Patches of Matches'

Deep Exhale

2011-04-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

I don't always meditate, but when I do, I find that it helps me in significant ways.

It's been a long time since I've pursued meditation as a mode of living....that is, made time for it on a consistent basis such that it became foundational in my life. A very long time. This is unfortunate, but understandable....I just fail to carve out a station for it in my day-to-day activities. Perhaps it is that I am unwilling to commit to it because I've got more important priorities (unlikely, considering how much time I spend socializing and imbibing, etc.), or perhaps it is that I am intimidated by it. I can't precisely calculate the equation which leaves me in vapid stupors of non-reflection. The more frustrating angle, however, is that each time I *do* make time for it, it ends up being incredibly fruitful and rewarding. I have such a solid track record with it making me feel good, feel great, that I don't know why my brain refuses to make a habit of it. Maybe I feel the need to do it in a social setting, so that I don't feel so secluded during my time spent sitting. I'm sure that Portland, of all cities, has active communities who pursue awareness and presence together. Perhaps I've just slipped into a mode of being too hedonistic, and I need to consciously redirect my intentions towards the more fulfilling motions of thought~

Regardless, I sat down on my meditation cushion the other day with the intention of just staring out my floor-level single-pane window and trying to void my mind of thoughts. This, as some of you may know, is a startlingly difficult task to accomplish the first time that you sit after a long drought of meditation. Your mind rebels against you, trying to prod you towards social activities or the numbing sensations of the internet. Your body clashes with your intention as well, persistently trying to realign itself into poor postures and arched limbs. Posture may be an even bigger struggle for me personally than the thought redirection, to be honest...it's one of the things I've hoped that meditation would help me to improve (and it has, but only when I am consistent with it). A distracted mind is mildly frustrating when you cannot reign it in, but an ill-postured body causes physical pain after about five minutes....which - at least my mind - tends to treat on a higher order of attention.

I didn't have a terribly long sit; perhaps twenty minutes all said. Mental frustration, bodily fatigue, communicative distractions all in play. Near the end, however, I remembered a little technique that the Shambhala crew in Boulder taught me during one of their classes...."Breathing in, I am myself. Breathing out, I am here". It sounds nonsensical if you haven't shared in the stock of meditative frustrations, I am sure, but this little phrase has helped me immensely over the years. Most seasoned meditation initiates that you speak to (or yoga, or tai-chi; what have you) will tell you that one of the most important functions is breath. From what I gather, both in word and in practice, is that this is because focusing on your breathing gives you something simple, something rhythmic, to sharpen the blade of your mind upon. It does not involve words - which as far as voiding your mind goes, helps significantly - and it caresses your entire being, lulling you into a focused complacency (perhaps it mimics beta waves in your brain, or some such hard science). All I know is that it leaves you with purely physical responses....an inward-focus that observes the breath as it enters and exits your body, and the general path of that lifeblood as it circulates through you in between the two.

Personally, as I breathe in and out, I find it helps me greatly to focus on the aforementioned mantra...breathing in, I am myself; breathing out, I am here. When I flow over the first half in my mind, as I breathe in, it somehow delivers to me a wordless phantasmagoria of all the most significant images and notions in my life which I have come to associate with myself. Pictures swirl around my head like turning pages in a photo album, and trails of words, morals, demons, personal meanings and truths snake around the contours of my body and mind, informing and defining me in all the ways which I have become accustomed to being an isolated, self-contained consciousness. There are countless reasons why this is a powerful experience, but most prominently and forefront in my mind is that is plucks me from the amalgam of society like some sort of spiritual crane-game, focusing me on myself, both my meanings and my methods, for best and for worst.

Secondly, I exhale, reciting the second half of the guidance: breathing out, I am here. This phrase immediately grounds me....wraps up my whole from the in-breath, wordless but colorful, and plants it firmly in the ground wherever I happen to be. My roots flood outward, connecting to objects and expanses which surround me, and I feel the empowerment of being a sentient being placed in a specific time and place, with the self-capacity necessary to change all of it, any of it, if I so choose to, either by plotted plan or capricious whim. It stirs up a frenzy of appreciation for the ability to be here (there), to perceive and process everything that is going around me, and for the gift of self-agency which brought me here and continues to bring me farther still in every waking moment.

The I repeat, recycle, until clean or overly-fatigued.

These two concepts, anchored on the in-breath and the out-breath, create a powerful orbit of awakening within me, a cadence which structures my mind. When I step away from meditating, these things stick with me for a time (sometimes short, sometimes longer) and generate an intentional consciousness which is less distracted, more precise and yet more open. I do it for the perspective, I do it for the appreciation which is suddenly infused into each object, each person, each motion and feeling. I do it because it makes me feel, for a time, like the best incarnation of myself that I can possibly be.

Normally this process is incredibly frustrating the first few times that I sit down to do it after being away from any semblance of a routine, but a few days ago, for whatever reason, mental calm pervaded quickly (if not briefly). Each time I am able to relax into the situation, I learn something new about it....information seems to come in waves throughout life; when repeating the same activity, you will gain new perspective upon it. Regardless, a bit of the meaning of what I realized was infused into the last few paragraphs, but essentially it was that the breath embodies both of our human functions within the universe. When breathing in, I effectively breathe the world into myself....taking in its objects, thoughts, sensations, triumphs, and maladies. My body processes them in what way it sees fit, which usually I ask for minimal oversight on, and stores them accordingly. Then, breathing out, I release these transformed impressions back into the world in the form of new thoughts, new actions, new objects and achievements. Essentially I am a processing agent for the universe, perpetually draining it and destroying it, invigorating and renewing it. I see how easy it is to lose control of your own thoughts, your own processes, and in some small way this is doing the world a large injustice. If you find the ability and the strength to maintain focus, to output something equal or better than what you take in, it will transform everything around you.

To breathe is an art form; to breathe is life. Our breath is the breath of the universe.

The Art of War

2011-02-05T14:47:00.000-08:00

Alright, I haven't updated this business since I was in Europe, which last I checked was over 2 months ago. I'm bordering on a large amount of frustration with my novel, and I think the main problem is Colorado Springs. I mean, perhaps it is my mindstate, and I shouldn't be blaming something as mindless and unlikely as an entire city. Still, though, I feel like there is some merit to the claim when analyzed in the proper light.

Moreso than anything else, it is MY particular experience of this city. I have a few scattered friends left here, but the majority of them are either running in ruts that they have dug for themselves, or trapped in downward-spiraling relationships which rust over most of the basic enjoyments of life for them. This is a frustrating position for me to be in, because I feel like I don't have a correct or healthy social outlet to really satiate my appetites for interaction. In Portland and especially in Europe, I had droves of people to express myself to and explore with. Here, I barely have a reason to leave the house. You would think, at first glance, that this would be good for a writing project...giving me plenty of time to buckle down and get invigorated about the world that I am creating in my head. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, this is not working well for me. When I get up in the morning, I often look at my computer and feel a shiver of revulsion towards it. I occupy myself in other ways, with books or movies or something of the sort. Then I start to feel guilty because I know I have so much progress that I need to be spindling off my fingertips, and it is not happening.

Sometimes I do find bursts of inspiration....I usually try to write at least once or twice a day. Most of these efforts end in frustration (and moreso, distraction, I think because I feel socially unfulfilled for the time being), but some of them do result in writing and story progress which I am proud of. I'm at least making progress, even if not at the clip that I would hope for. The mainline of this post, however, is a concern about writing in general, because I feel that my hesitance and dodging of it is beginning to color the activity, the experience of actually writing, in a dismal grey. Whereas before....perhaps before, it was a vibrant green, or a cerulean blue~

Karl at Trident (where I currently am, coincidentally) once told me that the most important time to write, to his mind, was when you were most frustrated with your writing process and lack of inspiration. It rung somewhat true to me at the time, but I'm beginning now to realize how many pages of experience that sentence probably resonated with in his mind. I was amateur (at best) then; hell, I would be hard-pressed to call myself anything but amateur still. This guy was probably in his mid-fifties, though, so to him it must be (even though I didn't know it at the time he spoke it) an overarching axiom which governed his life, his entire creative process. Now that I can apply my more seasoned perspective to this one-upon-a-statement of his, it begins to snowball with meaning. I can only imagine that it will continue to do so for the rest of my life, or writing career....whichever turns out to be shorter.

I know deep down that if I continue to press on in my efforts to write (I am talking now about a singular instance, one moment where I apply my fingers to the keyboard and try to push one of them a millimeter down, enough to make a single character register - but knowing that to do this is a first brushstroke, and it will necessarily govern every one which follows it), I will eventually break through to expressing something potent, something which I feel is meaningful to me personally, to the point where sentences will begin to tumble through my mind faster than my hands can record them. That's the goal; also the rub. Many times that I end up sitting with my hands resting gingerly on the keys, I cannot make that first millimeter-drop. I get anxious. And when that happens, your body expresses itself as it usually does in situations of anxiety: activating your fight-or-flight response; stealing electricity from your imagination and surging instead straight to the amygdala. Then I just close the screen....then I just turn on an episode of Seinfeld.

I feel like if I had more satiation, my creativity would flow much more freely. My mind would latch easier onto concepts, and develop them in intriguing ways. This city in Winter, however, leaves me feeling stagnant on many fronts. It drones and buzzes and dulls the blade of my mind, and I think this is fatiguing me....physically, from just sitting much of the time and perhaps not getting enough exercise (a writer's curse as well), but also mentally, crushing my creativity by not supplying an outlet for interaction with nature, for witticisms traded amongst friends, for philosophy which juices the mind for all its contents.

I'll do my best with the situation as I can until I get back to Portland. Only a month more~ The goal is a first draft by the time I arrive. We'll find out if that's a reasonable expectation.

Paris - 9/11/10

2010-09-14T02:23:00.000-07:00

Well, first, allow me to update the rest of the France section. After day one, I woke up by myself and walked over to the Musee D'Orsee (I think this is the spelling). This was, overall, one of the better museums I had gone to thus far on the trip. There was good representation from many of the artists I enjoy, especially the impressionists....saw paintings by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Pissarro, Monet, Rembrandt, and a card-catalogue's worth of other painters with whom I wasn't familiar. The crowning achievement of the D'Orsee was their sculpture collection, however, which was vast. One of the the ticket packages included a sculpture garden with works by Rodin, and I was disappointed that when I attempted to purchase said package I was denied as too much time had allegedly passed in the day. Happily, however, there was a good share of Rodin as well as countless other sculptors in the regular portions of the museum.

After that I wandered around aimlessly South of the Seine river, which divides Paris into two halves. I randomly stumbled upon Notre Dame, which was fortunate because I had forgotten that it was present in Paris at this point and probably would not have seen it otherwise. This cathedral was stunning, staggering. I managed to leave there just a little before the good part of the sunset, so at least the light was dynamic for a few of my photos of the place. It's very strange though, walking along the tourist-portioned sections along the perimeters of the cathedral, all while regular Catholic services are going on for the people within the velvet rope barriers. It feels like the tourist presence is incredibly obtrusive, and I'm not quite certain how the regular church patrons (as well as diocese) put up with all the flashing lights and muffled footsteps crashing about their place of worship at all hours. Even for as majestic as that church is, the rampant tourism of the place rather cheapened the experience of going there. I stayed for a bit of the service and then left when I felt overwhelmed. It's a powerful place; there is no escaping the vibrations of their pipe organ.

The next day I wandered up to the train station to purchase my ticket to Amsterdam, because I needed to book it beforehand to reserve space. This put me up by Montmartre, so I took in some of the sights there. Sacre Coure is an amazing chapel on the pinpoint top of a steep hill, and when you get up to the top of it you not only have an amazing tour of a chapel - which, if not rivaling Notre Dame, at least comes close – but also an amazing panoramic view of all of Southern Paris. There are people littered all over the grassier parts of the hill, as well as musicians playing harps and guitars and various scammers and schemers trying to rope people in to purchasing small bits of colored string by using basic psychological principles. I'm really glad I made it to this spot. Afterwards, I walked down through Montmartre and got a coffee at the cafe in which Amelie was shot. It looked drastically different from it's representation in the movie, but they certainly capitalize on the marketing involved in being associated with a blockbuster movie~

On my last day in Paris I woke up, said goodbye to the people I had met at the hostel, and walked over to the Louvre. This museum was too much, literally. If I had a week of exploring it I would perhaps then come close to seeing the majority of their art. Instead, you have to be very selective about where and what you intend to see, because the crowds are incredibly daunting, both slowing you down in between exhibits and speeding you up to the point where you cannot comfortable observe a painting for more than ten seconds without feeling as though you are causing a bottlenecking of the crowd behind you. At least, this was the case in the Denon wing, which is where most of the famous paintings (Mona Lisa, etc) are. I hit this spot first because I knew the crowds would be smaller early in the morning...I didn't go back later but I imagine that they were daunting (at best) in the afternoon. Then I toured through various cultural sections, ending in the Louvre sculpture gardens. I had thought that the D'Orsee had an intimidating sculpture collection, but the Louvre put it to shame (mostly older pieces, but still.) I spent far too long here, and ended up leaving the museum right after in order to make it back to the train station for the Amsterdam rail.

Paris

2010-09-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

Arriving in Paris was a shitstorm. I may have forgotten to mention that while I was in London, they decided to have a rail-strike which made traveling around the city somewhat difficult for the last two days that I was there. The train to Paris was still running luckily, but aside from that, not much. Fast forward to Paris....I arrive and the exact same thing is going on here. Basically on the same days, just pushed out perfectly to fuck with me the maximum amount. I tried to laugh about it at first, but then it became less and less funny when all the hostels and hotels within a kilometer of the rail station had either been booked up by people screwed over waiting for their trains, or other usual travelers such as myself who arrived early enough to score them. After a very frustrating march around Montmartre looking for a spot to sleep, I returned to the train station resolute to just sleep there, but even that is not allowed apparently as there is not much space for it.

So, I went nearby and started asking around about places to stay, finally hearing about a little youth hostel by the Louvre which had rooms available. It was over a mile away and already 11:30 PM, but fuck it, I said to myself, I'm going to walk there with the backpack and all. That went decently enough for about ten minutes, until it started to rain, and then soon after started to pour. I hate blowing money unnecessarily, but at this point I hailed a taxi to get to the spot. The driver spoke not one word of English, which was fantastic for me, as you can imagine. Also, taxi drivers in Paris? Extremely slow.

Eventually I made it to the hostel and calmed down enough to relax and fall asleep. The next day I woke up and met a few good people in the hostel...Santiago, from Argentina, and Vout, a professional-caliber pole-vaulter and track-and-field athlete from Holland. These guys were awesome, and conveniently had not yet done much in the city. We embarked first to a cemetery which Vout's father had told him to visit, the 'Cimitiere du Pere Lachaise', which was, at least as far into the Paris stay as I am currently, the coolest thing I have done here. It was ridiculously mind-blowing. First off, it is devastatingly huge. Secondly, every grave and tomb is an absolute piece of art, and about half or more are gigantic. I have somewhere on the order of 50 pictures just from the time we spent there. Lastly, there are a whole host of famous people buried there. We did not figure this out until we stumbled upon Chopin's grave, which was basically covered in fresh-cut flowers from all of his adoring contemporary fans. Later we found a map and sought out the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Marcel Proust. Obviously I was the one making the calls on which ones we saw~

Then we hopped on a bus and rolled out across the city, seeing a bunch of landmarks just from the windows there. We got out at the Eiffel Tower, and walked all over from there, basically all the way back to our hostel by the Louvre. We saw many huge buildings with amazing architecture, as well as the Arc de Triomphe, Napoleon's Tomb, the Grand and Petite Palais(es?), and Champs Elysees (basically a street, but it has a lot of cred around here for tourists). When we got back to the hostel we relaxed a bit and then went out for food and debauchery, roping in some girls and guys as we went, and had a blast on the town although much of it was spent wandering around on drunken goose-chases for trendy bars which may or may not have existed. Overall a great time.

Today is now the next day, and I've done some stuff, but I'd rather stop writing for now and recharge a bit. Will upload some photos from this section when I get more moments. Also, these entries are going to be extremely sporadic because I am having extreme difficulty with internets out here....most places charge for it, and even when I find a free network the EeePC has serious problems when it comes to connecting. I hope this changes in the next few countries.

Au revoir~

Monsoir Mautchez

More of London

2010-09-09T11:44:00.000-07:00

Well, how about an update on how the rest of London went? Let me start at the beginning. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marrying Humperdink in about chalf an hour.

To begin with, my entrance into London was somewhat remarkable, as I thought that they might throw me out the proverbial gates and send me back home without a trip under my belt. When I got in line for customs or entrance or whatever you call the passport check, I was directed to a man who would be best described as somewhere in the spectrum between mildly upset and downright surly. It was as though someone ran over his beloved dog the night before.

When I got up to the window he began drilling me with questions, most of which I had no legitimate answer for. Mind you, it is his job to look out for suspicious behavior; I don't believe that I was acting suspiciously in the least. My usual chipper self after a red-eye flight, which took some effort. He asked me where I was staying since I hadn't written it in on the card. I told him that I didn't know yet; my friends were out of town and I hadn't felt comfortable booking a hostel sight-unseen, since I knew of a few that were in the same general area. Agent did not like this. Then he asked me for proof that I was leaving his country sometime soon (what a jerk), and I told him that I was flying back from Madrid but that I didn't have a hard copy of the ticket on my person. Agent did not like this. I told him that I was taking the Eurostar to France in less than a week, which I also had not yet booked. Apparently I am a shadow with no evidence. They do not like this.

He also asked me a barrage of other uncomfortable questions, such as how much hard currency I had on me ($30 US), and how much was in the checking account which I was planning on accessing from ATM's, as well as whether or not I had any proof of the reported sum. Agent did not like that I had none of this. But, in the end, my charming demeanor won out and he let me into England with a bit of a lecture.

Jerk.

After that minor hiccup, things went much more smoothly. I found a great hostel, met some cool people from South Africa and Australia, and then proceeded to do a variety of things that normal tourists go do, and some that they do not. I visited the British Museum, which was amazing. They have the Rosetta Stone, etc, and some of the most detail-oriented recovered art and metalwork which I have ever borne witness to. I walked along some good areas: Trafalgar Sq (where I stumbled upon a very unlikely poker-event where I got to play a few free games for prizes), Piccadilly Circus (no lions or bears, just breakdancers), Hyde Park (Speaker's Corner has been bastardized and was a huge letdown, but the park is beautiful), and Camden Market which was an amazing collection of people and booths/stables/stores selling just about any item or food which you could desire.....imagine all the open-air markets in Oregon and Washington all smashed into one area~

I also went to the Science Museum, which for how general a name it has was quite good. They have a great interactive psychology exhibit which was mentally accessible and challenging for both 5-year olds and 27-year olds. I don't know where to put the hyphen when I type ages. Additionally I met up with my South African friends at the Tate Modern (art museum), which was just about the most spectacular art museum I have witnessed. They have loads of amazing surrealistic and progressive art that I had never seen before, even in photos. It was a crash-course in a whole movement of painting and sculpture. Nearby I went to the Globe Theatre (Shakespeare y'all), but refused to pay seventeen pounds to tour it's meager interior regions. Ah well.

Lastly I met up with Will and Ilana when they got back from Paris, and took a train out to Birmingham (pronounced birmin-gum) with them, which is where Will lives now while working at Oxford. I wrestled with the iPhone issue for awhile and probably just made it worse (might not even work when I get back to the states, now...), but then we went and got some astoundingly-delicious curry at an Indian restaurant close-by their art-deco apartment. We also grabbed a pint at a quaint local pub which looked more like an tea-shop than a bar...it looks like they have a good neighborhood. We played some games, and Will, who is a gentleman and a scholar, did me the favor of lending me his iPod and a phone which can make use of the SIM card which I bought. Thanks dude; they have been a big help.

Etc, etc; then I went to Paris which is where I write this from. I'll save that whole thing for another entry. Photos you ask? Why yes, I did take a few hundred. I might try to upload later but for now, it is le hassle.

9/3/10 - London

2010-09-06T04:11:00.000-07:00

It is ridiculous how discombobulated one becomes while traveling. You never really feel 'on top' of your game, because the ground is shifting underneath you so often and you have vastly fewer resources at your disposal. It's difficult to feel 100% at a bar when you've been wearing the same clothes for the past two days, your hair is wind-tossed, and you haven't really cleaned yourself up for some hours because you've been on the go from place to place (none of them home) and all the bathrooms in the progressive country which you are in have adopted air hand-dryers - which sound like planes taking off - instead of paper towels. I never really have any privacy, either, which is annoying. I'm always feeling rushed when doing things that need done...checking the internet on the hostel computers, taking showers, using the sink in the room to brush teeth, shave, etc. Having other people around ALL the time is really a pain.

On top of that, perhaps the phone which you've taken with you and which used to work with your old SIM card in America has decided to reject the new one you've gotten for international calls, and reject it so HARD that it crashes and leaves you unable to use any of the functions which it used to perform, including being your sole source of all the music which you love and were planning on listening to in various exotic scenarios. You'd probably know how to fix it if you had your laptop here, but instead you have a little plastic one which is running an extremely obscure operating system which you haven't even come close to figuring out (I seriously can't even find a readout of how much battery is left, which is really important information to have), and which also coincidentally refuses to connect to any wi-fi networks which you instruct it to.

So that's where my day is at so far. I decided to be less upset and just take the subway to the Science Museum, which, for being as general of a museum name as possible, was actually quite well executed. Interactivity + Science = Success, at least in the museum world. The Exploratorium in SF knows what I'm talking about. Also, all the museums here are as free as watching the dingy-coloured (spelling what? it's correct here) birds which amble all over the sidewalks, so that's a nice touch. Actually, for having as expensive of a reputation as London does, I think I am doing quite well on expenditures here. 16 pounds a night for the hostel bed, and beyond that maybe 10 or 15 a day for food so far, plus 7 for transportation. Well, I thought I was doing well until I did the math on the currency conversion just now. Regardless, I'm spending significantly less than I did in New York (I think). I haven't really been drinking here, though, so I imagine that the probability of the damage approaching critical hit levels is high if I begin doing that. Luckily I have a saving throw for having a bunch of writing to accomplish.

Science Museum

On the positive side as well, my worst-snoring-from-a-roommate-ever hostel experience had me lying awake in bed for a little while, and I came up with some good progress (in my head) on my writing project. I feel like I haven't devoted practically any time to it at all so far, being busy with sightseeing and meeting people and eating, etc.

So, lately has been a series of mixed emotions about things...HOWEVER even with all this said I am still swinging with a +3 bonus on account of being in a new city, a new country, and being exposed to all the refreshing differences on large and small scales. Hopefully as I get more accustomed to being a traveler I will either develop techniques which will eliminate a lot of these discomforts, or I will just get used to them and consider them necessary evils. Although, it is TOTALLY not necessary for my iPhone to have bricked. Come on travel gods.

Oh, also, I missed my hostel's included breakfast because I don't have an alarm on account of the phone thing, but I got This instead:

Nomz.

Dissolve

2010-07-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at the Rocking Frog, knowing that I should sit here and write yet desirous (after listening again to the Tai Chi interview) of moving my body throughout the world, just to experience the connection with my motions and explore my awareness of them on various levels. Also, however, I begin to realize, to have dawn upon me, the importance of sitting still. When motionless, your body has less to focus on, and the movements of your mind become more accessible to you. The tendrils of thought, reaching out and feeling/filtering the world and your experience of it. I say not that static is necessary for attainment of mind-presence, but that meditative thought can be a tool to help you acknowledge which directions your mind gravitates towards, and how forcefully or stubbornly it travels. This can also be the state for slight adjustments, using your presence within this usually-shrouded process to tweak your own neural pathways and reactions.

Additionally, this helps me to grasp something which I have had some curiosity about for some time now, which is ritual motions and sounds. Beta waves, caressing the brain; tribal chants, unlocking depths of perception; walking and running meditations, pacing your thoughts differently than they might have drummed upon you before. These are all....unusual...for lack of a better. They, like drugs, remove you from the stagnant tar-pits of routine into which we all sink for majorities of our time. Challenging the mind...taking it out of expectation – from solid ground to quicksand. When you are displaced, you must think on your feet....and what better way to prepare for any possible future than displacing yourself as much as possible, adapting to all terrains?

Something about a tribal chant...removing the individual from himself, removing accountability and identity, unshackling from the body and expanding into the far-reaching pulses of sound, and beyond them even the silent world. When one's self is already dissolved into sound, you see, a significant portion of the bridge between self and nothingness has already been traversed. Can you imagine what that is like? What a liberating, frightening experience that must be?

Hopefully we all experience something so liberating, by degrees, in our own lifetimes. But with society as fractured as it currently is, I find it hard to believe that we could experience it with the same authenticity as a tribe might have. Being a part of that movement, of that sound-generation, in which the barriers between individuals completely dissipate and you become a singular unity...I can't for the life of me imagine what that would be like. I want to.

Neutral Jing

2010-07-14T19:38:00.000-07:00

What has been on my mind lately? I've become so distanced from the process of writing...I used to have such a reign of what my mind was processing from day to day, recording, remembering. But now, on the brink of this trip, I feel like I have been exercising the privileges of being social, blowing off my own creative work in an effort to spend time with people before leaving them for an indeterminate portion of time. I'm having thoughts, certainly, but somehow they become shattered by the frantic schedule I'm keeping...not having a good sit to sift through them, they become so pummeled by the constant flood of sensations that they are unrecognizable when I come back around to thinking about them, and I forget where I might have left off. What I was headed toward. What emotions I was spun up in when I first pioneered them. Without vigilance regarding these things, it becomes very difficult to trace a thread throughout one's thoughts...to keep a procession, instead of slipping in rank. I follow my thoughts from A to G, but then distance myself from them for a time. When I come back to them, I have a vague semblance of what G might have entailed, but it loses all context and meaning if I don't have the foundations of E and F still firm underneath it. Thus I regress back beyond the last achievement, resting perhaps at C, and must push forth again towards the distances. In the meantime, though, all my motivations have changed, and the G which I may reach is distinctly different from the G which I previously excavated. A troubling business, this 'thought'.

Overall, I'm pleased with how whimsical the world and my mind are when they orbit one another. Things come up which I could not have foreseen; any moment can occasion an explosion of personality or philosophy. It is bothersome, however, to acknowledge that I have no idea what a particular trigger might be or look like. There are such moments when I am caught up in a social circle, and something strikes offhanded, some flash or coincidence on my peripheral vision. I thoughtlessly acknowledge it, but being social requires a constant 'group' presence, a mask, and in pursuit of this I abandon the distinct subjectivity of such glimmers. I may club and drag them back to my tribe, but in doing so I alter them differently than if I were to be alone observing them...I turn them on their head for comedic effect, I dilute them for the masses and exploit some simplicity of what might have been a great concept had I pursued it on my own or in the company of genuine discourse. Occasionally I feel the charlatanry of this process, and I feel somewhat shamed, diminished by it.

