The tea is made. It steams beside my telephone and painted fish. My palate and stomach awaits a plate of waffles I just concocted. Yes, on weekends, I abandon my “diet”. Fuck um.

Plan!

Does routine really unhinge time so it passes like a flutter in a 12 year old hag’s loins? It depends whether it is an ingrained routine or a “conscious” routine. And I think that even the former can be converted into the latter if one denies the random pathway module of the brain dominance during said routine. The random pathway module is responsible for daydreaming. Or, rather, it is responsible for the inception of daydreaming. Other modules take over, focusing a daydream, an illusion, a distraction from the details of the moment. Yes, habitual routines can be boring routines, but, as I discussed a few entries ago, concentrating on details of even scrubbing the filth from a fork or reorganizing the pinwheel collection one keeps in the vast, yawning, interdimensional gulf between the walls of the edifice you live in can become a zen experience. The focus trains the mind to recognize true insight when it noses out of the random pathway.

Letting the random pathway play constantly, and thus letting a succession of daydreams be the dominant mental state during ingrained routines, diminishes chances that one will recognize any unique insight in the random deluge of debris vomited by what I have come to call the accursed module. Focus should always be the goal.

This also goes for creative routines, such as writing in one’s electronic dumping ground. I consider Martenblog an electronic dumping ground. Though some of the ideas that surface are potentially brilliant, it’s really a distillation of another module that is associated with the accursed module. Most humans would name this module the stream of conciousness module. So be it. I consider it a narrower version of Herr Accursed. So, the focus argument also goes for creative routines, such as writing in one’s electronic dumping ground. A narcissist asshole might argue that I am already focusing because I am writing, but I refer to the details between the words, the act itself, which is below each syntactic and semantic structure. Since the original topic was remembering the details of everyday life, doesn’t the pressure of my fingers on the keys of my mechanical keyboard count? Don’t the gentle creakings from the void between my walls count? In the end, the product can endure in its electronic, typewritten, tattooed, painted, spewed, broiled titrated or composed form, and furthermore the details of the process itself can pass from short-term to long-term memory.

Thank you for reminding me that I should be steeping my tea. Today, I drink Touareg, which differs from my rough draft version of this entry, in which I was drinking Lady Grey. The contrast is sharp, or, as we say in Lakife, hele kotzom. Also, I commented in my rough draft that Lady Grey is tea for an elitist. In some way or another, I’m certainly an elitist. I also made the comment British bastards in reference to Lady Grey. I’m under the impression that all Earl Grey style teas originate from the seed of Sri Lanka. Or at least their idea did. Therefore, Sri Lankan bastards. What can I do, though? They are tasty?

Touareg, on the other hand, is the tea of the common man. In some way or another, I’m certainly a common man. In my universe of one, I’m as common as they come.

Today, I put on Distant Void by Dr Norah Lorway, who evidently lives in Cornwall, a place to my liking. I can see how living there might inspire this music. It’s elliptic, yawning and disturbingly tranquil. In other words, I like it. I chose it after pulling up Bandcamp. Instead of going straight to Puppy Bordiga’s page and listening to his Guitar Works, the feature on experimental music caught my eye and after sampling another that was not to my liking, I settled on Dr Norah Lorway. Yawning. Chasmic. Fuck um.

I caught myself earlier mentally planning what I shall do this morning and in what order. My first reaction was that creating such a routine in my mind for Friday morning was already extracting the morning from my life. My next feeling was that the details of the events I routinize will be lost. Naturally, the remains of the tasks (this writing episode being one of them) will remain to posterity. Well, they will remain in digital form until the heat death of the universe spreads the individual particles that represent them uniformly about the cosmos. That’s plenty of time for me to sit around, imbibe litres of vodka, and contemplate them. The details of the execution will be lost, drizzling trough the crevices of my short-term memory.

As an aside, Christián usually waxes obsequiously at length about the qualities of his dad. Lately, he’s been praising the old man’s organization skills. The guy does seem meticulous from my plump friend’s descriptions. I’ve known Chris for over 16 years and an adjective I’d rarely associate with him is organized. So, if he learns something from his father, good for him. Good for both of them. If his malady is anything like my ancient ways then the most difficult first step is seizing the impetus. I’m referring to the impetus to create, of course. Having my studio laid out before me so I can easily put any idea to “tape” is endlessly beneficial. My plump friend needs to get his fecal matter together and set up something similar, even on a tiny scale. Having one’s tools prepared to use at any arbitrary moment is mandatory for the creative spirit.

