A Seclusive Trip

Sitting here where my past lies still; unbending to the times a the city changes all around me. My memory still clings to me, while my mind asks if I should forget just a little--to make this life easier.

But I've never been the one to appreciate it easy: I need things to be natural, I want to adapt to become something better--something that can reckon with the age... and win. For what else is this life for, but to command it, but to lead this world upon a visionary dream. I see the world as it could be... as it must be, if we are to grow out of this small nature and perhaps gain the future.

Because of this--does the stones speak to you? Because of this, does the winds whisper? I've tried to drown myself; to see if just some ordinary life would be worth it--if I could settle for something less and live with that; but something keeps pulling me back, as like a natural instinct for fresh air.

I could not be lost--I could only not know--the path--I might never find, but I know that growing old and cynical will never be in the books for me--nor growing old and practical--so from this trip--a revelation emerges; do what is difficult --> treat the easy as your constant energy. The seduction of the comfort of civilization are many; yet golden cages never suit someone who would gladly walk the desert in search for the Truth.

I don't live in a world of pure Art. I live in a world where the Age controls, conflicts, and destroys the present. Our ever present capitalization.  

In a small town in Spain

Psycho-geometry:

"To paint is to love again," I believe Henry Miller said that in a short story in Black Spring.

There is that element of faith--ingrained, accepted, like the tolls of the church bells which echo the hour, that reminds you this is a Catholic country.

We can and should elevate the art of writing. Let us park ourselves at the capabilities, the intersections of modern highways and scope out a description--a narrative of the city as life--paint together - picture word poetries - of the night - of the crowds screaming in that familiar portrait of Hitler, the only familiar speeches we share. I believe we can, let the reality absorb into us, let the energy of a place reshape our sense, and practice our craft - to imperfection.

Restarting

Ok. Let's go.

Alone, Around.

Despite how much better things might be with people around, I tend to like to walk alone. I've slowly learned over the years that being alone too much when you'd still like to be a part of society isn't very healthy. Yet I am constantly seeking the minimal time I have to spend with other living people and the optimal time I can spend alone, without a thought of anything to do with people or society at all. Dead people don't count, especially statues. I like to sit and watch sun-rises and leaves fall from trees, or birds hovering around in patterns. I like to watch light change the look and expression on statues. I like the unnecessity of language in order to comprehend these things viscerally. The rhythm of a day, the rhythm of the surrounding life against inorganic rotations. You cannot say these things out loud. Their langauge is not a language of signs and symbols, of metaphors or abbreviations, or meanings. It is not taken out of life, but it is life, it is all of it. I watch the brown leaves fall of the branches of trees and float down. I long to join them.

Ethnic pride and ethic

If I weren’t blessed and cursed with this immigrant ethic and spirit of my grandfather, I could’ve been content to be only an artist, in love with beauty. My grandfather, especially towards the end, kept talking about doing something great, something big, and that will always be on my guilty conscience. I live now in the house he built. I repair the parts that are worn and old, and replace them with the work I do. There is a calming sense of continuation when I replace something, like the old mattresses, the dust caked dishes, light switches, the burnt out light-bulbs. Here lies the remains of my ancestor, which I can have no doubt I am truly a descendant. Here are the pictures of my family, in their proudest moments, their accomplishments in a line right above my eye level as I type, to know from which the life that I've been able to lead were built from these moments when I didn't even exist yet.

If I don’t turn to face the actual condition of things and match it, not with a critical eye and writing analysis, but with action, then I feel as if somehow I am betraying this tradition. Therefore these actions must include politics, which in essence is about power, and who gets to wield it. We no longer exist in a world where one could simply escape into some land, find isolation, and make our own way. The world will come knocking, with a gun at some point, and I want to able to return fire, match them bullet for bullet (no I will not be neither martyr nor saint, of any sort), and tell them to get off my property, rather than be a helpless serf, kowtowing to some ignoble politician, or a supercilious, last-namer. I hear the hounds’ echoes with every step I take, demanding, money, time, my youth, my creations, all for them, to keep us all citizens trapped here in our neo-feudal society under their little finger. This rage inside me of having to bend the knee to these idiots keeps me here, keep me running up against the ropes, instead of falling back into an evasive posture. The world itself might not need me, but I need to make the world.

