Two kinds of folks re: their garbage disposing habits
June 23, 2009
There are two kinds of folks in the world, not eliminating the possibility and probability that there exist other kinds, and perhaps other sorts of kinds (of folks). There are people who are unfailingly good about bringing out their accumulated garbage the evening before garbage day and then rolling the garbage can back to the spot (where it accumulates their refuse until the next emptying day) the next day after it’s been ferried away by the garbage people. There are also the kind of people who will do it occasionally if the moment arrives when they realize that garbage day is tomorrow and it’s time to take the garbage out. These second group’s garbage cans may well stay at the bottom of their driveway, or if they don’t have a driveway, outside the front door of their apartment or living space, for a few days, maybe even until or past the next garbage day.
Antidotical poison.
June 19, 2009
We are not so much poisoned, needing an antidote, but the poison and the antidote. The antidote may seem like the poison, and quite often the poison, the antidote. But the poison may verily be antidotical and the antidote poisonous, if not applied in the proper and timely manner. Some dive deep down into the sea of the poison while others wish to and then there are those who apply the antidote and live safely for the short period before eventually succumbing to the poison. Most apply a bit of the poison to themselves for a smidgeon of the excitement, followed by the long draughts of the antidote. Few are those who engulf themselves in the poison until the very last moment when they pull themselves back to the safety with a few small drops of the potent antidote, approaching closer and closer to the limit each time.
Music and an unabashedly short attention span
June 18, 2009
What if he thought of listening to music the same way he thought of reading books? It’s strange how he would ordinarily think of an afternoon listening to music as somehow inferior to one reading a novel. Why shouldn’t he devote lots of time just listening to songs, over and over. They both carried the danger of becoming a totally passive activity. They both should be thought of as input, which if absorbed productively, will produce output which is different from the input and which machinically perpetuates the creative flux of it all.
He would watch people talking around him, get a sense of what they were saying, and then sort of let them keep going, watching their facial expressions, but not really registering what they were saying, because he was thinking through his own notions, and all of a sudden he would realize that he had been listening to the person speak without paying attention to what they were talking about, and that it didn’t matter, because he’d used what they’d talked about in the first few minutes of talking to him as a foundation for his own private flights of fancy. What right did they have to his attention? Just because he’s looking at them, nodding his head, he’s under an unspoken obligation to pay heed to what they’re going on about?
He had plans for the next few months. He liked the idea of finding himself through writing. He thought it was possible. But more so in the way of finding out what your body is capable of. He thought that that was what “finding out who you are” entailed anyways – finding out what you and your body is capable of. That is something that always comes not just as a surprise but as an opening out – when you realize you’re capable of not only engaging in an activity you didn’t see yourself capable of approaching, but mastering it. This sounds like some boilerplate self-help inspirational bullshit, but I would be surprised if most people experience this more than a few times in their life. I’m not talking about what the self-help manuals are usually talking about – going skydiving, quitting smoking, etc. Or am I? I might be churning out sentences that would feel more at home in an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet. To return to where this paragraph seemed like it was headed when it began, he liked the idea of finding out what he was capable of writing i.e. was he capable of writing a long fictional work? Was the answer to his question that he must simply embark? It seems that he is beginning to write fiction by writing fictionally about himself writing fiction. He was from this perspective representative of a type, not distinctive. Was he writing to be distinctive though? If he was honest with himself, he would admit that his writings were attempts to fit himself into a mould. To find out what you’re capable of through writing, however, you need to really push yourself, that is, be capable of really pushing yourself. Henry Miller, as I remember, wrote that he had written 1,000,000 words before he began his first novel. That is five and a half years of writing 500 words a day. Before he became Henry Miller.
A splinter had dug itself underneath his pinkie finger’s nail. The end of his pinkie finger felt warmth. He wondered what would happen. Would the splinter eventually emerge? Would his pinkie be infected? Would it be amputated? Hell, was his demise imminent? Questions answered: I dug into my nail with clippers until the splinter was sufficiently vulnerable to ejection, grabbed a hold of it with tweezers, and tweezed the motherfucker. The tip of my pinkie finger now feels a bit raw. But I know that I overcame pain and intense discomfort to accomplish something that was good for my body in spite of itself; cleansing. My pinkie fingernail is now jagged, ragged, haggard. The base is forming, and I must vigilantly insist upon adding to it each day. Making more connections, looking the connections over, correcting the connections, making disjunctions where there were connections and then forming new connections with the disjoined. There are lots of things going on underneath us, to which we may not be as disconnected as we commonly assume. We are surface creatures, and it is only natural that we often involuntarily prize the exterior over the interior. Of what sort of connection do I speak? There is the obvious one: gravity. We are pinned to the face of the earth by an invisible force, and would consider it an herculean, nay, deific feat should one of us jump even so high that their lower extremity were to reach the height of their upper extremity, i.e. that their feet would be at the level of their head, we, so very far below, at the extreme depth of the troposphere. We are simultaneously at the extreme peak of another level: the level of the compact, the strata of the earth, from the crust to the core. We are not so much surface creatures or the equivalent of deep-sea creatures of the open air, but in between, in the mean, between the interior and the exterior, hovering on the barrier between the two. We are at the juncture; we may be the first creatures to wonder at what happens underground. The other day, I was waiting outside of a supermarket while a friend was inside shopping, and noticed a police car which went to the drive-through window of the bank which was located in the supermarket’s parking lot. It looked strange there- police cars are supposed to function as police cars, not as vehicles of civilians who share our quotidian needs. They are supposed to be there to act as the authority, not as one of us who happens to have a job which gives them authority over the rest of us. But sitting there in the drive-through of the bank, he looked like a civilian, his car could have been any car. He looked vulnerable and out of place.
OK so you know how the googilluminati read all your gmail emails and then from their secret laboratory beam advertisements to you based on the information contained in all the responses to your classified ads for casual encounters on Craigslist? Well, I also use emails to go back and forth with other like-minded people I’ve met on/in various message boards and chatrooms, lamenting the dearth of the taste of bacon in my life. And so today, thanks to our future world leaders, I was beamed an advertisement for a wondrous product called Bacon Salt, whose rallying cry is, “Everything should taste like bacon.” EVERYTHING. They are absolutists who take an idea (the taste of bacon = gustatory pleasure) and bring it to its logical conclusion. I passionately support this product and the concept behind it – who would deny that everything from red wine to toothpaste to casual cunnilingus to bacon itself should taste more like bacon? – and so will put a free advertisement on my blog, in the humble form of a link:
I would also like to throw the idea out there to make a unisex bacon-scented perfume, which could be called something like Swine Flou.
