Leggo my ego

When I think about what I want and expect from life, it makes me seem really selfish. I want to be comfortable - to avoid things that are unpleasant. I want people to like me. I want something elusive called happiness that seems to be an amalgamation of passion, contentedness, and security. I want to make people who are nice to me happy. I don't want to be nice to people who are not nice to me. I want to eat, to be safe, to be kept within reasonable temperature limits. I don't want to have to work too hard for all this. I want to express myself, not merely exist. In a world of six billion people, I want my voice to be heard and to be taken seriously. When I think about it, it makes me seem really selfish.

The Sound

And wide are your delusions,

Deep red is the space behind your eyes.
Closed forever is the door to your room,
But inside there lives the sound.

You despise,
But I love...
You despise,
What I love...
You despise,
I love...

Mother, I was wrong.
I was wrong.
I am wrong.

(m. gira)

(picture is of unknown origin)

Almost midnight

How to make good on an evening. Never spend it alone. But whatever you do, don't share it with anyone else. To make good on an evening, retreat into yourself and then let it all go. But don't do that, absorb what others are all about instead. Sleep inside the mosquito nets thinking, with the three-quarter moon overhead. Try it sometime. In the morning you will feel interested and challenged, not hoping the sun will somehow travel faster, not hoping that life will leave you behind in its wake, not shaky. When we include other people in our dreams, out dreams turn out richer. No matter what we logically think.

Best. Lyrics. Evar.

"Echoes"
(waters)

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb toward the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can

And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
And no one speaks and no one tries
And no one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
Inviting and inciting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Comes streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky.

VoIP, brah!

Let me tell you, the telecoms are really ripping us normal folks off. But what I'm here to tell you today is THERE IS A WAY TO BEAT THEM AT THEIR OWN GAME. Oh shit, sorry about that, the caps-lock key got stuck. Anyways, you get the idea. Let's all band together to use the ample bandwidth of the Internet to provide geeks like ourselves with free, yes FREE phonecalls, anywhere in the world. We'll call it Voice over IP so it sounds sorta descriptive-yet-tech, but can also be shortened into an acronym, VoIP, that will make star wars and buffy fans will go nuts. VOOIIPP!

Of course, all this will take some money to run. I mean, the software switchers have to sit on servers, which must be upgraded and maintained continually. Techs will have to do that. Those techs are gonna need a layer of management above them to ensure they aren't just sitting around blowing smoke rings of the sticky icky. And then there's the top tier staff who have to have porsches, legal advisors, military advisors - wait, forget that last one - the people we'd have to contract with to give us a marketable "brand" and handle all our press contacts, customer support, and a myriad of other things.

So no, of course it's not gonna be free. We'll pass along some minimal cost-per-minute to the users so we can stay afloat and not actually LOSE money. That would suck for customers too, right? And it's not like you all - I mean we - have to have physical telephone sets anymore, so that's an even bigger savings! If you do have one, you can always ship it to those kids with huge stomachs in Africa, making them so happy and giving you a little more karma in the bank. Back to the phones, though; See, instead one of those clunky dedicated phones, you have a crappy sounding headset and a mic that makes any sniffle or throat clearing sound like the storm that that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald. You'll have to pay a bit for this starter kit too, and maybe even more if you want to actually hear words on the other end rather than the vague sound of bears chewing on onions.

Ok. Ok. We admit it. The cost saving aren't going to amount to much if you're a moron who stays in his mental box all day thinking his simple neolithic thoughts. But the hip crowd is gonna be all over this, because check this out: You can use it anywhere!!! You don't have to stay in a room with a phone jack. You're FREE baby!! (there's that word again). Yes, you'll have to find a hotspot to have service, but people are throwing those up all over the place, right? Although...I heard many are now charging small subscription fees of their own. Hey... Maybe we should see if we can get a piece of that pie as well. [editor: do not print last sentence]

So, to summarize.

Pros: It makes you look cool. It makes it possible to not take a cellphone with you on your business trips, since you've got that big hunking laptop you can talk with. Two, you're sticking it to The Man (who, to be fair, also owns us, but he doesn't OWN us, if you get my drift. We call the shots here, not those pricks in their boiler suits). And lastly, but possibly most importantly, it makes you look cool.

