by j-a

Apr, 2002
4-1-02

You all deserve to die, all you people who run around hating everyone and preaching violence, all of you miserable Palestinians and militant Jews, all of you murderers and rioters, all of you government officials who prosecute killing in the name of freedom. You too, Bush. You deserve to die. You all disgust me. The world is fucked. There is no hope for the human race. People are a wasted form of life. Christ is not risen. Jesus died 2000 years ago and that was that. Happy Fucking Easter.
I've been pretty much out of it over the last 24 hours since I returned from spending Easter at my brother's house. All I've done is slept and laid around, not wanting to do anything. And now, finally forcing myself to begin to work again, I find myself in the above nasty mood.


In answer to that guy on television (I forget his name) who couldn't cut it as a therapist and so turned to pop psychology: What am I proud of in my life? What am I guilty of? Being myself. [His name is Dr. Phil, the pretentious prick.]

4-2-02

Trying to get back into a production mode. It's funny how one day away can affect my sense of progress. Yet, if I never do a single thing (except write, of course) for months at a time, it's okay, so long as I do not backslide in the progress I have thus far made (except for maintenance requirements created by the ravages of time, which will always occur no matter how hard I work at it). Progress on the various other segments of my life can then be picked up where they were left off and continued on when I become motivated once again; or not, if I never do feel again that I must pursue these other threads. I make progress, or I do not, but live a life instead. (I make lots of progress in my fantasies, and who is to say that this is not also valid progress? Who's to say that the "experience" I gain will not be useful years from now? And if it's not, so what? It's my life, isn't it? Will I be eternally punished for wasting time? And if so, I've already wasted so much of it thus far, working at thankless, unimportant jobs, that I am already doomed. I see the inevitability of death in exactly this way: we die, and then there is nothing, and wasted time is just exactly that. Dead individuals do not suffer for it any more. The living do all the suffering. That's why we are made to feel so guilty for wasting time; it's the people left behind who suffer, so the living want the living to better their lot, before they die. Working for a reward after death is just a superstition in the service of the living.)

4-3-02

Last night on Greta Susteren's show on Fox, they ran a segment on a cat that was killed, skinned, and beheaded in, I think it was, Texas. Greta was outraged, mortified, and indignant that this had been done. But, apparently, the college student accused of committing this deed didn't actually kill the cat. His lawyer says that a friend of his did it, with a pellet gun, and the defendant [yes, he was tried in a court of law for the "crime," folks; talk about how our courts are backlogged] only skinned and beheaded it after the fact. And, as his lawyer pointed out, skinning and beheading a dead cat isn't a crime.
What a bunch of horseshit to get so upset over, Greta. Now, I'm a liberal, to a fault. In fact, I'm way beyond liberal, and usually, I find myself far to the left of Greta on most issues, but when it comes to these "crimes" of animal molestation, well, I think we're going a bit too far. Yes, it's not nice to kill animals, especially in these days when all of our meat is processed in filthy butchering plants in "inhumane" ways, out of our eyes so that we consumers are shielded from having to know about the horrible pain and suffering our proxies are causing the animals; and, yes, it's not necessary that we hunt, despite the arguments hunters make about thinning the herds [the herds will thin themselves, like they did before humans started to hunt them with high tech weaponry, and modern hunters do not necessarily do natural selection a favor by killing off the best of the herd instead of nature/predators/archaic humans killing off the weakest] and all of the other lame arguments (excuses) hunters use so that they can be out in the woods acting like neo-cavemen; but it's not so big a deal when they play their silly Neanderthal games. And it's not so big a deal when college kids kill cats either. At worst, it's a right-of-passage into the redneck hunter culture. And that's the real issue here. Greta and her ilk express the pc opinion that warm and fuzzy domestic animals are somehow equated with warm and fuzzy humans, and when we kill one, we somehow endanger the other, and maybe, in a certain way, this is true (ala Jeffrey Dahmer killing and butchering small animals when he was a teenager). But this is the extreme; the mean is that boys run around all the time working through their Neolithic heritage in the woods, and they grow out of it as they become socialized/civilized, or else they become hunters and direct their instinctual behavior in socially acceptable hunting ways. And as for killing beloved pets, well, sure, we hurt families, especially the children, when we "murder" their cats and dogs. And when it's proven that we have done this, we should be punished maybe, like spending a night in jail or paying a fine equal to the value of the pet plus a small addition for pain and suffering. But to turn the episode into a nationwide tv event because you think it's absolutely horrendous is going way too far, especially when a jury found the kid not guilty. Yet there are other Dudley Dorights out there who feel the same way Greta does, because, despite the fact that he was found innocent, the kid lost his college scholarship and had to drop out of school. Some do-gooder school official had to have made that decision. Now that's a just punishment for legally skinning and beheading a cat, huh?
This whole incident is silly. We've become a society of people who think it wrong to kill cats, but okay to drop thousands of pounds of ordinance on people halfway around the world and if we accidentally kill innocent civilians, well, it sometimes happen in a war. It always happens in a war! Frequently! And we know it! And yet we do it anyway, because we see the loss of innocent lives as an acceptable risk. I think we got our priorities upside down. We should see the loss of a few innocent cats and dogs as an acceptable risk, but the loss of a single innocent human life as unacceptable. The death of animals is the price we have to pay for our physiological and cultural heritage. If you want to bemoan the death of a cat, get to the root of the problem and outlaw the hunters (I bet you wouldn't even dare to try, Greta), because that's the real problem, if it is one. The boys were only expressing their culture, trying to grow up. Give them a break. But instead, we take away a scholarship to a college that might accidentally have taught the kid some liberal values while he thinks he is pursuing another agenda. (I think he was an athlete.) We shoot ourselves in the foot, so to speak, when we insist on pursuing this pc "liberal" line of "logic." [A real liberal wouldn't be concerned. It's not an issue. Real liberals live and let live.]