Lately I have been running in packs. This is an oddity for me...I'm used to being around a single other person, or perhaps two. The dynamics of these situations are notably dintinct...the broachable topics being drastically different in varying degrees of severity. With a lone companion, one can talk about anything one wants...still the topic will find itself fair game. It may be shot down, evaded for the purposes of comfort, but it will at least find attention and acknowledgment. I miss having an intelligent girlfriend. It's too hard to bring such things up in group discussion, or especially in party-scenarios where one must constantly keep pace with the fluid dance of many partners, many conversations which ideally should be so simple (yet clever!) that others can easily drift in and out of them at their moment's pleasure. I've never been tops at this simplistic cleverness. I am somewhat in awe of those who are~ I lack those razor-sharp, caustic, fervent tendencies...I gravitate, generate, slowly roll into presence like a timpani. I'm beginning to think it has to do with different dispersals of energy...separate and chosen (if unconsciously) types of expression. I am learning from these quick-witted types; I can switch this on if I need to. It feels inauthentic, to me, and I doubt that I could keep it up for long stretches....this conversational sprint. But it is there, a tool at my disposal, and I notice how it alters situations, how it commands. I feel the heat and the power of this clearly incendiary technique. I could not burn like this for long - my hourglass turns - I require respite, shelter. I am mostly sorcerer, but augmented with warrior tendencies at my reserve.

Some Things I am Excited About

2010-06-26T09:47:00.001-07:00

I may not have updated everyone recently...I am quitting the job and traveling for an indeterminate period of time. Holy shit, right? Before you go and worry yourselves, this has been a long time coming...if you've read anything that I've written here, or know me as a person in general, you probably have the sense that 'jobs' and I do not get along in the most idyllic form of camaraderie. We just don't see eye to eye. I dislike being lorded over and told specifically what to do with my time, and they dislike being disobeyed and made a secondary priority amidst the many facets of any given life. Yobs are supposed to be function, to be purpose! Why does Matt dislike us so?

I don't feel the need to explain myself, because I feel that 80% of my friends are sympathetic, working jobs such that they can survive comfortably as opposed to harshly, garnering responsibility...everything we are instructed to revere. At any rate, I find myself excited to take a portion of time off, to stir my life around and agitate the potencies which have settled and lie dormant at present. This is one of my focii as I bound about - to figure out a better mode of life, of reasoning which still supports me but which compromises less of my being and my intended existence/expression in the meantime. This is a monstrous task, but it also has the charm of being an enjoyable one....juggling possible extensions and iterations of myself, finding one which I am most comfortable with but which also allows a more thorough and justified presence of mind, streaming the incantations which I desire most to express.

To travel: here I come. After much deliberation (months) and funding (years) and waiting (decades), I have settled upon a position of "fuck it" regarding my finances as they stand now, and purposefully select the option wherein I discharge all my hard currency into Europe's disastrous economic situation in an effort to bolster it in my own meager way. Also, this will include me receiving many places to stay and transportation to and fro and delicacies heretofore unknown by my domestic palate. Kind of a perk, right? Just doing my best to help out the economy.

Travels as planned: ~3 months. New York, England, France, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Italy, Spain. Bouncing here and there, with the exception of Italy which will be a 3 or 4-week stint (more on this in a second). Finally the excitement is eclipsing the nervousness, and I feel like my mind will have entire worlds and perspectives to absorb, and hopefully an equal or greater amount to output based on this input. That's right; much of this is an artistic journey, with the aim of exploding my mind into a million pieces, energy which I hope to use to construct many a work of fiction. Also, there will be sightseeing and friendship-forging and exploration of offbeat paths.

Italy. I am staying at a monastery here for 4 weeks. This will be wonderful, and ideally will give me respite and an opportunity to construct the better portions of a book which I have been playing with ideas of for the last half-year or so. I will have to do a fair amount of work at the monastery, but I feel confident that being in such an atmosphere will allow me to reign in my focus and spend time on my own endeavors. It is, after all, an Art Monastery, basically sieged by paperwork and taken over by a venerable community of artists and flipped into a bed-and-breakfast to pay the bills. There should be other artists of all concentrations working and living there as well, so it will hopefully be an incredibly nourishing and replenishing experience. One point of curiosity is that I will not have a laptop, or at least as presently planned I will not. I've never written anything significant without one; the ability to Ctrl-F and save as different files and research via the internet is always something which I have taken for granted. So, this will be a difficulty which needs to be overcome. Pen and paper are something which I have not tangled with in a long time. One reason I write on a computer is that the keyboard allows me faster documentation of my thoughts, and with my brain behind the stream, that is a very good thing. I'll have to slow my processes down when I'm writing on paper, but hopefully that will be more helpful than hindrance. I imagine my individual thoughts will be more fleshed-out, but I am somewhat worried about losing track of where I was going with the larger themes racing through my head while scribbling away at the minor details. Ah well. I'm sure it will work, one way or another.

Let me know if you'd like me to send you a postcard from somewhere~

3/25

2010-03-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

3/25

how is it that i had coffee this morning, and now my brain decides to go sluggish on me? must be the whiskey. best guess. one would think that the tea here, oolong, would do the job. yet, no. not at all.

where is the merit in appreciation? here i find myself next to a flurry of quick-witted people. i'm not in the mood, myself...not hardly. but since this happens from time to time, i find it worth noting....and the question has popped up in other manifestations, most notably writing and music. art.

what value is there to be found in mere appreciation, aside from production?

must an appreciator tend towards production at some point? or it it enough simply to enjoy, to have no ambitions in particular for themselves? when i started listening to music, when i started reading what i consider to be decent literature, it came about for me that i began to want to produce it, to spin my own wheels and find expression. now, since i am at the point of scribbling here about it, it seems clear that it is becoming ever more important for me.

as i sit here and hear these people, i realize....there is a fine line between well-placed witticisms and obnoxious overstatements, both in word and in personality. there is no accounting for taste, and some people speak because they have to say something, rather than because they have something to say. maybe a little too harsh. at least these kids are eloquent with their wordings....intelligence is denoted, sometimes too enthusiastically but, who is to say what is too much?

the point remains. what becomes of me, of my mind, of my legacy, if i never produce that which i appreciate? doesn't appreciation require an aptitude for the subject matter, and enough of one to be able to separate your own tastes in it from the general stream of possibilities? an area, room to insert personality and idiosyncrasies? and isn't that, when it comes down to it, what really matters in the world of production? can you separate the words aptitude and skill? i suppose you can...but it seems like the path would be much narrower and easy to follow for someone who had a taste, a preexisting identity within the realm of the subject.

so here i am, struggling and giving an attempt at producing. but what if the larger works don't pan? what then? is an attempt which does not manifest in its entirety necessarily a failure? i want to say that it isn't...but perhaps that is more of a security blanket for myself than anything else.

3/28 (continuation)

what of incomplete works? do they have any merit, ideas pursued, if they never morph into their best (and completed, Kant) manifestations? i remember this moment in college, philosophy class, where it was posited that only actions have any value, and anything which remained only in theory or thought had no value in the real world. i remember being incredibly uncomfortable with this idea, especially when applying it to my life, perhaps because i was only a college student at the time and my entire life existed only in theory at that point. what a candle-snuffing restriction, i thought. i personally think that everything is being accounted for, somewhere...which is an interesting concept, because it may feed into the appraisal or rejection of an ego. ego in some circumstances certainly seems justified, such as when the subject has accomplished recognizable and vast compendiums of progress. these people are allowed by society, as a whole, to become....not necessarily arrogant, but perhaps a bit more discerning in terms of what they do and do not choose to acknowledge, to pay attention to. almost everyone agrees that someone who has proven their worth in a certain capacity or function is allowed leniency in other matters, allowed a certain length of artistic distance from the general problems ruling the rest of the equation. workplaces, as well, follow this same pattern, dividing workforce into factions which have unique focii, and then liminal departments or liasons who bridge the gaps between all these diverse fields being concentrated on individually, thereby connecting the gears and allowing oversight, control, and production. so clearly this is a recognizable and respected practice...perhaps it should be allowed those same respects for potential, for people who have not yet manifested but who feel the thunder at their fingertips.

if ego is really composed of these diverse partitions, however, it becomes increasingly hard to stop a person from being forcibly overbearing with their personality....which actually creates elitism, and corrupts the very practices and concepts, poisons the stream from which those future manifestations would spring. the balance is staggering. one must maintain their own lives, and take accountability in full for any collateral damage that acting profoundly, or egotistically, may incur. it would be obnoxious to be egotistical around the clock, but perhaps there are certain times in which it is beneficial and offers a generative effect to be able to disregard certain facets of everyday life.

let's get a fragment more in depth here, since i feel that the last sentence i wrote was a bit ambiguous. i don't think that condoning arrogance in an ego is ever a good thing; i think that to be more of a vice which should be bred out of our systems in early age, and which potentially is by the harsh realities of childhood in a public schooling system (perhaps that was just my being put-in-place experience). rather, what i mean to say is that there are certain times at which it can be largely beneficial, especially regarding the creation of art, to exude confidence in yourself. the burdens of psychology can be quite a weight in some circumstances; we continually second-guess ourselves and question our ability to finish things out which we begin...question our ability to provide or draw the final line. i know i do this. but from time to time, especially in times of heavy work, a well-founded ego can be essential to the production of intelligent art, and additionally intelligent and artistic living. being freed from the burdens of neuroses and worries, grabbing life and creativity by the horns...these two ideas are interchangeable, but often come off to an uninitiated mind as an inadmissible arrogance. living by the sword, however, is a good practice for an artist. boundaries must be drawn, and actions must be taken and backed by a solid degree of confidence in their application.

A Meditation

2010-01-23T16:20:00.000-08:00

Leadership. A pivotal concept in our society, and yet something which so much of our population lacks a propensity for. Even for my own part, I acknowledge that I have gone so far as to actually aim for a lack of responsibility (which could be said to be part and parcel with leadership – for the crux of the matter is the ability to commit to decisions instead of constantly fluctuating) for a good portion of my life. I'm not sure where that lackadaisical desire comes from, but certainly I wanted no part of 'hard work' at the time, no semblance of having to own up to anything which I might have done had I more resolve.

Instead, I felt the need to resign myself to a submissive position. Over time, both in and beyond the workplace, I still feel this urgency to appeal to others, to seek guidance in their words or their actions. I want them firstly to validate me, to give me a purpose and to deal me a set of tasks. Secondarily I want acknowledgment, a rapport with 'superiors' or 'equals' which denotes a mutual respect for each others' functions and responsibilities. Admittedly and thankfully, this propensity no longer commands a large percentile of my working mind-state. I have found motivation – by degrees – within myself, and can utilize these newfound personal desires to craft my time and activities accordingly without outside input or approval. I now encompass my own approval in the best of times, and this is a perspective to be cherished like one's child – which, on some level, it is.

Even still, however, I find myself appealing to others for their input upon myself and my desires. I find this to be a hard habit, or perhaps vice, to exorcise from personal routine. The rut is that I at once acknowledge the rule as being 'to each his own', especially in matters of personal and artistic investment, while still primarily being domesticated by the need for a group acceptance, an outside acknowledgment of my struggles and subsequent trophies. Of what import are trophies, without any organization to put stock in them?

Thus it comes down to the invisible – potentially imagined – metrics of personal and [humanitarian] development. Just as it is with friends who have not been seen for a length of time (thus seeming much changed, based upon the collective number of small changes built up into a broader observation or scheme), so too it is difficult to measure the variables of our mind – that companion which we can never be quite rid of – be they positive or negative, and to what degree they thrive or suffer. There is no way to step 'outside' of ourselves for an accurate portrait, and so we feel that we must rely on the approvals or disapprovals of those who know us best.

This is a flawed system for a variety of reasons. Firstly, people generally exhibit a bias towards reliability: keeping things just as they are. This is not much to the discredit of humanity, for this assumption creates more manageable mental maps and compasses for us as we navigate through the polarities of the world. Counting on things, including people, to remain the same gives us an advantageous ability to be predictive in future scenarios involving known elements. But for this reason, our friends might be discounted as reliable indicators of our own progress or stagnation. To excel beyond the scope of what you previously had been counted on being may conspire in the minds of those who 'knew' you as a negative trait, as a regression from what they previously knew, since now they cannot be sure of what they know. In all matters, perspective is at the heart of valence. [Additionally] to the point, an inquiry can be made as to whether or not we all experience some degree of schadenfreude, for to see another trapped in a state of general inertia regarding some intangible progression of mind and life certainly occasions a mirroring, a validation of one's own self as being in some way superior, somehow further along or in motion. Ego both feeds and starves on distinctions, on partisanship.

Secondly, if we can throw out the whole 'nobody can ever really know anybody else' idea which is so touted in certain circles, I at least feel confident stating that the only reliable appraisal that can be obtained from another person (when we are confine ourselves to the field of artistic developments) would have to come from someone whom is also a student in the same field of expression, and for accuracy of judgment it would have to be someone who was quantifiably superior to you and – as a final caveat – was also familiar with the progress or detriment of your accomplishments to date. To wit, the only worthwhile yardstick for accomplishment is a teacher. This is not to say that one cannot trust or respect the opinions of anyone else, but rather to say that alternative ideas about yourself or your progress are less likely to be accurate in their methods of distinction and divination, or may be more about the work in itself than about its reflections upon you as a unique force of humanity.

I bring these previous points up because true leadership, in its most meritorious sense as I see it, involves a good degree of humility. To lead is to make decisions, and if the input placed into those decisions is fabricated or misleading then it may become negatively repercussive. To be sure there will be repercussions regardless of the path chosen, but a real decision should be incisive: cut to the core of the matter. It should be expansive in its scope; agreeable in as many capacities as possible to as many different components as possible, but when it comes down to bolts it must also be willing to make sacrifices as necessary for its most genuine realization.

The most pertinent decisions which I find myself making these days are the decisions regarding the expenditure of my time. When I say, 'my time', I must also be candid in explaining that this does not only apply to my 'personal time', because in effect – and what many people seem poised to miss – is that all of my time consists of a conscious decision on my part regarding how it is being used. We may feel resigned to certain places or actions which typically orbit around our jobs or our scholastic endeavors, but if you investigate the scope at play within them you realize the frightening degree of freedom which we are in possession of at any given moment of our lives. This realization is the beginning of leadership; it is the most fundamental of all the structural pillars supporting initiative.

What I come to realize more and more these days is that most of the self-governing and actuated principles that my mind operates upon are beginning to lean further and further away from what my 'job' entails; at this point I would consider myself downright tilted. It may be that I am merely disconsolate about daily repetition of activities, etc., but if the feeling is inspected more closely it allows me to see specifically where the conflicts exist. The principle conflict, for my own part, is a snowballing desire to create....perhaps not even tangibly, but to in every way exist and think and, most specifically, to write creatively. To seek out the chaotic, dynamic mechanisms in my mind, to nourish them in whatever ways they crave, and to express and record the experience. I'm not even certain, at this point, that writing will be the medium of choice, but currently I feel that it allows me the widest range of expression and versatility as I already have mental brushes and palettes painstakingly constructed for this canvas. And some really nice pens.

I cannot say with any certainty what this feeling will lead to. But I bring it up in order to directly address a reef which any seafaring motions towards creative independence must necessarily come to, under threat of being foundered...the ability to actively and consciously engage decisions, and to forge ownership – steeled, individual validity – regarding your terms with them. By 'decisions', I don't mean to imply that I am discussing book plots, or pseudonyms, or anything one typically makes creative decisions about. Well, perhaps books to a degree, in my particular case. Instead, however, I mean to associate fragile, momentary decisions with the timeless quality of leadership, and all the connotations which you may bring to the word...which is what I began scribbling about today in the first place.

For some unknown but rooted reason, I seem to have a difficult time of creativity when I set to it in the moment. This is, of course, a world apart from creativity in theory, when ideas flow like wine. Virginia Woolf - “One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.” If you have tried to create something distinctive, then I'm sure that you too share some knowledge of this anxiety among the front lines of creative forces. This would be entirely tolerable, if it weren't for the fact that it constantly forces you to question yourself. It finds opportunities in which to communicate to you that you are in uncharted territories and that you don't know how to do everything, or even what anything necessarily is. In short, creativity would not be itself if it didn't force you immediately out of your comfort zone.

My instincts until just recently have been to immediately seek reassurance....to stop, to read, to talk to someone safe, to locate comfort quickly. This is a faulty approach, and it lacks the most critical element of success in such matters: personal leadership. Without the strength contained in this engine, your focus will flag, waver, and fail. If you've already sat down to independent creation and accomplished any small part of it, then most likely you are not in terrible shape; no need to panic, you are at least not amongst those who willingly let themselves be entertained into oblivion. Leadership is a muscle, however, and to form resolve and concentrated effort takes a lengthy period of breaking and building.

What must be done is to keep pushing against those waves, because like a coastal tide or reef structure, they only bar your way for a short distance. Once you've navigated the labyrinth of obstacles (which will likely be different each time) and reached a calm focus, real progress can be made, real distance towards the goal. You will still experience catastrophic storms and perils while out at sea, but they will seem more natural, more intentional; you will already be committed to the journey and they will truly seem like challenges which can be overcome, which momentum will push you forward through. Perspective changes significantly when there is no shore in sight. When they are finished, driven through with fortitude, you can again drift along your creative flow; you will have nothing to fight against and the only facet you will need to hold steady to is your orientation amidst the vast horizon of possibilities.

Navigation, however, is a more compound concept than it would seem; nothing that I know of is less straightforward. If you know precisely where you want to end up, then you will have an easier time of it...but as a sacrifice, in a manner of speaking, the journey will have fewer crisis points, less opportunities to discover yourself and your capabilities along the way. For my own part, these crises have been some of the more worthwhile reasons for me to continue writing, even if it doesn't end up amounting to a finished work. To hammer something out, to imbue it with your own personal architecture, to seal it with your fingerprint as a genuine statement about your or the world as you perceive it...this is the real reason to commit to your own leadership, to trust yourself to bear a torch through the darkness and come out somewhere meaningful and symbolic. If you only have profit in mind when you enter into the creative seas, then you might as well resign yourself to being a publisher or a broker instead, for there is no reason, no compulsion for you to make the first or last strokes.

The real reason to create, the most genuine incarnation insofar as I can envision it, is not the moment of completion but rather these smaller victories. A finished work would be nice, but complete realization of my ideals – which also involved defining those ideals to myself in full – is a luxury which I do not expect to achieve anytime soon. For this reason, I don't have a final destination in mind...rather I wander, sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with intense focus, until I experience something like an 'Aha!' moment. This experience is something you are familiar with; it happens in just about every facet of life when something is illuminated to the full extent of your understanding – or in lieu of that, your complete awe. This is the reason to create, and the only reason to share creation is to attempt to gift this intimate moment to others. Sometimes entire books or companies are dedicated to a single, potent moment of thought, which was of such devastating importance to the thinker that it had to be committed to...nothing they had experienced had ever seemed more real, more important to contribute. These moments are the basis of artistic navigation, and they compose the greater part of personal leadership...following the constellations that these individual points compose, as you drift along them through the passage of your life, is the only guide for genuine expression.

Ultimately, if you want to own your work and your life, you have to trust in yourself as a metric. It doesn't matter if you want to lead many people, or just yourself in your personal endeavors...good leadership requires that you have a standard for guidance, that you have a path to follow, even if you may lose sight of it for long lapses of time. This naturally happens when motion is involved. To obtain the focus that is necessary to achieve, you have to have anchors, fixed points upon which your can locate yourself and subsequently pivot off. These points are impossible not to notice; they are impossible to avoid unless you remain stagnant and dig into your routines too fastidiously....what matters is what you make of them, and whether or not you are able to hold them within your vision after they have passed. You might also worry that some fascinations are implanted in you surreptitiously by other people, somehow transferred, or that you have somehow stolen them – but if your interest is genuine, you will know it. The hollow resonance of thieved passions, the faint boredom that you experience when you engage with them is important to distinguish; you must develop a hammer to test and destroy such things in order to be the truest incarnation of yourself possible. The focus and the energy inherent in genuine passions, however, is impossible to mimic. It will define your choices along every step of the way, and illuminate all paths you have yet to travel.

post-processing

2009-11-05T18:36:00.000-08:00

i had an interesting experience the other day...i was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, typing away at something or other (or perhaps internetting, as i am also prone to do), and a flash of recognition erupted into me. it wasn't deja-vu, or anything of the sort...i had been sitting next to a wall (a rather thin one, it should be noted), and i picked up on a piece of the conversation in the next room. now, i hear conversations from the guys next door frequently; at least once every day. they're crazy characters, sometimes bursting into song in the middle of their little office. but i have learned to completely tune them out when i'm doing my own thing, so it's rare that i actually pay attention to anything that they are saying. the small fragment that i caught, however, happened to be about myself....not directly, but rather it was about the company that i work at. it wasn't derogatory, it wasn't praise; it was just a passive comment slid into one angle of a joke. but where it gets weird is....i wasn't actually listening to them when they said it.

despite the phalanx of distractions that surround me at any given moment, and despite the fact that i was engrossed in many other things, my senses reached down into me, like a hand, and pulled me up into the cool waters of the present moment. this means, if i understand correctly, that my mind actually has reserve storage for everything which is currently happening. and i think that this concept is amazing. despite the reality that you may not be paying attention - in fact you may be completely distracted - you are still caching information on some level unknown to your conscious mind.

i know for a fact that i didn't hear them talking as it happened....i just wasn't listening. simple fact. but, after the actual conversation had occurred, my mind decided to grind it through its economizing machine, just to see if any of it were useful to me. so it stored all these impressions that i was unaware of, packaged them up in some obscure encryption to keep them from me, and sorted them neatly into piles of relevance. beginning of a joke: irrelevant. to the bin with it. vocal inflections: irrelevant. binned. company name: relevant! ring-ring! hallo! what is this that we have here? and then my mind, sufficiently prompted, investigated the situation. it retracted, uncrumpled papers from the bin; in fact i was able to recall the joke in its entirety with no problems whatsoever. this was very odd; i'm certain all of this happened in the snapping of fingers, but still i regarded the ensuing sensation with some degree of scrutiny, and found my recognition of the thing to have happened definitively after the reality had lapsed.

and holy shit! how amazing is that?

this is encouraging, enlivening, for a number of reasons. i've always personally been fascinated with the mind...seeking ways to understand how it makes sense of this chaos that we label our world (Recursive with a capital, i know), and constantly prodding/asking it for insight into its inner-workings. rarely does it give any non-cryptic answers, but every once in a while i am present while it slips up, which offers a whole new perspective on matters. this is one such instance. i wonder how long such information is stored? is it possible that it is still stored outside of us, lingering in the atmosphere, and an uber-short timeframe is the key to being able to still disentangle it from all the other static which spins its wheels perpetually, replacing and realigning? is this something which you could train your mind to perform better and better, with more regularity, until you were able to recall, to access this liminal brain-space, consciously and actively? i could use some extra brain-bank, personally...i always describe my mental function to people as 'a little different', in that i have astounding recall for minute detail, but only once i have a serious trigger with which to work, a hook to hang my reminiscence.

when you're strange

2009-10-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

it is entirely remarkable how we are constantly surrounded by strangers. do you have those words, sometimes, where you always miss the same letter when typing a word, and must go back in order to fix it? strangers is one such word for me; it always ends up 'stanger'. which is not so much even a word; i checked just now. regardless. looking around, i find an overwhelming feeling, a filling-up, with the sheer force of strangeness around me. i don't know any of these people, yet we share such a base commonality that i am able to find comfort in their presence, and perhaps comfort too in that they, for the most part, do not know each other....i am not the odd mind out; i am just as curvy of a jigsaw-piece as all of them, as far as any distinct one is concerned.

they are all focused on different tasks, different projects; all have different thoughts rifling through their minds even just now. there are some moments which rob us of this individuality...say for instance that a red-mortar firecracker goes off in this coffee nook right now. bang! everyone flinches, every mind is void and catches pace with the circumstances and general confusion just as quickly as the others, for the most part. then we are together, somehow. we have all had the same experience, at the same time, and while we may not consciously acknowledge it we have been bonded to these people to a degree; we have been the same as them through circumstance, they have shared in ourselves. on larger scales, this is school spirit, this is patriotism, this is the flexing and uncording of the various muscles of the humanities.

but i feel comfortable around all these people, despite the concrete reality that no firework has bound our shared existence. it seems to be bound on other levels, less immediate and less discernible. i am somewhat surprised to find this comfort within me....not shocked, necessarily, as it has been building, rumbling around, for as long as i can remember, but at least a little surprised to find the ease with which i regard them. just like anybody i have clasped onto my fair share of social anxieties throughout my youth, but at some point they were hammered at by something...good...the human spirit perhaps, and partaking in the realm of it...and ever since then my anxieties (at least, the social ones) have been crumbling, like a cracked and eroding reservoir wall, spilling more positivity and more goodwill as time continues to batter away at it. for all the uncertainty that i could choose to see in this room, knowing that in any human lie sparks and clashes between dignified Ubermensch and primal beast, instead i am experiencing an outpouring of kinship and warm curiosity.

it is funny how difficult it sometimes seems to meet people, such as when you move to a new city. i'm certain, at this moment, that all it really takes is patience, and then just the tiniest pinch of the outgoing archetype to be summoned within you. looking around, i barely recognize anybody...maybe a face of two that i have seen elsewhere, but nothing solid enough for confirmation. but i recognize that other people, like myself, run in general patterns. you are bound to meet people time after time, despite the randomness of the city, because people seem to be creatures of habit. unless you never venture outside the confines of your walls, you will of course see the same people again and again...perhaps not every day, perhaps not always in the same places...but it will happen, and the only way to not take advantage of that situation is to stay silent, antisocial. or to be looking too....specifically.

the problem, i believe, if there is one, is a tendency to not see people. normally, i take so little notice of other people, other than to regard their general occupation of space and time (and perhaps attractiveness, natch). all these people are incredible, multifaceted minds, flexing and fluxing in ways i cannot even begin to comprehend, but until i make some recognizable contact i resign them to one dimension, just a flat-frame appearance, and leave them at that. i feel bad about this, but really, what more are we to do? i could spend my entire life trying to meet everyone that i could, and still not be able to tackle more than just my own state (or perhaps one more at an extreme best!) additionally, meeting people would become meaningless; i would be saturated with information and it would leak out of my brain faster than 9th grade geometry class. so, it is reasonable to only expect to meet so many people...it just seems a shame, with all the interesting things going on in the minds of the people, all the projects and emotions and expressions which remain intriguingly and perplexingly bottled to me.

on the upside, as a writer, i am beginning to pick up more on the realities and expressions of the people whom i do know, and even beyond that beginning to culture an ability to observe someone whom i do not know and divine something core of them (or perhaps just my own imaginings, but that will do fine for myself and my work). it is incredibly enriching and endlessly interesting, to the point where i must draw a solid line between the observing and the recording, just to ensure that i get something tangible completed instead of whiling away in a fog of thoughts and inspirations that might slip into dizzied memory without a measure of ink.

i am basically never bored anymore.

wow

2009-09-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

it has been a seriously long passage of time since i have pasted up any words on this thing. a lot has happened; details are unimportant and unwarranted; more of a telephone thing anyway. so, what has been on my mind of late?

