subject, meet predicate

isn't it interesting how the first sentence shapes the rest of the thoughts streaming forth from it? this could also be said about any sentence, but the first one is the leap between your thoughts and matches'; that rough sandpapery scrape of the chin. a lot rides on the first sentence. as they say in art, the first brushstroke could have been anything, anywhere. the last brushstroke....that had to be exactly as it was, exactly where it was, to have made the painting into the completed picture that now exists after the fact. the freedom, apparently, gets chiseled away gradually somewhere in between.

this all depends on how cohesive one needs their work to be, though. if m were drafting a novel, instead of writing arbitrarily here, there would be a significant amount more weight placed on that skeletal system than this brief one. this could be made of balsa wood, for all anyone cared. patch it with a little glue and surely it will support an ornamental thought or three (tree). this architecture will not be subject to natural forces quite as strong as a larger piece of work - the keystone can be crude and misshapen here. but he is at least learning much from this, so as to hopefully strive toward a masterwork of masonry someday.

because when it comes down to it, this here is an exercise in fleshing things out. in letting thoughts play; in allowing them the room to bounce around and see what else they hit, and what else might strike them in return. it is a billowing, a bellows under his hands that should breathe these things into cognizance, into relation with the world physically....and also tease out essences spiritually, with a coaxing finger (somewhat like a cotton candy machine; an awareness dipped into the cyclone of the unseen, and emerging wound in something quite fantastical and savory. on that note, all things may be cocooned in their own spirits, waiting to curl around ethereal thought-objects). this is a firm handshake directed towards all existence, not just the parts which may reciprocate in like manner.

as such, there are an endless set of possibilities for first sentences, for jump-off points. it's dizzying, really....but this is also the charm of it. without reservation, something can be launched into, and simultaneously it is acknowledged that it must be worthwhile and that it has no more definite value than any other idea which might be pursued. it is a frozen moment, a roll of the dice in the same way that thoughts might be considered a gamble. there are periods, are how much time elapses between each one? always it is different - always this lends a unique characteristic to the rhythm of the explication, the exploration. there are paragraphs, and do they relate with one another? should they exist in the sequencing in which they are found by casual readers? can one say, with any certainty?

whereas a book is a pragmatic calculation, a constant and intentional blurring of 'x' and other factors, polynomially, this instead can be complete chaos and freedom. antimatter has no characters to conceal; no deus ex machina. or rather, all deus ex machina, depending upon how you look at it~ the first sentence....this thing is not a constriction. it does not squeeze his mind, ever-flaring, into an ever-funnelling-smallward corridor. instead it is a flowering, a chance color, stumbled upon, which tints everything after and before and makes them at least somewhat noteworthy. entertaining, enchanting? boring, ludicrous? completely up to you.

platonics

the something that is in the air today: it is autumn. perhaps not verfiably, but there is that old-timey chill in the air....the scratch of sweaters and the pop-crackling musk of cedar smoke from porous brick chimneys. you can smell their red, like you can hear the bleat of a fire-engine. and since i was supposed to be writing my thoughts, and instead had a conversational, here it is.

he: i'm both inside the box and outside of it

most people are in some way or another, i think

she: how are you outside then

he: i like to use my mind in unconventional ways

i like to devote its energies to things that aren't typically attractive to people

or, are attractive, but people never do because they perceive incorrectly that it will be too 'hard'

things are never that 'hard' once you're in them, once you commit to them

then they just 'are', and you can get over it and work your way into or through them

she: like what

he: like books, like writing, like, exercise. like, talking about something that is 'hard' to talk about

people like to follow the path of least resistance

resistance is what makes people interesting though...being bombarded by outside things and influences, and morphing along with them, and emerging something else

she: to what extent should one resist

he: resist what

she: i dunno. you just said resistance

he: oh

i meant, doing something unknown, doing something difficult or big

doing the same things one always does; that is 'easy'

she: so aspiring to do something great or impressive with one's life

he: not necessarily

great and impressive are subjective

just, living, and acknowledging change, and not being sedentary

i think that people who follow their hearts and do these things will probably be pleased with life overall

but, its difficult to be judgmental of people; we are all so different

i'm at a tea shop right now. i go to tea or coffee shops all the time. people see me there. they think probably that i am just running in my same little circles, being a small person with not much ambition to change myself.

