White Hatter

2008-02-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

I can sing in solitude now. And I don't have to worry what it sounds like.
This is just how it is.
We are together. On the bright side, I am together. And I did not, nor thought much of it. Not thought of it at all.
And I don't know if I do anymore.
One year past with nothing to show for it. But what was going to be shown anyways? What did I ever think was ever going to be shown? God? The Devil? Was there ever anything in between?
Some sort of jealous void that wants infinity but can't even get immunity. Or even a little bit of peace.
I know that none of this makes any sense. Luckily it doesn't matter because it does make sense to me, and I'm throwing it out here into the world for no particular reason that I am willing to admit.
I haven't written a word in 9 months.
Not since I left the tracks of fate. Taking this detour. Another detour. Yet another detour, happening while I wait for life to take place. Determined by beggars and thieves.
Not that it has gotten me anywhere. Not that it hasn't gotten us anywhere. But that is to a cold cellar cell and a wait to find out if I have the strength still to believe in fate.
I'm going to start writing again.

2007-02-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

The merits of Inefficiency

Surely any self-respecting, unconscious conservative should read those words and move on.
Good riddance.
John Ralston Saul talks a lot about our obsession with efficiency. I think he has a point.
We have an obsession that things be done faster, cheaper, to perform better.
These are all worthy attributes. They are the engines of economic growth.
But are they, in themselves, a meaningful end? Or are they just a means to an end that needs to be first defined?
There's this article I read about two weeks ago. In the National Post. It was about this young writer, who's name I can't remember, and he's written some novel I also can't remember but I'm sure you could find it in the front display of chapters and coles.
We love young novelists.
Anyways, he said that he wrote about 2000 pages to come up with his novel. His novel was about 400 pages.
And it made me wonder, can beauty be efficient? Can creativity be efficient? And, of course, can writing be efficient?
This opens up a whole can of worms. Because I think it really puts to question the value that we place in our society on efficiency.
That which is most beautiful has many layers. It arises and exists in a web, textured, confusing, often with a structure so subtle that it might not even be detectable.
Efficiency, on the other hand, is all about being linear. Achieving an end as directly as possible. With time as the crucial component.
This writer, of whom I still can't remember the name of, he said something like 'you can take the most direct route, using a map, to get from here to there, or you can take the route intuited by your senses, and that route is maybe all over the place and full of dead-ends, but it may be also be full of a beauty you would otherwise never find.'
So yeah, if we were more inefficient we'd miss out on growth. And our corporations wouldn't make as much money and all those stock operators wouldn't get so rich.
But I wonder what else we'd find?

2007-02-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

It don't matter where you bury me.

I'm sitting around on a saturday night eating cheesburgers and getting ready to write. That's all and that's it.
But don't get me wrong, life isn't anything dull.
Earlier tonight I was looking at myself in 20 years and you know what, I liked allright what I saw. I might have shaved the beard and I do think cognac tastes like sewer water but all in all its all right.
I'm getting ready to write.
But not a post. For the first time in a month, my god has been a month, I'm going to write something longer than the length of my hand.
This is what I'm going to write.
I'm going to write about this fellow. This fellow who used to think he was really all that and knew it all and he didn't need no god telling him what to do.
A blasphemer. That's what he was.
He blasphemied most anything that you'd spell with a capital. Didn't buy any of it and said so. Was a real thorn in the side of tradition.
Well anyways, this fellow, its been some time now since he walked away, and now he's coming back.
And he's coming back crawling.
He still doesn't buy it, doesn't believe it any more then when he left, but now he knows he needs it. And he's begging it for mercy.
He no longer can handle the markless desert.
And having been there and seen it all and tried it out, he now realises that it doesn't so much matter whats real and what isn't as it does what works and what doesn't.
He learned what doesn't work, and so now he wants to come back.
That's it.

2007-01-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

Bill Barker was a straight man without a side kick.
Billy would stand outside of a dozen and main, on twelfth that is, and he would tip his hat and give a good morning to everybody who went by. He'd look expectantly as the fellows passed, but it was never the case that he got any in return.
Poor guy just didn't know how to say it.
Billy would get quite dejected at times. You would notice his shoulder shrug and he would stare at the ground. He would stay this way for a moment or sometimes a day, but he would perk back up as soon as he heard laughing around the bend.
Billy had a house around the corner but he wasn't there much. He lived alone except for his sister who no one saw anyway. There was one day, about ten years back when Billy brought out Marie onto the corner with him. They tried, and Billy held that grim veneer. But before the sun even came up she was spooked and ran to the house crying, yelling bloody murder that Billy would ever do something so mean.
After that, Billy was all alone on the corner.
This went on for maybe twenty years. Maybe still does. A year ago I close down and moved myself to Tulsa. I don't know what became of Billy, but I doubt he ever did find a funny man.

2006-12-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

I think its safe to write again. No one is listening.
You have to be silent for a while to make everyone forget that you're there. And then, when the coast is clear and everyone has gone about their business again, then you can get out your new eyes and look around.
I can look around again. Nobody cares.
So I'll post what I want to post.
Last night I was in a classroom, sitting on a bare plastic chair, and listening to an old man I know speak to an audience of no more then six.
He is a great purveyor of worldly knowledge, able to tame the ebb and flow of current events into a coherent trajectory. I think its fair to call him a prophet for our modern times.
I would be excited to have sat before him, and listened to him speak. But he wasn't as I expected him, he was old and frail and in a wheelchair. His hair was much whiter then in any picture I had seen, and his skin was much more wrinkled. He was wheeled up to the podium, where he spoke in a barely audible voice.
It occured to me that he looked a little bit like myself.
But he did not speak as I expected, he launched into a rageful tirade, condemning the poor for their stupidity and sloth, proclaiming that we have always dominated, and will always be the masters of men. He spoke incoherently, his ideas confused and without structure. 'Who is this man?' I thought, and when I looked in his eyes I saw nothing but vacancy and I thought this is not the same man.
So it was far from the well reasoned ideas that I had been expecting. And I thought to myself, how sad, and who is really to say what a man's views really are, for they are only words that are said in that very moment, and past that they are really nothing at all but memories.
And still, even on hearing this ranting fool, his poorly crafted barbs exposed in their shocking nakedness, it still seemed hollow that there were only six others sitting to take it in.
When his time was up, he was dragged off the podium by his moderator, who attempted to hush him as he refused to stop his speech. 'The time is up,' she pleaded quietly, but he wanted none of it, and seemed oblivious to the reality that no one was really listening.
Finally he was taken from the podium, and quieted down to a degree. Questions were taken, to which the moderator answered herself.
'Is the time not really up?' I thought. I felt suddenly overwhelmed by impatience. I looked over at this bumbling old man, the shell of who I thought I knew, he was still muttering and cursing under his breath, and I realised how brief the flame of that sort of knowledge is, it is good only for the moment of which it is current, and after the moment is done you have to prove yourself again, or accept your banishment to the asylum of history.

2006-09-17T23:51:00.000-06:00

Leadership

It's late. Maybe 11:30. I don't know. Nowadays I turn the clock away before I lay down.
It makes me anxious to look at the time.
This is not my bed. It's a top bunk. There are four mattresses in the room. I have a pair of ear plugs on the side of my bed because the guy below me snores like a snowblower.
Across the street in the pub they're booming out redemption songs. It's karaoke night and most of them have gone over there for a drink. In the hall there's the rest of them sitting around on low backed chairs, I could hear them before I put my plugs in, talking about righteousness and corruption and leadership. There must be 30 of us in all. I'm the only one holed up in his room.
I like it that way.
The world is full of extroverts. They grow like Epsilons. Or is that just because they are the only one's out? Don't matter. We're led by the Gamma's and that's what matters. Like it or not. The rest of us just have to scrounge the floor for table scraps.

Righteousness, corruption and leadership. Blah, blah, blah.
I feel alone when I make even a mention of truth and beauty.
I was the one born in the wrong time.
I don't really give a fuck about leading and pioneering and making the world a better place. The world is going to be what it is. Maybe it will be a little hotter in a while. A little poorer. A little less light. Or maybe it won't. I don't know, and I'd hate to take the lead only to find out it's in the wrong way.
What I do give a fuck about is truth. And beauty. And yeah, they aren't tangible. And no, you can't rally and picket for them in front of city hall. But they matter to me and that counts for everything.
The thing is, I don't know if you could even find either of them in the real world. The real world is just a bunch of compromise and half lies and two sided faces. Truth and beauty are religated for the netherworld of my head. They turn themselves up in a verse or a sentence or a few strokes of color. That's them. I don't think I've found them once in small talk. I don't know. Maybe I just don't hang out with the right people.
Maybe, but I could waste a lot of time finding out that I do, and that they just aren't there. So I'll sit here in my bed and write myself to sleep and hope that I get a touch of them before dawn.

2006-08-13T21:38:00.000-06:00

I went to go see the Al Gore movie yesterday.
Today I bought I bike.
But don't get me wrong. I'm no optimist.
I spent the morning trying out different sizes, handle bar styles, seat cushions. They had to fit it with a saddle sack holder, put on some different tires without treads, change the pedals. I went home while it waited in the queue.
I came back on the bus with my saddle by my side, but it didn't fit so well and they had to adjust it. I got a coupon for a coffee and was told to come back in an hour.
I had a latte.
The waitress behind the counter was telling the guy in the front that she might as well marry Jimmy. She was convinced that he was better then Jay. And it wasn't like there were any other prospects coming along.
In the corner booth there was a woman in a purple suit telling a young couple how to get their mortgage.
I was reading an article in FFWD on urban sprawl.
The guy in front pointed out to the waitress that she did work in a coffee shop after all.
Big help that's been, she said.
I need a cigarette he replied.
As for the bike, I'll ride it to work, probably more then I rode the one I had. I can't on Monday though. I have to pick S~ at the airport. On Tuesday I have an interview. I guess it will be Wednesday.
So I went to the Al Gore movie and I got a new bike. But I'm not all that optimistic. All the stuff in between gets in the way.

2006-07-14T20:51:00.000-06:00

Ancient Footsteps

Out with the old! That is our mantra. Out with morality, with structure, consistency and consequence. We have vanquished them all, left them to rust away in a quaint little corner of the canon.

These virtues have become antiquities in the name of a new god. In the name of
Honesty. Nothing else is required, so long as we are honest to our own self.

Well I disagree. I damn honesty. I say that we've taken it too far.

Honesty is a virtue, not the virtue. It is not a deity to be worshipped and practiced without doubt.

Taken alone, honesty is a poor substitute for humanity.

The problem with honesty is this. At a personal level (and let me make it clear that I am speaking of purely of personal honesty) it is mostly meaningless. It is meaningless because it has no consistency. What is honest to us one minute is a damn lie the next.

Of course, that realization is the essence of humanity. To be inconsistent, confused, uncertain; that is human. But amidst such tumult, what is also human is to somehow still accept that life goes on, and that we must go on with it; that we must blaze a path, make decisions, and accept mistakes. Even bound by our flawed inconsistency, we must try our best to do what is right.

But if we worship only our own personal honesty, and give honor to each passing fancy that happens about our head, we will drown in inconsistency.

To say it another way, if we honor each moments whim, we profess a faith to a church that preaches that the past and future as having no meaning. But where there is no meaning, there can be no coherence. And coherence is the asphalt of any path.

Yet personal honesty is our new god. A god; meaning another way to stay unconscious, as opposed to facing up to what our reality is, what I believe is best summed up by Dostoevsky, when he referred to it quite elegantly as ‘our terrible beauty’. When we ignore the beauty of our responsibility in favor of a new faith, even one so seemingly virtuous as honesty, we drop from our heaven to a new god strumming his lullaby below.

No knight-errants here, not even a squire is in sight.

So how does it happen that we can we justify this new religion, this reckless faith to personal honesty?

The problem, of course, is we justify anything. This is just another truism of our human plight.

But if we are to be ‘honest’ in this justification, I think it is correct to at least observe this: that to follow our honesty blindly we must accept no claim to responsibility outside of our self. We must accept none for what our honesty might bring, and none for the other that it will undoubtedly touch. We must be purely cynical, and be content with that.

And hey, if we can do that... well, I guess the world is our oyster, at least until the chaos ensues. Because then we are both Hegel and the Saint, all as one. True to ourselves, we say what we feel in the moment, we act as we wish at the time, and we do so without a care for consistency, nor a worry for compassion.

And most importantly, we can sleep well, comforted that we are faithful to a new god, and that our rightful place in his heaven is secured, so long as we follow his commmandment and be honest to our self.

Well that all may be so. But as I briefly touched on, there is a problem with all this. If we bow to this new god of honesty, and give ourselves to its passing whim, then we will never have coherence in our lives. Because our coherence, or maybe you might prefer to call it our path, is not built upon honesty. Honesty is perhaps the map, but it is certainly not the guide.

Well that all may be dandy. But as I briefly touched on, there is a problem with all this, even beyond the obvious deterioration of society that we can already see the ripples of. As we bow to this new god of honesty, and submit ourselves to the passing whims that it throws upon us, we lose coherence to our lives. Because our personal coherence, it might better be called our path, is not built upon honesty.

Honesty is perhaps the map, but it is certainly not the guide.

Our guide is not so easily conceived. It is something timeless, something that is in us, but only because it is in everything. Bob Dylan said once that he could hear the ancient footsteps. Those footsteps are our guide. We must follow them, even if we realize that there's nothing really there. Real or imagined, they must guide our path. We have no choice, because they are our coherence. They hold us with integrity even as our honest reactions ebb and flow like tides.

I suspect that, on the other hand, a path faithful only to personal honesty will look somewhat akin to the path of an ant. Ants are seemingly busy going somewhere, just so long as you don't look too close. If you do, you realize they are only going back and forth and really going no where at all.

Look around. You don’t have to look down from far above to see all the ants that run around below.

As for myself, I will only say this: The rest of the world can bask in their honest piety. I'll pass this one by and stick to my own coherence.

