forest fires and curiosity

when did curiosity become spectating?

conversion of human experience into the commodity of human interest. that could be it. resale. well maybe its agreeing to settle for digestion of human interest instead of producing human experience. who the fuck cares. i will never stop learning.

outside of the box is another box. but outside of that box is another box. one day ill get to a space so big that i cant see where the box ends and then ill be happy. really happy.

there was a thought about a title for a collection of poems. the thought about the title was calling it hurricane in a well. sometimes i think life feels that way. everything is moving and blowing and changing but from the bottom of a well you're safe, but you never see the violence and beauty except through a tiny swatch. i think my life is a pixel. well not my life, but the view ive been reduced to. its a pixel. the difference i think is that in the well im in i extrapolate that pixel into a whole picture and it suffices to stop complacent spectate and consumption, but i know theres so much more.

would you really be impressed if you could see the whole landscape. maybe. whats the fun in creating worlds when there's nothing to compare it to. america is full of morbidly obese brains.

maybe ill try and get published again. rejection hurts every day. its like a sour vagina. but when its gone all you have is sour events. at least before you had some pussy too.



i dunno. im very not so pleased. bad wisdom teeth. no health insurance. whatever fuck it. you know what im doing? im pulling bricks out of the wall. maybe if i can somehow perform a controlled collapse of the cell i can dig my way out. lifetime movies do not reflect reality. for the record. please stop watching them and attempting to divine life lessons from bad writing. if you want life lessons just read this: life is not karmic or fair or orderly or entirely predetermined. life is probability and predation and music and chemicals and instinct and fabrication and irrationality. there. done.

go forth and live so that the person coming after you will be denied nothing by powers beyond themselves.

okay. hokey. done with that. maybe ill attempt to reconnect with dcscompton. we havent smashed our ideas together in years. i wonder whats happening in canberra australia. they didnt make the world cup did they.

my lifes on fire. that will not ever change.



///ladytron - "cracked lcd" from russia, with love.

explanations excuses and

sometimes people complain about being alone. sometimes i complain about being alone. but the truth of the matter is that my mind is crowded, and sometimes its a good thing and sometimes its a thing that threatens to destroy.

ive missed you. i write songs about you. i never sing myself to sleep, but sometimes i like it when you sing to us.

im sorry i didnt give you a song last time. id be lying if i said it wouldnt happen again.

today i was wondering where people go when they die, but then i figured it didn't really matter. where do people go when they live. i dont think that question really matters either.

the downside of thought is that the things really worth expending the energy to think about are the most difficult to crack for their density, but also the easiest to hold and so as they sink to the bottom of oceanic discourse they get picked up and tossed about and litter the landscape and become cliche'd as horseshoe crabs littering a beach. and when someone does pick it up and start to take it apart it becomes silly. i guess a better analogy would be the tool set of things a person needs to situate themselves in time and space. every tool box has a hammer. everyone knows what the hammer is for. but learning to use it well is ... is what.

religion is a tent and a propane grill in the wilderness.

i think i should explain something. there's so much that begs to be explored. i didnt mean to be away for so long. hopefully next time ill be able to bring something back with me.

///fear factory - "21st century jesus (pisschrist)" not on the obsolete album, but still sometimes i listen to albums and hear a story and fear factory's remanufacture is one of those beautifully apocalyptic albums that makes hot sex with the gothic romantic in me.

hyper swagness

so i was thinking about the 90s and the ultimate male personalities that dominated it. Mchoughnehy (however the hell its spelled) was the ultimate slacker, or was that owen wilson. Sean Penn was the ultimate sad addict. Johnny Depp was the ultimate weirdo. Samuel L Jackson was the ultimate black guy. Michael Douglas was the ultimate white guy. Schwarz was the ultimate strong guy. Nicholson was the ultimate eccentric (not to be confused with the weirdo). but yeah... the 90s was a time of ultimate dudeness. there was so much cologne in the air you could smell it right through your tv and it was kinda gross.



