freedom. Freedom that you owned. Little did I know that there were things like Credit which meant that none of them actually owned their trailers, but rather paid the minimum monthly ammount on them, stretching the need to pay over past the end of the father's lifetime. But that's a worthy goal in itself; mostly paying off the trailer, so when the kids grow up, it'll only take a few years of working in the Shit-Field Processing Plant to pay off that old trailer. And then Freedom! It's an investment, you know. It was only after I got older that I heard that living in trailers was supposed to be a bad thing, but even to this day, I realized that America isn't about roots. It's about migration. Our roots, so called, are in migration. The trailor, and the hard labor, even the shit-fields, are all part of our America. Our American Dream.
Lex’s Pre Birthday Blues Blog
Current mood: enlightened
A couple poems:
I'm already old but still useless There was always this assumption: I will be more awesome eventually Not true! Eventually never came And probably never will I'm as awesome as I'll ever be Which makes me feel quite free
-Lex
Can I write a poem now? My fingers hurt from lack of use and my face itches from a couple mosquito bites I didn't notice them last night
My lips are cracked not drinking water will do that Better make a better plan But then I'd have to go through with it The sheet's come up off my bed
The desk is such a mess I sit by it with the laptop in my lap The light is low and funny in here Makes me think of drinking And chui, it makes me think of chui
I attribute this sometimes to sadness but then my lip curls angrily and says 'shut up baby' 'You don't make your bed, now sleep in it'
I posted this on BigThink.com earlier this evening. It covers a lot of things. I tried to keep it condensed to one thesis, but my rampaging ADD prevents that. I do, however, think that it is well written and interesting. I hope you think so too. It was written in response to a gentleman who has a very very very specifically optimistic Star Trekian desire for the future.
---------------------------------------
A lovely 'Utopian' world seems quite nice. A place in which our technology has evolved to the point in which we no longer have to battle one another, and have thrown off the 'shackles' of religion to me seems grand. My problem with this type of 'utopianism' is that there is no room for the people who see religion as a 'freeing' concept, not one of shackles. But as long as there is a religion that says that all other religions are wrong, there will be disagreement. I'm not so shallow as to say that 'No matter what, people will fight,' but there will be disagreement.
I've recently developed, (but not polished) a theory of ethics/morality that I like to call the 'Realm of Intolerance.' This is almost a subjectivist theory of ethics, but it describes a universal: we can all be offended to the point of 'action' by other's behavior. At what point do each of us throw our own safety to the wind to stand up for a principle? This is the subjective part. The fact that all of us have it is universal. If I were to see a person smack their child on the bottom, I will not be moved to act. I will silently judge, but the fact that this offensive action does not in turn cause an action on my part means that I condone this behavior on some level, and is thus not a part of my Realm of Intolerance. However, if I saw a woman being raped in an alley, I would attempt to help her, at great risk to myself. Rape exists in my 'realm of intolerance.'
Granted, I do hope that people learn to develop free energy and solve the 'limited resource' problem that's been plaguing our species, (nay, all cosmological systems) since the beginning of time, at which point I would hope that the arbitrariness of others' religious beliefs would become apparent. At this highly improbable point in the future, I could see the previous gentleman's vision for the future becoming real. Throwing off the 'shackles' of religion is hardly a solution for those who love their religion, but being tolerant of others' religion seems universally beneficial, regardless of our state of technology.
On a less optimistic side of the future spectrum, I do see a sort of 'Cyberpunk' future coming soon. Everyone dropped cyberpunk like a bad habit once the year 2000 hit, probably because all of those cyberpunk writers of the '70s and '80s predicted extreme economic, sociological, and political change by the year 2000. Given that this didn't happen, I bet that people thought it never would. Well, if Mighty Capitalism keeps marching forward the way it is, cyberpunk is still a possibility. A future where corporations rule with an iron fist, and combat one another through espionage and all-out war. 'The West-Coast States of McDonalds.' 'The Pepsico Southern States,' etc are possible in that future.
There is an inevitable clash between this type of world and the Communist/Totalitarian future. (this world is set forth in the cautionary tales of Orwell, Bradbury, and Huxley)
To find a medium between the two types of rule, or, heaven forbid, a completely new idea of rule, seem exceedingly unlikely.
Pick your poison, boys and girls, for we drink 'till the Sun goes down.
