House Explorations

Hello there old me. Kind of a 4th dimensional distant speck these days, aren't you? I see a lot of you around in here.
blowing off some dust
Let's get re-acquainted, shall we? Looks like the chasing of white rabbits is over again.

I'm not sure yet what it means, but I keep looking at the horizon more and more. I think I may go far away. To somewhere. I may just be baking in the heat right now, or I may be twisting and changing. At the very least, I am strong. The moving finger writes...

It's necessary for people to feel like their life matters in the grand scheme of things...or even just within a specific context.
I've been grappling with this sort of thing since I graduated from high school. I remember the floor falling out from under me when I realized that I had no idea what to do. I've plodded along more whimsically than not since then.
Tonight I witnessed just another act of craziness within this season of cabin-fever madness. This was my friend though. Somewhat estranged for a while due to his particular problems of late, but now these problems are getting violently out of control.
Some people should never drink.
While I can dismiss the litany of crazy people who brush though Epoch and stir up a few days worth of gossip with their personal cataclysm, I cannot stand to watch a close friend go through the same.
People are not heartless, though it sometimes seemed that way to me when I had problems and felt that my acquaintances would let me drop to the bottom without lending a hand. In fact, this friend of mine was a voice that literally called me back on a particularly bad night when I was driving aimlessly through Llano, my sense of direction being inadequate to find my way to California that night. Just a voicemail out of the blue that demonstrated that at least someone thought about me sometimes.
People are quite the opposite of heartless...they simply have only so much capacity to endure sorrow and witness sorrow. Surely a few are just lazy and adept at rationalizing away others, but most simply have to close the floodgates on the overwhelming amount of small and large, rational and irrational tragedies around them. Those who try to take responsibility for the whole world quickly burn out and either become cold or fall apart themselves.
Epoch has some sort of quality that attracts the dispossessed. As a general rule, those who become regulars are black sheep of some sort, though some hide this more than others. Many seem fairly sane and balanced...until you get to know them. Being surrounded by so many invisible closets with resident skeletons may very well be what attracts the truly lost, who also regularly appear at Epoch and proceed to flip the fuck out. And we must necessarily dismiss those lost ones, because we are simply not equipped to help, even if that subconscious well of lost and foundness gives the lost ones a sense of being among their own kind. Everyone has a white knuckled grip on that sense of solidarity and sanity lately. In fact, more so than usual Epoch seems dull, like it's collectively faking normalcy too hard.
So I know well that I can't get too wrapped up in my friend's dilemma, because at a certain point the in-group must be shunned to the out-group as part of the social immune system. Some equilibrium must be maintained. But I must bend whatever rational efforts I can summon to helping my friend even as I watch him slipping over the edge. I need to try to reciprocate that voice that called me back one terrible night, because even though I would have driven back to Austin of my own accord soon enough, the reassurance that someone cares can be immeasurably valuable at certain times.
I don't know how to help him find purpose in his life, because I haven't figured that one out myself yet. But I can recognize what it might be and how important and vitalizing it is.
Much of the tragedy of humanity stems simply from this lack.
Writing in the second person is usually distasteful, but just this once...this particular page of mine does not have many readers, but if you're reading this, I'm thinking about you. Human relations are often tenuous, but at some point I have met you and respected you for a unique quality. Just another satellite of humanity transmitting a feeble signal of reciprocity in the dark.

It got all over the counter...spraying equally in every direction as the burst was remarkably symmetrical. The base and 3 other pieces.
My hand had just touched the handle, and Mac had just turned to do something and POP!
Mac and Amanda filled a new coffee and threatened to send me to the circus if I kept exploding glasses.

Sure, it was just glass fatigue brought on by thermal expansion (though it was not cold outside, nor was the coffee unusually hot)
Synchronicity is pseudoscience.
It had nothing to do with what was going on in my head.

Dualism splits black white left right lysis.

Just to prove that I don't get on here just to complain, I feel rested and rejuvenated by slacking off all weekend so far. The stress of late papers and missing car titles and missing money take a back seat while I eat, sleep, and streeeetch.
Today's winter air is just tasty!

Wipe off that shit-eating grin sir, or you'll anger the Fates.

It was just a pause in thought to concentrate on immediate, mundane matters like money and school. Just keeping things together. Now, I can't remember why exactly I'm going the way I'm going, and even the boring things are getting out of hand. I have this nagging feeling that I misplaced a set of ambitions and goals somewhere...

