Myron the Magnificent

Magnificence is an utterly rare quality, though one immediately recognized.  It's a sort of combination of elegance, comfort, and personable charisma that can be embodied by anyone no matter how rich, beautiful, or intelligent.

Today I met a gentleman named Myron, and I doubt that I shall ever encounter him again, though in the few minutes we talked my entire being was moved - shifted.

I have been having a lousy couple days - though in truth I have been having a lousy couple years - I've never been diagnosed with depression, though my therapist says it may be a keen possibility.  I am always on some spectrum from sadness to anger, with choices governed by an outlook of scarcity and the resultant fear.  It's hard to enjoy anything - any feelings of "enjoyment" seem like fake projections onto a reality so cruddy that I am simply being a childish fool in denial if I claim happiness - how could one be happy in the midst of what's going on, uncertain if society will collapse and I & my (very few) loved ones shall die tomorrow?

It's all quite unpleasant, and has led to plenty of drinking, smoking, and pornography watching, the latter two of which I've stopped after a particularly miserable weekend that involved some of both.  As for the drinking I have no intent to abandon it but I also have no real desire to do it right now, and at the very least I'll avoid it until the end of the week and see how I feel then.

The lot of them are distractions & numbing agents; I want to remove them and feel the pain.  Because if I can really feel it, feel it all and have to live with it instead of slugging down another mental painkiller, I might finally realize that the work of changing and taking risk to really do something worthwhile in this life will be less painful that enduring the way I live now.

It's a strategy that worked once before, and enormously well.  It led to what was the most challenging, though readily the most enjoyable and legitimately fulfilling year of my life.  What a backslide it's been since then.

I won't belabour it longer - I'm saying all this to set you up with my mindset as my and Myron's paths crossed.  I was feeling sad, quiet, not friendly, basically worthless - I wanted to avoid people.  Perhaps it's the latent shame or embarrassment about myself.  I kept interactions superficial.

I was working with the electric company at the time, constantly going to different substations and communications sites to maintain our private safety & monitoring network for the electric grid.  I arrived at today's substation and was greeted by a few other fellows - one employee - Myron - and one outside contractor.

Immediately Myron offered a welcome, though it was not the procedural, forced greeting merely to satisfy etiquette that is all-too-common.  Rather he was genuinely saying hello to someone who he saw as a friend, if for no reason beyond being a fellow man - and if you have ever experienced this yourself, you know that no further reason is needed.  We're all on the same journey here.

I was obviously much younger than he, and so he asked how long I'd been with the company.  "Just about a year," I said, adding, "What day is it?  The twenty-ninth right?"

"Yes, the twenty-ninth."

"Well then exactly one year today."

"Congratulations on your first anniversary," he said with a smile.  There wasn't a trace of Pan-Am in it - it was a quiet, but glowing, warm smile.  It was a smile that said "You're part of the family."  It's a sentiment to which I'm all too unaccustomed.  "Now you just gotta do thirty-nine more," he joked.

Although he was only half-joking: the clear reference to his own time at the company was far from the first like it that I'd heard.  This was a place for career men, and I learned my lesson two and a half years ago: I have no interest in a career, not of that type.  To be locked into something, with no way to grow, that's the source of much of my pain now.

I may have no interest in that path, though I can respect people who have made that choice, as long as they have actually made it themselves and not simply fallen into it as so many poor souls do with their lives.  I could tell he was one who made it.

He continued his introduction by sharing what his home base is; I didn't recognize it; I shared mine.

"Telecom?" he intuited, and I confirmed.

He moved like he had all the time in the world and not a single piece of unfinished business.

Myron returned to the subject of years worked: "I'm close to wrapping it up.  Got my house, got my daughters through school, and they're having kids now."  He said it all nonchalantly, even with cheer.

"How many do you have?"

"Three daughters, and my oldest has two kids, they're six and eight, they live in Huntington Beach now."  I lived there too; we talked about Huntington for a bit.  He didn't live there but seemed to enjoy the active lifestyle and easygoing vibe.  He asked if I'm "a water guy, do [I] surf?"  I was actually impressed at the level of enthusiasm one practical stranger expressed in an other's pursuit of surfing.  I told him I had surfed, though not for a long time, and part of my own moving there was a not-so-subtle attempt to get myself back on the waves.