4-4-02

Long bouts of fantasy punctuated by brief excursions into tv news, just to check unfolding events, comprise the non-writing content of my life between rare social events. I haven't bothered to do anything at all, or rather, the barest minimum, for well over two weeks now. (I didn't even bother to go out and get the mail yesterday.) Life is slow, and I'm slower.
4-5-02

The imp is across the street, visiting my neighbors. I call her the imp because she's a cute, dwarf-like creature, yet she is not a dwarf. She drives a navy blue, late-model sub-compact car and has a big, corn-fed, farm-like boyfriend or husband. I like her looks. She seems to me to be a very interesting person, not your run-of-the-mill, typical American, nor your cookie-cutter television queen stereotype that everyone tries to emulate.
[I used to call my ex 'the imp' (in an endearing way, of course) because she had this habit of hunching over when she was unsure of a situation, approaching it with a cautious guile that, when you examined the motivation closely, actually betrayed a mischievous intent. Photos of my ex, db, below. (This is not the imp who is visiting across the street today. I see, rereading this, that this may have been unclear.)]

   
another pic here.


4-6-02

Who am I? I don't even know any more. The world conspiracy deepens. I awaken out of a dream. But that's no longer me. That's someone from my past. Someone I used to be. I struggle to the surface, put on my conscious mind like clothes, cover the nakedness of the variegated personality that everyone who thinks they know me never knows.

4-7-02

A friend tells me that, given the way I live my life, I must be bored to death. [I've written of this friend often in the past, never using her name, because this is the way she wants it. She's the only person who knows me personally who knows of the existence of this Website. I wish I could tell you her name and describe her in detail, because she's quite a nice person, and I'm working on convincing her to let me do this, but I haven't yet been successful, mostly probably because I don't see her all that often. She's the only person I allow to inhibit my public expression [other than all of those virtual people I have locked up inside me, of course--and yet, some of them do have real world components], so this must mean something. I guess we all have to have that one (at least) person for whom we compromise our being.] But I'm not bored. Not at all. In fact, when I was working, I was bored to death, with the routine, and with the insignificance of the work. Now, my life has full significance, for me. My life may have significantly slowed down, but it hasn't become at all boring. In fact, this is the most interesting time of my life since college. Boredom arises, not of inaction, but out of an unthinking mind. And too much irrelevant activity can prevent the mind from thinking.

4-8-02

I'm disturbed by a dream (dreams very seldom actually disturb me): My fish tank (but a very much larger one than the real one) is at the intersection of Rodi Rd and the Parkway, but at the same time, as if it is in my house. There are a whole lot of fish in it, all goldfish, too many, as if it were one of those overloaded tanks in a fish store. The water level is all the way to the top of the tank, which has no cover, and the fish crowd very near to the surface and the edge. Although the water is aerated, the fish seem to struggle for air. They "crawl" at the side of the tank, threatening to spill out of it, and some of them half-float on their sides, as if they're trying to get their gills up into the air. Occasionally, one of them jumps and propels itself out of the tank. I stand waiting to knock each one back in with a flicking action of my thumb and forefinger (to avoid having to touch them and risk damaging their scales and protective slime coating). I find a mesh screen that has already been cut to the size of the tank because I'd previously used it to cover the tank when I'd had fish before (in the dream; not in real life). I fit it onto the tank, but it doesn't quite fit exactly since it will not lie flat, but instead curls up in various places so that there are spaces at the sides where fish could still get out. When I awaken, I interpret this dream to mean that my unconscious contents (fish; my standard imagery) spill out of their "format" (tank = mind); they cannot be contained and must jump in pieces (individual fish = pieces I write) out into the world (where they cannot survive, being fish out of water), or else they struggle for air (expression), lacking a format. The "pieces" stagnate in my mind (e.g., fantasies not translated into fiction) and on my Website (traffic is way down, almost non-existent) and when they're incorporated into fiction, it doesn't sell (because I won't promote it). Yesterday, I got an e-mail from my Website host. They're cutting back the free service. It doesn't affect me, yet, because my total file size isn't anywhere near the lesser maximum they've cut back to. But I've been through this before. In a series of steps, my last two hosts cut back on the free services until they forced me to decide between paying or cancelling. The choice was obvious, since there were free services elsewhere. So, I see the crunch coming. There are still free services elsewhere, but moving the site is such a hassle.

4-9-02

Did absolutely nothing today. [Didn't even write this today. I wrote it the day after tomorrow. I'm backtracking and catching up.]