but i am *always*, or mostly, doing something different; reading something new and explosive, hashing out a new thought in writing, trying to work my thought around something; creating something in my imagination

but nobody would ever know this

so, when other people who are similar to me talk about 'america' and how lazy and distracted it is, they are grouping me into that category too

they just don't know

and i don't know everyone; there is no way to

so i feel bad making generalized statements about people's interests and personalities....i think probably everyone has the capacity to surprise or impress me if i let them

we just have to exist on a personal level, and follow our hearts i guess

i've been typing a lot just now.

she: heh

he: yr thoughts?

she: i would agree with everything you said

he: would you add to it?

she: do you think there's a truth?

he: a truth?

i dont know

about some things probably

not about everything

i would be surprised if there were a truth about everything

she: what do u mean

he: i dont know...sure, i think there are physical truths

i am here, you are there, jupiter is alla

but i dont know that i think there are definite truths about a lot of things humans spend their time fretting about

either way, i don't think it makes it any less noble that we are fretting about it nonetheless

but if nobility is not a truth, then im really in trouble :)
i kind of live my life on the assumption that trying hard counts for something

she: counts for what

he: i don't know....that it is, important, that we try to be the best that we can be?

if it isn't important then i am probably living my life wrong.

she: says who

he: i'm not sure

i guess most of my philosophies make the assumption of some sort of judgmental force outside of our own selves~

she: does that force also determine what the best version of yourself is or is that up to you

he: good question

i guess i think there is an ideal for myself, which exists outside of myself

but it is entirely possible that i am mistaken about that

she: i feel like that too. how did you arrive at that conclusion

he: maybe not, myself...so much

i feel like there is an ideal for humanity

i feel like correct living is probably to lead by example

in the ideal direction, of course

she: even tho we don't know what ideal necessarily is

he: i feel like i know some things. i work with what i feel like i know

no point in stressing myself out over other things when i can't conclude anything about them

i don't know

maybe my life is worthwhile even if i just advance the species in only one individual aspect of life

she: advance the species?

he: like say, for example, if i knew in my heart a better perspective upon government, or war, or something of that sort

maybe my life would be worthwhile, even if i wasn't the fully, evolved, for lack of a better word, person; but instead i just helped steer humanity in the right direction in one particular aspect

she: sorry if i'm being obnoxious, but what's a right direction

(feel free to change the subject if im boring you)

he: like i said, i feel like i know certain things to be right

like, say, the triumph over laziness....getting out into the world and experiencing, and expanding yourself and your mind and horizons

i feel like that is 'right'

she: how come?

he: you can critique me on that if you want; i don't expect everyone to agree

she: i do agree

he: but if i help people to see that as a valuable thing, that they can cultivate in their own bodies and minds and souls, then maybe that is a worthwhile use of my life even if i don't get everything else right

she: as tho there is a wrong option

he: i think that not capitalizing on the time we have is a 'wrong option'

i'm not entirely positive i am right about that, because who knows, it takes an outside truth to really concretize it

but i do feel it

i feel like what we are experiencing is a gift, and to not use it is to not respect it or the granter of it, if indeed there is one

life is amazing

but, by definition, it is also an everyday thing

it is very easy to let it slip into some sort of jaded perspective

she: so you think it important to respect the granter of life, tho you don't know if there is such a granter

he: i think it is important to respect life. if we do that then the 'granter', if he is around, will be happy for us and for it and for him(it)self

imagine

she: so we can presume to know supposed granter's thoughts and feelings

he: imagine that there is a couple who breaks up, but the woman is pregnant, and she has the child

it is a little girl

she never meets her father or, for the sake of the allegory, is even cognizant that she has one

it just never comes up in conversation, k~

and on the girl's 5th birthday, she comes out into the backyard, and there is a baby horse with a big bow tied around it, for her

the father bought it for her,and the mother takes a picture of the girl with the biggest smile on her face that she will ever, ever, have again in her life

the mother sends it to the father.

