I decided to re-read the Foundation books by Isaac Asimov. I half jokingly write re-read because I don’t believe I have ever read even the initial trilogy in its entirety. Following a suggestion by Isaac himself somewhere near the aorta of the internet, I begun Prelude to Foundation a few days back. It’s puttering along quite nicely. Psychohistory is it its infancy. Or, rather, psychohistory has been conceived and its gestation will crescend during the curve of the story. Or that is what I predict. Another book bridges this one and the original series.

Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.

Here is a succinct way to state something that even Shambal, swaying strangely, half erect in his slumber in his sessile spot, could believe. The force of rumour is a hurricane. It leaves scorched earth in its wake. Well, at least it leaves modified earth in its wake. It leaves a swath of humans with changed opinions concerning the purpose of life in its wake.

The context in the novel is a conversation Heri Seldon has with the Emperor, whose name I have forgotten. Hari is required by the elite to predict the future with mathematics by employing a system he calls psychohistory. Being a abstract approach, he finds the request impossible to follow. I suppose that will change as the story progresses, but I hope with reasoned steps.

As an aside, I do appreciate Asimov’s style. He takes science very seriously. He is meticulous and I can imagine he revised his work time and again until anything that could be cross-referenced was consistent. Another author of his ilk is Larry Niven. I suppose the appropriated name for this genre is hard science fiction. I’ll harden you, baby.

The self-fulfilling prophecy, to me is like semantic drift. A equally very clever or very daft human begins using a word or phrase in a manner at an angle to it original meaning. His, her or its use spreads to his, her or its local peer group, then exponentially from there. Mostly these turns of phrases stay localised and confound newcomers. They are shibboleths, in a sense. Spreading further abroad in space and time, a whole segment of a dialect can change, however.

If Hari predicts a fecund future and as he does so, possesses sufficient valuation for his message, half-astrology or not, to be believed, the future will come. Humans will work towards it collectively, even unconsciously. The power of hidden desire is a force to be grated up and fed to your cyborg ocelot on a Tuesday evening after guzzling brandy and rubbing the skin of your buttocks raw on your expensive rug bought specifically to impress loose chicks but now serves as the home for countless microscopic insects and dead portions of the aforementioned buttocks.

To know what the future holds, in even the most general and probabilistic way, would serve as a new and marvelous guide for our actions, one that humanity has never before had.

Isaac sums it up with that sentence again a bit more succinctly that I may have in my previous paragraph.

Black Swans that uncurl their necks and open their fetid beaks to yowl are stumbling blocks. As the rush of humanity striving for a singular, even utopian future bounds downhill at a frightening pace, the possibility of strange crevasses wrecking momentum grows. The blunder towards the singularity is mostly unconscious. Our species is the steed and a dream holds us by reins. Dreams shift unpredictably. Mr Black Swan swallows some of us. Those devoured are shat out to stagnate forever on the slopes. Insular cultures sprout from the dung.

Hari will leave certain worlds behind. I am sure of it. These worlds will be the backwaters. They’ll be the Fort Stocktons and Cold Brooks. The shitholes bereft of expansive culture. Mr Black Swan, why have you kicked humanity in the larynx once more?

Fuck the backwaters. I’m sitting on the multi-dimensional head.

Before Shambal knew with any clarity he’d be sessile for centuries, he was a man of ephemera. He’d still be were it not for the condition keeping him tied to a hovel in a wasted land. His own waste continues to churn beneath him to create power and a superficial luxury. Robotic apparati scuttle, clunking here and there, often even tidying up and bringing him required quantities of comestibles. The quantity is immense. In order to excrete enough to power his small hovel, including the ancient batteries on which his mechanical company feed every late evening, he must consume constantly. His gastrointestinal system has evolved quickly over centuries to create dense, fibrous feces full of nitrates. Tubes routed to engines rattle in mock digestion. Shambal himself is a tube. During waking hours, he is acutely aware, even with myriad intellectual distractions, that he is simply a processing plant.

In one infinity of quantum universes, Shambal is from Tanzania. In the one of which I write now, he is a Spaniard. In every quantum universe, he ends in his hovel, sessile. Thank the rings of Neptune for convergence. Like in the Tanzania branch, he was born into a sordid aristrocracy. The vast family spread its tentacles from the nucleus of Almogía, a white and brown pueblo. Their feelers poisoned Malaga and even as far as Sevilla and Cadiz.

