1) i still have a very vivid imagination and, when you're not looking or around me at all, i'm probably ninja-pressing against some wall in an effort to get all cloak-and-dagger with the next person to walk down the wrong hall at the wrong time. an alternative possibility is that there may be magical spells erupting from my fingertips.
2) my #1 favorite food is fruit. my #2 favorite food is sushi.
3) i wouldn't go so far as to call myself obsessive-compulsive, but i'm certainly compulsive-compulsive.
4) i believe that the world is speaking to us, telling us what to do and how to achieve balance, down to even very specific little things. i believe that it is possible to cultivate one's mind such that the whispers which we only catch hints of from time to time become more like a complete and articulate dialogue.
5) while it may not be fashionable to have an amazing, drama-free and well put-together family, i have one that i am so proud to be a part of and wouldn't trade for the world. they give me ground to walk on when everything else is missing.
6) i really like to quantify things, mostly because i think it is an exercise in absurdity. when it comes down to it, the second best coffee i've ever has was really only about 75% as good as the best coffee that i've had.
7) i've always been a sucker for green eyes. when i was little, i wished and wished and wished for green eyes; mine were brown. i wished hard. in high school, my eyes changed colors and now they are 70% green, 30% brown.
that's a funny follow-up to the last point, but these numbers are actually quite verifiable.
8) i aspire to be great at a lot of things, but most poignantly i will be disappointed in myself if i don't end up writing a handful of books that i can be proud of putting out into the world. if i sell out and write gobble-fiction, that might be even worse~
9) my favorite place that i've ever been to is garden of the gods in colorado springs.
10) my most valuable possessions are my old moleskin notebooks, although i rarely ever look back through them. i would be less devastated if my car got stolen.
11) my dreams tend to achieve a balance with my life. when my waking life is extraordinary and exciting, my dreams are mundane. when my life gets repetitive and droll, my dreams unfold thunderous and colorful.
12) i believe in a deeper order of connections between things than just what we can see, and i have one specific personal and surreal experience which i attribute as the anchor of this belief.
13) i've eaten well over 4000 peanut butter & jelly sandwiches in my lifetime.
14) one of the biggest turning points in my life was when i realized that it is okay to feel sad; that we shouldn't always feel the need to grapple for happiness in every moment. that is one of the most liberating perspectives that i have come across.
15) i have a very irregular filing system for my memory. i haven't quite figured it out yet. all i know is that i have an extreme recall of many details, but i need a solid trigger to really unleash them.
16) i tend to judge religions and philosophies on the personalities which they produce.
17) i think of my brain as a tool for making living easier (or more difficult) and more interesting. i come up with strange thought exercises that bend my perception, and i think that they have helped somehow, doing something.
18) at some point in my childhood i founded an assumption that i was going to live for 100 years at minimum. i will probably be disappointed if i don't reach that number, illogical as it may seem to my adult self.
19) a lot of times i am frugal to a point of insanity, and it gets a little out of hand. usually i won't buy things at the supermarket unless they are on sale, and i will rarely get a single drink at a bar. if i'm going to pay for it, then i'm gonna go big or go home, as they say. usually i just get nothing, and am pleased with not paying twelve bucks for a minor buzz.
20) graveyards freak me out a little bit. no, seriously, more than they freak you out. srsly.
21) i love to paint (watercolor), but i have seen what the medium is capable of (wyeth) and i am usually disappointed with what i produce. i was supposed to be an artist at some point.
22) i don't think that i have ever really hated anyone for more than an hour, which has taught me what an immature emotion it is.
23) don't take excessive advantage but, if you're my friend and i can do you a favor at all, i almost always will. i try not to expect anything in return but i might call it in someday~
24) my childhood terror was the banshee from 'darby o'gill and the little people'. i saw the movie when i was 3 or 4 and it scared the bejesus out of me. for something like 10 years.
25) i know that i can fit everything i own inside of my nissan se-r. i bet that i could fit everything i need inside of the glove box.