and that happiness is the happiness occasioned by respect, by joy in life

she doesn't need to know that he is responsible, that he worked his ass off in a paper mill to pay for it

he just needs to know that she is bursting with happiness

that's all there is to it

you think about things like that, and you just know somewhere deep down that something like that is real love, that it is above and beyond most manifestations of it

the type where there is no need for recognition

she: if he cared that much about her happiness, wouldn't he want to be an actual part of her life too?

he: he can't be; he is detained in a venezuelan prison.

she: if he can send her a horse he can send her a picture and letter :)

he: it is physically impossible for him to be a part of his daughter's life

his name is on the terrorist watch list and all mail he sends out gets burned as soon as it leaves his hands~

except the horse...they waved it over with some metal-detectors and it seemed okay, so they let that through.

she: uh huh~

well if he could be a part of her life then he would

he: it would be better if he were there, but he just can't be

didn't you see the end of raiders of the lost ark? his voice would essplode her head if she heard it

at least, old-testament-style.

she: must have missed that one

anyway, this still says there is a specific sender

gift-wrapped horses dont just show up~

he: its an allegory~

and it was on the fly, so i think i did pretty well

the horse is life.

he already gave her life, but who appreciates just that?

she: true~

he: so, it has a physical manifestation, a happiness

she: precisely

he: did you dislike my story

she: hehe. i did like it. i also liked that it seemed to prove what you were disproving in a way~

he: in what way was that

she: we have a specific sender, and if said sender isn't a physical part of our lives at the moment, said sender sends something that can be to represent

and add to our happiness

he: i'm not savvy to the incongruity here

she: incongruity?

i need to look that word up~

he: non-conforming

she: well that is essentially what your story was communicating, right?

he: well, the physical manifestation, the horse, is just the very fact that we are alive

for me, at least

life is a gift

she: yes

he: and life is hard sometimes; i left out the part of the story where the horse kicks her and breaks her arm, but then feels really bad about it

and of course he craps all over her yard

she: heh yeah

he: but, she loves the horse for what it is

she loves that she can see it, feel it, smell it (ew), taste it (ew), and hear it

in short it is all the potentiality of sensory information

just like the physical world.

she: but who is to say we know what the gift-giver meant by the gift

he: the gift-giver doesn't even need to have a consciousness

i imagine it to, but i wouldn't constrain it in that way

she: then it doesn't care about little girls' birthdays~

he: ay thats the rub

who knows~

she: the rub?

he: shakespeare

the core issue

she: my english degree is not serving me tonite

so the core issue is, who knows

he: heh

well, it's not like we are losing out on life by appreciating it, even if it doesn't mean anything

i am just a proponent of appreciation.

she: as am i.

soundhole

live jazz. m likes how the guitar player's hands, in this particular duo at least, only move as fast as they need to. so many musicians are more frantic than they need to be....more misplaced energy which bleeds out peripherally and lessens the committed sound of the music. and this isn't laziness we are talking about here; it is somewhat the path of least resistance, and somewhat not. it would be a mistake to think that a musician wants to create their peculiar blend of styles with as little effort as possible...no, musicians are of that class which fully appropriates and enjoys infusing melody lines with as much mental velocity as possible. music is, by definition, not inert; it must have motion, and great musicians are the ones who can focus that motion into all the intricate channels that they are conscious of, and perhaps even some channels which they cannot yet definitively cognize but which, when they hear, causes an 'oooo' to issue from their lips along with a look of rapt bewilderment, or depending on the player, of flow and groove.