A dynasty is similar to a religion. A dynasty is similar to a fundamentalist religion. Shambal’s family indoctrinated him. Shambal’s family burned their legacy into his brain. Any deviation from it was heresy. Devations were blasphemy against the perpetuation of an idea, no matter how ludicrous. And, after time, after his pampered childhood and his elitist adolescence, Shambal saw the whole pattern of life ludicrous. Ludicrous was painted on every path behind him, on the entrace to every corrador backwards, back into the shell.

Perpetuating a dynasty constructs the shell. In parts, it is thinner, in others, thicker. Relations outside of the shell are less or more tenuous, but always tenuous. Even the thickest of cords connecting Shambal to the exterior were easily severed from denizens of the interior. Lasting bonds only resulted by bringing others inside, and never letting them escape. Shambal saw this again and again and the horror and despair from both sides. He finally fled through a crack in the shell that would have eventually sealed him from the outside forever. After a certain point, usually a certain age, the denizens only nurtured those of the interior. Their world was small, but coherent to them.

The traditions of Spain struck Shambal as antiquated and stagnant. The world was moving on. That is to say, human culture was moving on. It never could quite regress to a state of olden times, good old days or rural greatness. Those times were the past. They were etched into the past. No matter how humans tried to recapture them, the recreations were fake, as the species’ expansive culture had outgrown them. Shambal knew dynasties were regressive, or at least sessile, ironically enough. They become more and more hefty until their movement both intellectually and creatively could no longer be set adrift.

In his vast lifetime, Shambal never uttered the word adrift with negative connotations.

He mumbled to himself once, during the end of his adolescence in Almogía:

I see the shell of my dynasty like gauze. Time and again, it tightens, or perhaps it is just my perception as my mind grows increasingly curious of the outside. The gauze filters outside stimulation increasingly granular until I catch only smatterings of fragmented scents. The denizens do it unconsciously. I am like the beloved son still connected umbilically to a possessive mother.

He cut the cord.

From the outside, Shambal saw his life before as a stone in an endless ocean. The stone rose magnificently from the waves and was even nearly impervious of them. To the brief lives of most on the outside, it was unchangeable. The ocean’s contrast was stark. As liquid is to solid, the pace on the outside was immense.

Many centuries later, Shambal wrote:

Spain is both alive and dead with dynasties. They pervade and separate, unite and spurn. We were encouraged subliminally, almost hypnotized, certainly brainwashed to create our own. A stone is a cottage or villa or apartment you purchase. A vast ocean of liquid is going from one rent to another, never settling down like in olden times. I wanted to outpace my retrogressive environment. The denizens held me as long as they could, but when I finally broke, I severed the cord for good. My mother shrieked from her grave, as if she’d felt the knife.

As I candidly continue from another curious day:

I try to never order the same thing twice in a row at a restaurant.

I do go to restaurants time and again. I resist mightily the urge to stab contemporary clientele with soiled utensils. Soiled utensils are the best if you go through with murderous intentions since it infuses victims with your silava. This liquid, which flows freely from a crevasse beneath your lolling tongue, is like a tattoo you force upon another person. You can even do without the cutlery, stand erect or slumping slightly on your table, and begin distance spitting. Practising beforehand at home is recommended. The targets you tattoo will be revolted, but, as your spittle soaks into their souls, they come under your control. Soon, after a few weeks of patronizing various cafés, you’ll lead an phalanx of stolen bodies. Victory! The death of this decaying culture is dripping from your moistened lips.

I am not the cunt I used to be, so I don’t insist on ordering radically different plates everytime I frequent a place. The stagnation that is going to Polo every time I attend to my Prague itch wore me down for years and I feel a bit of shame for it. The majority of our evenings there saw us ordering Křidelky. Those severed chicken limbs never seemed to taste better. Tradition it was, time and again. Fuck um. I didn’t even break the ritual last I was in the smoke fouled bar.