It is the same feeling that bubbles in me when I see a hard-working Chinese man or woman sacrificing for their intended future. It is a concrete-abstract lesson taught to the inheritors. While most children have their imaginary parents telling them when they are doing wrong, imagine having a great line of ancestors from way way back before anyone can even remember looking at you disapprovingly as well. The children that stay bent over their multiplication tables and school work instead of wandering drunk at parties. They're all whispering to me that I'm not doing enough. And perhaps I'm not. So for that I'm hoping to make amends.

I am teaching a fellow college graduate who spends most of his days reading now. He reads until he collapses, and has a schedule for different subjects to read listed every day. His reason: He's never knew how to read before, until the last year of college, and now he's trying to get back all that time for all the things he should have learned. 

There's something about that plain desire and ethic that I just love.

 

-----

 

The more I am around them, these people following the ethnic script the more I am tugged back into something dormant but very much alive within myself. Defiant eyes challenging teachers, outsiders beware, and I am ready to match them. Almost treasonous eyes, that you don't expect from kids. That look could enlist hatred, but I understand what is behind it; the understanding of the world, and the order. All those years it took to deprogram myself away from order. I just hope the pressure goes against awareness as well, so that they don't wind up as automatons, but the leaders they want to be.

The Siren Song of Sleep

There are certain things which must be actively resisted. Then there are many situations which lie right outside of our control which one can do nothing about which are much better left out of active consciousness. The troubling thing, however, are the things which lie right beyond our reach. They are seductive, making themselves known, and then moving away at an alternating pace. They seem to be promising that if only you’d try a bit more, push harder, then you’ll reach into the zone and possess it. These siren goals are all the more insinuatingly devastating because their promises are true. I’ll reach the point of exhaustion and cross into the realm of exuberance, merging with the flow with the creative muse. What I should I have known: Siren songs kill dreamers; Muses are fickle, that is their nature. So you reach the exalted state, only to peak early and come crashing back down amidst the ruins of your tired body. The sickness should’ve been a warning. The pain and tiredness should’ve been a cloud on the horizon. Instead you lay there shattered, the feathers of Daedalus’ wings blanketing your face, as you watch the sun-streak behind Apollo’s chariot carrying your use to burn in the light of day. Morning: 5 A.M. You physically can’t push yourself off the thin mattress on the cold tiles. Your head feels like it’s about to collapse back into the shards of a nightmare of monotonously angry agony. Your legs and fingers are numb. Exhaustion is screwing with your homeostasis; you don’t know if you’re in fever or just too cold. It’s all just numbness, and heaviness, and frustration all rolled into one. The flash of that garnish sun, that whimsical beauty that stabbed you through the back of the eye, is still haunting you. But you know you’re not going to get it. And you know you’re got to get up, get strong black coffee, smoke a cigarette and get to work. What these eyes see here wide-awake, is just another dream, and dreaming wide-awake you’re going to make it reality.

Running

Real seduction takes time. In our age of instanteously gratified impulses, turbulances are an inconvience, when in fact, life should be tough. The real seduction is getting through that toughness to the real sweet moments which comes as the natural reward of struggle, of Will. Will is seductive when it becomes Sublime. Like a long distance run, when the High kicks in, and the running becomes natural, becomes a very part of experience, I feel a part of myself reach out to meet it and extend. Then, anything is possible. It is no longer putting one foot in front of the other, but the very flow of life to be running, the sensations of activity and the limits which were hypothetical things to work around become a game as it approaches nearer and nearer. Can I hold on just a little bit longer? Can I keep on going without the need to take a break to some disturbance or the other? The whole of focus and concentration become like an opponent in a fair game, who would smile at you if you managed to beat him.