this path of least resistance is a little bit different than mere laziness. this path is carefully-whittled economization; it is realizing that, in relation to music, the hands may be the agent of creation, but the brain and the soul are the agents of inspiration, of catharsis. this economization bows to them - respects the instrument as more than a tool, rather a channel for these things to cord into existence through. matches will end a sentence with a preposition when he damn well feels like it, thanks. no, the hands are the cause of the reverberations streaming through the air, but they are dumb...they cannot unify with feeling and direct a chorus of subtle mathematics and chromatics; this is the territory of other faculties, more intangible and interpretive things. a masterful player can silence the static of the body, of his hands; the fumbling, the courseness and slip and explorative, driving sensation....this player can silence these sentences spoken by the body and command them to deal with a different authority. this player can redefine rules. then, once the mind of the hands has been emptied, they can accept instruction from the higher source, the music~ they are vessels, poured into and emptied accordingly, all liquids passing through them being energy, being light, being warmth, and perhaps this is why the melodic minor can stir a shiver, curling cat-like up your spine. it is cascading from sources known deep, deep within another body; even ones potentially inspired by something completely transcendental but which your body cannot help but wordlessly comprehend. zen art, instrumental bushido; there can only be one mind which calls forth the spirit of music; only one indelible focus deep within, one door to be opened and all others to be shut.

laptops run out of juice at just the worst times.

matches would insert a quote from saul williams here to end on, but he hasn't one handy. use your imagination; burn his poetics into the sensibilites of rhythm, of melody, of humanity, or spirituality. there you are.

a slip of parched parchment or more

blah. so hard to find time to write when bouncing around from place to place. it is exceptionally difficult to be resigned to these things, to have no creative outlet for a portion of time (additionally, a who-knows-how-long portion of time). this personality is not designed 100% for the tribe; m would give it 70%, at best, on a social day. and so back to silence, to solitude, to the wordless and smiling friendship of nature.

there is a guy sitting next to me, who would make the best of friends with colin onstot. he has been reciting true lies and commando in true schwarzenneger form, not a missed or clipped accent to be critiqued. they have similar styles of banter, similar topics of conversation and rhythms of humor. it is extraordinarily interesting how, the longer m spends on the surface with the birds (obscure), the more he sees people who are similar to people whom he already knows. really, how many combinations or packagings of personality can there be; there are bound to be similarities across the board. even so, it makes one wonder. did these people come from similar backgrounds? are their parents, is their genealogy, convergent or alike in some crucial patternings? did they have similar shadings of emotion and expression as they grew up to become the people they are today? or is it perhaps completely random; god throwing dice and creating intricate dungeons and dragons character-spreads? 11 to intelligence....17 to charisma. a rounded 14 to constitution, unless your favorite hoodie denotes some enchantment, some past life, to keep you up at night.

aside, m had a conversation with rockles not too long ago about similarties between completely separate people. occasionally you will catch flashes, pieces of another person spot-welded onto the frame of another, usually when you least expect it. take, for instance, the way that someone whom you know closely holds their body when idle. maybe they have a slight slouch, or a tilt to the head. they impatiently tap a particular part of their body on another, or one part into whatever stable objects happen to be present. rhoda - "i push my foot against the bed, and thereby affirm that i exist, that i am real". think about the sleights of a hand, of a face. think about the way that your father holds his face, when it isn't occupied in some task or another. people have these maps....matches for instance prefers smiles that are one-sided, but for some reason he cannot smile quite as cheerily with the right side of his face as he can with the left. practiced muscle-memory...an immediate and unconscious responsiveness. and there, that is the trigger....who people are when they are unconscious of being anything in particular; when they are distracted and have no front steeling the world from themselves. these are the things in which mattress notices convergent patterns....a laugh, a sideways glance, a rolling of the shoulder. even if he cannot concretize anything in words about a person (for what an injustice to solidify a person, to seize their mobility and hold them to their previous selves....yet also how essential a reminder in this windswept world), he can press into your palm a picture, a parody of their tocks and ticks. and if not that, at least he can smile about them for himself (those good-natured smiles, occasioned when the veil of society slips up and betrays its inner innocence, its naievete).

