The Bold Red Rays of Dawn

4 days a week, 8 hours of those days, amounting to 32 hours a week, I serve a prison sentence in a windowless room in a drab concrete building in a gray-death cluster of sad concrete bunker buildings in Orange.

If you think of prison as a form of punishment, you may be inclined to deny my frustration and dismiss it as spoiled, privileged, middle class griping.

But I see imprisonment as a more broad state of being, as a sort of reality in which one is perpetually stuck in an enclosure that one does not condone, a place that offends every sensibility one has. This is a place that puts a very real constraint on a human being's natural inclinations.

A strange moral dilemma, to say the least, seeing as how I was raised to believe that you must work a job of convention to make a living in modern society. I'm being paid. Is that not enough? Should I not shut my mouth and do as I'm told?

Unfortunately, this code of ethics is wearing off with every new generation born into modern capitalism. We are overdosing on objects. On consumerism. You can't work an honest job when you no longer believe in the ends that you work towards.

What is my award for bowing my head and committing to hard work? A big house? A luxury SUV? A swimming pool? What are we working towards? Where is our moral justification for trudging on when we have our dirty fat hands violently groping the Middle East?

Our society needs to consume, consume, consume in order to sustain itself. We must devour oil in increasingly incomprehensible amounts to stay alive. How long can this go on? News headlines of bipartisan compromise and pragmatic governing mean nothing to me. We need radical change, but this country's sordid inertia is far too powerful.

Yes, as a Native American or Inuit-sounding speaker so eloquently says on Godspeed's first studio album: we are trapped in the belly of a terrible machine, and it is bleeding to death. What foresight! This fatal bleeding has been underway for some time now. How they must be holding their breath, waiting for the collapse.

Trapped. That is how I arrive at my prison complaint. Our cultural values and aspirations have become bankrupt, they have expired. It is time for something new.

But I stand conflicted! Today I came home to a package. A large package that was almost as tall as me, a package that my brother wrote, "Fuck Yes" in pen on the front to greet me as I stepped through the front door. It was touching. And when I opened the box and flicked open the catches on the hard case, one of the most beautiful human creations I have ever seen was revealed to me.

A cherry red Gibson SG was facing me, an undeniable work of compound art. Everything about the instrument was perfect: the machining, the shape, the colors, the finish, the electronics, the instrument's function! Every component was its own micro masterpiece, closely fit together to create a tool envisioned to create the most divine sounds.

And it screamed out its electric perfection like I knew it would. What an incredible instrument. And all because of a corporation. A benign corporation. And maybe that's key.

Do we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? I resent the modern corporate power hold to the point of enduring sustained physical pain, but there are some creations worth having, worth spending on.

How tragic that the most beautiful objects to behold in this society are the most expensive! The best craftsmanship, the most wonderful works of art, the most magnificent views to behold, all retaining the more value as they are desired by more men. And so the unfortunate, the poor, are left to fight for scraps. There must be a better way.

There is a better way. Hopefully the noble side of the species finds it.

Geological Movements

Would my cells sense their imminent destruction as I was falling off of a cliff?

It's Tru

I've been exposed to two volatile elements at the same time: two glasses of wine and truTV (that's really how they express it).

I sit there grabbing my head, lowering my eyes, as a program on truTV claims that nothing is funnier than pain, humiliation, and stupidity. It's called "It Only Hurts When I Laugh."

My head-spin changes direction with every syllable of the announcer's high, nasal voice, with every note of the clichéd background song, with every annoying superfluous sound effect, with every "haw haw" of canned laughter. All of it orchestrated to mock others' misfortunes. Oh, the contemptible oscillations!

The commercials in between offer no repose. Short messages of shoddy manufacturing: hodge-podges of diluted ideas, blurred and blunted to enter and dominate weak minds. All of these cries emanating from the mouths of hustlers, distorting information. How does anyone brave the perils of cable TV? Numb minds maybe. People learn to ignore the multitude of stimuli, a stubborn skill that I can't seem to learn.

This is American Television. This is what most people in the country tune into.