2006-06-11T08:30:00.000-06:00

Hirschfeld Nights

Sleeping, sleeping, but only sedated.
As I was lying there last night, held by the insomnia, it gives me some comfort to know that I could quit my job, if it came to it. I'd still be ok for a time. Maybe a long time, if I lived off of frozen vegetables and canned beans for protein.
Food doesn't taste that good right now anyways. I feel like I have to eat, not that I want to.
Last night I lay in bed for about an hour before I finally gave up and took a sleeping pill.
Why can't I fall asleep on my own anymore?
I guess though, that at least it seems to be getting better. At least last night I did actually lay there for almost an hour, unsedated, and I didn't once break out into a cold sweat of fear. Still couldn't sleep mind you, but at least I could relax.
At this point that is a major accomplishment.
Today, I feel okay. Better then yesterday maybe, definitely better then friday, definitely better then earlier in the week. At least I'm not terrified anymore. Like on friday. It's hard to believe that was only two nights ago. I was a mess. Terrified. And of what?
Being alone I think. Alone, awake and alive.
Please, please, oh please. No more dark sides.

2006-05-16T22:14:00.000-06:00

Riding Mother Nature's Silver Seed to a New Home in the Sun

I am being haunted right now by a ghost. By ideas that have been instilled in me and that are now being threatened by, of all people, a monk. The ghost fights back, and he is wreaking the havoc of his insights on my mind.
I haven't read a word of Nietzsche for a very long time. I think its a phase you go through, like when you eat hamburger helper for a month straight just cuz you like it. Its been probably 4 years since I even picked up one of his books. Yet his ghost lingers.
What is important will perservere.
As an aside, is there anything more cliche then a young man making a poetic reference about Nietzsche? I should be slapped and fined for writing without a poetic license.
Still, even the cliches are sometimes are correct. There he is, staring me in the face.
'Is this really what you were brought up to believe?'
The last thing I read of Nietzsche was from a t-shirt.
On the front of the shirt it said 'God is dead' - Nietzsche, 1888.
On the back it said 'Nietzsche is dead' - God, 1901
Anyways, I thought it was pretty funny.
For better or worse, I learned from him. At times I think I learned too much. Here's a few paragraphs I wrote about five years ago. I stumbled on it yesterday.

He was considered a genius, at least by himself, and while much of his writing seems a tad indulgent to me and some of it is just straight off the wall and into the abyss, it isn't without its merit. There is this one idea in particular that pervades everything I have been reading, and I just haven't been able to let go of it. Tonight I finally get it. He's talking about the necessity of man to create. He sees the one who creates as being the crack through which the light is drawn.
I always thought that I understood what he was saying. Oh sure, its simple, straightforward, he thinks we should all be artists or builders or something of the sort. We need to create. But I was wrong. Tonight I think I figured it out, as I was wandering in my typical aimless stupor around and around the blocks circling my house. He was talking about meaning. We are all to be the creators of our own meaning.
I gained an ounce of solace in realizing that.

I think it's safe to say, in retrospect, that I gained more than an ounce.
It's a pretty simple idea really. I guess most anything of any importance is. But anyways, I latched onto it. It lifted me from the mundane dance of futility that, at the time, was bringing me down. Because what he is saying, in essence, is that we are our own creators.
Would could be more empowering? Because it makes it all ok. It makes it ok to be human, it makes it ok to make mistakes, and it makes it ok to try.
So that all brings us to the now. I am being asked to follow a path that I am told is the 'right one'.
And I hesitate. And shake. And sometimes I even tremble.
I am not all that sure about it.
Because there it is, the voice of Nietzsche, haunting my gut, telling me that there is no 'right one'. Telling me that we must all be creators. Telling me that if I give up my ability to create my own meaning, even if it may be in favour of the 'right one', then I give up that chance that we are all blessed with, to create the world in our own image.
Well, I don't know. I don't know much. But I do know that I'm not ready to give in to that just yet.

2006-05-07T22:54:00.000-06:00

My First Few Weeks in the Undertaking of the Profession of Knight-Errant

I have to say, its been a bit of a slog.
Immediately after making the toast of which I have already spoken (and which must really be read first to understand what I say here, and to understand as well the historical accounts that will undoubtably follow as I further my design to resurrect the profession of knight-errant), well, immediately after that, I made out into the countryside in search of a steed.
You see, a knight-errant must have a steed, if for no other reason then that you look rather stupid walking the interstate in armor on foot. Not to mention, in such degenerate times, there is more then a little chance you will be accosted by some ignorants who see not your noble profession but a fellow wrapped in aluminum foil (real armor is quite expensive I've found), and these types of ignorants can be less then kind. The deficiency of foil over hardened steel becomes quite apparent at such times.
So, if only for one's health, a steed is required.
But lord, let me tell you, it is no easy endeavour to find a steed. I have roamed around since the moon was full, looking far and wide for my proper form of transportation. But my god, what frustration! This land is littered with cattle, hogs, and horses, but it is almost entirely bereft of steeds. It is no wonder that the knight-errant has fallen to extinction.
And let me say this! I am not just a little suspicious of this strange extinction. In fact I have a feeling there is some design behind it. At the least, I have some very pointed questions I would like to ask those with such means as to whether there is some grand design that has conspired to bring it about. After all, what better way to rid the world of such a selfless profession then to erase from the earth its transportation.
Well, I write this from a small hotel outside of a town that for all I know has no name. I will continue on my journey from here; my quest for a steed shall not be soeasily deterred. In the mean time, I am given the chance to do some reading, and brush up on the historical accounts of knight-errantry, so that I might be best prepared when I find my ride. I am also reading Thoughts without a Thinker, which I would highly recommend.
But at the bottom is this: I pledge to you, upon my heart, that when I write next it will be upon a faithful steed. Assuming, of course, that wireless will reach that far. Adeiu!

2006-04-28T21:41:00.000-06:00

In Remembrance of Jane Jacobs

In an interview a few years back Jane Jacobs was asked what it was that she would be remembered for in generations to come. She replied, to the great surprise of the interviewer, that it would not be for her work on urban development. Instead she said that if she were to be remembered, it would be for her insights into economies.

The interviewer didn't have much of a response to that. He probably had never read that aspect of her work.

Having read and listened to the tributes and accolades bestowed upon Jacobs this week, I can say that almost without exception they have focused on a single work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, and on her contributions to urban planning and development. Make no mistake, this was terribly important work, and she should be commended for fighting the fallacies of the over-zealous and under-endowed who took it as their destiny to gut our inner-cities. But to focus singularly on her work as urbanologist is to miss the wealth of her other contributions, particularly her ideas about economies and how they develop. These ideas, I suspect, will prove in the long run to be of greater consequence.

In truth, the ideas about economies that Jacobs discovered are radically different from traditional economic thought. It is no surprise then that most who read them, drifting themselves with the tide of common convention, cannot hear the truth that the ideas hold. That is why much of her work is forgotten, brushed over with at best a sentence at the end of her eulogy.

There are a few, however, that recognize the importance of what she has given us. Donald Coxe, Chairman of Jones Heward Investment, paid tribute to Jacobs this week, calling her a remarkable woman, and making the same point that I make here, that her work on economies may one day prove to be even more influential that her work on urban development.

For the rest, who choose to ignore these pivotal ideas, it is best said that some insights are just too radical for the time in which they are conceived. Art, literature, and philosophy are all littered with the bones of the lately revered genius who, while alive, had to scrape away in anonymity. The world is never kind to the original thinker. And as for the idea itself, which always threatens the core of convention, and more pointedly the heart of those with a vested interest in the matter, well, it is at best ignored and at worst reviled, often heaped with scorn for a minor flaw that is besides the fundamental point.

In Jacobs’s case, her primary fault was that she never gave herself to the tedium of getting a degree. Given our preoccupation with letters behind the name, we are skeptical of how someone without a Harvard PhD might come up with a meaningful economic contribution, let alone a revolutionary theory that turns the subject quite onto its head. It is simply inconceivable to our culture that such independent learning is possible, as we are ingrained with the premise that academic credentials must precede anything of worth.

Jacobs had no degree. She had no formal training in economics. It is true that she probably could not have worked out the Black-Scholes present value of a synthetic derivative, which of course we all know is the mark of a great economist, as the success of Long Term Capital Management so aptly demonstrates.

What she did have was an incredible wisdom that could see through convention and stereotype, and through the novels of imagined theory that we pretend to be the canon of our reality. She could pierce through the gobbledygook of false premises and poorly achieved conclusions and see things as they actually work. She was an engineer in its truest sense.

By doing so, she provided us with a conception of an economy as it relates to nature, an economy not premised on the whims of paper currency traders and forever oscillating yields, but instead upon energy flows and the laws of nature that hold themselves no differently in the concrete jungle then they do in the rain forests of Brazil.

She understood that economies, like ecosystems, grow not from restriction, regulation or subsidies, but from freedom, and that it is freedom that is essential to allow for the adaptability and uncertainty that is at the heart of economic growth.

She perceived that the growth of an economy is driven not by exports, a traditional belief proven wrong so often that it must take real skill on the part of its commissars to keep up its adherence, but by the simple idea that economies develop by imitation, and by replacing the goods that they previously imported with goods that they make themselves.

Finally, she pointed out a premise that has been wrongly conceived in most all previous economic thought; that it is the city, not the nation-state, which is the essential building block of an economy. She is the first to conceive of the city as a discrete, interdependent organism, alive and growing, an eco-system within the biosphere that grows and dies by the same principles as nature itself.

Jane Jacobs has taken the first steps towards moving the science of economics away from its theoretical stasis and into the practical world where the human economy is not an aberration of nature, but a part of it. More generally, she has shown us the superiority of having two eyes and a good pair of ears over any number of plaques on the wall. No one with a Harvard degree could have come up with her theories. They are simply too elegant, too precise, to be anything but the work of an unbiased observer.

This week we mourn the death of Jane Jacobs, and for most that means the mourning of a tireless activist and the mother of modern urban planning. But we must also acknowledge a different woman, the writer of what will without doubt someday be seminal texts of economics. The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Nature of Economies, to name a few. That the title of the book Cities and the Wealth of Nations follows in name to the great book written by Adam Smith is fitting, for Jacob's book is the next real step towards an understanding of economics based upon how the world actually works.

I don't expect that this recognition of Jacobs, as mother of modern economic thought, will happen today or tomorrow or any time soon. True genius takes time to be digested, and the audience of our time is not yet ready for such upheaval. But the day will come. I would not be surprised at all if 100 years from now Jane Jacobs is spoken of in the same breath as Adam Smith, referred to as the brilliant economist whose ideas have rebuilt nations, along with a great contributor to urban planning and the savior of many an inner-city. When that day comes, the world will be a better place because of it.

2006-04-12T18:05:00.000-06:00

To the Resurrection of the Knight-Errant

Well. Sitting here, delayed by rain, I am intent upon nothing but that my travels continue along their current path and are not want to be returned. In this mean time I have nothing to do but to put down a few thoughts. It is this which is laid before you.
But don't mistake, I do not write this purely of conditions. For truthfully, has there ever been anything in the realm of the atom that has inspired me to take to the pen with appetite?
No. Not once I think.
No, in fact, I doubt I would be writing at all had I not been tempted by a sudden urge to make well of an idea that has struck me so hard that I am currently quite incapacitated from the neck up. For this idea has instructed me to take upon a course, and it is that design which is explained in detail below.
So what idea could there be that would lead me to words after two months as a mute?
I suppose it might not be difficult to surmise that I am immersed in some sort of antiquated literature, as I have this strange plague to take upon the style of that which I read, and I imagine that's evident here.
It is true. I am reading Don Quixote. And it is indeed from this source that I come to my idea, which I believe is worth the world itself. And that is this: it has occured to me that the world is want for someone to take up the tradition.
What tradition is that you say?
Why, knight errantry of course!
But make no mistake, I do not read this most extraordinary piece so strictly; I see the spirit with which Mr. de Cervantes intends. And it is the spirit I speak of. Yes it is quite true that Quixote can be taken for a loon, and that his actions can be described as folly. But he also cannot, if one so chooses; and both are ripe to the mind who perceive it as such.
Besides, the spirit of the knight-errant calls for just such a loon, a loon of the strongest constitution, who will not break to this silly delusion to which we give the name reality. And as for the folly, well, it is exactly that which I hope to rekindle, for what greater need do we have, in this age of knowledgable ignorance, then for the folly of chivalry!
And thus, for the good of mankind, let us resurrect the profession of the knight-errant.
Oh yes, yes, I know you look on me with skeptical cynicism. Well that is the age. And it is true, there is of course the riches and fame and all of that which must come along with the tireless pursuit of knight-errantry. But they are but water to the meal, and only serve to better wash the deeds down. For I know full well, as did Quixote, and as must any knight-errant worth his salt, that all is being created out of the mind, so that it must be conceded that all riches are mere appearances and that fame is nothing but a boast.
No, the designs of said profession are far more substantial then such cotton candy. The well that the errant seeks is deeper to the core, to where the water may be known only as nectar by gods. For to the knight-errant it is the creation of the act which is the highest honour that may be received. It is this that the knight-errant treasures at the deepest of his heart, so that he would prefer it to any woman, or to any weight in gold.
That a history may be created, from which the future will take shape! Oh, what more glorious an honour could be bestowed on one. And what better image to shape this future then in the one of chivalry, taking the cue not from a heavenly dictate, nor from a lowly carnal seed, but from the heart of what makes man his most mighty, from the very mind of his own self! I should drop to my knees and kiss the kind fates to be so empowered!
So please, indulge enough to understand me, so that my plea is not on deaf ears. We will seek out our steeds and take the rein's to the only course that can be followed. And first, take this moment to toast with me, to the resurrection of the knight-errant, and the empowerment of every man!