Spain is a difficult thorax. Various pintxos scream at you from upon counters. They are naked as your favourite bare-breasted wench you dilly in your dreams. Variations occur, but were I to sit and think of every pintxo place I’d visited in the time stretching out backwards from immediately before I began writing this bit of absurdity to crawling out of the bubbling morass of the ancestral swamp, I’d come up with no more than seven valid genres of the accursed foodstuff. I’m telling you that Spain has been designed to mock freedom of choice. The rulers now die the flame death. I choke on my own vomit gurgling at them.

Whatever comes next in this life, and many things do, some unexpected and some not, I shall remember during my next restaurant visit to order a cream-filled ocelot kidney.

Before you shoot yourself in the face with a water pistol filled with bleach to cleanse the horrors of not knowing the source of the subject of this entry, I shall just start out by telling you. It’s from the wobbly lyrics of the first and title song, Largo, from an album I just acquired by Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly. The latter sure has a wobbly voice. The record still got made and should show me that I should never be insecure about my singing, playing or flailing away at any inanimate or recently deceased animate object. Fuck um.

Since Dani and I are going to see King Crimson next month and Bill Rieflin is currently a member, I am checking out other work he has been involved in. This introspective album flows throughout my workroom, dampened by an excess of furniture. What ever happened to people loving open inner spaces? Yesterday, I enjoyed an album by the Revolting Cocks and one by Pigface. Rieflin was a member of the latter, but not on the album I found. He only participated on their first, which I shall listen to later today, given time and avoidance of perpetual imminent death.

Now I shall urinate.

Continued from some days ago:

The only things I like to do on a beach are smoke, drink wine and be introspective.

When I lived in San Sebastián, this point was certainly true. I sat for hours every evening on the wall overlooking Playa de Zurriola guzzling bottles of cheap wine out of two litre plastic bottles I’d bought from Lidl just across the river. Introspection was my game, if you don’t count getting quickly incredibly sloshed. I always carried a small, spiral notebook in my bag. In fact I still have it. I’d scribble scraps of blather in that notebook as they drifted past my consciousness. I wrote about the drifters, and I was one of them, I suppose. I wrote about the granularity of the wind as it rose from the beach and blasted a day’s emptiness away. I wrote about murdering the stupidity around me, of which I was most likely a part. I wrote of being ignorantly in love. I say ignorantly in retrospect because I have hindsight for a lens.

(Playa de Zurriola)

Strangely, I don’t recall smoking during that period, though I surely did time and again. I spent September evenings at that beach. I sat infuriated during the daylight in an internet café despising my distance from Praha, perhaps attempting to program, perhaps browsing pages without real purpose.

Some song sang in my ears last night on my evening walk I wasn’t living. I was just whiling away time. Or something like that. September 2002 in San Sebastián was whiling away time. Perhaps a few jots in the aforementioned notebook were constructive. As Sea Song currently sings in my ears, a cover version by Mrs Rieflin and Connelly, I’ll act my part and drift back to the subject.

Were I to live again at the beach, I’d surely walk there at night. During the day, with superfluous sun and humans crowding out any time for dreaming, I’d be ensconsed in a cave, much like this one, in front of my laptop, or holding my guitar, or shaving one of the many rodents I’d captured during the previous night.

I finished breakfast. Were I to say something similar in Spanish, Acabé el desayuno, I’d be routinely criticised in fair La Rioja for grammatical misuse. At worst, I’d be called a panchito and stoned until fragments of bones protruded from flesh. Perhaps I say this because I happened idly upon my ex-spanish teacher last night during an evening stroll. I ignored him, or he ignored me, or simply didn’t notice me in the crowd. I’d prefer to think the former. In my very short lived class, after my stoning, my broken body’d be strung up on one of the myriad classroom crosses. As my life waned, this ex-teacher and the other students’d chant He acabado el desayuno to the rhythm of my failing heart.

Acabo de desayunar is actually best. My ingominy will quickly be forgotten.

I have just finished breakfast. To make my Sunday morning as exciting as possible, I switched from bland oats cooked in soy milk with honey to stiff wasa crackers topped with mustard, ham and cucumber slices. The thrill of this abrupt change in life’s direction reverberates throughout the multiverse. The pulses jar the skies and wipe out all nacent life on Europa. Fuck um.

