Scattered thoughts

Today it's raining again, out of the blue. I thought summer was here to stay. Well if the weather can be random than so can I. Time to unload lots of little tidbits scratched on the back of envelopes and ripped triangles of paper.

***
I may be hopelessly simple and naive, but I know a few things. There's nothing you can't take and make it better, if only a little. Time, effort, and consistancy will improve 99% of your troubles. Not cure, but improve. So why aren't you working at it?

***
It's not pretension if you mean it.

***
When you're little you think nature films are great and animals are so cute. Then you grow up and you realize that everything just eats everything else.

***
Bad habits bear the hallmark of being easy to repeat, while correct habits seem to beg you not to continue them. Only if we understand this reverse psychology correctly, that denial is giving and easy pickings come up empty, can we navigate our way successfully through the maze of challenges each day presents.

***
Capitalism is replacing religion with an ethic for living which is just as insidious and brain dead. What we need is humanism, a system of morals based upon altruism and not selfishness, whatever its guise.

***
I learned about simplicity the hard way.

***
I know what is right, but it's boring. I need stimulants and alterations which take me outside of my normal thought-space so I can see things from without; gain some perspective on social mores and daily habits; produce works which hold a mirror to these things and illuminate what is otherwise too obvious for us to see.

***
Forgotten is the god of the woods

***
You have to find your stride. Don't try to walk to fast. There are no shortcuts. Art and fame are products of opinions, they are artificial. They depend upon perception, not reality. Find something more real than art. Otherwise you'll spend your whole life trying to communicate the ineffable to people who aren't interested in anything but the messenger. That is art and it's the most unreal thing in the world.

***
I really don't like humans.

***
Life is weird
I don't remember much about it
I seem to have lost touch with everyone
Like a pool toy taken by the tide
Every relationship I have seen has ended
Unhappily
Everyone thinks I am a lunatic
Including me

***
Only insecure want to date 'above their station.' They think it will make them feel like a bigger person, and will impress others. People who are comfortable with themself look for an equal match.

***
You can only get so happy. After that it turns into something bad again. On the other hand, there is an infinite shrinking sine wave on both sides of peace, leading to the center. You can travel this road safely, but you have to give up the idea that there are better things.

***
My day is 26 hours long.

***
I'm pathetic. I've lost all confidence. Real confidence, not that reckless brand of daring-do brought on by chemicals or pathologic moods. Nearly every night I dream about being late for work and getting fired, ditching classes and failing my finals, or something equally humiliating. Everyone laughs at me and shakes their heads. I can't find the keys to my car or my way home. I end up crawling in the gutter just trying not to be seen, crying all over myself.

***
Time to go eat some worms.

***
If I created a roleplaying game, you could only be an aboleth, a githyanki, a beholder, a mindflayer, or a gelatinous cube. The object would be to slaughter all the humanoid races.

***
I have a charm, but I use it irresponsibly. I charm other people with words, with flattery, with need, and with sincere cavalier enthusiasm. But it's not in their best interest to accept me, I'm starting to suspect; maybe I'm a cancer in the lives of everyone I know. I want to save people from that, even if it means being lonely and denying myself happiness. I wish I could find the road to healthiness. I should focus on things other than love and pleasure for now. I need to learn the discipline of hard work and denial. It's too easy to dress up nice and talk nice and pretend everything will be great, and end right up back in another predicament, and lose interest and not want to change, and never change.

That's the answer. I need to focus on denial instead of gratification.

***
If it seems I've fallen on hard times
In recent weeks,
Months...
Maybe even years
Who cares
I go where the wind blows me;

If it seems like I care about you
Don't let your
Mind fool you
Don't let desire
Rule you
You've been taken in to be ground up like the others.

***
I need a proof-reader with startlingly insightful powers. I long for a companion who treats me not as an absurdity, much less a deity, but who follows on because she sees the light of consciousness in my eyes and because she has lost sleep over similar universal conundrums, and recognizes an alliance with me, where we can share our distinct synnergistic overcertainties. We are not intellectuals in any sense; we feel the patterns coming togther and swing for the fences. One day we'll connect.

