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.