4-10-02

Did absolutely nothing again today. [Again, I didn't even write this today. I'm still backtracking and catching up, same as yesterday, except that now it's not the day after tomorrow, but only tomorrow.] Declared a retrospective vacation day. [That is, a vacation day declared in retrospect, not a vacation day during which I review my past, although that's kind of true too, to a limited extent.]

4-11-02

Steve's pissed. He's working outside, tossing things out of his van, sweating, obviously overly stressed. Marcia sees him struggling and goes outside to be with him, smiling warmly as she approaches, apparently intent upon changing his mood and cheering him up. It doesn't work. I know what's going to happen before it does; I've seen this happen before. She never learns, or else she unconsciously intends for this to happen. Yes. Of course. He says a few harsh words to her, she becomes hurt and a little bit pissed herself, and she returns to the front door, obviously upset, as seen in her changed facial expression and the way she tosses her hand up so very slightly at her side in a gesture of frustrated pique. It's a game she plays: "Let's See If You Can Piss Me Off." She thinks she approached him so innocently and helpfully. If she really wanted to be helpful, she'd stay away from him at these times (forcing him, maybe, to play later a game of "You Don't Love Me Because You Won't Submit Yourself To My Abuse.") In fact, by not submitting herself, she would prove that she loves him, enough to apply sound contingency management principles, because, by staying away, she would avoid reinforcing his bad behavior in the way that she does when she approaches him in her kind, caring, joking way. It's really not all that kind and caring, given her hidden agenda. And it does him a disservice as it prevents him from changing, keeping him locked into his own agenda through reinforcement. He needs a tougher kind of love than that.

4-12-02

Something basic has happened to my artistic motive.
Every once in a while a fundamental change occurs.
But this one seems more than a simple need to change.
I am different. I am averse to doing things as usual.
I don't want to write and post. I don't want to work.
[later note: It was a passing phase, and not at all a basic change. You'd think I'd have learned to recognize this by this time in my life.]

4-13-02

For a while now I've been developing a new motive: reporting.
I'm a reporter, a stringer, a correspondent, an editor-at-large.
I report on the state of the world, and on the state of my mind/soul.
It's a macrocosm/microcosm thing, an obtuse continuum.
I am the local bureau chief for a worldwide news magazine.
(It's a fantasy, okay? But this is how all great organizations start.)
I've been developing this motive for nearly a year now, mostly without paying attention to it. Now, I want start to develop it more consciously.
This magazine is worldwide, not in distribution--well, unless you count the potential of the Internet--but in scope, in that I report on news worldwide. (It's self-definition, okay? And even if it's not okay.)
But the real impetus is the effect of that news on me. I reflect my world, or vice versa, I'm not sure which. Both, probably. Yeah, both. I create the world I know, through perceptual filters.
The net result is an almost schizophrenic mix of pieces (the zine is only the metaphor for this process, not the literal translation of the motive) collected into pastiches, mini-pastiches, stories, etc. incorporating all ideas included everywhere within the purview of my influence, formatted as daily entries, in journals, blogs, and additions to developing pieces, some of which are labeled 'novels'--because it's the fashion nowadays to call any collection of ideas that tells even an anti-story a novel, and nothing is more postmod than fashion, which is what it's all about, anyway, isn't it?

4-14-02

Today's thoughtjournal entry was appropriated into content for a new pastiche. Read it here.

4-15-02

It was a tough winter, all the more so for seeming not to be so hard as previous ones. (The essence of winter lies in the reduction of ambient daylight, and not in the deceptive nature of a relative lack of cold or heat.) The great thing about the warmer weather (apart from the fact that it's warm, which is the greatest thing of all) is that I can work in my underwear. But now that spring is finally fully here, I have to get with it and stop making excuses for not going out. I have to change my focus and shift my gears. It rained today, so I could justify staying in, despite the fact that the temperature was in the mid-seventies. (It never got to ninety as predicted. I should have known.) I will go out tomorrow, definitely. Tomorrow's the day. Great weather predicted. I've got to sync my sleep/wake cycle to a daylight schedule and get out, let the daylight reprogram my physiology, get the necessary shopping done and, maybe, do some discretionary shopping too (even though my discretionary income has dwindled to almost nothing; short term interest rates and low stock prices are running hand-in-hand. I thought they were supposed to run as opposites). I have a lot of projects awaiting purchases. It's been a long, long winter.

4-16-02

Went grocery shopping today, the first time I've been anywhere since Easter. As usual, after I've been out a few minutes, the "inside" "edge" quickly wears away. I feel almost normal again.

4-17-02

Today's thoughtjournal entry was appropriated into content for a new pastiche. Read it here.

