no more here. back to the old xanger: www.xanga.com/sklddy

The feminists have it wrong all the time and everyone knows it because they're so ugly--not them necessarily, but the entire ethos, something so unappealing about it all, and there is a certain genius in aesthetics (or some say genius is aesthetics, the beautiful defines the good, though i think that's highly suspect). Ok--here's one place where they (the feminists) got it wrong: god IS essentially male, because his love is not unconditional but whollly conditional on how well one adapts--adapts to rules he has created, how well you play a game whose rules he has set, how well you are his child. I mean this in the basic survival sense. But that is the merely adaptive. Is it me or is the cerebral cortex the prodigal son, the only one out there--born and raised to be adaptive and yet, and yet can be, and is so often, turned towards say, destruction, turned against ones maker and all those laws. Set a forest fire not for timber but for fun. Everyone knows there's much that's appealing about destruction but nobody seems to know why. Some folks swear by it.
That last sentence was false, a contrived afterthought, but i wonder if you can even notice. How much can be gotten away with. This kind of pettiness, this stealing--maybe there's nobility in that too. Intellectual arbitrage, a balancing of scales when no one is looking. A city kid over the frozen river late at night, automatically almost frantically shuffles toward the light at the middle of the bridge; she recognizes this, is disgusted, and sticks with the dark river all around, tries to climb above her fear, that most basic fear.
I can even almost put a date on it: I was twenty and in the big attic there was a big window which on that day looked out into a black windy rainy night and blahblahblah was talking about his internship at cocksuckermotherfucker investment bank and I snapped and said i'm never getting a job, which may or may not have been a lie, but that's pretty much the point....2 roads diverge at rock bottom, where all assumptions have finally been so assiduously un-assumed. one road is a scrambling (to liiive godamn it) and another is a relaxing and floating (because knowledge of the_best_life comes from beyond), but oh no not if what's beyond has in fact looong forsaken you with all your gray matter. all of this is metaphor, of course...because i'm an atheist.

THE CHRONIC CONDITION:

Saturday, June 05, 2004

mm. Everything: getting into Twain, into Stuy, Dart, all those SAT's, my fucking IQ--all the things that place me at the tippity top of the population, the things the scream that, shmuck, if you'd only focus your energies you'd be a smashing success --have been falling on my deaf ears for a long time, because...ohhh, but what's success. All my life I've been motivated by the fear of mediocrity. But yet, at this point everything I'm supposed to be aiming at seems mediocre--what? top grad schools, high GPA. I've always hated school and why am I wrong for that? Picasso spent the time he did go to school staring at the clock (sounds familiar), Einstien took every opportunity to skip class, Fitzgerald all but flunked out of Princeton, Bill gates flunked out fo Harvard, Thelonious Monk flunked out of Stuyvesant. I could go on for ages. Everything I value and respect at this point has nothing to do with the big four-oh, or Harvard law. But that's exactly what I have to aim for if I'm as talentless as I might be. Awww, I'm tearing myself apart. Back to studying....calm, syncronized movements.

- "You're too distracted"
- "No, not distracted, abstracted"
________

HAHAHA. I could topple over laughing. To finally live with purpose because the usual things are no longer demanded of me. To slip away from under the glare of so many anemic entrenched disapproving--clueless--faces to a real differentiation and ripening in the wilderness outside of all things formerly known. My highest short term ambition is to find work on a boat, and complete a manuscript. Ok, that's all.

Philosophy is to music as fiction is to visual art, roughly, maybe. I am naturally more inclined to the former, I think. Extreme abstraction versus things more fleshed out, closer to sensual reality, and possibly more false. Of course I could be completely wrong.

Extreme abstraction:

I’ve known it all along, from the very first bit of consciousness. That they sit so close to the communal fire that they have long immolated themselves in it. And that there is nobility in being more restless and agitated than average.

Really while I’m in the pile I only really care about dominance, about climbing above the person next to me—an undignified state of affairs. Yet nothing else motivates me in such claustrophobic circumstances, with such miniscule horizons…
The assumption might be that climbing to the top of the heap may provide a new vantage point for looking out, but that does not feel right at all. Real innovation—innovation being the only thing that matters—requires, at least for a certain sort, more than anything, ones own hands to the earth, with no middlemen whatsoever. Of course the danger is spending an entire lifetime re-inventing the wheel and the ridicule that goes along with such an occupation, but at least it’d be like nothing else under the sun, a fact that does give value to such failure.

The real struggle is between curiosity and integrity—horizontal drift versus digging deep, as digging deep requires fixed points, assumptions, immovable and load bearing, the aesthetic versus the ascetic.