Not that chicks were not also having their ultimate moment of girl power (right after the idea that every chick who was a feminist was probably also a lesbian and owned a suit with padded shoulders was beginning to fade from dominance) in which guys felt okay with them being important (mainly because they secretly believed that they were still several magnitudes more awesome than the most awesomest chick in a power suit and heels high enough to ruin her ankles for the later half of her life). but thats not the point... the point is

hyper swagness hit its maximum point of enviability in the late 90s. you wanna know how i know? because what passes for swagness now is so far away from anything any normal person who was not entirely wrapped up in generating the power ballading, mosh pitting, sucka busting, im-gonna-put-my-cigar-out-on-a-hookers-teat-and-then-burn-some-bales-of-hundred-dollar-bills-and-then-drive-my-lambo-off-a-peer-because-im-really-just-a-lonely-kid-who-never-grew-up-on-the-inside-but-have-the-weight-of-my-ridiculous-success-on-my-shoulders aura of the late 90s. i mean... not that ive been watching as much as its drifted across my eyes like the stink wind off a landfill... do you think any of the jersey shore people or the gottis or the other rich idiots would be so concerned with topping every exploit theyve ever done every day of their lives.

its not living life to the fullest. really... waaay deep down inside each person on the bleeding edge of insanity and free time is a tiny michael douglas in polished shoes at a desk a mile long with a fireplace big enough to put an entire family into and still have room for their pathetic assets, and he's puffing on a cigar that cost some poor child laborer in a third world country his soul to make just so he could buy shoes to go to school, and as he's tucking his solid platinum zippo into a chest pocket made of pure silk woven from the tears of crucified angels, he's smiling because he knows that he is it. the end.

hyper swagness is dead. burried under a mountain of modern gestures and frittered away inheritances in what amounts to putting speed holes and vinyl stickers and what was once a wondefully thoroughbred piece of automotive steel fit for the Guggenheim. which is incidentally where michael douglas had his 13th birthday. swagger.

///diplo - "money power respect" such a good song. its beat has the burliness thats reminiscent of night time street hustle, but then the string instrument kicks in with its low call that cranes like a tourists neck in manhattan when they realize just how big the city is and just how small the rest of the world is.

i owe you one

one sentence about what i do know for certain. i was belly aching about the world, like ya do, and i said that i could probably sum up all of the knowledge i can grasp with certainty. today i give you that sentence in all of its shining glory:

death is freedom.

that's it. i mean, that is the one thing that i know to be a certainty. freedom from what exactly is debatable. whether or not there is an afterlife that will be better or worse than the one you're in is debatable. but the cessation of life, the end of all thought, the end of the never ending struggle of blah blah blah whatever. who cares. i mean every single day we get along with knowing less and less for certain. in fact a lack of certainty seems to make life easier to live for everybody. the less you really know the happier you are unless youre mission in life is to be all knowing. then you're just angry all day.

i guess thats the part of me that is looking forward to getting older when i start to forget the things that have been burned into my skull and the abuses and the filthy bits of history that refuse to quit. age will erase them and thats good for me. and the world. i think as i get older i will feel less apt to mass murder and more apt to napping and enjoying ... something. anything. that is the unlearning. the switching of dream life into real life.



i suppose thats the appeal of avatar really. screw the anti war message. screw the native overtones of history and genocide. the real joy in watching avatar is the possibility and promise of that one day down your road when your brain pumps you full of dmt and everything you really wanted in life, everything you were denied, everything your mind mulled over when the real world wouldnt let it, becomes real.

that, i am looking forward to very much. what else do i owe you? oh yeah... a link:... well no. no link. i didnt find anything particularly fun today. today was not a fun day. but who the hell has time for fun these days anyway. i do. i have time for fun. because i have no job.

okay heres something useful: you pay for what you get when it comes to alcohol up to about the 25 dollar mark. beyond 25 its all a matter of taste preference and taste is imparted by the individual maker's process. case in point? you didnt ask? im talking to myself? well, case in point... i like whiskey/bourbon/scotch whatever you call it. i dont know the subtle differences but i do know what fucking disgusting moonshinerocketfueltotheface tastes like. i wanted a 1.75 of old grandad 101. the shop didnt have it. i was going to settle for some beam than. the shop didnt have the 86 proof beam black. fine. next step down for me was beam white. it cost 25 bucks. little iffy. its only 80 proof and id run through it fast. was it worth the 25 dollars, just fucking tell us already. it was, but i didnt know it till after i bought the bottle of kentucky gentleman, went home, and poured a glass. god awful shit, but it was 7.50 a liter.

why so god awful? the proof was the same. they both said whiskey on the label. well in small fucking print it said on the kentucky gentleman whiskey and "other spirits". enter jet fuel. 51% whiskey. 49% jet fuel. 100% not worth 7.50 a liter. let this be a lesson to ye youths. pay the extra 5 or 10 bucks and get something that only needs a pair of ice cubes to drink.

dont buy this.