***
I think the whole universe is sentient/preserves its its organisation/survival to various degrees depending on scale. Molecules show very little natural selection, cells more, animals more, superorganisms even more, etc. Is the universe itself aware?

***
All the research doctors and men of medical science, all those busy coldly charting neuropathways and pinpointing the temporal-spacial locations of creativity and consciousness, those men and women who attempt to understand a thing by looking from the outside in, like through cleared glass into a toasty cabin, who somewhere along the line decided that a thing can be reduced to its parts and conceptualized to operate only at this miniature level, in machinelike fashion - all these people are fools. They're correct in their own minor ways of course, like shamans and fatimas and rabbis are correct in their reading of the less discretely modeled aspects of human social behavior and need. But they'll never see the thing as a whole, or be any wiser about the actions of madmen. They only understand what has a meaning.

***
You are full of yourself like a pinada is full of old and worthless candy nobody wants, and yet still everyone wants like mad to smash you open.

***
I really dislike the type of people who get so enthusiastic about something, talk a novel about it, then as soon as things don't go their way and they get that first kick in the stomach, take their ball and go home. Take your time; step gently and carefully at first. If it feels right, take a bolder stride. Be tough and believe in yourself. No one in the world is a better person than you! If you get to a point where you don't feel you can take the scrum, or don't want to debate, then leave and be even more cautious next time you get involved in a thing. Just don't blame it on others and give everyone the finger on your way out - it's sour grapes and just makes you look like a faggot.

***
Truth and beauty

I love TRUTH and I love BEAUTY
And the TRUTH is that sometimes there is no truth
And BEAUTY can sometimes come from the most horrible places
Atrocities are an addiction
Freedom a lie disguised as affirmation
And time floats all around us keeping us chained
To the things we most despise;
So, yes, I love everything that is REAL
And that includes, by definition, what is
Completely fictious as well.

***
Her eyes matched her name.

***
Life is going to be the death of me.

***
I had bad dreams. I dreamt my daughter was pregnant. I dreamt my cat had run away and I couldn't find him. I dreamt I was away at a camp with students from all over the world, learning fascinating things, mostly about each other, and I fell in love and just then there was a disaster that flooded the place and everyone had to be whisked away by emergency vehicles, and I never got to know her name or tell her how I felt. And everywhere I looked were mushroom clouds, extraordinarily distant and yet still unimaginably huge. They swallowed up the fuzzy sky and the electric sight of the air made my lungs hurt and the world go weary. I think then I fell into a dream then; the dream I'm living out right now.

***
Only one transcendent truth that trumps all else - but, by god, this pink pill is making my head hurt and for the life of me I can't remember what it is.

***
I like it when people tell me to cheer up, it means I'm on the right track.

***
I took one of those online personality test. This is seriously what it came back with:
Disorder | Rating
Paranoid: High
Schizoid: Moderate
Schizotypal: High
Antisocial: Moderate
Borderline: Very High
Histrionic: High
Narcissistic: High
Avoidant: Very High
Dependent: Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive: High

Hmm.

***
This is how it will go I regret to say
It will happen in a closed room in the broad light of day
And the blue goddess Set will come take me away
From the misery,
And from the savagery.

