The Importance of Seeming Earnest

Straws in hand he climbed the trees and drank tears from the eyes of sleeping birds. He ate mushroom beetles and tiger's eggs and prolonged his suffering using the restorative powers of ant's blood. Fortnightly he purified his organs by ingesting a mixture of bark, fine gravel, and shrivelled grapes which he dried on the backs of alligators who hung in sun-drenched stultification between the trees, slung like hammocks. To repair his shoes he clawed at gum trees for sap and cut down wispy vines with his teeth. He strangled snakes with his necktie and trapped badgers in his coat. In times of emotional distress he gorged himself on butterflies. At night and on foggy afternoons he slept on the back of an emaciated bull that wandered the back of a mile-long snake, grazing on nothing but the dew that collected under the serpent's scales. In his dreams he was a snowfall, a piece of broken jade, a cat's strangled warble, a discarded bus ticket; he wandered a muddy, circular path in an ephemeral garden of light. He was a scabbard, a scuff-mark, a tiger's wounded paw, a spanish galleon, a solar system, a tyre in the backyard.

Once he tried to speak but then felt ashamed, as if he had spit in a temple.

I am not a Postman - Vladmir Nabokov

Page 1
You wake up and instantly feel an overwhelming regret for everything you've ever done and fear for what you might do in the future. In a moment this passes and you look at the time: it is 1:35PM. Your stark grey curtains are glowing dimly, suggesting sunlight, but you can hear a light rain falling on the leafy roof of your shack. Gingerly you try moving your right hand: it isn't broken after all, but it still aches from its meeting with the palaeontologists jaw. You wonder idly if some future paleontologist will discover his bones, like a dog digging up its grandmother. Somebody knocks at the door, which is unexpected because you thought everybody else was dead.
If you prefer the sound of an umbrella being opened to that of one being closed, don't turn to page 4.
If you cannot decide whether “Spelunking” is a sexually connotative verb or the last name of the arch-duke of neo-Sweden, refuse to turn to page 5.
For a list of reductive statements about caste divisions among societies of cannibals and instructions on how to auto-asphyxiate when faced with turning to page 12 which details with a Rabelaisian bawdiness the drunken exploits of your student years, turn to page 9.
Otherwise turn to page 12.

Page 9
Noam Chomsky walks in and abruptly informs you that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. How do you respond?
If you reply nonsensically that analytical and empirical knowledge are meaningless because they do not detract from postmodernism, take a bite of your watermelon and turn to page 35.
If you blurt something about “invisible tigers” and fire a rubber band at his face before huddling under your sheets, clutching a broken wristwatch to your navel, turn to page 4.

Page 35
That last question was designed to test your susceptibility to hallucinatory episodes and whether or not you read the instructions at the beginning of the book which explain how to by means of mental arithmetic reason your way back to conventional reality. You should have turned to the page which is the sum of the difference between the two page numbers proffered and the square root of the year in which this edition was first published. Go there now, if you can still feel your toes.

Page 86
Having banished this apparition you rise, enjoy a breakfast of lizard meat and coconut milk, and go about your days work. By midday it is pouring heavily and you grow increasingly concerned about the possibility of flash floods, which are common in these parts during the rainy season, although it is November now and this unseasonable deluge might be mitigated by the relatively low levels of the volcanic lakes. At one point a flash of lightning distracts you causing you to misspell the name of a specimen in your report to the National Board of Extraplanetary Science. The report is mailed without your noticing this slip-up, and ten years from now that errant “W” which should have been an uncapitalized “f” will scandalize a jaded botanist into filing a report against you. This might cost you your job in spite of your acknowledged professionalism, but first you must make it to the end of the story.
By two o'clock the rain has slowed to a mere drizzle. You have been working without pause for the last hour, when a streak of yellow at the edge of your vision causes you to look up from the holographic screen. A bird has landed on your windowsill, a magnificent golden parakeet the likes of which you have yet to see on this island. With regret you think of the dismembered corpses of the two young biologists, Joan and Andy, either of whom might have been able to classify it for you. You make a mental note to recover their books from their hut as soon as the weather clears. To your surprise, the bird begins to speak. It does not look at you directly as it does, and it sounds almost distracted, as if it were talking to itself. It has a thick, Hungarian accent, and with a start you realize that the bird is not a living bird: it is a mechanical, imitation bird, the kind that some people keep in their living rooms to amuse their bored guests (who have inevitably seen three or four hundred of the same thing before and are wondering why they still bother visiting people). In your experience however they have proven to be bright, well-spoken and annoyingly cheerful contraptions, with a limited vocabulary; this one seems listless and mordant by comparison, and is using such a variety of technical jargon that you can barely follow the gist of the narrative. You catch the words “quantum superposition” and “Copenhagen interpretation”, and decide that the bird must have been programmed by a physicist. But for what reason? The more it speaks the less sense it seems to make as its vocabulary becomes increasingly complicated and theoretically oriented. You reflect that descriptions of high-level physics always wind up sounding mystical beyond a certain point. After five minutes of this it still has not looked directly at you, and it is getting on your nerves. Moreover you are concerned about where it might have come from. There were no physicists in this expedition: as far as you know there is not a one in the entire solar system. What is it you wish to do?
If you wish to attempt to destroy the bird with your handgun, turn to page 11.
To attempt to capture the bird with a roll of mosquito netting that you have under your bed, turn to page 50.
If the bird suddenly reminds you of your ex-girlfriend, who for two years held an apprenticeship at the Nuclear Research Center in Virtual France, inspiring you to drive it away by passive-aggressively torturing it, turn to page 76.
To finish writing this nonsense, click “Submit Reply”, and go back to whatever it was you were doing before.