4-18-02

The Pope has Parkinson's! Why didn't someone tell me this? Am I an asshole, or what? It's so hard to be politically correct any more. I'm raving on about how he sits overlooking the crowds and drooling, implying that it's a sign of senility, and here it turns out that the man has a disease. [Actually, what's the difference? That the Pope is ill is not the problem. The problem is within the structure of the Catholic Church. (So, what else is new?) They (who are 'they'? Well, his local cardinals, of course) say that he is alert, clear-headed, and perfectly capable of functioning as the spiritual head of the world, but of course they'd say that, because whenever the Pope isn't competent, they're the ones who do the job. It's a power issue.]
Anyway, what's the difference? What does it matter if he's incompetent. When he was in his prime, he was still a reactionary iconoclast. Oh, sure, in comparison with past popes, he was the epitome of revolutionary zeal. But in comparison with the real world, like all of his predecessors, he lagged far behind the times. It's the nature of the profession. This is why religion is so inhibiting: it doesn't respond to the real needs of the masses, except in those few millennial moments when the spirit moves to create a new one. But that motive is always very quickly lost as power brokers move to capture the enthusiasm before it gets out of control and results in something really dangerous like freedom and dignity. Why do I even bother writing about it? It's not going to make any difference.
I awoke this evening after a four-hour nap with a prevailing image of hot volcanic lava seeping down into the earth. I recognized this as my work (and the work of others) seething as it melts down into the soil of culture, causing a foment of activity that changes society as it both reflects and changes general public opinion over, of course, long periods of time. That's an optimistic image. Usually, I'm far too removed from the consequences of my work to realize this activity--if it actually exists. Already, I'm awake enough to suspect that it doesn't really happen, that it's nothing more than an image from a dream, wish fulfillment maybe, or symbolism for something else altogether.

4-19-02

Moved to here.

4-20-02

The music industry is a joke. What happened? It used to be so cool. Even though it'd been ripping off artists (and a lot of others) since its beginning, still, it was a cool industry to work and play in. Yeah, there were a lot of sleaze balls in it, but there are a lot of sleaze balls in every industry, and the more money the industry makes, the sleazier the balls get. [It's funny that they don't know who they are. If you criticize industry sleazes in front of one of them, he (or, more recently now, she--you know, the kind with balls) commiserates and criticizes them along with you, failing to realize their membership in the group. (Or maybe they do realize it, but only agree with you to try to dissuade you from identifying them.)]
Anyway, the industry is worse than it ever was, and all of the cool has gone out of it, transferred itself over to cottage industries in bedrooms and basements where fledgling artists record their own mp3s and burn them onto CDs or make them available over the Internet for free, or even for a modest fee (but then, nobody buys them). It's cool to give away your art for free. It's cool to be an independent artist and sell your independently produced CDs at gigs. It's way uncool these days to be associated with a record label, and it's getting warmer every year as the industry heats up and bumbles its attempts to stop "illegal" digital file trading. The more they try to make pirates out of ordinary citizens, the more uncool they get. The more uncool they get, the more ordinary citizens think it's okay to pirate their music. (It's not really their music. They "pirated" it themselves, from the artists, via their heavy-handed business practices, the fact that they might have paid the artists a lot of money for it notwithstanding. Artists are either in agreement/cahoots with the labels or they are cool--too cool to make known the fact that they hate it that people aren't paying for their music. It's okay not to want people to rip off your music. It's okay to want people to pay your for your work. It's not okay to say it out loud. It's cool to be anti-major record label. It's cool to bite the hand that feeds you. (It always has been. Rebels are always cool.) It's way uncool to let the record companies manage your career. Brittany Spears is way uncool. Man, is she hot, or what? (It's not cool to be too hot. This isn't the fifties any more.) Moby is the man. He does it all himself, and he uses the labels, instead of the other way around. This is the way the industry is changing: power is transferring to the individual artists and the labels don't know what to do about it except cry to their Big Brother and hope he will bail them out with heavy-handed legislation that will only further compound the problem. Yeah. The music industry is a joke, and the homegrown pirates are laughing their asses off at it. [And the administration looks for opportunities to prove it's cool because it needs to get a handle on the current music situation. Think they'll manage it? ]

4-21-02

Big day for processing old journals and posting material to my Website. I finished two monthly journals today, May and July 2001, and I'm working on June now and almost finished with it. [I just realized that next month I will be posting to my Website this journal entry about posting the contents of journal entries to my Website. Deja vu all over again.] I have a Ten-Year Plan to process all of my old journals and post them to my Website: I hope to do two years' worth of journals each year for the next eight years. Then, in the ninth year, I hope to post five journals (the total content per year getting shorter the farther back in time I go). Then, in the tenth year, I hope to post the first eleven years. What's not yet included in my ten-year plan are all of the unfinished and almost finished projects that I want to post (in complete or incomplete form). I should live so long. An artistic vision is a terrible thing. Maybe I was better off without it. [more]

4-22-02

Last night, I discovered that the kitchen faucet was leaking under the sink. That explained the wet basement. It's been raining a lot, so I thought water was getting in from outside somehow. Now I know. The cold water line had a slow but steady leak. I managed to stop all but the occasional drop by tightening down the lock-down as tight as I could. I put a container beneath it to catch the miniscule amount of water it still dripped. Now, I've got to go down and dry up the basement. This is just a reminder that the repairs I did last year that I've been thinking were permanent, as usual, are temporary. It seems I'm destined to have water leakage problems all my life. Maybe this is some kind of a cosmic message. Maybe I'm supposed to be learning something here.

4-23-02

If the Democrats don't dump Gore in 04, I give up on them completely. (I've all but given up on them already.) He's such a putz. He's a loser. And if the Dems can't see that, especially with such a good field of possible candidates available, then they're all losers too. Now is the time for a radical change (ala The Fourth Turning), and Gore is just more of the same old thing, and a panderer besides. He'll say anything to get elected. He wants it too bad. Back off, Jack. Go and prostitute yourself in the business world where they'll more appreciate your "talents."

