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.

I started reading The Lost Art of Scripture by Karen Armstrong yesterday. I read another one of her books in my early twenties and it helped spawn a part of my life very interested in exploring religion, myth and their effects on culture and the people I knew at the time. During more recent decades, I’ve separated religion from what Karen calls the arts and left it in a box to rot under the bed in the apartment I lived in back then in Houston. Perhaps part of the present Bobbus wants to summon a bit of that past Bobbus and re-explore those concepts.

Certainly, a mental struggle against ideologues throughout my existence has engendered cynicism. I’ve come close, but I wouldn’t say I’ve ever completely immersed myself in atheism. I’ve always retained at least a small sense of wonder for the ineffable. Karen states repeatedly in the introduction of the book, we cannot discount logos for mythos nor vice-versa, and I am in complete agreement. In fact, as I wrote, religion and its scriptures and ritual surrounding them were always a part of the arts. Just recently (century-wise), occidental culture has moved to quash that idea.

Grinding the ideologues up into fertilizer for the plants on my balcony is the first step. The second is to immerse myself once again in the shifting dialogue between mythos and logos.

The first thing that hit me was this:

We shall see that in every agrarian society, a small aristocracy, together with its retainers, seized the surplus grown by their peasants and used it to fund their cultural projects, forcing ninety per cent of the population to live at subsistence level.

Regardless of mythos and the wisdom of scriptures of old, I still stand firm in my belief that those who want to backtrack into some past system of ideology / laws to solve current problems (at whatever level of granularity) are imbeciles. In the world of art and music, it is equally or even more true. I’ve had numerous conversations with Herr Christián lately concerning the aristocracy and its ties to classically trained musicians he knows, most notably his friend Krzys, an opera singer of “note” from some Slavic nation I forget the name of. (There are just so many of them!)

What Karen states was once the unbending norm, but I posit that the aristocracy no longer exists in any form resembling what it was in those forlorn times. A far greater percentage of humanity have aristocratic beads hanging about its neck, each giving us time out of serfdom to pursue cultural / artistic projects. Logos, or humanity’s success in technological progress, is the plinth on which we stand that brings us up to the level of the olden aristocracy. Said classical purists who cling to the times where only the chosen could enter into and flourish in the arts are living in a rapidly diminishing bubble. Fuck um.

Habitually in Spain, it’s seen as maleducación to directly tell someone you dislike what they have suggested to you or given to you as a gift. I suppose that to some extent, this practise would be considered maleducación in most cultures. Sadly, its effects are detrimental to a relationship. In fact, the effects are so detrimental that I’d place them on the level of, say, binding one’s friend to an outcropping overlooking a churning sea of pus so that a goat can consume his / her pancreas.

Marisa’s sister, María Jose, bakes a fish cake every xmas for the entire family. Of course, the entire family despises the dish, though they are required to consume it. Why are they required to consume it? Well, they wish to spare María Jose’s feelings, of course! So she prepares it unfailingly each xmas. Wouldn’t it be better to make her feel bad for a short period by telling her the truth so that she can move on and spend her time baking something everyone will enjoy?

The spongy wall of appropriateness only allows certain acts to be criticized. Somehow it is proportional to how original or how traditional the act is.

Miguel suggested a semi-documentary for us to watch the other day. In my opinion, and also in Marisa’s, it is awful, detailing a part of life in the United States that we have no interest in. Miguel can revel in it. I don’t have a problem with that. But I’m not allowed to tell him that I disliked it. He’ll never be able to align his suggestions to what is actually enjoyable for us.

For most, this type of critique is reserved for their closest friends and sometimes family. I task myself to break this cultural more. Fuck um. Humans that are close to me need to know when they are creating something abominable so they can either form it into something more palatable or swap it out for a less abominable abomination.

Other sides to this story exist, of course, especially in the case of art and the importance (or lack thereof) of an audience, and if the point was to create an abomination in the first place. I’ve written about these topics before and shall again. The reader of this particular abomination is now tasked with baking a fish cake that is only moderately abominable.