In relation to that, remind me to stick my handwritten journal in my backpack. Oh, wait. I never go anywhere excepting to Mercadona or Lidl.

Back to the current topic:

Details were slipping through the crevices in my mental edifice. Indeed. Though I know that the slippage will happen, has happened, is happening because my mental fondue is not capable of digesting multitudinous stimuli. Fucking subconscious filters. So far, I do not know many ways to capture individual details and pass them from short-term to long-term memory. One that does work is to immediately discuss the event with someone who is loitering in the area. That is, make it a more nebulous event. If the mind has further associations, the passage to long-term memory is facilitated. My experience bears this. An example that leaps to mind is a writing episode from 1993. I was sitting at a terminal set up by Craig in the house at Enfield. I typed some pretentious complex paragraph which could be interpreted in myriad manners. I then discussed it with Michael Achenbach, who was loitering in the common room.

So - to pass an event more clearly from short-term to long-term memory, not only notice the details of the process, but also discuss (possibly even with yourself) the process or content produced by the process. There is a difference, again, between the produced content and the process, but they are entwined, I’m sure, as far as fixing one or both in long-term memory. My situation with Marisa worries me slightly in this regard. I can’t really talk to her to any depth about my creative endeavours, as they are not her cup of Touareg. I shall continue the plan of writing every morning until I have seven days worth of dribble. Then I’ll compile it, as I’m doing now. From time to time, I must randomly select a Martenblog entry and consider it.

I put on the album Perhaps by Harold Budd before beginning this moment-dump. I glanced through the review at Samadhi Sound previously. It’s an album of improvisations, like some of Budd’s other work. I appreciate that. Of course, I cannot pay attention to the details whilst writing, but the ambience the sound-universe makes is splendid. I miss multitudinous details whilst attempting to commit the mortal sin upon focus: multitasking. Yes, listening to music during writing or programming or shaving the mouse found between the baseboard and the yawning interdimensional space between the walls of this edifice I live in is multitasking.

I’ve considered cutting out all background activities during my days to try to focus better. This includes removing all the autonomic functions in my living corpse, resulting in the husk that now sits before the “terminal” typing in elaborations to a stream-of-consciousness moment-dump from last week. You see, I decided, to eke along my dissolving habit of writing, to do these moment-dumps every morning for approximately a week. Afterwards, I take them, as I’m doing now, and reform them into actual entries for the Martenblog. So far, the idea is worthwhile.

I’ve considered cutting out all background activities during my days to try to focus better. My good buddy and workmate, James, has got it right. When I put on Aranis, for example, at his place in Praha, he cannot work. He’s not familiar with the music and since it is both rhythmically and harmonically busy, it distracts him. Much like the people I was ranting about in the last entry, James is also a narcissist asshole, but the fact that he spurns listening to Aranis is not a manifestation of that aspect of his personality. I’m even distracted, somewhat, by the sparse piano tones Budd put to platter as I type. The clustered, rhythmic arpeggios of the current piece ( Moss Landing ) are distracting because they have melancholic beauty (the best type of beauty, in my opinion).

In contrast, I’ve noticed that when I’m programming and no music is playing, my mind begins to become numb. I cannot discount habit, however. The mind loves latching on to routines. It may be complaining that I am not following a normal put on some background noise and program agenda. The lack of background information stupefies the environment. Or the lack of this information, though not analyzed in real time, diminishes my want or ability to function as a programmer, or even as a human, or mustelid, or interdimensional rodent. That being stated, I usually put on instrumental music because music with those pesky vocals is much too distracting. A comparison can be made to music that is simply a melody or sparse piano tones without an apparent harmonic backdrop. I enjoy this sort of music in isolation. That is, unlike programming, one of my mental modules does not get frustrated in the backdrop. That frustrated module (in the case of programming) without music begins to shudder and demand that the other mental faculties are taken down. It becomes a narcissist asshole.

