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.