***
Sometimes I want to black out and never wake up
Most of the time, I just want a little peace
To be left to my own devices
To not have to answer endless questions
That seemed like a good idea some eager young prick with a degree
And his army of nurses eager to serve medical science
Mostly I just want to be left alone
If I rot then my body will do the rest of the world
That little bit of good
If I succeed I only suceed at consuming those same goods
People so deparately seem to want
So here's what I will do:
I will seal myself in an impervious container
One that will last 10,000 years
And bury myself somewhere no one will every find me
So I can contribute nothing whatever to this superorganism
Of which we all act as limbs
And which seeks to vanquish lovely chaos and conquer all of reality
The cancer called life we only throw our wills and bodies at
Because that is what it compells us to do
I will be the ultimate protestor
Forget Ginsburg, Kerouac, forget Lennon and Trungpa
They all found themselves sucked back into the web
Despite their earthly protests
And in the end their eloquent sermons of rebellion,
Of liberation,
Were only heard by worms and maggots
And paying customers
And they meant nothing;
But I, I will separate myself from this tumor
And experience eternity on my own terms
Or until the enemy finds a way to corral me and
Put me to its ultimate unholy work
Of uniting every single atom in this clockwork universe
Into a living, thinking whole, scared of death,
Scared of lonliness, scared of God,
Puzzled why it exists and desparate for some kind of escape.

***
Yes the dead will walk again, when you are all sleeping He
Pours like a mist over your unmoving bodies and removes
Dream-tears like tiny black threads from your unseeing memory
And in a morning slow to light you rise and know only vague
Trepidations of the limbo'd hours laying still
Turn a fornight's counterclockwise spinning in your covers
To watch the blinders torn away from your eyes
See out with the vision of ancient men across unnatural
Chasms of time, the world as naked and empty as its natal day.

***
Would I be safer and happier in a long-term "facility" than I would on my own? I don't want to accept that. Still, a question central to my heart at the moment, when each day seems to present an air-tight reason for one or the other.

***
Give me another reason to accept darkness,
Savage world.

***
Labels are the worst thing to ever happen to the world, and the oldest.

***
Some of the coolest animals are orange tomcats, proboscis monkeys, bull elephant seals with those huge schnozzes, gibbons, yaks, and man-o-wars.

***
I guess I'm a slow learner. Or I learn quickly enough, but I cycle interests rapidly and never become expert in anything. I feel like a robot who's been programmed with robust tools but without a specific purpose. So I just sit there, lights blinking, trembling. I don't know what to lunge at.

***
Is the whole "Founding Fathers" reverence just patriotic hyperbole? What are the chances of such great men living at the same time and acting together? Can't really take my own theory seriously, though. Most of the larger body of "fathers" (revolutionaries; lawyers; politicians) comprising the movement may have been ordinary men inspired by visionary leadership. But when you look in any detail at the lives, careers, and writings of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, you reach the inescapable conclusion that all were extraordinary thinkers and doers. Some glorification has no doubt occurred in the intervening years, but I think a truer explanation is that the revolutionary period was simply one of those times that brings greatness to the fore in those in whom it may have lain otherwise dormant, and then brings those men together when else they may have wandered into unrelated discliplines and even countries. We've seen this before with scientists (think the first couple decades of the 20th century, with Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, Dirac, Schrodinger, et al).

***
The subtle approach always beats the mad dash for pleasure. You end up with more pleasure, of a more satisfying kind, if you are moderate and work hard. It's an earned pleasure and not a guilty one.

***
I can't work when it's cold like this
I just want to crawl back in bed and hide.
I can't work when it gets hot, either
Makes me want to lay down and die.

***
I can't wait till I'm on the upswing again
I'm so tired
Tired of seeing women half-dressed soul-disguised
Sick of people being professionally polite
I'm just drawn
Stretched a bit thin
Over the lathe of what are supposed to be my best years
And I can't enjoy them because I'm comatose with fear
Can't get off the chair
I want to be excited
Believe what I do means something
But I am unable
And around the bend of another day or another week
Maybe a new ship will come in
And I'll give it a go again
But I'm unstable

***
I envy people who are innocently earnest, who take a delight in something simple and feel real joy. I know now I'll never be a part of that world again. But I can enjoy it vicariously.

***
A really huge small bear.

***
Hell is already full of people who have tried to control life and failed.

***
Critic: a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste

***
there's a sadness
behind everything.

***
My road is the same before me and behind
Like a snake eating its tail
Feel like I've been to hell and back
Through the belly of a whale.