Ah but I've got to be careful with this buzz. My top-heavy mind sinks easily with every demoralization. Such cynicism! I try to remind myself that it is because I expect only the best, not because I have come to accept that popular culture is a gaping sinkhole and that's all there is to it.

Well, now it's time to use the restroom. Enough of this wining.

On A Trembling Sunday Night

I'm caught in others' whirlpools, sinking down with them.

My mind comes close to grasping the truth and then emotion pulls it away.

We are a species in transition, sandwiched between terror and logic; conflict and goodwill.

My head lurches but I realize the sooner I go to sleep the sooner I wake up to lies.

I want a medicine sleep, a stretch of blackness followed with remnants of vague dreams.

But I can't escape that vulgar rat race of a job it seems.

On Love

We need mirrors to bounce our beliefs off of...

...to make sure we are doing the right thing.

The Little Bang

The modern era saw a violent explosion after a convergence of jarring forces. We blew apart and found our selves strewn asunder. Floating in a void of existential terror, gazing at the twinkling lights of others in the distance, with only our own selves as company, we pined for connections, for mutual understanding. Now is coming the time for all of us to be sucked right back in to where we came from.

It's Just a Game, Man

I just got done with a frustrating night of gaming. I spent over two hours running, getting shot, running again, getting knifed, getting gunned down by helicopters, and being blown up by RPGs.

Is it because I suck? Probably. But the frame of reference for sucking has been shifted dramatically. I am of course talking about Call of Duty's highly refined multiplayer platform.

The more time I spend with Call of Duty, however, the more problems I begin to have with it. This isn't a new development really, just a conscious convergence into an unconscious repugnance.

There was of course a few nights when I was unfortunate enough to play it stoned and I immediately grasped what was wrong with the game, and for that matter, the culture behind the game. These things tend to happen when you're stoned. I don't know about you, but I have a profound intolerance to violence when I am in such a state. Even pretend violence. It just bothers me. It begins to reflect that horrific, meat-soaked image onto my own character and I begin to feel nauseous. Such is the nature of the psychedelic experience, however mild the state is. Reducible instances multiply into infinity and take on that eternal quality.

So what is wrong? As a culture we've become highly desensitized to violence. Games and movies become more and more graphic, realistic, and depraved. We should be getting used to this kind of thing by now. I myself seem to be sliding backwards. I've become squeamish.

There are sequences in the game when you actually slit someone's throat, or jam a knife into the throat of a sleeping Viet Kong. I've always been bothered by the image. To die choking on your own blood seems to be a horrible fate to me. The terror of asphyxiation and the violence of laceration is combined and you have to watch all of this and know that you won't make it.

You inflict this fate by your own hand in the game. This extends the image to a new, disturbing dimension involving your own agency. You are partially responsible for the deed.

In another instance of the game, you shove some glass into a man's mouth and then punch his jaw full of shards. You have to do this. It's not optional. The game begins with a prompt asking whether you want to skip the graphic violence. I of course said hell no. I wasn't quite aware of what was in store for me, and at the same time I really didn't want to miss any of the experience. Many people are going to feel this same sentiment. 8 year olds are going to play these passages of the game. I shudder to think.

These passages are growing more disturbing with every installment of the game. And they're only going to try to outdo what they did before. In the second Modern Warfare, you buzzsaw your way through a crowded airport with a light machine gun. Many people are reported to have actually refrained from shooting these people. I of course fired away (I thought it was required!), but it made me very, very uncomfortable. Later on you stab someone from behind and watch his eyes go dead. These subtleties capture a side of fictional murder that I never really wanted to experience.

No one stops to ask what's going on. Because this threshold of violence slowly expands, as a culture we are widely comfortable with this bloodlust creep. Like the Romans before us. Does the fact that it's fake absolve it? Or does it cast that same murky reflection that the gladiator games did for them?

I haven't even gotten to the multiplayer yet. There is a strange social environment that is being shaped and refined with every development of the concept. It is one of an odd blend of sadomasochistic savagery.

Bah but it's just multiplayer right? It's just a game? Maybe, but I'm not so sure.