-Lex
Currently
listening
:
Corymb
By
Boom Bip
Release date: 29 June, 2004
In my coffin, The lid doesn't rattle The air doesn't run out At least as fast as you'd think My heart beats Hard up in my chest Lips purple and spit covered There is matter under split fingernails Any kind of matter; Flesh, cloth, wood. Teeth crack and split from clenched anguish Back of head bloody from hard pounding A calm sets in though, no need to struggle But alas, the body screams at my mind -DO SOMETHING- It cries, but there's nothing to do but die... Waiting.
Currently
listening
:
Say I Am You
By
The Weepies
Release date: 07 March, 2006
I very deeply fear the lack of something. Nihilophobia it's called. I fear seeing beyond this world and seeing nothing. That this is something IN nothing is no comfort. I want the back of reality to be pure energy or something, not nothingness. I want it to be intention, but I know how realistic that is... I just don't want one day to grab at my cup of coffee and have it cruple in on itself because it's not REALLY substantive, and only a trick of light and gravity or something. I know, it's irrational. Who's to say that there's anything 'behind' reality. If this is all there is then that is boring as hell. I almost prefer my deepest fears be real than 'everything is as it appears' = truth. Empiricism = ick. My senses be damned. They're flawed, and therefore any notion of 'until proven otherwise' world is flawed. (ed note: 'until proven otherwise' is the dogma of the so-called atheist who depends on 'science' for cosmological backing, but who believes implicitly in an objective reality despite the fact that they can't completely trust their senses, which is inherently non-science) "But what about 'reality is knowable?" you ask. Well, that is a very broad statement. Especially because there are different types of knowing. "Oh, well that's just semantics!" Well, Semantics is a necessary deviation from any topic where people disagree with what a term means. Knowing through the senses is but one way to 'know.' Knowing through 'reason' is another. There are others, but suffice it to say that 'knowledge' is vague at best, especially if (and only if, you bloody atheistic 'scientists') all knowledge is done through the senses.
-Lex PS Ramblings courtesy of Broadley Vineyards in Willamette Valley, Oregon.
Overbearing drukard's mane Sheds shagglies upon my front porch door His words slip out like tangled pain Smelling strongly of cheap Pinot Noir His old worn knees slip to the floor I fast decide that he must move along And with a voice I consider strong I tell him to leave my front porch door Rain upon my roof sings sweet its song I think fondly of the wine and sweets Waiting patiently for me at my seat And so I leave him at the door My dinner consists of soft dark meats Beer, rice, and all manner of delicious eats
Currently
listening
:
Songs For Silverman
By
Ben Folds
Release date: 26 April, 2005
Closed shut tight, her heart remains, Attempts at love it does abstain, Her thighs spread wide, in stark contrast, She tells herself she needs the cash.
After years of drinking himself to death, His wife, now mad, decides on meth, His child, neglected, goes and dies Under the porch, it gathers flies.
Every night he sits and cries, Thinks of his sister, so cool and wise, She died so quick, short of breath, He'd hit her so hard in the chest.
Brother Thomas, My God, alas, Loved to finger a young boys' ass, When caught, he couldn't quite explain, How the boy had died, blunt trauma to the brain.
All these horrible little rhymes, Can barely keep up with the times, The subject material sure is dreadful, But from this culture, I've got a headful.
-Lex
aabbccddddccbbaaeeff
Currently
listening
:
The Lost & Found
By
Rasputina
Release date: 21 January, 2003
After all, the lobbed bricks only broke bones, his face clutched in hands slick with either blood or tears, trembling, his back ached against the wall, the flashing lights tearing past his head and onto the wall opposite his agony-wracked face blasting angry sobs at them. His honor hurt and highlighted by the crowd of lazy onlookers mumbling like a roar into the hole that was once his window. Every one of them knew that there was no way he could return to normal life now. How could he face them after this, he shouted at himself in his head, his fingers gripping his hair as a tearing sound shot into his ears, arriving at his brain a moment after the pain of having his scalped yanked by an angry stranger that was himself. All he wanted to be was normal, and until now his pretense had slipped by the scrutinous eye of his neighbors. No, someone had followed him, from his hideous and wretched past into the present, into his sanctuary of normal, reminding his new life of what he once was.
Currently
listening
:
The Flying Club Cup
By
Beirut
Release date: 09 October, 2007
melancholy
eccentric
focused
adventurous
contemplative
enlightened
thoughtful
moody
drunk
morose
nostalgic