The Garden of Literature

From the Pages of My Diary...

I won't leave, unless you wish it of me. I am on a journey of discovery right now, a journey deep into my own psyche, a journey I've made countless times before, but relying upon others for guidiance I wound up upon their forks, their fixations and repressions, but not my own. The space of the collective human imagination is vast, and despite that good feeling of a resonance off a familiar sign post by the great men and women who have come before, my spirit is finally ready now to venture forth into virgin territory and with my own eyes witness the passing of the veils which blind us from what we ought to see, ought to know--our selves as we exist in this unique universe, and nature and beauty as we might never concieve it if one doesn't trust enough that intrinsic capacity inside of us to Will it so. So let it be.

In that blue, which only a few may enter is where we meet. The secret garden of literature is not open to everyone, and those that do pay a price: to be consistently untimely (in the sense of, Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations) with the temporary, contemporary society of the age. This is both a curse, and a blessing. For like Nicolo Machevilli or Petarch, one may call upon the giants of history to stand on their shoulders whence one own might not contain enough strenght to bear the pressure of oppression, which exists in every age, especially upon children and the young. We can feed on ichor, and glory, as much as milk and honey.  

And of that I am now in Need. For this seeking has left me again, in front of that high door which leads into Camus's Absurdity; Sin without God, a life of shifting meanings and no solid ground, no clear enemy, to lay my Self against. Like the psychological breakdown of a prisoner in solitary confinement, in that dark place, entombed in the prision of a mortal shell, the lies one tells oneself that constitute consciousness begin to breakdown, and the Real-(as Lacan defines it; that which Returns, always)-ality of the Subconscious asserts itself to the horror of our preconcieved notions. Either they break, or I break. 


Of Sermons and Songs; to lift the spirt. 

A True Nomad

Achieving control from inside.

   It has become apparent to me that these distractions from the ability to concentrate brought about my the electronic age were in my way. They provide such ability to move fast from one mental space onto another mental space, like slipping between the cracks, a wonder to be sure, but ultimately the wrong medicine for needing to be rooted to the spot. Rooted within one, and satisfied and grateful for the very fact of existence. I am always seeking to better myself with learning, the allure of the knowledge inside of a book, inside of the wealth of information available with a few touches of my finger tips, a few clicks off a couple of links. What wonders will I find? Yet that is not the right attitude to writing, to wanting to remain, focused here upon a singular task, a singular character, a singular plot. With the quantity of information of varying quality available, one tends to diminish the need for quality within oneself. Quality within oneself requires massive investment of time, for only this mind, this one singular consciousness with all its limitations need to move beyond it, to cut at the roots of whatever is holding one back.

   I recognize a flaw in my character. Before I left the isolation of my provincial college, I had done research into the practices of Shamanism. Apart from an ongoing intellectual interest in the altered state, and the dimensions of consciousness, I had been seeking a pragmatic use of the techniques of Ecstasy to achieve a solidifying unity within the vacuum created by my inability to worship or rely upon a deity for the meaning of life, of existence. I had thought that by becoming filled with this element, as I see it now, which I felt from inside an intellectual quest, I could somehow achieving a purpose without Reason: a believe only in the journey itself, to no destination. For a while, in the rewiring of my Being, my purpose to achieve this aim I found a spirit to which I could turn, eschewing the usual drugs of drink, cigarettes, the munia of distractions to which a restless idle mind turns to escape the gnawing sense of lack, the Absurdity of a rationaless universe against my need for Reason. Now over a year in pursuit of the journey itself, I have fallen again into idle distraction. A journey without destination grows wearisome, as the sights, though of no repeat, begs of the question of the journey itself. Why not linger here or there? Why move again? For what purpose? The questions return, with a renewed sense of hopeless to ever escape the need to answer them. Wandering around, feeding wayward curiosity has left me feeling superficial. I feel further away from my aim then before. And I become more vulnerable to distraction than ever, as idleness slowly crept in.