Cons: Our lawyer says we must disclose these. Customer service will vary wildly from bad to horrific, lines will drop off and cut out every time someone three streets down sends an email to your daughter, the equipment is all proprietry and will need uprgrading periodically to keep you in with the hip crowd and give you the biggest pipe on the block. Yes, those phones from the 40s still look clasy and work like a charm, but... um... well anyways like I was saying VoIP (*tingles*) is the wave of the future, and if were you, buddy, I'd grab my malibu pronto and dawn-patrol straight into the green room rather than waiting and having to baby ramp into someone else's curl like a barney.

"Voice over IP - I'm Lovin' It!"

Ăä

If a boy is crying wolf
Maybe it's because
There really is a wolf.

Hulme's finest

"Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me"
(morrissey)

Last night I dreamt
That somebody loved me;
No hope, no harm—
Just another false alarm.

Last night I felt
Real arms around me;
No hope, no harm—
Just another false alarm.

So tell me how long?
Before the Last one.
And tell me how long?
Before the Bright one.

This story is old—I KNOW
But it goes on.
This story is old—I KNOW
But it goes on.

Goes on....
Goes on........
Goes on............

Absence.

As you get better looking, take better care of yourself, find happiness and love, and begin to achieve true independence, the people in your life who purported to care about you become increasingly hostile. They feel less and less needed.

So now I wear black every day. Nothing but black. I've seen the godawful true face of human nature and there is nothing else for it but to reflect the absence of anything good that greets my eyes. When they send me back the way I came, cold and finally uncaring, it will seem somehow appropriate.

悲しみ

I cried all night
When I needed someone
No one was there
In my room of shadows
Barely able to stand,
Barely able to breathe

And you lied
Said you would call me
I waited all night
I had to remind myself
Even then it was like pulling teeth
Your grief got in the way of mine

When all I've ever been was kind.

None needed

I've lived my life in the valleys
I've lived my life in the hills
I've lived my life on alcohol
I've lived my life on pills

Banff

Put the pieces back together. One octogon (how strange) there,
Arrange this bullet shape an tiny saucer brown inside polyethelene
Dark so the sun cannot feel guilty for neutering them.
Circumstance and the fight inside my stomach between ancient rivals
Convinces me the effort may not justify the end result.
I take two brown and suit up, air is free to flow and handsigns flash
The dark water holds the key to all fears of our original home.

Fear of Christians

I think Christians are a confused bunch. Shouldn't I have the fear of THE DEVIL in me, not the fear of God? What's that about? I thought I was supposed to love the dude upstairs. Apparently 'love' in this context means slavish worship and mindless obedience.

OH WAIT, he's the one who rains destruction upon entire towns because some of its citizens are sinners, and sets plagues upon the peasantry and infant population of Egypt because of the Pharoah's misdeeds. Almost forgot those are accepted parts of the literal bible. Ok, nevermind about the loving part.

Now that I think about it, The Devil doesn't set about demanding anything of the human race. Sure, he's there to gobble up the sinners, but that's their bad. And yes he tempts them, but you could argue he's testing their faith (as God has been known to do, think Abraham and Isaac), or probing for weaknesses already there. At any rate he is not pitting his authority directly against mankind's, roaring like some preternatural Steve Ballmer at the top of his lungs how humanity MUST obey him or be destroyed. He's always pretty low key about the whole thing, and it's the mortal who succumbs of their own free will (hence it being a sin) rather than capitulating to irresistible might.

Can anyone not read this short piece, or better yet the Holy Bible itself, and not draw some pretty strong parallels between the bullying, elitist, arrogant, privileged MEN on the one side of the chalk line (and the progeny carrying on their ways into present times), and the diverse, individualistic, skeptical, colorful party animals filling the ranks that oppose them? I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which side represents whom, and why this is one of the most damning blows to organized Western monotheology of all. And also black holes.