***
There are a lot of bad people out there. More than that, there are a lot of selfish and jaded people out there. Where are the gentle men and women? The kind people who listen and care what happens to you? So rare indeed. If you find one let me know.

***
My whole life I've been craving an audience, and then doing everything in my power to alienate any potential ones.

***
The big, big world is nothing of the kind. It's a lot of small worlds connected together.

***
Why do children develop personalities corresponding to their birth order? Why do people tend to behave the way they look? Personality, I believe, develops to conform to expectations, and is largely NOT inborn.

***
People around me say, "you're always asking why, why, why." This is true. I want to be with OTHER people who ask Why, not people who remark on my doing so. I like ideas. I am curious. I am an intellectual being more than a physical one. I'm also a recluse. A tough combination sometimes. But fertile grounds, I suppose, for Art.

***
I'm not coming back this time. Time only goes forwards. When I stood on my own two feet I saw how bleak the land was, how stifling the air, how unfertile the soil. Some of us want to live rather than just exist.

Don't bend over to please me. It doesn't. Don't watch me carefully and say what you think I want to hear. I know when you do it and it's lazy and selfish on your part. I want to be with people who are genuine and have something of their own to offer. I don't want to be with someone who is the whole show, nor someone who makes me the whole show. That's not the point.

I like things that buck trends, that are unexpected. Like a memoir that everyone expects to be glossy and say all the right things actually turning out to be an unbelievably raging inferno of vehemence and a philosophical mindbending journey that throws off all you ever knew of the person and kisses off everyone and everything that person's every known or done. Something like that.

I don't know what "success" is - it's not supposed to be a game, right? - but I'm at least as successful as many around me. I've gone rather far along my own path in this journey of life. I've thrown off the slaver's chains for moments of exaltation, if only occasionally. I've looked outside and around. I haven't quietly played my part and that is ALL that counts to me. I've lived a life less ordinary. That is a kind of success.

It's funny how some people almost seem to pity me. I may get sad or go mad or lots of other scary and negative things, but it's not like I want to be like those people, or feel they're in any way in a superior position. I feel more accomplished than them in ways; I've dared to dream, and then to look. It's hard for a person to take full reality in the gut and keep going. The one on the front line always gets shot. I certainly don't feel I should have or could have gone any other way. And I certainly don't think people who live conventional lives are to be unduly applauded.

***
You're a nothing
You don't stand for anything
You don't have anything to say
You are hollow inside
You don't even choose to be the way you are
You are mindblind
Simple natured and silent
First to get in line
(You are a planner's dream),
The very last to know what it all means.

***
In general, males want to hold somebody. Females want to be held.

***
Re-normalization is both our best friend and our biggest curse. I need to expand on this.

***
Kate Beckinsale is yummy.

***
The time it takes a tear to fall
A snake to shed its skin
Is all the time it takes to forgive.
-Bjork

***
Caffeine, the savior of the universe.

***
I'm turning into a cardiovascular disaster. Need to hit the gym pronto.

***
Why doesn't Mountain Dew or 7-Up fizz like Coke or Pepsi when it's poured into a glass (especially over ice)?

***
Just then, a huge Thesaurus came around the corner and chased them away, roaring at the top of his lungs.

***
I like that Bauhaus song, Histogram Sam.

***
Sometimes I feel like I'm unarmored, carrying a spear, charging uphill all by myself against a batallion of archers fortified at the top behind walls. And that's just, like, getting out of bed and brushing my teeth. After that it gets harder.

***
I tend to speak in hyperbole. You know, that land where Conan lives.

***
3 Reasons:
-Because I'm sad
-Because I want to be something special
-Because I can't think why not to

***
Whosoever hold me back, I will
Come and find you and break your neck

***
Text file, oh text file. You're the only one I can talk to truly, it seems. My mood changes so often. I have so many different takes on everything, all the time. I'm nervous and pessimistic and optimistic and proud and determined and apathetic. I'm tired and I can't relax. I can be so many different things, like roles an actor might play. But I'm not acting. I really inhabit those clothes and become that person, if only for a brief time. Who am I really? I don't think that question has any meaning. Life without meaning is ideal. Unreachable.