///luke slater - "hectic bag" rolling deep bass and a moment of clarity matched only by driving on the interstate from chicago to kansas city and somewhere in between with a train drawing a line between sky and land on your left and empty fields stretching to infinity on your right the overcast sky breaks open and the cars dotting the road slipping away in front of you glisten like the backs of dolphins in an ocean of gray light.

artistic identity and laughter

so i gots to thinking the other day... this whole process of gussying up the page to make you read more would be a lot easier if i knew what my artistic identity was. and then i thought: how many artists actually know what their artistic identity is? i mean the simple ones do. im sure jessica simpson never wakes up in the morning and thinks "i wonder if people think im a dumb blonde" or whatever the hell color her hair is. i honestly cant remember and im glad i cant. its one of those things you unconsciously attempt to forget from the moment you see it and now i finally have and it should stay that way. so anyway... yeah... does banksy ever wake up and say to himself "am i an edgy street artist?" or does a blogger wake up and say "i wonder if people know that..." no dumb example. other example: basically what im saying is (scratch other example) does a person who fills role X know how it is that they are expressing role X.



if i coat the page in scrawl will people connect that to my personality and my work. i guess thats what i want on my home page. i want to connect my personality with my work. sure it doesnt encapsulate the whole of my personality and probably encapsulates some things unintentionally that i probably would not count as being a part of me for any reason. but... nevertheless the fact remains that those two phrases should never for any syntactic reason follow each other. the fact remains that my work will largely be my interpretation of things and therefore encase my mouth feel. maybe thats why i write. to preserve my mouth feel. maybe. i dunno.

what i do know or have become more aware of is that the absence of sadness in my life and the presence of disappointment borne more from drawing rage from an empty tank than anything else is an indication of an imbalance. i mean if you dont feel sad then you must not be feeling or able to interpret the sensation that is supposed to counter it. children learn to laugh and have a good time and cut loose but im sure if you really wanted to you could probably teach a child to unlearn those things.

if you never really enjoy yourself you never really can be sad. if sadness is part of your life then maybe as a defense mechanism you stop allowing yourself to enjoy things. you start with little things and work your way up to big things until you hit a point where nothing short of someone dieing, like actually dieing will make you sad, but by the same token nothing short of fireworks, while having sex, while pounding beers, while buzzing off of adrenalin from a street fight you won by almost killing someone will really make you feel joy.



things will blip by and smiles will be appropriate but the real feeling wont register. so then as an adult can you relearn the joy response? maybe not. maybe what you learn as an adult and being conscious of societal expectations is the appropriate response. you dont laugh at anything or you laugh at everything that could possibly be considered funny by someone. you laugh so much that you stop enjoying laughing because you get headaches from the amount of focus, the amount of blood clotting your brain, from trying to figure out if anyone will think something is funny. does that happen?

maybe. probably. definitely makes me want to go to jstor and see if there are papers on just this sort of thing.

remember yesterday when i said i'd put links instead of just my own hijinx. thats probably spelled wrong. well here's a link: JSTOR in case you didnt know what jstor is. its pretty great. i used it at least once a month during classes when i was an undergrad. usually many dozens of times a month.

///aphex twin - "d-scape" lets see... this song is from his selected ambient works... cant remember if its the first or second volume, but its a good song to wonder to. its a song you can dive into and it keeps getting deeper not because it is any deeper than say a 20 second segment looped over and over, but it keeps getting deeper like a treadmill gets longer the more time you spend on it. not always a bad thing. some of us need treadmills. just not always the kind you beat your feet on.

the secret to righting the ship

is to forget about righting the ship. its going down. theres nothing you can do about it. you know that feeling you get of being the only one bailing out the water? thats not you feeling like you're the only one bailing out the bilge. that is you and you are in fact the only way bailing out the water. so put down the bucket. take a breath. and make friends with the guy in charge of the life rafts.

or better yet... especially if the guy in charge of the life rafts is a total dick... and you dont have children or women to barter or a gun or even so much as a harpoon cannon with which to spear yourself to a passing dolphin that will swim you to safety, just let it go. if its a decent cruise there'll be plenty of trash or dead children to cling to. theyre almost as good as floatation devices once they stop thrashing. find yourself a nice fat kid (they struggle less) and stay close to him till things die down. instant save. and you didnt throw out your back tossing water either.