2006-02-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

I was lying in bed mostly asleep (though who ever really knows). I woke up by a noise, something in the kitchen, and then another at my door. So get up and get out and open the door. That's always the way. And there at the door, on the other side, was this little ghost girl, dressed in white.
'You don't want to be here', she said to me.
That was all.
She ran off and out, out through the back and out the door, a door which was locked, not that it mattered much. I stood there stunned, too unsure of what to do except contemplate the debut and cringe at its encore.
The doorbell rang. I went to it, and opened the door (for some reason, I don't know why. Why do we ever do what we know we ought not to do? I guess you might ask as well, what choice do we have in the matter?).
Of course it was the ghost girl that I opened it to.
She ran at me, threatening but not in a threatening way, instead in a deliberate way, with her arms spread open without a face that I could seeand up to me she ran and into me she ran, and I don't mean into me but into me she ran and it was such a terrible sight if I could have only seen it.
Quite terrified. I am quite terrified still. That's not what I wanted to hear.

2006-01-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

I spent about half an hour trying to figure out what to say about this quote that I found today. Its by Jane Jacobs, I found it when I was googling her name and reading everything I could about her.
Anyways, I came across this quote in an interview that was written a few years back, and it just seemed like the sort of thing that you'd want someone else to see. So I figured I'd post it up.
But I got to thinking that if I was going to post it up, I should have something to say about it. You always want to say something, you know? So I wrote something about it, and it sounded pretty silly, and then I wrote something else, and it didn't really seem right either. This went on and every time I said something it just was not really there and all it did was get me more frustrated trying to figure out what it was that was supposed to be said.
Well, if you're trying to say something and every time you try it seems like it just isn't being said, it could be because it shouldn't.
So I'm not going to say anything at all.

There are two ways you encounter things in the world that are different. One is everything that comes in reinforces what you already believe and everything that you know. The other thing is that you stay flexible enough or curious enough and maybe unsure of yourself enough, or may be you are more sure of yourself—I don’t know which it is—that the new things that come in keep reforming your world view.

I have nothing to add.

2006-01-22T23:08:00.000-07:00

I can quite understand why it is we are always taking to drugs and women and television. This terrible emptiness is hard to bare.
So what to do? Amuse oneself to forget? Or stare at the terror straight and risk its awful fear, all the time praying that the mind has the strength to conceive, in its place, only a terrible beauty.

2005-12-28T20:28:00.000-07:00

A Freakin Fun House

Now I'm not fooling anybody and I know damn well that I still don't know nothing about nothing, but it sure does seem to me that if you can have just one thought worth thinking, you're doing a hell of a lot better then most people.
And the real beauty of it is just this - that most of the time the thought is so simple that when you think it, you figure it must be some mistake.
One simple thought. One simple idea can make a life worth living.
I think I said some time before that I read too much. It keeps me from thinking.
I'll stand by that. And I'll open it up to the floor. Cept maybe its listen too much or watch too much. This sense or that, its all the same. We're all running away from our minds.
I have a friend who's always scolding me for running away and hiding myself in this or that. He says that you have to examine your mind and learn to understand it, so that you can train it and overcome it.
But I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure of anytime I have to do something. Seems to me that death trumps all those have to's and nobody's really given me a very good rebuttal.
I digress. I thought I was going to say something tonight. But I guess not.

2005-12-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

Laryngitis

I think I've about had it with all them crooked lines for the time being. Time to sit back and let it all go south. With the risk of sounding a bit too cute, it is time to let hegel play the fool.
The truth of the matter is that I lost my voice again. It happens from time to time, it happens far too often and it makes me wish I could make it stop. It happens the same every time. A severe case of laryngitis and I have to keep myself busy whispering to ghosts of hope that never come true.
A structural flaw of sorts. My very own.
So it was laryngitis. You get that when you start to care about who's listening and you stop caring about who's caring.
And the best thing to do when you can't speak is to shut up.
The other truth is that I have found something worth saying again. But that's going to just have to wait. I'm still struggling just to right myself here, its a little slow and there isn't the least bit of a beat coming to my ear just yet. I'm feeling a bit tipsy from even this kiddie pool of words right now. So this is enough for now.

2005-07-12T09:41:00.000-06:00

Not my thoughts

Last night I went to a class where I learned all about how I am not my thoughts. Its an idea that keeps popping up in my life, and every time it does I marvel at what a potent idea it is, and how simple, but then I forget it until the next time.
Its cool enough that I'm going to try to explain it.
Through the day I have all these thoughts, and all these judgements of the world around me. These thoughts that I have distract my attention from my experience, and these judgement I have color my experience with qualities that I attribute to it.
That's the philosophical description of what I do. But this is what's really important. I don't have to believe the thoughts and judgements that I have.
What an amazing idea! Just realising it lifts the weight from my shoulders and leaves me free. For having realised the nature of my thoughts and judgements, I am no longer a slave to them. I can, if I want, choose to see the thought coming, recognize it for what it is, and then let it go. I can choose not to let it exert any control over me.
I can choose to live beyond my thoughts and judgements. I can jump off of their rollercoaster, and content myself with watching its somersaults.

2005-07-11T10:14:00.000-06:00

As I try to work out this ominous fear that has shivered through me since I woke up.
And it probably has nothing to do with the dinner party, where I sat along with all the others at a big long table under a low lit moon. Everyone else seemed so overdressed, with suits and ties and distinguished gowns. They were all very important. They were all very proper. I don't even remember one face from the crowd.
I don't even know what I was wearing.
But there I was, the center of it all, forced to choose what they all would eat. I don't know why that was, I arrived to the scene late, so I missed out on all that background.
The center of attention. Forced to make a decision for all the others. I was terrified. I didn't know what they would all want to eat. I didn't even know who they were. The menu might as well have been gibberish. I slunk between the covers, hiding my face so they would not see my shame. I thought seriously of running out, but I didn't know where the door was, or even if there was one.
That's the last that I remember of it. But it probably isn't why I'm so fearful this morning. I don't really have any decisions to make for anybody else. Only the one's for myself. And that's scary enough.

2005-06-30T09:20:00.000-06:00

My Favorite Donald

Last night I was in a classroom, sitting on a bare plastic chair, and listening to an old man I know speak to an audience of no more then six.
He is a great purveyor of worldly knowledge, able to tame the ebb and flow of current events into a coherent trajectory. I think its fair to call him a prophet for our modern times.
I would be excited to have sat before him, and listened to him speak. But he wasn't as I expected him, he was old and frail and in a wheelchair. His hair was much whiter then in any picture I had seen, and his skin was much more wrinkled. He was wheeled up to the podium, where he spoke in a barely audible voice.
It occured to me that he looked a little bit like myself.
But he did not speak as I expected, he launched into a rageful tirade, condemning the poor for their stupidity and sloth, proclaiming that we have always dominated, and will always be the masters of men. He spoke incoherently, his ideas confused and without structure. 'Who is this man?' I thought, and when I looked in his eyes I saw nothing but vacancy and I thought this is not the same man.
So it was far from the well reasoned ideas that I had been expecting. And I thought to myself, how sad, and who is really to say what a man's views really are, for they are only words that are said in that very moment, and past that they are really nothing at all but memories.
And still, even on hearing this ranting fool, his poorly crafted barbs exposed in their shocking nakedness, it still seemed hollow that there were only six others sitting to take it in.
When his time was up, he was dragged off the podium by his moderator, who attempted to hush him as he refused to stop his speech. 'The time is up,' she pleaded quietly, but he wanted none of it, and seemed oblivious to the reality that no one was really listening.
Finally he was taken from the podium, and quieted down to a degree. Questions were taken, to which the moderator answered herself.
'Is the time not really up?' I thought. I felt suddenly overwhelmed by impatience. I looked over at this bumbling old man, the shell of who I thought I knew, he was still muttering and cursing under his breath, and I realised how brief the flame of that sort of knowledge is, it is good only for the moment of which it is current, and after the moment is done you have to prove yourself again, or accept your banishment to the asylum of history.

2005-06-16T14:06:00.000-06:00

I'm having a terrible time writing anything longer then a page. I blame it on the blog.
It was part of my reason for my hiatus. Or at least lack of posting. I wanted to write something real.
The ideas are coming well enough. I worked out an outline for a story, I even had some more detailed designs for the first few chapters. It was all just ducky.
Until I actually sat down to write.
I do very well for the first page or so. Let's say the first few hundred words. And then I run into a full on road block and I am stopped dead.
Its a funny kind of block too. Its not like a crisis of creativity. The ideas still there. Like I said, I had a pretty good outline going in, so it wasn't really a problem of not knowing where to turn the page to.
Nope, it more a problem of apathy. At about the 300 word mark apathy wells up in me and freezes my fingers from another stroke.
Its fear I guess. That's usually what apathy is with me. Fear. But I don't want to admit it so I just say I don't care.
Its all a damned lie though, cuz I do care, and I have a good idea and so I want to write another story. But I just can't seem to bring myself to do it.

2005-06-14T19:42:00.000-06:00

I am captivated by the events going on in Bolivia.
The street protests, the resignation of their president and subsequent refusals of the presidency by the next two candidates in line. The left wing leaders intent on nationalizing the country's gas production. The looming storm cloud of potential US intervention. And Chavez, cheering them on and proclaiming it all as more evidence that Latin America will no longer be a subservient colony of the North.
I read and read and read about it. I read and I cheer for Bolivia. But, and it strains me to the core of my being to admit it, it embarrasses me and chokes off my breath, there is a little part of me that cheers against them.
I feel like I need to come clean. As though this were some sort of forum for addicts unable to admit their addiction. A first step. To admit your disease.
I am a speculator.
I play the market to accumulate dollars. I accumulate dollars in a hope that with them I can escape from this meaningless existence of corporate schlock.
I am fully aware that the companies I invest in have adverse impacts on the environment. I am aware of their impact on third world workers. I am aware of their homogony that eats away at our culture. And yet, I want so much out of this cubicle dungeon, I want so much out of contributing to a world so fundamentally fucked up, where bad continually wins out and power and desire make mincemeat of morality and integrity, that I continue to speculate.
So I speculate in Bolivia.
In particular, I speculate in a company that has a large property claim in Bolivia. On that claim there's a large amount of silver and a large amount of zinc. The company, in my own opinion, is terribly undervalued, and silver fundamentals, in my opinion, are terribly ripe for a rise. So I buy futures in this company, and wait to see if my opinions are prescient.
This is all fine and good you see, until the Bolivian peasantry came along, these miners and teachers and indigenous folk, frustrated by more then a century of being pushed around, sick of the Washington Consensus and its free market idioms that took away their sovereignty to govern, that same concensus that Stiglitz and the like now admit so sheepishly that maybe, just maybe, was wrong.
So these good folks are fed up and they say NO. They look over at Venezuela and they see some hope for their own independence from the Western fist. They see a chance for better wages and some working conditions fit for humanity. They ignore the carnage that their past struggles have brought upon them, and in the face of the possibility of yet another, they stand up courageously to the ideal that they are human beings and they deserve more.
So I cheer them on.
But wait! Not so fast. Then I read that they want to nationalize the gas industry. Its their gas, after all. But that gets me to thinking. Well, if they want to nationalize the gas industry, well then maybe they'll want to nationalize some of their other resources. Its all under the ground you see. So maybe they'll say, 'Well what about the silver? What about the zinc? All of that is in the ground and it is really ours too. Why should we let some American company reap all the spoils for that?'
What would happen then?
Well I'll tell you what would happen. This little speculation of mine would go very sour.
And suddenly the cheering becomes a little more muted.
So there it is. I'm not going to say anything more about what I'm going to do. I don't know. The morality of investing in a world that promotes such inequalities is difficult to reconcile. Where do you draw the line? If you buy a government bond, you're supporting expenditures that are going to the military. If you put the money in the bank, they are lending it out to who knows who to support god knows what atrocity in the name of a return. Where's the line? No return at all? Go live in a cabin off the shores of the pacific where you can shut the door and pretend it all doesn't exist?
I don't know.
What I am going to say is this. I have learned a lesson here, and that is this -
Whenever the rich elite jump on their podiums and talk about how they are doing it for humanitarian reasons, well don't believe a word of it.
So don't give me that bullshit about how you're looking out for the best interests of the country when you send in the troops and restore your 'order'. Or when you attach those Washington Consensus conditions to your next third world loan. Or when you prop up your next puppet government with money you call 'aid'. It doesn't work with me, cuz I can see it all with speculator eyes. And its terribly clear that when those eyes are painted dollars, the only 'best interests' of your concern are the one's you're looking through.
So where does that leave me? I little more clear maybe. Still cheering for Bolivia. But also aware of this little part of me which is reluctant to cheer. The cynical piece that wants only for myself and doesn't give a care for others. So I've done what I can do; I pinpointed it, it is in my sights and quarantined. You have to keep your enemies close, and this one's not going to grow on me.
In the meantime, Bolivia fights for their independence from our Western free market death grip. I hope they win, speculators be damned.

2005-06-13T08:12:00.000-06:00

I could never understand how some of these young folk, my age and such, were able to create so well.
Take the F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, and the Great Gatsby. He wrote that when he was 28. He had already written a number of other books by that time.
Anyways, where I'm going with this is, I was reading an article a couple weeks ago that put forth the theory that there were two types of creative genius. They called one type conceptual, while the other they referred to as being analytic. I'm not too sure about the terms they used, but the definitions make sense.
Fitzgerald was a conceptual genius. This is why he was able to write so well, so young. There was no learning curve. He just knew, it was hard wired into his brain.
Dostoevsky, on the other hand, was analytic. His greatest art came after years of honing his craft. The ideas he expressed were too careful to be unconscious, they were ideas that came after time, from hours of solitary thinking and years of experience.
As for my comment on the matter, I don't have much to say, except that it makes sense and is interesting, and that I think that I respect the latter type a bit more. If only because it implies a struggle to the peak, instead of being born there.

2005-06-09T08:19:00.000-06:00

The Broken Prism of Economics

Last night I sat in a mammoth church with high ceilings and stained glass walls and I listened to John Ralston Saul declare the end of globalism. It was ironic.

Through the prism of economics. That is the foundation of our dogma, the one that's driven us for the past 35 years. He's right about that. Globalism is not a new idea, transcontinental corporations, taking advantage of cheap resources abroad are not a sudden development over the last 10-15 years. This country was built on the Bay, and that was 300 years ago.

