Jetzt, geht’s, los!

I am unable to face life right now. I am sad. Depressed. In pain. So, I am going to sleep. Under the covers, as always, I will find solace. Or at least escape.

The one thing that Americans need to learn, the one thing that they least understand and refuse culturally to admit — is that actions have consequences. Americans cling to this new age bullshit that unlinks materiality from the causal nexus somehow.

The way most Americans see the world anymore, things don’t happen as the result of interactions in the real world, things happen because you believe (or don’t) that they’ll happen, or because you want (or don’t) them to happen.

It’s utter nonsense, utter rectile smelly-ass shit, and it will destroy not only a hundred million relationships, but also the entirety of the western world. The causal nexus is real, children. If you light a match and set fire to your house, it will burn, no matter how much you believe it won’t. If you betray a friend, they will hate you, no matter how much you’re sure they shouldn’t.

—

More to the point, about this word, “should.” It’s the most insidious word in the English tongue. The word begins from a position of utter denial. Things only “should” (or shouldn’t) be when we refuse to acknowledge what actually is (or isn’t).

When someone uses the term “should” what they are really doing is:

1. Denying/refusing to admit what is actually the case, and
2. Declaring their own personal desires, i.e. what they wish would happen or was true instead

The problem is that due to the new age shit that pervades American culture today, they immediately proceed from #2 to:

3. Knowing that because they wish it, and they’ve said it, it will (or, ahem, *should*) now come true

And then they get all broken up and frustrated when #3 fails to come to pass, and they try to blame someone for it, or hold it against someone, or attribute it to intentionality on the part of some party, i.e. because it is intention and not materiality that drives consequences, any failure to achieve desired results must not be based on action (or lack thereof) or decisions inappropriately made, but rather on some competing will that is willing the precise opposite.

Thus, if significant other A is unfaithful to significant other B, and B departs for greener pastures, A sees it not as an instance of poor decision-making leading to undesired consequences, but rahter as B willing a split or other negative consequences in greater measure than A wills continued togetherness.

In short, everyone begins to take everyone personally, and everyone denies the relative autonomy of everyone else, not to mention the universal subservience to the simple laws of physics, i.e. if you didn’t want the Iraq war to go badly but it did anyway, it’s not due to poor decision making, poor planning, or a poor conceptual framework to begin with, it’s because people that suck didn’t will us to victory.

—

Intentionality is indeed very powerful, but this power does not have a linear corollation to the imagery through which it is manifest. Instead, it is dialogical and often opposite.

To put it another way, if you spend all afternoon willing an egg to crack with your utmost concentration, you will likely fail to make it crack (try it if you don’t believe me) no matter how much you believe or how much you medidate beforehand, meaning that the directness of your intentionality was utterly worthless, but you will likely succeed in wasting an afternoon, rotting one egg by leaving it out of the fridge and on the counter while you stare at it, and possibly also in dying after you give yourself an annurism by concentrating so hard.

The material consequences, as always, were real. They just weren’t tied to human desire or to some new age shite “belief” in the will to power.

The apostates and the faithful… they simply cannot mix.

No worky.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

(desired) ends always justify employed means

**always**

Can I get over it, let it go, be bigger than it?

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s already too late. 🙁

i w i s h t o b e u n d e r s t o o d

Man, you take my pretentions and you
iterate them like minimum wage Warhol
So reckless like you own the technique
and I watch you and I
can’t begin to fathom the magic
When you take that farce and reconstruct it
making truth for the only population
that still knows it —
those ever-fucking monkeys, cultureless but alive
and imbued with that essence
you so shamelessly exude.

I think your words are heavy and you
know that’s what you wrote, what you sang,
tire walker, sign talker,
bridge stranger burning.

Yeah, on the universal train
my thoughts went to you,
and at the final destination like a night shack monk
they were whole, better for the journey,
driving, driving to the gates
to zen candy afternoon, murderous peaceful
cannibal king.

You are the loudspeaker plague and I —
I wish I was your shaman.

I am really tired and somewhat depressed.

I don’t know what I need.

I need something.

End of day.

The world = too big for me. The family was here for a few days. They’ve gone. Things have been wild. Things have sort-of been decided, but are also sort-of as open as ever. I worry that my co-workers and boss read my blog. I worry that someday I’ll stop blogging because of the fear that the co-workers and boss are reading.