nice. i know. if only someone gave you that idea sooner. i myself only thought of it just now. even better than that? find rope or an extension chord. tie two fat kids together. that way when the sharks come to pick over whats left of what was supposed to be your serene vacation theyll fill up on fat kid and leave you alone and also leave you plenty of fat kid to spare till the coast gaurd comes. when they ask you questions just tell them they tied themselves together and thats how it was when you found them. people do crazy things to survive. dont make yourself a foolish exception.

or do. i guess it really depends on who you're friends with.

pictures and links and interesting things

okay so i feel bad. mainly because i feel like this thing doesnt contribute anything to society. well, to society that exists beyond the four walls of my room.

would links help? dull the doldrums. do you remember reading about that in the phantom tollbooth? yeah, it was a good book. so how about this. ill put links to things that are interesting to me sometimes instead of just telling you about it, ill show you fuckers. and then youll be sorry. youll all be sorry!

or not. probably not. so pictures, links , and was there a third thing? there wasnt was there. there feels like there should be a third thing.

oh yeah the third thing... im gonna go back through the receipts and tag all of the artists i mention at the ends of posts so that well no that has no bearing on what you will or will not be able to see. oh well. how about this: you know that time i said it would take a tiny bit of work to make this account of human collapse even more fun to look at? i barely do. its hazy. no im kidding its clear as fucking day light on the belly of a beached albino sea cow. yeah, ill do it. and then we'll really be in love.

///The Roc Project Feat. Tina Area - "Never (Past Tense)" only because there was a 120 minute mixtape once upon a time that had this song in the mix. it isnt particularly good. there's very little i would count as special about it. but the song that was mixed in after it was amazing. sadly it was a live mix on the vaunted, now dissolved and refaced, 99.1 whfs. back when the radio still had something interesting going for it besides the prairie home companion. remember that show? it started off as trancemissions and then turned into zoltar's closet. shit was tizzight. anyway... this song was not great but the one after it that i remember to this day, but couldnt tell you the name of if you held a gun to my head, was soooo good. so i keep this song around to make absolutely sure i dont forget its conjoined hotter sibling.

flat earth round earth

so ive been meaning to read rich dad poor dad. but my current thinking has lead me to believe that whatever is actually in the book itll boil down to flat earth round earth.

flat earth round earth is basically the argument im working on (not really, unless thinking about it all the time can qualify and pass for argument these days. how about monologistifying to myself about. daily. hourly. all right im talking to myself and arguing. there. i said it) but a lot of things fall into the flat earth round earth argument structure. perspectivising. creative writing has ruined my vocabulary. or maybe just english...

so the whole flat earth round earth thing is this: if you live in a world that says the earth is flat you gain nothing from knowing that it is actually round. in fact you would experience increased success and opportunities for success if you at least behaved as though the earth were indeed flat. fast forward to today... the opposite is true but thats only because the consensus is that the world is round.



so where does the modern predicament come in? good question. does a person get farther by fitting into common tracts of experiences? yes. i would argue yes. if your experience is simple to understand in terms that are common to descriptions of experiences in popular media then you do get farther. the more specialized and unique you are the greater your chances for failure.

for a minority of people the devil really is in the details. because they dont fit into common tracts of experience and complications blossom and abound and make progress difficult if not impossible. but in a structured society i guess there is only so much tolerance or should i say "tolerance" for deviation. i.e. if someone has mommy daddy issues, there are only so many kinds of mommy daddy issues covered by common popular experience or media portrayals that will allow people to access, identify, and respond to those specific mommy daddy issues in a meaningful and positive way. when those experiences fall outside those boundaries responses turn negative (like a kid tasting radically different food. their response isnt a like or hate it response as much as it is a unfamiliar [and thus gross] familiar response). when that happens you are living on a round world in a flat universe.

its not that people dont know how to respond as much as it is a response simply is not forth coming that is meaningful or positive (in that meaningful responses are generally posit...) well i just got way too technical. i guess what im trying to say is for every unique world changing personality there are entire country populating amounts of people just as unique or fucked up who will never experience that golden ratio of fucked upness to relatability. thats what im trying to say. flat earth round earth.

basically im seeing life in 4 dimensions and i somehow need to get back to one. enter chemicals.

but before i go, rich dad poor dad. that book. in that book i believe i will read about how planning and temperament and education and savings and taking a longer perspective in general will make a rich dad and that rich dads make rich kids who become rich dads... but i severely doubt that i will read anything that will turn poor dads into rich dads. not that poor dads would know what to do with money to begin with (an argument for another time) buuut rich dad poor dad is basically flat earth round earth framed around money instead of human experience.i think. i assume. possibly. i dunno

i just do not know. im never going to read that book.

the measure of information i know for certain i could probably write in one sentence. that information is coming soon. one sentence. next post. promise.