I interrupted myself by answering Christián’s comment concerning his current listening obsessions. This time round, it happens to be Brian Eno. Good for him. Not for Brian, but for Christián. Brian knows nothing of Christián. Actually, this also may be a good thing. So good for both of them. I’m happy that my friend is discovering music that I have been talking about, indeed championing for decades.

Here’s my issue.

Some people have a manner of expressing themselves that rubs my fur incorrectly. Christián’s obsessions and his “excitement” in the moment about them is one example. Even if I’ve championed Eno for decades, when Christián discovers the music himself, it is if he was the founder of the ambient institution and must proselytize it to even me. Perhaps I am taking his “excitement” as the wrong thing, but my impression is a forceful “evangelist” attitude. I’m aware that advocating for Eno is not a bad thing at all, but it is the manner that bothers me. It infuses my friend’s personality in many ways. A long list sits in journals askew on my bookshelves detailing this same phenomenon in others, and in myself.

This an indicator of narcissism. Because of it, my friend will die horribly plump and alone in a murky house in South Carolina, surrounded by reeking empty cans of Coors Light and dried strips of his own flesh, clawed away during nightmares of being spurned endlessly by nubile chicks. The wasting away, this punishment for egoism, of course, will only happen once all of his tasks for Flavigula are complete. I will discard him like a holed dishrag.

I should be lighter on the imbeciles of the world. I recall when Lee (whom I still dream about frequently) discovered The Final Cut. Of course, it’d been in my playlist since I was 15 (or thereabouts). It annoyed me to no end that he obsessed about it. He played it whilst traipsing around in his underwear. He sang it ( The Gunner’s Dream, I think ) in Acy’s shower during the bizarre summer of 1991.

Possibly I simply have problems with people who are obsessive and what I see as narcissist outpourings are just a result of the narrow focus they have. What Lee was doing was finding joy in the discovery of something he loved. Or, well, being obsessed. Same thing? Similar? I should give even narcissist assholes their temporary bliss before they either shoot themselves in the head at McDonald Observatory in West Texas or die in filth surrounded by Coors Light cans in South Carolina. After all, I am a fair fellow.

I’ll return after I begin the steeping of TEA.

A concern I have lately is memory. I’m referring to the actual process of memory. It’s actually not a concern of just lately, but of most of my life. Unfortunately, when I address it, my strategies only work for a few days, maybe a week, perhaps an epoch or two, and then I lapse back into a malaise.

Specifically, I’m writing about short-term memory. I have always somewhat had my head in the clouds. Because of this, I miss details as I wander through my days. I’ve tried so-called mindfulness meditation many times. Again, I get into it for a few days, maybe a week, perhaps an epoch or two, but then lapse into my normal not practising mindfulness meditation routine. The new strategy, which is not new at all, but devised by one of the mental modules floating around in my mind-soup during the endless journeys to and from the outskirts of Munich during the summer of 2001, is to be meta-mindful. The process is simple and more reliable than actively trying to sit quietly and pay attention to surroundings. The key is to stamp out daydreaming. This is particularly important during mundane tasks such as washing the dishes, consuming vast quantities of vodka or planning the ascension of the mustelid regime in South Asia. Daydreaming is the assassin of attentive thought. Simply concentrate on the details of each task at hand. The expressive clankings of dishes of plates and glasses and subtle poppings of soap bubbles create a tapestry of sound. The wheezing and choking and burning burbling from your oesophagus are the last music you experience before falling into stupor. The chatter of whiskered muzzles and rustle of fur weave nuances into passing instants.

The space between moments is the space where a mouse hides between the baseboard and the cavernous, interdimensional gulf known only to the architects of this building and to me.

So, that’s the mindfulness of the moment. Whilst washing the caked filth off a lasagna dish or equally whilst shaving the aforementioned mouse, I can pay attention to movements of my wrists, the poppings of soap bubbles and / or the scrape of the razor and how they orchestrate to create an atmosphere. I am brought to the idea that I am mostly concerned with sound worlds. Mainly concerned with sound worlds. Since one of my concerns is creating music (in this particular infinity of epochs, anyway), it makes sense. Paying attention to ebb and flow of warmth in my muscles and currents of breeze on my skin could also be suitable mindfulness opportunities, but, then again, that’d be multitasking, the enemy of focus.