January 30, 2009
January 24, 2009
pocketful of spare change
we hear so much about how limitless the human is
the indomitable spirit
but indomitable is measured by degree of dominance
nothing more
it could extend only just barely past all history,
we slipping gradually towards that breaking wave
of intensity
which will bring us down
will best us
but can we springboard off of each other,
you and i
devise some infinite sonic-the-hedgehog gravity cheat
some method, overlooked,
whereby we can keep rising, *sproinnng!*
we can access the secret areas
and even places beyond them,
beyond borders, limits
beyond plans
if there is such a thing
beyond ourselves
perhaps what so many seek
in nobility, spirit, the like
is succeeding in surpassing limits.
but how we aim now, bumbling
it would be no great honor to make it beyond ourselves
by some oddity of chance
some shortcut; wormhole
we would probably shatter in the higher frequencies
the mind broken
cyclical, like a record.
if we really want to bring ourselves there
and achieve, and feel that achievement justified
irises flaring
it must be slow and steady
we have to know the pain of trying, failing;
the real motivator in learning.
the indomitable spirit
but indomitable is measured by degree of dominance
nothing more
it could extend only just barely past all history,
we slipping gradually towards that breaking wave
of intensity
which will bring us down
will best us
but can we springboard off of each other,
you and i
devise some infinite sonic-the-hedgehog gravity cheat
some method, overlooked,
whereby we can keep rising, *sproinnng!*
we can access the secret areas
and even places beyond them,
beyond borders, limits
beyond plans
if there is such a thing
beyond ourselves
perhaps what so many seek
in nobility, spirit, the like
is succeeding in surpassing limits.
but how we aim now, bumbling
it would be no great honor to make it beyond ourselves
by some oddity of chance
some shortcut; wormhole
we would probably shatter in the higher frequencies
the mind broken
cyclical, like a record.
if we really want to bring ourselves there
and achieve, and feel that achievement justified
irises flaring
it must be slow and steady
we have to know the pain of trying, failing;
the real motivator in learning.
January 13, 2009
oh dear me
dear future self,
do not be whittled, do not submit. be a channel, a conduit; do not be swept. focus, burn it into your memory, focus, use your memory as your bridge to yourself, rickety, earthen, swaying. breathe in colors, sounds, let your mechanisms dismantle them and amorphously absorb them, then breathe them out in positive geometries, vectors, transpositions; planes like photographs, which originally are sharded from a singular moment, now tidally wrapping the contours of everything that you experience, newness stemming from the old, mycelial, hieroglyphic. burst forth with being.
do not be whittled, do not submit. be a channel, a conduit; do not be swept. focus, burn it into your memory, focus, use your memory as your bridge to yourself, rickety, earthen, swaying. breathe in colors, sounds, let your mechanisms dismantle them and amorphously absorb them, then breathe them out in positive geometries, vectors, transpositions; planes like photographs, which originally are sharded from a singular moment, now tidally wrapping the contours of everything that you experience, newness stemming from the old, mycelial, hieroglyphic. burst forth with being.
January 11, 2009
maintenance
one of the most frustrating aspects of adult life, for me, has to be the incessant maintenance required of us in just about everything that we do. this is an inescapable facet, i believe, but i still feel the need to make note of it. it just took me two hours to swap out all the music on my ipod, and replace it with various tunes which i had hunted and gathered like a tribal warrior with a flash-drive spear. there is the endless question of what will and won't make the cut onto my portable music player, because there has to be a delicate balance there....a good amount of organic, fresh produce, which spurs the mind and body in quite a different way than the processed and already-digested music which we have incorporated and cycled into our personalities already. then too, there is the consideration of leveling and balancing the recipe overall, such that you don't end up genre-heavy because you didn't take the time to level off your spoons correctly. nothing worse than a playlist with too much nutmeg in it; it will throw off the whole flavor of your month. then of course one has selected 20 gigs instead of the required 16, and you must go back to pare down the whole thing.
but the point is that this maintenance, constant, is deadening, dulling; it robs us of such vital and diminishing time in our lives. i know some people who relish kneading their fingers into this, but personally i just can't understand it. i want to do, not prepare. probably an immature perspective for me to adopt, but what really is immaturity but an unwillingness to accept the way things are? a healthy idealism has its positive sides, as well. one should struggle to not become to sheepish in their allowances for the intrusion of life's harshness. we probably often put up with much more than we should.
this is only accentuated by the fact that i work at a medical device company, which requires the most stringent of all possible documentation regarding anything that happens in the process of developing and/or selling a product. you can perhaps imagine how frustrating it is to have to do something, anything, and then record it in a particular format.....also involved is knowledge of the format, the medium, the jargon, and keeping an eye out for how to describe something that you would normally just DO, and forget about afterwards.