This last bit: it’s because of the shear strength required to fix one’s own points. N. talks about viciousness of ancients (beheading, quartering yadda yadda)—that it was all for the sake of memory, a conditioning for what is adaptive and thus good, a necessary layer of blood laid down, as the very foundation of civilization. But there are things far higher than civilization. To be more than merely adaptive, and furthermore not be stuck in any way-stations, to forever theorize, wander, and dabble but to really live by one’s own laws, new laws—may require a new negation of the flesh, almost as vicious…
_________________

So:
[no red meat
No refined sugar
No orgasms
--req for a dream]

Something along those lines. Sorry fellers. At least later.
___________________

also, hmmmm:
"Sartre states that many relationships are created by people's attraction not to another person but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves by how they look at them. This is a state of emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with "the look" of the other. "The look" of the other found the person's own being. The consequence is conflict. In order to keep the persons own being the person must control the other but must control the freedom of the other "as freedom". These relationships are a profound manifestation of "Bad faith" as the for-itself is replaced with the others freedom. That is to say that the purpose of the participants is not to exist but to keep the other participant looking at them. This system is often mistakenly called love but is in fact nothing more than emotional alienation and a denial of freedom through conflict with the other. Sartre believes that it is often created as a means of making the unbearable anguish of a persons' relationship to their "Facticity" (all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited, such as birthplace and time) bearable. At its extreme the alienation can become so intense that due to the guilt of being so radically enslaved by "the look" and ergo radically missing their own freedoms the participants can enter into masochistic and sadistic attitudes. This happens when even the participants cause pain to each other to try to prove their control over the other's look they cannot leave because they believe themselves so enslaved to the look that experiencing their own subjectivity would be equally unbearable."

..real integrity is standing on two feet in the face on innumerable seductions here and there: sensual pleasure the most innocuous, the worst being the home and hearth that's both in back and in front (because it can feel so healthy!)

"In 1951...MIT was not exactly an intellectual backwater, but it was nothing like what it is today...it also had a less exclusionary tradition than Harvard or even Princeton. By the 1950's, perhaps 40 percent of the mathematics faculty and students at MIT were Jewish. Bright youngsters from New York City public schools, effectively barred even then from attending Princeton as undergraduates, went there. Princeton was 'out of the question for a Jew,' recalls Joseph Kohn, who enrolled as a freshman at MIT in 1950. 'At Brooklyn Tech the greatest thing in the world was sending a student to MIT.'"

HAHA. That was only 50 years ago. So, the point isn't to shed identity and align yourself with the Hegemon. It's to topple that beast over, put yourself on top--and popular values re-align soon after. Like in the Believer: "Maybe we're all Jews now". And put the Asians there too, of course. At Dart I forgot what it felt like to be in a crystalline meritocracy, how correct it felt. I had long stopped believing in god but in the not too distant past I believed unequivocally (transcendently!) that a 95 was always vastly better than a 90. That was before I had the precolonial bullshit architecture of the sons of old Dartmouth shoved in my face all day, before I could ever think that achievement could be a myth, that what was really on top of the mountain I was climbing wasn't the smartest or the best, but a bunch of cretin mediocrities in pink polo shirts, and only because their daddies' daddies had bigger guns and no conscience. What I mean is I really do look forward to a time where J&As rule the world...

So much lately has been directing me towards, of all things, biology. (relatedly, why way back when and maybe again why I wanted to be a journalist--sanctioned dilettantism). But anyway, biology. Psychobiology in particular (but not only). For example:
1. Why does sitting very straight clarify thinking, help remove delusive veils of consciousness? It's a fascinating and well observed and phenomenon in the meditating world (don't believe me if you don't want to cocksuckers).
2. Every time I watch Empire of the Sun, I suddenly, bafflingly, start bawling my eyes out (on the inside..) at the point near the end when the entire ship has pretty much sunk and young Christian Bale says, "I learned a new word today: atom bomb". These convulsions are highly impersonal and come from beyond, or way down below near the root, nothing I had anything to do with anyway--an organism's despair for its species. It's palpable, and opaque.
3. K. says--telepathy. Why not? Transmitting entire sections of consciousness, beyond the chopped up semaphores, the glimpses, provided by utterances and postures. Telepathy might even be possible right now in a crude proto-prototypic way: GSR+MRI+PET+EEG+yadda yadda, add them up and you get more complete communication, at least. For what--to help alleviate the tremendous stress of solitary confinement within one's own skin.

I don’t want to complain, but…
Everything depresses me. Like unambitious white people drinking around a campfirein New Hampshire depresses me. Like all of America that isn’t NYC depresses me. Like all the outer boroughs depress me. Like everything that isn’t the tallest, shiniest buildings in Manhattan depresses me. I neeeed to be similarly way way above the mess down there. Fixation with infinite perfection can be a sign of immaturity and also psychosis, so I hear (ever watch Taxidriver?). I share this trait with several of my least accomplished friends. If it’s not perfect or close then it’s worthless. 60% perfect is a particularly ugly percentage. This goes for other things. If it’s not infinite love then it’s nothing at all. To know you're being shown the diplomatic side of someone’s ambivalence, the stronger side of someone’s indifference—what can be worse! Between a rock and a boring place, spinning in place. I want to be rich, and I want a motorcycle.

