Kisses

Well, at least you hear me Anton. You understand the agony of this awful silence.
You said it yourself, if not in so many words. How did that go again... a stream to a river to an ocean, to evaporate as vapor and then fall again as rain. It was something like that. And what was it you called it... this incomprehensible, aimless jest.
This treat or that. A milkshake or a absent lover. The function is the same. The heart jumps or then it falls. The thoughts flood in and then flood out. We shiver or shudder or quake with anticipation. Its all just consumption of one sort or another.
But I see how we differ and wonder if you're right. Maybe I am too cynical about the whole affair, placing blame on our treats and scolding myself for being deceived by them. I suspect that you would rather welcome them, be pleased to take whatever they can offer, make as your only expectation that they leave you a tad richer in the experience of it all.
Is it better to enjoy the ball then to spend the night at home in a brazen melancholy? Or does it matter at all?
After all, the glamour of the ball and the solitude of these pallid yellow walls, they both end up as nothing more then landfill in the end. To be forgotten, or at best remembered intermittently, vaguely, probably incorrectly. And both will someday disappear completely along with everything else.
So what does it matter? What does it matter if I drink my shake or climb my ladder or kiss my woman? What does it matter?
Its all just landfill.
Maybe it was for none the worse that R~ stayed home in the end.
- posted by Sigurd3/31/2005 10:22:00 PM

 
Drowning out the beat of reality

I was wondering last night as I drained to the bottom of my licorice milkshake, why it was that I had wanted one at all.
Why do I want?
Its an easy question until you think about it. When you think about it you're forced to realize that its just a milkshake. It's just taste. And then it doesn't make so much sense.
'Oh, but it tastes so good,' you say. Good? What does that mean? The next time you're tasting your licorice milkshake take a moment to be aware of what it is you're tasting. Cuz its really nothing at all. Its sugary, licoricey, liquidy taste. Nothing more.
What's there to make me want it so much?
The other night this monk said to me that it relieves my agitation. I think he might be right.
Wanting something puts a thought into my head. A thought to preoccupy myself with. To twirl around in my mind and keep it busy.
Without the wanting of this milkshake, what would I be left to think about? Well, not much. There's nothing in my mind unless I put something there. If I don't put something there, then there's nothing in there at all.
There's no background noise.
And I want the background noise to drown out the beat of reality.
So I stick this milkshake thought in my head, and make myself believe that I really want the licoricey sugary taste. And with that it becomes much more then just a taste.
It becomes an idea.
I can preoccupy myself with an idea. How do I get it? When? All the obstacles. All the possibilities. Its just loaded with thoughts.
The milkshake has become this incredible tool that allows me to ignore reality. I can drown out of the beat of it's empty nature.
To not be aware.
To me, as I sat there and took the final few sips of a milkshake that really didn't even taste all that good after the first couple sips, this made a lot of sense. Its not about the taste. The milkshake is just another way of drumming out the silence.
- posted by Sigurd3/29/2005 11:37:00 PM

 

One crazy fucker on another I've been reading about William Blake again Blake saw arch-angels and demons and God outside his bedroom window And then he wrote the most amazing words about them. I think he was probably crazy. Wigged out on the noodle crazy. Though I suppose it's possible that arch-angels and demons float around our streets and we're just too self-involved to notice them. But I doubt it. He was likely just crazy. If Blake was alive today we would pop him full of pills and sit him down on a leather lazy boy and get him fixed by some introspective gentleman with a few years of schooling.

And then Blake would stop seeing arch-angels and demons. He would probably get work in a little cubicle with blank, pastel walls and fake marble drawers and spend his days crafting emails to vendors and customers.
Because that's real you see. Vendors and customers are real. Arch-angels and demons are just plain ridiculous.
Yup, that Blake was a crazy fucker.
- posted by Sigurd3/27/2005 11:47:00 PM

 
what matters what matters what matters what matters...
Tonight I was a lion
Tamer.
I wore a suit of red and white. Stripes down its side. A jolly Rollie Fingers handlebar moustache. And an oversized top hat.
I travelled with the circus from town to town. Entertaining.
The respect you get as a lion tamer! A bit above the bearded lady. Each night the crowd would gasp and applaud in awe when I was in the center of the ring.
The spotlights were upon me.
But even taming lions is not all glamorous. Not when you dig a little deeper. When the spotlights are turned off and I am back in my tiny trailer with my not so tiny bottle. In the morning it is chores, feeding and cleaning, and training tirelessly to get it just right. And then the travel, always the travel. Days of my life are lost to the road.
And you still don't have your freedom.
So yeah, tonight I was a lion tamer. A lion tamer and then an engineer and then some sort of orporate head and then, finally, a writer. And what I learned was that even taming lions isn't all glorious, and that for me real freedom is simply a matter of time.
- posted by Sigurd3/23/2005 11:54:00 PM