maintenance creeps into my life from all fronts...there is the keeping up with cleaning, hygiene, paperwork (bank, phone, insurance, taxes, junk mail, real mail, the mail that is kind of real and kind of junk), exercise, diet. these are the realities which are not told to you when you are growing up; they are the chisels of operable society which eventually wear people down into little lumps of their original potential. i know people so involved that they could go for weeks, viably months, perhaps years, of nothing but such maintenance. maintenance and life become inextricable. friends get offended, consciously or subconsciously, if they are not kept up with every so often; i feel it in myself and can infer from that. having many friends becomes a whole system of its own, an solar system in which planets cannot swing too far from your star before they start to drain warmth, before the flora and fauna which grows between two people begin to die off and begin to be brushed away for different climates. a comfort: there are exceptions to this.
what is frustrating about the whole thing is that you can't really understand all the intricacies of something until you dig into it yourself. this makes these mundane preparations and adjustments necessary, to avoid being coddled into a general sense of luxurious ignorance. nobody likes someone who can't do any footwork for themselves, or won't. i recently heard about a service, a help-desk secretary sort of thing, and people are now contracting out this service who aren't busy professionals....some are just average people who don't want to deal with contesting a visa charge, or haggling over a doctor's bill, or going out to buy argyle socks. instead they pay a modest fee to have someone else take care of their busy-work. this sounds fantastic, but also ridiculous to a degree. like trying to buy back time wasted at a different market price. i suppose the real question is, does busy-work really constitute wasted time? so much that i write on here is a direct refuting of typical value systems, which so many people seem to have such an easy time with. i'm not sure what is different about myself, such that i was not able to adopt many of the same systems as the average person. many people would be completely content living on a ranch in a small town, doing work for the day, taking care of children until the night, sleeping in the liminal spaces between. or a law firm; pick your flavor. there's a good chance that i myself could be completely content with this storybook farmhand lifestyle. these are just things to be threshed out, combed for, well, really, whatever i can find of myself in them. what else could i be searching for? there does seem to be a genuine, good, productive feeling that emerges from accomplishing little tasks, or big tasks, which have nothing to do with some transcendental truth or existential realization. certainly those little tasks provide more concreteness, a more solid realization of something than that other, which is a constantly fluctuating field and wavers along with me from hour to hour. but am i conditioned to feel good, to feel justified after a day of errands? have i moved myself any closer to some goal; have i oiled some machinery which aids in that other?
is there a point?
can i develop something, some logic pattern, a cerebral independence, such that it eliminates the need for this? can i exist in two places at the same time?
but the point is that this maintenance, constant, is deadening, dulling; it robs us of such vital and diminishing time in our lives. i know some people who relish kneading their fingers into this, but personally i just can't understand it. i want to do, not prepare. probably an immature perspective for me to adopt, but what really is immaturity but an unwillingness to accept the way things are? a healthy idealism has its positive sides, as well. one should struggle to not become to sheepish in their allowances for the intrusion of life's harshness. we probably often put up with much more than we should.
this is only accentuated by the fact that i work at a medical device company, which requires the most stringent of all possible documentation regarding anything that happens in the process of developing and/or selling a product. you can perhaps imagine how frustrating it is to have to do something, anything, and then record it in a particular format.....also involved is knowledge of the format, the medium, the jargon, and keeping an eye out for how to describe something that you would normally just DO, and forget about afterwards.
maintenance creeps into my life from all fronts...there is the keeping up with cleaning, hygiene, paperwork (bank, phone, insurance, taxes, junk mail, real mail, the mail that is kind of real and kind of junk), exercise, diet. these are the realities which are not told to you when you are growing up; they are the chisels of operable society which eventually wear people down into little lumps of their original potential. i know people so involved that they could go for weeks, viably months, perhaps years, of nothing but such maintenance. maintenance and life become inextricable. friends get offended, consciously or subconsciously, if they are not kept up with every so often; i feel it in myself and can infer from that. having many friends becomes a whole system of its own, an solar system in which planets cannot swing too far from your star before they start to drain warmth, before the flora and fauna which grows between two people begin to die off and begin to be brushed away for different climates. a comfort: there are exceptions to this.