Valueless living is: saying yes to everything, no only to what’s uninteresting. It was a blip: like the solitary cigarette burn on the clean white door panel of the Asian Studies Center.

I have many addictions
I’ve wasted enough time already
*beautiful moments* are justified only if I write about them
I am an utmost bore.

If I really had no values I’d try to be a journalist, or something else as inconsequential and self-indulgent. I feel that it’s more noble to attempt to provide a drop in the bucket in the corpus of human knowledge. Ooor--actually it's really because a Ph.D is at least some respect from others in the bank. It's not like I really want to be a professor. After those seven years are up I'd rather go to China, knowing that I have those letters after my name, and train to be a Daoist mystic. And do something else after that activity starts showing decreasing returns.

Of the five people across from me on the train bench, the only one I really notice is the one with the jew-fro and the tanned biceps. And not much else about him either. The human animal is highly imperfect for getting at *objective truth*. My future, or at least part of it: cognitive epistemology.

Kierkegaard was an urban writer. All the signs are there: the poisen pen, the self-absorption, the cleverness, the feaux-jadedness as a tractable island to retain poise over an intractable sense of wonder. He even takes time out here and there to complain about how meaningless his life is. Love it—I’d only regret coming to it so late, but regret is a waste of my motherfucking valuable time. A month into my time at Dartmouth I knew that I would come back to the city, at least a city. I enjoy my time the most at the center of the disease—why? Innumerable reasons. Relatedly, ever hear of the folks who during the holocaust would snap and throw themselves against the electrified fences? It’s the way I want to go out. Here’s an imperfect/perfect metaphor. You don’t know it unless you know it. I was a Brahmin in a past life so I know better. Statement of fact. To prefer unity in a dualistic world seemed a matter of integrity, of obligation to oneself. To prefer it also a matter of escape. From obligation first, fellow feeling second. BUT knowledge by acquaintance vs knowledge by description. To someone who feels she values knowledge above all, this little duality, this clarification, is mind-blowing, life changing. The brother calls: he was on the 1-train and heard…a thud, an emergency break, an entire platform gone wild crying and screaming—talk of a child. My first reaction to (factual, not theoretical) pure overwhelming horror is to think of the words on the wall of the uptown pastry shop “secular humanism will save my life”. Of course the universe has a mystical core—if only if it is the subtraction of the known from the unknown which comes out to an infinity—and then that mysticism is just the general fogginess of what one is ignorant of? It’s more than that. Subterranean spring yadda yadda. Again though, the Daoists got it wrong. The entire Daoist canon is one flash a brilliance gone corrupt (of course I’m not qualified to say that but I’ll say it anyway). Duality trumps unity. Climb out of pleasure seeking/pain avoidance into greater things. Into loss of ego boundaries. And then there are things even greater than that—the creation (creatively, awarely) of new ego boundaries, for the sake of oneself and the rest of the disease. Ultimate acts of autonomy. The human supra to the ante-human. Something as unglamorous as secular humanism. So I’m back in the city to stay.

More:


"Tuesday, March 28, 2006

" I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: "In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death." I only meant that the hero of my book is condemmed because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives; he wanders, on the fringe, in the suburbs of private, solitary, sensual life. And this is why some readers have been tempted to look upon him as a piece of social wreckage. A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least one much closer to the author's intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn't play the game. The reply is a simple one; he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn't true. It is also and above all, to say more than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels."
--Camus


- I've become very laconic.
- .....because whereas most of my relationships have been kept afloat by laughing a lot, and saying very little (even if we say it desperately, movingly. And then theres the lying, so much lying...because there are no such things as values right), I have at least momentarily lost my tolerance for (for lack of a better word) bullshit--especially my own.

"X: he's unspeakably alone; as am I
Y: as is everyone
X: everything is done in flourishes to disguise the fact""


________________________


First rule of life is to never be too obvious, for the obvious reasons (do you know them?). And, all that veracity inevitably has the property of calcification, of heaviness—all that’s wonderful and mysterious, and pregnantly silent falls off, which is the worst thing it does.

Relatedly, I was wrong. There’s nothing in the world that cleanses so well, that is so conducive to moving on, of living well than all that flourishing. Say less, say more, but never say the truth, most of all not to yourself. Never commit yourself like that, never accept a reality that is just so boring when it's not painful. Romanticize, glamorize, poeticize—and do it well. Tug at your own heartstrings with counterfeit emotions; they’ll never have the power over you that monstrous reality does when taken seriously.

And, have you ever noticed how in a roomful of people, if one person coughs someone else starts coughing? Here are intimations of where language came from, as is the nature of all things biological to react. Not to react is an ultimate act of autonomy, of differentiation. Like the learned stoicism of abused children. The guy on train platform is hot but looks like a douche and an otherwise repulsive human being. He coughs and then I do the same, which I catch and stop, because I don’t like him at all. There are better, less (physiologically) depressing ways to control all that reactivity. What I mean is to learn how to react well, which maybe means falsely.