    Only in a complete disengagement from my life did I start to retrace these steps I stumbled through, holding the Ideal (again) of the journey aloft as my only compass.

   A true nomad is not a wandering man without a home: He has settled himself as his home. The journey without and within reflect the change of the world. One does not make a home on the road, but becomes at home on the road. Thus, wherever the journey, it is as a center moving towards the periphery, not as a moving away from center towards the edges of the Mandala.

   I have been idealizing the malcontent, the shifting restlessness of youth for so long. Now I hope to make peace with this life. For I see now the reflection; why certain moments in traveling, or driving long into the a lonely night on my moped towards a distant destination feels so right—I have become one with moving, with movement. I have settled into the moment, into myself in the moment of flight. This illusive feeling of belonging to a place while in transit, has been the unity of a return into the self-flow of This (I can find no other word to express it).

To grandpa

And finally I have the time to write again... it's been a hellish couple of months, but that's not what's on my mind right now. Looking forwards, and what in 2 days I'll be 24. 3 years after expectations. 3 years after the initial scheme. I've been foolish to think that others could replace it, that things could just become as what I've heard told or retold, not what I'd lated down for myself all those years ago.

The writing is coming, but I've been afraid again, keeping it all in for the right words to flow out. The right voice, the right sound, the right words. And it is coming, like drops out of a faucet, a drip and a drip at a time. But do I have all that to wait, for the little pool to become something on its own. A little collection of words so right for what I need?

Sometimes, when I'm dead drunk or just feel like starting up at something (you can't see the stars in a city like Bangkok) I lie on the tile floor of my bathroom along the gecko and rat shit and stare up at the cracking ceiling, looking for random patterns that might assemble themselves into something, listening to the rats. I like living in this house, my grandpa's house. I've got to admit that condos are more convenient, I'll give it that, but I can't help but think of grandpa in almost everything I see here. He's cobbled most of it together from bits and pieces, like he does with everything. Plastic pipe canes, industrial sinks for basins, cement ponds to block out the water, lamps that never match, sockets that don't work, and a thousand tools mounted on rotting wood and empty cans with the nails still sticking out. He cobbled together something for his children too, while not having an real significant degrees himself my uncles are all lawyers or doctors, and none are or had to be that damn poor to own pieces of plywood tools, or build their own fans, lamps and tables. And all of a sudden I'm back to being 7 years old, building tables with him in the backyard. The tables we still have at our house. With the pieces of scrap wood left I built myself a box car. I remember hammering tails in the side, and sticking in cans in the bottom. I remember getting into it for the first time and seeing all the jagged nails sticking out which I didn't bother to hammer down cause I was so excited to just be in it, even when at that age I knew it would never move. I'd made something, and I didn't really care that it was just a weird box. Grandpa could've probably made me a box chariot, but he just let me keep it that way working on it until I cut myself with the saw, and perhaps that was all for the best.

Now if I could learn to write like that again, like I built the boxcar, like grandpa does with building whatever he had at hand. Despite the mismatch, or maybe because of the mismatch, I can learn to love the wrong words for everything. Like PVC pipe hand canes, plastic bottle lap shades, and aluminium plate clocks.

This pressure

This pressure. It won't let up. It can't let up until I do something, something important. I write because I can't keep away. A voice keeps nagging me to keep on doing this, to never give up on what I have to say. The censors hanging above always, the ignorance hanging above always. The imago of Thailand in the minds of the rest of the world. We're marketed as an alternative to porn. For the price of a porno mag in the United States you could get a fresh body here, trapped and ignorant.