I've been thinking about these things mainly because I'm noticing a lot of change around me... and it has become hard to separate myself from that changing current. This means that I'm floating along on borrowed momentum. So before I freak out and thrash around wildly in a loss-of-self crisis, I really just need to remember what I used to think was important and why.

Gonna be sitting here for a long time I think.

I don't know quite what it is, but it is not present lately.
I know that it was a mental state.
A state of being and potential.

I must work harder in all respects.
Perhaps I'm still disappointed with myself.
I don't like the phlegmatic nature that has reasserted itself.
So many paths to take, and I'm just napping on the side of the road.

Maybe I just need some artistic expression...painting sad clowns or something.
That's not quite it.
Where is my conviction? Folly might suffice.

We've all got our own self-fulfilling prophecies.
I would prefer to improvise as much as possible, though.
Anything that smacks of destiny or inevitability really makes me cold.
Despite this tendency, there always has been and always will be an aspect of my psyche that craves pattern, boundaries, and predetermination.

Physiology has its mental chains as well. Being male is a mental facet as well, even if I think that I am atypical.
The alterations in my behavior and state of mind within a new relationship are as physical as they are mental.

I am finally reaching some equilibrium, though.

Now I have no choice but to face my individual problems with school, work, motivation, life, etc.
Not too anxious though.
I am tired of being a person that lacks a characteristic talent or ability.
Being a general occult literary enthusiast just isn't very useful.
I'm no longer concerned about being fulfilled or loved or any of that sort of thing, so now I just wish to be useful in some fashion.

I'm excited about finally getting around to another enchanted rock trip. I always seem to find something up there in the wind and moonlight.

Hopefully I'll have a more long distance adventure this summer as well. I would dearly love to see mountains again.

This new year has been quite the rocket ride so far. Lots of drama (much of it of my own fault)and big decisions and deceptively important little decisions and many many interesting social patterns emerging. The days are blurring a bit. I can partially blame some oxytocin flooding,
(SCIENCE! http://physrev.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/81/2/629#SEC6_6)
but it can't really be boiled down to that entirely. I needed a break after a rigorous 2006 and some dreamless haziness has been a necessary respite. Being a hermit again is refreshing.
I have some regrets, but I still feel that I am where I am by choice and necessity.
I've been a little worried about losing touch with people, but the ones who care ought to stick around, so it'll work out.

So. Where can I now drag my flesh and fire and frailties to achieve a greater good?
Purely rhetorical question, 'cause I don't expect anyone to answer that fully anymore.

Farewell to

it was fun. Mostly.

Flashbacks and comfort imprints.
Religion is going to break me. But I don't won't can't break.
This station is clear and the music is compelling.
Red pulses are flowing/humming through this channel but are the space-time coordinates correct?
I can't shut off this analysis device.

This is the game where we run through mazes and only shoot at exposed flanks.

I need to pass my classes. What is this life business that keeps getting in the way of my expected social genuflections?
My knees are stiff.

So I'll pull a broad perspective shift to make myself feel better. So I might fail some of my classes through flagrant irresponsibility. It's just one semester, right?
How long can I keep saying things like that?
25 nails in the coffin soon. (I say that to light a cigarette in a faux debonair pose)

Some part of me is chanting, "This is all that you can be. This is why you're where you're at."
I've got a weakness, and it's quite obvious. A connection catch-22.
Maybe I could toss out an astrology screen to delimit my potential?
It's all bunk. Let's make sand castles in the playground dirt...
What if...just what if...
I'm stuck in a sand castle?
Or even better...what if that's all that there is?

The motivation behind that train of thought is unfamiliar to me. I wonder from whence this impulse comes?

I can probably fix this. Am I going to? For the first time in a while, I have no fucking clue what I'm going to do.

Ok, so no one ever comments me on these rambling say-nothings, but for once please tell me something if you read this, even if it is only tangentially relevant and/or a story regarding cross-dressing fish.

I've spent too long being wishy-washy. And I even detest that onomatopoetic wording. Too much!
Addictions.
I smoke, I feel crappy. I don't ever enjoy the dizziness from nicotine.
Then I light another one. Yeck, why am I doing this?

It occupies a behavioral niche and gives me something to do with my hands.
A coping mechanism adopted to deal with a stressor that is no longer present.
Conditioning outlasting the environmental pressure. Me oh animal my.

I know that I'm better at this kind of thing. Dropping smoking, dropping other bad habits like waffling.
I have not lost my hard-won confidence and purpose...I've just misplaced it. It'll turn up any time now.

Meanwhile I'm getting some nausea from not being alone at sea any longer.
Alpha waves of ocean waves.
Why can't I relax already?