how long has it been since you have taken a lengthy, analytical and prognostic look at your life? are we settling for the concerns that we have now, which become so overwhelming and eclipse the backgrounds behind them? i feel relatively complacent of late, which always pings as a red-flag status for me once i realize that it has been going on. it's summertime, and the living is easy...money that was made is now spent. weekends, so longed for and anticipated, are shrunken in a haze of relaxation and sloth instead of being charted with intriguing mental cartography. all is fine, i am young...but i am beginning to feel the pangs of frivolity, the lament for lack of accomplishment and distinction.

i am at a loss for how to describe my job; it is good and i feel fortified, insulated by it. at the same time, i feel like it thieves forty hours a week from me - more counting transit - that could be the blankets and backpacks of a genuine pioneering. it isn't that it takes all my time...a large chunk to be sure, but not all of it. but i feel drawn toward vivacity, towards the city, being young and ever-awake. i feel like maintaining friendships is absolutely essential, and rewarding, and that such a thing should not be abandoned for lofty artistic dreams...yet in the mathematical set i am working with, job + friends + sleep = matt at 26. wedging more in has proven difficult.

i have also come to acknowledge that relaxation is essential. this plays into the idea of friendships, because a good friendship is stress-relieving instead of stress-inducing. my job creates stresses; hell, just being inside my mind creates stresses of its own. decompression is a must, if i don't want to end up a crazy person, aimlessly wandering the alleys of Portland. if the equation is as simple as it seems (probably not the case), then what i need readjustment in is my work. do i try to find something else; something incorruptibly-fulfilling and which broadens my horizons as an artist? do i just need something as simple as to pare down my hours, such that i have more time to commit to personal projects and still stay afloat financially? finances are an argh. i see now how adults become progressively more preoccupied with such concerns, and how it has the ability to rob you of so much potential. i have some degree of scorn for our current incarnation of the capitalist system based upon this, but here is probably not the time or place to complain about how you can't stay afloat by scribbling away your days in coffee shops and mountaintops, even if it were for the advancement of the human spirit and all that riff-raff.

so, for the summertime being, i am currently stunned into inaction against this front. it marches over my mind with its full strength, and i plan to observe and characterize it before moving my own armada against its dark and foreboding will. i just need to find a way to set reminders for myself, little mementos that disarm my fear of its structuring ways since i know another, more ideal life, rooted somewhere in the deeper portions of my thought. i have faith at least in myself, as long as i am successful in keeping myself the same self. the people we naturally evolve into have different sets of strengths and weaknesses, different centers of gravity based on their abacus-arrangements and allotments.

a passing of time

2009-07-11T14:49:00.000-07:00

well.
it has been quite some time, hasn't it? lots of happenings, changes of seasons, musics ebbing and flowing through my list of recent listens and new discoveries. things are always similar, however; let us see if i can pick up the pace of this writing as quickly and as intently as i remember myself having done in the past.

a quick update on myself. i have been reading quite a bit, all manner of short books which satiate the mind for a time. i've been noticing lately, in light of these books, that books with a heavy density of ideas seem to leave less lasting impressions with me on the whole. of course, reading philosophy is an entirely different gear of mental motion than a casual story, but still i have to note the finding that, for a reason which i may dive into, readings which overwhelm me with the rapidity of their ground-shattering ideas tend to slip into grey area of my mind. i find that with shorter, more spaced and storylike books, there is less of a chance of being overwhelmed by the waves which crash into you; you have more down or recovery time and as such your mind has more of an opportunity to turn over the ideas which are given to you and do something memorable with them....even make them, in some incarnation, your own. with a lot of the writing that i would typically read, the writers are incredibly profound and prolific, so much so that it takes an equal mind to keep up with them unless one wants to get all 'literary analysis' and pore over every page for a matter of hours. to do this disrupts the pace, and so i cannot resign myself to it. and yet, being less intelligent than these giants of writing, the crashings of surf, their own minds against mine in turbulent and one-sided conversation, tend to rip my footing out from underneath me, erode my balance, and leave me dizzied and disoriented. many times i cannot tell whether or not i pay more attention at any given time to the story itself, or the ideas which it carries in its pockets.

this is a lesson learned for me in writing: do not over-pace, do not saturate with intensity. a gifted writer is one who, without condescending, can thresh out his ideas and their forms almost surgically, taking one piece and pinning it to a page...keeping the entirety shrouded until it is ready to be revealed as the sum of its parts. good writing is archaeological, it is constancy in your ability to dust and connect, connect and dust. i think personally that i used to have an idea about how my writing would be this immensely good thing that could not be ignored for all its potency, and yet what i come to realize more and more is that a tasteful balance is the essence of one's ability to write coherently, impressively. there are artistic aesthetics which must be adhered to, for threat of entirely butchering the very concepts that you are attempting to reveal to your audience by their misapplication or neglect.

in short: the human mind, at least insomuch as i can speak about it from my own experience, is something which cannot be rushed. it is a delicate recipe, a plant which grows in its own distinct conditions and which only flowers at the correct temperature specifications. i would call these temperatures "focus", for lack of a better...focus can be achieved by a set of conditions that must be conducive, conductive of real thought. many of the books i have read are harsher environments, attainable only to the most adaptable and giving minds, and often i find myself stumbling through them for a lack of interest which really is anything but. it is an incompatibility, an incompatibility. learning, challenge, must be paced appropriately or it will founder before making it off of the shore. part of this responsibility lies on the person who would seek knowledge...you have to prime yourself in order to work with what you can. but in addition, part of the responsibility lies in the hands of the teacher, in order that they might create a lesson with proper pacing and enough tangible ties to allow for navigation through it.

i hope that i have a gift for storytelling.

halt....hammerzeit

2009-05-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

so it seems clear that i am stepping away from writing smaller entries, and launching into a larger piece of work. but it's daunting, at best, so i think that from time to time i will still be finding spare change to spend on some abstract and unaffiliated subjects here. this site was always a good cathartic release for me, and i'm glad to have the vent here where i can always find it.

memorial day weekend! i should by all rights be excited about this single-day-more-than-usual break for working purposes, but it seems i have been signed up to go to Bend for a good portion of my time off. hopefully that will be fun; if nothing else it will be good to get into a truly fresh area where my mind can recharge, and perhaps recapture a piece of originality. even though i have of broad spectrum of things that i do these days, i feel that for the most part they are things which i have constantly done before. and there is a definite charm to reliving experiences, especially since they always hold some new context even if in small degree...it has been on my mind that repeatability, replay-value, is among one of the foremost tenets of the american economy. sometimes you just want to know what you're getting, or know what kind of atmosphere you are going to immerse yourself in. i do it all the time; holing up in coffee shops because i welcome their kaleidoscopic atmosphere, while still having a comfortable and calming familiarity. at times, though, i get burnt with doing the same things and going to the same places. these ideas start to coagulate, to clump together into a ball like a putty, and they become less and less distinct from one another. it is a phenomenon which i regard thoughtfully, and often, because it seems like the larger themes of my thought and life are reflected in these massed-stars; they are certainly useful if only to illustrate and make more tangible the waves of time passing over me, and how what i think about changes in both manner and mood. but they also, at times, begin to acquire a stale taste which makes me eager for something new.

i am at odds with time lately. my weekends seem to flit away, which would not be so concerning if they weren't in contrast to my weekdays, upon which i typically do not get anything meaningful done. and let me separate senses there, because i do have a full-time job, and a good one at that....i just don't think that i accomplish anything monumental or inspiring while a chip away at it every monday through friday~ my time balances are all mixed-about, because one must save some time for relaxation or risk excess stress. it would be nice to have more time to write, more time to paint, more time for music. always people think it would be 'nice to have more time'. i realize that it must be made, and i am making it, but i worry that my life-formula is currently incorrect because i feel like i am always struggling with time-management. it does not seem, as it sometimes does, as though time is in my corner.

on the other hand, i am much happier, overall, than i have ever been. i can't remember being so satisfied with everything since i was a child. i have complaints, of course...nobody wants an office for 40 hours. but what is irregular, what seems different than ever before, is that all the time i find myself with a genuine smile on my face, and more goodwill towards everyone on the planet than i can usually muster. i have come to a lot of realizations, which ones supposes could be considered maturities, about people in general, and i've subsequently found myself to be in possession of a lot less inward negativity than i used to exhibit. perhaps it comes from having more personal confidence, and being less worried about what others think. i can't pin down the roots precisely (natch; they are underground), but i know that things are better, in so many ways, than they had been for me during say, high school and college. i am actually happier in a lot of ways than i was in college, the so-called 'golden' years, and i take that to be a positive thing. perhaps i am nourishing myself in all the right ways, and have nothing at all to complain about~ least of all time.

perhaps i can find a way, today, to make peace with time. that sounds infinitely pleasurable. here go.

oh.....GO NUGGETS!!~

aw

2009-04-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

you know what's twisted, in retrospect? elementary and middle-school magazine drives. seriously, it seems like there should have been some child-labor laws violated there.

but man do those mag companies know how to market their shit - leeching onto cute little kids who need money for field-trip funding~ then rewarding them with toys that probably cost twenty cents to batch up in china. just awful.

some shadowed places

2009-04-09T19:22:00.001-07:00

let me theorize for a moment here. i had a dream the other night that was oddly coraline-esque, in the sense that i was struggling with some dominant monster in the house that i grew up in. i don't remember a lot of the details; i wish i had written closer to the actual event but i haven't been finding the time lately, and it just struck me upside the head with its oddity. i do remember that i was in my parents' bedroom, though as characteristic in dreams it was not so much the same in furnishings, or size, just in relative location and perhaps general shape. this is an energy-center of a house for children, so i can understand why my mind would choose it as a setting of some sort. i'm sure that i also branched, at some point, into my own childhood room, which was just across the hallway...an easy jaunt even if progress was hindered by battle, or whatever~

i'm not really sure where i intend to go with this prelude...it strikes me as, not necessarily unusual, but quite curious that so many of my dreams happen in or around my old house. you would think that my mind would be engaging nightly with newer problems, newer ideas, and setting them appropriately in my new surroundings...but perhaps these are too volatile, in my lack of knowledge of them, to paint adequate pictures for a backdrop. i'm fairly certain that my themes, the ideas that my dreams are really digging their fingers into, hashing out, are more intelligent than they used to be...that they deal with different issues as they develop, as i come across them in my actual experience. but they come as ghosts in my old haunts, which, for my part, was unexpected.

so, the parents' bedroom was unique, usually not a typical setting. there are other places which recur with more frequency...namely the backyard. we had a good-sized backyard at my house in the springs, and i suppose that i spent a good deal of time in it. in the dreams, however, it is permeated with a sense of mystery, of vagueness and enormous, almost incomprehensible, size. i wonder about myself as a child, and in the wonderment i find this charmed recurrence of earlier self. it makes me wonder about the most basic sensations in life....that of the security of the home; the focus of life for everyone that you know. the comfort found inside those walls, and how that is imbued upon a childish mind....what the outside would have meant to me, then. i imagine myself, done up in blue one-piece winnie-the-pooh pajamas, gazing in rapt bewilderment out the glass doors in our main entryway, trying to decipher the strange wilderness, the unexplored depths of our backyard. what does a two-year old think of a tree? of grass and flowers? do they have the same positive valence that we would attribute to them now? part of me thinks that they would be frightening totems (head on pole) of the outside world, of complete loss of control.

of course, to a child, unknowns behave in different ways than they do to us now. our adult selves build up apprehensions based upon our past experiences; they fortify us from the outside world with snowglobe-like bricks, each teeming with motion and memory, each distorting the outside world more and more as we look through them, sometimes not even being able to see past the memories themselves. children become apprehensive, fearful, but only after their base comforts have already been stripped from them. a child misses his mother only once she is gone, not before; a child does not fear being lost until it actually arises. we tangle with these scenarios before they exist, and in that we lose something valuable in our interface with the world - we begin to focus more and more, and ultimately we see less and less.

so here i am, standing with my hands and nose pressed against the glass separating my child self from his house's backyard. squirrels scamper by, and i do not understand them. i wonder what sensations they call to my heart.

if i had to guess (since the time i am describing is before memory), and i am going to infer from my dreams now, i would venture to say that i felt fear. not a gripping terror, but an ambiguous shadow floating just beyond my perception, darkening. i say this, because in my dreams i find this same darkness to it. it has apparently been chosen as the place where i work out most of my unconscious struggles. i wish i had a running count of the number of dreams and/or nightmares which at some point trample through that backyard, which in reality has not a trace of ominousness to it but, who can say what a mind will twist anything into at the end of the day~ different sections of that backyard are honeycombed off in my mind; each attributed with memories and characteristics, properties which are real to me but which never belonged.

additionally, as if that weren't enough, i have an amplification of this wilderness....i have my family's cabin, secluded deep in the woods of kenosha pass. this was the spot for family vacations, an inexpensive spot to get away from it all, and i'm certain that it is tethered to numerous memories for everyone who goes there so it is a logical place to return to. i have spent time at this cabin as far back as i can remember, and always it has been a holy temple to me, an observation of the depths of nature and a retreat from the world as i knew it. this cabin is a fantastic place; perhaps you, reader, will be taken there one day~ but it has also developed, for me, as an extremely psychologically-powerful token. i go to this cabin, in my dreams, in my unconscious mind, when apparently there are mountains of rubble in my head that need to be worked through. almost always this cabin appears to me as a fractured house of the most haunted and haunting capacity possible. always there are deep-seated ghosts, literally; always it is overrun with the raw power of nature, crowned with black, spindly insects, the wardens of what deeper unsettled spirits lie slumbering there. the woods around this cabin host my deepest dreams, my deepest indications of what being 'lost', or pursued by the night, feels like. always it is an incredible adventure just to get to this place, rarely by car as would be expected; typically i must forge my way through snowfields and packs of savage animals, cross extreme conditions and distances in pursuit of something i do not know, at least not consciously. i am never sure what the motivation for returning to this place is, but always there is something drawing me towards it.

i do not know why these nature spots have become the seats for my subconscious psyche. all i can say is that they are bottled with unspeakable things; they reflect a different side of the world, as if i had stood in the middle of them and used the mirror from A Link to the Past. things do not make sense there, and everything is darkened. i thought it notable, towards the goal of figuring myself out a little better...and it always helps me to sort out my thoughts more clearly, this 'writing'.

shhh! listen:
royksopp - "royksopp forever"

today

2009-04-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

"friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival."
~ C. S. Lewis

how good to have friends, people that we can merge ourselves with; the refraction of perspectives gives telescopic sight. what we can bounce off of a friend is a concept, a notion of ourselves that we have gathered, and we present it freely...a concept which is taken, and puttied, and molded in another mind, mirrored, until we really begin to get a better idea of what we meant in the first place. they can show us things, they can take us farther...obliterating our boundaries and creating impressions of some unexplored territory to the east. they will notice different things, they will append our own selves until we begin to merge the lines and become confused. and then they position us, they help us to see where we fit within this larger picture. they bring our artisan selves, our works and spirit, to places that we have not physically or emotionally been to. places that we shall not know for some time, but which could alter our way of looking at life.

my friends are powerful forces. for them i would burn my books, my money, my car, my apartment. i would sacrifice these things to do real good for them. time is never 'spent' with them; it is savored thoroughly. it is crafted and shared. to spend time is the function of a job, lathing away wafer-thin slices of us so as to preserve the rest (for what else is the remainder intended?) and in the space with our friends, in nurturing environments, we grow back to our former selves. we relearn skills, we reconstruct our memories which had been partially-stripped. we are the children of our freely-chosen experiences.

so damn, it's great to be here. my people build me up, when i am down; they recall the shapes that i am missing at any given time (which takes a fair bit of analysis and knowledge of myself on their part), conjure them from our shared spaces, energies, and present them to me swathed in new packaging. or forgotten packaging, which is the best sort. i could only hope to do them this same service when it is needed. there is responsibility inherent in knowing someone (if they can be said to be 'known'), that we must keep vigil over them for when they are in a time of need. we all need, at some point. being close, that is really something to be proud of....not independence, which callously walls the heart against hope.

i hope some of that made sense.

"treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being."
~ Goethe

happy patties

2009-03-17T18:09:00.000-07:00

it might seem, by all outward appearances, that i am slacking largely. i haven't posted anything on here for something like a fortnight. but even so, it doesn't mean i haven't been writing.....instead i am trying to work on *gasp* projects, bigger things, which is nice because usually i can't screw up the courage to embark on something larger than what i typically write on here. explosions of thought. perhaps you will find them here as they are developing, or as they emerge from whatever sort of chrysalis they might happen to be in. that i cannot say for sure. but,

isn't that exciting?

i think it is.

dreamcatcher

2009-02-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

i had an interesting experience last night....i started hovering over the precipice of sleep, but not actually tumbling into it. i had an exhausting day, and laid down at probably two in the morning, but for whatever reason wouldn't completely drop off. my mind sunk into a sleep-like state; i was able to clearly "see" things that i was thinking about, literally visualizing things in sharp lines and shapes. i wasn't able to control it necessarily. sometimes it would be an eruption of colors, and sometimes it would be a clear landscape, a play with players, a created world.

i remember when i was smaller, say elementary age, i used to have a particular skill. i was able to visualize drawings on a page, before they were actually there, and from that impression i would basically just trace out what my mind had already splashed onto the paper. i'm not sure at this point what to make of that, or where it has gone. i'm not sure if i lack the degree of creativity that i had then, or if my mind is so partitioned and full of varied information that i don't have the caches left to accommodate such lucid imaginings. maybe my mind clings to this solid-state world that we have, since it is more constant in ways than the imaginary, and it keeps my arm steeled against nonsensical interruptions. at any rate, it is a skill that i miss. lately when i draw or paint, or write for that matter, i don't really have any idea where it will end up....i have no means with which to reign things in. usually i will make a first stroke, and then a second, somewhat geometrically or in a unique formation, and then i will treat it sort of like cloud-watching....letting my mind pick out a picture that it could be a piece, it could be a keystone of. then that leap of faith is what it ends up becoming. now, this is a great modus operandi for a lot of different reasons...i've learned a lot from it and it has a lot of real-world implications that are useful in my everyday life, the more and more comfortable with it i become. i'm not sure i want to change it, for the time being, because i think it to be a valuable cultivation, a little precious crop of my own that i can work on to my ends. but, especially in the wake of my experience last night, i kind of miss the vivacity and forthrightness that my creative mind used to exhibit.

last night, like i said, i wasn't able to sleep for awhile. my mind somehow gave itself up to this, and instead it chose to drift in a liminal state...dreaming without sleeping, but not like day-dreaming. much more potent. the interesting part of it all was the degree of control which i had. i could nudge it, i could guide it. it was similar to a lucid dream (in which you acknowledge that you're asleep and dreaming), but without the comical side effects that usually arise from having the predominant sectors of logic in your brain completely switched off. a unique and psychedelic experience, but arising organically. it was a combination of mental functions which, for me, is very rare. i suppose i'm saying that i think there is something interesting to be learned from it, or ways to harness it for a positive result.

as i lay there, eyes closed, i was thinking from time to time of running for a pen. clearly this would have disrupted the stream of the moment, so i didn't~ but even so, i think (although not verifiably) that, had i been aware that the situation was going to happen, i could have had a pen in my hand and a pad of paper on the bed and been able to capture what was going on in some decipherable form or another (words, pictures). i know that i was awake enough to process the ideas, and could have transmitted them had i the means, even keeping my eyes closed. the feeling was loosely that of a bout of sleep paralysis (for those that have experienced it), but i know i could move slightly without risk of shattering it. instead of focusing on how i couldn't fully interact with the tangible world, i focused instead on how i could interact with the intangible one. i wish there were a better way to photograph what's going on in our minds than drawing and writing, but there really isn't, so i suppose it's fortunate that these are mediums which i am comfortable expressing myself through. *take care not to end sentence with preposition, blar. i think this skill, if i can develop it, would be a huge resource for me to draw from. it becomes so hard throughout the day to catch your mind on the hop, and to really express your good ideas when they come to you...this could be a door of perception that is worth throwing open. i can't think of the window i would have to close to accommodate it~

what is a more genuine expression of your mind than a dream? a whole world, rich landscapes, personalities and societies, architectures, all constructed out of nothing but the raw impressions the real world has left you with, and how you own unique mind twists and bends them. signs, representations. i would guarantee, even without a smidge of research to back me up, that dreams are one of the foremost inspirations for painters....i have had so many dreams that have been the richest, most explosive color schemes i have ever 'experienced' (if one can admit that reality of them). finnegan's wake, one of the most revered works of fiction that exists, is allegedly the lucid documentation of a dream. i think that they are powerful, that they can give us insights into the utmost potential of humanity and vision; new eyes to see the daylight with.

i'm so excited for the rest of this year~

phantom limb

2009-02-22T13:42:00.000-08:00

i kind of like the grey weather in portland. everything feels sort of muted, volume turned a little lower than usual, and it creates an odd harmony between all things. it acts in many ways like a thick colorado snowfall, which muffles sounds and tends to hang miniature weights upon any activity to be undertaken...but the greyness isn't so apparent a sensory change; you can't hear the karr-onchh of snow underfoot, sharp like glass shattering because there are no other sounds to vie for your ears' attention. i suppose that the mists here feel like some sort of oppression, something distinct which drapes off of your body like cobwebs. and it doesn't sound to a lot of people, especially when phrased as such, like a good thing....but i enjoy the directness of it. i like that it has no pretenses about being anything else. it's just, there, and it lends this tangibility to other sorts of oppressions, the kinds of sludges that we wade through every day in our lives and in our minds...it makes me feel as through i can assign this same 'thing-ness' to those (baggages), and that i can, now fully recognizing them for what they are, snap them over my knees like small twigs to be thrown down as kindling in my fire.

for some reason, this helps me to sort out my personality. i feel like i have a much healthier mindstate in portland, as opposed to other places lived, as though i am getting better and more rigorous in my gold-panning techniques (properly, being able to cut through the pitfalls that seem to be more and more dominant in everyday life, giving some lift to my feet and gaining golden perspective from a higher place). once in a philosophy class, we learned about an an idea of predator-creation, to coin a phrase. we have evolved to stay on our toes, as it were; to create situations which will keep up on guard, so that we won't be caught unawares when danger sneaks in peripherally. this worked out pretty well for us when we had wildcats and bears to contend with, but our current situation, as a society of evolved minds, has distanced us from most of our original concerns for safety. our instincts, however, those finely-tuned mental reflexes forged like clockwork over countless generations, remain. and now, caught in this modern situation, they force themselves into application and find all manner of new predators to conjure out of what should be minor troubles....social anxieties, insecurities, distant concerns about death and uncertain futures.

the problem with these apprehensions is that they are weaved thinly....not thick, easy to pluck strings, but rather numerous and minute, corded with great intricacy such that they gain an unparalleled fibrous strength and depth. these concerns are almost impossible, most of the time, to recognize as something separate from yourself....they come, sprouting to the surface, and they feel like 'you'. almost completely unrecognizable as something separate. you don't realize when they happen, but they darken like rainclouds and the world seems like it has always been this way, forever tinged with dejection and uncertainty. it is really, truly, very hard to break out of this cycle of thinking.

perhaps it is that i'm having a much more mindful year than any previous, taking opportunities to enrich my mind and my spirit, but i'm starting to pick up on these problem thoughts. indirectly, to be sure....i couldn't describe to you what i feel when i begin to acknowledge them. perhaps a subtle humming, like a struck tuning fork, a low-frequency from beyond a thin wall. perhaps meditating has helped me to pick up on a wider band of feelings, enabled me to stretch out the spectrum of emotions further so that i can chart my being with more accuracy. i can't say for sure. but i know that, being swathed in the clouds of this city, i feel a bit of that same logic, as if it has helped me somehow. helped me to locate the barnacles to scrape off of my hull when i have a moment to rest in port; filtered my possibilities into a better representation of what i would hope myself to be.

i don't see the weather here as a negative thing. i start to see it as recursive, mirroring myself in an outward reflection. and the funny thing is, i'm not saying that i am getting gloomier; quite the opposite really. the more i spend time in the shadows, the more i find myself able to bathe in the light, to preserve it, like a firefly in a bottle sitting on my shelves when i need it (or a photograph of one, if you want to get all buddhist about it~). and the more i can appreciate it, when it is actually present.

you're actually engaged.

2009-02-15T16:58:00.000-08:00

you and your friend approached me, reading over drinks, and we started talking about books. you asked me what i was reading so i flashed the cover, to which you replied that you had heard of him and read some of his other stuff. i'm certain that you hadn't, but these sorts of tale-spinnings are to be expected in our context. when you brushed your hand through your rigorously-conditioned hair, there was a distinct flicker on the only finger upon which flickers are to be dully noted; now placing your hand on the table it was clearly created by a smallish stone on a golden band.

"oh," i thought.

we continued our conversation for twenty minutes or so, you cooing and low-cut, and when i next looked down i was surprised to find that your ring had somehow managed to find its way off of your finger, vanished to an undisclosed location. there was a little red imprint around your finger where it used to be, and there was honey in your eyes when you looked at me. i hope it wasn't too much effort to pull it off without drawing any attention, because that was the last bit of my attention that you will be drawing from.

for:
http://youwillnotbedatingme.blogspot.com

perfect, whether to fly?