4-24-02

I have a minor problem: I'm obsessed with a woman. No big deal, really. I've been obsessed before. And I'm almost always obsessed with at least one woman. But this has been going on for quite a while now and I'm starting to wonder about it.
I've written extensively before about how easily I find it to fall in love. I reserve feeling passion for those women who will love me back, but just simply loving a woman is very easy for me. Feeling passion for a woman tends to force me to withdraw my affections for other women I might love via a mechanism that seems to be the positive correlate of the negative jealousy, but apart from this, which is not too much more than an attention-valve, being in love is an easy accomplishment for me. It's when they begin to love me back that things start to get hard.
So, I tend to keep my distance from the women I love. As long as you don't get too close, you never get forced too far away. There's a certain ideal distance, different for each person you love, that you must maintain in order to stabilize the relationship. When you push beyond this point, when you get too close, discord results. But back the main issue:
I'm obsessed with this woman. She's married, so I know I must stay away, because I've been there before and I know the kind of havoc I can create, in her life and in mine--especially since her husband is a very volatile person. She's made a number of attempts, all through her husband (who knows me), to bring us closer, but I've managed to resist them. I know the game, and I don't like it, despite the physical attraction it creates. It's this perception of her attempt to respond to my ("psychically" projected) feeling that's creating this obsession, I believe. I can set aside the attention I will turn on her from time to time, but it always returns, in unexpected moments when I think of her, and always when I see her--from a distance. I try never to let her see me seeing her any more, because I noticed that when she does, her attempts to bring me closer, via third parties, start up again. But often I get the idea that she feels my presence at times when I know that she cannot actually see me watching. That's all I'm going to write about this subject. I don't want her (or anyone) to know who she is.

4-25-02

How did I ever become a psychologist? Or rather, why? I know the answer to that. The real question, the real doubt I am having, is why would anyone want to go to a psychologist? That "need" is so foreign to my mentality. If I were a "practicing" psychologist (I'd have to practice a lot; I'd never get it right), I'd have to tell my patients "Get over it and go back to work." People are such wusses. Everyone's got to be whining about something. (I'm whining about whiners.) But I never felt that I had to take my problems to someone else. In fact, I've always seriously avoided any kind of behavior that even suggested that I tell my personal feelings or betray personal information to any third party other than a woman during intimate moments (and often times I've regretted doing that). So how did I ever become a psychologist? Or why? Well, of course, in order to treat myself. If I wasn't going to let anyone else do it, and I had at least an unconscious need, then I was going to have to do it myself. I am my best client, and currently, I'm my only one.


I feel this way sometimes, when I don't feel the opposite, as if I'm being harassed through social expectation for only half of my split self: I don't belong in this society. I may not belong in any society. But I make good use of social mechanisms like corporate capitalism (for its means of production whereby it can produce cheap consumer goods and entice potential customers via free deeply discounted introductory offers) and the corporate monoculture (when everything's the same, it's cheaper to produce) to minimize expenses and maximize my minimal affluence, all as I participate as minimally as possible.

4-26-02

There's a line from the film Jack and Sarah where, in response to his son's caustic attempts to drive him away so that he can remain alone, Jack's father, a psychiatrist attempting to bring his son out of a deep depression initiated by the death of his wife in childbirth, tells him to snap out of it "before they stop caring." This is the truth I have come to: I've been isolated for so long that people seem to have stopped caring. But this is not the sad state of affairs that the psychologist in me wants to tell me that it is. This is just okay. Not an ideal way to live, and certainly not a social one, but a bit relaxing, if the truth be known. No pressure. When people don't "care" for you, neither do they bug you, when their attention may be not so genuine as they want to believe as they carry out unconscious agendas in the name of social concern.
This is all an elaborate and round about way of saying, simply, that nothing happened again today. My world is at peace, and it's starting to get boring. But I know better by this time in my life not to stir it up, like I always used to do, just to keep things lively. Life is still interesting, if a bit distant, when you determine that you do not need a hornet's nest of action to feel that you're alive. But there's a difference between life and activity. Life is what I do, and what I observe other's doing. Activity is what other organisms do. My activity is my life. Other people's activity is my sense of observation.
Boredom is born out of not paying attention to the intricate details of the life and activity around you. Much happens that we do not observe, even in the quiet depths of ennui (which is certainly not the case at this time in my daily life). I am quiet, living peacefully, productively, a bit off schedule, but I have not been meditating so much lately, which is a disgrace (dis-grace). In meditation, you attend to the minute distinctions that life offers. I'm going to have to settle down even more and begin my life anew. I'm going to have to start meditating again in earnest, instead of in the token way I have fallen into the habit of (non)doing.