this he can tell you, even if he has trouble phrasing it.

i've been thinkin about my doorbell

when you gonna ring it, when you gonna ring it?

mattress has been doing a little bit more reading than usual lately, and it is a good thing. slid somewhat out of the habit....so much to do in new areas. just started a new book yesterday, a biggun. very excited about it. anyway, for the most part he has been reading books that generalize in introspection...those about self and ego, body and spirit, those sorts of things. one sentence in particular struck him whilst flipping through a page of joseph campbell's. obviously there was a lot of built-up context beforehand, and a lengthy explication afterwards, but we shall see if when removed from those bookends the thought is still perhaps just as intriguing.

to paraphase, there is something noticeable which happens when someone dies. the body is still there, but it has been completely voided of its animating force, of its will to live and to perpetuate its own healthy existence. in short, something was there which no longer is...something is missing, removed. it is doubtful that many would argue with this statement, but feel free to unleash in comments if you find yourself rubbed sideways.

now m sat and strummed his mind for some time over this notion. it makes much intuitive sense at first, but like any other statement, it opens up fields and fields to frolick in depending upon what personal and mental associations you may have which resonate with it. and one thing, being somewhat of a man of science, was brought foremost in his sight. he has been contemplating all sorts of different notions for the past while, but a recurrence in his thought is the idea of an afterlife, or of defining what different scenarios could be conceived of as a, continuaton, for lack of a better, of this consciousness which we currently experience our worlds through. for whatever reason his mind grabbed these two thoughts, and smashed them together, possibly to see what remainders fell to the mathematical wayside (things can perhaps best be defined by what the are not). and he happened upon a curious thought.

in all of the world, of physical existence explained by current and/or past paradigms (at least insofar as he is knowledgeable of them), he can think of nothing which truly disappears when it seems to. there are many things which change, yes, but change cannot really be considered a disappearance, can it? when a puddle of water disapparates from the floor overnight, our caveman instincts babble and coo and perhaps rifle through a bucket of sidewalk chalk to search for a color with which to best express our confusions on callous cave walls. but with our cultured brains, shackled and chained, we know what happens here....the water evaporates into the atmosphere and perpetuates one of the most fundamental and natural cycles known in life. the water disappears, but really it is explained and we know it to be nothing more than a shifting of states. name any natural thing which defies this law, and surely matches will devise some clever prize with which to reward your wily fox-consciousness. he is rather confident in asserting this, because he is rather certain that you won't have any aces up your sleeve.

now, one of the clever minds which m enlisted on this problem proposed the idea of quantum physics, in which particles are known to disapparate and apparate all over again, apparently with no logic or methodical structure to the events. and m will perhaps accept subatomic theories tomorrow (perhaps this is why he is writing it tonight....the LHC may append these thoughts with quite a volume of information as soon as tomorrow), but for now he is throwing them out the door. partially on account of his general ignorance of the subject, and partially because perhaps nobody can claim enough knowledge of the subject to necessarily prove it, inasmuch as something can be empirically proved anyway.

so here we are. one dies, and something has disappeared from them. with our corollary information about the world, can we really be so stubborn as to believe that consciousness, or the soul, or whatever you would deem this existence....can we be so stubborn as to believe that it actually just disappears completely when it appears to? should we believe that it vaporizes in some unfathomable, intangible manner? that it returns to a grand cycle; a dying and a rebirthing, again and again? is it possible to explain it in terms which we are predisposed towards; does its nature extend beyond the confines of our ability to express it? he thinks that considering the controversy of the thing, that much at least is clear....we cannot definitively say what it is that happens, or even what the 'soul' encompasses...what its boundaries are. but can we at least cultivate an idea that there is something which happens to it; that it does not simply end in darkness and ennui? the evidence seems to back it up.

energy cannot be created, nor can it be destroyed. it can be shuffled and redealt; swirled and recycled....but nowhere can we find a case of energy ceasing to be. where, then, does the light in your eyes vacation; on what shore does it summer? and before the tides shift, before the seasons are published and frozen in their fleeting moments of majesty....can we winterize ourselves, our truest cores, for the long cold ahead?

