Dr Livingston I Consume?

Listening to And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead while blogging makes for interesting posts.
There is now an institute for the study of personal websites in Philadelphia. Times? Sign? What, no!

I’m such a total prick. I just made that up. Why the fuck would I care about Philadelphia or what’s in it anyway? But you believed me, and that’s what’s important.
LIES SPIRAL. I just made up that I made that up. FUCK.

And now you’ll never know. Nor care.
Unless you’re from the land of the long white cream cheese doodle.

So we arrive again at the crossing of the mighty path, where are you fellowship? Why have you forsaken me? Bereft, I have to fake my journey, all packaged down, grim grime of the baleine oil keeping the wheels of my cart slick. We set out.
Where, friends, are we going? Friends? Oh, that’s right, we’ve done this bit. BEREFT I tell you!
I have enough supplies to last me and my compatriots the length of the crossing and 4 days extra in case the river is high. My grim cargo is weighty in its immaterial moral mass. It is the news that my brother is dead, MY BLOOD, is blood on the face of the stone with which I struck him. “Cain and Abel seem to still be causing trouble,” as one troubling troubadour spurted.
Goodbye mother! I must away! For the road beckons, the gravel calls my name and the horses that will race behind me need to be given a challenge. How archaic this notion.
Where am I going? Oh Where?

Hang on. Good fucking question. Where was I going with that? Those words just sort of seeped out. I don’t know what purpose anything has any more. It’s all like I must do this, I must do that, we fight and we bicker and it turns out I’m not really special, and neither are you. You are not unique. You are not even capable of singularity through rebellion any more. And if you find a way, then you are hardly the first, or if so, you are surely the fool, because it’s your loss, not the universe’s. We trick ourselves like that.

I am writing a novel this year. It’s 2006, fuck off, I’m allowed to. I’ve always wanted to try, I’ve written every other form of everythting, plays, short stories, poems, poetry series, painting series, I don’t see why I should fail… but it might suck. At least I’ll have written one. But I want to be able to show someone special at Christmas the culmination of my year, the fullness of my work, and I don’t want it to suck. I don’t know who that person is, but I hope to find that along the way. It might well be me, or better yet, a publisher. Who is a woman. A Beautiful woman. Who I seduce with my words and is coerced into publishing my novel. And having sex with me a lot. I still wouldn’t be satisfied. I hate that. What a fucking life.
“My chest is a cold acre”

! New Augie March album! Oh It’s so good! Go now! Listen, frolic, buy!
Brave men dare to tread…

Brain Bend

You better not laugh, you better not cry, repress those emotions, I can’t tell you why, I’m not passionate enough.

Humans have a tendency to mythologize people/events/narratives which really scares and interests me. To pick and example out of absolute thin fucking god knows; Benjamin Franklin. Here’s a man who’s known to the world by the wisdom snips and occasional invention he left behind, a founding father. There’s a loaded expression for you all, cherub monkeys. So (ignore our mostly shared Australianism for a moment, those readers who actually do live in the land of the *cough* free, I’m probably way off the mark, skim over please.) we have this group of largely repulsively ugly men, in various states of slave ownership, drug and alcohol abuse, womanizing and building the greatest damn democracy the world has ever seen, and they are known by nothing but what we place upon them. Nobody cares about who the founding fathers were as people, and if they do, it’s relational, nobody cares about historical figures except in the context of their actions, we build images, meanings, everything around something often massively unintentional.
All this is fairly obvious and well documented. It’s hardly new thought.

Ok so where am I going with this? Are you utterly lost? Well, what we’re learning in university right now, (WARNING – innocent first year shit coming up, tune out now if easily superior or uncaring for wankery) is that we receive the world effectively “mediated,” woo buzz, and that we cannot perceive reality but through the visual, lingual, kinesic etc languages we use. So we cannot directly interact with reality.
NOW, let’s use the example of a “mountain.” We understand the land form we term mountain through the cultural connotation, lingual connotations around that. So words like mountain, land form, etc, everything is loaded, everything is stopping us from processing it as pure, we see it and compute it through systems of language.
For the purpose of my rant here let’s call the ‘pure reality’ MOUNTAIN and what we see and understand and imagine and connote as OUR MOUNTAIN.
Ok, hitting the meat now. I learnt about this concept because somebody used language codes to explain it to me. So I processed the ‘reality’ of my processing capabilities, mediated through YET MORE LANGUAGE AND SYMBOL. Now, here’s where I know I’ll lose the last clingers of you, this means that language systems, and the concept of not accessing reality, is a reality which is mediated to me via meaning systems.
Which, if anyone in my course followed, leads to the logical conclusion that we DO access reality directly, because language systems are a reality. Scary.