If the reach between what we perceive and what actually “is” is as infinite as it seems to me, then our perceptions during waking and our perceptions during dreaming are equally valid. It goes without saying, or writing, or squawking that our perceptions whilst flummoxed on some drug or another is also equally valid. As there are other shambling physical forms in the world, the way we perceive them during moments of wakefulness, dreaming, drugged out bliss or psychotic rage isn’t as important as the way we react to our perceptions of them during moments of wakefulness, dreaming, drugged out rage or psychotic bliss.

I posit that for the safety of all, each flow of mental information should be separated from its fleshy container. How this is done is irrelevant. Transfer these flows of mental information into digital form, giving each a universe created from all experienced whilst in fleshy form, including daydreaming, nightdreaming and drugged out bliss-or-rageful interludes. This way, since no fleshy forms are left, no fleshy form can cause damage to any other fleshy form. Each flow of mental information flounders or flourishes in a universe of its own.

I’ve always had the premonition that this is similar to what happens anyhow when one’s flow of mental information is about to cease. The brain constructs a completely new universe in which to live during its final moments. This universe is basically reincarnation, and time is stretched to the length of a lifetime for the dream during these moments. The process is, of course, also recursive.

So, see ya in the next life, brotha.

Instead of claiming that something is the best of some genre or other category, I need to remember to use my favourite, instead, not for political correctness, of course, but to tone down all things arrogant inside me.

Boorish when I awake. My nap was useless, of course, since now I feel much worse than I did before. Except for the fatigue, I am the same plus the added symptoms of too much sleep and not enough activity. I am very indisciplined. Solving this hateful aspect of my personality (which amounts to stamping it out) is a giant step on the way to enhancing my 1) creativity, 2) physical health, 3) mental prowess, 4) overall knowledge and 5) grades.

My vigor for school is vanishing. I must, starting today – starting immediately after I finish my morning pages and check my mail – get back into the groove that held my needle in January. I have to play the tune of commitment to many hours of study so I can put more and more chunks of classwork, insipid as some of it seems, behind me. I am awestruck in the sight of those capable of holding fast to a study schedule and churn out exactly what the professors who preside want. They are portentous in that they will get this behaviour pattern through with sooner than I. They are players of the pattern, shaped by the American way and what is right. As I might say, my pattern is smooth, rubbed off. The original was stamped somewhere in my brain, but my conciousness took a file to it long ago. I would not be who I am today if this had not happened; I would be a harnessed horse like the rest, surely, but my own state, on which as maze I must, myself, carve, prevents me, subtly, from obtaining by the same means, what others find natural: IE, the will to work and succeed in society’s mold. I must find a way to drive myself, alchemy myself some social gasoline so as not to jump into a pattern that I despise, but to run along side with freewheels (much like a car runs along side a train) to get to one or two of the same destinations – a diploma, a job and money enough to leave this fucking pit of a nation for good. I will have to borrow fuel from sources I can only barely imagine.

I am a fortunate soul (or rather, spirit flapping like a tattered flag forewarning of coming thunderstorms) in that I don’t have to worry about grades any longer. Regardless of the dribble I wrote on 27 March 1995, I don’t think I seriously worried about them then, either, because most of my courses were metrically valuable. There was a bit of creativity involved in the steps to solving certain differential equations, but not much. The resultant grade was clearly calculable. Life after university isn’t so.

My experience with professional work during the epochs since university can be summed up by what the lanky German dude whose name I forget told me in 2003. That company was Extech. He told me that hirings were made 10% by demonstrable technical merit and 90% by gut / emotion / intuition. I’m not surprised that the company ceased to exist shortly afterwards. That had nothing to with me, of course, or I don’t think it did, anyway, as I was only in it for a quick buck until they figured out I was only in it for a quick buck. It was the attitude of the owner, of the lanky German dude whose name I forget, that killed them.