What is new is that everything be viewed through the prism of economics. That all decisions be made through the prism of economics. I remember talking to a friend a few years back, he was an avid and active environmentalist, and he talked about how we had to put environmental impacts into economic terms so we could quantify and prove the losses. Its a very tidy idea, but I thought at the time that while it may be well intentioned, it is also giving in to the premise that economics exists as the root of all decisions, as the root of all life.

The environment should not have to be counted like beans. You can't quantify air, and if you think you can, then its time to take a step back and evaluate what reality you're in.

The end of globalism that Saul is talking about is not the end of free trade. It is not the end of currency markets. It is not about the end of economics. What it is about, is the end of the prism. The end of letting the markets dictate our decisions. The end of the notion that capitalism is an inevitable force beyond the control of any of us. It is the realisation among citizens that economics is an important 'aspect' of life, it is not life itself.

It sounds to me like a hopeful future. One that's much more balanced. I only hope that there isn't too much chaos blocking our way to get there.

2005-06-04T09:45:00.000-06:00

'Mankind’s indomitably optimistic spirit has a habit of postponing foggy days until the gloomsters’ warnings and ultimate sanity are called into question. Crying wolf must be done infrequently and with relatively precise timing to be effective and to merit the “Order of the Savant.”' - Bill Gross, bond expert and closet philosopher

I think most bond men and currency men worth any salt are closet philosophers. The problem with this world is that it doesn't have any room for philosophers any more, so those with such a bent have to find another persuasion to put their firepower to work. Bonds and currencies, which are essentially prices derived from just about every economic and political factor you can imagine, are well suited to such a mind.

His point, of course, is that it doesn't pay to be pessimistic. The underlying truth of our existence is that we, as human beings, have a real bias for optimism. Even irrational optimism. Even in the face of obvious obliteration, we still can conjur up a way at looking at the sunny side. At least I'm going to heaven.

We have to remember this, as the shit really begins to hit the fan in the next few years. Just keep looking at the bright side. Reality is created by perception, and so it won't do nobody any good to get all down about it.

2005-05-19T20:56:00.000-06:00

'The devil's in the headlines. Its God's truth that we find in the nuance.'

That's Paul Samuelsson. He's a professor of economics at MIT. I linked to a paper he wrote on a post a while back. Its a bland, boring economics paper that refutes in theory our current dogma that free trade is going to be mutually beneficial to all parties involved.
This probably should be important. After all, we've created a world structure based on free trade. One would assume that this structure was based on something more then just faith.
But in the absence of theory, what are we left with? Well evidence I guess, but we don't have that yet, we're still too much in the midst of it. So then, what are we left with? Faith?
Our trust that it is all going to be ok is based on faith.
And that's why we have to put it in the headlines. You gotta make'em believe it.

2005-05-06T11:32:00.000-06:00

We've created a world that is far too complicated for our little minds.
If you look around at those most important issues that need to be addressed, in many cases they are just too hard to figure out. Even the people who are paid to figure these things out can't figure them out.
This can't be a good thing.
Here are two examples. Both are difficult to understand, are full of complexities and uncertainties and non-linearity's, and do not lend themselves readily to tidy conclusions.
The first is global warming. What struck me when I first started reading about the global warming debate was that there really is quite a bit of uncertainty about the whole thing. There is not necessarily uncertainty about whether the world is warming, that can be easily measured, but there is definitely uncertainty about how quickly it is warming, whether this warming is secular or cyclical, what the causes of the warming are, and how strong of an effect each of those causes has.
Its no fault of scientists. The problem isn't lack of research or resources. Its just a very complicated phenomenon. The weather is the result of so many disparate events, some of them reinforcing, some of them dampening, some of them difficult to measure, some not very well understood at all, and all of them difficult to separate from each other in a way that allows us to discretely analyze the problem so as to be intelligible to our minds.
Of course, the good scientists realize this. Their argument, and the one I am sympathetic with, is that such uncertainty is to be embraced, and that decisions should be made based on probabilities and the impact of potential outcomes. This is how you deal with things you don't know.
But the uncertainty can be wielded as a weapon. The skeptics use the uncertainty to discredit the idea entirely. They use uncertainty to advocate a continuation of the status quo. We don't know for sure, so why should we change?
But that debate is for another time. This post is about the complexity of our world, and how its just too complex for our little minds. Global warming is just one example of this.
The globalized economy is another.
I read a lot about economics. Its fun, and what makes it fun is that its so puzzling. Most economic problems that we face today have given rise to a number of conflicting theories regarding them and not much agreement as to which of the theories hold the most water. The phenomena are just too complex to understand.
Take for example the US current account deficit. This has the potential to be a major problem in the future. If you listen to some commentators, the correction of the current account deficit will lead to higher interest rates, a falling dollar, the slippage of an economy, a fall in house prices, and just general economic disorder all around.
If you listen to others, the current account deficit will benignly correct itself with a readjustment of exchange rates that will have little effect on consumers or businesses.
And you can argue the point back and forth till the cows come home. There is at least a degree of validity to the arguments on either side. So you won't get agreement. Hell, there isn't even agreement as to what the current account deficit is caused by. We have this thing happening that's causing more then 50 million dollars an hour to leave the US and we can't even agree on why.
The point is, the whole system is too complicated for us to understand and drawn definitive conclusions about. We've created a monster.
This is true on the macro-level, as I have just demonstrated, and it is true on the micro-level of each of our little lives.
We drive vehicles that most of us don't understand, take out mortgages based on interest rates we don't understand, work at jobs where we don't understand the consequences or outcomes of our work, elect politicians who make decisions on issues that we don't understand based on papers and research and graphs that we don't understand... I mean, if this isn't the friggin dark age, I don't know what is.
Its not the age of information, or technology, or any of that crap. Its an age of ignorance. An age of not understanding the world.
So tell me how we're supposed to control it?

2005-05-03T21:56:00.000-06:00

I haven't been writing much because I'm too cold. I feel like death warmed over.
Its an icy chill that numbs me. It starts at my feet, seeping into my souls from cold, tiled floor, and it flows up through my veins to my skull. And there it holds claim to my mind.
When I try to push back it strikes me down with fear and apathy and that terrible truth that you just can't get past. The truth that it really doesn't matter either way.
You can't beat that argument or reason your way through. The best you can do is ignore it, and you can only do that when you have control of your mind.
When you don't have control of your mind you can't ignore it, and so it hollows every act and makes them easy prey to the hammers of apathy and fear.
Shattered potentials making a mess of my room.
So yes, there you go, but all that isn't really true, except by metaphor and even that is more conjecture then not.
I really just can't think of anything to say.
I think I read too much. It keeps me from thinking.
I can't really read and think at the same time. I can only do one or the other. So when I'm feeling lazy and frightened, when I hold myself captive, I read vorociously.
And that keeps me from writing, because I don't have a thing to say.
Hopefully I will soon.

2005-04-26T10:14:00.000-06:00

We're so damn fixated on the end that we forget to just look around.
I was talking to my girlfriend the other day. We were reading some article in the local paper that was discussing new spiritualist movements in the city. One was Buddhist and of course the Buddhists want to be enlightened.
The article referred to enlightenment as though it were a thing. Some sort of destination and you were either there or you weren't. As I read the article I could almost imagine the landscape of enlightenment, as though it were some sort of place in the clouds, but instead of everyone wearing white robes and having wings they wore yellow robes and had really long ear lobes.
I think it misses the point.
We're all about destinations in this society. We're all about getting a job and getting married and getting the kids grown and getting retired. Process is just a means to us, something to be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. We can't even conceive that it could be the goal.
So given that, I guess its natural that we're all about getting enlightened.
I have a feeling that if the Buddha were alive today he'd shake his head and laugh, and then probably come up with a new word to describe his process.

2005-04-22T11:13:00.000-06:00

Sinking Globalism

John Ralston Saul has a new book that’s coming out called the end of Globalism. I haven’t read the book, all I've read is a little blurb about it that didn't really say much. However, when I heard the title I began to think about it in the context of what I’ve been reading lately.
I don't know if Globalism is dead yet, but it looks sick, and I think the pressures on it are only going to get worse.
To accept Globalism means to accept that market forces will determine the direction of society unimpeded. This is a fine proposition when you're winning. But when you're losing then it doesn't seem so wonderful.
Let’s examine some evidence.
The US congress is lobbying for a 27.5% tax on Chinese goods unless China goes and revalues their currency peg against the dollar. The tax is the outcome of politicians looking to appease dissatisfied Americans who feel that American jobs are being undermined by cheap Chinese labour. For example, the average Chinese auto-worker makes about $2/hour. And that's a heck of a good wage there.
People in the US are dissatisfied because job growth in the US sucks. We're well into an economic recovery and job growth isn't even keeping up with the birth and immigration rates.
Job growth in the US sucks because the average Chinese worker makes about $2/day.
In France there is a May 29th European Union constitutional vote that looks like it could go either way. A no vote would be a blow to the EU. Its true that part of the discontent in France is with the reigning Chirac government, but part is based on skepticism about whether the constitution will usher in a plethora of low wage competition for French workers.
Other established EU nations are nervous about the cheap labour competition that they are facing from fellow lessor developed EU nations like Hungary, Slovakia, Poland. Germany, for one, is looking at legislation to limit the wages of Hungarian immigrants coming to Germany, as the influx has weighed on the standard of living Germans. In Hungary, wages are about 1/10th that of Germany.
I could go on, but this is a blog, not a scientific paper, so I don't have to prove my point ad nauseum.
There is a massive disequibilrium in wages. Our Globalist formula depends on letting markets choose their labour. Until that disequilibrium disappears, markets will almost always choose the cheapest labour.
Any disequilibrium in the market, or anywhere in nature for that matter, will tend towards equilibrium. The disequilibrium in wages won't be any different.
We, in the west, will lose.
Tell me how we are going to maintain our current Western wage standards in the face of extremely low wage competition? Yes, the wages in the poorer nations will rise, but I find it impossible to believe that this will be done in a vaccuum, without a corresponding fall in wages for the richer nations.
Meanwhile, on another stormy front, oil is at what today? $55/bbl or something close to that. Saudi Arabia keeps making promises of putting more oil on-stream, but nobody believes them. Even if they do, its going to be heavy oil, its going to need more refining, and its not going to be cheap. Oil, in the longer term, is only going to become more scarce, and this is only going to strain relations between countries further.
When you look at the supply/demand dynamics of oil over the next 5 years, you quickly realise that its going to get ugly. There just isn't the supply coming on-stream to keep up with solid economic growth. Much of the potential supply is in areas that aren't politically stable.
What does this mean? It means that countries are going to be under increasing competition for dwindling oil reserves. The obvious question is - how far will a country go to secure oil supplies? Well we have a first example with Iraq.
I just don't see how globalism is going to survive all this hostility. We're already seeing the buds of such hostility in the above mentioned events. People will fall back on their governments to protect their standards of living. Businesses will fall back on governments to protect their energy supplies. And the globalism ship, with its open market rudder, will sink.
And then we can come up with a grand new theory to pad the pockets of business.

2005-04-20T11:51:00.000-06:00

Hypocrisy

I went out walking. I was looking for one good capitalist.
I went to the tallest of the steel towers that lit up the horizon. I traveled to the very top floor.
Inside there were men seated around a solid oak table, leaning back in their chairs and looking very satisfied. Each of these men wore an expensive suit and had mostly perfect silver hair. I sat down with them and asked them if they were capitalists. They scoffed that I should even ask. So Itook them at their word and asked themto speak about their ideology; they replied with certainty, with unwavering conviction, and would have no part of any rebuttal. They spoke of the need to grow, and I listened at first with interest, but soon it was clear that their growth was aimed at a piece of paper and a price attached to it. Their interest was in that price and not in the production.
And I knew that these fellows were not capitalists.
I went down a floor and stepped into a large office where a man wearing a plain white shirt and tie worked diligently at his desk. I asked him if he was a capitalist and he replied 'damn right he was'. He told me that he ran this company and I asked him if he owned it. He said no. But he ran it. So I asked him what would happen to him if things went sour. He told me the fellows upstairs would fire him. I asked him whether that would leave him with nothing and he told me that no, he had taken care of that, and had negotiated a severance into his contract for such a case.
It occurred to me that this man had nothing at risk in this company he ran. He was an employee. One with responsibility, but still an employee.
And I knew this fellow was not a capitalist.
So then I walked to the old, clay buildings, where there are mostly old men with wide toothy grins and hearty handshakes.
I went looking for a particular man I had heard give a speech on the radio. He had espoused the virtues of a free market and spoke of the glory that its invisible hand would lead us to.
I found him in an office lush with expensive decoration. I sat down on his leather chair and asked him if he was a capitalist. I am indeed he replied, and he gave me a perfect smile. I asked him about his ideology. He gave me the same speech that I had heard on the radio, he said it verbatim. He told me it was all inevitable, that the market was an unstoppable force and that we were best served yielding to its dictum. It was all out of our hands he said, out of our hands.
I looked around his office, at its luxurious interior, full of art far too expensive for his pay. I asked him what he did before he ran for office. He told me he was a lawyer. I tried to ask him more, but he told me he had to go, he was being taken out for lunch.
I knew this fellow was no capitalist either.
I had given up my search. I took the bus home. After about two stops a scruffy man in a rumpled suit got on. He looked deep in thought and somewhat distressed.
I asked him what troubled him. He told me that he had just lost business to a competitor. He told me his mistakes and how he had misunderstood his market. I said yes that would bring any man troubles. But he looked at me and shook his head. No, he said, I'm not troubled. I've learned a lot. And I will not make the same mistake next time. I'm just trying to figure out what I should do next.
He had a relentless look in his eye, and I knew he understood the torture of success. His appearance was pocked with a thousand battles, many of them lost, but he carried with him a confidence. But it was a different confidence then I had seen earlier that day, it was not built upon the certainty of any invisible theory, it was built upon the only thing he could be certain of; that if he was beaten down again he would get right back up.
This, I thought, was a capitalist. The others only sullied the name.

2005-04-14T16:05:00.000-06:00

I know I'm harping a bit here, but I REALLY recommend this fellow's website. He has a great post today on jobs and housing and the unsustainability of it all.
I promise you'll learn something.