Here's a minor problem that's been disturbing me that I haven't been wanting to face up to: 1) I'm not getting to the things I really want to do because they're too far down on my scheduled list of priorities. I've tried a number of strategies to solve this problem over the years, none with success: a rotation schedule where I do everything on my "daily" list before starting it over again (but this lets too much stuff that really does need to get done daily wait too long, and when I split the list into primary and secondary items, intending to rotate the secondary, I never get to the second part); 2) separate days for different kinds of work (it never works, because I need the discipline of doing the same thing every day, otherwise I forget about what I'm trying to get done); 3) doing the stuff I really want to do first (i.e., as a matter of immediate interest as opposed to longer term intelligence, i.e., attacking big tasks bit by bit, which is what my priority system is all about in the first place, that and getting done the maintenance tasks that I tend to put off until too late if I do not schedule them as priorities, thinking they are not so important until they become important through neglect--but this doesn't work, because I never get to the schedule at all if I do what I really want to do. There's wanting and there's wanting. Hmm. Maybe this is the problem, wanting.)
But there's one thing I haven't tried that will certainly work: work longer hours. Somehow, when I get a certain amount of work done, I feel relieved, justified, and I go about the rest of my day in peace. But it's not really peaceful when you've got this idea in the back of your mind nagging at you that you'd like to do all these other things that you never get to. And if you've felt this way for twenty or thirty or forty years and you're still not managing to get to them, then it's pretty much a given that you're not ever going to. But I will not give up. I will persist, and maybe one day I will hit upon the method that will allow it all to happen. Meanwhile . . .

4-27-02

I've discovered (or realized) that as I meditate I can maintain, at the same time, at least four separate threads of consciousness: 1) the basic meditative state, i.e., a state of non-thought; 2) an awareness (perception) of the environment, e.g., such events as dogs barking or birds singing; 3) music, as if a song plays in my mind like it would be playing on a radio, without conscious attention directed toward it, i.e., I can "hear" a song and even the words to it without attending to it in such a way as to break the meditative state; 4) ideas, i.e., actual thoughts that run like a tickertape through the meditating brain. This fourth thread, that of conscious thought, is not considered by purists to be meditation in the strictest sense, since meditation is, by definition the cessation of conscious thought, but in my experience, after a state of meditation is achieved and then conscious thought is begun again, it can be observed as if from a detached state, as if it were someone else who was doing the thinking--and it is. And anyway, purism is a concept itself antithetical to meditation.

4-28-02

We plan ahead. That way we
don't do anything right now.
 
Kevin Bacon,
Tremors
After a long, productive week, I take a hot shower and plan to spend a long time in bed asleep. Although my sleep episodes have been frequent lately, they haven't been so long, so I think it's time I correct that situation, at least once. I fall asleep at 2:45. My sleep is interrupted by firecrackers, which, at first, I thought was gunshots. Several times I am awoken by what I decide really are firecrackers, especially when a string of them are set off. The people across the street were partying when I went to bed. I resist becoming upset as I twist around to look at the clock. 4:30. Why the hell would anyone be setting off firecrackers in the middle of the night?
I awaken suddenly at exactly 8:00 out of a strange dream about attending high school on the last day of my senior year and being made by a good-looking woman teacher, as a requirement for graduation, to attend a gathering of students in an aisle in a grocery store ¥ (which was the classroom) where we are each put on the spot to relate what we learned and what we will do with our future. Three other male students and I are required to sit at the end of the aisle and made to wear special hats, because we are the near-incorrigible students. One of the hats we are made to wear has an erect penis on it. None of the other guys will wear it, but I willingly volunteer, stating that I'd be proud to wear it, but I say that I think it would have been more appropriate to have put an asshole on it. Everyone laughs, including the teacher. I awaken, and for a moment I lie peacefully humored, trying to decide if I want to get up or if I want to remain in bed. Then, it strikes me: there's a movie on that I want to see. I think, at first, that I already missed the beginning of it. But then I remember that it's on at 8:30. I turn on the tv. I remember that it's on USA, but I can't remember what it is. I turn to the USA channel. Tremors is on, but that doesn't tell me anything. Tremors is always on. I rush out to the computer, turn it on, and wait for it to boot up so that I can check my almanac where I listed the movie. Meanwhile, I return to the bedroom to do a few preparatory things. I think about the firecrackers and realize that I'd been wrong, that they hadn't been setting them off in the middle of the night, but in the middle of the afternoon. Well, then, that's okay, I think. As I'm heading back out to the office, I am brought up short by the realization that it's not 8:00 pm, but 8 a.m. I fell asleep at two in the morning. I think this is funny and I begin to laugh at my foible. The sky is gray because it's overcast, not because the sun is setting. Either that or I slept for twenty-nine hours. Back in the bedroom, I switch the tv to the tv guide channel. Yep. It's eight am. Might as well go and do some work, now that I'm up. And they were setting off firecrackers in the middle of the night, the pricks.



The first thing I do every day is to plan my schedule. I plan ahead. That way I don't ever have to do anything right now. That's the way I would have said it. The way Kevin Bacon said it makes it seem too imprecise. Scheduling is a fine art. If you want to take the best advantage of the practice, you have to be exactly correct in the way you word everything. Plans and goals are most easily achieved if the words you use are formed with precision. If formed perfectly, you don't have to (consciously) do a thing because your subconscious mind will direct you to the tasks without your awareness. Often I come to the realization, after the fact, that I have accomplished a whole lot of what I wanted to do months or years ago, because I planned it all and then subsequently forgot about the plans. This is why I plan, so that I can be freed of the burden of their desire. If they come to be, fine, if they don't, well, maybe they weren't such good ideas in the first place, or maybe they weren't planned with enough precision. Re-plan, then, and let them go again. Life is easy when you live well within your mind.