The pan pipes just get louder. Worthless ancient impulse that I cling to dearly.
Some part of me is ready for this contradiction to end. Thrashing, thrashing, flopping around on dry land.
But I am also quite deliriously, wonderfully content with where I'm at.
That may or may not be a good thing, because I have a lot of ambition.

Well I guess many things don't tend to end so much as I forget about them. Analagous to the arrangement of my apartment: all non-current things get stuffed into the closet so that I can treasure hunt at a later date. My impulse to clean is not based upon any natural fastidiousness so much as it becomes an archaeological expedition. I analyze the strata of my discarded or forgotten possessions, record their location and significance, and then throw them out or stuff them into a deeper strata of neglect. Things also remind me of people, and there is a parallel to be found there as well.

In Clive Barker's Imajica, the main character is an ageless magician who chooses to forget the past beyond 10 years prior. He becomes an aimless hedonist. This is a necessary for a resurrection of perspective. The process of remembrance makes him terribly ill, but once the process is started it continues relentlessly. He is able to perform a great reconciliation because he is not completely aware.

So now we caf, nic, CLICK. Caf, nic, CLICK. Cough, nick, clique? Nah. Just more caf, nic, CLICK.
I live in this machine. When I crawl out into the daylight, the oil and soot mark me. The Sunday dress crowd will wrinkle their collective nose, but my pride in purpose might just scrape at them. This is my tribal warpaint.
(I live my disguises.)

Tangent. Celebrities get stuck, fixed into a sky that is too simple and suffocating because celebrity fanatics are pushing their undifferentiated infantile fantasies into an all-too-human host. This works on smaller scales too, so the rip-and-tear cruelty of the popular is an effort to get some air.

Top layer strata artifact.

To the e of experience and the x of the crossing. Free flow.

I entered a place where the thoughts flowed so freely and the words tumbled out of their own volition. Every instinct of interaction was laid bare and my perpetual habit of meta-analysis had a field day while my heart gibbered forth in an effort to create so many bridges with words. Now as I dip under those bridges, due to the ever so important lack of that serotonin neurotransmitter that is supposed to be the basis of my confidence and mood and hunger and whatnot, I can splish around in that water that was so terrifying before. I got enough courage to open my eyes, (reminiscence about my hesitant fearful swimming lessons after callous chlorine terror gave me such apprehension with the whole thing) and now I can make out some other swimmers who are diving and whirling about confidently.
Still learning to manifest positively. Taking lessons from the gifted. And oh, how I used to love to start races and challenge and win. Then one day a girl beat me and I stopped. Such a zealous child. Wonder when I lost track of that. It was always still there somewhere, though.
AH! More water.
Such a hard quench.
Stories about Santa Claus. Relates to: taunting tales of goddesses and nymphs.
These figments have an important role in the up and down of belief and disillusionment.
They're as real as anything to children. They're a nonsense to most adults. And then real gifts soothe the loss and we think we don't care that Santa didn't bring them.
Storytelling is a gift.
It encapsulates the numinous.
People know this instinctively. They go to church and taste with their ears. A certain flavor.
While I was open wide this weekend, someone told me a silly goddess tale that broke my heart. It was mended soon enough, but the mark remains.
Both real and not real, but now the presents are all unwrapped and it's time to get dragged to church. That sounds sort of bitter, but that's the way that people forget how to think as they get older, which I'll get around to again soon enough.

And the bones got up to dance.
We waltzed.

I drove by to pick up an old self of mine.
It's been a necessary long time.
Continuum like I left it on pause
Which I did
And then called it dead.

Let's play pretend and take a ghost by the hand.
Traipse across rusted starshine
And now I understand
Finally

Could you understand why I had to hurt?
I detested the child within me
because I couldn't smell the summer grass any more
and taste the salt of being wrapped up in a ball
Because children don't understand why adults would cry
Being so large and all
And learn to mimic that incomprehension.

And now I am one.
And now I am
one




Just in time to get to work, to get to the Work.
If I really try I might get as many breaths as I want.
My hands feel unusually warm.

That sound means I'm going in circles.
Lots o' bones.
Thanatos.
Why all the crossing threads all at once?
I can't keep track and I no longer care to.


We have lost cabin pressure.

The air is fluctuating freakishly lately. The fog last night reminded me of a Stephen King story...which reminded me of King's cynicism and writing style. Recently, he could be writing my life plot. Including the verbosity and the almost tiresomely inevitable sexual subplot.
Full of mundane details taking center stage as visceral symbols of a fallen world.
Everything is breaking and scattering.
My only solace lately is that for the first time in my life I feel like I'm paying full attention.
The warm moments pass on by...nothing ever stays the same. But with some places like Epoch, we just keep on coming up with verses extemporaneously. Summer fades to ice, ice melts and washes away all trace.