what is frustrating about the whole thing is that you can't really understand all the intricacies of something until you dig into it yourself. this makes these mundane preparations and adjustments necessary, to avoid being coddled into a general sense of luxurious ignorance. nobody likes someone who can't do any footwork for themselves, or won't. i recently heard about a service, a help-desk secretary sort of thing, and people are now contracting out this service who aren't busy professionals....some are just average people who don't want to deal with contesting a visa charge, or haggling over a doctor's bill, or going out to buy argyle socks. instead they pay a modest fee to have someone else take care of their busy-work. this sounds fantastic, but also ridiculous to a degree. like trying to buy back time wasted at a different market price. i suppose the real question is, does busy-work really constitute wasted time? so much that i write on here is a direct refuting of typical value systems, which so many people seem to have such an easy time with. i'm not sure what is different about myself, such that i was not able to adopt many of the same systems as the average person. many people would be completely content living on a ranch in a small town, doing work for the day, taking care of children until the night, sleeping in the liminal spaces between. or a law firm; pick your flavor. there's a good chance that i myself could be completely content with this storybook farmhand lifestyle. these are just things to be threshed out, combed for, well, really, whatever i can find of myself in them. what else could i be searching for? there does seem to be a genuine, good, productive feeling that emerges from accomplishing little tasks, or big tasks, which have nothing to do with some transcendental truth or existential realization. certainly those little tasks provide more concreteness, a more solid realization of something than that other, which is a constantly fluctuating field and wavers along with me from hour to hour. but am i conditioned to feel good, to feel justified after a day of errands? have i moved myself any closer to some goal; have i oiled some machinery which aids in that other?
is there a point?
can i develop something, some logic pattern, a cerebral independence, such that it eliminates the need for this? can i exist in two places at the same time?
January 8, 2009
boards of canada
i am getting my ideas in line and i feel more and more, with what i am learning about writing, that a large project is right on my horizon. my plan currently is to busy myself as much as possible....not only with scribbles, but with music, with language, with art, with exploration (just probably not of an outwardly social nature; had a lot of that already and need to recess a little into my own worlds). is it too much to expect yourself to be able to branch out over multiple projects? i hope not....someone once said to me that if you want to get something accomplished, give it to a busy person. the mind somehow just aligns itself with intention, and piggybacks onto so many other factors involved in motivation. have you ever been bowling, and stared down one of the marks on the lane while you were winding up for a toss? really zoomed your focus down onto it? somehow the ball just finds its way there, as though the ball understands. and it does, in a way; it follows your body which understands intention much better and more precisely than we do. if there is one distinct thing that i have learned from meditation, it is that there is a cleverness to silence, to the absence of thought in its streaming form...silence is a variation on the theme of nature, and its transmission does a lot more good in terms of communication, it seems, than screaming obscenities into the emerald sides of a forest.
silence and writing, though...these two things are seemingly poles of a spectrum. it's impossible to be a silent writer....or at least, if it is possible, i haven't yet been made aware of a method towards achieving it, and wouldn't be certain of wanting it in the first place. the silence is what a writes rallies against and battles, even though really he can be trying to do nothing more than describe it in a glorified manner, if the situation calls for it. thoughts are different for everybody. perhaps silences are one of the great unifiers. at any rate, things seems to be set up in such a way that writing is an immense complexity: it involves finding your center, your calm eye of the storm, and maintaining in it such that you can obtain the perspective that you need to really possess a story instead of being consumed by it, by all the possibilities; to play master instead of minion. jeff expressed it to me quite succinctly the other day...that artistic inclinations are a like a djinn flying free from a lamp. you have to be able to contain them, or they will trick you with their cleverness; they will spin you round and round until you are completely disoriented. they can destroy you as a functional person; look to history if you need any semblance of evidence. but, if you can reign them in, if you can chain them and train them, have them do your bidding without letting them get the upper hand (which their explosive nature is apt to do; dizzying, damaging), then you can accomplish great things and amaze with your originality, with the spells of an unencumbered mind loosed upon the world.
one must know their own limits. it seems that possibility has none, and that it will balloon and balloon, fuming fiery generative on the inside. letting these thoughts pass through consciousness is an amazing and enlightening experience, but training them, focusing them, controlling them, is where one must know themselves or risk more than would be assumed to be at risk in most human endeavors.
it would be easy to write something trite, something book laced with consumption. it would probably be relatively easy to bend towards a casablanca style, a plot-and-drama spurring hollywood locked in verbs. people would read, it wouldn't challenge them very much; this would probably please them, or trick them into thinking they were pleased. but to actually come up with something inspired, something which forays into privately or publicly unexplored territory...this would leave a scorch-mark, and should be treated as such (with caution). it takes great personal fury, and not the angry kind, to be able to spin such a dynamo off of the fingertips. it takes knowing your brain as one knows an instrument. feeling it in the hands, as though it is an extension of you and a clear palate for expression. knowing what keys and chords to hit, and what, in particular, those effects have upon you. how you would steer it, with the wheel endlessly in your hands alone, as it should be.