Flowy motions

Why are all these animals on this earth and all these people who are posing probing questions like these and the plants and the trees and all the living systems at all size scales from cells to organisms to superorganisms and beyond and the worlds revolving around the sun operating according to a set of laws that supposedly no one devised makes me wonder how it is they're even there at all and if someone did create it all then it only pushes back the problem without solving it because then what created the creator if you say nothing then you might as well have said that about the universe in the first place and skipped the need for a god at all but what about the idea that we are in a sense all god or in other words that everything is part of a whole does this really have any meaning to it or does it just sound nice what does it mean for something to be individual anyway isn't it just as valid to look at the entire volume of space as being a continuum a vast three dimensional array of on-bits and null-bits that creates interesting patterns but gives none of those patterns the right to call themselves individual after all there are fuzzy boundaries between self and other and between life and nonlife and we don't even know how to define what being alive means in any fundamental sense anyway it's all just theoretical postulating and posturing and such searches for truth from within the system seems to me akin to juggling on a moving train or trying to write down everything you've ever done including what you're writing right now in other words it's impossible because some tiny piece of you must remain included within the definition and it all becomes circular and regressing to infinity or strange looped or self referential like this sentence is false so i think we can presume that science will never know all the answers nor be able to define everything including itself completely and if this is the case then of what use is science to philosophy i maintain that it is of no use and that in fact philosophy is of no use because either there is nothing to be understood or else if there is then we can never understand it either way we lose in expending the effort and benefit from refraining from such speculation if you are the kind of person or robot who cannot function without meaning then you'd might as well freeze up now on the other hand if you can somehow put that out of your mind and you are content to operate on the surface of things for apparently no end except what occurs from moment to moment on a continual basis a kind of one second philosophy then you can just go ahead and keep your head down and keep plowing along you're not missing anything and those around us who never think this way who do not need to know why who are content to thrust their legs into cold streams scream from the top of a mountain or bake bread in the dead of winter these people are the kings and queens of the human race and i would donate half my brain and one of each set of redundant organs to science if i could but join them.

Lost in NJ

So you wonder
And you wander
And people seem to scatter
One way or the other
Some seem cocky
Must know what they are doing
But what they are doing is lying
Some seem scared
Afraid to commit to one thing
Or another
You feel no pity for them
You still miss your father
And the world's hard
Crazies look at you every day
You know too much of what
Lives in their eyes
I know too much of what
Lies within their minds
Mindlessly turning around
I am haunted by this place too
But I've made my peace
Words won't always do it
I just push my way through
I've been stumbling around
I've been lost for seven days
Trying to find what matters most
If you're not
One in a million these days
You don't matter
You don't belong
But one in a million are wrong
If I'm not
The master of every situation
I may have been there
Thought what you are thinking now
I decided one way or another
And I learned
Something about the human race
And I earned my stripes
Without falling on my face
I'm lost but I keep getting up
Reaching for the impossible
I know I can never achieve it
I also know I have to try
This world isn't kind
People are not generally good-natured
They are wild animals
And the setting in which we live out our lives
Is savage and horrible
But we can find the borders
Map every extreme
Reach down and take a handful of dirt
Feel the grass beneath our fingertips
And resolve to go on despite the absurdity
Yes, it is sad
But things that are sad
Are beautiful, too
I'm not going anywhere without you.

Les yeux sans visage

In this orange van, not remotely the danger silent movies would have you believe. Humboldt told me for one my days were numbered, dear God, and I don't know how I ever felt so happy. Though her colorless legs... Her unfertile eggs. In a sense, my own time distortion, I had tragic words but I won't say with whom. I was far too young having only a preponderance of knowledge and some useless extrapolations slash disconnects between events and place, not to mention the necessity I lie extradimensionally earnest, hair askew or flattened, I spy 'freeze' first tenth-second against the voluminous fragmentary documentation of mundane telltale deeds existing essentially dead in a state of primeval chaos. I have been a pack rat when the choice was mine, proud that I could swell and die, but conditions imposed by the rough sea world outside took hold and left gaps in these works and compromised the truths of others. It may be art, buy battle-mark c, outranks all in lander aggressions, a true loss is the one clear the pity. All will be clear when you see what I've we no you them I got. *static*

I would like to get a comprehensive academic-level life-story carved into semi-soft stone before entertaining any inevitable reductions that surely make the present more compelling reading to the layman. I'm afraid such gargantuan efforts outstrip my capacities in a very gross sense, as well as compromising the work's tantalizing jerks fantasizing berserking, but remarkable residue shaped chiefly in hyperinflated vats seems impossibly lossily contemporary. It would take Raymonde, and his proletariat colleague assistant, cooked to coney-potato cast iron dreary denizens vibe. Black, white, indigenous freaks who want the lower effort grinds an aside seeketh escorts of the "way out" belly dancing and leave-it-to-your imagination. Swank superlative Silicon Valley soared through two timeouts, challenged by Raymonde and a vassal of camrades.

Is it too much to ask to keep it beautiful?