///amon tobin - "el wraith" twisting turning gripping my brain till it pops into two pieces and then four and then eight and then sixteen and then five minutes and fifty nine seconds are gone and im back to seeing me.

life snobs

for a while i was afraid that what education ive pieced together over the years has made me a snob. like a life snob. the kind of person who turns their nose up at everything because of things encapsulated in the following phrases:

"the book was better"

"the original from (insert obscure year) was better"

"i wouldnt buy that if i were you"

"i researched X Y and Z and this is my informed opinion"

"i heard on npr the other day..."

"i read on bbc.co.uk the other day..."

"thats just history repeating itself if you look back to (insert obscure date and event)"

"that was actually a sample from (insert less known band)"

"if you weight the pros and cons of it..."

"i think you are definitely mistaken..."

"well if you think about it, thats what they want you to think..."

"thats how the system works..."

and so on. any one of the above phrases can be exchanged for simpler cruder and more direct and colloquial phrases like "you dumb shit"... and "that is some nigga shit right there" and on and on so the point is.... the point is that normally i would be extremely self conscious about these kinds of things and go home and worry that people think that i must think im some kind of poindexter life snob who knows more than he should about anything and tries to lord it over his peers cuz he has no friends and sleeps with a teddy bear and a dictionary under his pillow.



but the fact of the matter is... haha what an ugly phrase... how about the simpler answer to this conundrum is that all this percieved snobbery is a machination of being American. Simple as that. America encourages simple, muddy, plain as dirt thinking for the masses. Sure schools don't (usually) but the other school, the tv, does and continually. whats more is that any show of discernment, of critical consideration, automatically punts you up to the ugly "elite" class... those people that are too smart for their own good that fuck up the country for everyone, regardless of what your actual income is. im broke as hell most of the time, but im 99% certain that my parents think im some uppity smart ass who doesnt understand the value of a dollar. whatever the fuck that means

so i guess what im trying to say is that the french aint so bad. or the brits. what passes for snobbery now used to just be critical thinking skills and the ability to turn down cheap and instant for slightly more costly and much longer lasting. the desire to turn max profit out of everything has essentially made anything less into snobbery, when in fact most profits should not be measured in dollars despite the thousand dollar bills the tv smacks us with continually. but thats snobbery. dont be a snob. dont make your own sandwiches because they taste better. just shove some mcdonalds in your throat. its cheaper too so you get to put more money in your pocket. no brainer.

everyone has become so obsessed with no brainers when the honest to god truth is the people that keep the brains in their skulls and turned on have a hard time passing in the world of the no brainers. so many things happen and we have to say to ourselves ... wait what the fuck just happened there... but what have to say it internally because if we said it out loud we would sound crazy. if we said half of the things we actually thought about we would probably be called crazy.

i dunno.... maybe the problem here is that my thirst for knowledge has vastly outpaced my station in life. that could be seen as the problem. if i was a lot dumber. like a lot fucking dumber.... i would be happy as a skunk doing whatever it is skunks do the 23 hours and 55 minutes i dont see them walking across my parents back yard. i would be happy to be at home doing nothing. happy to eat food and wash dishes and mow the lawn and happy to listen to my mom talk about her bleeding fucking toes and my dad talk about how he has to beat the sluts off of his fat disgusting body all day while he works as a phone technician. christ... the root of this entire existential crisis is my education.

at least thats what a no brainer might say. and you know what... in the current setting... in this state of the union... they'd be right. fuck them. my brain is strapped on at all times and it might be the death of me, but god damn it, if thats the case then im ready to die.

///four tet - "Untitled [SAW2 CD1 Track1] (Four Tet remix)" this song has brought me nothing but joy. i came across the four tet remix album in the second lowest pit of my life. it wasnt a shovel. it wasnt water in the desert. it was meaning and reason and design written across the formless mass and black and blue of life's crush. and thats why i still like it. and thats why i still love it.