2005-04-13T22:46:00.000-06:00

I have an addiction. It holds me back and bottles my freedom.
So I gotta bring it under control.
There's this line I like, and it goes something like 'insight erupts not from the thinking mind, but from learning how to restrain your thinking mind.'
My most worthwhile thoughts, those that are colored with imagination and a smattering of truth, come from a barren desert and an empty sky.
They do not come from confusion, from anger, or from greed. And they definitely don't come from the mind of a million scattered thoughts.
This addiction I have, it creates all these minds. It hijacks my awareness and takes me away through a wormhole. Away from this world. It makes me want things to be different.
I need to try to let it go.

2005-04-12T08:26:00.000-06:00

Outsourcing our soul

This is an excellent post, and an excellent website for that matter.
The internet is an amazing place. I have learned more by reading the articles on this fellow's blog then I would in 1000 hours of watching CNN, CNBC, or CBC newsworld.
My conclusion. It only strengthens my conviction that a hard rains coming.

2005-04-09T11:50:00.000-06:00

Quiet Desperation

I'm always beating around the bush. And that can be fine, even preferable, but by doing so its all too easy to lose the message in the leaves.
So maybe I'll be blunt for once and just ask the question…
Are we leading lives of quiet desperation?
Its a rhythm I keep hearing in conversation. Again and again, different words, different language, but the same expression, beating like a drum.
Not satisfied, unsure of what do, all the possibilities seem bleak, no point to any of it, unappreciated, can't get up in the morning, what alternatives are there, what choices do i have, feeling trapped, feeling hopeless.
Could it just be a coincidence of sample size?
I don't think so. I don't think that this is just me carelessly extrapolating the words of a few malcontents. I think its something much more pervasive.
I think there is a serious structural flaw in the way that we live.
The interesting thing about a structural flaw is that it pervades through all of us and everything, and therefore is mostly unconscious to us. As an underlying premise upon which our lives are based, we don't even know that its there.
The consequence of this is what I hear. Somethings wrong, I don't know what, I'm confused, but the world goes on as it always has so everybody else must be ok and I guess that means there must be something wrong with me.
So I'll shut up and pretend I'm ok too.
Quiet Desperation.

2005-04-06T11:58:00.000-06:00

Masks

Last night I dreamt of the devil. I've never done that before. I've dreamt about ghosts and skeletons and frightening beasts, but never the devil himself.
Until last night. Last night I dreamt I made masks for the devil.
I made them among grey leaves under an old, autumn tree; it was grey and knurled itself. Every so often the devil would come and take those masks that he desired. I don't remember much of him, except, strangely, I remember his teeth. I remember his teeth because as he approached he gave me a smile that showed them quite clearly. It should have been scary but wasn't. They were boney white, way too white, and they were larger then any I have ever seen. And for some reason they reminded me of eternity and made me think desperately of escape.
But it was not because I was afraid of him. I wasn't. I felt that I knew my place, that he knew it too, and that I did good work so I had nothing to fear.
Still, there was a feel of eternity in his teeth and it made me want to leave.
So when the devil had left with his masks I decided to attempt my escape. For cover I put on one of the masks he had left. I knew that the mask wouldn't fool the devil, but that it would fool most everyone else, all those who strangely were absent, but who I knew lurked about.
Though the details of my escape are no longer clear, they have been lost in the fog of my consciousness, I managed to get away. I hid at first in a neighbors house, in the room with my best friends sister, and then later, having been forced to flee as my friend became the devil, I lay hidden in a field of tall, ripe barley.
Until that time I kept thinking that I must continue to run. This gripped me with fear. But among the barley my fear was replaced and for a moment I felt a profound sense of freedom. I realized that I was no longer a slave to my labor of making masks for the devil. I felt strong and in control.
But it didn't last. It was replaced by a much more insidious thought.
A terrible thought! Much worse then fear! I was free from my labor, yes, but I was gripped by a new slavery, one subsumed under a different name. I would always be on the run from the devil, yes, but worse, I had only the world around me, I was limited by it, and my freedom was contained to what it could offer.
I began to wake up, and in that half-conscious swirl of dreams and bed covers it occurred to me that all my freedom could be struck down by simple perspective. That I would always be running in this finite world, of which everything was terribly grey. It would never be absolute. And that the devil would always be able to see through my mask.
I woke up like that. I went to the bathroom to look at my pallid skin and sunken eyes. And I thought to myself quite lucidly now that there is no freedom out there at all, it is only an illusion, and thus all freedom must exist inside.

2005-03-31T22:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-29T23:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-16T23:32:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-13T16:22:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-09T20:12:00.001-07:00

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.

2005-03-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

'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.

2005-03-03T19:06:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-03-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-02-27T23:50:00.000-07:00

We are all Richer?

I'm drinking too much. It dulls the mind and then I can't think of a thing to write.
But lately my breath hasn't been cutting it.
Alcohol does. But it also makes me empty of ideas.
Not that its the only reason. Its this goddamn money. That's the other reason. That's the main reason.
Money kills life.
Making money kills the creativity. Why? Cuz it makes me feel too damn good about things.
Everything is ok. That's no good. I can't write when its ok. I can't leap from a flatline. I write when its all going to shit.
There's a reason that there are no rich artists. Or that when an artist becomes rich he generally turns to crap. Emily Dickenson's greatest luck was that she was never discovered until after she died. She never had her talent corrupted.
If I do have any talent, there's not much chance its being corrupted by fame. That's for sure.
Nope. Not fame. Its these goddamn stocks, and they just keep going up and up and up.
Oh well.

2005-02-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

The lady next door's been yelling into a phone for almost an hour now. I banged three times up against the wall, slamming my fist above the bed, and the third time she said something nasty to this tacky wood wallpaper.
And then she told me I better not do it again.
I should probably write something. You know how tough it is to find a hotel with a high speed connection in this deadshit place. Well, its not easy and now I got one and of course now I don't really have much to say.
I think its cuz I'm coming down from too much right now.
So writing doesn't help.
The only thing that gives me any peace at all is when I close my eyes and let the waters flow. Its a little scary at first but it goes and pretty soon I'm imagining strange looking women and big furry coats and basketballs rolling across the floor.
I don't know what to make of any of it but it sure is free. Feels nice for a change. Even the drinks don't let you lose like this. They numb the mind, but this is just accepting it.
Of course I can't really do any of this worth a shit with the fucking racket next door.
One more minute and I do it again.

2005-02-24T00:25:00.000-07:00

Trains of Insomnia

There's a train outside my window. Always a train. I can hear it from across the river. I can feel the wall shutter against my back as it goes by.
The river's moving and the trains moving and even the walls are moving.
And I am still.
There isn't a thing to eat in this house. I haven't picked up anything in a week. There's rice cakes. Half eaten rice cakes.
I put one on the floor as an offering to the mice. They used to bother me but now I think they're gods.
And I don't like rice cakes.
So the minutes tick by and I've written all this and still haven't figured out what the hell I'm going to write.
But I'm going to write something.
I'm not sleeping tonight.
Tomorrow will be hell. But tonight is a sanctuary.

2005-02-24T00:09:00.000-07:00

Not so real

Just about everything I write starts on paper.
And it never starts with the intention of getting put here. That happens later.
Usually much later. It'll happen when I'm eating cheese or sitting in front of the tv or reading some stupid ass spiritual fluff. And then I think, you know, I should really put that one up.
For posterity.
And it is fluff. By the way.
So then I change it and make it not so real.
Cuz the truth is never real. Well, rarely. The truth is rarely real.
I'm starting to think that beauty is never though.
Real.
Except maybe for a few of them.
Though I'm not sure so sure they're real either.

2005-02-23T23:01:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to post what I write and fuck it all to whoever reads it.
If I can't write then I'm not living and then its just not worth it. Stick me in a box cuz its over.
So I'm going to post.
Tonight I spent the evening drinking wine from a box in a kitchen. The one girl told us all about lesbian sex. In the car next door. Through the paper thin walls. On a train ride in Vienna.
It makes good press.
I guess.
Che Guevera was just a man. With an idea he believed in.
And I'm no revolutionary, but I know what I maybe can do and that is make something beautiful.
Just one thing maybe.
But even one is more than life.

2005-02-22T23:44:00.000-07:00

The problem is that I just can't pretend now.
It all got said and you know maybe there is such a thing as too much truth.
But I don't know that. Maybe I'm just not light enough.
Cuz right now there's no more make-believe.
Just reality. Cold. Hard. Like concrete.
Now I can't pretend. You can only pretend if you believe it.

2005-02-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

I pushed it to the edge. I pushed it and now I'm terrified that I've pushed it too far.
But I didn't have a choice.
I didn't even know what I was doing.
I know now.
I had to push it to the edge to know. To know what I really felt. To strip away all the thoughts and be left with
Feel
I had to push it to the edge to feel the pain.
Time is molasses right now.

2005-02-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

'Who is this Charles Bukowski guy?'

That's what I asked her. And two weeks later I received a book of poems.
Now I'll never go back.
He is so good. Look what he's done to me in a night and a half. I'm sitting at the kitchen table in a stunned state of illumination, by the glow of the tv with the volume turned down. A little tipsy from an empty glass, I'm flipping through a book by Nietszche that I haven't picked up in three years but that suddenly seems so relevant. Maybe, just maybe, I'm seeing the beauty of it all.
Beyond good and evil.
I've been reading Bukowski's work like it was about to go rancid.
My favorite so far is about a guy named Karl that Bukowski used to work with. The thing about Karl was, he didn't understand that we are perishable. Karl thought that we could do whatever we wanted and that cause and effect was something reserved for billiard balls.

Karl thought we were Gods. But Bukowski knew better.
We are so perishable.
I maybe know a lot of Karls, which I guess is why that one is my favorite. And sometimes I know I am a Karl, which is maybe why it scares me so much.
I have to watch that.
But enough about Karl and enough about Nietzsche. This is about Charles Bukowski, who last night I read for the very first time. And now I probably won't stop till they put me down. He's that good.

2005-02-18T23:01:00.000-07:00

I'm retreating.
I think I've been retreating my whole life.
Only now its formal.
Now I sit cross-legged with my eyes half closed, surrounded by strangers in a tiny red room that's a little too hot, and I stay real quiet and try to pretend I'm thinking about my breath and not thinking about sex.

Back then I would just find an empty room on the 13th floor. All alone. I'd sit at a desk in the corner, stare out the window on the world, and think about God and the Devil and pretend I was them.
Either one. Didn't matter much.
And I used to sit there on that cold, tiled, basement floor with the waves crashing down on the wallpaper walls and I'd listen to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen speak to me about life.
Now I try to chase tantric prayers, and I don't know if they really speak to me at all.
Now its got a name. Now you know when it starts and ends.
Back then it would end when my feet got tired of walking or when the midnight rains would begin to fall.
Or when I finally got tired of being alone.
But that didn't happen much.

So yeah. Now its got a name and back then I just thought I was weird. But its all the same.

2005-02-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

Its one thing to write something well. Its a far harder thing to write something true.
To write something well just takes time. And rhythm helps. But mainly time. You just keep pecking at it, reading it over and changing it and reading it and changing it and eventually, if you have any sense of aesthetics at all, you have something that's been written well.
But to write something true is an entirely different beast.
You can't just keep plugging and expect to come up with something true. You could plug for your whole life and write nothing but lies.
Nope. Truth doesn't come from quantity. Its way too elusive for that. And that's the way it should be.
So yeah, like I'm saying, its tough
You'd think on a blog, where you're writing about yourself and your life, it'd be pretty easy to come up with something true.

But its not. Because most of your life isn't really all that real.
Just because it happened doesn't mean its true.
When I go back and read all the stuff I've written on this blog, I can pick out maybe 2 or 3 that maybe, maybe, just might be true. I wrote them so its tough to know. I'm too close.
But if its 2 or 3, I'm ok with that. I mean, what's it been, like a year. And I got 2 or 3 shots that might have hit a mark. That's ok. That's better odds then most.

2005-02-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

If you go to the www.kitcometals.com website there is a list of headlines of metals related articles. They must pull these up from reuters and associated press by searching for key words like copper and aluminum and nickel.

Looking at today's headlines, about a third of the way down is 'Girls Gone Wild Rocks America with Nationwide Tour; Revelation Theory and Copper Headline Rock Tour -- Sponsored by Dickens Cider'

They should refine their search a bit more before they post an article.

2005-02-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Hello out there in TV-land

I would like to take a minute to talk about the Safeway (the local grocery chain) by my house. It's worth talking about because it probably has the highest per capita level of pajama bottom clad patrons in North America.

I live in an odd neighbourhood.

And it isn't just late at night or early in the morning that such customers abound. I mean, yeah, it would be understandable if I was doing my shopping at midnight. The odd pair of late night snack seeking flannel bottoms would be expected.

But this is at like 6 in the evening. 3pm on a Saturday. Doesn't matter when. There's always at least one person wandering around with messy hair, pajamas and maybe a ski-jacket hastily tugged on over top.

Who are these people?

At least they're benign. I have yet to see a pajama wearer get into a fist fight, scream at another customer, or recklessly deface the merchandise. They just wander around the frozen food section with dazed looks in their eyes and sometimes trip over their untied shoe laces.

In comparison to another species, the tight blue jean, three day shadow with a moustache crowd, pajama wearers are the perfect customer. Tight blue jeans, three day shadow with a moustache is a bad scene. I try to steer clear of them. On friday night for example, I walked through the main doors of the Safeway to the sight of pizza pops and frozen burritos strewn across aisle 9, many of them torn open to leave an ugly potpourri of melting tomota cheese sauce and baked bean guts mushed into foot prints on the floor.

It was gross.

I knew it had to be a tight blue jeans, three day shadow with a moustache. And it was. I got a glance at him in the backseat of the cop car as I left.

So the pajama people - they're ok. Just watch out for them when they're tripping over their shoes. But tight bluejeans, three day shadow and a moustache - you have to remember they probably just came down from their binge and are seeing the sun for the first time in 3 days. So they're a little owly. Its best to steer clear of them altogether.