Yesteryear, ahem -day, I dutifully persued but one of the goals I inscribed into Martenblog with the knife of my insight. What was it? GraphQL absorbed my day. Acabé el tutorial. I began putting together a schema for Martenblog, which, when you think about it, isn’t that complex, you grub. I feel I became sidetracked by a DSL provided by graphql-tools. With this set of tools, I wrote the schema using a more natural language. It went like this:

(GraphQL)
(DSL)
(graphql-tools)

type Topic {
  _id: Int!
  topic: String!
  entries(
    limit: Int
  ): [Entry]
}

type Entry {
  _id: Int!
  createdAt: Int!
  entry: String!
  userId: Int!
  subject: String!
  topics: [Topic]
}

type User {
  _id: Int!
  createdAt: Int!
  username: String!
  entries: [Entries]
}

type Query {
  # page count, vole
  pCount(
    topicIds: [Int], # can happily be null
    search: String # can also be happily null
  ): Int

  # retrieve all topics
  topics: [Topic]

  entriesByDate(
    y: Int!,
    m: Int!,
    d: Int!
  ): [Entry]

  entries(
    page: Int,
    topicIds: [Int],
    search: String
  ): [Entries]

  # Get the two surrounding dates that are relevant.
  # IE, the ones that also have associated entries.
  alrededores(
    timestamp: Int!
  ): [Int]
}

Normally, I’d just provide a link to the relevant github page, but I’ll soon excise the DSL from my code and go with raw Javascript. Why? Because I’m a luddite? Yup. That’s the reason, you grub. I’ll luddicise the code after this blog entry, you fucking grub.

I’ve also had a few curious dreams of late. To be mostly honest, I’ve tried to avoid the recent electoral campaign. Parts seems to have drifted into my subconscious, however, as much as I skip the multituninous political facebook posts that appear on my ahem timeline. Given the dream I shall describe, perhaps this is not all bad.

Less and less of my dreams take their setting from the village of my upbringing. A few nights ago, during spastic sleep, Mr Donald Trump and I were driving around in a cramped, grunting vehicle. His right arm was broken and strapped to his chest. I was sitting in the driver’s seat, yet he was driving with his unwounded limb. This was possibly symbolic, especially considering that I time and again requested to take the wheel myself since it was positioned directly in front of me and within easy reach of my stubby appendages. We were riding around in the village of my upbringing.

He was amicably chatting about the rehabilitation of the village and his distaste of excess. He did not regret the distraught masses thinking him a maniac, though. He felt his clowning was well earned after a hard life of piling coin upon coin for his myriad offspring. They’ll surely toss it to the clouds with no thought of humanity, he lamented.

At some point, I felt a bit sorry for him and commented that his playactings may have painted him into a corner. He laughed and said Entropy is the measure of the amount of disorder in any system. Any system’s state naturally tends towards higher entropy. I really couldn’t argue with him since, in the end, this was actually my synapses talking to themselves.

We ended up stuck in some sort of road construction under a highway segment that most likely does not exist (nor of its like) in the village of my upbringing. The vehicle tilted crazily and eventually was almost vertical. Trump exited before I could. From my position, poised between a fractured windshield and a dissolved door, I lept to the ground. At the same instant, the beast flipped, landing face down. I was clear, but it clipped Trump’s broken arm, breaking it in a second place.

He howled and cursed. I woke up.

Here, I shall set out a few goals for the coming weeks. I shall accomplish but few of them, if any at all, but I certainly have a grand time making plans for the imminent future.

Before I do so, I shall procrastinate one moment by telling my gentle and teary reader that I am listening to a beautiful album called The Room by Harold Budd. I recommend it to all. Actually, I began it last night as I was winding down from self imposed lessons in the semi-new GraphQL, which so far, toots my muffin mightily. The album itself will wind down soon, possibly just as I am finishing this entry. I shall move on to something more agitative as I continue my lessons.

(GraphQL)

So, goals:

• Rewrite Martenblog using GraphQL.
• Write android / ios app for Martenblog using Cordova.
• Thurk with Tidal Cycles for at least thirty minutes a day.
• Continue with GOAT, which involves at the moment Albahaca and Stone Calendar. This will probably not be possible every day.
• Practise guitar every day.
• Vomit on an infant left in a pram outside of a pub every other day.
• Snort a powdered anvil.
• Stir up a ruckus.
• Fuck um.
• Scribe brilliances.