It is a game of maniacal junkies running loose every which way. When you die, it is extremely frustrating and jarring. You begin to hate the people that take you down. An hour into gameplay an uncharacteristic flair of anger bursts from within me and sustains itself for the duration and even into the night.

The entire online community is becoming rapidly more and more skilled. Within seconds of spotting somebody, you are dead before you raise your gun. You repeat this pattern of punishment until you finally get a kill and boom, that rush of endorphins and you are back for more. I can't deny it is a wonderful feeling. And that is key.

They have all sort of points and incentives that further that elation. You feel like you are accomplishing something. So everyone does this over and over and gets better and better. Every time you sign into the game, the pace is faster, more frenetic, more violent.

Several hours later I sign off and I realize, what happened? What have I done for myself? And I hear about children that get home from school and don't stop playing this game until bedtime, and maybe even after. And they become so insane and their reflexes so fast.

I must admit that it is an excellent game. It is an excellent construction following its own logic, but taken to its logical conclusion, it is a system of savagery and addiction. Stuck in between the madness are surprisingly human moments when a player does something to make you laugh. But then it is over and the storm resumes full force.

Maybe I am being too sensitive. Maybe it is all harmless. Nevertheless, what I have experienced is unsettling.

An unpopular opinion, to be sure, seeing as how this game is one of the highest selling pieces of digital media of all time.

On Synchronicity

We were two antisocial beings, each a rare creature formed through bootstrapping our own fragilely emergent ideological conceptions by necessity.

We dropped out of the race early to find another way through the dark, alien forests and somehow met each other amidst the din. Somehow we were a match.

What were the chances? We formed not on societal rails, but off in our own wilderness. How could we even communicate? Was it chance?

Jung spoke of synchronicity: two seemingly isolated events that bared more than a curious resemblance to each other, suggesting that there was a deeper, larger, subterranean flow of pattern. That synchronious events could emerge on either side of the world was suggestive of a deeper, ordered force that was faithfully giving rise to these supposedly separate events.

Was this not an altered form of what many eastern religions were trying to convey? That there existed great, deep tidal movements, that it was our religious duty to perceive those movements and align ourselves with them?

What was I to do then? Well, so much for romance.

Whiplash USA

An entire civilization has given birth to something that stands in stark contrast to itself. It gazes on in fear and confusion; it attempts its old methods of power exercise on the new generation, old procedures that have long become obsolete in a changing world that has made the civilization irrelevant.

They are creatures who employ 2 dimensional thought in an emerging 3 dimensional discourse. They are dying and through their fear they are clutching their wayward convictions in insane desperation.

It is up to the youth to embark on the unsavory task of prying the old tyrants' cold dead fingers off of what was once theirs.

It is all slipping through their fingers and though they can tighten their grasp, it grows old and cold and weak. The question is: do we have the stomach to touch the dead? Will we have to touch at all? Or can we let it fade? Hard to say.

Free enterprise? Free markets? No men are free when all men are completely free. Power has a tendency to collect and crystallize and then you have an oligarchy all over again.

The bully makes friends with the other bullies and soon you have asymmetric power relations...all over again.

The rich get richer and as the system grows more top heavy we see social strife, infrastructure rot, insanity, the struggle of the damned to collect the table scraps, a macabre procession of warring men reduced to animals...fighting for illusory salvation in the name of civilization.

The past has past because it is past. And now is the first step to the next.

Can we save it? Or must we let it fall?

An Instance of Discomfort

I woke up this morning with a twisted, aching back, and the overwhelming feeling of being infiltrated by insects.

This wasn't an inexplicable feeling either. I went to bed last night under the impression that I was covered in ants. I wasn't actually covered, I think. I think it was just my arm and leg hairs being...jostled...as I moved under the cover. But I was still tripping out because of all the ants that have been around. Fuckin' ants man. They've been literally all over the place this season.

You leave out a tiny grain of obliterated shitgruel and all of a sudden the entire colony is swarming upon it. They must be really desperate. If you blow on them or anything they absolutely trip out. It must suck being an ant. I usually try to avoid killing ants. I blow them away, which must really mess with their poor little heads.