His second daughter had two children as well, and he enjoyed how much he was able to be hands-on as a grandfather.  He admits that it wasn't like that as much with his children, "Dad had a lot of work to do, sometimes be outta town."

We kept talking for another couple of minutes, about everything that mattered and yet nothing of particular specialty nor significance.  The big things in life really are composed in little moments, aggregated.

Eventually it was time for him to roll on.  He and the contractor - an air-con & heating guy who was strictly business and probably somewhere between numb and bored, like I would be on a typical day - were checking the air conditioners at various substations, as well as killing the weeds and other such housekeeping that goes invisible to 99% of the population, and for that matter to probably 99% of the people who work here too.

He said he'd close the gate but leave the lock hanging in it, unlatched, talking about minor mechanical courtesy as nonchalantly and peacefully as he'd talked about his dear family.  Then he wished be a good rest of my day, and a good rest of my future, basically I felt like I had been blessed.  I offered my own for him.  We said that it was nice to have met one another, and both of us meant it.  Then Myron proceeded to leave.

I walked out to my vehicle to fetch some tools, and he was in the process of reversing his truck to exit.  On any other day I would have gotten my tools and simply walked from my van back into the building without so much as a glance; I would consider the interaction ended despite the obviously still-extant physical presence.  I knew that he'd be looking to give one last goodbye, and if I wasn't looking back to return it he'd be disappointed, and as a result I'd be disappointed too.  And as soon as I would return to the room I would wonder, "What the fuck is wrong with you, man?  Why couldn't you have just turned your head and smiled, it's so goddamn easy to do!"

And so I did turn to look, and sure enough he was looking back, smile still beaming.  He waved, on the other side of his truck's window, and I smiled and waved back.  He shifted into a forward gear and drove away.

And like that I was in a good mood.  I mean a genuinely, not "I'm trying this but it feels fake and like I'm in abject denial" good mood.  Things were easy and there was a lightness to the world.  I actually...I actually could see a future, something I don't often...hardly ever, in fact.

I was possessed of the sense that what I would do for the next couple hours was a valid and useful stepping stone to somewhere good.  Maybe not a direct and obvious one, but it was motion as opposed to motionlessness, and it was in a productive direction.  All I had to do now was make tomorrow either bigger than today, or pointed in a better direction, or with a little ingenuity maybe both.

Thanks Myron.

 

May 29, 2019

You Think That Guy's in the Band?

          Three years ago some friends were coming into town for a weekend-long music festival, and there were other concerts around town capitalizing on the crowd.  My best friend and I go into a bar adjoining the music hall; we've always understood each other deeply though I have long considered him more connective & social than myself.  I'm feeling out of place, my self-consciousness playing its usual tricks of having me believe I am sticking out as an obvious square in a dimly-lit room full of talent-possessing, love-making, interpersonally-adept people.
          As we get toward the back of the crowded bar I see this tall, thin-as-a-wire guy - who looks as young as we are - with an intensely asymmetrical haircut sitting rakishly in a booth with two very "alternative" styled, patently attractive girls on him.
          I tapped my friend and said, "You think that guy's in the band?"  My friend turned to me, looked me straight in the eyes with amusement and how damn enjoyable the universe is, and in a moment of unrestrained brilliance said something that changed my life:
          "Everyone in the room is in the band."

Designing to Contain Your Shit

It's impossible for some architects to stay away from interior design, for hopefully obvious reasons.  And why should they?  The two are complements...isn't it keen for a good racer to also be a good mechanic?

In designing interiors I'm trying to arrange, or even barely fit, my shit articulately into a space that some other fool designed poorly for the purpose.  In architecture, I'm designing a space to adequately, seamlessly, sans constraint nor exaggeration, fit my shit.

And if you think, in either case, "shit" means personal belongings, you are mistaken.