The person who is an island sees only mirrors all around him (and nothing in all that saltwater is the least bit nourishing). I blame my congenital myopia among other things, that the existence of the entire outer universe has always been just a little doubtful. Which has something to do why I often, and preposterously, think that it was the best decision of my life, majoring in government (of. all. things); and in secret I think it was what I was thinking all along. Because I have great difficulty multitasking. And the past few years have been an—I almost say necessary because it was so instinctive—mad rush to corruption. Because the best things lie beyond good and bad and knowledge by acquaintance is far superior to knowledge by description, maybe.

________________________________
Break, Redux:

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

1. it scares me, it really does. That I may not be the same person who would say all so assuredly, so brightly back in day, sophomore year of stuy, that "economics make da world go 'round". I cared so much about what make the world go round back then. It scares me that maybe I--dont--anymore. maybe it was ­­­~ or something. ====> but im still on that route. because it reminds me of a day when I unequivacally would choose the positive. I was a rational creature back then, much more than I am now. HOMO ECONOMICUS, if you will. 2. I'm not the meritocracy's pure product. John Lee is. traded in his soul for a ticket to MIT. This kid was my competitor in junior high, when I was still effortlessly the best. Green is the color of envy. And Bronx Science. And Dartmouth. Second best. Why dont I care. Because your worth comes from the 1% of you that isnt like the next person and what you do with it. Not how adroitly you can weasel and all-nighter your way up a system that in many ways is ultimately--false. I'm reminded of Matt Wasserman--750 verbal in the 7th grade, ditched stuy to go to some alternative school in the mountains of Massechusetts. once he said "you need 10 hours of sleep a night to function correctly". he had the right idea. sucker motherfuckers.

_____________

To continue: Or—how low can you go. And early-twenties are experimental throw-away years. And, always keep them away from what you love, right. Naah, sometimes silence germinates and sometimes it rots-out. This thought is indicative my maturity. My increased sophistication. My increasingly nuanced thinking. My liberal arts education. Applied to relevant issues. Like how hatred, too, is a healthy emotion. Which I’ve known to be true for many years, or at least that it’s a potent palliative. Of course, be careful, always. That can get out of hand too. Acupuncture with a fork. A deft touch is an utmost virtue. I know of only a few.


_____________

also:

The Boy With the Incredible Brain

(the part about his skin response to pi especially. see--everything is connected. emotion, abstraction, aesthetics, biology, among other things.)

Blah blah blah. Stumbled upon the San Genero Festival this year. The tail end--cool night, descending depression that comes and goes, paralyzes here and there. Three or four old and alone people listening to loud rock music meant for many more. Been looking at ~’s pictures on facebook. Whooa—living. It’s so easy for me to live very very small, very inward. It’s very easy for me to be very content with what I have and ruminate about the rest. Always waiting to be done to; going out and doing something that has always been a rarity and getting rarer. Laziness?—Maybe. Solipsism, too. And the (irrational,) desire for a clean, unencumbered life. Yesterday I got drunk for the first time in many months. Conversation drifts to sex like always. Attention drifts to the lean shaggy haired types in the corner, of course. Feeling the loss of my resolve, dissolving in fun that is nothing more. Resolve to live better, richer. Stop seeking the same dead end exhilarations over and over again.

Other hobbies include scanning the dollar book carts at the Strand every single day for Either/Or, which I hear is about radical decision-making. Decision-making for life—aware and irrevocable and not without pain, which makes it a transcendent act. More theory from theoretical humans. Those who find it impossible to live without justifying every_single_thing that enters such awareness. Charles Lindbergh was one. He looked at one thing only when choosing his wife, which was breeding. “I learned it living on the farm” he said. Also accounts for his Nazi sympathizing etc etc. And then someone went and stole his baby. Tyranny of the unanticipated. Reality checks come in all forms. Even through something as unglamorous as facebook.

When I was nineteen or so I loved dance parties. Then I had this nightmarish thought that all of life might just end up amounting to just that, a procession of flashing lights. They never did much for me ever again. So goes life of the senses. What was Kingson’s yearbook quote? The effort to understand the universe is the one thing that raises life above the level farce and gives it the grace of tragedy. Yes, it’s important to understand. It even feels like the most important. There are other things. Exploring. Creating. There isn’t much else.

This book I finally got around to usurping from the sibling unit and reading might be one of the few that will really change my life. It’s about Platonism versus empiricism. I’ve always thought that empiricism is just a lot of boredom, left to people with more patience, a better work ethic, and that Platonism is about possibilities and therefore far more interesting. Taleb prefers empiricism, for fantastic reasons. We’re both right.