They travel in well-ordered lines. Everything is very linear and interconnected. One ant is always in front of the other. Then you blow one out into the far reaches of space and then what does he do? He wanders around in loops on a great alien plane of marble for eternity, as far as I'm concerned. It's too bad they have to be such a nuisance.

Raid is an absolute killer too. I've seen it sprayed on them. They instantly shrivel up at the epicenter, and then the rest in proximity start writhing on their backs and it's very hideous. I am pretty convinced they feel their own world of pain and sorrow in a relative way.

I still haven't solved my moral dilemma on killing, or where to draw the line between what truly lives in a conscious way. If I had my way I wouldn't kill anything, just to be sure. But the problem is that we exist as displacements in a world that is universally living. So there is always going to be a point at which we have to occupy the space we are meant to occupy, possibly denying that space to something else that seeks it.

That is a problem for another day. The whole point of this post is to provide an outlet for an absolutely miserable dream I had last night, vaguely connected to the ants on my body phenomenon. It has to be connected, because I went to sleep feeling that way.

In the dream, I was back in my room at my Dad's old house, but it wasn't my room really, it was the ruins of my room, where the room itself had become a sort of backyard terrace.

I was munching on a sandwich and I began inspecting it because I suspected that the jelly that was on it had turned to ketchup. Suddenly, I noticed a strange ribbed surface at the end of the sandwich, and realized that a huge cockroach was actually baked into the bread. The feet and antennae were hanging out of it and everything. I held the sandwich out in horror and my Dad yelled, "Aw that's disgusting!" Then there were baby cockroaches swarming my room, darting every which way, so I suspected the damned baked cockroach had laid eggs in a sort of bizarre Trojan horse maneuver.

That's why I woke up feeling invaded by insects. The bastards were everywhere, even deep in my psyche. All morning I had this unshakable feeling of dirtiness. Sandwiches are going to be a hell of a lot of fun eating now.

I mean, I understand dreams are a way of consolidating information and organizing everything into a digestible construct (or so we currently believe), but really come on. It doesn't have to come up with dreams like this. Really.

Fuckin' bugs man.

When Life Gives You Icebergs

Attempt a picnic on a sinking ship.

Fractals

Think about colds and viruses and disease. There are mini wars taking place all over our bodies. And within those conflicts are cell structures who's molecules are also engaged in their own mini wars, and those embedded mini wars can reach possibly into infinity. Perhaps eventually it forms a loop and we find ourselves back at the realm of macro wars among men.

There's always been a fight between good and evil. But good and evil aren't necessarily good man versus evil man. This is a notion whose logical form can be traced back to the beginning of time. There is a universal struggle for life but within that struggle lies differing methodologies as to how survival can actually be attained.

Some methodologies aim for all life to benefit in the struggle for survival. There are also other methodologies that pursue blind selfish ends and seek to live whatever the cost of surrounding life. This is the evil. I think...

This is how a serial killer can envision murder as an art form. The act of surviving by killing. Anti-life has been given meaning and purpose. Something to be attained.

This is how a corporation can endeavor to live, live, live by accumulating the life force out of everything it comes across until there is nothing left outside of itself.

The good is what a surviving entity that possesses power experiences. The evil is what the disenfranchised, the vacant, the declining towards death experience...

And so on into infinity.

That Habit

Buzz writing again. "So what?", or whatever they say in defense when they are questioned. There's a pretty big fly in the room right now. Flying around. He's smug over the fact that I refuse to hurt him.

I sat on the roof this evening with my brother and watched the sunset. I find sunsets more beautiful than fire. This is cliche, I know. Everyone loves sunsets. But I fancy that I love sunsets just a little more than everyone else (this is of course followed by a wink).

Sure fires are mesmerizing. They burn. They are passion, incredible physical violence, bursting with a thirst for life before they extinguish. They flicker, dance, and hiss.

But It is the complexity and subtlety of the sunset that I love...the spectrum of colors that show themselves. Sunsets tell a story before they depart quietly into the deep dark blue. They paint themselves on billowing clouds and express themselves in an unfolding symphony of color. They melt the horizon with their blazing oranges and then cool to their reds and purples. They leave that melancholy white afterglow that silhouettes the tremulant black shadows of treetops. There is a rise and fall. Every stage has its own elegance.