Shitting the Sun - first trip to Pluto

APR 5 2015

When the conversation turns to the topic of LSD experiences, people inevitably carry on praises about the colours, the heightened pleasure in music, and the sense of cosmic one-ness felt.

But you see, there's another interesting (and similarly primal) aspect of the aforementioned that no one ever warns about, perhaps as a sort of collective possession of this unspoken understanding that is nonetheless universal among those who've tripped before.  It's almost like a joke continually handed down from the previous generation to the newbies, the punchline thus: 'Because we experienced it alone, you're going to experience it alone too.  Welcome to the club!' 

I speak, of course, of shitting while on acid.

Entering the loo I realized I was alone for the first time since before the Undeniable Tripping Action had begun.  Once I locked the door to our small house’s sole bathroom, I was struck by a sense that was both novel and familiar at once: déjà vu, if you will.  I was immediately aware that I had entered an intricate machine which sent me here from my home world:  In there, time and space are sheared at an extreme.

The room was flying through space very fast, accelerating much more so in one direction than another such that the distance from the doorway to the toilet – ordinarily only two or three steps – was now stretched long enough in which to park a Volkswagen.

I strode across the room and assumed position on the throne.  The room – the “ship,” shall we say – continued to accelerate: I glanced back towards the door, and the square floor tiles had become such severe diamonds from the acceleration that I’d venture to say each one was roughly half the length of a tennis court.

There must have been a high-tension mass compressor embedded in this ship’s toilet, because not long after I sat was there suddenly little doubt I was anywhere but halfway through the process of shitting the sun; that isn’t to say literally our Sun but rather some object of collectively the same mass, a quantity that was even more doubtlessly at the same temperature.


This was surprising, seeing as my only consumption that day had been of previously-frozen taquitos and chilled habañero salsa, nary a pound at most.

 Moments after first pondering the fact that this experience shamelessly obliterated the laws of mass-conservation and thermodynamics as I knew them did the in-flight message automatically play.

           “At these speeds, so many collisions occur with stray neutrinos and similar particles that biological organisms will take on significant mass, particularly in the gastrointestinal tract.  Our airline features entangled-shield toilets.”

Well, I’m glad someone thought of that feature, because it’d sure be a bitch to travel near-luminal speeds without ‘em.  After a few minutes the deed was done, and I rose to wash my hands and get off this ship.  I took a quick glance in the tachyonic inverter and beheld an attractive though ultimately uninteresting man, and after we exchanged a hearty glance I decided not to waste any further time with him.

I strode a few miles to the door; I stretched out, my fleshy digits touching the doorknob, and twisted, actuating an ancient cam system to retract the door's bolt from the jamb's strike plate.  What if it hadn't worked?  Three-eights of an inch of metal could keep a man locked in here for a few hours, which for all he knew could be the rest of his life.

The instant I turned the knob, the uncountable trillions of quantum probability

waveforms collapsed into their conventionally comfortable states

I had seen that trip to Pluto - only momentarily glimpsed it, really, and began to see how what I call “information” is most readily defined as “that which can cause change to something else," whereupon I knew this was something I'd have to pursue to far greater ends in my lifetime.

A Day With The Voice

April 26 2015

Wicked deja vu.

As soon as the song I'd never heard before started I realized this was it, the thought I was about to have was going to happen...I knew it was one I liked, ultimately, so I awaited it eagerly.  I'd just have to hold on a few seconds to find out what it was.  I stared at the computer screen, with Photoshop open, working on an image I rather liked that no one I knew would ever see, because they knew my Bruce Wayne.  But Batman was crafting this image.

Then I heard the voice speak.

"Everyone's some character to someone" the voice said, "you think you're a real bad ass, don't you?"

Of course I thought that.  I've learned now not to bullshit myself, and only to traffic in the truth.  Just because it aggrandized my ego doesn't mean I should deny it.

"But everything's relative.  Sure you're hot shit to some folks you know, but what if you're the 'gay best friend' to that chick that's your best friend?"

          "Who cares," I told the voice.

"You know you'd bang her.  Wouldn't you?" He retorted, trying to hold any position he had left.

Even he doubted himself now.  The days had been getting brighter for me, but I'll admit, actually seeing him get weak was a special breakthrough.