You shouldn't try to control your life too much
It's really not possible anyway
Just buckle yourself in and be authentic to your feelings
Gently guide yourself along, nudging one way or the other
To avoid obstacles, restrain damaging words,
Or seize golden opportunities
But the vast massive weight of living
Cannot be substantially altered; It's written
In your brain and inside your genes before you are born
It's written in the stars or on the subway walls
Or in ancient books or inside the leaves of plants
No use trying to swim upstream
Just enjoy the life you do have and don't
Ache for someone else's.

Don't break my heart

THE NIGHT

(Mark Sandman)

You're the night, Lilah
a little girl lost in the woods
you're a folktale
the unexplainable.
you're a bedtime story
the one that keeps the curtains closed
and I hope you're waiting for me
'cause I can't make it on my own.

It's too dark to see the landmarks
and I don't want your good luck charms
I hope you're waiting for me
across your carpet of stars.
you're the night, Lilah
you're everything that we can't see
Lilah-
you're the possibility.

Unknown the unlit world of old
you're the sounds I've never heard before
off the map where the wild things grow
another world outside my door
here I stand I'm all alone
driving down a pitch black road
Lilah you're my only home
and I can't make it on my own.

3am

It's a musical life
Painters feel blind, words die
Photographs wait silent

But I can course alive
Deep in the middle of the night
I can shine

Until that dark star rises
Covers me with her maddening light
Until time

Slows to nothing
And I feel that pull upon strings
Bowtying closed my mind.

Wu wei

The closest thing I've ever found to God is the Tao. Taoism isn't a religion, although it will be seen as one by many people. If it is a religion it is a holistic religion of Nature, without deities. It is a way of viewing existence itself as the divine force, a repudiation of the dualism of Western thought. When you spend a day fishing, listening to water lap against the shore and sea-birds hanging on an air current, this is the Tao. When you lay atop the peak staring at the blue and white sky, this is the Tao. When lysergic suggestion frees your brain to perceive the fractally geometric essence underpinning all complexity, this too is the Tao. Time does not seem to flow from past to future as physics would have it. When you really know a thing, it feels permanent and now. Past, present, and future come together in a single spell which is all there is. You can think of time as flowing in a circle or you can just abandon the idea altogether and let the cycles of the seasons and the struggle of life be what they are without description.

If Buddhism is a prescription for personal tranquility, a way out for the mind, then observence of and respect for the Tao is the prescription for the soul. It provides an abstract existential justification where Buddhism leaves a profoundly empty hole. If Buddhism's foundations lead as easily to nihilism as to humanism, the Tao provides a positive focus around which to organize one's life. There isn't meaning per se, but there are the facts of existence, motion, and change. A de facto reality that is right simply because it is there, and it works. Really the concept is no more than an elaboration of the Buddhist's universal unity and transference of the importance from the cosmic to the mundane. That is, it removes the sense of belonging from the insular world of the meditating mind and places it squarely in nature, in the relationship between stone and water, between man and beast.

I believe in the Tao. Whatever you call it, the organizing principles are there to be seen and felt. I don't believe in Taoism, insofar as it's a codified doctrine made by human beings which threatens to replace the personal immediacy of experiencing the Tao first hand with a filter of arbitrary rules to be followed. I find Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, an extremely useful tool for the upkeep of the mind; for stripping away layer by layer the old paint of the past; for staying away from objectification and staying focused on the present moment, the authentic experience of the senses. Likewise, I find Taoism useful when it comes to thinking in the long-term, something which Buddhism discourages but which most of us rather naturally do anyway. The Tao is always there, flowing when water flows, blowing when the wind blows. Scientists call it natural selection, emergence, chaos, structure. Mathematicians call it mathematics. Mystics call it God. I don't call it anything at all, I just listen, and remain silent.

Bluenight

The stars are impossibly bright
Through dark curtains blazing
Stitched patterns burning
Otherworldly light
A hunter has lost his secret
A heron tilts her long,
Lithe neck to the ground
Misfortuned
A woman calls his name in earnest
There is no reply
Her face is mirrored by water
That murmurs like laughter
Under a clear midwinter sky
I lie dreaming of beautiful things
Bygone days
Tales of beginning and end.

Mettle

I get so tired living on the edge of doubt, pessimism, self-loathing. It's one thing to sit back and sneer at the world. It's not nice, but for the person doing it there is some measure of comfort. A psychologist would tell him he's compensating for an insecurity. But who cares, most of us aren't psychologists. On the other hand, it's much different when the one you're sneering at is you. No shrink needed for this one; You feel the thorns of that cruelty every day dig into your flesh, depriving you of peace. Making sure everything you do ends in failure.