2005-02-11T13:12:00.000-07:00

PJ and I were just reflecting on how the most vivid memories from our childhood and adolescence are Simpson's episodes.

The bright side is that you can reminiscence about old times with people you've just met.

2005-02-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

You can't make this shit up

On bubblevison today, or CNBC if you prefer, they were discussing the recent trade deficit numbers, which are, to put it bluntly, Gi-nourmous.

These dudes they had on, I can't remember what their names were and they aren't worth remembering anyways, described American consumption as being "a sacrifice," and American consumers as "bearing the brunt of world consumption," and of having an "obligation to consume."

That's priceless. Its like the 11th commandment. Thou shalt buy.

Brutal.

2005-02-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

White Flags

It’s my belief that capitulation is something that can only be felt. You can't understand it. You can't predict it. You can only experience it.

But what a force it has! It is so hard not to give in and just let yourself drown by the weight of your sinking belly. It challenges your resolve, makes you question your assumptions, and leaves you wondering if you don't understand anything at all. Who knows what's out there in the unknown.

It makes you sick.

So you capitulate.

You throw in the towel and start over. And with that, the feeling dissipates and you're left in some sort of lonely abyss.

Alone.

What's amazing is how quickly that feeling, which had been so terrible, just ends. Like it never was. And all you're left with is the memory of its discomfort and some spinning uncertainty of whether you did the right thing.

This goes on a few times or a thousand, until you begin to understand.

And with understanding comes the strength to look capitulation in the eye. Eventually you conjure the courage to stare it down for what it really is.

A feeling. Grasping. Fear. Extrapolating a terrible past to a hopeless future.

You realize all that. But just as importantly, you realize its true nature. It’s only a passing deliverance that fades with time.

And then the fear doesn't seem so bad. This too will pass.

And with that, its power deflates.

Next time you don't capitulate.

I look forward to these moments now. I get a little smirk on my face, and my eyes burn fire. It is the weakness of others. It is the smell of blood. It is opportunity.

I thought I had capitulation on Monday. Now I’m not so sure. It doesn’t smell right. But soon.

2005-02-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

Organic Poser

These apples that we Canadians get imported in winter are brutal. They are the most tasteless pieces of fruit imaginable. I think they've been genetically modified with the DNA of sawdust.

And they don't go brown. What's with that? I've had the core sitting on my desk for like an hour, and its still as alabaster as my butt.

Are there scientists sitting around investigating ways of delaying the rigor mortis of apples? There's a worthwhile pursuit. 10 years of schooling to create the eternal apple. I'll put that one down on my gravestone under a life worth living.

I will update if said apple ever does turn brown.

2005-02-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

Don't listen to what anyone tells you. The purpose of life is dying with a lot of money.

2005-02-08T01:22:00.000-07:00

Twas in another lifetime...

Yeah that's me. A creature void of form. Stealing lines from Bob Dylan. Eating Big Macs and spitting out the chew. Cuz its wrong you see.

And why is it so fucking cold? Everywhere, everyone, its so fucking cold.

I was sitting in the waiting room waiting for Arlene and this couple was there next to me with this one fat lady and this other dumbass work boot buddy kissing and farting like it was their front room.

He's telling her what a good job she does and he'd smack somebody if he had to do it and she's telling him no, no, no, darling but you could do it too if you only had a bit of patience.

Then he's making cracks about spraying in her ear while she's complaining to Arlene because 'there's something about it that just isn't quite right yet.'

I've been waiting 20 minutes and all I could think of was fuck you're brutal.

Yeah, I'm trying to love.

But people are awful easy to hate.

2005-02-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

Cars do funny things when they get old. Especially in winter. This is a list of things that happen to my car. Its a scientific marvel.

when the temperature gets below -20degC it will start fine but if you turn it off within 5 minutes of starting it won't start up again for at least half an hour. Thus coffee 'to go' quickly becomes coffee 'to stay'.
The exception to this rule is about 20% of the time you can get it to restart if you press the break pedal down really hard right after you stop it.
between -10degC and 5degC the coolant fluid leaks out and you have to refill it every third day or the car will overheat.
when the car overheats the headlights burn out.
at really cold temperatures, like lower then -25degC, it won't go in reverse unless its been driven in a forward gear first. Thus you have to back it up into parking spots.
at certain moon intervals the coolant fluid leaks into the heating system and fills the front seat with a thick, green, antifreeze fog.
At 84 km/hr the car hits its resonant frequency and if you leave it at that speed it will begin to shake uncontrollably. Though I can't confirm it, I believe that if you left it at this speed for a good long period (say like a minute) the wheels would fall off.
there is a loud squeak from the left front wheel that only occurs when you're driving where the road is sloped. Its like a warning reminder that the road isn't perfectly flat.
The wind shield wipers work perfectly except for a 2 inch square spot where they completely miss. This spot happens to be directly at eye level when I sit down.
If you try to wipe off that spot on the windshield by hand it only gets worse and pretty soon you'll have to drive around with the window open and your head sticking out. This is unfortunate when its below -20 as you become acutely aware of the magic of wind chill.
the left signal light turns on when you signal right and the right signal light doesn't come on at all. However this can be prevented by turning off the headlights, which isn't such a bad thing when the car is overheating.

More to come...

2005-02-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

The Apparant Insurmounity (if that's a word) of Designing a UFO

PJ and I were having a discussion about UFO's. We think it would be cool to design UFO's.

Anything is better then sheet-metal boxes.

So yeah, it would be cool to design a UFO. Think of the recognition, the fame. You could be the life of the party (or at least invited). But, as we were envisioning our future glory, what occured to PJ, and in turn shattered our bubble, is that the whole thing is quite impossible.

In attempting to design a UFO, you run into an insurmountable difficulty. And that is this. If you design a UFO you know you have designed it, and if everyone else knows you have designed it, well then it is no longer really very unidentified.

Thus its only a FO, which is not nearly as sexy to design as a UFO.

All this means, of course, that a true UFO was never designed by anybody. Even god.

Its all very existential you see.

So even having the good intention of designing a UFO, having done so you couldn't go around saying it, initiating reactions of awe and amazement and causing people to bow down before you, because it wouldn't be true and people would think you're a liar and a fraud and instead they'd spit on your shoes.

Just like they do now.

And of course, if you went around telling the truth, saying you designed FO's, then people would tell you to FO yourself. And that wouldn't be good either.

This is a terrible paradox. Its quite distressing to realise that my dream of designing a UFO will never be attained.

2005-02-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

When I get really tired, I start to feel like my mind is going to crack.

Its a strange sensation. Its like the continuity of moments break down. Does that make any sense?

If it doesn't it because my mind is cracking.

And I get very paranoid. I'm terrified of mice at this moment. I keep peering at the cupboards in fear that one will poke its head around the corner.

If a mouse does peer around the corner, I will be sleeping at the travelodge tonight.

Or not sleeping. To put it more accurately. I'm not sure where I should be not sleeping tonight.

That's the strange part. Too. I know I won't be able to fall asleep. I'm too tired. Too tired to fall asleep.

I think those evolutionary forces passed me by on that one.

And then when I won't be able fall asleep, that will make me paranoid. Paranoid that I won't ever fall asleep. And then I'll come back into the kitchen and that will make me think about the mice and so I'll get all paranoid about the mice again and the next thing you know my roommate will come home and ask why I'm sitting beside the cupboard holding a spatula in the ready position.

I really shouldn't get so overtired.

2005-01-28T19:46:00.000-07:00

She told me that he didn't like parties. Even when he was younger he didn't like parties. Always he was worried that he would end up next to some polyester insurance salesman from Winnipeg.

But they went to the swerve, with all the other cool cats wearing their funky goggles and silky shirts.

And she told me that he said to her before they went that he just wanted to be with people. And they'd go up to people and just find out what was beautiful there and just grab onto to that a little bit for a moment. That made it all right for her.

It just so happens that some time before he had ended up next to that insurance salesman. And he had been from Winnipeg. But he wasn't at all what you would expect.

And they had fun.

2005-01-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

‘Listen to Johnny.’

That's what I whispered. But nobody was listening.

Johnny was on the stage at the time. In behind him those big, bright, blood red curtains were still swaying back and forth. Johnny was wearing his white face with his dusted pink cheeks and it made his teeth look yellow when he opened his mouth. He was standing there, right there in the middle of the stage, on that old wood floor that kept creaking cuz he was shuffling his feet all awkward like. He was trying so hard not to notice.

He was standing on the same spot where they had hanged Johnson. The same spot where old Fred had been a few minutes before. But now the spotlight was on Johnny, and dim as it was he was still doing his best to make the most of it.

The fellas that were still in the audience, who had stayed after old Fred had let his mouth flap, they weren't much interested in anything at the moment. They had seen enough for one night.

And that’s about it really. That’s about all you need to know to understand the crux of it. Poor ole Johnny, standing up there with his little cards, ready to conjure a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and he couldn't even muster a rumble from them. In a moment he’d be gone too.

2005-01-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

My grandfather is a great man but now he has alzheimers. Every week my grandmother goes to an alzheimers meeting with the other spouses of alzheimers victims and they talk about the difficulties and try to figure out how they can make it easier. I picked her up from the meeting today, and in the car she told me about how earlier that day, when she was being picked up by my uncle to go to the meeting, my grandfather had asked where it was she was going.

'To the alzheimers meeting' she had said.

To which my grandfather replied, 'Who has alzheimers - you or me?'

We chuckled about that in the car. It was forced, but sometimes you have to laugh at the stuff that really isn't funny cuz that's the only way to deal with it.

2005-01-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

This is one of those nights.

A night to lose myself in character. But not this time. Let's hit this head instead, and do away with justin and deidre and ross.

I want to know if I can enjoy my sorrow.

So what does that mean? Does it mean that sorrow is gone? Or just that now I do not hide from it, not in character, and I embrace it for what it is.

I am crying.

Tonight I learned that the Buddha said that one can know a thing in itself. I have always taken it for granted that I can't. Indict western philosophy, for its all very convincing in between yawns. And so I have believed, in between yawns, in 'a priori' concepts of the understanding, or rules of the understanding, these things upon which our mind works to know things. And the deal with that is this: if our mind has certain underlying concepts, or rules, upon which it views our experience, then we can't possibly ever know the experience itself. All we can know is how that experience is perceived when brought into the context of these rules through which it manifests in our mind. The actual nature of the outer world is a mystery. And we are all alone.

But Buddha says different.

And yes, sure, I know, really, this all seems very profound, and all that fluff, but how does it bring me closer to loving my tears?

I'm not sure. But somehow it seems to. Somehow it makes it ok. It makes it not matter.

Maybe because if we were wrong about this then maybe we're wrong about everything and so who gives a fuck about convention anyways.

Or maybe its because it reminds me how fragile my mind really is, and how I can change it on a dime.

Hmmmm... or maybe its this:

I am no longer seperate. Kant said it was just us. One. And we could never know the other. So I was it. But now that's no. The Buddha says we can know the other.

We are not alone.

And that makes everything all right.

2005-01-19T21:37:00.000-07:00

'Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so?'

I suppose that really, if we are going to get to the bottom of this fuddle, we might as well face up to it and admit that we will, oh we will, have to answer that in its turn.

But it turns so goddamn quickly.

Sigh... shut up please. Enough with the mongering...

Because well, if these gods and devils really are in our gut, and it just so happens that by some terrible chance the proper procedure has not yet been perfected to detect these beasts, then I guess its up to us to make them in the image that we choose.

But what do we choose?

I choose now.

But what is that? How can you choose now? What in the good lord's name does that mean.

I say it means nothing. Now is nothing.

And then they scoff and the crowd boos and disperses back into their tragic shacks. A few shouts of 'snakecharmer' are heard above the din. When they are gone there is little but dirt in front of me; I am left with only the dust bowls of an empty street, stretching out to the sunset of that inevitable horizon.

Still though, I say it. I hesitate at first, I think of turning around and heading back to that little house in the suburbs to catch a quick lunch and be back to work by 1. But I don't go. I don't and can't and its just too late.

'Fuck it' I mutter under my breath.

And then I say it. And I don't say it meekly. I say it with conviction. I say it without fear. I say it as though my bones were already dust, as though my blood had been already boiled, as though my soul were already free.

So yeah, I say it, but I don't yet believe it.

Yet.

2005-01-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

I am quite frightened of life.

I wonder if there are many people like this. I wonder if I'm the only one. I know lots of people who aren't. I'm often told that change and flux and all that stuff should be invigorating.

I don't find it very invigorating. Mostly I find it stressful.

The worst part about being frightened of life is that its quite a ridiculous thing to be, and yet even the realisation that its ridiculous doesn't seem to lessen the feeling. So instead you just end up being frightened of life and insecure about being so.

To be frightened of life. Sheesh. And it really is ridiculous, absurd even. What makes it riduculous and absurd is the alternative. Death doesn't seem terribly enticing. But I mean, if you're not going to accept the shit of life, well, then I guess you should get off the pot. But who wants to do that?

So its ridiculous to be scared of life. Its absurd. It probably means I'm caught up in some sort of delusion of what life is, cuz I've given it some form that it doesn't possess.

Maybe life doesn't have form. Maybe its like the mind. Maybe life formless.

And you know, maybe that my problem. It would explain the fear at least. Amitting life is formless. That anything goes, so to speak. I don't know.

That's scary to me. That makes me get all shaky and panicky.

But I don't know. I don't know much. All I know is that its damn difficult to accept. That and that I think too much.

2005-01-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Sweet tropic, warm cancer
If only you were -
To taste your grim fruit
How evil - your cure

The poison - I'm mournful
Of death - to invent
My Minds hollow fall
The netting is rent

So spiral - to blackness
Forlorn clench at the Soul
To huddle the devil
As cold to a shoal

2005-01-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

Excuse me sir, but do you hear a rhythm?

Cuz I swear I hear it. And I swear its there. Out there. Reverberating through the bitter air. Haunting deep into the ice pack of the merciless snow. And in here. Inside these tortured, hollow walls. Screaming out in silence for an escape that can only come too late.

And yet it doesn't care. It is nothing but a beat.