Continual repetition of the news all day long on at least three stations is one thing (and maybe a good thing at that, being, if repetitious, at least informative--in theory), but it's pretty bad when, on the weekends, we have to watch news reruns because there's not enough news happening to fill the programming time--or rather, there's not enough news considered good enough by the programmers to attend to. There's always plenty more news that we ever actually see on monoculture tv.


I think the public and the news media are missing the point re priests and pedophilia. Yes, pedophiliac priests should be reported to the authorities immediately. That should go without saying. (But it doesn't--because everyone is saying it, over and over again, on television--and they haven't been reported anyway.) Bishops should be indicted for conspiracy, at least, if they let priests off the hook. But to kick them out of the Church with a zero-tolerance policy? I can see why the Church hierarchy is having problems with this one. Whatever happened to the concept of the Mother Church? Is it becoming the Father Church now? And a severe Calvinist father at that? The whole point of entering the priesthood (apart from the fact that it was a vocation, a calling, which has often been, I suspect, an excuse) has been to gain a certain protection from the severity of the big bad world. Priests, as long as they were repentant and submissive to the authority of the Church, were kept within the flock, protected, separated from the sources that tempt their evil inclinations perhaps, but included within the fold, to be sure. Public opinion, at least in the United States, seems to want to undo this, in the name of moral outrage and a pretense at piety. (Piety is almost always a pretense.) But the whole point of the Church is that it's a sanctuary from the evils of the world. When you join the Church, it's because you want protection (and, of course, salvation). Now, the public wants to reverse this function. It's easy to understand why the Church fathers are reluctant to give in to the demand to kick wayward priests out (over and above the fact that they have so few priests to begin with). The suggestion strikes at the very heart of the meaning of the Church. I'm not a churchgoer (or even a member), but I understand the necessity for retaining priests (and penitent members as well). There must be (for the weak people of the world; not for me) a place where people can belong, without reservation, so long as they remain subservient, of course. (This is the main reason I don't belong in the first place. Subservience is for wussies.) And if this place is not the Church, then where? There is no other place in society, with the possible exception of our mothers. (Most of them. But maybe not mine. Which is a possible explanation for why I am so goddam independent and isolated.) But our mothers don't live forever, but the Church does. And as for the difference between priests who defile young kids as compared with those who entice/are enticed by sexually active teenagers, of course there's a difference. Okay, Imus, maybe there's this wide gray area where the two classes overlap, where some teenagers are as innocent as preteens or preschoolers, but there's a huge population of kids who are not so innocent, and it's among this population that the difference lies. It's not so terrible a crime to have sex with one of this latter group as it is to have sex with one of the more innocent. Of course, who's going to make that determination? This is why we have statutory rape laws, so that the matter is arbitrary, so that we don't err on the side of understanding, because civil society must be careful not to be too lenient and forgiving. That's religion's business. Or it's supposed to be, Any more, I don't know. Not if the American people have their way. American religion is becoming more and more strict. Strictness is not only the realm of the fundamentalist any more. Now, the Catholics are joining the crowd. Pretty soon, it will be the New Age movement. And then? Who knows? Maybe the ACLU. (They're kind of a religion.) Christianity is dying. But what can you expect? Jesus warned us about false Christs. He must be turning over in his heaven by now.

4-29-02

At Play in the Valley of Jezreel.

The journey is the reward.
 
Taoist saying
I've got to keep this in mind: plans and goals are not the point. The point is the daily activity. What you do is what you do, not for the purpose of getting somewhere, but for the doing.
A newsletter I get is running a thread dealing with Website development v. design. One guy writes that he went to a design seminar where, instead of actual design, he was taught to play.
His point was that he expected to be taught some serious design skills. But, as he participated in the exercise, he remembered what it was like in college, before he became a professional.
Art, in its most creative form, is play. We take the world, especially the business world, so seriously that we forget to have fun. The designer realized he wasn't having fun in his work.
Duh. So what else is new? America has forgotten how to have fun, me included. (I have to keep reminding myself.) My journey, my daily life, is supposed to be an expression of my freedom.
Instead, I'm chained here to my computer, which I love, don't get me wrong, but it's become an obligation--unless I can keep in mind that it's a game I play, to keep from having to work.
This is what I do, this is my purpose, not posting my life to a Web site bit by bit, hoping to one day get the backlog posted, not completing the big goal, but doing it, day after day, happily.
My Website is actually one complex "blog" of my life, as if I'm surfing life instead of the Net, making notes as to where I've been, logging it all in my journal and transferring it to the site.
If I never get it all done, who cares? (I do.) But at least I got a lot of it done. At least I'm on my way. And that's the point I've got to keep in mind. I'm may be going nowhere, but I'm going.
When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to be able to say that throughout my life, mostly, I've had fun. And if I then think the fun is over, I must remember: funeral is an anagram for real fun.