I don’t have a problem, necessarily, with family businesses, per se, but think the concept shouldn’t extend beyond small, justifiably dubbed mom & pops and the apprenticeship model. When the family business mentality extends into technology or creativity oriented businesses, I’ve experienced nothing but direness. I’ve drifted to this topic because it is an example of hiring by gut feeling or, better, hiring by emotion (or emotional blackmail?). Hanging out in companies that brought in project managers and even programmers and graphic designers because they were family or old university drinking buddies has resulted in my own practically endless personal amusement. This amusement involved watching new compañeros de trabajo, some suddenly my “bosses”, with minimal technical or design skills but sizeable egos, slowly poison their departments. Developers and graphic designers began dropping out like runners suddenly realising their marathon is a farce. They dropped out not because of a sudden vanishing of their skillset. They dropped out because of a occlusion in the workflow of the department and of the company as a whole. The friends and family new hires and their unchecked egos wreaked havoc. Fuck um.

At least I only have one fuckup to deal with work-relatedly during this epoch, and I know him strictly on a professional level. Oh, wait.

This morning, which is several mornings after I first started this entry, as the vim process sits open on the Raspberry Pi I call Yak and therefore I intermittently add to it, helping Christián, as foul a person as he is, with his website reminded me of something Craig used to do, repeatedly, during that other epoch which was my time at Texas A&M university. Were Craig asked for help in something programming or system administration related, he would gladly help, but only to an extent. One, if not several, of the puzzle pieces would always be left undone for the asker to complete. The puzzle would be simplified, sure, but asker for help, in the end, always would have to help him / her / itself at least a bit. Craig would have made a great teacher. I respect my old friend’s behavior emanating from that ancient epoch more and more as I grow into decrepitude.

Concerning the harnessed horse: Since I am currently a form of harnessed horse, I need to sculpt the routine into a path as productive as possible. This is a time of transition in my life, a time that began roughly at the end of 2015. The harness solidified from steamy potential into something that drove me, though I was partly the one driving. My living situation was the other driver. It still is. In a way, it is frustrating and confining. On the other hand, I have had the most creative years since the late 90s / early 00s since the purchase of my blue Telecaster, which I have failed to give a name to, in November of 2016. Fifteen years of debauchery puro, of the so-called bohemian life is exemplary of where a big part of my mind still wants to be. Oh, and Sweet Entropy will take me there again one fine day. Let’s just see how many albums I can churn out before that one fine day comes around.

I wonder what makes my upper torso smell good. On the days I wash my hair (every other day), Marcie always claims I smell very good, but, on the other days, I wash my face, neck and armpits with the same shampoo that my hair is cleansed with. Perhaps my hair influences my smell more than I can reckon from simple observation. If I shaved it off, I would not have this problem, surely, but I shall not. My hair is important now and I can’t get rid of it. It models a part of my personality as surely as the way my mouth twists into sardonic smirk when confronted with mindless blather from a typical teenager. Gandy, irresponsible, lethargic, helpless, immobile, stagnant, fertile, bombastic, burlesque, niggardly – which world does not go with the rest?

What kind of arrogant tripe is this? I am enjoying parts of this ancient journal I’m going through, but bits like this are laughable. I get that babble from teens can be tiring, and I was, indeed, in a relationship with a teen at the time. And if I recall correctly, I had many arguments with said teen about what it means to babble, what proper adults would call small talk. I’m still not a fan even if I see its utility. I’ll let myself float away on the arrogance carpet and say that at this point in my life, I am beyond any need for small talk. Fuck um. It’s possible that I floated on the arrogance carpet frequently during my 20s. I was certainly what Acy liked to call an intellectual elitist. Somewhere in the intervening decades, I leaped off that carpet, perhaps still floating high above the undulating floorings, and plunged into the funnel of humility. I passed through the infinitely narrow tube at the vertex and emerged an infinitely long chain of single quarks spanning the dance between the original cosmic bead and the heat death of the universe.

I just received a letter from the municipal court of Houston, surely declaring that my check bounced and I owe them a lot of money - $150 to be exact. My money situation is grim, actually. I owe Friendswood court $138 and Houston municipal, as noted, $150. Where the hell am I going to come up with the money? I’ll leave it up to God and his little guardian angels who flutter ’round my head like moths around a blazing bulb.