          "Yeah I would, but there's a vast difference between will and desire."

The voice just stared at me angrily.  It was the only option he had left.  He'd exhausted all rational arguments and I'd defeated them; he was reduced to moralizing.  How pathetic.

          "I'm not really seeing the problem with being gay, or a friend, and I'm definitely not seeing the problem with being the best."

I tossed the statement to him the way you might to a roommate when you're reading the paper and he asks you for the weather prediction but you're actually paying attention to a different article on the same page.

The voice yelled, "Fuck you you louse!" but I'd already taken another swig of tequila, and I couldn't hear him over the agave tsunami coursing 'round my tongue.

It's Sunday.  I wonder what'll be on the radio later.

Lowkey Brilliance and the Intimate Epic in Vice Prinipals

It's easy to use a T.V. show's host network's own confidence in that show as a marker to decide how seriously to take that show.  Television monoliths like Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or Westworld get every last frame scrutinized and analyzed as they are held on pedestals like the finest works of classic literature.

And in our ever more frenetic world each of us must decide which art we want to indulge in, since there's certainly more television produced than is worth our time to view.  It's easy to overlook a show like Vice Principals, which compared to HBO's heavy hitters has a minuscule advertising campaign and could probably have the production of half its season paid for by one Thrones episode.

That would be to overlook one of the most subtly well-constructed programmes on the network, and a masterful new entry in that holy grail category I call the Intimate Epic.

These are pieces of literature (any medium) that tell grand stories of consequence (power exchange, life & death, sex) through only a tight lens on just a few characters.  The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly might be the ultimate in intimate epics: the story spans vast physical expanses, but more than that it's the impact of the characters' actions with one another that are immensely heightened, not necessarily because of what they are but because of how they're presented in the film.

What these guys are doing isn't all that important to anyone other than them, yet the way director Leone uses every cinematic tool available to display these events in the movie makes the audience feel like the consequences of the titular characters' actions shall be of universe-altering magnitude.

Kill Bill is another peak intimate epic, with the film bending us to believe that all of reality hinges on nothing but one person's hunt for five others.  What happens at the end of the film is no surprise - it is given right in the title - but knowing that makes no difference.  What makes Kill Bill riveting and immensely rewatchable is how it gets there.  We get to see and hear moments of intense drama unfold between all these key players, events that reach across years and continents.

When our hero does finally kill Bill, a simple and low-key death becomes as climactic as the explosion of the Death Star because of everything we know about what led to it, and because we know how important it is to the main character.  The world will still turn, wars will still be fought, and billion-dollar deals will still be struck tomorrow, but in Kill Bill that all completely ceases to matter as the film manages to shrink our perceptive scale of drama down to the intercourse of just a few people, and that is the essence of the Intimate Epic.

Vice Principals has tread some important new territory in this vein, and I hope this article can help establish it in the annals of great television-making that is worth your time in today's oversaturated tele-visual market.  Principals brings several novel characters to the screen, such as the flirtatious but not-stellar-looking writer Brian Biehn and the batshit sociopath who's managed to remain functional thus far Lee Russell.  About them and others an entire article could be written, but what I want to focus on here is the use of an ordinary, relatable, and - for those reasons - totally mundane setting in which the show occurs.

Previously I'd assumed part of what imbued an Intimate Epic with its epicness was certain qualities of the setting.  It had to involve locations that commanded attention one way or another, perhaps being exotic (the Far East, jungles of South America, islands in the Caribbean), or exclusive and rarefied (Swiss chateaus, modernist houses overlooking sprawling cities, penthouses and boardrooms amid metropolises, government agencies or top-secret facilities), or simply unique in their extremity & beauty (vast deserts of the spaghetti Westerns, curving roadways along the Mediterranean, hostile mountains).  Settings that were unusual immediately capture the viewer, saying "hey, this is not a regular place, the people that are here are doing special not-regular things."