2009-02-03T19:52:00.000-08:00

ah, it feel so good to be able to power through a regular-sized book, one that doesn't have the density of a neutron star. i was questioning my english-major status for awhile on account of the mazes that pynchon has been dangling a carrot in front of me all the way through, but i set that one aside and picked up a few breathers, and now i feel like i can come back to it sometime soon. what a relief. this is what i love so much about life outside of the constructs of college....you get to make your own directions, and give up on things when you want to, and pick up different things when you catch sparks touching them. its a bit of a black hole at the same time though, and you really have to begin to get a grasp upon yourself and what your driving motivations are. i could easily see one small distraction spiraling into months and months of absent-minded debauchery without real direction. what's curious, though, is that even that sort of approach has its definite benefits....you never know what you will stumble into in a tempest, or what might stumble into you, and you might pinpoint something spasmodically instead of via the typical slow-n-steady routes...likely even a lot of interesting things that would have lain long away from your intended paths. there are ups and downs to that of course. but at a certain point perhaps you have to relinquish control to your body and spirit, and let them guide you unguarded. you have to know that you will still get somewhere, that you will still learn something, and you have to think that your ambitions will find their way towards what "you" would intend, even if the route is circuitous. it is kind of like surfing around on wikipedia for hours and hours....it seems in ways like a sinkhole, but you learn quite a bit....and you likely wouldn't have clicked onto that next progression unless you had at least a slight inkling towards it, consciously or unconsciously nudging you self-ward.

the world's a brilliantly complex state of affairs. it seems like one misstep in it can ruin or take a life; conversely, it can create an opportunity or conjure an idea. every moment of every day, we are confronted with choices we can make, that we usually don't even consider. perhaps you would call those blinders that we put on, 'personality'. it's interesting to hear that word in a negative context, isn't it? but how could we function without some semblance of ourselves? we would completely dissolve into the world and its vast machinery if nothing compelled us to some constancy. there are literally 360 degrees that we can travel in, from any set stance, and once we've taken a step, there our 360 options are again, but they have changed slightly. for ridiculousness' sake we'll leave out non-horizontal travel~ but we situate and we follow paths, wearing down the tracks of our own memory with repetition, like the stairs of hellems. it sort of digs little ditches for our feet, you see, but one supposes that it makes life more intelligible so it remains the standard. you really don't get a fair picture of it if you're already enmeshed...but travel a little, and you really begin to acknowledge what a difference time and place, and the tiniest choices that we make in our lives, have on the whole tapestry.

the sad part about acknowledging this is that you realize, at some point or another, that newness is really what makes the world inspiring, what makes existence creative. people complain as they get older; they complain about the acceleration of their years, and about how those throttling years are no longer 'golden' (a precious metal reference...i doubt that people would admit it, but they may literally feel that the later years are less valuable to them, overall, than those forged of gold). it's all in the paths that we run, or dig ourselves deeper into; it's all in the timing and the actual use of our time. you can say that newness fades because we collect experiences....that there is only so much to do and that it is inevitable that we pass beyond these vivacious times. i just think that, at this juncture, i would respectfully disagree. the choice to work an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, is not a societal norm in many places. when we do this we are shackling ourselves, or willing it to be done to us by others~ workplaces are efficient; they are well-oiled machines and they tend to treat us like mathematical functions, like specific applications or gears in a project that is ongoing, never-ending and ever-growing in the ideal of the market. we work so that we can live, so that we can have money to explore or dig ourselves deeper if we choose...but we are under the impression that money is life and that we are being sold the means to life~ it's right at our fingertips, no work necessary, but our entire country, our entire world has been designed to make it seem like an absolute necessity, as though one cannot do without it. i have a lot of deep-seated issues with all this, but clearly i'm still in it playing the game. it definitely burns deep down in me sometimes.

and now we pass the time in this manner, and now our days become more and more clustered...our experiences more and more similar to one another, our days adrift and unchanging. i think this is the reason that people report life as 'accelerating'; i think that when you act as a single function, if that is what is expected of you, you spend long portions of time doing the exact. same. thing. every day, every week, year out. when we're youthful, when we're in college or high school or what have you, our moments are constantly fluctuating. new knowledge, new people, new places, new things to do, new music to listen to, new ambitions and hopes. jobs have a way of crushing ambitions, relegating us to the present, and cramming us into it in a way that it is surprising to me so many people put up with. we no longer have the *time* to do different things, to be new selves; if we were able to then it would compromise our current positions~ so our days become more selfsame, and we snowball along with them, rolling up layer upon layer of habit and similarity and convention to block us from experiencing the changes that are, in the end, so essential to the living spirit and to keeping life crisp and new.

i would like for people to put a more genuine effort into finding jobs which they will really enjoy and be rewarded by. i would like for myself to do this as well. i'm working on it, sort of, although not really in an amending-the-current-situation sort of way....i'm trying to explore, and find something which really inspires me to devote my energies to it. all this i'm doing on the side, and trying to stay active about it. in the meantime we do what we have to, i suppose; i'm just tired of seeing people work jobs that they have no affinity for, that they continue on it because it is the path of least resistance on account of their own digging into it. we can literally be worth whatever we put the effort into being worth; all of us.

mind is burnt. matches out~

25 things 'bout you

2009-01-30T10:59:00.000-08:00

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.

pocketful of spare change

2009-01-24T23:49:00.000-08:00

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.

oh dear me

2009-01-13T18:50:00.000-08:00

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.

maintenance

2009-01-11T15:15:00.000-08:00

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?

boards of canada

2009-01-08T20:52:00.000-08:00

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

colorado

2009-01-01T15:40:00.003-08:00

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.

backspace

2008-12-18T19:04:00.000-08:00

the plant, this plant right here, looks like lightly-grilled green peppers skewered on winding shish-ka-bob sticks. thick, ruffled, vibrant. there doesn't seem to be any ordering principle to the juxtaposition of the tendrils....unlike some sharp and angular plants one might find on wooded walks. this thought from the other day floats back into my mindspace....chaos is still math. there is still logic here, there; it grips at your eyes and rakes them left, right...gently curls your ankles, like a summer breath, coaxing them down a sideways street. a coppered scent lances through you, permeates the inside of the compass, dizzying. there is a dialectic for everything here. there is an equation compounding...both complex and getting simpler, by less-than-seconds, to understand. it is ourselves who are dismantling our own progress, disordering the rubix while we aren't looking (really looking). we feel some need to make this math STOP, some imperative to frost it, slow it, and script it so that it might be applied to ourselves. whom we cannot, for the life of us, figure out.

so instead, we focus on everything external to us. we burrow, curiously enough, into the outside world. when things go pear-shaped, we sometimes hang on to it for dear life, for sweet surrender to definition from an informing source, from something which seems to have more solidity than the nebulous fluctuations of our minds and thereby personalities (no, do not claim no inconsistencies in this arena. they are there; we are just better-trained to pass over our own faults and paint crimson flags upon others'). but we need to learn to retract our claws; to fall from the world and simultaneously be cushioned by it. we have compounded depths within us that most have not even bothered to scan with whatever radar techniques they can muster. our potential ranges of sensation, of experience, are exponential, or diminishing to near zero...one of the two. we have lost much of the sense, the liberty, of innovative living, of casting out and burning with the newness of the stars. there are many territories to be explored, not all of them tangible. but the more darkness one burns away inside of oneself, the more focused and torch-bearing one can exist on the outside.

dreams, in particular, and an exemplary manifestation of this idea. dreams sublimate the vast and murky, sensations (or whatever you want to call them, those indications of distance within one's own mind, emotions, spirit) that we are capable of, with actual plots of what seems to be more manageable mediums. dreams are crayons, scraping waxen upon the intricate sculptures of the soul. how fascinating that we can conjure whole oceans, whole continents, out of the raw materials which our thoughts, and what goes perhaps deeper than them, provide. it seems little wonder that god is imagined as human-like, and humanity as the sharded form of a god.

we exist in multiple dimensions, in multiple forms, and they can teach us great and wonderful things about the other. i think that only something which was laced, somehow, could exhibit these properties, these bridges of understanding. to quote a friend..."livelovelaughlook". Do not sell yourself short on the boundless possibilities of existing with apparent chaos. Embrace.

family business

2008-12-11T20:26:00.000-08:00

do you know what is interesting? despite the fact that i somewhat take issue with christmas for the necessity of buying people things (and it's not that i am cheap...i dislike the economy propagating itself based upon an expectation or imaginary premise), for whatever reason i am completely comfortable with it when i consider the situation that my life is in. these are my family peoples; these are the people whom i truly care about and who will take me in regardless of circumstance. the dejected part about the holiday (which isn't the holiday's fault, so much, as it is a naturally-arising situation) is that it reminds me of how infrequently i actually get to see, get to spend face time with these people. family is an oddity in that there is a natural rifting of it at a certain point in a person's life....and it is likely a recursive theme as well, for i'm sure it will happen to me with my children, leaving me in a similarly set-apart stance of forlorn expectation. no, the thing is that despite loving these people so much, we don't get to see each other at all.

what i am finding, though, came as a surprise to me; an offhanded realization, a peripheral that it took me some time to see glinting. gift-giving may be cliche, but i absolutely want to do it....i want to thrust my purchases upon these good people with hope that they will express sentiments which i cannot, or at least, cannot from a distance, cannot over a telephone line or zooming electronic parcels. i hope that they do some damage to any walls that have built up between all of us. not walls that anyone would expect to be there....nobody in my circle, that i know of, has any grudges or misgivings which might set them distinctly at odds with me, or with each other, at all. we are a smooshily-happy family. but i consider, i hope these gifts to be the sweeping hands which might brush a coarse ivy off of a cottage-side, one which was beginning to be overgrown, overpopulated with seeds of tangled indifference.

i wish 'la noyee' was more than two minutes and three seconds long.

its not that i am not close with these people; they will always be my closest, i feel. but it is hard, hard to be instantly made as 'at ease' at our history should have us be. even with friends, non-relatives, sometimes it takes some time for gears to mesh melodiously again....a smoothness of being is a thing to be cherished, when it can be found in the company of others. i know that i can be completely at ease with my family; that they know me best of all, in many ways perhaps better than i know myself, though probably in ways which i could never grasp in the first place by faculty of some ego-bias intrinsic to being an encapsulated mind. relaxation, however, mindfulness and being completely at ease, is something that people spend their entire lives trying to swim upstream of.

one thing i know now about relationships now, is how pivotal it is to establish comfort in a solitary setting. and of course by relationship-solitary, which seem contradictory, of course i mean tete-a-tete; the one-on-one equilibrium which two people can find with each other when they are alone together. in general, the social bullshit stops, and people start being real and engaging with one another about meaningful things. i suppose my concern about family nowadays is that this balance is shifting into a group dynamic...which, hear me out, is no bad thing...after all, a group is what a family is, at it's utmost core. no, i rather mean that, considering that family time is so scarce, we are likely to spend the bulk of it in an amorphous blob of good feeling, complete saturation of senses with the bliss of being around my favorite people, all together again, and trying to relish it (knowing that it will not last). i fear that i won't get my solitary, singular one-on-one time with my family members...that time which i have come to feel is crucial to maintaining a real, crisp, honest relationship with someone. those walls that might be cracked or shattered by such contact will not have the time to be worn down....this is my fear...i will not be able to express to the fullest of my being, because i will be entirely in a social setting where emotions and phrases and looks and jokes are addressed to the crowd (albeit a *very* good and close crowd), not to an intimacy which my heart speaks more to now than ever, considering how little time i have to make it count.

i fear that the more and more i accept the distance which circumstance forces upon my relationships with these people, the more and more i will regret it, because life transitions and who can know where or what or when? i could move to a different country for two years, just like my brother, and not be able to see any of them for a serious brick of time. it would be a voluminous experience, to be sure....not to be missed, i am certain of that. but i cannot help but wonder at the trade-offs one makes with any decision. perhaps the philosopher in me. i feel distant enough even just living where i live, on the west coast, unable to connect with my family but a few scarce times per year, at best.

take a step back from this: how thankful that holidays exist; that they have the magnetism, the force of family to be able to draw these kindred souls back to one another again! bliss, pure. and this is the reason that i could not possibly mind spending exorbitant amounts of money on my family; they are rocks in my life more precious to me than any that i could buy in a store, regardless of any gemstone claims of infinites and forevers. i feel ridiculous, at the same time, buying them gifts, because they do not need them; they feel the same way, but the cycle goes on. i wish to express my caring, and it expresses itself thusly, in the traditional ways that we all grew up with.

presents have come to mean so much more to me, to us, i imagine. i could pull a j.j. abrams, and give my family ambiguous boxes wrapped to the nines, telling them never to open them but to leave them as symbols of what could be, and what is....never knowing, always knowing; forever finding out more about what the concept means. they are foremost mementos and remembrances. take a piece of me with you to your varied lives, and express it how you will. perhaps i will do just that. but these symbols aren't necessary; in fact they have never been less necessary. we observe the tradition, we curtsy, a-courteously, to the court which we owe allegiances to. this is our kingdom, and we may be as foolish as we choose; everything is rainbow-edged and glows with something not to be found anywhere else. our currencies are superior to the federal reserve's; socialism at it's best, most flawless ideal. depression cannot come around here no more.

if its broke; fix dat

2008-12-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

i've been being a little whiny bitch to myself lately, ever since my ipod broke. i need tunes at my side, in my step, quickening and modulating my rhythm. i haven't gotten a new one yet...i wanted an ipod nano, but then i realized i could get a 'touch' and have internet and apps as well (and built in speeks), but then they were too expensive. but then i decided i should just get an iphone and hack it for T-Mobile, but then iphones were waay too expensive, but then i found a decent deal on an older model, but then i thought, i know matt and he wants the newer model, but then i found a used ipod touch for a good deal, but it was an older model, and didn't have the speeks or the much-improved battery life, but then i almost bought an iphone but the bastard on craigslist committed verbally to me but then sold it to a coworker instead, but then i found decent deals on older touches and am wondering how much battery life and speakers really matter to me, if i can get a 16GB model instead of an 8GB.

fuck.

i am overwhelmed, and in the time i have spent trolling craigslist for this shit, probably could have made enough to pay off whatever it is that i end up buying (still no verdict). but its made me consider a few things. stress-level is a very important factor in purchasing. deals are only worth finding if you have time to waste (which i'd like to think i don't) and if you need to absolutely scrap for the money (which i don't necessarily). and i could have been listening to my sweet, sweet strawberry jams by now, if i had just gone ahead and bought something during an online black friday sale from apple~

second. kierkegaard makes mention about a distinction between 'choice' and 'absolute choice'. these things are supposed to be resigned to the realm of philosophy, and i am completely tainting bold ideas in my application of them to consumerism...fuck it. i always tend to think that choices i make are absolute choices, because i hate being wrong and going back to cover tracks for shit that i did incorrectly. but a purchase, esp from craigslist, is not an absolute choice, in any sense of the word. if i buy a goddamn touch from someone and get even a halfway decent deal, chances are it wouldn't take me two seconds of effort, if i didn't end up liking what i got, to re-list and dispatch it to someone else who perhaps did want it. i might even make a little cash on the side doing that. so. stress, begone. you ain't worth mah time.

fuck.

rep

2008-12-02T20:20:00.000-08:00

i was reading / thinking about art just now. artistic nature and qualities.

and i still need to buy christmas presents.

art and temporality. what constitutes a solid, chromatic piece of art? like i was reading, pride is the perfect artistic fodder. it comes in stuttering bursts of indignance; it erupts to the surface like lava, searing and scalding the air. humility is no good. it takes too long. an instance of humility means nothing, because it is a quality which loses all semblance of meaning if it is not practiced in continuance. if all heroes could be hypocrites, then not much would set them apart from the crowd, would it?

i have started to use my pinkie finger to type, or hit return, in certain situations. it is something i saw my boss doing, and it pleased me greatly with its efficiency. must be the german in me. now i have begun doing it for myself, and this paragraph was preceded by the first instance of me noticing it. it's kind of like stretching to that new fret for the first time, bending into a whole new note instead of just a half-step. pleasant. accomplished.

art is something that most people consider as existing within space. the frame of a painting. the green depths of an iris. the purple-fudge-ripple of a mountain range in twilight; rambling rocky roads with marshmallow-softened edges. but art is something that absolutely, positively, must exist moreso in time than in space. definitively. art is not stand-alone...it requires observers, audiences, critics, bearers and bringers with intentions, or sometimes assumptions and arrogances. even a painting or a landscape is nothing if the blossoming mind which is ripe to sweep the dust out of its intricacies has its back turned. it is a required, a fundamental prerequisite. a canvas by salvador dali is nonsense without a rational mind with just enough quirkiness to be awestruck by the disruption of convention.

other art is just as involved with time. some even go so far as to invoke it...music for example. but a song is only...playable. after the fact, after the striking resonance of its first instance, it is then a reproduction, which doesn't seem to say much for its innovative and intrinsic artistic value, even if we still find it charmant. certainly that sentence will rub some folk the wrong way, and i don't know with any certainty why i wrote it. seat of pants. what sense does poetry make, if not when it is being recited or thought about? none. just words, just thoughts, and at that just thoughts that were scripted by someone else who probably felt a host of different feelings about their words than you do.

trying to weave my way back into this writing thing~

update

2008-11-19T18:42:00.000-08:00

well, here i am.

it's been a long minute since i last trod upon these white spaces. currently i am sitting and enjoy a fine mint tea, instead of the yerba mate latte that i would prefer from this particular place. the reasoning behind this masochism is that i am currently on day six of what is typically called the 'master cleanse'. and if you don't know what that is, well:

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=master+cleanse

basically this means that any food and drink aside from this tangy lemonade concoction (fresh lemon juice, water, pure organic maple syrup, and a dash or four of cayenne pepper), basically anything that exists outside the confines of my old nalgene bottle, is off the table for me. i am sort of at peace with this, sometimes. other times i can't help but fantasize about digging my teeth into the explosive tastiness of enchiladas, apple fritters, etc etc etc. my list is lengthy, but it's actually kind of fun. i felt for a little while like i was sort of in a rut with food....always eating the same things and not getting much variety in. that may or may not have actually been accurate, but once you've had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day for a week, you start to tire of all aspects of it....the combination of flavors, the texture, the size; the redundant steps of preparation, especially if ingredients are particularly hazardous to handle. now i feel like i am really beginning to smell food. maybe it has something to do with sensory deprivation of sorts, for an extended period of time, but my receptors truly latch onto scents now. i didn't know the capacity that they had before this...outrageousness.

it is interesting to see, when removed from the fray, how much people actually concern themselves with food. whenever mention is made of it now, my ears prick up as if conditioned...and it is alarming, the rate at which this happens. people talk about food, or eating, or planning to eat, or having just eaten, or having eaten years ago, ALL the time. it is coming to the point where i might start believing that 30% of human conversation (and that might even be conservative) is composed by the humming strings and harpings of food appreciation and critique. watching TV nowadays is almost more torturous....one realizes what a consistent and necessary commodity food actually is, as observed in the droning drummings of food-based or oriented commercials. sometimes even shows. the airwaves are saturated with promises of flavor.

and the mention of flavor brings up one of the most poignant distinctions that this fast has helped me to realize, which is the distinction between actual, necessary hunger and psychological, sometimes even social (which one supposes is psychological as well), craving. despite the fact that i haven't eaten any solid food for, damn if it isn't 6 days now (7 if we don't count just fruit), i haven't really experienced any pangs of severe hunger. i'm not entirely sure that i ever have. i have felt probably the same depth of hunger as i have experienced at other times in my life, but they lack something now, some imperative. they lack validation. it's as if the only reason that they seemed so strong in other scenarios was because they were fueled with the strength of my expectations, with my then-concepts about what 'full' and 'hungry' were. after doing this, i don't think that such naive concepts should be able to get the better of me again. i remember as a child, whining on hiking trails that i 'simply could not go on' without stopping for food. i'm sure that if i were promised a feast sitting at a table two miles from where i stood, my legs would miraculously find the strength to carry me to it~ after this experience, i feel that my definitions of what 'full' and 'hungry' are will shift noticeably. they rest on a spectrum, as do all dualities it seems, and generally our minds operate within a very thin band of what we have experienced. only by pushing the boundaries of our experiences can we learn to see things differently. now i know that when i feel the same hunger that i used to feel...well, i still have half a tank left, in case i need it to get anywhere. even if you are blind to it, your body has ways of course-correcting.

2008-11-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

"how remarkable it is that those who do not bore themselves generally bore others; those, however, who bore themselves entertain others."
~ kierkegaard

"idleness is not the evil; indeed, it may be said that everyone who lacks a sense for it thereby shows that he has not raised himself to the human level."

since i've been lazy

2008-11-06T21:55:00.000-08:00

here is a sliver of fiction that may or may not be any good. been keeping busy and unable to dish out a cornucopia of posts as per usual~

He is cloaking down these ruddy streets now, body slicing through the frosted breeze or tropical heats. Very difficult to tell which on any given day. Footsteps fall and billows of air spiral out from beneath them, curling fingers striping his paths but always outwards, never collapsing back in upon him to cradle his direction with any sense of resistance (if straying), or purpose (if keeping), which could perhaps be considered the same thing after all.

Exhaustion is setting in. He lifts his eyes from the grained and gray slabs of concrete below his feet; it is now 10 AM and he has been gradually receding into the day, much like the shadows in seams of this sidewalk....sinking downwards into passivity, thoughts draining down his body and mingling with the brute imperatives of the terra firma below. The head bone may be closer to the sky bone, but the earth has a seductive way with words and a gravitational ace up its you-know-what.

Eyes lamping slowly, hazily, like chinese paper lanterns strung over a small collection of indifferent powerlines. He sees souls scattered here and there. Now they are there and here; they careen like pinballs unlocked by the raw, compressed energy of a quarter. Every other one has a briefcase filled with ambiguous and rattling contents. These people very much enjoy rattling in one way or another. Mostly they move in straight and orderly lines, so he doesn't have too much problem keeping some semblance of distance at any given time. This is not to say that he hasn't had his shins tapped by the occasional car bumper when trying to cheat the hedge-maze, as it were, horns blaring angry social-ruptures as he lopes across a one-way. But he begins to get the hang of all this again.

After all, it was only yesterday that he felt the comforting drumming of the city sounds, the wavering crescendo of every moment, the invigorating pipings of the littlest things....a tea kettle searing steam behind distant doors, the creak of an armchair as it accompanies a reclining mind. Today, this morning, the clouds have rolled in. Some slinking, feline despair has curled up deep within him and must, must make itself known; scraping, raking his insides like the hollow of a pumpkin, invalidating the slightly-tipped triumph or ennui of an average city-dwelling day and replacing it with a bitter smokiness that seeps through any sense he might employ.

He knows for a fact that part of the 'problem' is that he refuses, on some level, to fight this feeling. On some level, he may even encourage it. But it bristles him; the part of him that seeks to do what it sees, that yearns for approval.

to be continued maybe.

the city paranoiac

2008-10-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

in thomas pynchon's writing, specifically gravity's rainbow (because obviously, i am currently attempting to power my way through this book), he comes up with a concept that i find innovative in its application, even though we have proven examples of it in some different areas of life. this is not to say that nobody else has come up with this concept before....i think there is a solid chance that this is, while obscure, still a running theme in many notable works of fiction. pynchon describes what he calls the 'city paranoiac'....it isn't a city-dweller who constantly checks his six either. granted this is only my first exposure to what is probably a running dialogue in this book, but i found the following interesting and would enjoy sharing what i think it meant to my mind. initial exposure:

"if the city paranoiac dreams, it's not accessible to us. perhaps the city dreamed of another, enemy city, floating across the sea to invade the estuary . . . or the waves of darkness . . . waves of fire . . . perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the silent Mother Continent? it's none of my business, city dreams . . . but what if the city were a growing neoplasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the changing state of its very worst, secret fears? the raggedy pawns, the disgraced bishop and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and waiting."
~ gravity's rainbow

what this means, at least to me, is a conglomeration of consciousnesses. a sliver, gleamed off of each inhabitant....these spirit-structures drifting apart; committed to the person, the original owner, and yet coalescing into a collective organism which feeds off of the life bustling within it. in this way you could imagine it somewhat akin to a human body, or human mind itself. atoms, cells, distinct and yet working cooperatively and with some uncanny and not-necessarily acknowledged sense of unification. the greater consciousness, the thriving organism, the paranoiac city, scrapes biopsies from each and every one of us, building database upon mathematical database, wavelengths cluttering our airspace like radio signals, endlessly clashing with one another but, if tuned just correctly, surprisingly clear in their intricacies. these are checks and balances of a more natural order; a return to the nature of the social organism for those who still have ears to hear it. this is why cities find distinction from one another, why they are unique and their particular styles bleed into and out of the personages who populate them. our governments, governors supposedly control these equations, and allegedly speak for us. but who is to say that the city does not have a voice all of its own?

now, we know that humans do work on these levels, psychologically. we bond covalently, both giving and taking in like kind, gaining something which probably used to be shrouded in mystique but which now, thanks to psychoanalysis and such mental tools (don't get me started on using the mind to dissect the mind), has been elucidated for, ironically, our understanding of ourselves and our placement within these structures. the city gives back to us what we understand life to be; it is similar to a monastic experience. one gives their work, their money, their attention, their time and energy, their emotions.....and in return, they are initiated, accepted; they learn and experience what they find to be most relevant to their existence. but this relationship, which it could not be called anything but, assumes an 'other', a significant. this other is the relationship, it is the shire, the farm, the town, the city, the metropolis. it is the marketplace and the stranger's gum which sticks to your shoe on the subway steps. it's....

"It's the caffeine, the nicotine, the milligrams of tar
It's my habitat, it needs to be cleaned, it's my car
It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain
It's the cat box it needs to be changed, it's the pain
It's women, it's the plight for power it's government
It's the way you're giving knowledge
slow with thought control and subtle hints
It's rubbing it, itching it, It's applying cream
It's the foreigners sight seeing with high beams, It's in my dreams
It's the monsters that I conjure, It's the marijuana
It's the embarrassment, displacement, it's where I wander
It's my genre, It's Madonna's videos
It's game shows, It's cheap liquor, blunts,
It's bumper stickers with rainbows
It's angels, demons, gods, it's the white devils
It's the monitor, the soundman, it's the motherfucking mic levels
It's gas fumes, fast food, Tommy Hil' mommy's pill
Columbia House music club, designer drugs and rhyming thugs
It's bloods, crips, fives, six
It's stick up kids,
It's christian conservative terrorists, it's porno flicks
It's the east coast, no it's the west coast
It's public schools, it's asbestos
It's mentholated, It's techno
It's sleep, life, and death
It's speed, coke, and meth
It's hay fever, pain relievers, oral sex, and smokers breath
It stretches for as far as the eye can see
It's reality, fuck it , it's everything but me"
~atmosphere - 'scapegoat'

but in this spatial oddity, is there something residual left over, after all the energy has been tussled about and exchanged between us? i submit that i think, it being just on the edge of my mind, that there is. the 'city'...as pynchon describes it perhaps the 'city paranoiac', is a nebulous consciousness which is dictated in small part by each individual component, adding up to a ridiculous equation swayed at least (if in some infinitesimally small way) by each nuance that we grind into it. if something is understood even by the few, then the city could be said to understand it....the memory is in the molecules, and they are infectiously similar throughout the whole. the 'city' can be more than a mental projection....it can be considered with the instincts and attributes of a person. just as a corporation is, for all legal purposes, a concretized citizen of the united states, with rights and liberties all its own (look into it if you are skeptical), i think it is entirely possible to view a city....or for that matter a nation or world, or campfire-ringed friends, as a real, legitimate, and entirely existent collective consciousness which, in some very esoteric and self-generative way, begins to act, and desire, and fear, and think, and...well, overall the shock of the matter is that it feels, and generates its own volition.
remember that ish~

matches out.

full moon

2008-10-14T20:13:00.000-07:00

"he had, had, this was of removing all excitement from things with a few words. not even well-chosen words: he's that way by instinct. when they would go to the movies he would fall asleep. he fell asleep during nibelungen. he missed atilla the hun roaring in from the east to wipe out the burgundians. franz loved films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out of sleep. 'you're the cause-and-effect man,' she cried. how did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open?"
~ gravity's rainbow

granted, this is just a passage from a book of epic proportions. granted, there is a lot of context, a lot of precursing, weaved into these words. but one of the things that i enjoy most about literature is that, in general, sentences and paragraphs are sometimes almost works of art all their own, and have a tangible value set apart from the rest of the work. maybe even these things wouldn't have been possible, perhaps they never would have been imagined, created, unless the author had all the previous stepping-stones to skip around on. but in turn, sometimes i write entire pages of crap that turn out to be worthwhile (in my mind) just for a scrap....a sentence, a word in new light; maybe even just a feeling.

doesn't it see impossible, to piece together the fragments that we see only while our eyes are open? let's take this at its most literal, in its hardest granite form. you are asleep, and something significant is altered. a pet dies. a significant other cheats on you. anything. waking, your world has changed....but it is completely lost to you in a temporal gap, a sliver of thought between cognizance last and cognizance next, and it has affected so much that direct impacts you. now your time, your actualization of the event, becomes borrowed time - you attempt to catch up with the world, but can one ever really break stride with something that marches persistently on, never stopping for a breath? we are perpetually out of sync with the sequences of photographs flying in front of our faces. our lives, as we know them, cover some 70, some 80, some 90 years. how much of that can we call our own? can we own a war, in our lifetime, if we do nothing to influence it, nothing to disarm it? if it exists outside of our spheres?

let's tumble worldviews off of the table, however; what i would really enjoy digging into is how this structures a personality....or, more accurately, how a personality filters the utter bombardment of experience that the world is constantly pitching (now a fastball, now a change-up) directly in our faces. step outside your door; take a brisk autumn stroll in this full moonlight. grab a notepad to take along with you. come back and, what did you see? what did you think? were those things correlated to one another? if you mapped it out, somehow, would it be intelligible; could you dive headfirst into it and explain, logically and soundly, how you progressed from square one to whatever ecstasy or depression you were mired in when you returned? a mind, isolated, reveals its fundamentals.
but i doubt you could explain all those hops. rarely, it seems to me, do we check our thoughts.

but here i stand, supposedly, offering you a vibrant storyboard of all your brainwaves, all your free-flowing associations and tangential interruptions and fortitudes and anxieties. can you tweak them; can you turn a dial, slightly, in photoshop-blur fashion, and alter something - can you turn this dial in my storyboard as easily as you can turn your head during your moonlight stroll? does that accomplish the same thing? do you ever choose the low road, simply because you know the high road so well? and the point is: what has that changed?