The thing of interest here is what is easily mistakable for nothing at all (for the peasants, for the ants on the anthill, as is the nature of insects to look down and not out). The black space off the edge of the map. The vast intractable unknown. How to get acquainted with it? Maybe even bootstrap oneself into it? Back in the day the popular consciousness put seamonsters and all sorts of other things in that black space. Bolder types go out and survey the place, generate maps. Empirical, like. Close to reality. Some time later others come back and reshape the place, (Platonically) carve out the island of Manhattan for example. And look how that thing has surpassed its progenitors.

Relatedly, of course what I’m in my heart of hearts most interested in isn’t love or kindness, but a leaving a self-perpetuating something that issues forth from myself, a copy that copies itself, viral-like. Those feelings are lubrication for that disease, what it ferments in. The luckiest person in the world is the one who loves his work and loves his family too. But love doesn’t seem like an end upon itself as much leaving a mark does—and it’s always important to hedge one’s bets—here, between work and progeny, hope that either one or the other doesn’t fail. I don’t have any intention of telling my kids that, though.

what your old stuy classmates are up to:
St. John's suspect troubled but meek, pals say

holy shit..

Yo, went to a Mets game the other day, a first for me. Games are appealing: rules are clear, success is easily defined, and so it’s easy to throw all your rational and irrational force behind personally or vicariously pursuing that success. Then there are the regular rational aesthetics. And, elements of the game are accidental, but not too much of it. All these things are pleasurable for most people--like for the rowdy moron drunk gumbas, paying $6.50 per beer, 5 beers each, in the row behind us. Me too—Jose Reyes missed a line drive that eventually cost the game, knocked my elbow into my armrest accidentally out of disappointment and it still hurts. There are (at least some) reasons for all this.

It's like most pop music, which is almost defined by regular rhythms, changed up here and there for kicks. Also, there is still nothing I find hotter then guys in uniform. Or even better: It was a wonderful day for me when the more attractive hipsters started to wear army jackets. Regularity but with elements of irony. The utmost in simple pleasures.

Why is that? Wikipedia says thinking is: “a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires”. Whooa. Is this why all this simplicity—ready-made models with variations here and there—is so appealing?—provides a (maybe rare) feeling of mastery over the world. Feelings of mastery are pleasurable for evolutionary reasons (mastery = survival) ? Maybe.

How much of life really is like that? Easily defined, and easily mastered with practice? Much of the 9-5 work world, world for sure. But that is an explainable subset of something far less explainable. What accounts for the job you have, the spouse you get, and all sorts of other things. So much randomness, not so model-able.

Real jazz, more than any other form of music, is close to life. Musicians have repertoires of riffs already learned, and then it’s how all this knowledge and skill interact with each other in time and improvisationally that constitute musical reality, an unexpected synthesis. A true metaphor for life. Most folks don’t like it at all. Hard to blame them for it.

Quiet times like these are for sitting back and sifting through, sloughing off the wrong, embracing the right. If. Possible. I read somewhere that memory is more about mood than pictures. How can the moods occupying all that swath of time be described with any accuracy—even the narrative I might impose on it right now must be effected by the mood I’m in this hour. And that will effect future narratives. Corruption without end.

Today is another nine-eleven. Which for me then comes out to sixteen pre- and six post-. Finally far enough, right, to be callous enough not to need to tread as lightly as possible and even appropriate the thing for exegesis about one’s personal life. Though I still feel that even mentioning it is an act of defiance—that last sentence too, another act of defiance. Defiance against what? There is nothing pushing back. What’s with all this fury (if w/o sound) that seems to signify nothing?

I run two miles every day now—up from one and working up to three. I know that isn’t much for most, but I’ve never been talented at endurance, so it’s more reason why this improvement gives me a sense of well-being. Like the carrot-and-sticks of old, like grades were before the all the insidious complacency. Intimations of greater ambitions to come; it’s fully possible to create one’s own superstructure of carrot-and-sticks, which people do, and it takes them all sorts of places.

And yet as always it seems like an impossible farce to grasp backward at the unbounded optimism, the infinite ambition, of a Stuyvesant sophomore when the entire direction of one’s life hence has been towards tepidity and timidity. Not just because you’ve grown older and wiser and now think that the most even gaze produces the most correct information, but really the other reason you keep your head down is because you happen to know that this world is full of horrors and that nobody escapes. (Guess which Tony Kushner play I plagiarized that last bit from.)

Relatedly, a good half of my real experiences with pot have been about pure terror, the same waking nightmare about *cosmic* solitude. When it’s not so terrible, it’s a background mood, a corpse in the room, which you refuse to look at because you’ve seen it before, and it was horrible enough to neutralize any curiosity about it.

This is not trivial. X, the only person I’ve met that seemed to really identify, said that it can be something to grow from. He said it so equivocally (maybe he has never been successful it?) that I almost didn’t catch it. It’s a thought that has really gotten under my skin, though. The idea that it is fully possible to ride roughshod over the abyss under your feet, the one that you know to exist, while drawing from energy that is its own justification. The same autotelic energy (“what is right? Whatever increases the feeling of power”) that can again, in turn, transitively be used to justify all those ridiculous sticks and carrots...