On the same note - I wonder when my Hawkwind t-shirts are going to come in - or if they are going to come in. The email about them was hauntingly ambiguous, keeping me up nights wond’ring aloud about the eventual outcome.

Happiness is a warm, glowing lamp shining on the pages of good science fiction. Drolling is inevitable when morning pages are in the works.

Do I sense some sort of excavation? My senses sometimes evaporate into a sort of ghoul watching from afar. One of my biggest problems is, when trying to concentrate, my mind goes into “meta-mode”, and starts thinking about trying to concentrate on something instead of actually concentrating on it like it should be doing. I’ll be sitting Zazen, counting, and finding myself doing well, following the numbers, then gasp because I was not following the numbers at all but thinking about following them. It is this hierarchy that scares me. I feel my mind has already made up its mind about how it shall work forever and my concentration powers are ka-plooie, no good, wasted, curtailed, precluded, fundamentally fucked.

I’m pretty sure that I never received a Hawkwind t-shirt of any kind. I could order one now to make up for it. I could order three! Having checked with Redbubble, the source of my Can t-shirts, I verified there are a number of Hawkwind ones, though mostly the usual suspects: In Search of Space, Space Ritual, etc. No Levitation, but I paid out of the snout for Church of Hawkwind. Odlično! According to the recent album grids I did, it’s, after all, one of the albums that changed things for me. Though those grids were semi-arbitrary, I should dedicate a few blog entries to going through how my very soul was subsumed into each of the albums scattered within them. Should I make a mental note of it? Mental notes don’t function well for me, being subsumed into the murkiness of synaptic infinity. Should I make a Joplin note of it? Will it come to anything? Let’s stake our bets, Herr Reader of this Rambling Void.

I’m still plagued by the problem I described on 24 March, 1995. My mind is a multi-level abstraction generation demon. That last sentence was an attempt to type like James sometimes talks. The whole of this paragraph so far is an example of the plague I wrote about on 24 March, 1995. One thing that has tamed this savage part of my module-sphere is guitar practise. Oh, I concentrate! Unlike now, obviously. The harmonium emanating from the twin near-field monitors aside my desk, because of its sheer beauty, interferes with even stepping up and down that ladder of metas. However, that is sheer distraction, not thinking about thinking.

I haven’t sat Zazen in centuries. Possibly the last time I seriously did something similar consistently was during summer of 2001, though it was a walking Zazen, performed on my way from the S-bahn to work and back again every day. My breathing and steps subsumed me. I was bathed in shimmering light, dissolved into the quantum foam and never seen or heard from again.

This entry is full of true stories. Stories that bathe you in shimmering light and dissolve you into the quantum foam so that you are never seen or heard from again. The end of ever story is the same, regardless of being bathed in shimmering light and being dissolved into the quantum foam and never being seen or heard from again. They are all tumbling down the same funnel into the same infinitely narrow spout.

There is just Shambal Brambel, sitting sessile on his bed, on an unnamed moon. Breezes howl against the vacant space around the vast pine box surrounding him.

You can’t live your life in a pine box, mister. The kitchen yawned as I walked into its midst this morning, then settled back into some sort of dumb, droning daftness that kitchens are known for. I opened the refrigerator to obtain my morning meal. The garbage can stood like a dungheap in defiance of anyone who dared move it, try to sink clean hands into its murky recesses, grasping for, perhaps, some sort of handle to use for easy carrying.

You can certainly live your life in a gypsum plasterboard box, however, mister. Until minutes before (or even moments before) writing the last sentence, I did not know that pladur is plasterboard in English. The only time I was part of the bubble that is construction (of houses / apartments / woodsheds / kennels / yawning archways to the passively malignant stars / etc) was when I was 9 or 10 (I’d have to consult my father) during the construction of what we later, even decades later, called the new room in the house I grew up in. So there you go, hoss. Pladur is plasterboard in English. You have learned a new word, as have I.

But -

You can certainly live your life in a gypsum pladur box, however, mister. When I walked into our plasterboard kitchen, it did not yawn, nor did it mutter obscenities at me as I reached for the English Breakfast tin box that actually contains Touareg. After banging the mesh time and again on the inside of the garbage bin until I considered it clean, I sprayed it with what I consider the hose, placed it in its place in the tea kettle gifted to me by proxy from Lidl, and filled it with 92 degree water.