***
Life skills ... yeah. I missed those classes while I was off reading about physics.

***
I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps and "get things done" ... but I truly am phobic about some of these things, and fearful of mental breakdown as well. I feel completely blocked from doing anything that will change the protective micro-world I've built around myself. I begin to feel extremely threatened and anxious. I don't know how to get beyond this point.

I don't want to be manipulative or self-centered or anything else. I want to find out what I'm really like, how others see me, and to fix what needs fixing so I can be a person I am happy with. I want to build better relationships. I want to know if it's me, or if it's the people I've happened to meet. Or both. Just need to know so I know what needs to be fixed. Maybe I'm the problem and wherever I go I'm going to run into the same problems. Maybe I'm fine and just need to get away from the people (person) who makes me feel like shit. Or maybe it's some combination; I have issues and so does she. This last one is surely the case. But I want to find out the details, see it from the outside with an impartial eye, find out what's really going on.

***
If I could do anything, I'd fly into space
If I could go back in time, I'd go back and kill Leo Baekeland and Walter Hume Carothers, Inventors of plastic and nylon, repsectively.

***
Do I need to be in treatment of some kind? Sometimes I feel woefully self-insufficient. I have a hard time functioning and coping. But I'm afraid of losing control, of putting my life in someone else's hands. I don't trust people. I would hate to lose the writings and things I've collected my whole life. My books. I don't want anyone to take these things away from me.

***
I want to be in a situation where I am appreciated and cared about, valued for the things I am good at rather than chastised for the things I am not.

***
Why does anyone fight in a war?

***
When I got older and began to realize what the world is like, that is, what human beings are like...to say I was disapointed is a grand understatement. Why do people make porn? Kill other people? Why do they act so immature? Why is everything about money?

***
The thing is,
Everyone's got a personal story
Personal stories - personalities - are great
I love them
Fear of surviving this runs rampant
We are in our bunks talking about sneaking sweets
The most unusual looking people become our friends and our
Objects of desire in this crossroads of a place
I can't find a rake among the trash cans and old laundry
But I'm one of the crowd:
For once that doesn't disgust me.

***
He struggled greatly over the idea of being happy. He wanted to be happy, but needed justification for it, and that was his stumbling block. His stone.

***
1. I don't want to do things half-assed
2. Everything done in the real world is half-assed by definition.

Therein lies the root of my inaction.

***
I don't think people who are content feel compelled to look at things very deeply. That's the reason art comes from the down-and-out. The Norman Rockwells are comparatively few in the annals of art, and they're boring.

***
People who don't listen are the most selfish people of all. People who avoid conflict aren't being kind and keeping the peace, they are dodging issues which honestly need to be addressed and therefore contributing to misunderstanding and resentment. Avoidance is just as destructive as anger in the long term.

***
Lives are different with every mindset you have. You could be drunk. You could be sober and serious. You could be fresh off a fantasy novel or lovemaking, your head far away. These are concretely different things, and they have only indirect bearing on one another. Goals shift, understandings change. I am only in this for some sort of authenticity, the kind I always seek. Has that become a game? Somewhat, I suppose. But I don't want it to. I keep trying to refocus on the original heart. I don't want to live a life to be looked at later. I want immediacy and then finality. I think.

***
You don't have to understand everything. You don't have to take all that is out there at fit it into some kind of grand scheme, with everything slotted into a category and building toward a conclusion of some sort. Search for structure. Big Mind. Just relax, enjoy your time on this liquid earth, relax.