"what, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more'...would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'you are a god and never have i heard anything more divine."
~ nietzsche

the raindrops, the raindrops, the raindrops

ah, back from seattle, from a lengthy period of festivities and explorations. apparently matches truly does occasion good-natured weather in that city....it is a phenomenon which he cannot fully explain, but also one which he finds no reason to. like so many things in life.

scintillation is spending a day on your own terms, especially when bookended with social ties on both ends (it helps to make the sensations that much more distinct). it is seeing sights genuinely as you view them, naturally, without distraction. it is hearing the sounds that your mind naturally brings the the forefront of the general static and buzz, and not being alerted to anything other than your own experience. it is spending as much or as minute a moment as you want, with whatever it is that captures your precious attention; it is having enough attention of your own to be able to spend it recklessly and with complete abandon to what might normally be expected of you. it is hopping between slick stones on the river of your own consciousness, no recommendations or outside disillusionments required, and falling in with a splash exactly where you were meant to, precisely where your last thoughts had left off. one must become wet all over again to really appreciate the warmth of dryness.

perhaps europe is a trip that would be best left to one's lonesome. is what mattress is perhaps on the cusp of thinking, of admitting to himself.

matches made somewhat of a resolution today, and you may scoff at it if you please but don't rain of his parade recklessly. his resolve was a temporal one, with a certain future point in sight. by the time that last thursdays roll around in the alberta district again (mid-spring), m would verymuch like to have some salable pieces of art of an as-of-yet undetermined nature or medium which he could contribute with all the other streetfarers. if nothing else, it would be enjoyable to give people a piece of yourself in non-conversational form, and hey it wouldn't hurt if it spawned some conversations. unless those conversations turned violent....then it would hurt. but how likely is that to happen? mattress knows that he has what could be considered a disarming personality, when he feels like exercising it. the art does not have to be particularly 'good' in an artistic sense of the word, but he would like it to have some strokes of timeless nature and uniqueness to it...he would like to infuse some care and comtemnplation into it, and see if other personalities can recognize it as such.

additionally, he aims to have not one but two songs of an acoustic nature, which he can reproduce skillfully on guitar, by this same imaginary time-mark. these songs will be written by himself, and if he is not proud of them then certainly they do not count for the purposes of the ambition, or the gamble, or whatever you would find preference to call it. the silliest thing of all is, that while he considers himself a writer above these other artistic pursuits, he does not currently feel like defining a landmark for himself in that capacity....the writing will come when and as it pleases, and that 'when' may be tomorrow; who can say. perhaps his mind will become favorably shaded by stirring it with other mediums, and words will flow like mountain streams after a long thaw. for whatever reason he feels like writing will always be there for him, but if he does not get a jump on these other aspects of his ability to express then they will surely fall woefully to the wayside. how can one willingly limit their spectrum or scope without giving other landscapes an honest effort? there is a certain charm in the convictions of a bold naievete, but he has wandered on both sides of that fence and found one to hold more interesting flora and fauna to his eye. change is a kaeidoscope from which there can be no escape.

expect great things, and chide him, spur him if he is not at first able to produce them. the most magical of spells take decades of devoted studying, long hours put into careful patience, the sort that is required to deal with the delicate forces at play underneath an ordinary understanding. you will see it for what you will...how deep will you look? will you see the surface, and be ignorant of complexity beneath it? will you find mysterious bliss on those waves, or misunderstood malice? or will you engage just as fully as he, and see how he intended for it to be seen? or will your brain complixify deeper than he intended, burrowing into personal theories, forging fathoms into connections that he could not, in his limited saltwater sight, have foreseen? if that...will he have gotten it right still? will he in the first place, on the surface?