The climb to the roof was precarious, even more so after having a drink or two. When you are buzzed you do things for the sake of doing them. You say live first, think later. Death whispers but you ignore it. Obliteration seems forgiving at a time when it is hard to decide what to live for. This might be overly pessimistic though. There are many things to live for. It is hard to think objectively when you are buzzed. Your thoughts simply lurch forward as your body does when you move.

But this lurching motion can be beautiful in itself. My writing flows more free when it lurches, so does my guitar playing. Art begs the agent to simply give in to his or her impulses and lurch. Reach into the dark and simply be. I've jammed in the dark before and it has had favorable results. Think after the fact. Rationalize after things have happened. If you think while you move you forget how to move and you stumble. So I've found in experience.

I've wondered if we still aren't simply creatures of impulse with the added benefit of being able to rationalize our actions. But I think there's more to it than that.

I must confess I dislike my brother's girlfriend simply because she's dumb. This rends my heart because she's a human being and deserves a chance like everyone in this world. I do have a prejudice for the dumb. I can say I love sheep, but I can't seem to look past the dumb human. Maybe I hold a subconscious conviction that humans should know better than to be dumb, but this simply isn't the case, because many don't know better. They simply live. Forgive them for their dullness. I pride myself for my open mind but sometimes it quivers shut like some ocean floor shellfish. Forgive me for this.

Right, right, onward though.

America

I am a cell on the tip of the finger that's pulling the trigger of a gun.

An Oscillating Rollercoaster; Pole to Pole

During the day I look up multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, autism, the collapse of civilizations, biological decay, social network and innovation dispersement theory...all of the extremes in an attempt to put together the pieces.

I probably shouldn't be doing these things on company time. But I am irresistibly compelled to search, to rationalize these burning convictions...so much that I am much less productive sitting there trying to nod away these questions anyway.

I wonder how they do it. How they give themselves completely to a manufactured set of beliefs. How they smile day by day and watch the years go by. I want to ask one of them if they don't believe there is something else to life, if their smiles are simply rehearsed to be used as tools to tell the boss everything is OK, but I don't for fear of unnecessary scrutiny.

All of this is probably an over-dramatization. They are all probably happy with the houses they can eventually buy. Sure their lives are signed away to other businesses. They'll be working someone else's dreams until retirement, but they'll be happy with the possessions they've acquired. They are fortunate enough to still buy into the American Dream, even if it is fashionable to say on the surface that the American Dream no longer exists.

I feel as though I am a ghost in that place. I can tell they sense something strange in me, something distant. They avoid contact with me because I don't reciprocate theirs back. And that's alright. I don't expect it. There's always a subtle flash of sadness, when that old human instinct for companionship is frustrated. But I've learned to deal with it, because I don't have to lie to myself any longer that I even have the capacity.

I constantly have moments of clarity (or complete obscured vision) when I realize that life is strange. I stand in the kitchen looking out the window, listening to the air conditioning and I wonder, how did I get here?

Strangely, it feels as good as it always does to purge these thoughts by getting them down on paper, but when I read them over again, I wonder what it is that I am, which returns me to the beginning of the cycle in which I am hunched over the computer, leafing through electronic documents. Searching.

What Can Ya Do

I'm stuck in a series of endless loops trying to anticipate how other people will react. An endless attempt at prophet, trying to piece together a concept that was shattered years ago. The concept of social interaction. I'm trying to rebuild a model of the social world but it doesn't work like it used to.

It is hard to tell whether my own faculties are fragmented, or the conventional social order itself is fragmented. Or both.

Some thinkers talk about the atomization of society into individuals. How men are becoming unique islands only able to interact by improvised procedures. How the individual itself is fragmenting further. Are we learning to stick together by weaving technology between us? I suppose we do feel more comfortable with pixels in front of us.

I wonder if these trends really are symptoms of a collapsing civilization. Even if it were the worst case scenario, destruction can be as beautiful as creation, as much as we hate to admit it. After all, isn't destruction the birth of the tragedy?