Vice Principals dispenses all of that for a setting with none of those features.  Instead the heightened importance of everything comes from the way it's shot, the way it's edited, the usage of music, and of course the writing itself.  This is one of creator Jody Hill's calling cards, as evidenced from a similar style in Eastbound & Down.  The cinematography, often coupled with slow motion, transforms high school hallways into backdrops for deceit, love, scorn, alliance, and betrayal.  These two men are mid-grade losers working at an obscure suburban high school, yet as Vice Principals progresses they carry on as though the rise or fall of nations is at stake.  Make no mistake: there are full-bore personalities at war here, and the show expands their conflict to fill our brains' scale of what a conflict, at its greatest, can be.

The final nail in the coffin is always the closing music and cut to the credits.  Viewers are left, episode after episode, with the notion that something big has changed, something bigger is afoot, and whatever goes down not everyone will come out of it well.  In short, the musical selections and perfect cutting at the show's conclusions haunt, and that is just about the finest thing that can be said for any piece of art.

This latest episode - the penultimate in the show's punchy run - leaves us with Neal Gamby and Amanda Snodgrass together again, as Miss Abbott looks onward, crushed, while the dreamy, spacey tunes of Roost's Big Black Delta play over everything.  That final shot of her lingers just a little longer than you expect, and combined with a little hint they dropped a few episodes ago when she was shopping with Gamby, my money's on her as the shooter.

Half-Literate

Mar 15 2015

 Knowing how to read it but not how to speak it
sometimes feels worse than not knowing how to read it at all.

YOU SUCK

APR 8 2015 2

If you think I laugh too much, it's not true.  It IS true that I laugh at all jokes.  That's because there is something funny to be found in all jokes.  Perhaps you actually told a good joke.  Then I laughed spontaneously.  That's best; good job!

Maybe your joke wasn't good, but seeing as it was a joke, it should've been.  Therefore, I laugh at you for thinking that a shitty joke would work.

Be Being Been

JUL 27 2017

I'm SLOW and INEFFECTIVE at generating things because I believe that "I can't BE there unless I've already BEEN"

In other words, it's my mantra - "it can only be found by those who already know where it is" - being applied onto myself, destructively!

Of course I KNOW the whole being-->doing-->having method of things.  Yet I constantly believe that I must have ALREADY BEEN somewhere to be valid in pursuing being there (what moronism)!

How did I get into motorcycles?  I just joined the class and I bought one.  Boom! Now I'm a biker, because I ride a bike.
How did I get into swinging?  I just attended events.  I mentioned that it was an interest to girls I was into, I got onto SLS, I said yes to the opportunities that existed.  How did I get to make furniture?  I just made it.  How did I get to be an acid head?  I just took acid.  The doors were all open.  It was merely my prerogative to walk through them, but for some weird reason that's the part we humans find difficult.

So how do I get to be an artist?  Just make art.
How do I get to be a lover?  Just love.
How do I get to be a fit muscle man?  I just exercise regularly and eat well.
How do I get to be sexy?  I just be sexy.
How do I get to be rich?  I just make money.  I find things others value but  aren't doing, and I do them.
How do I get to be a leader?  I just lead.
How do I get to have fun?  I just enjoy doing stuff, and pick fun things to do.

Note the shift from 'be' to 'have' on the last question there, is there anything worth exploring in that?

How do I get to have my dream house?  Just build it, get the people needed to do so.
How do I get to have the life I want?  Just be the person who'd have that kind of life.

What's bigger than pornstar, or The Pleasure Man, since those haven't been drawing me forward.  The Maestro's part of it, so is the Powerful Man, but they're not there just yet...what's the magical thing that'll go DING and make EVERY LAST THING from the past disappear, leaving ONLY the beingness of this supermaster present.