"did you see the woman in the red dress, neo? look again."

it dawns upon me that this world is infinitely rich; far too much exists to keep track of. when i do something as simple as turning my head, i have abandoned a solid 240 or so degrees of sight, of sense, of potential influence upon my mind and its understanding of things. i know this example is absurdity because we have no other choice; i welcome this absurdity. push it forward. when i narrow my focus; when i hinge my mind upon the world such that i can apply myself fully, such as writing this or that word, here, now.....my perspective has dimmed almost to absolute darkness...i find myself looking at a 1" x 1" square, if that. i have a full sphere of rotation for my sight...standing on the surface of the earth, i choose to look at a single star. in photography, however, the smaller the amount of light you let in, the sharper your overall picture becomes. food for thought. but that is contradictory to the point so i will abandon it~

we all pretend to be these fully-aware, fully-composed beings. we absorb the world around us, but when it comes down to it, our selectiveness is absolutely, postitively absurd. the world eclipses our composition to such an extreme that it seems an impossibility to advance any further than childhood wonder~ the more i learn, the more naive it seems to me that any concept of "knowledge" is considered to be valid. i must reign my thoughts in; they flare wayward. how did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open? we develop habits, erratic pieces (peaces) upon which we choose to align our individual focus-sets and mental toolboxes. it is staggering to me, at this moment, that our concept of fludity, of a smoothly-flowing stream of constancy, can be applied to the world as we experience it today. the world is an unknown; a massive labyrinth with minotaurs roaming the grounds, and we hold tight our creature-comforts, steady the wheel towards them and try not to look back.

i'm exhausted and my mind has become somewhat muddled on the topic. i'm certain that this comes through to some degree already (le sigh). perhaps i can pick this up tomorrow...but by then a world of differences and two million possible muses will have crossed my path. one more sun.

bookmark

2008-10-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

don't know where to begin; it has been a minute since i've written. the again-tour of colorado was phenomenal. wandering around my old home, the house, my old garden; driving those ancient streets. finding everything still in working order, clockwork whirring away, drilling into peoples' lives and experiences. even just skimming around, lightly tracing a finger over all the solidified memories; picking it up again to find a ring of dust circling one's index....this is a profound experience. i felt like an architect, unearthing fragments of a civilization now passed by and trodden underfoot, unseen. what is even more, is that i certainly would be an architect of the highest degree - a specialist in the field, as it were. i have seen pictures of all these relics in the textbooks of my memory; they communicate intimately with me as signs of something alive, a heart once beating, once merging, semiotic and symbiotic relationships calling, threshing, billowing flat-fictioned fossils into saturated realities which i can only hope to edge at with my mind, crowbar into with all the caution of someone trying to to break the antiqued wood-linings of containment. and on some level i am alien, come down to a place which i understand in some respects but which i now have so much more context to offer. i cave through intricate mines, brushing debris carefully off of time-capsules sealed with childrens' hopes. these are things, breadcrumbs, which i have subconsciously left for myself, to be discovered at a time when i had better ideas of what they could mean. they are old perfume bottles once servient as crystal balls in merlin games, spells of the mind arcing through them along lines of refracted and long-gone light.

they simultaneously mean both less and more; it is a dark struggle which i find in abundance these days. they are powerful, combinatorial, world-philosophies and ethical systems. they speak like poetry, spilling thousands of pictures and lifetimes of emotion from mere handfuls of words - and small hands, at that, perhaps covered in too-big and leathern-rough baseball gloves which may, may have a better chance at netting these monolith concepts than all our webs, all our adult intelligences, anxieties, and trivialities. the words of my childhood speak to me like thunder, booming and distant. once i was rod for them, they ripping and shredding me daily, building from the rich resources of naievete my personality, back stronger, faster, muscular....now i am mostly grown carbon, charged metal particles now diffuse and in severe scarcity, stinging every so often like licks of static electricity, occasioning an "oh, what was that?" and mere momentary disorientation. but i try, try to pan this sun-glinting metal from the stream of my consciousness....what else is all this, this here, but an exercise in precious metals? i don't know if the world agrees with my economic schemas, but this, this is my currency, this my contribution. communist if it seems so; what would one like me care for labels~ when i find my true vein, my niche; when that rush of gold erupts to the surface like stored energy, a surge of ball-lightning cracking from my fingertips to these keys, or this pen, or that soft skin, or any application potential to the sphere of influence which daily i spin in ever-wider spirals...

well, watch out - and don't hold me back.

subject, meet predicate

2008-09-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-02T15:02:00.001-07:00

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?

my strings, let me show you them

2008-08-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

he likes to wear a guitar with a strap swirling around the shoulder and neckline, because it draws a direct and hard line between the proximity of his mind and the focus at which it aims. mental target practice, music; at least the rudiments. the faculties of the head are close to us, our consciousness....sight and smell are precise, discerning. the brush of the cheek and lips are practically buzzing with nerves; a loaded weapon waiting, itching to feel itself be fired. the further away, the more clumsy the senses get...hands can be trained, but cannot candle to, say, the intricacies of the tongue. the hands are ripe with utility, but they falter in that they absorb the finer points, mashing them into a singularity. further down are the feet, so removed from our mindstate that we would not normally consider to feel with them. they remain clumsy and relatively useless for anything other than their narrow purpose. no offense feet.

the strap tethers the mind and the hands, though; webs them and brings a focal directness and understanding between them. the mind tops the pyramid, which untapers down into two triangular shared sides, the body and the instrument. it brings a geometrical understanding, a simple assimilation that cradles the instrument as if it were a new archaeological discovery, fitting into the pieces of human history, filling a gap that has been void for far too long in our both sweetly short and exhaustibly dense genealogy. most people don't consider the strap, but it mobilizes. it makes accessory into effortless, alli into aqui, with an urgent note of immediacy.

myriad strings of varying substances likely creating a unique sound as they brush along fingerprints, but one would be hard-pressed to capture that differential within our unrefined hearings. more tangible are the inflections, the rhythms, the negative-spaces which are employed in the distances between notes. the beat, the swing, the slides and hammers and controlled spasms of the hand tensing on the frets. the nearly-chalkboard scrape of transposition. frets. an oddly-named partition of the instrument; it makes it seem as though anxiety were the only thing spurring a musician on from one chord to another. perhaps not so far from the truth~ anyone can play a scale, give them five minutes to learn. done and done. it takes a special kind of, abandon, however, to exist within one.

resumed. guitar is another one of those things; there is a natural propensity for it but it also spirals deeper in terms of effort (much work must be undertaken in order to really justify calling oneself a 'musician'....do not toss such words lightly). there is always another tier just beyond grasp, so ask any of us and you will watch us discredit our own achievements, eyes forever forward as they must be in order to achieve, to mystify, to transcend the current impression of what something is and of what we are capable of. good music is patient, humble, flabbergasted at its own existence and completely content with exploring its reaches. there will always be someone better if you think in terms of betters. so don't; chances are it won't get you where you want to be. and if it does, it's going to be a very lonely place when you finally arrive.
does that make any sense?

"now life's only pleasures is digging, i do it often; so when i die, don't cry, put my records in a coffin and bury me next to a very big tree, with my MPC."
~ Double K

number one-hundred

2008-08-13T20:12:00.000-07:00

is this a milestone? matches thinks so. it is the onehundredaneleventh post, and he is honored to know such fine and admirable hobbits. proudfoots. but in all seriousness, aside from a half-assed novel project for a writing class in college, this never-ending electronic page is just about the longest writing project he has ever embarked upon (and he shall see to it that he is only just getting wound up). there are cigarettes burning to the right of him; the kind of smokysweet brand that insight used to puff upon when he wasn't spitting hot fire.

if you hadn't noticed, that last posting was a branching out of sorts....a foray, as stylistically it was separate from everything else he has done here. obviously it still had a little bit of the other flavor, but that's hardly avoidable when one has been focusing on one such perspective for, a yearish. a year ago almost exactly it was that he moved to portland; one year taffying into a thousand facets and experiences and people. taffying lengthwise, and then again widthwise as he reflects upon it later. and it had that same sticky tendency; one could not shake it off of their hands even if they wanted to, not to mention the blue-raspberry tinge tattooed onto the tongue. which is an interesting analogy, he realizes as he types it, because really memories are like diluted sensations....colors, but not tastes; sights, but not sounds. feelings, but not saturated, overwhelming awareness of them.

back on track...that last one was a bit more fiction-based, a bit more storylike. which is certainly a direction in which m has always intended to head -- he has just been jogging sideways for some time now to avoid it, to strengthen other muscles which may lend him a little more stability in the harsh gravity of creation. forging other tools in the fire, hammers and pliers and blades, brushes, which might give him a superior foundation or fabric on which to beginagain. suicide drills before the big game, to tighten up those reflexes. and don't be fooled, the mental faculty is most certainly a reflex. albeit a rorschach sort, with free-associations flying furiously in every corridor of a paragraph. he still has yet to learn how to draft the blueprints~ so far his are only fingerprints, which it is true leave faint traces of structure, but nothing on a scheme so grand as he would have it be. and he would, if it would make itself apparent to him.

come on, feet.

a brief interlude: mattress loves it when a girl walks by smelling like fruit snacks. you know the type. what is that scent; does he even want to know? it seems like buying it and spraying it all over the place would ruin the effect that it has in its never-naturally-occurring isolation. there are a number of fragrances that do it for him, but that is certainly in the top three.

it is interesting to ponder all the things that people may appreciate about us, even though we would never know and they might never say anything. we are all beacons of light in some way or another. do we need other people to validate that in us? is it arrogant to appreciate oneself?
is that the definition of cool?

if there is one merit that matches will concede to smokers, it is that it occasions a moment for them to just chill, enjoying or sharing a reflective moment. to break from the bustle, even though ultimately they are contributing to it in some odder (otter!) way by feeding the craving. people rarely take the time for genuine conversation these days, but in smokers sometimes you will find people who have refined it to a science....three-minute bursts of brilliance, that they always have a somewhat-valid excuse to step outside of a situation for.
either that or they are just very socially inept, and need a socially-accepted out for when they begin drowning in conversation.
he is sure that both polarities are to be found in any setting.

writing is one of the most simultaneously relaxing and energizing things in the world. it is almost always, if not honestly always, a good thing. and you would be hard-pressed to say that about most things you come across in life, no?

a time for transition

2008-08-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

eyes sliding unfocused, loosely over the room, alighting now upon the mirrored exterior of a phone. still need to buy a real alarm clock, but what's the point? it shuttles back and forth, rattling, piping out now with rapid, heavy notes. the wind-up happened while i was still asleep, so then at some point on a sliding scale the more shrill tones waged a spatial-war, flexing in and out of real dimensions, with the caverns of my dream....eventually popping it, bubble-like; a needle shredding any point will rupture the structure of the whole, and reality cracks its way in on all sides like a cross-firing squad. the rememberance of the dream is lost almost as quickly as an equalizing pressure between those two, encrypted in invisible labyrinths like the air speeding out spherically, practically imperceptible after just a sliver of a moment, but it still has the to impact to make the child shoved down within us cry a little. this is the raw power of the world, calling for voluntary submission. again. after seven 'fuck you' hits of the snooze trigger, i swivel my body towards the edge of the bed so as to expend the minimal amount of energy possible for this first of the rote motions.

since stability is the foundation of comfort and possibly productivity, the next thirty minutes are precisely the same as they were the day before, and the day before that, back until the last time that the horizon of the day showed signs of different terrains to navigate. not counting weekends and christian-administered holidays, that seems like a long time ago. shower shave (maybe) food teeth hair door hallway elevator small talk garage street light highway parking lot, thank providence for unnasigned parking spots. even when broken down, these activities remain generally the same; it is usually best to wash the body starting from the top, down. it makes more sense. sometimes my shampoo smells different...green apple puts me in a slightly better mood unless a random sud finds its way into my eye. but they all could do that, technically, so it is no reason to discriminate against the apple. still it seems like it happens more often with that one.

it doesn't all hit me, the nausea, until that corridor at work. you know the one; it has bad lighting, or maybe too much lighting. its the longest single distance you walk during that first hour, and such it occasions a moment of reflection about how today is practically indistinguishable from the previous eighty. so far. i see a few of the same people, but not necessarily always the same ones...our patterns of existence are convergent. maybe there is something to astrology after all; orbits roping close enough exchange a smile or a g'morning how are you, but then they are past before they get a chance to reciprocate the question, and nobody cares. maybe there is nothing to astrology.

it isn't a sickness sort of nausea, no, it is perhaps more sartrean. it is a sleepiness; my sleepiness, as i would be loathe to impose it on anybody unchecked even though it probably exists even more prominently in them. scapegoat it if you like, it's all the same. it's the antithesis of the hiking trail derailment, the adventure. it's the low-pile monochromatic carpet, it's the controlled thermostat. it's the absence of elasticity; it's, stasisticity. it's when you trick yourself into thinking that something is different because you drink a smoky tea instead of a green tea, or when you take a hallway that is an obviously less-direct route but hey, you're feeling saucy. and it's all fine...but who has ever been content with just being fine?

and i stop in the corridor, the reflective one. i smell the air, recycled, metallic. it pumps through this building day and night, and it really is entire a mystery to me whether or not it ever escapes. i am inside the balloon, i am in a dream, and there is a natural existence outside of it. this life sits still, confined by walls of concrete painted for appeal, busy and bustling inside but with a series of the strangest concerns and intentions. the atrium is actually quite nice, but it suffers the same detraction as it is technically aiding this intricate system of distractions, of false focii. and i turn on my heel, 180, and i break from that box, that plane, that pressure system. the air outside is clean, fresh, crisp; the breeze swirls around me; i can see it, there are leaves caught up inside of it. i can *see*, the breeze; i can feel it smell it taste it hear it, and it is entirely real in this moment. this is an intoxicating notion to me. it is all part of this pressure, this monstrous enigma of life. i presume that the air inside the box makes it outside eventually, and i see in my head a cartoon rendition of the trees artfully cleansing it; stripping it of its crooked impurities and breathing it back onto the planet; it drifts like dandelion seeds and curls its way around everything. i am swept by these ideas; i dissipate inside of the breeze and my consciousness is eclipsed in a sequencing or perhaps madness of molecules, and the smaller bits which molecules would consider to be molecular. i am lost and found, and where i go from there, i cannot say.

empiricism

2008-08-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

be curious....it pays off. if not only in richness of memories.

a higher place

2008-08-06T21:27:00.000-07:00

whatever it takes to stop the squeaking noise, that's what antimatter is prepared to do. across the campus from his apartment, there is a library with a prominent tree sticking out of it. you would think the sharp trilling would be coming from a family of cicadas, but no, you would be incorrect. it is, in fact, coming from the silver air-conditioning tower atop the library roof, which clearly has a belt loose or a rust issue or perhaps just an ill temper. this wouldn't be such a big deal if it weren't constantly whirling away all hours of the day (and night), but, it is so. a bladed sound which penetrates the walls of the apartment complex (not to mention the non-double-paned windows. honestly, m's apartment is in the middle of downtown...use some foresight in your building plans, management). and so the sound pries its way into his dreams and always, of course, his waking apartment hours.

rockles and matches are up in arms; today they complained with all the fury they could muster. unfortunately (for the purposes of this one occasion) they are not furious people by nature, and didn't have much more effect than being routed from one desk to another across campus in true asterix and obelix twelve-tasks manner. bureaucratic madness. the end result was 'borrowing' sarie's PSU login so that they might barrage the campus with an epilectic sequence of computer-generated work-orders to better get their point across. fingers crossed, verbs at the ready. let's be honest with ourselves....it was either this or water-balloons filled with WD-40.

now mattress is feeling lethargic after being delayed from his coffee-shoppery for so long, and instead hoisted a beer or three at the italian joint downstairs with neighbor meghaan. three-dollar guinness, you're my only friend. so now it is rambling guitar-chords and summer-night deck sitting, with the smell of brownies fresh-baking, home-making, and generally drifting out the door in cartoon perfume-cloud fashion, tickling the nose and lifting one off of their feet in delicious anticipation.

the bar conversation was the only notable part of the day, so it might as well be recounted. it was a battle of the wits over whether two people need to be attracted to one another to have a successful relationship. she thought that they certainly did, no getting around it, then got quiet and completely retracted the point, saying the opposite. oh fickleties. matches produced pocket-like the point that beauty doesn't necessarily have to be traditional hollywood-glamour....he related the story of colin in germany and celia (or is it silje?) with the heart-surgery scar which he cherished. he related that he thought that beauty did not necessarily have to be of the face or body; that it could also be in the personality or, his favorite, the personable and playful gestures which one unknowingly and charmingly produces to compliment their existence and what they consider it to be. playfulness is essential. then meghaan countered that personality was never in question, that it was important but was being voided for the purposes of the conversation. refuted. but matches went on to argue that the gesture thing was not entirely a product of personality, and that they played into the physical beauty of a person...which seemed to go over well. we agreed upon silence as the difference, for the purposes of the conversation, between personality and physical attributes. charisma if you will. and, since it is matches' page...you will.
they settled that attraction was an important factor, but that it was not confined to the traditional static appearance. it went far and beyond that paradigm, into a higher place.

plz to listen:
royksopp - a higher place

card houses

2008-08-01T20:58:00.000-07:00

nothing quite like the smell of hyacinths mingled with a summer breeze.

mattress wrote from this seat not long ago. something about a black dog. there is a man to the left indulging in a cigarette; next to him there is another indulging in a pint of ice cream. enraptured. on the right, there is a couple indulging in pictures of small nephews, or perhaps children of theirs, dressed lacily to the 9's. by all appearances, post-wedding photos. other than that, ahh, not too much going on in this particular spot. much foot traffic as per 21st street standards, especially on the most riotous of the weekend nights.

it strikes m that since he has a large open-air storefront directly behind himself, there are in all probability scores of youthful scenesters making their nightly rounds, seeing the backside of matches and silently scorning him. they see the trademark "b" for blogger website, cresting atop the left side of his illuminated screen, and this screen is as much his face for them as his actual might be were the directions in this scenario toggled and turned aroundways. he is at the moment a 'blogger'; much the worst sort by their standards since it is a friday night and surely only a person of irreparable social-ineptitude would be sipping caffeinateds by his lonesome and plugging away at these little black pieces of plastic laid out according to logic of some lost sort. to be fair, this is probably only half the people straying hither and thither....there are probably troops of linux-coders and chess-players and magic-dealers and all manner of cordial nerdiness to be found in the deep nooks of this particular cafe. the company is not so bad.

even so, it strikes him in a minor sort of pitch, this thought. he doesn't really consider himself a 'blogger', though by definition he supposes he is pinced into this category by the thorny walls of distinction; one thought must follow another. he tries not to cast into shallow pools, and certainly he hopes that anonymous reader is gleaning more of his thoughts, his mind, rather than his day-to-day excitements and uneventfuls. they are probably, in practice, difficult to extract completely from one another. like a duality of hot and cold, what would a mind be without everydays to complement it. what would a mind be without days and hours to contain it, to teach it, to age it into its peak season of consumption, of expression? if you know the answer to that, or even think that you may have a hint of it, then you should probably start writing yourself. there is a world full of eager ears aching for soothsaying.

he is a writer, not a *blogger*. but to blog is to write, is it not? k, perhaps one can post pictures, and video. that aside, blogging is not so much different from conversation with a friend. wouldn't we be remiss not to record it in some way (doesn't our memory serve that fine and excruciating function)? so this is the rub; people think that conversation is different than writing. it isn't. perhaps admittedly in minor ways but, really they are pre-defined by the same rules and boundaries (for the most part). they are both a constant hashing-out, a formless fluxuation which wavers back and forth on anchors we would refer to as topics. they are both clouded by common knowledge and occasionally, alternately, electrified with personality...the trick is to get into something which bypasses the conventional and wanders wayward into the personal, the mysterious, the intriguing. then you put it out there, and maybe it becomes the convention. a vicious cycle to be sure.

it's different in one way. a conversation with yourself; you would think it would be predictable. it isn't. but the difference is that it is very rare to stump yourself. one can think their way into corners, certainly, but in general the way out is only a slight turn from the last known good thought. kind of like computer back-up in that sense (or so you would think....curse you miscrosoft). writing feels more like a gradual stretching of the mind's boundaries, or an electrical obstacle-course attempting to link different areas. sometimes when talking to a different person, especially one not well known, there will be complicating factors. missing reference points, drastic jumps in theory, biological hurdles (attraction and flirtation to be dealt with), misfirings in communication, etc etc. the list, is quite a list. but the point is that there are certainly merits to both. thinking your own way through something is a great, helpful, memorable accomplishment. trading ideas with someone else has the potential to expand a mind more quickly, but it will be a sharp spike as opposed to a gradual painting, radiating strokes outward towards the accomplishment. there will be a lot of unfilled territory trailing behind the epiphany; a lot of hollow ground that it will likely sink back into. a transition, a mental change effected by a single person in communication with himself, is more likely to find a stable architecture....if it can attain those same heights. sometimes one must look outside of themselves for that inspiration which lifts highest.

no way. a yellow lab has just been chained in precisely the place that the black lab was on the night whenever ago. that has to be a stopping point to revel in~

here is a pic to commemorate matches' long hair, which ended today.

happy weekend.

verifiably strange

2008-07-30T10:18:00.000-07:00

matches had a dream last night in which there was a cat, but the cat's fur had been specially, painstakingly-groomed to appear exactly as if the cat had been knitted out of yarn or something. the closest description he can come to for the texture is weaved corduroy....tiny, interlaced cornrows of fur. so, basically, it had the appearance and fabric feel of a stuffed animal, but it walked around and mewed as per normal cat behavior.

does that sound normal to you?

friendshippery

2008-07-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

it is of note, that time becomes an enemy when one is trying to accomplish something. then hours blow by; relaxation becomes a testament of infidelity to one's intended purpose. something to feel guilty of. spending time with people whom have separate intentions with their lives becomes different, burdensome. which is no fault of theirs, or of one's own....it simply is. it's not that they have lost anything or you have gained anything which makes for incompatibilities, it is just that they break focus, shattering the continuity and organization which slowly, gradually, begins to emerge in the mind when something of great importance is being dealt with. would that our minds functioned a little differently, and that it were not harmful, routine-breaking, to distract yourself for a time with alternate interactions. maybe sometimes it actually is beneficial to do this. but what m notices more often than not is that it whips a destructive wave through mental progress, dis-jointing one concept from another, forcefully and also somehow sleepily.

the social nature of the mind, or at least of the mind in society, also pulls these same strings. often the biggest distraction is merely thinking of distractions, not actually achieving anything in the meanwhile. human relationships are sometimes so intoxicating (for blissful better or venomous worse) that they stand firm, obelisk-esque, immovable by the brushes and brooms of the imagination (facebook is the worst!). it is impossible to retreat from one's mind, so instead focus has to be cultivated from it, nourished, proactively aligned in sunny/shady spots, with/without water, depending on the nature of the intention to be achieved, the plant to be grown. what do you want your efforts to grow into?

friends are like the hard, metal typeface on a typewriter. if you look at them, in all their combinations and commonalities, you will see what you can accomplish and what your limits of expression are. you are the inked ribbon that can bring these things together, you can unearth and bury them, and in the process create a reality for yourself, a circuitry which channels specific energies which then conduct the processes of your life, your liberty. it is your liberty, your choice, in a sense, which ultimately defines the end product of your time-usage....which sounds obvious, but hopefully you will see what matches has insinuated here. to take responsibility for your life and to wheel the helm whichways you would have it lead you.

you are what you can express. and if you have no outlet for a particular expression, if you have some unspoken whispers rattling around inside your frame with nobody to express them to, then they have no means for growth, no outside to lend them to so that they can truly be analyzed, inspected.