How would a song like that go?

"The world is terrible and that's aaaaaaaalriiiiight." Something like that.

Scattered Notes and Observations on a Blurry-yet-Cheery Fourth of July

A depressing yet contemplative drive east out the 91. Through East Yorba Linda, Corona, and Riverside: watching the unremarkable surroundings pass by in silence. I know those neighborhoods that flow down from the top of those dry hills are beautiful. I know those people are successful. I know the average car model there is a BMW or Mercedes, and I know of those custom granite kitchens and designer-furnished backyards with huts and cool blue pools. I hope those people are happy in their own minds. But from here it looks...tedious. Unappealing. Unfulfilling. And they are just:

Cookie cutter houses stacked and crammed along green banks in the arid hills...

Artificial green banks slapped on top of tired, resigned, smoldering brown hills.

But I turn away, my attention caught by Neil Young's guitar. As he played, I was thinking:

All of my thoughts and feelings are riding a single white strand of molten metal.

And as he sang, I was thinking:

I have to believe the wrapping of my words in soaring melodies will cut through to you.

And that's what I want. I want to make those words and those snapping electric lashes that sing like some sort of silver, wounded, splashing mass of abstraction.

It hurts me that so many of us want a house like the ones spilling over those sorry, dull hills to be the crowning achievement of our strange, confusing, toiling lives.

Stone the man that feels imprisoned in what is supposed to be a paradise, for he is an ungrateful wretch.

Ah but that's the ugly side of the double sword that is this strange bipolar journey...through peaks and valleys and all that.

Ugly thoughts get all twisted up with pretty ones to form a truly bizarre species of sculpture. It's all in the process I guess. I just hope I get to make it to the day when I can see the product.

Anyways. You pass through Corona and Riverside: the gray-brown sprawl of workers' barracks that they call suburbs, and then you pass through wretched San Bernardino and climb up into the mountains and the air grows cleaner and the sky is clear and blue. You look back and regret the smog soup behind you as it laps at the base of the mountain. Then as you climb further up into the green pines and blue skies you forget.

There are plenty of times I am grateful to be an American child, I'll give you that. Or if that is too chauvinistic, a child fortunate enough to exist among the smaller group of world inhabitants that are above the poverty line.

We sat out on a nice porch and ate good food and I drank champagne and whiskey. We watched hummingbirds and blue jays feed and a B17 thunder over the tops of the trees. I sat on top of the labor of generations and was grateful for that as we sat and talked.

Stand on a porch overlooking a mountain town and you can hear everything. Sound travels well in the mountain air and the topography of the town allows all the noise from the bustling village center down on the lake to make its way right up the mountain.

You can hear people laughing and talking, children yelling, dogs barking, birds chirping, and boats roaring up and down the lake for miles. You could sit in the thick of the sound and be immersed in a sonic picture of the bustling activity of the region on this holiday.

As the sun left and the surroundings darkened, the experience blurred along with my progressing intoxication. We smoked and walked the mountain roads in the dark, listening to all of the activity up and down the mountain. Orange lights glowed above and below us. People celebrated in their houses encased in the inky-black dark of mountain night.

We stopped at an overlook and beyond the black outlines of trees we could see the shimmering sprawl of Arrowhead lake. Miles below boats were scattered all over the lake. And we watched the fireworks as they shot out of a barge that sat in the middle of the glittering cluster of lights:

Expansive neon dandelions suspended over a flickering white exhaust cloud colony sparkle in the dark plum blue sky.

Below, the quivering quicksilver lake shimmers in electric flashes, mirroring the spectrum of colors the fireworks put out.

Thousands of sparkling spores rained out from explosions that were mirrored on the waters below. Thunder claps from the explosions slapped their way up and past us to continue up the mountain. You could hear the sounds pass in waves of a rich geometrical structure.

And to think that a species invented neon color explosions for the wonder of it alone. Festivity is fascinating. What a sight it would be for a non-human to come across this globe full of micro war zones taking place from coast to coast: where expanding globes of colorful fire spores appear and fall over glittering towns.

There are some incredible idiosyncrasies to this human race.