What do I REALLY want?  Who do I REALLY want to be?  That would have the self-respect to pull off anything and everything I desire, no stoppages or excuses or shortcomings or justifications for why I don't have it.  I'm talking that Mad Max, Don Draper, Baron Flambeaux, Cary Grant, hard-rocking, brilliant, sexy, art-shitting, OUT THERE rockstar who just burns the world to the ground with his very gaze?!  The kind of guy who'd set sights on a girl and ultimately get her to a choice about him, and satisfied with her choice, but nonetheless having made it....rather than quiet in the corner, HOPEFUL (god what a vile word!).
The guy who's got a big, shit-eating grin on, whose Miami-neon swim shorts ripple in the wind while he holds open the throttle on a cigarette boat loaded with acid and amplifiers bound for some atoll off the coast with guys & girls of highest caliber.  He doesn't need to be the best..because they're all the best.  He's a god, yet he's among gods.  And he pulls others toward godliness.  He understands other perspectives but does not adopt them.  He is the Lizard King, and his presence throbs with a gentle, torquey unshakability.  Others may lob what they have at him...their cheers or their jeers, their tomatoes, their empty bottles at the back of his head, their roses & soaked lace knickers, their condescending tones & disapproving looks, their mind tricks, their delusions, their awe-struck compliments, every mechanism they have, and he shall not be deterred from his course.  For he knows it, and it is true, and true to it he stays with an authenticity purer than hydrogen.  There is only one sin: doubt.

He is.

I am.

"I am," he declared, and thus it was law in the universe.

Tales from the Intersection

     I sat there, at the helm of the machine, rumbling & grumbling in the misty night, waiting for my turn at the intersection, as the motor throbbed in anticipation.  I strained and in the distance I could hear the echoes of Spitfire pilots over the Channel.  A pink cigarette died in the ashtray.
     The red light disappeared and with nothing more than the slight twist of a small metal plate the beast came alive, all sound and fury and chrome and hot leather.
     The smell of female had suffused the cabin, born of the soaked upholstery, but presently it fought off the invading scent of premium gasoline.
     I howled down the boulevard, a blue streak, fully possessed of the moment.  It was all rich, clean energy, and it reeked of a man dealing with reality on its truest terms, namely: no terms at all.

The Heart of Elegance

            Complex solutions were not necessarily arrived at by complex means and only from the minds of geniuses.  They are typically derived with unwavering attention at the exact point that needs it, and a solution is ventured upon that point that may or may not work.  It probably won’t.  But there’s a possibility it does, and one can get good at guessing which solutions shall work and which shan’t.  All it takes is observation.  Reperepetitio est mater studiorum…

            And after that there’s a second pattern to notice: sometimes, one solution solves not only the problem being focused on but in its same course solves a second, yet unresolved problem.  It’s here that one can become even better at predicting the solutions, striving not only for merely a solution that works rather than one that won’t but instead for solutions that solve two problems rather than one.  It is just as the separation between an average golfer and a good golfer: playing from the same distance, the former aims for the green while the latter aims for a particular spot on the green.

            That is the heart of elegance: single solutions that simultaneously, intrinsically, solve several problems.  It leads to the association of complex solutions with brilliance, for there is the true heart of genius: not just to pull something off, but to pull it off so elegantly that it appears effortless.

Imagine A Penny

MAR 26 2016

Imagine a penny.  If you're like most people, you know just enough about a penny to distinguish it from all the other coins.  "Ah yes, the red one!"  If you know any of the following, consider yourself part of a rare breed:

• Which direction Lincoln is facing
• Where the year is stamped
• Where the minting facility is stamped
• How many times total (both faces of the coin) the words are "One Cent" stamped

These are stimuli that occur to us but which we filter out because they are unnecessary information: while your perceive everything, you only regard the minimum necessary to satisfy a situation.  Because you never need to know these details of the penny, you find yourself unable to remember them right now, even though you see pennies all the time.  Or if you don't, imagine something else that you do see all the time.  Money & credit cards, plant life around your home, or the architecture of buildings along your commute but which aren't ever your destination are all common examples.  It is this ability to filter that allows us to navigate complicated city routes without knowing the street names: we don't know what the front of every building on every street in the city looks like, but we know just enough to navigate using a few landmarks.  Our brain has boiled down the entire town to just a small handful of landmarks for a given trip and in the process saved much time, certainly an evolutionary advantage.