On Why I Am Better Than You

i imagine many of you are like me. you didn't know that you would become drug addicts, petty thieves, and shut-ins. you never followed your dreams, and you compensate for it by always dreaming. look at yourself, sitting at home alone, have you changed at all in the last five years? you say you love change, love chaos, love randomness, but you're the most predictable people in the world. nothing surprises you anymore and you get along fine with everybody. when was the last time any of you had a really serious grudge against someone for no good reason? when was the last time you spat on somebody smaller than yourself and scowled cynically at a child? as artists you struggle for authenticity but only ever manage to produce cheap knock-offs and fakes. as writers you try for originality but only ever succeed when you say something too clever to be meaningful or too dense to interest anybody. you have wasted your lives, burying yourselves up to the neck in books and dvds and soundscapes and covering your eyes with mirrors. remember all that meaningful stuff you used to write? all those thoughts and fears and hopes you used to have brimming all over your edges and onto the page? now it is like the light has been drained from your eyes and the world spins around you a total blur. you never quite found the path, did you? not even a dark one? you worry now that it's too late for you to start over. for the most part you believe it, too, but you'd never admit it - quick, hide your face in a book, don't face up to the truth! and i am here now to tell you that there really is no hope for you. only i will be saved.
love, the king of everything.

tl;dr

She was searching for the language of her soul. It wasn't in fireplaces or closets, she had discovered, or inside clouds like the seeds inside of fruit (she learnt this from her first air-plane trip). Nor did it resonate from any speaker or shine from any lamp. It did not hang in petalled boughs from the trees in spring and fall from them in autumn, or flutter against the screen-door in a passionate rite of seeking entrance to the kitchen, or make its nest in the ceiling among last years newspapers and eggshells. Several experimental holes revealed that it probably wasn't hidden in the earth - lying awake at night she heard only silence from the stars. Sometimes she caught glimpses of syllables sparkling in streams and rivers and heard snatches of vowels echoing underwater in the bathtub, but it was such a watery, elusive alphabet that she could not contain it with the dragnets she cast about her. Without it she began to feel soulless, inhuman, when she was only unable to speak. Circumstance was the only culprit, in not providing her with an older, more experienced soul to see and draw her embryonic speech out, first in whispers and eventually in wholly-formed narratives, but she did not realise this and began to assert that the disease, or just a crucial absence, was within her, that she wasn't properly formed. And so her soul remained silent, as if it wasn't there at all, an unregarded, dormant part of her being. She felt that she was nothing, or at least nothing profound or beautiful or sacred; to make up for this lack she decided to feel Important.

***

In this crazy onion of which only every tenth layer is real, in which transubstantiation is the squeezing of a sacred stone thrown by a drunken pitcher and caught by his enemy, am I losing the trail? Is the trail losing me? Has anybody lost a trail? Trails, trails for sale. What do do? Pause for sigh? Sing a song and dream on, wear a sweater, wear a thong.
Samsara, said Siddhartha. Life is suffering. I wonder if he meant that for all possible worlds, or just this one. If there are an infinite number of universes, infinitely variable in form, then surely there should be those in which conditionalised suffering does not actuate out of mere being. I mean you wake up happy and go to sleep feeling even better, or even just maintain a status quo of staying positive. Or perhaps there is nothing worthwhile in every single universe - that seems pretty daft. How will we fare if even the gods are just mindless manipulators of clay?
I think that the landscape of the soul must extend in directions that are invisible to us. New Zealand is a kind of ridge on the predominantly submerged microcontinent, Zealandia, which of course is only a flake on the crust of earth-pie. I, we, must have (and share some) sunken temples and water-logged fields. What if I am just one of the livestock in a peculiar herd of spirits, only a few of whom share this planet with me?
Bewilderment. Vast, aeon-spanning bewilderment. Cosmic confusion and stellar delusion. What if our universe is neurotic?

Prosthetic Anesthetic Imported From Sicily

On Saturday John ate two apples, one of which had a worm in it. For the next six nights he experienced a recurring dream that he was being eaten from the inside out by wood lice, and would regale his workmates with his discovery that the degree by which his fingers naturally curved inwards (towards his palms) corresponded to the number of years he had lived, and speculated that on the day of his death his fingers would be curled up into complete circles, and afterward into fists. This theory was not refuted by the fact that children do not have perfectly straightened fingers, because children were to be considered ageless until they reached puberty. At 6 o'clock on Friday night, at the end of a week which had been the most peaceful and reflective he had ever known, John went to a bar, drank three pints of cider, flirted with a bar stool, and bumped into a lamppost as he staggered home because he was imagining that his legs were no longer moving but that the world was shifting uncontrollably beneath him.