Meanwhile, water still trickles over the granite bones of the mountain, building to a white cascade. Trees still curl their toes in their favorite soil. Water vapor still rises from the lake. Ducks still rear their young, returning to this spot every spring. Clouds still pile snow over the dead bodies, and flowers replace them. The hungry solitary wolf still roams the peaks beneath the moon, trying to find his way, and all about him the crisp morning air is full of noisy silence.

Now

The heart has reasons
Which reason knows nothing of;

I'm a very weird mix of wise and childlike
People who understand me are the ones I want to be with
I don't have time for the rest,
Though I wish them well in their own journeys;

I'm not interested how many times you've been around the sun
I'm interested in how your mind reacts to situations
And how your heart responds;

I'm not interested in playing games. Playfulness is one thing.
But to pull when I pull then push when I push
At opposite ends of the same rope will never accomplish anything;

We were born at different times in different lands
There's no way we could come from the same world
Quite similar worlds? Yes;

I don't smile often
But when I do-
When I do,
It's usually for you.

Five dreams

I had five dreams last night. My journal records each very briefly. From each I awoke still tired, but hesitant to let myself fall back into sleep, though each time I eventually did.

The first dream I had was about the ocean. I had learnt to breathe water, somehow, and was thrusting about through coral reefs and into sinkholes trailing away to the very deeps of the world. Inside were blue whales, frightening behemoths who could direct all life and swam about slowly in their role as sentinels of the planet. Occasionally they would fight one another, and the percussion waves of this disturbance shook the foundations of the sea. But sea became space...

The second dream I had was about fighter pilots who had taken their vehicles into space. I'd searched the internet to find a school who would put me into such a vehicle, and at last I was involved in the push into extra-earth habitats. But I soon discovered that such vehicles were unlikely to be inhabited solely by the pilot; If one engaged the autopilot and left the cockpit, it could be seen that a large vessel had been comandeered and not a fighter at all. It was a colony ship; present were women and children, gardens, databases of human knowledge. Examples of human artistic achievements. I wondered just how far back the holds of the ship extended...

The third dream I had was about Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union hunting for me, sniffing every source for clues as to my whereabouts. They corrupted my publisher. I followed an evasive route through space, simulataneously directing a human avatar on the ground below to circumvent the now-corrupt United States and traipse the border of Canada to possible salvation beyond. They controlled all the checkpoints and communications. There were hardships and setbacks; I spend a year inside a prison languishing while my real identity remained unknown. At last I reached my ship, upon earth. In space, I'd reached a safe dock...

The fourth dream I had was about finding myself enlisted in the military. I stressed vigorously my pacifist views, but was assured just as vigorously I had volunteered for service and was legally bound to cooperate. As training we were split into teams and one would then assault the other, using live rounds. The survivors were considered to have passed the assignment and moved on to the next challenge. From a pool of thousands of cadets the officers were hopefuly several hundred would survive and prove themselves worthy to uphold national values in times of war. Needless to say I was terrified, given the odds, that I would be a casualty. Especially since I refused to fire on another person, at least at first...

The firth dream I had found me back in space, a refugee from the suicidal training camps and part of mankind's project to reach the stars. My sister, somewhat bizarrely, had cooperated with the Chinese to engineer a system of transportation between the planets (islands) that took only minutes. We found ourselves riding a shuttle to Jupiter which made use of superheated carbon nanotubules to eliminate friction and thus allow unrestricted accleration. But the forces in pursuit of us soon once again closed the gap, and the game was up. The transports were shut down, and the few pods which managed to escape headed for Jupiter's murky atmosphere in desperation.

Finally it was revealed: Jupiter, like other giant worlds throughout the universe, were the blue whales in their true forms. They were not immortal or invincible, but they were stewards of life wherever it occured. Our whale decided it was time to move on, and space trembled as she cleared the region of despots and do-gooders to allow those of us inclined towards harmless exploration to clamber aboard her and set sail for the stars. Another realm awaited us, untouched.

The last aboard

The first aboard is the quick among us
Who claims his life as if it were a quiz
The last aboard is the hopeless savage

The last among us is the child of average
The seers still claim their right to know
Whilst all about us the future converges

And the first thing in us is fear of the unknown
The first aboard rejects this quickly
The middle-man awaits his turn

And waves the first man gone completely
And tides roll up upon understanding
With muse reborn, I am the last on board.