Let the debauchery begin.

(Cordova)
(Tidal Cycles)

Chirstian is in the toilet. He belongs there, as do we all. I’m sure he . chris does not care for anything.

He is the sociapath.the people who don’’t have a clue are christian’s point of view. i shall care for them until they are corpses. They rot in the fields while we wander in the wastes. That is very chliced.

Chris sits before me as a atomaton of these days. We will die together.

Continued from a few days ago.

Capitalism disgusts me.

I can claim steady ownership if this phrase, for it suits me, and marks me. Other humans, usually ones in my circle chastise me for it. I don’t mind. It’s difficult to live on an axis when most of the world only thinks in extremes. Clarification: Absolute capitalism disgusts me. The need to monetise practically every pursuit in life disgusts me. Perhaps disgusts is a hash word, as plenty of my friends are wont to this failing. It may be easier on the universe if I just leave them in shallow graves to fertilise the upcoming weed revolution. I’ll consider it.

A more suave point of view that I do now, to an extent, practise, is to be exhausted by excessive talk of monetisation of every activity instead of outright nastiness. The inborn fingernails of buisnesspeople shall not deter their bloody crawl to the apex of humanity. Though their phalanges protrude grotesquely, they conduct the new world order even without batons. The choir is the mass that hope to scale their heights. The orchestra sees Steve Reich walk out of the back of the auditorium but still plays on. No modulation.

I enjoy a good discussion with my fellow compatriots of this planet well enough to entertain their ideas to an extent. It ends badly at times when they refuse to rise from the bog into sparkling noontime. At times, my callousness is overreaching and I clutch at the only straw left - the demise of humanity for reasons of its greed. Scientific evidence cannot be denied, and even I have researched what more similar compatriots in the mathematical realm have proven. Mass extinction is no joke. And capitalism is directly to blame. This is no fucking abstraction.

On the other hand, I am a fan of chaos, and, as I once told Jennifer as she gaped at me. We strolled Zilker Park. I believe our intent want to either fly kites or bury her recently deceased hedgehogs. That last sentence was an outright lie, well, at least the second half of it. I told Jen that the purpose of humanity was to cleanse the world once more, to let it be reborn again by fire or plague or some other undoing of civilisation by our hand. She was repulsed. I don’t really blame her. She was even lovely enough that I’d have assembled her scorched bones myself into my final hovel.

Capitalism bites me in the rectum! So perhaps, beginning with the industrial revolution, our species found its purpose. History is slow. It doesn’t outmatch geological creeping in that respect, but comes close.

Cleanse!

Perhaps the flame death is preferable simply because conflagration is magnificent. Witness humanity and their tireless firework displays. But, in the end, we’ll probably have to go with a second option.

I fancy entropy’s beauty. Do you?

The black blocks of residential flats seemed to glare down at me as I passed on the train. If they did glare instead of it being only my imagination, it was in apathy. The consumers of such places are shielded from one another by black walls. The black absorbs all sound and even feeling. It mutes the percussion of emotions. The foetus beats in its sister’s makeshift womb. He’s tried to grow nails before, but just now has succeeded simply by force of will. He doesn’t wish to die.

The sister, once a foetus herself, wails as her innards are shredded. She even gasps for more than half a half-click of the device before expiring. The foetus, let’s call him Shambal, is gruesome, but we root for him. His erect penis impedes his progress as it bumps nagging on the floor. He’s headed for the food store. He knows its location, but by intuition alone. The sister was often there.

There are only figs. They crack and splatter on the floor after the effort to pull open the aperture nearly puts Shambal to eternal rest. He, too, finally tumbles to the floor from the counter onto which he had climbed, exhausting his frail form. The fig-muck cushions his drop. He scoops the pulp mass into his underdeveloped maw.

A conversation with the Christián Newman (see below) earlier got me thinking about the connection between inner dialog and a sort of self-attribution. When I, or anyone else, introduces a topic, Christián often directs the course of conversation towards facets of the topic he has included in one of his creative endeavours. My friend almost perpetually has a stream of said inner dialog flowing beneath any personal interaction. Thus, attaching a topic to that dialog is not really surprising.