Yeah. I understand I have the habit of writing mainly when I'm down. A lot of these posts do take on a negative quality. But half of my life is spent in awe and wonder before human phenomenology. When I'm not struggling to understand what it means to be human, I am sitting back and enjoying it. This was one of these times.

Since The LAst Drunk Post

I'm watching shadow oscillations on the popcorn ceiling.

It's always the simple things. But the simple things are comprised of the most general concepts that extend to universal truths.

Whatever that means, as they say when they utter something of truth but strange to the ear. It is a defense mechanism. Plead a sort of insanity when under the viewing lens.

We are Generation Y. Shitty name for a generation. Dooming an entire generation to the obscurity of a single letter is bound to cause tremors. Especially among me.

If you're having trouble following this train of thought, blame it on the alcohol. That's what I do, what I am doing. The air conditioner just turned on and off for no reason.

We are a generation of isolated individuals. We all want to do things ourselves. We all want to follow our own dreams, as opposed to obliterating our selves for the the good of the masses.

I'm not entirely sure if our world view is based on the ebb and flow of natural, global events, or simply the progression of the American consciousness. I guess it will take time to arrive at an answer.

I have some plastic in my eyes that causes me to see. That's pretty remarkable. I'm also slightly constipated. That's not that remarkable.

There's a ringing in my ears that is not imagined. It was caused by loud instruments. At least I'm not imagining it this time.

I write for an actual company now. They ask me for advice regarding the written word, and I give them advice to the best of my ability. But I really don't know if I in fact know what it is I'm doing. I've always written completely in a stream-of-conscious mode of thought, completely in the moment. To write for a certain interest, you have to write in accordance with a certain structure, with a procedure. I'm trying to learn how to do this but it is difficult. Right, right, right.

This is probably the alcohol talking as well. It is always "probably" with alcohol. Alcohol increases entropy. It adds a sort of random element to thought. During certain moments of the night I am completely lucid and brilliant, and then in others I am tumbling head over heels and somewhat retarded. I say, "Hey you know I have this great idea, it pertains to jumping on the dog and pulling her ears back."

They say, "What? When you say you have this great idea, it makes me think you're on to something, and then all of a sudden you suggest something that isn't a good suggestion at all."

And I lower my eyes and mumble, "Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well..."

Here we have a conundrum.

To Hell With This...And That

They say the world might end in a little over two years. There's a lot of talk about the Mayan Calendar ending and speculation about aligning planets and natural disasters. Then we have the seemingly increasing amount of absurdity in the world...in what people say and do and think, or the absurdity of the absence of thought. We have this rampaging greed machine that appears to be out of control: a monstrous business entity that's creating stupidity and sucking it right back up for nourishment. We have all this talk that we are now a parasitic race, we are the most abundant mammal and are far past the planet's sustainability threshold. And etc.

Everything does seem to be deliberating and accelerating towards an apocalyptic climax, that's for sure. Perhaps the human race has already reached its height of progressive, intellectual splendor and now it is finally collapsing into itself and regressing to its primitive roots before being devoured by the planet's defense mechanisms. Brings to mind a dying star, whether by an accurate analogy or just a misplaced connection of remote ideas. I don't know.

But then we were given the concept (through repeated exercise and combination of prior concepts) of a body of thought. Perhaps all this hysteria is pessimism in the face of a particularly harsh low-point in history, thus giving birth to a new doomsday vision painted with the help of our current trusted belief systems and academic procedures.

Is this period of time not vaguely comparable to that of the 60's? Everyone thought the world was going to end in a nuclear fireball and many probably believed it, but it hasn't yet. They gritted their teeth in anticipation, sitting wild with hysteria under the extreme pressure of the era's turmoil. That age saw extreme culminations of various socio-political forces and now a new age is experiencing new iterations of the same old impulses.