***
Every man wants his wife to grow a spine, then secretly fears she will.

***
The thing about being up in the clouds is you have to come down sometime. And it's a long way down.

***
Ugly Americans?? They're ALL ugly.

***
The world is all at odd angles
The lake like a black sheet thrown over the valley
Sighs take the night

***
Michelle Branch is a serious betty. Never actually heard her music though. I don't want to be disappointed.

***
Red, White, and Black II

I've had some problems... I have problems sometimes with my mind. I don't know what to believe. Everyone seems crazy.

Don't know what to think about things that happen and then unhappen, people saying I've done this and that, journal entries that make no sense, pictures of places I can't remember.

Sometimes I want to carry a bright red flag, white skin pale beneath the artifical light of the sun, dressed in solid black. These are the only symbols that mean something to me anymore. People come and go and stories change. Old favorites become new hatreds. Life is an oroborous in four dimensions.

I don't belong in any of them.

***
My greatest fear is the ultimate one: Being alone and immortal.

***
I want off that particular treadmill
And I don't want back on
I want the things I was afraid of as a child to be gone

***
The thing is, one or the other of us always feel compromised. The two outcomes of our basic disagreement always make one of us feel better and the other feel worse. The problem is, we have fundamentally different needs that cannot possibly be met by the same resolution.

***
I had a dream I met a mortician
Who was bigger than me in every way
Larger than life, one could even say
A meta-mortician to his dying day

***
What has this world come to when Debbie Gibson is now known as Deborah Gibson.

***
I hate onscreen displays. I always feel like I'm playing a game of Simon when I'm using one. If you don't press the right keys in exactly the right order to magically stumble on the setting you're trying to find, the whole thing explodes and it's back to the beginning again. Only retards and engineers think this way.

***
A quest for the world's darkest, saddest, most ethereal music. Meet me at 3 am under the oak.

***
You don't think I've been alone, been scared most of the time? You don't think I've been going out of my mind? What do you think I am, some kind of monster? Maybe I am a monster, a rational monster. Maybe I make too much sense.

***
I'm on the verge of losing my insanity.

***
Everybody's scared in one way or another.

***
America: A vast, vicious corporate theme-park for junk brains.
-Andrew Eldritch

***
Television is embarrassing.

***
This generation has been ruined by television, sensationalism, extremism, and base human nature. The masses have no reasoning abilities, no perspective, and no class. All life is not equally valuable in my opinion. For every articulate, moderate, mannered person alive there are 50 wastes of flesh and blood who would benefit society best by being tied to a large stone and cast into the sea.

***
Dreams can be frustrating. You're trying to run, or wake up, or be a man, and you can't. I just had a dream where I was trying to look up "malthusian" and kept getting different, nonsensical definitions.

***
Are you dreaming now?

***
I've been unhappy ever since I popped outta my mom's placebo.

***
You sit a few feet from me
You don't smile much or answer any of my questions
You have the bluest eyes I've ever seen

It needn't be definable, you say
I am off in mind-sights of cotton clouds and slow,
Measured deep breathing all along the curves of your body

As you lay next to me half sleeping
As I take another blue pill and two tan ones for
All the abhorrent conditons you deemed might afflict me

But now I've etched your name on the wrong memory
You were the one who discredited that lunacy
I think you may be as loony as I am, as I am

You still sit a few feet away, talking
For a second you play with your hair and I understand
You have the bluest eyes I've ever seen.

***
Higher

The speed of love
Instant in mind's eye
If you send love in all directions
Then love will be all around you
Space around you breathes and exhales
Doesn't matter that you've broken your own rules
How far from yourself can you go?
Outward into the playground of the stars
In, in, in to a soul
Infinite in scope
And swaying trees
Bird hangs motionless on an ocean breeze
Baby cries in the woods
Drums.
Pulse spreads from the heart
Like wildfire dancing
Stars are all aligned
The pattern of the leaves
The eaves
Hold faint echoes of yesterday
There is no should
But there is love
Love is
This is the Tao that has always been
This is God to me.