Only that which exists as process of another. Or so he told me. But what does he know and who am I to say. So yes, I know, its not very good. Not yet. Not terribly coherent, still more like a muddle. Just a vaguely recognizable beat, dripping in the background like a leaky tap. No, no, its not very good at all. Keeps on stumbling over its stool and stepping out of tune, getting caught up in the numbers, and just going too fucking far. But its coming back, and its gaining in momentum.

Listen. I swear I hear a rhythm.

2005-01-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

...and that should scare them shitless

The world is run by practical men. Men of wealth. These masters, who have reneged on responsibility, who lay idly on their throne, who have coasted to their altar to blasphemy their god to gold.

These are the men who prick the pawns and determine fate.

They are power. They are strength. They have every resource at their disposal. They arm every soul that can be bought.

Yeah, they have all that.

But we have Grace.

2005-01-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

Well on this boring friday night when its far too cold to go out and I'm far too lazy to study I think instead I'll write something mostly incoherent, or incoherent to most, whichever fits the best...

What a boat and what a rough and tumbling sea and so close from shore where the argument began.

To one she was an inland soul on her first trip out to sea. She had ventured there alone, from the peaks of a solitairy mountain top. And two he was harboured mate, old and weathered long to the waves. But never had he ventured so much as a league out from the land.

These two would otherwise be strangers, had they not passed by that night and happened unto this boat that promised both eternity but could offer truth to only one.

They met upon the bow where already the shore could not be seen. She asked of him from where he came and he explained of his and him and of how he held this transport to take him there at once. And he then asked of she her ilk and whether it was the same. After some reflection she replied that though she did not know the barge and could not be sure at once, that still it was the same. He seemed content with this, and he looked on her like kindred with a smile upon his face.

But she was not satisfied by his, and took the look to be not understood, and so she explained that it was not perhaps of name the same from which she had first come, but that it was the same nevertheless.

At this, he furrowed his brow at her and looked on suspiciously, and asked her to reveal herself.

So she explained she came in such a way as he, that it was inside of her just as it was of him, and that she took this boat and risked these tumbled seas in the manner that he did, and so what was it of name to say that they were not the same.

The fellow though, was not satisfied at this. He shook his head with violence and quickly rose in his defense. 'No! No! Its not the same!' he said and cried at her the devil. Frightened she recoiled, but to her credit still tried again. Now though the tide had changed and he, having heard her just, only walked away in disgust, and would have no part of her after that.

These two travellers fell asleep upon the deck that night. She took her root at the stern and he took his at the bow. They both were wary of the other, her for his defense and him for her devil. But sleep eventually overtook them both.

And when the sun came up over the western crest, this old lubber rubbed his eyes and took his feet to the deck. She, however, did not take hers, and was of no place to see.

2005-01-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

Guided Imagination

'I think I've been on the wrong course.'
'Oh yeah?'
'I think that all that stuff I've been doing was missing the point.'
'That doesn't sound good.'
'It could be better.'
'You don't seem very upset by it.'
'Yeah. I guess I'm not.'

'I would be a little frustrated. I mean, if it really has been a waste.'
'Uhhuh. But it doesn't bother me that much.'
'Really? Don't you feel like you've lost a bunch of time.'
'No. Not really. I don't look at it like that.'
'How so?'
'Because I think I've found the point.'
'Oh yeah?'
'Yeah. And so it seems to me I've gained time.'
'Gained time?'
'Yeah. Because if it's the point I think it is, then really, time has just begun.'

2005-01-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

Love Actually

No. Shit actually.

Quite seriously, if you liked this movie, then you should go up to the corner of the page and click on the little escape icon out of here. Because there's no point reading any further. I don't mean it rudely. Its just that this blog will be a complete waste of your time. I'm doing you a favour. I might even post it as a disclaimer at the top.

Its a bad movie. It's a waste of time. It's just so wrong.

But apparently people like this schlock. A friend of mine was confronted today in an elevator by a pack of seven 'Love Actually' enthusiasts. They became violent when she mentioned that it didn't give her warm fuzzies and she didn't find it 'cute'. She narrowly escaped with her life. I don't usually get so up in arms about a movie, but when it becomes a rallying point for ignorant mobs, I think something has to be done.

I was quite surprised that there were seven 'Love Actually' ethusiasts in the world. I always overestimate humanity. I should really stop having such high expectations, because I am inevitably let down.

What is it that makes people like such obviously bad movies? Movies without a single redeeming quality. I don't get it. And there are others. Unfortunately there are so many others. 'Hollow Man', a pukefest of a movie that's only redeeming virtue is its title, which aptly described anyone who liked it. Dogma! It should have just been called 'Dog'. My god. It tried so hard, and did it so poorly.

And that's the crux of it I think. That's what makes a movie really bad. Any movie can just be bad. There's a lot half-assers out there half-assing it, so there's no shortage of half-ass art. But that special quality that makes a movie really bad is that it isn't half-assed. Somebody tried really hard, and just failed miserably at it. That sort of care is something special. Its unique. You can't reach the pinnacle of shit unless you really believe its worth reaching deep into the toilet.

The best way I can describe Love Actually is as an emotional wank. That's what it is. You fondle your emotions, trick them into thinking there's something real going on, and let them get all tingly until you spurt it all out and need to clean yourself up. The movie has no redeeming value, no insight, no character development, no plot - my god, this movie is over 2 hours long and it has no fucking plot. That deserves some kind of reward. 'Congratulations Sir, we didn't think it was possible to string that many words together without making a single coherent idea.' Even monkeys hit the right key eventually.

So yeah, that's enough. I've said enough and it really doesn't even deserve to be contemplated this much. Its not even worthy of hate. But a warning. If you agree, be careful what you say. One of the 'Love Actually' mob might overhear.

2005-01-03T22:39:00.000-07:00

Pray

He is in the hospital tonight, unaware of the nine hours of surgery that he has just been through.

To think that on Christmas day I spoke with him for the first time in five years.

And now... a single wrong step made on a dark night atop of an icy spot in a climate where the ice has no right to be. And that's it. One minute you're there, and the next you're out of control, down a flight of stairs to the sting of salt water below.

From that moment you're unaware. Not of your mother, crying in the waiting room, unable to stand the torture of hour upon hour of not knowing, thinking it can't be good for this to take so long. Not of the doctors, rushing about you, trying to stem the wound, trying to hold in your life force. Not of your family, the pacing, the midnight phone calls, the flourishes of anger brought on by an inability to cope. Not even of... well what of that - not even of prayer?

I don't know. But I do know that I prayed my guts out last night and this morning I was told he was going to live. And maybe its delusion or wishful thinking or something I just want really bad to be so, but I believe that he was aware of it. Of all of it sent out to him. That we wouldn't let him go.

2005-01-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

The only thing i can think to write is the monologue that keeps me from writing at all.

Some nights I am full of energy to create and understand. I read and research and write unconsciously. Time isn't lost because those hours are timeless. It never occurs to me that time will end. And I never ask the question - Why do it at all?

On other nights that question burns like God in front of me. In terror of the answer, I cower and take flight. Why? Its just too much to face. And so it becomes a wall between me and everything I do. Why write? Why read? Why eat? Why move? Why?

To this I am defenseless. I've racked my brain since the time it first became, a time I don't even remember when, and I have no retort to it. All I can do is accept it, and try to stifle the effect.

So both of these beasts exist, both inhabit my soul, and I cannot deny that. They are there. But from that I can go no further. All that I am able to do is wonder without hope of an answer - which of them is truth, and which is mere delusion?

2004-12-29T23:54:00.000-07:00

The Shared Mistake.

A shared mistake is a term that's used by some economists when they refer to a situation where there is an overwhelming consensus opinion and that overwhelming consensus opinion turns out to be wrong.

In the past there have been a number of shared mistakes.

The dot.com boom is probably the best example of one. The mistake was the belief of unlimited and unprecedented growth due to the introduction of the internet.

Whoops.

Anyways, I think I've found what could be another shared mistake.

I found a link on another website (macromouse.blogspot.com), to a paper published by Paul Samuelsson, who is a Professor of Economics at MIT. The paper has the terribly boring and unbelievably long title , 'Where Ricardo and Mill Rebut and Confirm Arguments of Mainstream Economists Supporting Globalization'. But its not as hard to understand as it is to read the title. In a nutshell...

Globalization might not work after all.

Basically, what Samuelsson says is that in its initial stages economic theory teaches us that the benefits of globalization will raise the standards of living of all countries involved. The richer countries get cheaper goods and the poorer countries get higher wages. Everyone benefits from the increased productivity of countries focusing on the goods they produce best.

However, once those initial stages give way to a stage of more advanced production by the poorer nations, so that the poorer nation begins to produce the goods that the richer nation had up until then held a monopoly over, the richer nation may 'suffer permanent measurable loss in per capita real income', in other words they might not be as well off.

This is important because the argument for globalization has always been an economic argument, and its often presented as one that we don't dare argue against because we don't understand the theory.

The argument went something like this: 'Yes, there may be losses to individuals, but the gains of the winners will outweigh the losses of the losers and overall society will be richer as a result.' So the theory went.

Samuelsson's paper shows that this isn't necessarily so.

It would be correct to say that we have embarked long down a road of globalization under the assumption that the economic forces behind free trade will work to benefit society in the long run.

If Samuelsson is correct, this assumption may be flawed.

Thus, there may have been a shared mistake among those who wielded the power to make it.

It might occur to an objective observer that if the theory behind the policies is flawed, the next step would be to reopen the debate and then possibly to reexamine those policies.

But we won't. There's too much profit at stake.

2004-12-28T19:01:00.000-07:00

This is a town without trees.

It wasn't always a town without trees. There was a time when trees lined the lengths of the narrow, dirt roads. The trees were large and magnificient, taller then any building. Their branches arched across the roads, stretching to touch their brothers on the other side. They protected the town from the empty sky.

The trees gave the town its beauty in fall, when the leaves were yellow and red, and in spring, when the buds began to sprout. The trees were the town; it seemed more likely that the houses had been planted in the spaces between.

The man who took away the trees was not an evil man.

The man who took away the trees ran a business for many years. He was respectable to his customers, and successful in his work. He brought much prosperity to the town.

And so it turned out, being a respectable man of the town, and being that it was a small town, that he eventually became the mayor. And his first business as mayor was to decide that the trees must go.

It was not that the man did not appreciate the beauty of the trees. He did. Often he would walk among the trees on his way home from work, listening to the rustle of the fallen leaves beneath his feet, and then he would marvel at the beauty of the colors all around him.

But when the man became the mayor, he decided that he must look beyond such aesthetics. To be moved irrationally was fine for a layman, but with his new responsibility he felt he should not allow his judgement to be clouded.

‘I must do what is best for the town,’ he thought.

He determined that what was best for the town was to take away the trees.

He reasoned that the trees were a hazard. He argued to the council that they were an accident waiting to happen. He noted the evidence. During big storms you could hear the trees creaking and groaning; it was only a matter of time before they snapped, he argued. Already after a storm you would see small branches that had fallen to the ground. On a few occasions, after particularly fearsome storms, the street would be littered with the carcass of branches, having cracked beneath the momentum created by their sway. With great concern he pointed out that some of these branches were noteable in their size, and that they might do serious damage if they fell on an unsuspecting passerby.

‘We cannot tolerate such a danger!’ the man argued. ‘What if one of these branches were to fall on a house? What if one of our children were to be crushed by one?’

The council at first resisted, but the man refused to give in, and eventually he won out. His reasoning had no answer.

‘After all, he said, ‘These trees are a risk, and they are unnecessary. They have no reason to be here. We do not need these trees. And so they should be gotten rid of. For then we can live in peace, and not in fear of some fateful day.’

The next spring the trees were brought down in a cloud a sawdust and chainsaws. And now the town does not have to think anymore about falling branches, and no one worries when a big rain storm comes.

But now the town is treeless. The streets are no longer shrouded from the sky, and the bright sun beats down on the barren gravel and illuminates all its imperfections. The beauty that the trees held has disappeared. The houses are now misplaced, seperated by parched grass and stumps, naked to behold the chipped paint and crumbling foundation.

But worse is that the town itself was held together by the trees. The roots were the roots of families, their leaves the sign of life. Since the trees came down the children don’t come out as much anymore. The couples no longer walk through the streets holding hands and laughing. The old men no longer sit on their porches through the long summer days, rocking and watching the shadows pass.

The mayor has since moved on. He found work in another town, and no one has heard much from him since. But his legacy will only be forgotten when the stump of a town finally withers and dies.

2004-12-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

Tonight is one of those nights where I would really like to write something, but I don't have a single idea in my head to write. Its too bad. There's lots of nights where the ideas are floating around like schools of fish, but I'm just too lazy to put them down to words. Those nights aren't too bad, at least for me, because the ideas are there and really what do I care whether they're here or there. But these nights, when I'd love to put them there, but I can't because they just aren't here, well then that's too bad.

So instead I'm sitting here watching the Red Dragon, and I think I'm going to switch the channel cuz its freaking me out and Ralph Fiennes just took off his robe and showed this weird-ass dragon tattoo on his back to Phillip Seymour Hoffman and oh - that's the last straw - he just ate Hoffman's tongue... yikes! Time to turn the channel.

That's not inspiring at all. That's just wiggy. I think the most inspiring thing I heard on TV tonight was buddy on the trailer park boys reminding us all that Christmas is not about gifts and stress and any of that crap but instead about getting drunk and stoned with your family. That's the true meaning.

and that is life.

2004-12-21T20:45:00.000-07:00

Atlas Sucks

'Then don't be that yourself,' said he with elven ears, 'That drunken fool you laugh at is truly the greatest sage.'

'Surely you jest!' replied his neighbour, 'He must be three sheets to the wind, if not more. And I dare say those winds would make a nasty knot!'

The neighbour had a laugh, but the man with elven ears just shook his head and frowned.

'I don't kid you,' he said, 'And don't mistake a fool for despair.'

'Despair?' replied the neighbour, 'What nonsense is that? And now I know he is a fool. So don't conjure that old relic to this world.'