I squatted and considered the garbage bin. It was practically empty, very unlike a dungheap, and in fact smelled pleasant. I gave it a small shove to see it if would react. It wobbled then settled back into place. I continued to consider, but this time the distance, superficiality and stark difference between two distant snapshots in a life.

My cereal did not snap, crackle nor pop when it was suddenly awash with a bowl full of milk. I always fill the bowl too full of milk and waste. That excess (that part that doesn’t get eaten directly with the cereal) goes down the drain of the sink. Would I be some sort of phobe in never drinking the remaining portions of milk? I hope not. Phobes are, unlike Phoebes, not squishy and sometimes fun to fuck.

The chair titillates my back - the lumbar part - so I sit up straighter to alleviate the uncomfortable poking sensation - not that a chair can necessarily poke, being that poking is an active action, but perhaps jut, since to jut you don’t very well have to be sentient. I’m glad I clarified that poking will be, by me, always used only in the sense of a sentient creature mindfully willing the act, whereas jutting can be accomplished by just about anyone or anything of particularly any geometric structure.

I’ve mentioned to Herr Neumann many times that I don’t eat cereal. Well - the proof is typewritten for all to see. I used to eat cereal. Obviously not the type that snapped, crackled or popped, however. The idea of the excess milk spiraling down the drain amuses me. It also reminds me of another ancient journal entry where I wrote of standing in front of a toilet, urinating, and always flushing before the stream concluded, attempting to time the whole urination resolution correctly. The connection with the milk is tenuous, but my associative module in the squishy mass of cerebral tissue housed in some cranium or another is always alert.

Pouring the excess milk down the drain also reminds me of the sheer defiance I used to have of any established norm, even in the private of my own home with nothing but a few synths and a guitar as witnesses. That defiance still lives within me, though it is diluted with time and compromise. I long to reawaken its vigor, though direct like a scalpel, not as the scattershot rifle of decades gone by.

Jutting is frequent in sentient objects, I have found. Its most frequent in those sentient objects that are considered either family, close friends, compañeros de trabajo or assholes in general. Unlike poking, jutting performed by sentient objects is usually passive. They obtrude into your space, always a constant burr in the lumbar portion of the back, usually to remind you something must be performed, done usually ritually, habitually and with more and more listlessness as life goes by.

My cynicism certainly doesn’t wane with time. Fuck um.

You cannot live your life in a pine box. Lee asked to be buried in an unmarked pine box. I still wonder if he got his wish. He certainly was, posthumously, denied one of his requests – that of not having a funeral. The loving bastards went and mourned his decaying body just like he hoped they wouldn’t. Oh well – some people can’t be stopped from doing the right thing and fucking things up.

The types of boxes that people live in are what I call bubbles. It’s possible that some of those bubbles are made of pine. I’d say that it’s even likely. The smell is pleasant. Who wouldn’t want to live in a pine bubble? Since the bubbles themselves are a psychological or cultural or mental construct to begin with, the material of their construction is immaterial. So, in this regard, we all live in pine boxes and in pine boxes within other pine boxes. We even live in pine boxes intersecting with other pine boxes. Sometimes the pine is less opaque than it should be. It can even be translucent or fully transparent, though the idea of said box / bubble / whathaveyou might break down at that point.

Decades later, I don’t think about Lee’s demise as much, naturally. The quoted parts of this blog entry are from a spiral notebook written during the spring of 1995. That part of my tramp through the pasture was one of imminent transition, and the feeling coincides with my current position in the pasture. Time slithers alongside differently as age subsumes me, showing me the gelling decades being absorbed into the passage itself.

Herr Christián mentioned that he considers the aristocracy those that feel their ilk, meaning those closest to them, meaning their families, deserve to be in some means above others. In that the so-called nobility in the forlorn times was something akin (pun intended) a giant family, he is correct. Familiarity breeds a feeling of superiority, a group-think nobility. This idea extends from the family to the community and to the city and nation. It is another form of bubble, and concentric bubbles with varying degrees of permeability, unifying in one sense, but beds of xenophobia in another.

As Shambal says, fuck um.