I dreamed this morning that I am out in front of my old house (6023) going through bags of old clothes that my mother is throwing out. I find a lot of clothes I want to keep. They're outdated, and some of them would no longer fit me, but I want to keep them anyway. Why? Because I like them. They appeal to me, to my sense of color and style. We're so practical, especially when it comes to things we think need to be discarded, like old clothes, or worn but functional furnishings, or old toys...whatever. We don't want a lot of things around cluttering up the place, if their only purpose is to have fun with (appreciate). If, otherwise, they are useless, especially if they look worn and dilapidated, pitch them. This is America: throw it out, buy new stuff, tear it down, build a new one; we're a pathological consumer society. I go inside the house and it becomes my older house (1728). In the kitchen, on the stove, I play with cooking food, as if it's an art. (It can be.) I'm so practical any more when it comes to cooking. Cook it, eat it (or eat it raw), and get back to work. I go upstairs into the front bedroom where I get out all of my old portfolios and review stacks and stacks of art¥ that I had done (far more than I really have). Then, I get out my old supplies and begin to experiment, not trying to produce any images or specific effects, but just applying paint and clear-coat to sections of paper and wood panels. Gene Wiegel comes into the room and appreciates me for the work I am doing. (He was always a common-sense, yet artistic and playful kind of guy.) Some of the clear-coat runs down the wood panel and I walk casually around to the other side, figuring I have plenty of time to catch it before it runs off onto the floor, but there's a hole in the middle of the board that I hadn't seen and as the liquid is about to run through it, Gene points it out to me just as I see it myself. [He and I are aspects of the same person, either 'me,' i.e., my ego (psychologically), or a meta-personality (metaphysically)]. I hurry around to catch it just in time, telling Gene that I figured I had plenty of time until I saw the hole. There's a flaw (a hole) in my theory of play somewhere, but I'm not sure where it is, i.e., I don't yet see it, and won't until just before it's too late. Maybe it's the fact that you can't play around when the world is about to blow itself to smithereens.

I got up to begin working at six am, but I didn't feel like it, so I went back to bed to meditate. There's a point I get to when I meditate, after about five minutes, which I will either get past and go on to a good session, or I will not and end up wasting my time. (But it's my time.) It has to do with how I perceive myself and the "outside" world. For a lot of years I tried (a basic mistake, trying) to "search" (another basic mistake) for "something" (I didn't really know what, of course, because if I had, I wouldn't need to search) "outside" of myself, i.e., in that "space" before my closed eyes. (Concepts are so difficult to explain re meditation, experiences defying labeling and conceptualization. Thus all of the quote marks.) A few years ago, I realized that the "space" was not really there, that what I was "seeing" (experiencing?) was actually my retina, or my "mind," or "something." But, during the best of my meditation experiences, when I actually do "see" "something," "it" always comes "out of" that "space," and since it doesn't exist, I conclude that "it" comes from a "place" between the two areas, my retina/eyes and the "real" world "outside," sort of like in the movie Poltergeist when stuff comes out of thin air above the stairs and drops to the floor, except that "my" "stuff" doesn't drop, but twirls and floats, bespeckled with points of light, more like the cloud that stuff comes out of in the movie than like the objects themselves. It's easy enough, early on in meditation sessions, to attribute this floating "matter/energy" to visual and/or cortical effects, but as it progresses, and especially as it transitions into various "tunnel-like" phenomena, it becomes obvious that it transcends mere physical/physiological bounds--in a way analogous (or identical) to the difference between my mind/retina and the "outside" world.
I like to play with these images in meditation. But sometimes, I get so serious about it. (I've been serious for so very long now, at least throughout the winter. This is what the winter does to me.) I get serious because I feel that if I have any chance at all of living beyond death, it is via the experiences I have and the "things" I learn during meditation. I don't know if this is true or just another religious superstition, but I feel that it's my best hope. Certainly better than the Christian mythology or winning my way to heaven by dying in a holy war. But play is better. If we're only here for a short time and then we're gone forever, it's better to play than work so seriously. And if God expects us to be serious, then I rather go to the devil. But I suspect that, if any of that is true at all, it's the other way around. What greater punishment could there be than to have to maintain a serious work ethic for the rest of eternity?

4-30-02

Originally, the idea for the name 'thoughtcurrent,' the title of my intro page, was that it was a reflection of my current thought, that which was running through my brain at the time, like a river or electricity flows. It was intended to be the current journal, which moved to the thoughthistory section as each new month began. It still means this, but now it also reflects a 'past current' (I like that phrase; it's a kind of koan*), since I've begun to log all of my past journals and record the entries on this page as I post them to the site. As I reread and process those old journals, those thoughts become my current thoughts, so . . . It's a never-ending process, thought--and current. You can't really ever separate past from present. The nature of thought disallows it. Memories (a figment of the past) themselves are a little tricky. It's been scientifically established that we don't really remember so much as we create new experience from the "memories" we have, altering them to a degree to reflect our current thinking, creatively and subtly rewriting our past as we go along. So, current thought is an amalgam of past and present, and, who knows what else? Maybe even future. I'd like to start a Web page entitled 'thoughtfuture,' but I don't know what I'd put on it yet.

* I've always "gotten" the idea of koans, when others around me were perplexed. When I was young, before I even knew what 'koan' meant, I appreciated apparently "illogical" statements. (Koans transcend logic.) Something about my basic nature grasps the transcendent essence of existence that koans represent.

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