It seems to me that a certain percentage of the violation of nature that I call the human race has an irksome habit. In fact, it’s so irksome, that many a times, I wish for these peasants to drown in their own blood. The paradox is that this habit, in the correct context, can be positive.

I require concise answers to questions in my work, and not only in my work but in other aspects of my life. When I ask a colleague a question, I don’t want a slice of their inner dialog combined with a vague pretension of an answer. If said colleague doesn’t know the answer, then they can kindly point me in the right direction and spare me a snapshot of a turbid inner life.

This malady is exacerbated when the person ostensibly answering my question is of the marketing or idea man ilk. In fact, the tendency of this ilk to dish out a slice of inner dialog instead of giving tight, controlled answers leads me to the conclusion that they all are better off used as fertilizer for my opium farm. To counter my complaints, such “people” answer with enlightenments along the lines of well, my mind is so rich with ideas that I cannot contain myself. Write it in a fucking blog. What you find to be insight is mostly dribble. Someone else can sort through the ramblings to find the 0.46% that may be of value to me.

The illness springs from the storyteller archetype - the old man in the center of the ring who recounts (highly edited and enhanced) tales of his tedious life. This archetype lives strong in self-proclaimed entertainers in our epoch, jokesters and other ego-addicts. My recommendation is to write a book or at least a blog. That way, if I spend time with the ramblings, at least I will have chosen to do so. Don’t bombard me with an inner dialog that you don’t have the willpower to tame and especially when I need a concise answer to a question.

About the habit being positive in the correct context - I changed my mind. They should all DIE.

I’m often overwhelmed by the amount of music that both exists and appeals to me on an immediate surface level. The question is, how do I choose which are worthy of profound examination? My conclusion is that the choice is entirely arbitrary.

Sometimes I’ll elect a group / artist / project to explore by association with others I’ve previously delved into. Last year’s Utopia Strong is a prime example, as it’s a Kavus Torabi project. I choose others because of social association. Lately this means through acquaintences on Sonomu.Club. Historically, I’ve found much to like through acquaintences on progressiveears (and in ancient times, rec.music.progressive). I also shouldn’t forget friends who ramble on and on about certain artists. I tend to check those out, as well, though at times with trepidation.

But again, the previous paragraph indicates over-saturation. I have to thin the elite herd and / or cherry-pick. These decisions to explore deeply, as I typed cheerily a few paragraphs ago, are arbitrary. Last year, I decided I’m going to be a fan of Lady With. I had enjoyed what I heard and also other projects involving the composer, but it took a conscious decision to make time to get into the musical universe of the group.

I’m guessing youth saw me having more visceral reactions to musics and choosing explorations on a lizard brain level. Those days are long dissipated.

Walking through the Pagan Park in Seminole, Texas, or perhaps whilst visiting the casino in Hobbs with my parents, a thought struck and amused me.

Say that living beings (all of them) have some sort of primordial force that various humans term soul or spirit. This premise is frighteningly widespread. I say frighteningly because I see myself as a rational guy who frowns and even scoffs at superstitions. To each his own, sure, but even novel and film related ghost stories give me problems these days. Perhaps it is my decrepitude. I am, after all, several epochs old. Anyway, that is a separate subject.

Back on track - Say that living beings (each one of them) have a primordial interior force. It exists symbiotically with our living corpse, but doesn’t deteriorate with time. Various humans dub this soul or spirit or elephantine farce, depending on whom you ask. It doesn’t cease, however, after the living corpse stops its elliptical ambulations. Taking the Buddhist standpoint, the primordial force passes directly into another living corpse after death. It makes sense to me that it’d elect a being conceived, born, whatever moment you’d like to choose at the same instant of the aforementioned living corpse’s death.

Given this theory, a spirit previously inhabiting a human has an infinitesimal chance of residing in another human. Most likely, that force carries on in a paramecium or lichen. Personally, I hope my personal (I laughingly call it personal) primordial force, wiped clean of those pesky memories, occupies a widely distributed slime mold. How’s that for megalomania?

A recurring bump in interaction with a friend who will remain anonymous other than saying he has what I call the Newman disease and both severe dyslexia and dyscalculia again happened yesterday. I suggested a course on Javascript using exercism.io, a useful site for learning programming languages at your own pace - ie, when you have free time.