Ben Franklin though? What the hell? I lost you there. Well, Ben Franklin the man was a reality, he was a living person, like you and you assume I am, but we know ‘him’ through what we have been told, what we see in the few photos, what we build as a mythology around him. So many people, as I said, make the distinction between the Ben Franklin construction and the real Ben Franklin. But what if by being such a contruction, what if through language mediation, THE MYTH OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS WAS EQUALLY AS VALID, EQUALLY AS REAL AS THE SUPPOSED REALITY ITSELF.
Theoretically nothing prevent this.

And I’ll leave you on that. Sorry if you feel like I’m wasting 1’s and 0’s here. You can just read the other posts. There’ll be something hidden in my archives for you.

No Love

Wow, like one comment in ten posts. You sons of bitches must really engage with my verbosity.

If you are a regular reader of this thing, comment. Just so I at least know how many of you there are. I can count two. And one appears to be internet dead.
My life is brilliant, show your solidarity people!

Whimper

What we got here is… failure to communicate.

Out by the spindling soulless grey of the gum trees where those old friends who we called auntie used to live, there was a brook. If you were lucky and everyone was healthy summer meant at least a few days at the Junction, where us three would be picked up from the train station out south of nowhere and be taken to. And in the dark we fell down stairs, we slipped on stones, we cursed the empty goddamn country until it was fucking obvious where the bloody hell we were. And the hot sun didn’t burn in memories quite like the cool brook, nor the stink of the animals quite like the fact that they roamed the granite hand-set floors.
And so now it’s 2006 and we’re all grown up, well at least I feel like I’m ready to pretend I am until old age crumbles the façade, and I want to try and tell you that I love you like I loved those days because I didn’t realize I had those days and now they are well gone and sold into the past of other people much more connected to that version of history than I. And in the rare moments when I think of this thing that has grown around us and I see it from outside, in those moments I know that it would all be different if I had grown up inside the bubble. That trying to be the one who shared the long forgotten ashen trees with you, or whatever those trees were for you, is as useless as trying to go back there now.
A great writer said words to the effect that nothing is a greater tragedy than a man forced to see again a place etched golden by nostalgia.
Though he said it in a much better way. We cannot go back to our holy lands, because they will be sacked and heathen when we arrive. Perhaps though, a hypothesis, maybe it is a greater tragedy that our nostalgia is set, that we cannot insert others who should have been there into the forever memory of the past. Or that we cannot feel that perfect longing for the future the way we do for bygones. It our base and wholly human perception of time, one dimensional and set.
What thoughts.

1776

I just thought you should know that I have now had as many blog hits as there were years from Christ’s birth until America’s declaration of independence.

Not that I’m American or Christian. I just thought you should know.

Giggles

Resplendent he strolls, perhaps a little self consciously, through the green overhanging leaves of his ego. Stately in purple, as all stately is, the waistcoat and the gold (just as you imagine!); “yes, this is how it’s meant to go.”

No, I wish I really did have anything to stroll about, but the fact of the obsequious matter is stroll is the new mope, and hope is the tract of chatter; essentially the goal.

That translates to I feel pretty darn nothing special. It’s like I feel good, but not because of any good thing, just the jutting general absence of striking bad. I am rather peckish. That’s to say, I’m ready to be pecked apart by large and oddly beautiful birds. DING, oh the metaphor bell is ringing, I’ll have to shunt off this track.
Trains and trannies and pains and pantomimes. Ugh! Mimes.

That’s like Hoffman/Huffman no one can pronounce Gyennhaal or Joaquin. HA! Or spell them for that reason.

I must eat! More later, stuff about university no doubt, I’ll talk about it when I FEEL LESS LIKE RIGHT-NOW-ME.

Be there for that.