From an outside perspective, it seems egoistical, as if he wishes to demonstrate his mastery or depth of knowledge. At times, this habit is tiring. Also, whilst pointing fingers at Christián, I have to admit that I am also guilty of this, though far less frequently. I attempt to catch myself.

Past episodes with Tony also come to mind. I have attempted to present a artist I appreciate to the guy and instead of listening and trying to absorb, he immeditely tries to sculpt his own voice to the song. I’m thinking of a particular instance now when I introduced Tony to the piece Farmer in the City by Scott Walker. His inner dialog interfered in a joint listening session and urged him to participate / change / better the music.

These threads are loosely connected, but demonstrate a human trait that disagrees with me.

Continued from yesterday, my precious horde.

Very strong English (especially American) accents annoy me.

It’s easier to bear the fools these days, actually. Another product of living with women for the majority of the last eleven years is a swelling in my personality’s penumbra called patience. I have always criticised others for not looking beyond the tone and delivery of speech to the actual words themselves. I’ve been a hypocrite! Well, at least some of the time - that is, when I don’t catch myself.

An old adage states that humans and certain mustelids criticise others for what they dislike in themselves. I’ll add that the distaste is often unconscious. Of course, my intense hatred for deeply resonant peasant accents is a direct result of my infancy, adolescence and especially my so-called university years. I nearly suffocated in a sigularity of misanthropy.

To reteach myself acceptance has been a hard road. It will continue to be a hard road. Well, actually, since everyone will celebrate my suicide at the aforementioned delta of the particular quantum universe’s existence, perhaps the road will not be that hard, after all, or even exist.

I am Bluebeard and I paint an immense portrait of the horde, all frozen in contorted enunciations in peasant-speak. Their legs have no toed feet, but are instead as trunks of trees descending into roots that flow and merge with every other pair. The delta is crowded. Every ghoul from my haunted university years stands clustered around the singularity where my corporal being and the crest of the wave of immediate future collide.

But that pointed caw coming from Southern Californian peasants still will not do. No. It will not do. They are not invited to my suicide party, in this or in any other quantum universe.

I was baptised twice.

I vaguely recall being submerged on or near the altar of a Baptist church in Clear Lake, Texas in the presence of Marcie, her family and the church’s congregation. I don’t remember my thoughts other than perhaps an inner warning cackle. As you, my prolific reader, have certainly read every other entry in this blog leading up to this one, it will come as no surprise that I concededed to this ritual to perpetuate amicable relations with Marie’s family (and curséd congregation).

Though memory is merely a phantom, I surmise that I relished the irony. I’ve always been a big fan of irony, even when directed at me. Tony was always fond of the phrase The universe is conspiring against me. I relate more to Let us laugh along with the universe as it laughs at us all. Grendel would relate to that.

I am an atheist.

My ancient love of following one statement or, in this case, list point with a sharp contrast is evident! As I ride the slimy back of time’s slug further and further to the apex that will send me cascading on a makeshift raft to the aforementioned delta and abundantly populated suicide party, I tend towards spirituality. Buddhism and Taoism especially beckon me.

A random entry from the Tao Te Ching, provided by my handly Tao Te Ching app nestled in the flash memory of my phone, follows -

It (The Tao) nourishes infinite worlds, yet it doesn’t seek to master the smallest creature. Since it is without wants an desires, it can be considered humble. All of creation seeks it for refuge, yet it does not seek to master or control.

The contrast with the Baptists of my university years is stark. To climb or fall from one to another involves ascending a sheer cliff or plummeting from one. Dogmatic religion is designed to control. I use the word DESIGNED because it was conceived and erected by an elite like a tyrannical government. The Tao is its opposite in this respect. I cannot take part in any “Spiritual Practise” that is not based in humility.

Audacity and arrogance see me balking. They cannot be included in anything I call spirituality. To teach and to follow are united. Both are the same humble path.

All that being typed, for the most part, I am an atheist. I dabble in spirituality and even at times daydream of a hovel on Saaremaa or in Tuzla and a simple life without possessions, wonton desires or ambitions. I’m still quite a long way off. Alienation by scientific progress sees many balking. Such phrases have been uttered on myriad occasions:

• Easier than thinking for yourself.
• Unity in ignorance.
• Old ways, the best ways.
• A cleansing of the spirit.
• Fuck um.

I like the last one the best.