"life is a blast when you know what you're doing
best to know what you're doing
'fore your life get ruined
life is a thrill when your skill is developed
if you ain't got a skill or trade,
then shut the hell up."
~heiroglyphics - at the helm
silence and writing, though...these two things are seemingly poles of a spectrum. it's impossible to be a silent writer....or at least, if it is possible, i haven't yet been made aware of a method towards achieving it, and wouldn't be certain of wanting it in the first place. the silence is what a writes rallies against and battles, even though really he can be trying to do nothing more than describe it in a glorified manner, if the situation calls for it. thoughts are different for everybody. perhaps silences are one of the great unifiers. at any rate, things seems to be set up in such a way that writing is an immense complexity: it involves finding your center, your calm eye of the storm, and maintaining in it such that you can obtain the perspective that you need to really possess a story instead of being consumed by it, by all the possibilities; to play master instead of minion. jeff expressed it to me quite succinctly the other day...that artistic inclinations are a like a djinn flying free from a lamp. you have to be able to contain them, or they will trick you with their cleverness; they will spin you round and round until you are completely disoriented. they can destroy you as a functional person; look to history if you need any semblance of evidence. but, if you can reign them in, if you can chain them and train them, have them do your bidding without letting them get the upper hand (which their explosive nature is apt to do; dizzying, damaging), then you can accomplish great things and amaze with your originality, with the spells of an unencumbered mind loosed upon the world.
one must know their own limits. it seems that possibility has none, and that it will balloon and balloon, fuming fiery generative on the inside. letting these thoughts pass through consciousness is an amazing and enlightening experience, but training them, focusing them, controlling them, is where one must know themselves or risk more than would be assumed to be at risk in most human endeavors.
it would be easy to write something trite, something book laced with consumption. it would probably be relatively easy to bend towards a casablanca style, a plot-and-drama spurring hollywood locked in verbs. people would read, it wouldn't challenge them very much; this would probably please them, or trick them into thinking they were pleased. but to actually come up with something inspired, something which forays into privately or publicly unexplored territory...this would leave a scorch-mark, and should be treated as such (with caution). it takes great personal fury, and not the angry kind, to be able to spin such a dynamo off of the fingertips. it takes knowing your brain as one knows an instrument. feeling it in the hands, as though it is an extension of you and a clear palate for expression. knowing what keys and chords to hit, and what, in particular, those effects have upon you. how you would steer it, with the wheel endlessly in your hands alone, as it should be.
"life is a blast when you know what you're doing
best to know what you're doing
'fore your life get ruined
life is a thrill when your skill is developed
if you ain't got a skill or trade,
then shut the hell up."
~heiroglyphics - at the helm
January 1, 2009
colorado
consuming, my time.
well it has been quite an eventful trip out here, with many good peoples and conversations. it's the new year now and, frankly, i'm not sure i have been as excited for a year, ever, as i am currently for this one. and i'm not sure that there is anything specific holding it together, in expectation, or setting it distinctly apart from any other. for one, i have started playing more guitar, getting more confident about writing (and myself as a person, for that matter), exploring, and have just acquired the french version of rosetta stone and a multitude of potential avenues of explosion in the form of Reason 4. who could ask for more in terms of potential? my time is, as of now, spoken for. and i think it is likely that i shall emerge much improved (and finally have some things to show for it) after the next twelve months. which is kind of an arbitrary timeline, to be sure, but it seems to be a line that people mentally associate with crossings for obvious reasons, though perhaps it might be more appropriate sometimes if transposed a month or two in rewind or fast-forward~
ducks are in rows. targets are set up.
well it has been quite an eventful trip out here, with many good peoples and conversations. it's the new year now and, frankly, i'm not sure i have been as excited for a year, ever, as i am currently for this one. and i'm not sure that there is anything specific holding it together, in expectation, or setting it distinctly apart from any other. for one, i have started playing more guitar, getting more confident about writing (and myself as a person, for that matter), exploring, and have just acquired the french version of rosetta stone and a multitude of potential avenues of explosion in the form of Reason 4. who could ask for more in terms of potential? my time is, as of now, spoken for. and i think it is likely that i shall emerge much improved (and finally have some things to show for it) after the next twelve months. which is kind of an arbitrary timeline, to be sure, but it seems to be a line that people mentally associate with crossings for obvious reasons, though perhaps it might be more appropriate sometimes if transposed a month or two in rewind or fast-forward~
ducks are in rows. targets are set up.
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