Now, if we assume that John exchanged certain elementary properties with the lamppost in their momentary collision, is there any reason why John, after recovering from the subsequent morning's hangover, shouldn't look in the mailbox and find that it leads to another world?

Or just suddenly drop dead.

Ho ho he he, said the Mute to the Pessimist.

She was the forgotten love-child of a Sumerian orchardist and his blind French mistress, passed on in her tenderest years to a notorious district in the notorious brothel district. She grew and grew until she was twelve foot five and her only customer paid in apricots because her distended stomach could tolerate nothing else. Her pregnancies were legion, yet her unrequited lust for canapés enhanced her awful beauty, and her nightly flights along the rooftops of Salvador de Bahia caused comment. Across the smoke-stacks and train-tracks traipsed this painted women; and where her dainty feet fell, marking the ground and sky alike with cream-coloured paw-prints, soon to follow were the inimitable multitude of monsterly creatures, her mutant spawn.

Mother you called her, plaintive by the battering seagrave til by came the humanchine, singularicurse mulitplicious of the racine philosophomus, dooming down the swallow shore. And borne into his forked limbs amerged you werecat, once brine now scree.

***

So, even Kronos made some mistakes back in the day. His own kids ended up putting a contract out on him after all. A fairly good indication, I think we'll agree, of some spectacularly bad parenting on his part at the very least. I can relate to Kronos, not only thanks to my titanic intellect either, but because I've been a very bad parent lately too. And the progeny of my various misdemeanors, misjudgments and miscalculations are all sharpening their knives as we speak. As I type. As you read. This is fine. Even God is up in Heaven now. Far better men than I have stumbled and fallen on some awkward morning. All mourning is awkward.

The details aren't very important - to you - but the Devil is undeniably in them. My own nature is a rotten, manaical Judas sometimes and my observation skills are nothing to write home about, and so it is that one day you/we/I look up and around your/our/myself and wonder just how in any God/Dog's name you could have ended up where you have. Nursing the wounds that you/we are. No matter! We live, we learn. Sam told me once that If at first you don't succeed, fail and fail again.

Fail better.


My mood has been all shot to hell since January but I sense a resurgence coming. I'll need to be proactive (ick) but I think all in all, when the dust has settled and the smoke has cleared - I'll be fine :) and isn't that nice.

And aren't I a sensitive little man! I mean, good god... :D

Trilateral Commision as Dinner Guests | Phase Two. BlahBlarghBlog

Power to the People! Drunk folks are innaresting, aren't they. Normally muted souls erupt in the neon showers. I get contact highs of them, rubbing shoulders with the wasted masses - because even when my brain is sodden with various poisons, self-reflection is still the greatest thing I've tried. I wish it were as easy for me as it seems to be for them. To let go, let the good times roll, tell 'em 'Dre "it ain't nuttin' but muuuuusic".

Vicarious joy is still joy though and greed is no part of me. I have other gifts. <wiggles fingers>

Never you mind.


*


Like a rabid cheetah - just run with it. I have an extraordinary propensity for ordinariness - if that is in fact a word - and it is a propensity I find extraordinary purely for it's shiny new-ness, I suspect. Unusual? Not really. And there, as pompous tweed wearers might say - is the rub. Rub me tender, rub me true. Elvis knew what he was on about. Except when he was talking about ghettos.

At the end of the day I don't REALLY care about much. I like to be liked - hideous trait, if it took corporeal form I'd crucify it while laughing and capering, even if it does keep me humble. For a given value of that term. But I'm unsure if that actually translates as my being a worthy soul. I'm very myopic. I'm very sun-kissed and tropic. I hate canned laughter but am quite fond of the tuna. Marrow of the bone of this story - I'm beginning to find myself even less interesting than other people. This is something I never thought I'd live to see. I mean - unnoticed death after an unremarkable life filled with missed opportunities and abused acquaintances - yes, obviously, but I always assumed I'd still be firmly in my corner when the curtain came crumbling down. Still chanting my own name with a silly grin plastered onto my charmingly symmetrical features.

Other people have real problems, I'm not about to grow a fringe about any of this but in the quiet times between Mars Volta songs certain truths do seem to snigger a little more insistently. Where are all your riches, the silence seems to say. Surely you should have riches by this stage. And bitches! Where are they all at? Timeless questions.

I comfort myself though - frequently - by reminding myself of all my myriad responsibilities. That might sound strange but so do underwater conversations. Responsibilties to all my selves, and all their children. And sometimes when things get truly dark I will think about Starcraft.

And how my life simply cannot be allowed to end until I suck a great deal less than I do. Advice for Survival - that one's on the house :)