The cultural project of the SEA isn't what is happening for the people who would be publishing them. What would a young, modern person do with that? What fantasy is this that I'm reading, that has nothing to do with my life. Another preaching tale, and the right, the authority to tell them, to hand them down like gospel. The young, the old, the imaginary pictures of the perfect country side on television and movies. Occasionally they would point at some city offical, but never in name, never in what's really going on. In fact, it's hard to know what's going on when the truth isn't valued, is protected all in all by threats, when whatever you write isn't held up to any kind of accountability, when government officals, teachers, civil servants are never accountable to what they give because to challenge them would be death, censorship, or jail.

How can you truly write, with this hypocritical bubble floating around your head? It's floating around like a giant cloud of pollution, acid rain killing everything.  

Speed Writing

I just suddenly realized that the greatest problems came from going too slow. I've set out to write three novels this year, when I should have aimed higher. I just aimed too low, with the speed that I can do. I am going too slow, and that's why I'm bored.

I went outside tonight to the street-lamp lit space underneath the bridge. The place they moved the sorry excuse for a park that they leveled for a show space across the street. Now it double as basketball court, tra-kaw court, a place to dump gym equipment, and do some aerobics sometimes, but they moved that behind my house with the children playground. The orange blow of street light, and me alone in the darkness with a box-cutter. I just watch the cars go by, and then wait for myself to catch up in this place where its quiet.

It's then that I notice that I'm going at a certain speed. A speed that's not quite right for how fast I need to go. Writing is like that sometimes. I've been surprised how much more writing I'm doing now that I have a faster keyboard. On the slower keyboard, writing was a pain unless I'm doing the kind of writing that requires slow thinking. I can still change and hook that thing up if I need to, coffee stains and all, but I prefer this.

I prefer having something that might just be fast enough to catch my thoughts as I abuse it all over.

So now what am I shooting for? Of my high speed education, I'm achieving the workout schedule. No problem, and I'm about a month or two away to lifting my own body weight. Reading books I'm averaging about 3-5 books a week, and I'm blaming that on the World Cup, but I also know can be faster. On the writing well, it's only been when inspiration strikes that I can write with any sort of enthusiasm. Now it's gotten to me; I don't really need that right now to write all the same. I need speed, and not that much precision. I need to keep clubbing the damn muse until it's all soft and I can apply it evenly on the canvas. I just gotta keep writing at a certain speed because my mind just works that way. In editing comes what people call a genius, and I'm no good at that. I'm just the curious guy trying to understand how this all works. So I'm going to speed write a couple of things this week, and now I'm going to aim say, for a novella in 2 weeks, and perhaps a novel a month.

Ambitious, yes? It's only the fear holding you back.

Something for those who know: Sometimes you sleep just because you're afraid of staying awake...

The Type of Artist I Want to Be

Been digging around my hard drive looking for another piece when I found this. The document said it was written on April the 20th of this year. :D

I wish to join in the ranks of great artists whose work expressed their unique individuality, their burning core of creation. Human beings who accepted their authentic vision of beauty come what may. Ruin, or late acclaim or even madness might follow, but I know this; that the voice that compels me to write, compels me to speak, my mind's eye that sees the visions of worlds unknown, those are mine and mine alone. Worlds of beauty and horror to visit and terrify every night, and day dreams that are more real to me than anything I could ever share with anyone. They are mine and mine alone, and the trill of their exploration, the trill of crafting them into words, pictures, voices, thoughts cannot be shared. They cannot be repeated. The ranks are few, and far between, diaries come close, but not always. There's that filter in between the writers and the reader, and the less of that coming the closer I get to my core.

I will write something to make one awaken instead of fall asleep. And see the day for once. To write another novel, another piece where the reader could close the story, feeling happy and fulfilled inside for having witness another perform the task that one essentially understood to be theirs to do. No I seek to jar those with half and eye open to fully witness, to stare upon the fire here, the shadow puppets, and see the light if you dare for yourself.

A sense of life...