 

My bike is a piece of shit. And its going to be the death of me. I ride it into the ground, grinding it through the chinook mud and salty streets until everthing metal is an unnatural shade of orange. Its deterioration has been accelerating. The back brake now works intermittently. The shifting has developed a delay. And the chain slips off at the worst of times. Its the chain that's going to kill me.

What's amazing is the intelligence with which it slips off. It never slips off on an empty side street or in a back alley. But you get me crossing something with four lanes in rush hour and its off like a banana on butter. Maybe the mixture of road salt and tar has created an environment conducive to intelligent derailers.
This morning it slipped off in the middle of 14th Street as I was trying to turn left.
How hopeless you feel, stuck in the middle of an icy intersection with an SUV barreling down on you at 50 clicks.
And there's really nothing you can do. You get off your bike. Cringe. And hope he can stop.
Luckily he did. This time.
- posted by Sigurd3/21/2005 10:46:00 PM

 
Erosion

Its snowing out in big white flakes that look like you could eat them.
We had spring and now its winter. Spring and then winter and then back again at least a few more times before it sticks. This is the city of a thousand seasons. Some of them last only a few hours.
Nothing lasts.
I was thinking that last night, out at dinner with my parents, looking at how my mother is starting to get a few wrinkles around her mouth where she didn't have them before.
Nothing lasts.
I think erosion is my biggest fear. I lie in bed, awake until the early hours, staring at the stars on my ceiling and worrying about erosion.
It never seems to console me much to know that the eroded sand will wash ashore again some day. People are always pointing that out, but it always seems sort of besides the point. I just can't shake the thought that the mountain is still long gone.
Anyways.
Those are sad thoughts and it is not a night worth being sad, so I will stop, and go meet my girl, and try to forget that I'm eroding away.
- posted by Sigurd3/19/2005 05:57:00 PM

 
She danced over me in not so casual slacks.

The room had lost its form. She moved above me in perfect rhythm. A rainbowed goddess, teasing me with simple motions of arms, legs and hips, she seduced me from above.
She curled her lips in the most dangerous of smiles. “milk and honey, do you want to love me? she sang, her eyes playfully melting me to pulp.
She knelt down to me, holding herself an inch away. I burnt with locked desire. The sweet torture, of her skin, her lips, the tiny black top lining her curves, lining my imagination with what was not revealed.
I have never wanted more.

She danced. Like Grace and the Devil she danced. As if she were desire itself. Her slim body, that perfect body that makes me think of nothing else, gliding effortlessly through life's ether, marking its melody to the air. Over me, around me, through me. All the while her seductive smile daring me to lose control.
Oh how I wanted to join her. But I was paralyzed. Too mesmerized to move. You see, you can't just join in with a siren. They will only swim away.
And so I could only lay in awe, enjoying her generosity, and hoping that it would never end.
- posted by Sigurd3/16/2005 11:32:00 PM

 
I've been trying all day to find my mood.
You have to find your mood to write. At least I do. Otherwise I'm faking it and it just comes across sounding like crap.
I think I found mine. Finally. My mood is that I don't want to write.
I have all this pent up anxiety over I'm not exactly sure what. Things to do. Stuff to get done. I have no idea what it is, but something in me is quite certain that I'm far too busy to write.
And I have to write too. That's just another thing added to the list and making it even more difficult to get out of this mood.
So instead I'll research my game and see if I can win the next round.
- posted by Sigurd3/13/2005 04:22:00 PM

 
I knew it was going to be a strange night. Sometimes you smell it in the leather and you just know things aren't going to be right side up.
There was him, and he was standing on the corner wearing a black cape, one of those vampire capes, and a big, black top hat. He was holding in one hand a gargoyled staff and in the other he was sipping a milkshake.
She had called me around noon, and told me that they had taken her identity. We never knew who they were, but that's not unusual. She spent most of the day trying to get it back.
And I was besides myself most of the day, not quite feeling like I was quite there in any sort, my head pounding from the pressure. I must have choked back a litre of coffee as I tried to numb the pain.
Meanwhile, in the background of it all was Miles Davis's horn, screaming out its prayer. Thinking back on it all, it was like the glue that held us all together.
- posted by Sigurd3/11/2005 10:26:00 PM