The marvelous perception-altering nature of LSD is such that you perceive the wonderful patterns, textures, and details of all sorts that're all around us - in nature, in machines, in people's faces, everywhere - which we normally ignore as extraneous stimuli and simply discard any notice of, let alone appreciation.  It is a way of seeing (and hearing, and tasting, and generally experiencing sensations of all types and origin) that we have not experienced for a very long time, perhaps not since before we can remember.  But to experience the goliath, unyielding continuity of reality with an adult brain and understanding is nothing short of breathtaking.

The Sound Drug

Music is the highest drug you can take.  Sure you've heard all sorts of people who insist that they "get their best high off of LIFE" say foolish-sounding things like this, but c'mon and hear me out.  Can it get you higher than heroin?  I don't know, with a hundred percent surety, because I've never taken heroin.  But what heroin does is give you a chemical shortcut to happiness.  It activates you, it activates you super hard, but in one direction, no?
Sit at the symphony and hear dozens or even over a hundred people belting out their full capacity, channeling their concentrated souls through their instruments.  That isn't one direction, that's a thousand bloody directions all coming at you at once.  You aren't taking one chemical and shooting it into your arm or the space twixt your toes, you're plugging your head and your crotch and your heart into the souls of a whole stage full of people, and not just them but the artisans before them who crafted those instruments too.

Music is a totally insane thing.  There's not a reason it should "work."  The sounds that any man makes are dreamt of in the space of pure originality in that person's mind ergo necessarily completely foreign to the experiences of the listener, yet the listener doesn't find them offensive, or revolting, or even unusual (unless of course that's a compliment): they find them pleasant, reaffirming, resonant, relatable, and even comforting.  The fact that we all group around certain songs can't be irrelevant to the fundamentals of human nature, and by extension the universe (I understand if you see that as a dramatic leap, which today it surely is.  But of course every thing is a variation on the same "things," and the same could be said for vibrations, so it isn't a tremendous stretch to say music is the most extreme & advanced articulation of the fundamental universe we yet have).  The facts that certain songs sound excellent in every genre, or that metalheads can be swayed by electronic freaks, and that classical die-hards can be thrilled by hip-hop compositions, are not trivial.

In that way, music is a critical interaction twixt people much the way that writing-&-reading is...except far more fundamental.  Where writing requires a person to take the interwoven complexity of his thoughts and emotions and force them to condescend to the level of language only to be re-interpreted up an identical but reversed pathway through the reader, music bypasses all these steps completely: a musician & a listener are a pure, evolved, human sense communicating with another human sense.  It's one [or many] people -- temporary collections of energy, vibrations -- creating vibrations to be received by other people, other vibrating collections of energy.  It is surely among the purest forms of one mind talking to and actually understanding another outside of literally Being John Malkovich, that is to say experiencing not just a person's physical sensations but the entire worldview that informs their 'soul,' if I may take and use such an overly-dramatic and over-employed word (for I feel here, now, it is necessary).

So to get back to the point, music may just be the highest drug we can take (on our own, at least.  To steal much popular culture before me, "the most fun you can have with your clothes on.").  With music we aren't just accelerating our mind's chemicals with one [admittedly complex] chemical that we smoke or snort or shoot or swallow.  We are intoxicating ourselves with the minds of others, with the exorbitantly complex interactions that are going on inside our fellow man (there is a universe inside each of us).  We are getting high off of their brain chemicals, by extension their entire beings, for a body could not exist without a brain and vice-versa.  Name a fan of narcotics who does not identify among their most enjoyable activities when high "listening to music."  From weed, liquor, and LSD up to cocaine, barbiturate pills, and heroin, and everything in between, music remains universally enjoyable and even essential to the experience of any given drug, commonplaces like marihuana and liquor included (to say the very least.  I could include sex and Netflix on my list of narcotics if I were so inclined). The point is these are all things people do -- absolutely all of them, from the most wholesome to the most depraved -- to make their situation better, by whatever their present notion and definition of "better" is.  And all of these people include music in their plan for betterness.  All of them.

In no way are we more connected with one another - even if at a distance - than though music.  And that comfort that comes from connectedness is the thing for which we're all looking; it's the comfort that sells every Coke in the country, and every square of LSD too.  There's some Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom in all of us.