X had a big mirror in his living room which cut off where the top of the couch started and below that on the floor a bed spread was laid out where I’d eat watermelons among other things. A set up that let me watch myself dive in—to what? It’s true that as much as I know about dead ends in theory I actively seek them out. Because all fun must be escapist in some way, right? And what is this whole genre of activity supposed to be besides fun. August on the other hand was the most solitary month I’ve had in years. Good for me—keeps the red blood at that low level I like it to be at. Of course that thing is unshakable. I try to sublimate it, drown it out, wash it away and it attacks from all sides, especially on the most gorgeous avenues which is the stretch of space from the village to where midtown starts. My big eyes and short stature have given who knows how many the impression that they are on at least close to uncharted territory. An illusion I let them have because I am vindictive and hate to be tread on and happen to know that in a post-prophylactic world, ethics about that thing truely are irrelevant (or, the distaste that replaces ethics for those who think they dont believe in ethics) and I believe in getting over one’s first if they’re wrong--or worse, limiting. But then I know it’s a 20^th Century form of hubris to tell the world how it should work and then pretend to live in that sort of world. Which was our parent's generation and look how they turned out. No sane modern person thinks he could really fight every single battle and swim against that tide of how things are. Relatedly, my mother at her most quotable and, actually, least anti-Semitic: “everyone else has a savior, what are they waiting for”. Weeell, maybe it’s on account of their higher standards that the soft spoken carpenter didn’t quite do it for them. Or maybe waiting-as-a-way of life is the best one, the most productive, least destabilizing one. I’m waiting too, for someone smart to make me feel things again. Preferably rich and with a nice body, but I wouldn’t want to ask for too much. Was never good at seeking these things out, in any case.

Furthermore, I’m on hiatus from zen. Made me so divinely-bovinely content. Which is fine when life is on the upswing but then a vacuum opens up and you’re like a lamb to the slaughter. Which is more a-posteriori theorizing, but I wouldn’t do it If I didn’t think I was getting closer and closer to a better idea (of what-the-fuck just happened in my life). In moments of most clarity is when I’m most disgusted at what I’ve become; when did I become so frivolous. There was a time when I felt like I took life as seriously as anyone I knew. By far the most dangerous (non-psychotic) belief that I can think of is that it's ever possible to just give up and go to sleep in the snow without some sort of consequences. And, that's all for now.

Psych Prof Farbstein once said that most inventions have correlates in nature, especially in the human body (pens are penises, hinges are joints, etc). Enrapturing idea. And then there are things that don’t fit. More basic things: there’s no such thing as a parallelogram in nature, as far as I can tell. Not immediately accessible to the senses anyway. It’s something that came forth spontaneously from humans, an invention of human abstraction.

Also: the first time I was old enough to notice these things and up in an airplane, the thing I found most shocking was all the squares everywhere: all that land squared, appropriated, made to serve a purpose, a purpose for whoever appropriated it. Just like the wonderful views outside Manhattan high-rises: other buildings, layers of square upon squares. It’s the human disease.

So--the older I get the more I think Nietzsche was right: I see power everywhere. Bureaucratic power over other humans is just an obvious form for obvious people. More profoundly, there is the power derived from power over nature, imposing oneself on it. Imposing one’s own order, one’s own laws on it (autonomy = self + law).

Then there is the flip side: destruction is *the* nightmare, penultimate only to nothing at all, which is luckily hard to think about. It comes in subtle forms, too: like how after a big rain, little rivers tend to carve themselves through the asphalt. Always the tendency towards entropy: the return to disorder from all that hard-wrought order. Terrifying. Order requires power and thus order is power, which doesn’t work out logically—but what’s that question? What do you believe even though you can not prove it? That'd be one answer, with the addendum that power, in turn, more than anything, is everything...

Theory comes from the greek theorei, which is the same root for theater--which comes from the same idea: to detach and watch. watching is prerequisite to understanding, says one theory. as assumes most of classical western philosophy (which forms so many core assumptions learned implicitly through years of schooling, and by just living in the modern world). Sanctioned by the assumed noble-ness of all this detachment, it’s possible to detach away giant sections of one’s life this way. For example, in theory X seems like the best thing to do with my life, this or that the best kind of person to marry, etc. Reject everything else. Things left to chance are reduced to a minimum. There are even theories for that element of chance. The central limit theorem for example. A more sophisticated theoretical person might make provisions for the 99% range of possible occurrences, which lie in the middle of the bell curve.

It happens to everyone, though: sexual preferences congeal into “types”, strangers into stereotypes, interests into, so very unglamorously, into what I should-be-interested-in because it’s the path I’ve chosen. In such a state of affairs, I think, living in the theoretical cloud that accounts for everything, the only things that are directly and truly experienced are curveballs. And only things that are really and truly experienced can produce (psychological) growth (or degeneracy) in the thing doing the experiencing. It's the difference between a theoretical punch in the face and an actual (practical) one. It’s why major events are so important. Everything up until point X is already accounted for intellectually and thus inert. Like how the stock market follows a random walk because all information up until point X, facts as well as theory about the future, is already summed up into stock prices. Completely unforeseen events are what really changes things.