The elven fellow sighed, defeated. 'Yes, I know. What you say is true. But I still can't doubt his wisdom. At least not enough to leave me undisturbed.'

The neighbour only scoffed. 'Well don't be disturbed. That's just your mind playing tricks. Leave that relic in the past as well. Now look, over there, at this so-called sage. He's drowning from the empty glass. Blames it on despair you say. I do scoff. Indeed I do. It sounds suspiciously like an excuse to me. An excuse to indulge himself while holding a more comfortable illusion.'

A third man, who had been speaking to an overappetized maid while keeping tabs on the discussion, now piped up.

'Its a lazy man who calls it despair. In my eyes that crushed soul is a pity of waste. I for one will not condone it with doubt.'

'Hear, hear!' cried the neighbour, and then, looking over at the sage, 'Look at him. He's trying to get up. He can barely stand. He must have been here since noon.'

With that the three fellows all turned on their own stools, on which they had sat themselves since almost noon, and watched as the old sage staggered to the exit. The only other who gave him notice was the bartender, and he did not like the company and was glad to see him go. He would tell his door to be more discerning tomorrow, even at only noon.

The door slammed shut and briefly let in snow. A cold breeze swept by and sent the patrons back on their stools.

and then, a few minutes after the old drunk left, following a flurry of discussion, a slight argument by the elven man, the three patrons were quick to pay their tab, uncheck their coats, and then they too made their way unforgivingly into the desperate night.

2004-12-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

In the January 26th issue of Mcleans, Donald Coxe, who is an economist, wrote an article discussing economic forecasts. The sub-title of the article was 'are you and optimist or a pessimist?'

Coxe went on to say that you can look at the economy and make an eloquent case for optimism, or for pessimism. It has less to do with the facts and more to do with the bias.

And really, the bias is what it all comes down to.

I read a lot of economics. My reaction is interesting. When I read the optimists, I begin to think that things are going to be all right. Yes, there are problems, but there have been problems before and we've made it through them in the past. If you look at things on a long-term scale, the world seems to be getting better. Certainly, there are more people living in better conditions then there were a couple hundred years ago.

When I read the pessimists, I begin to think that the world could be on the verge of collapse. The global economy is woefully out of balance, there are still huge numbers of people living in poverty, we are stealing from the future to satisfy the over consumption of the present.

The problem, I think, is not that I'm wishy-washy. Its that the answer really isn't that clear. Its hard to predict the future. And its hard to predict how the past may have turned out if it had travelled a different course.

Lately I've been reading a lot about global warming. Its the same problem. There's a lot we just don't know. We know that we are changing the environment. That's for sure. But no one can be sure what the affect is, and what its going to be. No one can even be sure how much we've affected things so far. So the optimists can have their optimistic predictions, and the pessimists can have their pessimistic predictions. And the two can't really be reconciled until its too late.

The world economy is a complex system. The global environment is a complex system. We, as human beings, just aren't smart enough to understand them. Both the optimist and the pessimist are wrong. Because they are biased. Because they are trying to extrapolate a fixed opinion on a system that we just don't understand enough to fix anything on.

I think we need to change the basis of our thinking a bit. The key word there is basis. No more is the basis blind optimism. No more is it blind pessimism. Instead, the basis should be that we really don't know. And from that, all else follows.

2004-12-14T20:44:00.000-07:00

...When you feel very sick, as I did, you quickly realise how unimportant it is. You realise that, and you realise how happily you should embrace the boring days of nothing, and just be content with that...

...and so She kept telling me, as I was throwing up for the fifteenth time, to just let it go. And I tried, but I just couldn't. Even though I had an inkling she was right, I just couldn't let go. I couldn't watch myself be sick. I wasn't strong enough...

...today though, I was convinced I was having some sort of relapse, initiated by splitting headache, but all it was was coffee withdrawal. sigh...

2004-12-12T01:07:00.000-07:00

Flowers for the Chief

I reached the island by boat. It was in the early eighties I guess. I had come from the prairies, where the boom had ended and there was no work to be had and so there was no reason to stay. I headed west without much of an idea of where I was going, and I guess I stopped there as much because I ran out of land as for any other reason.

For five years I stayed with them. For four and a half I planted the flowers.

With every year the Chief's condition got worse. He took to the bed soon after I arrived, and he didn't leave it until he passed away some five years later. He was an old man, and he was dying of cancer, and so it was only a matter of time.

But it wasn't just the Chief that was wasting away. It was the whole place. It was all dying with him.

It had become the kind of place, you see, where one man held them all together. I never knew the Chief when he was well. When I first arrived he was already too sick to speak for more then a minute. And if you had seen him on that first day, you would have said he'd had less then a year.

He lasted five. Those other four are a testament to his strength.

And as that strength left, and the color drained from his face, the wrinkles becoming sags that masked his features, well the town took on a similar complexion.

But that alone does not explain it.

Of course there was the abuse, and that had something to do with it. Yes, it had been over a half century before, but that isn't much time for those kind of crimes. It takes more then just a generation to heal those wounds.

But I don't know. All I know is whatever it was, they were all dying, and I think they knew it. They seemed to appreciate me though. And I appreciated that. I think it was welcomed that I was an outsider. They needed to be reminded there was something else.

After a few months of doing the handiwork that needed to be done, the job I'd been hired for, I had gotten mostly caught up with the repairs. And so it was about then that I took to planting the flowers around the cabin. Just in my spare time at first, here and there, to give the place some color.

And as the fighting got worse, and as the Chief lapsed into those long periods of unconsciousness that we all thought would be the last, I kpet on planting more.

Now I wasn't much of a gardener, never had any training or anything, and in a way that was a blessing. I'd plant the buds where they'd want to go, and I didn't give much thought to what it would all look like in a few months. There wasn't much order to any of it when they'd come up.

And that was the beauty of it.

I like to think that the flowers helped bring back a bit of balance to the place. That they slowed down the process a tad.

In the end of course it was all too much. You couldn't replace the Chief with a bunch of flowers. But I like to think they helped, that maybe they were the reason that it all held together as long as it did. At least the Chief, when he finally did die, didn't have to witness the pain that came next.

2004-12-11T20:52:00.000-07:00

Together we sat round the table. The feast was upon us. Laughing and talking, spurred by the drink to converse with our neighbours, we divulged ever more of our past. Soon the gifts would come, and they would come in mountains, and then would begin the frenzy.

All looked forward with expectation. All except for one. He sat there quite alone amidst the revelry and sipped his wine more slowly then the others. He spoke when spoken to, not to be rude, but he did not join in with rapacious stories of his own.

He stayed still while the others ran.

And he wondered to himself how it could be that he had come upon these others, and whether their ways and his could ever be reconciled.

He doubted it.

And that was very well, for if anything he was becoming more distant, so that in years past he may have taken part in the orgy, but not now. Now it was too much to task, too foreign to accept, and he could not have beared to join in. He knew that soon he would excuse himself, and his life would be changed.

It was strength, and he had always wished for it, but now that it was here it did not bring any joy. It brought nothing at all. The irony was that the source of this triumph was the same as that which would mute such emotion and so keep him from enjoying his moment of victory.

Thus it was that while trying to endure the increasingly less polite conversation, the lechorous advance, that he felt nothing, only a sterile sense of necessity. He would soon leave. And it would all be over. There was no other choice to make.

2004-12-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Crimes and...

But could you really live with yourself?
he seems to think so.
And he didn't.
But could you? You've certainly lived with lessor crimes. But this?

And the righteous will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished.

They aren't. They aren't. Fuck it all they aren't.
And the why would you be too?
Is he right? he can't be right?
But its in your mind. So why not? Under distress, why not. Out of necessity, why not change your mind. In this as in everything else.
It shouldn't be though. Its not fair. In some things the mind shouldn't be allowed to change.
I hope so at least.

2004-12-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt about her. I was at her work. I don't know what I was doing there. I don't even know if she still works there.

At first I saw her from the back. I wasn't sure it was her because she had short hair and she used to have long hair and she was wearing a long coat that didn't seem familiar. But later as I was leaving she was coming in and it was definitely her.

Her hair was short and her clothes were different with the long dark coat but yes it was her and she was as beautiful as ever. She came up to me and I was surprised because there were all these people around, people from her work, and I still knew we couldn't be seen together and it couldn't be known but it seemed that she didn't care now so she just came up and talked and we talked and talked about stuff, lots of stuff. She was going back to University and she was mad about it, and I thought isn't that just like her to get all mad and grumpy over something like that. It was cute and she was beautiful.

Well I don't know what brought it about, whether it was the emotion of seeing each other or something one of us said, but all of a sudden she was in my arms. I thought we can't possibly do this with all these people around because no one can know and what if somebody tells. But we did. It didn't matter. Perhaps we both knew it was only a dream and so the consequences would never appear. And as I was holding her I whispered in her ear that I loved her and she whispered that she still loved me.

Sometimes I wish that dreams could be transported through the air and that she could be dreaming the same thing that I dreamed. So at least we could be in love together in our dreams.

2004-12-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night. And I dreamed the mice were gone.

I was home and you weren't and there was someone else there but I don't know who it was.

He (or she or whomever it was) was trying to tell me to just open the door. He was telling me that it would all be ok if I opened the door, but I was defiant and I told him that I couldn't open the door because the mice would get in. And I remember I was convinced that he was crazy and I had this picture of all these mice outside the door just waiting to come in. So I didn't open the door.

Well, some time passed, you know how time passes in dreams where it doesn't really pass but you know it has passed. And I guess somehow he must have convinced me to open the door because after the time passed I was going to the door, but I wasn't very happy about it, and I was shaking my head and grumbling about how the mice were going to come in and this was crazy. But I was still going to the door and maybe I was just going to open it to prove my point and let the mice in. But I opened it.

And when I opened the door, all these mice, from everywhere, under the couch and in the kitchen and in your room and just everywhere, they all ran into the living room, there were dozens of them, and flew past me and out of the house. And then they were gone.

2004-12-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

Yeah well I haven't written in a while. And that's just the way it is. I haven't felt terribly creative. Or excellently creative or any other type for that matter. Ho hum. I might have to turn this into, god forbid, a regular blog for a while and write about myself. Or at least someone like me.

I wonder if people every write blogs about other people. I don't mean make shit up about themselves, but actually create this completely different person that has a completely made up life that they write about every day. If they do, I think that's cool. If you can write every day about someone else's life, that's cool.

Unless you do it because you skipped your meds.

So I was listening to that song 'The Warrior' at some gelato place off of kensington with my roommate tonight. We weren't there to listen to it mind you. It just happened to be on. Gelato is good. So is The Warrior. Aren't the 80's great? I mean, here's this dude, and he's probably got some weird ass frilled up poofy bleach blonde hair down to his ass crack, and he's wearing purple eye shadow, and fake press on nails, and he's holding a half finished bottle of scotch in the one hand and spilling it out onto the stage and belting out 'I am a Warrior' into a mic in the other. That's good shit. Cheers to the 80s Warrior's, and the double wide trailers they now live in.

2004-11-26T23:26:00.000-07:00

Guess

Mr. Smith, if I may be allowed to address the bone and not the marrow, then allow me to make the introduction of this small band of thieves. These, kind sir, are your worst nightmare.

You cringe. You whisper something inaudible to that crony on the right, that pompous fool who laughs too loud to disguise a nervous tick. He blasphemies your name and dallies out of context. Its a pity you have no choice but to allow it, to shift in your dirt at best.

But he is a fool and I want nothing of him. You, on the other hand, are not. You sense very well the ice in my veins. After all, we are both quite dead.

Yes, cringe, you have every right. For I care nothing of your laws. Your marginal this and your balanced that. Your silly fascination with productivity. As an end, not a means. What fool do you take me for! As if there were some heaven of history that might reckon you some day and bestow a earthly paradise because of your divine efficiency. Next I suppose I should expect an old bearded fellow sitting on the street corner, wearing nothing but a dirty robe and sandals, and in his hand a sign - '7% growth - your ticket to the gates'. Of all your delusions, and there are so many, at least admit this - The future is no god. But you admit nothing. You are most excellent at silence, I give you that. So I say fuck it to it all.

I laugh at the silly ladders you climb. Don't you know they only lead to dirt. Climb to fall like a soldier to his massacre. Your petty deadlines. To get ahead. One up. First to market. Hit the window. Do it quick before your dead.

Yes, now you cringe. I saw you, and don't deny it. 'Make sure that they are few,' whispers the one behind. 'They're just a petty nuisance,' says another beside. Silly youth you say, and now you laugh nervously, as I have touched your nerve and you have felt my chill. But you know damn well that the weapon I carry cannot be conquered and will not be bought.

Who am I? Do you really want to know? I am many things. Most of all I am nothing. I am idle. I am lethargic in every regard but to insure I do not change. I am your confidence without the consumer. I am negative retail sales. I am a fifteen year replacement cycle. I am chaos. I am 0% prime. I am an unmotivated worker. I am buses and trains and bicycles. I am a plunger. I am irrational. I am an empty wallet and a full bank account. One that keeps on growing and growing and growing. For a rainy day of course. When the hard rain begins to fall.

I am all of that. I have seen it all and I don't care to see it anymore. I have had it all and I am full. I have touched everything that you have to tempt me with, and now your vice is nothing but a tick. I brush it off and continue on my way.

Well, I best be going now. Off to my castle. Good luck to you. And don't bother begging for a loan.

2004-11-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

Just watching that hopeless little screen

'You don't write anymore.'
'No, I don't.'
'Why is that?'
'I couldn't handle the hangover.'
'Come again?'
'I can't string a sentence when I'm sober.'
'That's true.'
'And once I start I can't stop.'
'Drinking?'
'Writing.'
'Cuz it gets better with each drink. The connections become clearer. The world more obvious. More alive.'
'Uh huh.'
'Until I pass out.'
'The next morning I swear I won't do it again. But I always did. Until now.'
How long has it been?'
'6 months or so.'
'Do you still want to?'
'Every night.'
'That's a shame. You were good.'
'A man's gotta put himself ahead of the world.'
'In these times I guess.'
'Yeah. Do me a favour will you. Go over and turn on the TV.'