This will not come again. Nor this, nor this.
Nod to Clive Barker for that one.

I've been thinking about the style of Pan's Labyrinth. A little synchronicity I guess.
Take the sacred and profane and twist the contrast control like crazy.
Very good movie incidentally, though the camera work irritated me in some hard to define way.
Too wobbly or something. Also, while flat characters may go well with the fairy tale concept, I think that the movie missed a lot of its potential because of the predictable characters trying to fulfill a novel contrast concept. Fairy tales are all about the black and white, light and dark, but the director revels too much in the gory horror aspects and it consequently comes off as an adult world that's a little too fat to fit into the rabbit hole any more.
Maybe that's the point, really.

I miss summer friends. I miss the fire of autumn. But I am so thankful that I was really living and so the memories are very vital.
I'm getting truly sappy lately. It's appalling.
Maybe I'll go senile before 30 and I won't even notice any more.
Full speed ahead to crazy old cat man.
I'll probably have snakes and fish and lemurs and penguins too. I will have philosophical debates over tea with them when humans can no longer tolerate my company.
Oh, but saying that is just more ice crunching on the roof.

There's the press of skin around me...
My eyes are siphoning the vital light
coalescing neural pathways into spinning bodies, contorted faces.
I can feel the weight of lust and malice
Marshmallow soft malediction like a sleeper kicking off blankets.
Sweet cordial of a lingering smile
And everyone spins and spins in an intermittent choreography.
no particular direction, automatic patterns.
Even when I can explain the why and how of the situation—
boys do this, girls do that, they both vie for advantage—
something is still mysterious.
A Dionysian cipher.
I have to abuse and twist and contort my body until the moment hits,
days of negligent behavior leading up to,
a sudden sense of effortless floating. I am.
Then something else. Again, again, again.
and then the distinction of that change begins to blur into
seamless being.
Undifferentiated.
Dissociation.
Life moves along the dusty ground.

The only terror I find is the lack of traction
An instinctual need to feel the world on a personal level
What is the use of drama?
WELL, about that.
It's because someone has to push the ride along.
It's the pleasure of motion in its simplest form.

This week I realized that I don't hate anyone, and I question my ability to ever do so.
When I saw myself, judged myself, and found myself wanting, I saw the connective tissue.
And I thought about what I would tell each person I know.
I was in a dramatic dip
or just being a dipshit
and indulging in a penchant for finality.
It was worth it, I suppose.
I just kept going on and on with what I would say.
Critical or loving, the same connective tissue was always there.

Sometimes I truly wish that my method of thinking and explication was a little more...
predictable.
A mechanical, logical, and understandable means to an end:
having the ability to function reliably and coherently.
But the caterwauling is just my voice and I'll have to learn to like it.
Stream of consciousness writing is a bitch of a habit to kick.
(cater "tomcat" + waul "to yowl,")

Core jettison successful, overload averted.
Life support systems are all green.
Backup power operational.

I saw light glimmering through a crack in my windshield. A simple sharp flash.
For once, I let my eyes fly out and skitter frenetic across Anyone's face.
I think that I like humans again.
They have their struggling faiths and grasping have-not drives and awkward soft shame spots, but now I just see their faces. I smile, and they smile.

I want the future to sound epic again. It's just a matter of Will.

I look
I sound
I feel
Like a Cure reject.
I wish I could bottle this and sell it.
It could be used like smelling salts.

A mariner, the sea has a lot of power as a symbol right now
because the sun is beating down, and I see nothing but waves in every direction.
When in this state, one is liable to see monsters and mermaids everywhere,
and when you're alone at sea, who's to say whether you're right or wrong?

I'm analyzing my nascent writing style, and I see a foolish, demented hermit in a
dark, secluded cranny of some dead place. I see the style bubbling and
foaming in a cliché black cauldron. He is stirring and perhaps even cackling a bit,
but as he eyes the cauldron he sees an ebullient comical aspect staring back
and determines that the process is in fact in motion according to its own plan.
The bubbles tell secrets about flaws of passion and make an embarrassing pop-pop-pop.

Occult wisdom seems to me to be a very intricate, shiny wrapper on a gift that is only enjoyable if it takes a lifetime to unravel. I can't help but think that such a secret, if any, would only be of use to the elderly initiated.
A retirement plan for emotional security.
I could be wrong. Maybe infinity is tangible in some way.
I can't seem to put the shiny wrapper down in any case.
Digging through more myth like a kid under a christmas tree.