[Still, there's a vulnerable core in there, vulnerable to certain things, some things more than other things. Maybe that's what should be understood. One's vulnerabilities more than anything. Because the world is unpredictable. Jung's archetype theory is appealing. Events derive their power from the ability to activate certain proclivities. such proclivities in the collective unconscious, humanity at the most basic, and then one’s more unique proclivities. Matching modern empirical psychology with one’s own background and experience can illuminate that. The things it predicts, they might not ring true yet or even ever, but watch out! You might even become a homo, if the circumstances are right.]

Daoists sit and forget for the sake of richer experience. Forgetting all details, especially the mundane ones in order to experience them again, like for the first time. A return from detachment back into one’s animal core, the one that is always fully immersed in one’s surroundings. This, too is powerful. Everyone speaks better chinese when they are drunk. A (deliberate/non-deliberate) obliteration of the self-reflecting rational intellect. It’s what western psychology appropriated recently and called “flow”. Maybe it’s possible to live one’s entire life in that flow state. Daoist sages do it, maybe. But they were never known to be very productive--the tendency is to live intensely but with no value added (you can't learn Chinese while drunk). So, using the rational intellect to harness that subterranean spring, directing and channeling that explosive mess--at its best and most mature, a deft corrective…

yo--went to dc earlier this week. the washington monument looks like a huge cock. generates in me all the ambivance that those things usually do. somewhere floating in that ambivilance is i guess is that awe i'm supposed to feel in the greco-roman shithole that is the more famous parts of DC. this greco-roman business: like the reaching out for phantom roots that charactorize the usually inspirationless second generation. like greece or rome has all that much to do with the States. contrast for example the building that replaced 7 world trade center--the translucent one. like something out of a dream. no longer a copy of a copy of a copy but something new. anyway. later went to dupont circle. feel more at home with the drugs and the queers. talked about the rapture. good time was had by all. took the midnight bus back. arrived in manhattan too early so I went to wait out the sunrise in a 24 hour mcdonalds. circa 4am, hobo comes up to me and asks me what i'm reading. i show him in the bluntest most non-engaging way possible, making sure to make it clear that in no way would i tolerate being raped. he says he's read that. he was a philosophy major. at city college (before open admissions, when it was actually good, like stuy). drat. the last thing i need is this sort of kindred spirit. his life: a black sheep hassidic jew, books, alcoholism, zigzag around the country and abroad. long zen retreats (and of course retreating of an even more protracted sort). c'est moi, could be, of course--god do i have to, must, must, must stay on the flip-side of that coin. the respectable side. the accomplished side. for nothing else but fear of being left with nothing else. of course my instincts tell me it's on the same indifference curve--one thing has as many strengths and weaknesses as ther other (if antipodal ones). in other news, fall is comming. has a way of focusing the head, making one more serious, more ambitious or more desperate whatever the case may be. and...so on.

- teenagers are often great writers. it's a sense of wonder thing. For me, a fancy education and too many embarrassments have created an obsession fixation with logical consistency and factual accuracy. Pity. Once during some more precocious days X called me out on being full_of_shit. I was horrified: how could anyone not think that a fun hypothesis (and/or lie) is better than something as banal as a fucking fact. Fucking peasants. fucking academic peasants.
-->(reality is created as much as it is discovered. if anything, to stand at the head of a tradition, not at the tail of one. yea that's Ayn Rand--fuck you for rolling your eyes.)

- The insecure woman at the next table was talking about an orgy she had been to recently. More interestingly, abt. a bisexual NYU neuroscience prof she met there. Ooh la la. On a ship I'd be first mate, which has always been the case. Why-oh-why do I always look into the slop for role models. Because it takes courage to be in there and not with everyone else. Meh.

- honestly, i'm disgusted by the quotidian atheism of most of my peers. a refusal to ask *big* questions in anything more than *scientific* ways (conveniently handed off to some eggheads somewhere). Like big bangs and the primordial soup explain everything there is to know about the universe--just like a person is nothing more than all his neural networks put together. Uh, no. Take communism: straight lines, no god, complete failure. A castle in the sky, drawn up for a world dismembered of everything but the sum of its parts, if even that--(capitalism is far more organic, and better). Religion is metaphor, fools. And a good vehicle towards higher understanding. Someone once said something about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Mmhm.
- Science is wonderful btw. But it generates provisional truths. Newton's universe reigned supreme until Einstein came along, and then quantum mechanics after that. F equals MA still works for the vast majority of cases here on earth but it's not an eternal truth. Science hasn't discovered any and it's all open to revision. To think otherwise is fatuous and destructive.