"each friend represents a world in us,
a world possibly not born until they arrive,
and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
~ ana nin

if you are my friend, and you are, then i do appreciate all that you have given me.

stroll

2008-07-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

something m has learned from people-watching.

people often have a strong sense of where they are going/what they are doing. not often do you seem people wandering without specific aim, taking time to inspect a situation or a flower, or what have you.

when it comes down to it, most of these small activities that one is headed to/from do not matter much. they are enjoyments, entertainments. it is very tempting to call them distractions, but what really are they distracting from? is this life....this endless stream of activities that compose an hour, a day, a weekend, a year? how can one label that? is life something that is found in between the cracks of these surface impressions; is life the stroke instead of the finished painting? is life the typing of these letters, instead of the composed paper afterwards? are books and memories merely records of a life already past?

life is an interesting thing. it is an energy, almost a currency, to be dealt, traded, spent, perhaps wasted, perhaps burnt. m thinks that books are life, even fiction....it is life spent, life invested in something which becomes interactive, becomes more than an object. it has purpose; it is infused with it through the intentions which wind themselves throughout the fibers of the book. it is a needled pen, sewing colored threads....a knitted pair of gloves or a hat for someone else to wear, itching woolenly, buzzing with the vitality and love put into them, the warmth and energy that they can radiate back to a mind in need.

but this is why it is hard to say with any certainty that busying oneself with everyday things and entertainments is a silly, unreal pastime. energy can be invested in anything one chooses, and other people are certainly no exception. really getting to know someone involves a lot of situations, a lot of shared experiences through which real parts of one another can be revealed. investing time in other people is one of the most important things that we can do, or so it seems to mattress. it's hard when one knows entirely too many people to keep up with, because often (as happens) it becomes a situation of being stretched too thin with no time to oneself. budgeting time is difficult, just like finances. and knowing people is great....they always leave room to surprise you~

and thus people-watching is completely enjoyable, because who are these people and where are they going, to do what? we can twist up these stories out of anything~

comedy and tragedy masks

2008-07-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

matches wasn't going to buy a bonsai cherry blossom tree, because they only flourish for like one month a year, and how silly would that be? but then he realized that these dark red trees (which he likes) happen to sit in precisely the same places that he remembers there being cherry blossoms four months ago. it gradually begins to dawn upon him that they are, in fact, the same trees.

the dog sitting in front of antimatter is large and black, a lab. he seems to be doing alright, though pining now and again for his 'master', who presumably resides somewhere behind m in coffee time's cavernous indoor seating section. the dog seems to be content, aside from having to inhale all the clove smoke coming from the teenagers over yonder (matches feels your pain, black lab). and every time m looks at this dog in particular, it snaps its head to meet his gaze, as if it were somehow attuned to his mind's prerogatives. it watched the girl in the green dress as well. but mostly this paragraph is to say, that this dog is a little downtrodden since its master, the constant which channels meaning and empowerment into said pooch's life, is tragically absent. the dog sits chained, waiting, waiting. he interacts with other people, minimally, because they happen across his way and pet him, or make noises, or what have you. but he is tethered to the person inside the cafe, and is dissatisfied in the absence.

mattress wonders, if he made a hasty and surreptitious exit with this dog in tow, if the owner would notice. would the dog be happy for the companionship, if he took it home and called it his own? would the dog become eventually as content with m as with the previous, or would it always feel that something was lacking, some intangible in the back of its mind? it looks expectantly at everyone who passes. it just wants comfort, companionship. probably food as well. let's assume the dog is not presently hungry.

m is technically in the market for a dog, since he has decided that he wants to get one whenever he moves out of the apartment he is currently in, and hey, maybe even before then. but this question has come up, of how one chooses a dog. is it like transformers, where the car salesman indicates that the car chooses the person, not the other way around? there are so many differences, so many separate personalities; anything living is not so malleable as we might think. companions intertwine with one another; they become something unified in some shared ghost-space between them. a flickering of understandings and impasses. his dog will determine also his personality, in an as-of-yet undetermined capacity. he imagines, though, that it could potentially be a large one. isn't that a tricky thing to just toss a dart at? he guesses that sometimes, in the moment, one must just trust to one's caprices....but he has always been a somewhat cautious thinker~

would any dog be just as likely to form as strong a bond with him as possible? certainly not. choosing a dog is almost like a whole 'nother relationship process. he guesses that it comes down to a question, of how one soul speaks to another. in some instances you simply must trust to that first impression, that incredibly-barriered and yet somehow also completely defenseless moment of 'hello'. how does one puzzle piece fit with another? can we feel the merging and mending of those ridges, somehow, instantaneously? or is that a lifelong process? do we somehow know, and then only later find out the how?

how much of life do we actually have control over, anyway?

apparat - 'you don't know me'

undertow

2008-07-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

weekends come and weekends go
would that they could slow their mo
troll dallyingly, and produce that growth
which week work feigns but never knows

independence days

2008-07-06T17:16:00.000-07:00

a delightful set of days; good memories though perhaps not much has been 'accomplished'. friday consisted of an afternoon drive to vancouver, to acquire some fireworks of illegal proportions. it was a successful venture, but also an experience to be had....a veritable mall of fireworks stands and tents, all along one singular stretch of land, but with heated competition sparking left and right. the advertisements were circus-esque. the hired goons on the side of the road, twirling signs with names, confusing arrows, and vague promises of discounts. and this was actually a ferocious bunch; not the sorts of people whom one would want to encounter in a dark alley. they cursed at each other and made hostile gestures, trying to rope in the most sales to their respective stands, and screamed imperatives to the customers rambling down the dirt road in automobiles. when we arrived at the decided-upon stand (dr. seuss hats were the deciding factor), we unsaddled and made our way towards what was soon to be described to us as "a short line". a rather conspiratorial and misleading term. people were exiting the other side with large boxes. everyone had large boxes. matches thought to himself, what, do they have bikini-clad saleswomen touting the explosives?....but no, not the case. they just had an arsenal that would probably rival the militant forces of third-world countries, is what they had inside that tent.

so, made some obligatory purchases and enthralled the masses later on that evening with quite a display of harnessed elemental force. very much surprised, actually, that the cops did not swarm us, considering that we were blatantly firing illegal varieties of explosions over one of the more major intersections in southeast portland~ m guesses they must have had their hands full with drunk drivers or something of the sort. either way, it turned out to be the most active sort of day, if going from state-to-state, attending three barbecues, dismantling the darkness with bright colors, and enjoying the down-home old-timey musical stylings of a large group of banjo, washboard, mandolin, guitar, violin, and cello players can be considered active. upon arriving home exhausted but exhilarated, the both terrible and fantastic decision to watch the extended fellowship of the ring was put into motion.

it is a thing of extreme value to know many different people, all of varying personalities and temperaments. it does tax one's energy and time, now and again....but good company is, as of this point in antimatter's life, one of the most important and wonderful things he has known to exist. an observation: it is intoxicating to be a focii; one of the dynamic personalities which brings a crowd together and to which they entrust their energies. everyone has had, previously or currently in their lives, times when the dominant social instinct has caused them, their own unspun energies, to wilt like a wallflower. of course this would still happen in situations where one has no previous context....but what is interesting is the growing courage of older, wiser age; the heightened sense of being and validity. m can make his own context out of an uncontextualized situation, which is new as of the past, say, seven years, in a slowly skyward and flourishing flora form. this is exciting, this not bending to the wills of powerful personalities, this stasis and equilibrium of self that, instead of becoming defeated, deflated...instead becomes expectant, quickens and becomes vibrant. the mind is no longer a sponge, soggy and sloth-like when full....it is a battery, charged with current and direct, purposeful; yet playful, unpredictable.

"there is nothing we need to do in order to be ourselves."

time is relative

2008-07-02T20:22:00.000-07:00

what is something, when it's in your heart and not your eyes? when those are elsewhere?

anyway.
mattress needs to work on developing thoughts, instead of just grabbing at those which may happen to pass by in the moment. he had a long bout of actual thought-development last night while lying in bed, and perhaps it is easier than one would think to pursue an individual line, to be baited and caught, instead of dabbling around with all the floating particulate matter which obeys the volatile currents. there is this sense that pursuance is difficult; that it necessitates training your mind not to wander, and to fight its way through struggles as they appear, instead of dodging them until it becomes absolutely necessary to tussle. but perhaps this isn't training, so much as it is a force of habit to look the other way.

is it necessarily 'training', to gain a perspective which allows you to forge your way through situations, instead of bending to allow them to pass? m deals every day with his own phalanx of problems, neuroses, and annoyances....we all do. these things we have come to consider as standard fare and are almost expectant to encounter so that we can move on to greener greens *hem*. but at a certain point we draw the line, whether from lack of personal obligation, tiredness, depression....what have you. we flail wildly at the world, so that it keeps its distance from our personal bubble. we will not admit responsibility for the sorts of problems and ponderances which truly bury themselves and burn in the spirit of humanity. instead we occupy our minds otherwise, feign an air of nonchalance, and stave them off to further reaches of the future.
hm. no battery.

and, back, days later. if the ubermensch were to exist in pure form, there would be no dodges, no spins - he would tackle head on. the only way to maintain the momentum of mental industry, ultimately, seems like it is to deal with something as it is dealt to you. in small portions, these things do not seem to add up...certainly it is easier to focus on a task by ignoring all the tangents that your brain will slide in front of your eyes. but how genuine is our committal to the task, if it is so easily assailed by interruption? isn't that a sign that something is off? sometimes things start to stack up, and then one feels guilty when they just want to have a moment of peace with no priorities. additionally, the mathematics of mental images are more tricky than one would at first surmise. it's the old adage of pulling on a string, until the whole thing uncoils - everything in the mind is linked, and you never know how deep the rabbit hole will go until you actually devote some time to spelunking it~ it is a good thing to map out one's territory, and make a laundry list of things which need to be mulled over in more heightened and attentive detail. if nothing else, it generates a surge of validation and euphoria just to cross something off, and be done with it. if only life were ever just that simple.

a velveteen rabbit

2008-06-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

is there a key to happiness in a style of living? in a mode or pattern or rhythm, in a focused or unfocused impulse? m feels like there are sheets that steal over him, lucid ones, that somehow allow him to capture a purity or joy that is simply innate in all existence. ever-present. he can bring down his walls, seemingly all of his own volition (and yet also, definitively elusive in its recurrences), and let the sunshine stream down inward, deep, warming those most cavernous pools of thought lost within him and giving them a chance to cultivate all varieties of shadowed jungle plants, hidden subspecies of potential energy that can coil skyward until the thoughts find their way to the edges of his conscious streams, a nip of interest and absurdity, a tiny hand tugging at coattails.

he can do this; summon some monstrous and overwhelming excitement for the transition and passing of every moment, conjure a sparkly spell, a vivacious cloud of bees that dances around everything he can see. it is intensely engaging and he often reels, tilted whichways by the effects. but it seems to him to be, although immersed, also very disconnected in a crucial way from reality. it is potent and blissful, but it misses something....or does it? he isn't quite certain just yet. when he analyzes his idea of it recently, it appears thusly:

imagine a perfectly contented farmer, living peacefully and in harmony with his own quaint environment. his horses and strong and intelligent; his sheep are baa complacently as they bathe in warm sunbeams, never bristled by anything more menacing than a crisp breeze. his crops flourish; obviously he knows what he is doing, and nature approves. he crackles a thistle in between his teeth, twirling it now against his tongue, tasting the earth inside of it, and gazes over the rolling green meadows. he knows his place, he feels firm in his tradition and his foundations. he lives a peaceful life and listens to the music of the hills.

the farmer doesn't ask any questions...he knows what he knows. but one day, while he is sitting at the pub enjoying a rather sizable and frosty mug of spirits, he meets a traveler rollicking through the area. they talk warmly and become friends, though the traveler spends a good deal of time talking what the farmer considers to be nonsense about the 'meaning of it all' and such. the traveler shows him his paintings, his books, his music (radically divergent from the old-timey tunes the farmer's ear is accustomed to); everything of him in its due turn. the traveler unfolds a cassette tape and a crude set of paints from his red-spotted knapsack, and makes a gift of them to the farmer for his cordial company. they part ways after the night, and never see each other again.

the farmer ambles back to his farmhouse, and sleeps off the night. he goes to work in the morning, and the next day, and the next. on the fourth day, however, his sleep is stirred by a strange nightmare. he wakes in a daze, and spies the moon staring him down, sizing him up, from a lofted window in the heights of his house. draped in moonbeams, compelled by unknowns, he listens to the tape and dabbles vaguely with the paints, eerily absent of pigment in the nighttime shade. the music is modern, troubled; it is a mixtape composed mostly of progressive art rock and sprinkled with experimental instrumentals, the origins of whose sounds he cannot guess at for the life of him. he drifts off to sleep with the paintbrush in his hand and dark chords echoing in the hollows of his room.

things are never the same for the farmer. he cannot decipher the strange melodies or the significance of the colors and strokes, but he feels irresistibly drawn to them, to the ultimate detriment of his old way of life, his once-time peaceful mindstate. things are fine for him; his farm still flourishes though perhaps has more untended weeds than before, and perhaps the sheep complain of heat every so often because one or three have swollen up to the size of fuzzy haybales without the keen attention of his shears on a seasonally-watchful schedule as before. by most appearances, he is the same person, though perhaps seen a bit less in provisions marketplace of town and is often said to have a candle burning in his window 'til the midnight hours.

we know what has changed, though, don't we? he was struck by the thunder of humanity, of art, of the beautiful struggle. and mattress can say definitively (since he is acquainted with said farmer) that he is somewhat tormented, if not also invigorated and accelerated, by the teachings of the traveler.

so, m is elated to say that he feels he has the gift (or curse) of the farmer's previous life, but it would be a choice he would have to make...he is more naturally swayed towards the latter perspective, the artistic intervention. but, he could fight his nature and live an extraordinarily docile, naive, and complacent life. the tools are in his hands right now, these words; all he has to do is to toss them away without a second glance and be free of their burden forever. doesn't that seem on some level like an appealing prospect? to absolve oneself of responsibility for difficult philosophies, intricate sciences, emotional discoveries and upheavals, and again discoveries and again upheavals?

and obviously, he is reducing this to absurdity...nobody can really choose to go entirely in one direction. but it seems to him that so, so many people choose the route of 'today, and then tomorrow, and then tuesday', a day-to-day as it were. gleaming shards and fragments of deeper thoughts either when forced to, or when forced by boredom; not entirely by free will, in fact almost avoidant by nature of these concepts. and yes, please ride on him for generalizing about this, because no, it really isn't a fair judgment without knowing them well.

but he doesn't feel like he can turn back at this point; he would feel utterly useless and much like he betrayed his true self if he buried his head in the sand and gave up on digging both archaeologically and inventively through those sediments, choosing to be caved in, but restricted in transcendental dimensions of movement. he wants to be able to move his mind, his intangible perceptions, through that matter....even if his body may be cemented into place by them in its utter unfamiliarity with more spiritual natures. there is an antenna, or a whirling compass needle, somewhere inside of us...just waiting to be known by feelings and words instead of science.

this mind/body dichotomy is burly. lend the wisdom to know the difference~

"okay, dr. seuss"

2008-06-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

it is an intensely exciting thing to be, to feel like a person outside of society while still within its confines. someone fundamentally disconnected and admissibly, wholeheartedly, desirably undefined. one of the greatest thrills, for matches, comes at any time, in any place, sitting and contemplating this distinction amidst a collection of persons whom he does not know. it is somehow exceedingly liberating to be able to say "i am this, i am that", and conversely to acknowledge that shape-shifting and chimeric tendencies are twisted somewhere around our very roots, deepest in our nourishing soil, and that they they assist us immeasurably in extracting the energy and intrigue from a liberated life. our preconceptions are seasonings, and they will alter appropriately the raw ingredients which providence provides, the most basic senses and combinations thereof, such as a sleepily geometric intricacy.

realize that one's purpose is separate; that each person has a mission and a set of experiences completely unique to their muddled and meddlesome mind. there is no need to find oneself snared in the seaweeds of lower ambitions....we can swim to higher places where we may see with more clarity, and breath with both less and more concentrated effort (depending upon the concentration. think about it). everyone at some point feels the spin, the pivot of a real ambition sneaking up on them. if programmed to defend well, then you might turn it away without questioning the real purpose of the game....but if you are open to another outcome, happily unfocused, then you might let it slip by, and find out that losing one game was the best thing to ever happen (and the start of something completely new).

happily unfocused. this might be a good definition for the mindstate of m over the past few years. dazed, disillusioned and again re-illusioned, but open, welcome and accommodating. antimatter believes that life naturally behooves us to stay, at least in some proportion, in this state....constantly off-balance, switchfoot, preparing for another potential or possible. focus is wonderful - it creates a thought-space where one can truly fine-tune an aspect of themselves, and dig deep to find out what can be known or said about something that drives them. but life is a balancing act, and to build a sandcastle higher than one's own height can mean two things: bridging toward the sky, and allowing a perspective that attains and projects vast complexities upon the surrounding world, or blocking one's view, distancing you from the natural freedom and chaos which comprises the lurching waves of life, of experience. which is an apt metaphor, because life has this tendency of eroding away what you have built when you become too focused; whittling away at the base while the top tier totters, imperceptible to one clinging onto it.

how does one struggle with meaning? tune in for more next time.

colin and m have just now decided upon the metric: for a dollar to still be spendable, there must still be at least 87.7% of it there. it would be inconceivable to chop a $20 in half and all of a sudden have forty spendables. the economy would crash.

flounder found

2008-06-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

found a list on the ground. found a scrap of paper. found a bit of someone's life, similar to mine. but really, how much sameness does it take to be similar? i'm a person, bret's a person; you're a person. that person over there is a person. and when you're feeling lonesome, hopefully you can remember that. we could be roaming an earth, or another planet, that houses 6 billion persons who aren't persons at all; we could be swimming in differences and difficulties. it would be extraordinarily hard to progress through even a day if there were no medium of connection, no 'humanity', upon which to anchor ourselves.

even so, it seems like the general tendency is to distance oneself from the crowd of unknowns. and we're not talking separate or sub-species here, we are talking about an individual meeting another individual. we've got more barriers than we know what to do with; they are overwhelming and end up gripping up even though they are the means for a grip upon our worlds. is it such a bad thing to be a fluctuating entity? to alter with every moment?

m. feel incredibly lame for not updating these writings in the past few weeks. where are one's priorities? should have (hoping for) a slow weekend this time around though....it looks promising.

ananundrum

2008-06-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

the new coldplay album has some gems on it. it doesn't make the impression to matches of a pristine record, but there are some ins and outs that are not to be missed. if you're into it, spend a listen on 'life in technicolor', 'lost!' (god, any song with a running&chasing beat has such a persuasion on m), the first 2:42 of '42' (the latter portion, mattress really wishes they had committed to instead of abandoning the maddening spiral they had started for such a poppy-positivity), and of course the title track 'viva la vida'. he wonders if '42' is thus named because that is the second-count upon which they decided not to deliver on the building intensity. also notable is the last 17 seconds of 'cemeteries of london'. but then, matches tends to be easy to please.
you're a fan, if you got that.

haven't been setting aside the necessary time to write lately, which is a shame. it's great to be social, but he feels so hindered, in the sense of living life in general, when he cannot spill some real thoughts out of an inkwell and onto his shoes. it is the difference between the consciousness expanding forward in phantom form, grasping and mingling with everything....the difference between that and, dragging one's brain behind on a long leash, inspecting it later for the rubbish and residue which it collects over the course of travels. counting on photographs to do your forward-looking, is backwards in retrospect; he never remembers all the little hums and whistles which he pretends to log away for later contemplation whilst he is distractabusy. he lives much too much in moment-to-moment, and also in his head in a very odd sort of manner, and he worries that it will be his undoing as a writer. or perhaps his greatest tincture. can one be worried that something will be fantastic, domineering? that it will be too much so?

his castles are still in the sky. he apologizes if sometimes his statements tend to jump onto the page (screen) and solidify themselves there....he tends to trust his mind to the tipping point of absurdity and has hopes of thoughts falling, domino-like, in an if not logical, at least personable and traceable progression. he has a tendency towards the belief that anything can be relevant. have you ever picked up a tarot card deck? he rarely does, but this is what he finds so entrancing about them: no matter what card falls, it will have a conceivable relation to something happening in your life. tarot is a thought-exercise, it is a collection of perspectives and colored-tints which one may find some help looking through, sifting through, and letting them sway the direction of one's thoughts into eddies and waterways operating under the same principles as the universe. that is, either chaos or control. which is it again?

m really has some faith that drawing a card may influence the outcome of events. why? because it spins the mind, windmill. he has seen instances of a thought effecting/affecting an actual outcome...we all have, especially if we can choose to reduce the notion to absurdity by saying that when your child wanted an ice cream cone, you bought them one. that isn't what he means, of course; his indication is much more intangible. but we can, hopefully, acknowledge that the mind exerts a definite power over its surroundings, beyond the realm of simple physical cause and effect. if you find a genuine positivity and curiosity amidst a job interview, then you will get that job. qualifications, shmalifications. this sort of thought, this wild expression, expands beyond the mind that has spun it....it leaks out of the body, trickling from every possible angle, practically beaming; it is infectious in its spread and has no boundary. perhaps it involves another, unknown dimension. he isn't here to explain the science of it to you, but, there it is. your body is unconsciously affected by your emotions; body language tells us that arms cross defensively, and that eye contact is more embracing than open arms. these are not top-snaggle examples, but they are certainly a physical manifestation of a seemingly transcendental phenomenon. thought.

"Ha ha, just joking; only trying to see who's listening
Now heads up, time to test the potential of your faults
And the results will stay confidential
For as long as you face the front of your self-esteem;
Lose focus, get broken at the seams.
Let's open up the conversation for comments
To complement your circumcised mind-state, while I ride on your anxieties
Trying to speak to the class, and justify the act,
By pointing my finger at your head, and asking you, 'what the fuck is that?'"
~ deep puddle dynamics - 'the scarecrow speaks'

how many times have we dug ourselves into a dominantly depressed hole of mind, only to find that the answer lied in us fooling ourselves all along? humans are inherently facetious; the angle which our mind takes upon any, any situation dictates the majority of its impact upon us. the outside world may be rock-like, unthinking, but it speaks its mind through our extremes, our reverend suppliance to unknowns and subconscious jitters. the illusion is that it controls us, but all along it has been we who have dropped the reins. which is an apt word, because we could so simply, yet unfathomably difficultly so deep into the game, reign over our lives in a completely different and remarkably similar fashion.

all smiles (all sparks)

2008-06-01T16:27:00.000-07:00

the editors - all sparks
a good listen. not too many artists have figured out the seduction of negative space in music. and for a photographic concept, it seems to be found in many more places, or at least has the potential to appear on (or off) the scene. also, for a different feel, check the cover of 'feel good, inc.' by the editors. acoustic.

sitting on the waterfront today in cloudy weather, matches felt the fireworks trickle back into his vision. they have been tragically absent for some time. but when you can look at the world, at anything inside of this gigantic conglomeration of whatever-you-wish-to-call-it, and see the purity of existence (a term stolen from sam cooper yesterday)....things set themselves alight in the air, breeze-like, and spin the mind like a waterwheel.

in other news, herbie hancock's "head hunters" is where beck got samples for his recent goodness. certainly worth a listen. its got the funk that beck whittled off of it, but it also has the jazz.

matches has been making a tidy little sum off the beaten path of his job, by way of marketing research studies. who would have thought that with the economy as it is, people would be handing out money for cursory opinions of their marketing techniques and products? interesante. he feels a little silly; a little like he is fueling the possibility of them honing their advertising or products to the point of precision towards their intended markets. he thinks that he wouldn't want to have a hand in tweaking the subtleties of market-interest; at least not to the point of helping companies convince people to buy their products without thinking about it. but, he has to have a little bit of faith in the capabilities of people to make their own decisions, and to remain independent thinking entities amidst the tides of america~ plus, its kind of interesting to go to these things. you meet and have interesting conversations with people you would have never otherwise had an opportunity to meet, and one learns a little something every time one passes by. it's fun; a thought exercise. he could just as easily be fucking with these people's heads, and completely skewing their targets. and the money doesn't hurt.

san francisco last weekend was great. it goes to remind m how he really should be tucking aside moneys to up and visit his friends in other distant places. like jay on martha's vineyard, and yes eric in vietnam. passports were created to collect stamps, not dust. as an additional bonus, he could live for something like $3 a day once he stepped off the aerobus. oh, that the plane ticket were not the obstacle! also, the phobia of flying over titanic bodies of water. there is always that.

lately he has begun studying his old notebooks, his elder scribblings, and trying to thieve some perspective from them. perhaps this is what sparked the fireworks. it is quite an interesting thing to see the legacy of one's own life, to view it in a later and (hopefully) wiser state of being. he hears people talking all the time about how they cannot stand to look at their previous thoughts, works, songs, etc....but he doesn't share in this outlook. not in a smidgen of the least-ness. he values his past; it will always be engaging to distill old thoughts and situations through the filter of the advanced mind. 'distill' was a word he gleamed from the old pages (which have become quite detached from their bindings....both literally and metaphysically, now that he considers it). it is small treasures like the use of a word which has fallen out of memory, which can effect a domino-fall within him. one can feel the smile forming, growing, now erupting out of the body through all sensations and nerves. a genuine smile has an explosive tendency to it; an expansive nature. then there is the magical trans-barrier, when it sometimes expands beyond a person, into liminal space, and wraps itself around another person. that is, well....something, to see it light up another face, that thing that wound itself out of your own thoughts, your own emotions. it is a physical sensation, a touch; invisible to the eye yet reaching, disarming, penetrating. yet you know its power, can feel it like a fireball erupting through your frame which spreads dizzily, sillily (word?), washing over your surface like a quick surf chasing the shore.
i feel it all, i feel it all.

the letter A, as in abstraction

2008-05-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

who knew that it would only take 20 minutes to walk to NW 21st, after so many months of taking the streetcar? faster? certainly. better for you? absolutely. more exhausting? admittedly yes. more scenic? depends on whether you prefer people or charmingly deserted alleyways. but a portland sunset is a fine time for strolling any day. even the rainy ones, if one gets into the proper state of mind beforehand.

the world is too complex. too? perhaps. it's nice to know how intricately the details spiral, considering how many people put their heart and soul (or perhaps just their 9-5 attention spans, but we know what goes on behind the scenes) into making something worthwhile of it. m has, without anticipation, ended up in two jobs since academics that helped in some capacity to reveal the detail, to unblanket the larger forms that most people don't give a second thought to. no, really...imagine that your couch has a blanket thrown over it, you know, to shield against the dust and sun and cat hairs and such. now whisk that blanket away, and lo! it was never a couch at all. it was a collection of smaller items; and oboe here, a mcdonald's plastic bambi toy there, an un-lidded tin of peaches over yonder (aqui, alli, alla); precise meetings of points, that give way to something larger than themselves individually. not to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (wouldn't want to step on any traditionalist toes), but really what is value anyway. yes, that put you in your place, didn't it?

the point was reduced to absurdity on purpose, yes. more tangible that way, don't you think? what he really means, is really absorbed by, is all the ideas, the labor, the cooperation that goes into the production of realities in the world. engineering is a marvel, in any shade or color that you would choose to cast it in. every day, people see something and think to themselves, "now that, is neat". neat. what a horrible, candle-snuffing word; it completely robs the discovery of all intellectuality and reduces it to a bauble, a trifle, a pawn bowing to the power and complexity of the queen which rules it utterly and completely. and the mind does retain dominance, ultimately; let's not overstep ourselves here. the mind created and can destroy; the mind chooses its constructs and folds the world into whatever patterns and shapes it thinks commendable. but at a certain point, merely in an instance, even, one has to acknowledge and find a profound respect for these things, these objects, engineered commodities. one has to recognize the confluence of events and ideas and inspirations and drives which ultimately orchestrated these...things, into being. it was all human, all struggle, and it is commendable in that respect, interesting in another, and almost fearful in the way which the idea eventually took hold of its composers, trans-substantiated from a thought into a concept into a plan into a thing, and practically willed itself into the world.

it's amazing, really. and what's more, it is neat. but not in a dawdling, bashful, foot-shuffling way...in an empirical, investigative, and compelling way. it strikes one forcefully, the phenomenon of creation. it is an art, though perhaps more calculable, more formulaic in the long run than that more inspirational of imaginings. still, it has that same...liquidity to it. the modern world is steeped in design, in ideas manifest; the difference being that multiple people have had their hands dipped in this, um, pond. lost track of a metaphor halfway through, just then. what would normal commodities be like, if they were not governed by the rules of market and commerce; if they jutted up chaotically, plate tectonics, only meeting where they happened to run aground of one another? no, production process is more predictable than this....pragmatism wields its ugly hand time and time again, and we end up with square buildings. snooze.