Applied: About.com, Council on Foreign Relations, a few other things. I want to be out there, where I something that matters in a place that matters. Here I am sleeping under palm trees, always, no matter what it is I am doing. I want to touch the world, not escape from it.

I am tremendously unfulfilled and lonely and horny right now.

I miss Chicago.

I miss my girlfriend.

I miss my independence.

Life is too short. Life is too long. Life isn’t even there. I need another tattoo.

Fuck all.

—

I’m not me. I’m not me these days. I’m so fucking far into being somebody else that I’m completely unrecognizable. Me = the guy that went to Chicago and sat around at The Pub having a beer and playing shuffleboard. Me = the guy that reads Proust. Me = the guy that writes books, essays, and verses. Me = the guy that takes pictures and sings/plays folk rock on guitar.

I’m not quite sure where I lost me, or where the fuck me has gone. Gotta find him before I get too old, before it’s too late to turn back.

The American “experiment” about which we all heard so much in school… has failed. I suppose I should have expected it, but seeing footage of Bush (president of a superpower) demanding that we teach “intelligent design” in the classroom came as a shock. Then seeing CNN say that it’s a “scientific debate” that “scientists don’t want to have” sealed the deal.

It’s like hearing the claim that as a society we don’t have enough debate about whether mathematics can really help you to count things, or whether all of those equations are in actuality just “superstition” and antichrist pop paganism (as the intelligent design people say about evolution).

(They say these things — get their message across — through electric microphones and charge-coupled-device rapid multiframe synchronous image capture systems that perform analog-to-digital conversions at millions of bits per second, feeding the resultant data stream into a wireless high Earth orbit communications satellite grid fed by radio waves to millions of phosphor-electron-impact imaging devices a.k.a. television sets across the nation that rely on a national three-phase 60 hertz power distribution grid for operation. All of this stuff having, of course, arisen by mysticism and prayer — nothing at all to do with the scientific method or modernity.)

It all goes to show what some have known all along: “democracy” is a flop. Let a herd of sheep vote on what the most powerful force in the universe is and they’ll swear as a group that it’s a decent cover of clover, and they’ll follow that insight by voting that the most important thing that they can as a group do is cover the entire meadow with a giant, opaque tarp — because everyone knows that clover doesn’t grow while you can see it.

No, the tyranny of the übermensch is the best way to feed and clothe the underlings.

In the meantime, leave this country. Soon it will be a second-rate monarchy with a pasty, mediocre aristocracy, like Monaco without the housewife chic. Imagine the education level of an impoverished child in Myanmar, being raised in an evangelical family. Now imagine the kid deaf, dumb, retarded, beaten senseless, and clutching a crucifix while drooling on a Gideon bible. Now imagine 20 I.Q. points below that.

That’s gonna be the next generation of American high school graduates.

Got an infopacket today from the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at New School University (formerly the New School for Social Research). The prose in their course descriptions makes me cum. Hard. This is not a big name school, but there are some big names on faculty there, and they do exactly what I have always done in the arts and sciences.

Greenwich Village in my future?

Why the hell should one have to be interesting to be cared about? What if all of the uninteresting people banded together with a few large knives and well-polished guns and bloodied the hell out of everyone else? That would be interesting.

And it may be their only option.

—

I always expected to need corrective lenses by now. I don’t.

—

There are times and objects through which or with which my life has been much better than others. One would think I’d take care to actively learn from my experience, but, in truth, that really hasn’t happened, I think because life is simply too intense and full of distractions and imperatives.

Things along this axis:

– Keeping notes+diary on a PDA (i.e. Newton)
– Traveling a lot on my own in a car
– Being in school studying with insanely bright people
– Having a laptop rather than a desktop PC
– Having a camera and keeping it long enough to get to know it
– Having no mobile phone, or any phone whatsoever
– Writing books
– Being in places with actual seasons (extreme cold followed by extreme heat, etc.)
– Being an ass to anyone I don’t like or am even the slightest bit annoyed with
– Submerging myself in asian history and mysticism

—

The happiest moment in my entire life — or, to put it another way, my most precious, valued memory — was sometime in the summer of 2000 as I left Anthropology 5131 after having watched Yol. It must have been 105 degrees outside. The sun was so bright I could barely open my eyes, and I felt at one with the desert, at one with the academy, at one with the world, at one with myself. I will never forget that moment, walking in basic blue jeans and a white t-shirt against a giant yellow wall in the middle of the west desert toward nothing in particular, having just watched all of the beauty of life… of birth and of poverty and of rape and of death and having said nothing about them to anyone.