among the things that you'd think don't ever happen include: a tornado touching down in brooklyn! holy shit. subway service almost all frozen, among other things. more signs indicating the end of the world. ___ says by the time we're older "they" would have found a cure for mortality. (reading this book called the Black Swan lately--there was a time when another they thought all swans were white until they found a black one. Other black swans include almost every major event in world history--completely unanticipated until it was already after the fact, when it became inevitable). What's right then is probably impossible to know, but the attitude taken has profound consequences. There are whole cultures that have no word for the future. and they're extremely primitive. westerners in particular believe that history only goes up and up. i, too, believe there is a point to civilization. I dont know of any better measure of progress than that mass of extra average gray matter directly attributable to the modern world. Humans have a telos and it's to be conscious (aristotle agrees). Yet, that lackluster futureless state can be approached from the other side of consciousness, from too much consciousness. there's a story about an oracle in egypt containing the truth--one precocious young person snuck a peek at it and "his life thereafter was spiritless, his actions were undistinguished, and he sank into an early grave." yikes. Component to such a huge truth is, i think, at least, that everything dies. A notion that's despite all its truth is thankfully--probably biologically--at least psychologically--inert, for most. We're made to believe life lasts forever, even while watching all that ubiquitous aging and dying. always important to watch which bluffs you call. so, to ignore some truths for the sake of other truths. to make assumptions, wrong assumptions even. etc. etc.

So the one thing I learned in High School that I found most interesting was Hegelian dialectics. Maybe I misunderstood and continue to misunderstand. Regardless: push - pull - transcendence -- it's is a pattern I have looked for everywhere forever thereafter.

Here's one, from personal history, teased out of the last handful of years: the push pull between sobriety and intoxication--literal and metaphorical. I'm yet unaware of whatever may be supra to these two things so I'll stick to this potent, sometimes devastating little duality.

Sobriety: The domain of the middle class most of all. money, marriage, respectability. And especially, always strong. A good mouthpiece is Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of something or other, which is on upwardly mobile, obliviously servile (mentally at least...) immigrant bookshelves everywhere: "I doubt that anyone would seriously consider unfairness, deceit, baseness, uselessness, mediocrity, or degeneration to be a solid foundation for lasting happiness and success". Anything has to be tried before it can be so discarded, eh?

Intoxication then, is for kicks, and for clarity. What can be turned so topsy turvy?: nearly anything: economics, gender, orientation, rationality, law. Like the man, beer bottle in hand, at the anarchist rally on top of the picnic table screaming "fuck the police". [Get a motherfucking job, I said under my breath--not that I'm employed myself...]. And then there is consciousness itself. like all the times I spent drunk hunched over late at night pounding that very consciousness away with very loud music over the headphones. You couldn't give me a good reason to stop back then though. I was looking for something, a yet more altered state. Thus the fine line between exploration and escapism, if there is such a line at all. Cept maybe exploration, in order to warrant such a dignified label, always reports back to reality..But then there are stories about poems carved into the mountainsides of isolated parts of east asia--monks that left the human world and never (physically) looked back. wondrous. too many choices. meh.

Hi all--remember Xanga?

Back where I began in more ways than one.
Currently on South Street by the Seaport. Haven't spent much time down here since freshman year of high school--back when the greatest thing ever was watching X do front handsprings on the Battery Park black top. He went away for the summer and learned something wonderful, I thought. Meanwhile I studied topics that only half-interested me, while I looked forward to the time when all of life would be as exciting, because I had shaped it and wanted it that way.

(I did not necessarily anticipate the overwhelming psychological effects of the demands of employability and respectability--a massive chink in the gears--can't spend all one's time perfecting one's front handspring--a fact i've only become more and more aware of as I became older)

Now, Stuy and a college diploma later, I finally have not-much-to-do. And I do feel more than ever that my future is like so much clay in my hands--though the facts may not necessarily measure up to that feeling--I majored in something I won't pursue, and I am unemployed. Meanwhile my bank account leaks away, close to a hundred percent of my money spent on coffee and train-fare. An undernourished (and overprivileged) life, maybe. Regardless-- I am enjoying myself.

I'm also reading a lot. Joseph Campbell, again. I read the transcript of the Power of Myth for the first time three years ago in India, on top of my grandparents' corrugated metal roof, while the sun set in broad swaths of tropical pastel colors. Blown away as I was by Campbell, why I didn't realize then that what I was most interested in wasn't so much social science, but more that unwonted black hole at the center of the universe, and everything that arises from it (which includes social science). I mean I'm most into what is most universal. And then (consciously/subconsciously) you ask that poisonous question--how is that employable--and you continue to study the dirty stunted business of government and economics...blegh.

(intolerable idiot waitress talking to UEdinburough philosophy (of music!) student at the next table. How does one make_contact? By realizing the crushing life-depriving consequences of avoiding it. Not today, though.)

This last biography of Jung was earth shattering. Identification = earth shattering, at least in your own world. That's all I'll say about that. And...that's all for now..