Again, I got an offhand comment about js, but nothing more. Same old story, different epoch. Usually, when I get this sort of response from someone, I blink a few times and move on with my life. Some humans and even mustelids are interested neither in taking general advice or in intellectual self-improvement. Specifically, some are just not interested in educational tasks that will take a (even sometimes very small) chunk of time even if rationally they understand it will diminish various other chunks of future time and especially alleviate frustration.

Usually, I’d say fuck um and move on, but this oxlet with Newman disease (among others) is a particularly good friend.

My impression is that there is an aversion here to any learning that doesn’t have intuitive appeal. It’s an issue that pokes at my enlarged and pustulant liver because it also affected me for many epochs.

My path through primary, middle and high school was so easy that I learned no useful study skills. I mastered everything hurled at me intuitively. I received a nasty blow to the ego when I walked into the University of Texas at Austin and not everything came so easily. I had to sit down and feel myself through a maze of knowledge without that intuitive olfactory sense that leads the precocious rat to the fermented mold.

I tripped and found myself sprawled into a world where I had to grapple with knowledge and especially process to reach any sort of mastery. Bastards. Since, during my infancy and adolescence, I was showered with praise for my gift of intelligence, climbing the debris-littered slope probably took longer than for those who didn’t have it so “easy” during the formative years.

These epochs, I’m wary of anything that comes completely intuitively. I realize that is possibly an extreme, but I find constant self-observation appealing. Hand me a platter of puzzles I must unlock to get at the foodstuffs instead of a steaming döner in a paper sack, please. The hunger will encourage discovery.

The appeal of immediacy is undeniable, but just like plunging into a long term relationship simply because another human or mustelid is feisty in the burrow, initial wonder can lead to debris dodging and bug fixing for epochs to come. I haven’t seen a concise proportional measure ’tween effort and reward, but am pretty sure always taking the easy, intuitive path doesn’t work out so well for anyone.

Yesterday, in the early evening, I had a flash like a sudden fever that struck me then left, but returned in reverberating waves during the following hours. The feeling had subsided completely by the time I passed into sleep hours later, but the thought structure it left behind remained. It still remains today.

The collection of wealth for its own sake is an abomination. Moreover, the collection of wealth to pool into a family trust is equally evil. Common regurgitations I perceive are along the lines of I’m saving so my children can have a better life. But what these egocentric oafs are really doing is teaching the same behaviour to the offspring in effort to hoard wealth into a dynasty.

It’s somewhat the same as the mafia strategy, concentrating hoardings in the family throughout generations to no ends but augmenting the pile. The dragon in Grendel floats to mind, but on a hereditary scale.

Being a speciesist, or even a proponent of all life, in general, I find concentrations of power, wealth, or any sort of potential detrimental to what I feel is the flow of life. I can only peripherally understand it from the point of view of the hoarders, assume their motives, of course, but the portion I understand sickens me. I strikes like a fever at this flow of life, which seems to be diverted and diluted again and again by generational wealth hoarding.

Gather a pile of gold and sit on it.

I’m about to use the word should extensively in the following paragraph. Thus, I am accused of instructing others in the way they should act. It could be seen as my own form of fundamentalism. So be it if it is seen that way. I write what I feel would improve the world in general, and in specific, relations between communities in our species.

My thoughts are that each individual, and on less granular scale, each family or even peer group or organization, should to make a contribution from their hoarding to the flow of life. These contributions should be anonymous so they do not cause a fluctuation in the aesthetic perception of said individual or group. They shouldn’t be a one time thing, akin to a religious act of being saved by the one time scandal of letting the Jesus creature into their lives. Direct application of funds can be substituted by substantial acts of kindness. Either way, a portion of the wealth hoard is diffused back into the flow of life.

My seething hatred at those who pile their gold solely for their kin and for no other reason to pile their gold and teach their offspring to do the same has faded. The impression remains. The seething hatred has faded, but I’d still not mind were many of them used as fertilizer. We need more fertilizer around here, after all.