real art, if he can be allowed to make the distinction, ascends to another tier in that it does not play well with others. real art is cloistered, secluded....there is no concurrent interplay of minds involved in the end results of one singular piece. the artist is unique in that he struggles with the thing in its entirety; he buries himself in it and does not delegate any task within it for reasons of economy or raw efficiency. a writer does not pen a chapter and then pass the baton to the next for supplement. the purpose is found in the meeting of the beginning and the end, all contained and bubbling within one cohesive (sometimes jagged) mind. the first stroke can be anything, it can be anywhere. the last stroke has to be exactly, precisely, as it is~

evening in brief

2008-05-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

memorial day coming up. what to do with a substantial brick of time once one finally gets it off of work? three days is not substantial, he knows....but it is has more substance than most other opportunities at this point. perhaps california is on the horizon; it's only ten hours away. 8.5 by matches' driving standards. how good it would feel to go back and haunt those places which he experienced under a shadow, now that day has broken. those are the sorts of opportunities which are best not passed upon.

colorful lights and interesting fabrics at this coffee shop (about to transform into a venue for sam cooper's purposes) make m realize that he need to do something more creative with his room. it isn't a very good representation, at the moment, of a place where it would be supposed that a person such as he would occupy for an undeniable portion of time. he saw on the internet the other day a faux-skylight that lights up and has clouds floating to and fro beyond it, for those without the means for a legitimate skylight installation. he would probably make the purchase if it had nighttime settings, complete with constellations and embracing spiral arms. turns out he is quite picky about his purchases....well, about a lot of things in life really. but he has been trying to make up his mind about a pair of windchimes on the east side of portland for a good four months now.

if there are two colors that play unexpectedly well with one another, they are an aqueous blue-green and a frosted purple-maroon (only ten or twenty percent maroon). he is seeing this color splash more and more recently (even shockingly at an art museum or two), and it always catches him off guard with its refined yet vibrant appeal. a good pairing.

arg sam playing.

update two days later: what a curious coincidence that a band from boulder would be playing at the same place as samtron. well, not entirely unexpected, as sam is from boulder. still, an oddity that they would happen to be on tour. high-energy. and what fortunate occurrences came from the walk back home...events which would not have happened had he decided to saunter over to ground kontrol and play pinball with christopher, as was originally on the itinerary. the most compelling things can happen from meeting absolute strangers. stopping a basketball-turned-soccer-ball-by-faculty-of-overactive-slash-tipsy-imaginations from careening into the street and getting flattened by oncoming traffic. it really makes one take a step back and think.

phobias and photomographs

2008-05-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

there are always, it seems, those ghosts of insecurity that steal over us. even in the midst of cheerful times, there will probably always be the occasional shiver of disquiet, of uncertainty, of helplessness. even as m sits in this quirky coffee shop for the first time (but likely not the last; cute barista), reading some van gogh, he is reminded by whatever signs and tables and pooches outside the window that his life has progressed to a remote location that is dissimilar to what he has engaged with for a very long time prior to this. the city doesn't feel so different from any other city (well, admittedly, a bit "portland" in its ways), but there are fragments of sensations that have morphed into something quite different than any colorado springtime. he is reminded of visiting his grandmother in denver, the big-big city of colorful colorado, and gazing off of her deck into the massed confusion of a metropolis. everything was shifted slightly to the left, or the right; nothing felt as it should. this skewed his perspective of denver into the negative for a long time, and only began to repair itself near the end of college when he gave it a fair shot.

now portland is 'local' for him, and moods have shifted....he cherishes the slightly-familiar over the extremely-unfamiliar, whereas in colo he was steeped in the all-too-familiar. something he has only done once or twice is now the safe play, the explored territory, even though he knows that there are layer upon layer of understandings that one goes through in exploring any one thing, place, or person. one um, noun.

what's funny is that he makes motions between two opposites in this respect....sometimes he feels that the concept is what is important....and if we're talking theory, the same ol' things are happening in portland as anywhere else (with perhaps a few *hem* unusual exceptions). he would call this the majority of the time, where he feels comfort, peace with the turnings and tides of human patterns. life and he have an inside joke, a shared understanding, and it is simple to exist in whichever way one wants to. other times, which flutter in and alight upon his shoulder from time to time, bring a mess more confusion and imbalance, constantly prodding his mind back into stasis from the step it had taken forward.

why is it sometimes difficult to progress from a thought, from a mindstate? it's simple to be on top of the world one day, and have the carpet ripped out from under you in the next. self-questioning, self-criticism, stepping in pace beside you and inquiring in terse and obnoxious terms what your plan is, or will be, or has been all along. is it too much to live a life without a unifying plan in each moment? is it a confidence, which quakes at first only in order to be forged stronger yet by bending it to your will, now, and then again, in true damascus form? ("why do we fall? so that we can learn to pick ourselves back up.") do we ever feel so justified in what we are doing, that this recedes in the wake of our conviction? perhaps that could be said to mirror the 'good times', but certainly those are not always strong enough to ward off another coming, another regress (which we may call it, even if in fact it is a signal of a deeper progression).

why is it that when we strip off a layer of ourselves, when we remember the past fully, passionately, everything seems unfamiliar again? does that mean that our new selves do not effectively incorporate our old selves? that somehow we cannot reconcile the two, into different scenarios than what they had originally existed in? if that's the case, then perhaps it would be a relief rather than a concern....it would mean that there is never a reason to get down on yourself for acting differently than you might have at a later or more experienced time...there would never be any logical way to connect the two notions of yourself within the realms of space and time~ we live the best that we can.

or perhaps we live, forgetfully.

juice box

2008-05-13T20:58:00.001-07:00

how is it that every table at every coffee shop is always unbalanced? it's just a matter of adjusting the little knobs on the bottom of the floor piece. or inserting a select thickness of napkin-supports. now m has a sloshing green tea endangering his laptop (and lap) every time he lets up off the keyboard. tired of adjusting these things~ he needs to invent a cheap, perpetually-self-balancing table. phase 2: ? phase 3: profit.

everything that matches sees has the potential to become a life-changing painting. or story ("i twist up stories out of nothing.") it all washes away, down to the bare-bones framework; colors swirl in the sink basin until finally disappearing out of sight. do you think that your orange is the same as m's? he swizzles his own life's story-colors instinctively onto the wire, without even thinking about it. this naievete is why he will always be superior to a computer's cold calculations, its natural non-thought but yet its ever-vigilant...processing. mattress processes as well, but in a constant state of forgetfulness and flirtatiousness with his whirlwind sensory-surroundings, constantly imbuing himself in splatter-fractals inside and upon the sights and sounds, the memories and the re-analyzed memories and the noisy chaos in between the two.

every moment, if painted with a particular set and sunsetting-gradient of colors, if inked with the precise degree of abstraction that speaks just so to a certain person's own inner monologue, to their own aesthetic, with the correct shapes and printed movements, motions; every one has a drawing power, a spirit that can be found in it and if not captured, at least expressed. art can blow right through you like an icy mountain wind, mingling with the core and variably shutting down, numbing certain parts of you into absolute stunned silence, and illuminating, activating certain other dormant areas, stringing lights on to a map, brushing the metal side of the cavity in the old 'operation' game...a jolting bzzt that spirals consciousness, fresh breath, into new areas.

feelings. convoluted sometimes, but certainly indicators of your 'truth', your own self being located amidst world-wide waldo-madness. he knows them pretty well by now, knows where to juice the nourishing truth from the fruit; what is husk and what is energy, what is life~

will-o'-the-wisp

2008-05-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

"one minute I held the key
next the walls were closed on me
and I discovered that my castles stand
upon pillars of salt, and pillars of sand"

matches is stewing in thoughts, confusing illusions, and listening to the new coldplay single, 'viva la vida'. it's a soothing balm.
ah well.
am disagreeing with language lately; not sure if it is just a problem with our english version or what. perhaps m got too steeped in it during college, but he has a thousand colloquial expressions that do not make enough sense for every thousand which do. take the word 'facetious'. most people don't know how to spell this word in the first place, and they think that it means someone is just intentionally being an ass. but its root is facet, as in a gemstone, another surface, a different angle; light refracting and illuminating new accents. he would use this word all the time if this held true to its fine points, but the word means just a bit of silliness, really. literally. what an utter waste of an extremely poetic and far-reaching word. now the metaphor of a facet is ruined, what with the word being locked into the lexicon for eternity. one can't just unword a word; there is no unwinding of history, no subtle snippets of extraction to tinker with the end results. maybe he should get over it and move on~

something stopped him short the other day; snagged his mind like a sweater on a stray nail. he can't remember specifically where it was, so forget about all the story backtrackery. basically, it was an older gentleman relating how he was aghast at the pace with which his life was pulsing by. this is a notion that comes from several separate sources, so there must be something to it. why is it that life seems to go by more quickly once one trickles out of adolescence? is it that the mind shifts like sediments, becoming more settled, eroding away the walls of our conscious differentiation of one moment from another? is it that days and weeks and months become more self-same (like one another) at a certain point in life? likely the point of career-pathing, which weighs a trigger heavily on matches' mind right now....maybe he should just bail right now and hop a ship to madagascar or spain, for as long as need be to establish his own initiatives. he would be remiss if he didn't mention how quickly the last seven months in oregon have been burning by. it isn't that he doesn't have an extreme density of new and wonderful experiences, or that he feels he should have capitalized on his time in some other way....it's just very hard to describe. he hopes that acceleration is not a principle which holds constant throughout life, and that it is more of a state-of-mind to be grappled with and conquered through mindfulness. which is a word he hears too little these days~

what other propulsions could exist? can it be associated with age, in that we sleep more and play less than we used to? this doesn't necessarily hold true, especially not in the present case. could it be, perhaps, that our responsibilities, that our concerns and worries, are so much more numerous and present themselves with so much more immediacy than ever before? he thinks he is on to something with that one. the savory times are those in which one is acting of their own free initiative; fusing their own individual thoughts and cares into the atmosphere around them. "growth of the soul, growth of the mind" ~twelve days. we're so often forced into positions of maintenance these days, just keeping up with all the regular bullshit to make sure that it doesn't outpace us, that we seldom have the opportunity or the energy to pursue ourselves or our dreams. who honestly has a job that isn't involved in maintenance of some nothing, some customer or financial portfolio or product or service? who actually burns away the darkness into unexplored territories with those useful eight-hour blocks of their day? even then, they would return home and have to clean the apartment and sift through the bills and separate the papers from the plastics. so much of it is halfway mind-numbing, which he thinks is the core of the problem. it is willful sedation, and this is one poignant cause of time-slippage, of wasted hours and unnoticed opportunities.

another sentence that he heard a few days ago struck him in a harmonious chord: "it's not often the things that we end up doing that we regret, it's the things that we don't end up doing." a butchering of the phrase certainly, but the idea comes through.
he agrees almost 100%. almost. call it 92. he does so enjoy attaching hard numbers to such things.

the fury within

2008-05-03T17:29:00.000-07:00

sometimes a happiness steals over mattress, a frenzied flurry or curiosity, an ode to joy. everything is enhanced, brightened, colors tinted more deeply, movements quickened. this feels like the true state of things, this alacrity...it feels like m in his most genuine incarnation. the world is bubbling with movement, and one can twist it around one's fingers or thoughts like one of those ever-morphing frameworks of yarn that you sometimes see people playing at with their hands. tangible, accessible. happiness is perhaps not even the most apt word for it (but certainly it is a corollary result); something like wonderment might be more accurate. everything is its own pioneer, pirouetting uniquely and etching new patterns into the air with the frictions of movement. there are a few songs that capture this enchantment, dense works of chaos and sentiment. his most notable so far are 'tokyo', by the books, and the gradual crescendo of 'la noyee', by yann tiersen. the unspeakable poignancy of these songs tugs at something inside of him which grips it tightly; built steam screaming for ventilation.

in fact he is noticing an urgency in many respects and perspectives upon life, at least ones which he holds himself. he is starting to sculpt (non-visually, and without any tactile counterpart either....it could be said, imaginatively) out the shape of something inside of himself which seems to apply itself in multiple, if not all, venues of his life. it is a restless sensation, constantly fueling an initiative to drive deeper, to scrape out further towards any lights which may lie at the end of their respective tunnels. not in a negative way, though the metaphor might have seemed it at first. no, this is something like a fury, which, while writing, he realizes is a word with negative connotations....but strip the word of anger or vexation (well, maybe not all vexation) and you have a decent semblance of what he intends to mean by it. it is extremely elusive, and yet so apparent to him at all times...the phrase 'rainbow in the dark' comes to him, for whatever reason. he won't hash it out; sometimes one must trust whatever comes in a moment that progresses naturally from the last. he knows that this fury isn't specific to himself, and that all people likely have it in some capacity....some yearning beyond what is current or attained, some destination forever on the horizon. it formulates itself into passions, burning away the pages of a book or perhaps, blank notebook, like a flame. an uncompromising appetite. it beckons him to wander into untrailed areas off wilderness paths. it requires mobility of him, an itch sparking at the back of his mind that can be rubbed by relocating hither and thither, but never quite satiated (like one of those itches in the arch of the foot when one is wearing shoes, and has to wriggle endlessly in attempt to get a scratch on it). it alchemically mingles and fuses with all input, all output, asking him wordlessly to be better than he is, to achieve some beyond, some next level. it challenges, drives, buries the past in obscurity and the unearths the future in an apprehensive and sometimes false clarity, much like the sense of sight we are all so accustomed to.

it is frustrating at times, but mostly he envisions it as a positive thing. it churns often, altering the sense of what is important and what is trivial, constantly making him shift his footing to pivot in accordance with the new ground and maintain balance. it seems like a healthy thing, an intense thing; seems to lend some semblance of integrity and meaning to a somewhat undefined state of existence which we all share. the problem is, it is equally intense in its difficulty to focus. this is a life-energy we're talking about; it wants to dance footloose and bounce recklessly, unpredictable, all over the dimensions of possibility. and it always maintains a steel grip on him, dragging him along to whatever fields and corners it chooses to encounter. it is an energy with endless potential, but he is only starting to learn how to collect it (firefly in a glass jar. with a stick and a leaf to re-create the environment it is used to) and apply it towards the ends that he deems most important, most relevant to the person he is constantly in a state of becoming. it is closest to an emotion, and other emotions have empirically (but not from an unbiased perspective) been noted to send it scattering like an overexcited field of electrons. hard to keep the reigns on an emotion, he finds. even so, it holds the potential for anything you could possibly ask within it....it comes down to a matter of commanding it, which involves being true to one's self, defining one's self, and not falling to temptations and idleness along the way.

this fury is found inward, but is in a state of constant outward expression. and that is the relevance of the two songs listed at the beginning of this note...they find sympathy, or empathy, one of the two or perhaps two of the two, in the movement and bliss of existence. these songs express the joy of living; they are a natural accentuation of the rhythm of expression. they strip his observations of superfluities, and allow his mind to progress with the natural baroque pretense (or so he believes) of an underlying melody. they are part of his own melody; perhaps just a snippet or incomplete chalking of the equation, but help him to see things, to express himself, how he means to. basically, the place that they put him in....that place is his most organic, least-distilled character....the freedom and the joy of being, m.

isn't that interesting? he thinks so.

wood-panelled Van, Go!

2008-04-29T21:15:00.000-07:00

in the moment:
reading a book called 'dear theo'; it is the biography of Van Gogh, as laid out in a liquid series of letters that he wrote his brother, quite frequently. this cat can think, and express. well, obviously that latter....but he is also verbally profound and conceptually inspired. matches wonders how different the world would appear everyday, if we placed enough effort and focus into expressing ourselves through something as simple and deviously complex as the shapes and strings of our words. things would be quite different. he knows this much....people living on different regions of the globe have distinct thought processes to call all their own, and the dynamics there erupt out of the different lingual structures that they have been brought up with. russians legitimately think differently than americans, in many ways both subtly and celestially. have you ever studied a text in another language? with a teacher whom has read the verse or what have you, in the original form? the word on the street is that it is dazzlingly different, and that tremendous amounts of information in multiple contexts are lost to the translation process. when he studied faust, the professor would constantly be reminding the fuzzily-massed 9AM attention span before him that such and such passage appeared quite differently when he was reading it in german, and would (beneficially and frustratingly for us) be incisive as to how there was no proper translation in english for a certain or other german word. he would meander all over our adjectives, like leaping between stones on a path, never quite able to alight upon a solid footing and so maintaining the momentum of intellectual pursuit (much to his fancy). m gleamed the general impression that germans possess some concepts which he was not raised in attunement with; that certain states of mind slipped from his grasp, tantalizingly, like sand through the swift curve of an hourglass.

so how is it that we can come to expect a thought to arise in another person? 'knowing' a person is not possible in the complete sense, and yet we become put off when they rub us the wrong way. everyone has their own priorities....their own pursuits. it makes matches wonder a lot about what 'trust' is, about how it is something bigger than one's self. it expands the boundaries of the mind; it plays in spaces beyond the normal reach of the usual mental faculties. it is a bridge; a synchronization. it creates compassion and caring, understanding and freedom. trust, as a conductor of freedom, is a concept he will enjoy pondering...he can tell already. this idea of 'knowing' something about another person (or set of people) also makes mattress wonder about the possibility of a global political movement. how can there be unification if our fundamental drives and perceptions differ drastically enough to hinder communication? if our ideas of morality and freedom are different than one another? if (most importantly) our priorities, our designs for ourselves and our thoughts, our passions, our entire lives, are walled off from one another? it seems to him that the nations need to come to nothing more and certainly nothing less than an understanding, a mutual respect for the prospects of life and the infinite possibilities of the human mind in whatever quantity it chooses to be grouped within.

easily said, he knows.

m should have started writing earlier. now he must vamoose to take care of other things, leaving points unstated. expect a tomorrow, he supposes~

the beginning of 'carousel' by iron & wine just came on, and certainly it is reminiscent of pink floyd. 'night.

jot

2008-04-23T20:58:00.000-07:00

haven't felt like writing lately; but a quick thought today:

- light diffused through leaves, emerald, making for an enchanting atmosphere below. forested, fortressed, and all its own.

- memories of sinking into sleep, with the door cracked and loved ones' nearby voices spilling into the room, gliding along with a sliver of light. family acoustics. the crackling of a fireplace. burning cozily like an ember under a warm sheet of ashes.

k.

blossom

2008-04-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/04/getting-hands-dirty.html

apropos indeed. matches loves the internet, he loves humanity, for voicing such things. relevant. bright. full of fire and faith.

just ran. granted only a mile, probably nothing to those runners amongst you, but m is not the cardiovascular-exercise type, and he thinks that's an okay distance for the first time running purposefully since early high-school. funny how you feel, great, and energized, after such a thing. so much different from lifting weights, which makes one sore and sluggish for an hour or so afterwards. he used to get this sensation, this weightlessness, from swimming in california, but he is darkened and dampened (hah~) by the reality of not having a pool in oregon. le sigh.
perhaps he shall take up aikido after all.

he would love to sew his thoughts into the air, but he has been staring at this screen for 20 minutes and nothing has come out. a distracted lull; a dreamy haze. and oddly enough his actual dreams lately have stretched themselves into opposites - tantalizingly tranquil and radiant, beamingly happy. and sometimes rupturing, disjointed, dismal and downtrodden. he should have purchased a dream journal some time ago, but has put it off, and off again. how can one analyze a sensation, without a medium to record it, without some distance to look at it a bit more genuinely? it is so easy to become swathed in the wrappings of the moment. sheik in sandstorm, cuffing a cloak around a face to protect and observe.

feeling eccentric lately~

good day, sunshine

2008-04-11T15:09:00.000-07:00

apparently m is dangerous, as dictated by a little girl who saw him traverse a river on a fallen log and declared "that wasn't very safe!" he smiled and told her that being safe wasn't always the most fun. now he is undecided as to whether or not he even wants that lesson to stick in her head as she grows up~ so impressionable, the little ones.

the weather is bright blue with a strong (read: apparent, every passing minute) chance of verywarm sunshine today, and it is so refreshing. how is it that seasons are just so long that one gets completely wrapped in them, yet in a short enough succession that the body remembers how they feel, spurring the mind to reminiscence? this world is put together very well, and so finely tuned as to bring back the flower shoots in every little grassy nook of the northwest. if you're a vegetarian because of the way that it makes you feel, then perhaps you should try smelling some fresh hyacinths in a sunbeam-sliced forest. it has precisely the same effect, without all the day-to-day hassle~
he is, undecided, on flower-picking.

the ahead weekend is a large question mark. it is very tempting for him to play the solitary role, and cloak himself from known eyes in the various recesses of tree-trunks and coffee shop booths. none have the same reddened and worn appeal of trident's. it would be good to cloister, to shutter oneself in the west wing of contemplation and meditation, and music, and midnight strolls around the many fountains of rome (er, portland). on the other hand, it is equally tempting to forget all about reflection, as it wearies him so in sometimes aimless repetition, and parade around the town with his eclectic friends and associates. he wants to sit around and play cranium over beers and smiles, and he could make you a list of the players he would choose to have there, but they are all removed in various degrees of distance from his current city. it is more unwieldy than one assumes, this separation of all familiar peoples after the nigh monastic clustering of souls in boulder fades into e-mails from everyone's different locales.

he will probably achieve a balance of these two possibilities; that seems the best route if memory serves him precisely. for whatever reason, a weekend feels longer and more saturated if you juggle 15 separate activities instead of say, 2. and sadly, saturating the weekends is an absolute necessity these days...if it slips away unnoticed, then another week of work without the threshing justification of a few fun days bears down upon one in a significantly more weighty fashion. we can't be having that; not on our dime.

in other news, matches just realized that he carries around a ridiculous amount of value on his person at any given time. his backpack currently contains this laptop, a $300 cell phone, a $300 ipod, $100 headphones, and a digital camera whose value is rapidly declining in proportion to the number of times it cheerfully decides that it will function properly, vs the number of times that it stubbornly is unresponsive to any stimulus one can impart upon it. still, that's something like $1500. plus any cash or cards. he doesn't think that the rest of his possessions, total, would amount to that much. so basically, eliminating the car from the equation, he is carrying around something like 60-70% of his net possession worth on his person, at any given time. here's to not getting mugged~

bleh, scribbling today was terribly absent of epiphanies. still notable, perhaps, so up it goes. perhaps the contemplative portion of the weekend will reap some ideas to put a spark in his eye*

parachutes

2008-04-09T19:43:00.000-07:00

lots to think about. as if that is ever not the case....even so.

mattress was pondering on the streetcar just now (he is fond of pondering in motion) about the origins of the universe, and whether or not there were in fact some grand intelligent design to it all. he recalled the clockwork theory from his philosophy classes. do you know it? basically, it says that if all the gears and springs and cogs and such that compose the orchestration which we nowadays would call a pocketwatch (use, say, an ipod if you're too temporally-hindered to be able to visualize the archaic brasses and silver inlays of a pocketable timepiece) were to find themselves right next to each other, manufactured masterfully and without a trace of reckless abandon, but carelessly tossed into a pile and left there to rust until the end of time, there is no way that they would ever assemble themselves through merely the forces of nature into such a complex arrangement as they present in the polished and completed (ahm, ticking) form. it isn't possible for existence to be complex without a plan, a thought, a design behind it. m pawned this theory off as silly at the time, and perhaps it is....perhaps. but for whatever reason from his cramped seat on the streetcar, doomed to swallow the yammerings of some young female on the phone with her significant other (presumably) with no escape as his stop was still far, he remembered this one notion and it made a good deal of sense.

what's funny about faith, that most people would probably not admit, is that they would like to have it. hell, this is the sole reason that some people have it in the first place...but for others, this 'brain' gets in the way and for whatever reason, stops us from fully being able to acknowledge an unproven as a truth. matches would really like to have it; is that shameful for a philosopher to admit? perhaps thats a sign that he does have it, in some waxing or waning capacity, in some solid state whose only reason for not bursting into color is the alternative existence of an antipode.
ah dualities. you will be the death of us humans.

matches likes the word 'pithy', but he feels like there is some new negativity associated with the sound of it which perhaps should not be there. it isn't a beautiful word; it isn't a sonorous word. not by a long shot. which kind of aids the definition in a way. but still, he abstains from using it as it sounds vaguely insulting. don't you find? he would say 'sententious', but nobody would know what the hell he was trying to insinuate; he himself had to look it up (which was what started this). which is sort of counterintuitive to the definition. so out the door these words go, doomed to be scribbled into the lexicon of the archaic and unused within the next 100 years~

in this paroxysm of discombobulation, he wants to write something babblingly poetic, but fears that this post is doomed to fall to the pace which has already been set this evening. le sigh. it isn't very expressive of his real thoughts. which is not to say that it is false, but moreso that he is preoccupied and that his thoughts are adrift like blue balloons. which are, coincidentally, the hardest to differentiate from the sky. funny how that works, one image corkscrewing into another, both contributing and extracting like a bee farmer but without the protective screening. the bees, are they appreciative bees? do they give willingly, cordially, with a wink and a bzz? do they storm and ravage; a thunderous cloud of particulate matter behaving with the characteristic swooshes and splashes of solar-systematic movement? boomerang, a-rang, coming back just as fast as you happened to have thrown it. predictable, but not to an untrained eye; not to a first. can you muster the fluidity to give, like water, space as it is taken? displace and rearrange? change? slosh, unspilling, maintaining, a balanced mind balancing a body, balancing the world that pivots with its step? microns of subtle movement, alterations, snowballing straight out of any measurement systems into something entirely else. a flickering edge of feeling; a paper-thin space where one thing meets another. a shift; a friction. a warmth.

perhaps matches should retire from poetry. but he does enjoy it so, even if not so much for his own~

40% inspired by photograph

2008-04-02T19:24:00.000-07:00

he will rebel against the harshness of the future, if the past will hold against the winds of change.
because it is a daunting concept he is wrestling with...that the past is a moment, and that it cannot be held to exist afterwards. he will cup his hands and carry what he can of it; he will scrawl a note on the back of his hand (so that it doesn't rub off) and enlist its assistance in those subtle equations which govern human memory and hourglass sands. he will embody his past, not run from it, not neglect its reflection. he will use it as a comforter, on top of his comforter, on chilly evenings. what else could thought be composed of?

time cannot govern the confines of truth, of hard things which refused to be washed away by eons of subtle rain. a true friendship weathers ages and ages passing, without a word of exchange or a glance to be caught. it's the nature of the thing, because it defines and tailors both ends, bends them towards one another even when circumstance does not. such is why matches has friends, good friends, that he can have not seen for any number of years but still, the thing will remain. the principle, the binding force, the understanding.

still, there is something to be said for the past, if the future cannot contain it, cannot embrace it simultaneous with whatever the present holds. if things cannot be precisely repeated, then they have unique properties, rarity, perceived value. they exist in juxtaposition to that which they are not, to wit: a lesser moment. they are, they are, and who is who to stop them. you? you have a thousand different selves that you could be, and choose at this moment which is what is here, now. brown cow? no, silly, but that was a fragment of past trickling in. it defines, it associates; it has burrowed and becomes like seeding plants, percolating with vitality through into new iterations, new echoes. good album name. good governor of action.

how tragic that the transposition of the past into the present, into future, can be robbed from us; hooded, blinded, dumbstruck! that a child could be taken from a family; that a wife could be erased from an unattainably-perfect coupling...o, caprices of the world. in garden state, they spoke of a family as being a collection of people who remembered the same imaginary place, the same 'home'. chilling concept, removed and distant. but for parents, how true that concept must ring for children spreading their wings~ one mustn't stifle, mustn't confine, and yet inevitably the unity of a family dissolves as they are eddied into different pools of life. they can still be in touch, still be familial, but the thing, the circumstance, the group in unison against outside infringement (not against, necessarily, but you catch the meaning), six heads in cordiality over a dinner table, over a board game, around a fireplace....that thing is gone. how meshed a parent must become in that blissfully nurturing environment, only to have it swept away inevitably and likely much sooner than one would welcome after a complacency nuzzles itself in.

and yet there are connections, pathways, harmonies. associations. there are things we possess that are steeled against change, and these make all the difference. the past is alive if it is chosen to be remembered, or if it is cared about enough to make choice into an abstraction, at best. we can define who we are; we do, and in doing so define who we become. "the choices i make now, will follow me through life" ~braille. but to remember is a certain carrying over; a breadbasket full of faded photographs. the difficulty comes in transitioning a remembrance into a continuation, an actuality; forging a connection on the current lines of transmission. and that, is a very important distinction, matches is finding.

today matters.