The Green Man, Puck, or some equivalent avatar of primeval natural vitality seems to be the prototype for Santa Claus.
Which would make sense, as a successful resurrection of the sun into a new year would be best celebrated by a blessing of material gifts.
Who says that capitalism isn't religious?
It's just mother nature being ravaged by an overzealous celebration of birth.
The phoenix accidentally starts a wildfire and kills all of the other animals.
It's like Lennie in Of Mice and Men.
Man so loved the world...that he broke her neck.
But I propose a different ending. Let Lennie get away, because even a simpleton might learn if given a second, third, or fourth chance.

What about the product of joyful material pleasure and the goal of the hoarding, nesting instinct? what should the elderly see when looking down at their offspring?
A continuum? Destruction and mortality?
To what purpose?
To improve? To surpass? Or simply sustain?
The time has passed where it is feasible to reverse our course as a species. We can only hope to speed up and survive through our own excessive inertia.
Even if civilization were to collapse tomorrow, and the world were allowed time to restore its homeostasis, we'd end up in the same situation.
Each generation is ambitious to make a new mark, and there is no stopping the generative force.

So instead of hesitating at the start of a new year with regrets of things done or not done, we must try to not only dance on the grave of the old year, but dance more fervently than any preceding generation has on thousands of prior solstices, unto the limits of imagination and sinew.
And we must bear no malice toward our offspring when they must do the same to us.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.
-Don Juan, literary avatar of Carlos Castaneda

What I must avoid: losing myself in the machine, becoming the purpose of the tools that I learn to employ.
The most dangerous trap to subversive do-gooders is success. Confidence and stability. The system to be co-opted becomes so familiar.
So understandable.
And this is the achilles' heel of any will to power, because humans are inextricably connected.

The solstice is coming, and with it I inter all of my disappointment.(More a function of style than faith) I fell back on my disappointment, familiar jaded despair, as an ally during a state of transition. The bittersweet comfort of mourning. So my long time companion, my moribund darling sense of tragedy, I'm about to say farewell. Where you fall by nature, I must rise. But never forgotten, it's just that
your body is now
too cold
to lie next to.

Someone asked me today who I take care of. I didn't have an answer to that.
Essentially feathers and glue.
More or less a fiery ball of challenge to level at the world.

Hey, it's the same old hero plot over and over. So says Carl Jung, at least.
Hopefully I won't keep falling for the dragon by mistake.
But damsels in distress are just so boring!
Wanted: vegetarian dragon or fire-breathing damsel.

And now, to make room for other archetypes to play, it's time for the hero to go gallivant off to nondescript distant lands to do nondescript gallant deeds, until some worthy opponent arises.

Stepping back, I watch myself fulminating dramatically. Including such words as fulminating.
Truthfully I have always had a rational disconnect from emotional discord. I would not be functional otherwise.
I let the line play out for a while to see where it goes, but in the end a more sober directive must take hold.
Force and form. Temperance mediates the dialogue again for a while. Spinning up and stirring raw creative matter to mold.
Study the shed skin, but do not mistake it for the snake.
I'll wrap myself around the cozy familiarity of cyclical thought.
In the background, a stage is being set for the next show, and I can't wait.
For now, it's time to write the program, allot the budget, hassle with the director, and practice practice practice.
The key to enjoyable psychodrama is to bring in a foil, a contrasting plain voice before the rising tone becomes too frantic, to more closely align with audience expectations.
Life is too short to be entirely straight-laced though, so as much as I've railed against drama before, I'm finding myself to be a hypocrite.

A societal sense of shame is useful in a few regards, but it is also more or less a contagion of fear. An awareness of this instinct and flexibility within it are necessary for an individual to become more than the expectations of his or her surroundings.
On a visceral level, however, social breaching carried too far results in alienation and abstraction. The outsider can become a hero or a devil, but is beyond the wall of expectation, enveloped in a symbol that acts like a white blood cell of the collective human immune system.
Just as humans were forced to deal with increased exposure to pathogens when cities grew up around widespread agriculture, humanity will have to adapt to increasingly alienating social breaches due to the proliferation of information.
On a personal level, it is difficult to cope with too much change at once, and the healing comfort of familiar norms is necessary sometimes. No matter how much I wish to create and expand, I cannot afford the alienation and loss of boundaries right now.

tl;dr- I am calming down now. Like a fox!