The full movie Being John Malkovich appears to be available free on YouTube, at the time of this posting, leastways.

Forever'll Never Come

That feeling when opening a new handle, like "This shall last forever!"
But forever is never as long as your doctor and your wallet would have you hope. But the inner groove of every album keeps telling you, "forever'll NEVER come baby!"

A Very Late Night

Often I write several things in one night and then wake up to find out what they were.  This is one of those times.

My consciousness and self-awareness will have a battle of wits
while I sit back and chuckle away on the sofa.

Lightest I've Felt in Years

The truth is you're treating them like enemies, to be bested, because that's all they've ever been to you - competition or non-threats - when what you really want is to be friends.  You want it so dearly.

And realizing that was the lightest you'd felt in years.

Five Hundred Horses

How do you do it?

What, you think I've a secret or something?  Truth is...[leans in, fake whispers, narrows eyes] I'm fucking nuts, I just route the energy in one direction.  Imagine a thirteen-year-old boy behind the wheel of a Corvette.  Foot to the floor and doughnuts for days, right?

Mmm hmmmm...

The car's brilliant, the secret's to put a focused, calm driver there.  Five hundred horses all pulling the carriage in the same direction?  Beautiful.

Liquor

It's curious

it loves you
like a cat

it spits at your trifles
yet uplifts your victories

makes you fight better
encourages you to write better
bolsters you from the sidelines, no matter how hard you've been beaten
even though it gives its fair share of the punches.

always loves you when you're in need
always offers a helping hand when you're struggling

but never hesitates to stand holdin a hammer 'round your coffin.

She shoves you into the abyss as readily as she offers a hand out,
she'll always help you get where it is you want to go.
She doesn't offer you any advice, though she's centuries of knowledge.
No, she doesn't hold a map and doesn't give you her opinion.  Wherever it is you're trying to get, she puts her hand on your knee and pushes the pedal further to the floor.

she tells you not what door you're opening.
She only passes you the key, and puts her hand gently on yours as you turn it.

Anthony's Two Muses by Ron Lewis

Give 'Em A Chance

You know I never met anyone as crazy as myself.  But, I think the truth is everyone's as crazy as I am, I just wasn't giving 'em the chance to show it.

Originally written June 29, 2014

Today's Instruction: Don't Care

Turning a negative into a positive, turning weaknesses into strengths.  It is perhaps the most important skill anyone can have.  The terms "weakness" and "strength," when used describing character traits, are really just based upon the results derived by the person with the trait.  Anything can be transformed into a strength.

Getting to the title of today's article, not caring can be the ultimate weakness and the ultimate strength.  Think about it - the dream is sipping rum drinks on a beach, that you own, in the company of honourable men and beautiful women, not caring about a thing: strictly just being, and taking pleasure from "being" in the best sense of the word as you know how.  It can be easy to get there using the same technique: don't care.

Some may say that if you don't care, you won't get anywhere.  I'm saying that you channel that not-caring into the mindset of having no risk associated with your actions.  Note I didn't say no risk associated with your decisions.  I'll get back to this later.  IF you don't care about he consequences of failure, then you'll go ahead and just DO things without hesitation.  As long as you're making smart choices about WHAT you do you'll probably be succeeding at most of what you attempt.  In this way you'll always be climbing life's ladder, but fearless about how high up you are.  You'll just see that there's another rung, and keep on climbing.  What you could do is limitless.

Returning to risk: Every action has associated risk.  It would be pointless to try and live a life without risk for that's unachievable.  What we all do every day is make decisions about what to engage in and what not to based on the risk involved with failing at the task versus the reward achieved from succeeding at the task.  We don't articulately, explicitly do this with every single decision we make; rather it's a decision made so fast it feels automatic and goes by unnoticed at all.

After the decision's made - whatever the scale - we are done considering risks and we just go forth with the task.  So even with a risky task, the hard part is not accomplishing the task itself but deciding whether or not the task is worth accomplishing.  In this way your decisions do bear risk.  But once you've decided to do something, you cannot waste time being burdened by the risk associated with failure.  If you just don't care, you'll simply plunder ahead doing.