 
To recognize that in this moment I am ok. That in this moment I am happy. And to understand that happiness is the goal. And then to recognize that if this all true, it means I don't have to go outside of this moment, into that world of thoughts and feelings and future and past, to find happiness. I am happy right here. In me. There's no reason to go beyond.
- posted by Sigurd3/09/2005 08:12:00 PM

 

Here's a thought worth writing down. If I was going to think of one thing we've learned from the travels of our most recent genius-folk, it would have to be this - they have reminded us that we are fragile. I was thinking about this when Hunter S. Thompson died. Now I don't know a lot about him, I'm not his biggest fan or anything, but of course I've heard the stories and now I've read a bunch of his stuff and I recognize clearly that the man could really write. Just like Bukowski could really write. Just like Kerouac and Ginsberg and those other beat poets could really write. Just like Dylan can really write. The list goes on, the souls who decided to live their philosophy and find a new existential art to jot down for posterity. And the common thread between them seems to be that they threw caution to the wind, they dove down deep to that thick sludge of our blackness and drank it up. They indulged upon the dark side of their moon relentlessly.

As I look at what they have become by their orgy, would it be so awful to call it a shell?
I think they prove beyond much doubt that caution is not without its merits.
That we are more fragile then we think.
- posted by Sigurd3/07/2005 07:38:00 AM

 
'I'm sorry poor fellow, but creation has its limits.'
I like most of what he has to say, but this time I don't think so.
Maybe its the drink. Maybe its the pixie dust. Maybe its this fucking mind.
But i don't think so.
Creation makes life.
That's what I think.
Don't blame it for all us short-sighted students.
- posted by Sigurd3/04/2005 08:42:00 PM

 
This fucking corporate sham. This fucking world where we bestow an insane value on this figment of our imagination. This thing we call an institution.
This deadening jail for our souls.
And to think we place more value here, on some contrived, human concept, than on a real human life.
Its so fucked up.
We're so fucked up.
I'm so fucked up.
You know what the worst part of it all is? Its the apathy. The lethargy. Cuz that's what I feel right now. That's what I felt through all of it. Sitting there in at colorless room along with all the other carcasses that hadn't been sold. Yet.
I felt lethargic.
I just don't give a shit. The world goes to hell in a handsbasket, the world doesn't go to hell in a handsbasket. It just seems to be the logistics of time getting on.
Of course, the thing that does matter is that these are real lives that are affected, hurt, maybe destroyed. And there's dick all we can do about that.
But wade a bit further in and even that has to answer to history. There it gets really depressing. History quickly reminds us that this is nothing new.
So whatever right? Dog eat dog. Strongest survive. Meanest survive. Be a rugged individualist.
And just get on.
Blah.
- posted by Sigurd3/03/2005 07:06:00 PM

 
Praise and Criticism

All this blather about praise and criticism. And I couldn't help but think - it doesn't matter.
It almost felt like one of those coffee house chats, a little oneupmanship all around, pontificating about something oh so deep but really not so deep at all.
Or maybe that's just getting drawn into the fray myself.
I tried not to.
Maybe it was just boring.
Ok then. Fair enough. Boring because...
Why care about praise and criticism?
Well... what are they?
They are opinions.
Opinions of others. External opinions.
And thus their essence is that of a judgement, of good and bad.
External judgements.
But you can only have external judgements if there is some sort of good and bad that exists.
Right?
I know, maybe I'm not making much sense, though trust me I am. But I'm definitely indulging. Whatever. I'm going to write this so fuck it.
And drink.
Anyways...
Some sort of good and bad. External judgements of some sort of good or bad.
But nothing is fixed. Nothing is inherent. Nothing is out there.
So then the value of that good or bad judgement is entirely a concept created within one's mind. Our mind. Its what we're giving to the opinion, not what it carries itself.
And that is nothing at all.
Really.
So what's the point of wasting an hour talking about what it is?
Boring.
- posted by Sigurd3/01/2005 10:46:00 PM