There have been no moments like it, even remotely, since. I suspect that it may remain the best moment in my life even on the day I die.

—

you know, you reach this point where you know you have a very high I.Q. indeed and you can see all the way to the horizon just how badly fucked the world is, and rather than take the time to write a book about the cellphones in the landfills or the genes in the patent office or government-supported rape-murder for the incredulous masses who just won’t get it anyway…

rather than continue to believe in an ethic that liberates them (they’re too stupid; they deserve their bondage), you just feel lazy and ready to say:

“I’m better than you, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

and if they won’t buy it, you just leave them there and shoot y’self in the head because, after all, there is no greater curse and no position of greater weakness than actually having understood things.

the new age imbeciles have thought our tinfoil hats from existence; they have believed their way into joyous heavychains and will next raise water from the ocean with their positivity and simpleness in order to drink it down and survive handily.

play the maracas.

—

Mr. John Lydon’s wisdom — brilliant.
Hypermodern —
inevitable, even.

He’s rotten, friends,
he really is —
his pink hair proves it.

You know — his eyes sing still
that he has no future
and he is oh-so-happy
with his former sex
pistol
parts
and
dead, vicious friends.

No need for holidays in the sun —
just

“Fuck You!
God save the Queen
you rotten fuck-head!”

—

You will eventually kill all your friend-enemies with hot oil and bitter kindness given forcefully, like bullets.

I’ve always hated summer. Ask anyone that knows me. “Winter is beautiful,” I’ve always said, “and summer is hell. Summer sucks.”

I’ve always said that fanatics were untrustworthy. Movements consisting entirely of fanatics, doubly so.

I’ve always avoided white collar cubicle jobs actively. Just check my track record, I’ve told everyone I know that I hate them, don’t believe in them. I’ve never held one longer than a few short months.

I’m a city kid. I’ve always said I was a city kid. Every time I’ve ventured out into small-town-ness in years past, I’ve ended up depressed. Everyone knows this about me, myself included.

So what do I do after I get my graduate degree from a top-ten university in one of the world’s great cities, with every door in the world open to me?

I move to the foremost small town of permanent, ugly summer in the nation with a girlfriend who is a self-described cult member and leaves me behind soon afterward anyway. I take on the most middle-management of cubicle jobs, keeping it longer than any other I’ve had. In the midst of it, I move into a tiny place in a bad low-income housing neighborhood that costs me $1200/mo. in utilities and rent, talk to my family less than ever and co-workers more than ever, and somehow manage to consolidate my student loan payments into a single payment higher than they were when added separately. I trade in great camera equipment for poor camera equipment, books I value for books I dislike, abandon my health and sell my possessions on ebay until I own nothing, leaving my laptop behind in favor of a desktop so that I’m tied down that way, too, and finally, gain twenty pounds while surrounded by octogenarians.

I’m the stupidest motherfucker alive. I got my graduate degree from a top-ten university, and every door in the world was open to me, and this is what I did.

I deserve to be fucking shot.

And the real irony of it all is that I don’t even get the company of the girl who brought me here. I’m here alone. What is she doing? Um, working an exciting non-cubicle-job, rent-free, surrounded by young people in that very same one of the world’s great cities that I left behind.

I love irony in books, but in life it tastes like twice-melted tar.

—

The question is: what now?

Well, in the short term I’ve decided to work lots of overtime to try to shore up the financial situation. Until there are spare dollars, there is literally no decision that you can make in our society.

Beyond that… leave the job at product launch. Travel to…? I dont’ know. I really do love my girlfriend and would love to be with her, but I’m worried that there is a certain lack of emotional parity going on — not safe. And I have to take care of myself because, after 30 years, I have learned (been taught?) very well that no-one else will ever look out for me, even a little, no matter what they say.

My triumphant return to grad school is a very long time away still. I haven’t even applied yet. Asia? Southeast asia? New York? Canada? Suicide? Homicide? I have no idea. Beyond “work overtime, quit job” (an ironically paradoxical combination), I lack the wherewithal, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of emotion, to make any further plans.

I’m too old for my family to take care of me
My girlfriend doesn’t feel much for me
My friends are far away from me
My job isn’t inspiring to me
My finances are getting away from me
My body isn’t helping me
My apartment is too filthy for me
My hobbies are no fun to me
You can change some, but you can’t change a lot of things in life
That’s what makes life worthless