I don't know what to think, I only know to think. This way of going about things leads me through a series of panics and reassurances: a violent and draining emotional roller coaster, no doubt. I change the angle of the looking glass and switch out the colors of the lens and over the course of seconds become frightened and then tranquil, sometimes the two occurring in such rapid succession that I feel they are simultaneous. I get that old feeling of being torn asunder. In periods of lucidity I can sit and write and articulate the journey in words, or sit and play the guitar and articulate the journey in sounds. The articulations become cathartic and then it is over and I am left with a calm, a temporary clear head and still nerves. Then it is right back to the input-grind and the articulation and the cycle repeats.

I often wonder how I can stay afloat this way in a world that demands the conventional method.

It is all a cesspool of madness.

Up and Atom

Haven't written in a while, again. I keep thinking that I'm losing touch with the ability and then I try it out again and it's not so bad. But all this stop and go...it's bad cardio. Like trying to run in a spurt and stop and rest and then run in another spurt and supposedly this is not good.

I got done riding the Zoloft wave a month ago. It's more like the Zoloft dumb and numb wave, not exhilarating but not dangerous either. Like lying on a float in a wave pool with a blindfold on. I did it to avoid going mad, but then when I got too close to the opposite end of the spectrum, that is, going dumb, I was forced to stop. Now I'm finding my way back to how I want to feel, but I've slightly changed, so I have more to work with now.

All I have to worry about now is the dull ache on the left side of my abdomen. I've been downing these old antibiotics and drinking cranberry juice and doing whatever else I can think of to alleviate this problem. I try to keep the worries distant when I wake up nauseous and wonder if my liver is doing what it is supposed to. Liver, bladder, kidneys, who knows what the hell it is. The absence of health insurance takes its toll on the psyche. Having no control over your health is a scary feeling and is probably useful in securing an overall feeling of personal impotence. I am beginning to see glimpses of what it really is to be poor.

I'm a little unsatisfied with house-sitting. I'm staying in someone else's house and I still haven't found steady work and I begin to wonder if the leech feels guilt as it sucks on its host. All that will end soon, I imagine. Nothing to get too worked up about.

I haven't truly loved throughout the course of my life. That is, romantically. I have been in love with...well really just two people. The first interest was a bit misplaced, and the second was with someone whom I have never met. But the second still lingers in my head, I have to admit, even after the several years that have passed. No one thus far has been able to replicate this. A louder, denser, more forceful sound can resonate for a long time, especially if the surfaces around it are of a nature to sustain this. So goes the imprint of her that was left behind to resound in my head. After a while I forget and am perfectly content and then suddenly I have a vivid dream and the echoes of her memory make me hurt in the chest all morning. This morning was like this. And so I get up and write again, then watch the stirred dust dance in the sun rays.

Despite all of these bitter and semi-bitter, or bitter-sweet (whatever you may prefer) reflections, I'd have to say that for the most part I feel content.

I feel content because I have music, or more accurately, I have the means to make it with other people. It has brought my brother and I together, and two other unlikely people whom I have just met as well. It is the process of production, production as a family, producing something that we actually believe in. It is a simpler, more fundamental means of communication. Why is music universal? Because the meaning conveyed in music is more fundamental than words themselves. Notes and groups of notes. Melodies and harmonies. All arguments and events and states of affairs are rising in the sonic soup and sometimes I can feel my face get all twisted up as I'm playing a passage.

It is harder to lie. It is harder to cover up the truth, as ugly as it can sometimes be to the mind's eye. Your fingers do the talking and after that it is all up in the air, pretty literally.

It's like telling the bitter truth to someone you love.

Well, It's Kinda True I Guess

A really good guitar improvisation feels a bit like having your heart torn out and being sucked off. Simultaneously.

Something Sarcastic For A Cock-Blocker To Say

"You can't have your poon and eat it too."

Weird Letter Closers

1. Warmly, Dan P
2. Bonerrific Regards, Dan P
3. The key to expressive guitar improvisation is not necessarily in the phrasing or the licks. One could lick away with the most wonderful phrasing and still be missing a piece to the puss. No, the key is consistent and cohesive progression from one note to the next...a sort of finger athleticism if you will. It is as if the guitarist is swinging from tree to tree, from note to note, enjoying himself in the process, Dan P
   
4. Finger-licking good, Dan P
   
5. Your hardest fan, Dan P
   
6. Wackadoo, Dan P