"and glow,
glow,
melt and flow,
eviscerate your fragile frame,
and spill it out in the ragged floor,
a thousand different versions of yourself,

and if the old gods still offend,
they got nothing left on which you depend,
so enlist every ounce
of your bright blood,
and off with their heads"
~ the shins - sleeping lessons

green light: now begin

2008-03-28T14:11:00.000-07:00

mattress wonders where the epiphanies of yesterday have gone to. he remembers being electrified by many a concept. then various and sundry activities. then he remembers waking up, that pressure from the work-life collapsing his options for expression, and going through a routine set of motions that start the day most efficiently and comprehensively. fortunately, work has ended and that compression can be sloughed off for a few sequential days. would that weekends could be anytime.

he needs to clap the colander over the fleeting mouse of curiosity, to be able to control and focus it enough to serve his purposes. he had it trained well during college; it wouldn't wisp away unless he gave it license to. there was at the time so much new information, so many electrical currents flowing his way, that it was easy to find a capacitance to store and juggle them around for a time. prototyping personality. but now the information isn't flowing so freely, or at least not as forcibly. it does not stream across the ground in grids as it once did. people carry around their buckets of it, sloshing to and fro, and perhaps you can get a cupful from your neighbor if you ask a correct (but polite!) combination of questions to spark their discourse. people all have their passions...but it is more difficult than one would assume, to get someone to peel off a surface later and express something deeper.

and it can be the same sometimes with someone in their own presence; that is, alone. sometimes it is easier to just be surface; sometimes the depths have some notable spots that could stand to be avoided for a time. sometimes retreating into oneself entails denying a large portion of what you would consider to be your 'own' personality...there are myriad reasons why that might be the case. but, one has to be able to remember themselves after the fact, has to leave breadcrumbs to follow back. retracing one's own footsteps can be so rewarding~ to return with a fresh mind to places and problems that once had no escape, no freedom. the interest in them is still there...it seems now like at certain times in one's life, the recipe changes to express different flavors more poignantly. whereas once m was 20% immersed in literature, he is now 8%. the 12% differential is currently being occupied in other activities and areas of thought. it's a good thing, even though he can certainly say that he misses the degree of focus that he used to have in the area. certainly he will try to fade back into the habit, that's really what the point of this post is. but he is not saddened that his perspectives shifted noticeably for a few months or years. one could probably actually consider him mentally unstable had they not changed - the human mind needs to be refreshed with unique experience; it thrives on newness, life, just like any other organism on the planet.

in particular, though, one element that he wishes to recapture is the philosophical, burn, for lack of a better word. the searing deconstruction of the mind, due to a new and unstable idea. for whatever reason, matches has always been fascinated with the building of a person, the wandering through experiences, the tearing and the reconstitution of the mind. it comes back stronger, it does....'builds character', he would say were he calvin's pop. he thinks his is ready for crisp challenges, new pages of words constructing sentences constructing thoughts, new vertigoes to nudge him into unexpected orbital patterns. he was saying: for whatever reason, his mind has always throttled all the more fully when his current conception of the state of things in the world, the universe, was in absolute jeopardy...when the framework, the structure that his ideas of the world hung upon, was being cracked and hammered at. you can think that curious if you will....but there is an almost unbearable, bursting freedom that smiles directly at you in such times.

so, he will go on the task of recapturing, grasshopper-hunting as it were, and even attempt to take a concept or two further once he re-enlightens himself. if that's possible. he is very excited for the next year of his life...including tomorrow~ which is the most crucial point, of course.

" no more of that sittin' in a slump and uh,
no more of that coulda-woulda-shoulda junk
no more of that waiting for the inspiration, innovation
or a green light--now begin
no more of that lettin' all your time pass
no more petty illusions of the mindless
it's time to expand, power from within, you're takin' over this dominion
green light, now begin"
~ blackalicious - green light: now begin

peace ; )

glowing screen / familiar faces

2008-03-21T14:43:00.000-07:00

hooray for the iranian new year....matches has today off, courtesy of it~

here is a riotously enjoyable piece of media, via the onion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGxdgNJ_lZM

and chuckles aside, this recent trend of wariness towards technology certainly has some fair ground to it. no, m isn't frightened by the thought of robot police trammeling down his door to arrest him for being 100% biological (yet). that future is a distant one, he thinks. aside, it is strangely disconcerting to realize a future prospect that you will likely not live to see. in the case of pollution, or resource misuse, it is fair to say that we will probably not feel the full effects of these problems in our lifetime (not their full implications, at least...obviously things are already heating up). but we have a responsibility to our future generations, don't we? even though it's possible that we won't feel the squeeze of the problems that we are potentially creating, we still feel the need to mitigate them for our next generation. that's not just a courtesy....that's a faith. a faith in humanity, in the gravity and importance of our existence, our ideas, our ability to thrive and achieve beyond what has been seen thus far.

but how dependent, in other avenues, have we started to become? technology drives us; it facilitates communication and networking, research and learning, exposure to the previously unexposed. it has so much value, and yet usually lacks that final drawing power of reality whereby one is fully immersed in the event, the thought, the scene....whatever it may be. it can only transmit on certain levels, certain frequencies, and our ears are trained for so much more. so, we could call it simply a resource; we could belittle it and make it secondary. this is probably the most common perspective upon the matter, that there is an inescapable artificiality inherent in these transmissions.

this is the way that mattress is used to contemplating the matter. yet simultaneously, he feels a little bit hypocritical for resigning it to such a small stage....the reason being that it tends to play such a large role in his life. whether he would admit it or not, most of the people that he really cares about are only reachable through secondary communications. most of the exposure to the distant world that he glides upon is due to the efforts of others, using this marred medium. is the internet an art? is it around to ensnare certain aspects, amplifying a sense or two and discarding the rest for all practical purposes? matches has been awake and alive for the most part of to-day, but perhaps a third or one half of that time has been spent in inadvertent worship of this glowing laptop screen (for what is worship at its basest than a commitment of time and energy). that said, technology is beginning to encapsulate a lot of his waking time.

is it purely by faculty of pride, then, that he wishes for technology to attain some more validity than he currently assigns to it? he could well be hiking right now. isn't. perhaps in thirty~ but you see, this is a dilemma....he does not want to admit that perhaps he is not 'living' fully, simply because perhaps too much time is being allocated to the vast applications of technology. think of it as a large online game....one creates a new identity, explores a new space. but it cannot possibly have all the intricacies of real time, spent in real life. it can be considered an escape, a sheltered and mitigated application of the mind. for the most part, it is looked down upon by the common person...this 'online' life, this breaking of ties with actual sensations in favor of virtually-induced ones. note; this certainly is not meant to rip upon the casual gamer....m knows that there can be a lot of justification and legitimate worth found in such occupations of time, even though he may not choose them much for himself and his time, anymore. no, rather this is to brace against the rift of the real vs. the virtual; to expose the sides of the schism a bit more so that the light can trickle down and help us to make decisions more clearly.

if both his internet (lappy) and his phone (cellular) were simultaneously to be thieved from him in the midst of a crowded streetcar, his first sensation would probably be an anger, a distaste about the loss of financial investment on things that he will most certainly need to make purchase of again. this sensation would be first, but not foremost. no, over the course of the next three or so hours, he imagines that he would start to feel his thoughts slipping toward that intangible arena of virtual communication....knowing that based upon an extension of time, he would certainly be missing out on some fleeting communication from someone he knows, somewhere distant. anyone, it does not matter whom. his hand would twitch, and in moments of distraction would trail its way into his pockets in search of a phone to dispatch a text message on. he would not find it, and would again be frustrated....but this time it would feel much more like the loss of touch, than the loss of an apple pie-slice of paycheck. it would grow and grow, immeasurably (for who can gauge such intangibles without some sort of ECG analysis); it would stack to heights of unbearability. it would drive him to a momentary sort of madness until he retained his grip on that actual, fairer and more complex side of life....the operatic immersion of reality.

you see the point, he presumes. there is a duality being experienced in life....some degree of time being spent engaged in an intangible tornado, swirling with code, words, and mathematics. should this be thought of like sleep (to some people! matches certainly finds merit in sleep and, more to the point, dreams), a 1/3 reduction of the amount of time that we have alive? m wonders, if he ceased with the trifling communications that he has with most people online (not all, some are very interesting) whether or not they would still be just as good of friends. chances are that they would, they would just have to wait for actual face-time to catch up and engage in the classic witty banter. he finds that most of his true friends are just as cordial and engaging as always, no matter how much time has slipped since he last spoke to them. so perhaps he could completely do away with that time online, and be the better for it~ tough to say with any certainty, as he does enjoy keeping up with his peoples.

he supposes it will all be sorted out in time. it's just a question of current application that is bothersome~

papyrus

2008-03-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

on the trials of writing:
matches wants to take the scraps of himself that have experienced, that are saturated, and billow and billow them into lofty clouds, colorful when the sun of the eye hits them. float them like kites, running alongside a hill and chasing momentum. he wants them like water particles, each reflecting back some stance or perspective of the reader in some way or another, each mirroring or sieving some self-same sediment collection in the basins of thought pools. he wants people to find, by way of random foray into flipped pages, some shells, sand-dollars, and shards of sea-glass moving at scintillating speeds but polished so as to be solid, silken bubbles, brushing against the ridges of a fingerprint. if a thought, a reflection of one, can be possessed...how interesting a phenomenon! how noble to be an object swathed in memory, to be inert matter and to interact with the feathered fingers of a dawning perception. matapult (a recent domino name; snicker) can think of no better purpose for a tree (aside from the serenity of a natural existence, combing winds in the rainforest) than to be sheared into a piece of paper....not one to be casually timestamped and submitted to the HR department, but rather one that engages the colors of the mind....a painting, a poem; a paper-mache donkey, an origami hippopotamus. to be inbued, flagged, commissioned with the development of a mind must surely be an aspiration of even the most hard-hearted of the rocks.

it is admittedly odd to be typing such a treatise on a keyboard and internet connection, but surely these optic fibers and plastics and magnets came from some location other than the factories, initially.

shadows of ourselves

2008-03-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

"you should write about some of the things hiding in the back of your mind."

so it is. matches is rather bad at hiding his emotions...he has never been the type to distance his mind from his feelings and be able to truck on through an entire day without feeling those tensions pulling and pushing upon his insides. it always seems like the stomach, doesn't it? that sinking, depth-charge of a feeling, which can quite poetically be accompanied by a large scoobydactylic (scooby-doo-esque) swallow, a throaty bass note that plunges down into the darkness (like, zoiks, scoob). it does feel like dropping a large weight into the body of water that composes your consciousness~ being chased by some phantom with a chill touch and the happiness-wraithing vacuum of a dementor (from those most popular of novels).

but those times, those aren't really the back of the mind, are they? those are dispersed like a packet of sugar in iced tea; swirling around and clinging to large clumps of concentrated coldness. which could be said to be a problem of matches'....the inability to set aside these personal concerns and focus on the present. but those still are not the sediment that must be scraped from the back; the forcefully ejected thoughts that clutter the floor of one's unconsciousness. no, those feelings are all too conscious, and thus they are a world apart. how does one dip into the well of the unconscious, scavenging for sparklies in dark caves with no light to bring out their natural form?

normally in such a case, antimatter would find the best recommendation to be, meditation. letting all the thoughts breeze through and past you, without judging them, and then finding out what remained once all the winds had died down. but there's no time for that....no time! at least not at the moment, because this was supposed to be the beginnings of an epic writing session in which some sort of storyline would be conceived. must. not. stop. he would rather keep his fingers flying on the keyboard; hashing through these thoughts like an explorer ravaging the jungle with various bladed and sun-flickering tools. these thoughts, archaeological, are ancient relics...only to be navigated to by way of savage temples and winding corridors. what a word, corridor.

here; there is one. death. the most-and-least revered of thoughts; the grand poobah of them all. every so often, when m is drifting cozily off to sleep, this thought will rush upon him like michael turner trying to prove his mettle whilst the big man is out with a fracture. obscure, admittedly. frenzied, is the point. it causes a panic, a peril; matches wants none of the peril (but can't he have just a little peril? no, it is too perilous). for some reason, sleep occasions the downing of mental defenses. this can be observed in any dream, where one imagines oneself to be an age that is already bygone. mattress, age 8 or 9, is a common dream theme...and it is not a jarring situation, not a dislodging thought, not in the fuzziest. foggiest? certainly it is foggy. that's the thing, though; it seems just as likely to the sleepy mind. there is no connection between reality and the dreamscape. and because of this, the rational approach that we would normally have toward many things, well....it absolutely vanishes.

pondering death when awake is heavy, but not overwhelming. in dreams, it brandishes its full intimidation...it becomes present, apparent, saturating. dreams where death is impending due to anything, but most notably sickness such as cancer, are ab-solutely terrifying. they slice right to the heart of the matter, they expose complacency for what it is...a stance that is only based upon its remoteness from the actual matter at hand. you, in a hospital bed; that is the reality of the matter. and that is what is most striking about death. you just never know~ there is an assumption on m's part, probably on most people's part, that they will live to be 80. it seems a safe assumption, does it not? it can disappear, like *that*.

the timeline is also an interesting facet of this idea residue...the idea that we have a few cups-full of life to spend, and that the quality changes over time. does it improve? does it degrade? ask matches in twenty years. but even now, sometimes a demon comes to him in the night and whispers to him that he is already a quarter-of-a-century old. he is only 5 years away from being 30. 30! that seems quite a benchmark, doesn't it? things, up to this point, have been assumed to be figured out once one is thirty. now the mark nears, and the mystery shows no signs of drying up~ if anything, it complexifies. if we can admit that to be a word, because spell-check has placed a red line beneath it. he knows the point comes through; stop bringing him down, spell-check.

he wonders about the quality of the timeline, from an aged perspective that he has yet to attain. are these really the 'golden' years? should he be more, less disreputable and carefree during them? what of after thirty? after fifty? will he still really want to cling to life with this same tenacity, when he is seventy? will he wish for it to end, if he is ninety? there are some devastating consequences of long life; most notable the deterioration of the body and the mind, and the, unmapping, to be kind, of friends around the globe. the death of a significant other, of 50 years, would seem impossible to endure. the passing of all of one's friends would be excruciating. how much can the heart, the spirit, take? what would the world be like, to a mind handicapped by something like alzheimer's? these things are perpetual mysteries, and they do not really gain power enough to touch us until either we or someone close to us experiences them.

so they get shoved back into the clutter of the mind, and there they lie in wait. there; that is one thought lurking in the shady corners~ have with it what you will.

♫♪♫♪♫

2008-03-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

this dj at the camellia lounge is kickin' out the jazz jams...it is top notch at the very least, and believe me, we're not talking bottom-rung here. allow a backwards recount of the playlist: lauren hill, tribe called quest, LMNO, digable planets, moka only, and it all began with bahamadia. ooh, del is coming on. matches is diggin', audibly.

not too many people take their music seriously these days; have you noticed? does it upset you? aside from the pop that dominates the radio waves, and apparently people 'vote' for in whatever manner that happens, mattress doesn't get the sense that humans are really engaging with their albums anymore. everything is track shuffle...everything is disjointed. there is no time taken in this day and age for real musical appreciation; a consciousness sitting down solely with the intention of being swept away by a series of melodies and rhythms. there is no commitment to music, no dashing home through the rain, grinning sugary, grainy smiles in anticipation of putting on a simon and garfunkel LP and sinking into a bean-bag chair. matches misses the bean-bag chair. o where have you gone.

so there is a phenomenon of people not taking their music seriously. it has become auxiliary, secondary; it only gets a nod of recognition when combined with other activities. and granted, one of the seductions of notes are that they slide so silkily into anything you want to mix them up with....what else do you know that can be appropriate at any time, any place? those things are the transcendent things, like smiles for instance. if music can be compared with smiles, then perhaps it really has achieved that pillar of 'emotion' that it so richly deserves. that classiest of classifications, most minute of magnifying-glass meritoriousness. but m gets the slinking feeling that he is in the minority with this opinion~

do you not command your full attention upon a book, upon a painting, upon a sculpture? music is nestled firmly into these ranks, and to top it off with a cherry, it is the most transitory of them all. a note bursts into existence, hangs in the air for a moment like a lingering scent, and is gone. not to return ever in precisely the same form, if you want to take into account the smallest of acoustic deviations (which is admittedly a little snooty; play it as it lies). this phantom thing should require more attention if anything. and it is fine to treat it casually; obviously there are certain genres which are catered specifically towards that end. the main problem with most popular music is that it just doesn't have the architecture to hold up under the weight of a heavy listen~ and that's alright, but it certainly also perpetuates this cycle of music that isn't up to snuff. it is disappointing, nonetheless, when music for non-thinking people eclipses the popularity of a thinker's music. what statements can we make about the general population based off of that? best perhaps not to venture into hostile waters.

tonight, take an album that has stood the test of time and commit to it...even if only for a few tracks. let it shred your mind and paper-mache it into whatever its purpose decides itself to be within you~ it's one of the most exquisite joys ; )

footprint

2008-03-10T21:25:00.000-07:00

whata whata weekend.
it is funny how simple it is to overlook the path to happiness...how easy it is to become caught up in things outside of yourself, to divide your consciousness so many whichways and never really commit to any individual moment. m is at a very turbulent time in his life, when things are getting praised one day and tossed out the next, and it is difficult to get a grasp on oneself when the sands are shifting under your feet.

it seems like sometimes, the consciousness gets completely pulled from the body; extracted towards other things, other concerns, other ideas, other futures. scattered....feels like distance. how hard to maintain, when everything is remote. what happens when the you that you used to be, does not translate into the next frame? how do you feel about yourself? do you like chocolate-chip-mint ice cream in that hour? do you turn right or left, when resolve is whittled down to a whim? these are things that one trusts to a back-story for, a running dialogue to order the points of chaos into constellations.

"made a note of it
did you write it on your hand
put a name on it
to help you understand

well do you see
the futures holidays are for me
just let me know
where we go after the fall"
~ zero 7 - futures

in a new space, however, a distant place, the strands connecting you to those old ideas are stretched thinner and thinner; finally they are down to a filament that you can easily break with if you have no reason to hold on. they might even be nuisances, and you may be eager to brush them off. it is an interesting state of affairs.

the weekend was mentioned foremost for sound reason....it has helped matches to archaeologically recover some semblance of his past, an echo that bounces warmly off of this new city's corridors. having good, old friends in a place that has allowed you the freedom of choice regarding your personality is a profound experience. it allows you to recapture old decisions, old feelings, but now with a measured and compassionate perspective towards the basics of what and why and how. it is invigorating to be re-exposed to oneself, and also to play with, to bend and contort the notions of what someone thinks they may have known. life is chaotic, and thus it will always necessitate choice....a freedom that can be either cozily comforting or tormentingly frightening.

"how curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. how useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. as he approaches i become not myself but neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with bernard? yes, it is bernard, and it is to bernard that i shall put the question, who am i?"
~ virginia woolf - the waves

but, a useful office is indeed what matches' friends have performed this very weekend. they have given him the greatest of birthday presents - the past, present, and future. in his opinion, one of the greatest resources is the past...it is a deep well to draw strength and hope from. it is undeniable and locketed away, nestled layers deep and closer to the heart than the outside infringement of the day. it is not there to be feared; fearing the past would be a silly and wholly un-darwinian concept. it is to be understood; to be learned from. it aids us in our aims. and though we may glance at a faded picture and think, 'why would i possibly have worn that monstrosity?", the real question to be chiseled at is, "what self can this stir within me, which has lain dormant and yet has value?" never be embarrassed for your past~ it sticks up for you when all other support is vanished, like the truest of friends. it founds you; and to be misplaced from one's foundations is surely a sign of a degree of loss.

anyway, this weekend was brilliant in multiple respects. but most importantly, it has allowed antimatter to bring up a cool, clear bucket of himself to dip his hands in, to draw reflection and insight from and to douse the fires of his eccentricities (those that are negative, at least; he has a whole bushel of 'tricities). the places one can draw strength from...they really do depend on the personality, don't they? it seems that it can be found anywhere, it just takes the patience and precision to craft it into a reflection.

usually, titles come so easy. not today.

2008-02-29T13:10:00.000-08:00

matches is enjoying copland, sunshine, and a rather blatant bandwith violation at dragonfly chai~

ah, spring is in the air. flowers are tunneling their way through the soil, erupting at the surface life spurts of lava. it is so refreshing, after such a grey and downtrodden winter, to feel a breeze that isn't piercingly cold rustling through one's clothing. to sit at a table outside, and not have to defend your laptop against a barrage of raindrops slingshotting around to the underside of a pitter-pattering canopy. sunroofs, they are open. ice cream trucks, they are, curiously not present (let us hope that this deficiency is remedied in the coming months).

mattress is debating the idea of starting a vegetable garden on his extraordinarily-large deck. it seems that it would be a large investment of time and effort, but he imagines that he could probably learn some things from it as well, and also would get a kick out of nourishing himself with things that he once nourished (kind of like a kung-fu master learning from his student. well, maybe not much like that. but, delightful nonetheless). his main qualm is that he would probably be unnecessarily devastated if the sun became overly harsh and roasted his plants, as happened to justin naught but 3 years ago. so much effort poured into nothing~

the idea struck him long ago, but recently he has been thinking that it he might reap some quite isolated benefits from the process. for one, he has noticed this aspect of himself lately, whereby he has become quite impatient with anything taking longer than a few moments. it's a terribly frustrating state of being, because most things take longer than a few moments....for instance, he hasn't been seeking out much new music by bands, even ones whose names he is aware of, because he is exhibiting impatience with downloading or going to stores. sometimes he refuses to go to a website if it is not preemptively bookmarked, because he doesn't want to move his hand from the mousepad to the keyboard and type the address. these things do not take much time at all. it is a problem. so, perhaps taking the time to cultivate something lengthy will balance his mind out a bit. what is curious is that he exercises extreme patience in some respects....as a rule he would consider himself to be one of the most patient people he knows~ there is just an inclination of late that exhibits otherwise, and he supposes it would be best to whisk these inconsistencies into a more fluid smoothness. life is so much easier when one is in a casually-drifting disposition.
and then, of course, after all is said and done, he will get to put said vegetables to their ultimate destruction in his hands. which is oddly kind of a fun prospect, is it not~

do you notice the same tendency towards impatience? he is not sure quite what to make of it? is impatience a good thing on occasion? is it always negative; a weakness? upon contemplation, the problem is precisely in the application of the feeling. it is bad to have a pressing impatience, an inability to behave oneself when immediacy is unavailable. but it can be good, for instance, to have an impatient resolve, an uncompromising steadfastness towards achieving a goal. it's funny the quickness with which virtue can shift to vice, and then double-back upon itself. good things do come to those who wait, but it is foolish to let an opportunity pass one by when it could be seized. impatience clouds the mind, though; it confuses and magnetizes one toward finding a singular thing. it takes patience to really recognize a genuine opportunity~ so, kind of divided on the issue.

perhaps, like most things, the degree of importance which the quested-after object has determines its tendency towards either impatience or patience. when you only want something for shallow reasons, you leap upon it, frenzied, and fail to evaluate anything about the situation or the thing itself. when you desire a thing for more intricate and notable reasons, patience springs up as an unwillingness to compromise, as a third eye guiding with more depth perception. it becomes important, truly, and as such you're willing to invest more of yourself and your time towards achieving it.

hm. outro~

in theory

2008-02-25T20:26:00.000-08:00

here is one little notion on life.
the first step is usually the hardest. if you play an instrument, if you play it well, it will be easier for you to learn another as there are cross-functional ideas involved in the two. if you know a second language (or shall we say, a first; but the reading of these words then begs a question), then any other lingual exploit you choose to embark upon should ultimately require less effort to achieve the same level of comfort. if you become a savvy traveler, the world will bloom open for you like a summer rose. not that matches would know about that one, but he can know such things in reverse; there are large quantities of geography in all manners of intricacy that he is completely ignorant of. le sigh. the unseasoned explorer only knows vague facts, and wanders around in a daze. this trend also follows suit with busy people, somewhat surprisingly....if you want something accomplished, give it to someone who is already busy. they tend to have a better current sense of orientation, and can manage their resources such that the pieces all fall into place.

matches is witness, but also admittedly somewhat party to, a phenomenon which may be cultural; we'll see. it is an epidemic, a problem of inaction and complacency. rather than investing oneself in any particular angle of study or advancement, there certainly seems to be a growing tendency towards a more 'plain' genre of human (not to be overly harsh, unless it is necessary for spurring purposes). there seems to be less and less focus on any specific endeavor, and more emphasis on surprisingly unmemorable activities...frequenting the same spots, playing the same games, watching the same movies, unspooling the same unengaging and unstimulating small talk. shopping (depending on the item in question) deserves a category all its own. maybe mattress should be thankful that we have freedom enough to enjoy doing nothing particularly worthwhile with ourselves, but he somehow just cannot reconcile with it. if this is a cultural issue, then it is entirely likely that it will follow a trend, and that the next generation will be even less inclined to make something of themselves with the time that they are given.

the problem that m is running into, however, is a slightly different take. he feels horribly judgmental, going off like this on the surrounding people he does not know, who are surely verymuch like himself (saw some graffiti the other day: "hello, i am much like you"). he is having trouble assigning a value system to the world lately. obviously, don't kill, don't steal, etc....but when it comes down to how someone chooses to live their own life, how is there any chance of one argument obtaining more validity than another? what if the entire point of life isn't mental exploration, or spiritual development, but rather to sit around and indulge in as many small pleasures as possible? who can say, with certainty? what is grinding matches forward in his proposition is a gut feeling, an instinct, that tells him how he should be conducting himself. it falls short of the mark more often than it should anyway. if it really were a theory with some truth backing it, then wouldn't it logically be less arduous to fall into line with?

"life is a blast, when you know what you're doin'
best to know what you're doin', 'fore your life get ruined
life is a thrill, when your skill is developed"
~ hieroglyphics - at the helm

so, take note; this is not an objective mandate; not that anyone would have taken it for one in the first place. he thinks that, he hopes that, once you really find something that is worth doing for yourself as opposed to what anyone else thinks, it isn't 'arduous'...it becomes light-hearted, and fun to experiment with or explore. kind of like scribbling on this thing~

still, get out and see some nature this weekend. pick up a new book. meditate. chances are you will not regret these things~