Each moment becomes a moment to dream. Where I belong, my own oblivion. I need no one now, can have no one.

This training, this craftsmanship aids in the communication of it, but the beauty of the inner space of the creator is something only he can work on himself. It is the boat from within to without, the link, the communication, but it will not replace a void, a cheap imitator, or a dishonest hack. Those who spend their time singing others song be weary of forgetting your own. When the voice can no longer tell its own from the others, when its vessel would mold itself completely in idol worship of another, then creation is abandoned for ritual, a performance of something past and done.

Creation is active. I must know what I think. I must do what is rare to achieve what is rarer. The truth cannot set you free if you never speak it, or speak it without honesty.

And if the blood falls in between my fingers, to disfigure either of us, I know that it is only an eye on the world that it ever was. You could learn to love a monster. But you must learn to love whatever it is you do first.

Small platitudes. Performance is the order of the day, achieving a sort of 'realism'. It's always a realism never real. A world where you're taught to smile in politeness, smile to hide anger, smile in the face of death, to smile when you don't feel like it so others won't be upset, to smile instead of yawn, to smile at our own ignorance. What then does a smile actually look like? We're taught to act, but not to be. We're told to be free, but never shown. We're made to fear, and feel ashamed when we are.

This utter lie the swallowing of that I weep for. Tricked, lied, and rewarded to act and not cognizant of their hollowness, I see the void that children become. It's ever sad, and constantly said. Children learn ever so well. To learn instead of to grow. At last we are here a spoon fed society. Unable to grow, but constantly willing to learn, to adapt. Unable to live, but fearful of death.

In another life I might have been a serial killer, if I taught others worth killing. Now I wait for my moment, scheming, hoping.

Learning has robbed away the spirits of men. Where the majority subjugate themselves to rules never questioned. Marching in lock step towards individual dreams on hollow grounds. So lost, so trapped, and so unaware. Knowledge is there, but it is never free those whose themselves unfree.

Potential

To accept the heroic
and individual
in oneself.

To express
and experience the uniqueness
of this imagination to the edges
of its own possibility.

And to feel
the struggle and the strain
and the doubt.

Because I bring it on myself.

I bring it on myself.

How else can I own it?
How else can it belong to me?

The crimson seeds sown upon battlefields,
or trees now palisades
to keep the planters alive
were not sacrifices I needed to bear, to understand
How much a burden...
How much a strain...

Did you fight for freedom?

That there more kindness in the youth
who embraces sight
that the old can
no longer see

What a mess....

White clouds riding upon the winds,
may only give shape,
to the one that can see through
these voices that sing mimicry,
and be precious only to those that can paint
against blank skies.

I look upon the eyes of those that aren't my enemy
And quiet respect for the struggle they endure
I wish I could free them from the hands that have them chasing,
laurel leaves they already hold.

Though criminal as that may be,
the worse crime is to deny
thee, thee

I will make them see
I will make them see

There's nothing more precious
than the dying light that is
thee

Distractions in the Modern Age

I like Lacan's notion of the Real as being that which returns into place. If I could keep to that distinction between the real, and the unconscious then I would be a much more productive individual able to stand witness to a self-defeating delusion against a tide of unsavory self-hatred.

To be able to write with less distraction. Endless distraction is the reality of modern life, and unavoidable to get into the touch of what is going on inside this technological revolution spiraling into the generation. I can only hope to lessen the distraction enough to get to the core of my writing self. It is a showdown with Truth as I feel it that trickles out of these hands, and if the hands are stained with the blots of the the unsavory dribbling of my soul then so be it. Writing is possibly one of the most democratic art forms there are. This means that there is a lot of crap written all the time, which doesn't make any of it less true. A serial killer can write as much as a rapist, as much as an insurance salesman or arms-dealer.

In terms of distraction, checking email is worse than smoking half a pack of cigarettes. As long as one doesn't go for an extended cigarette break to chat with neighboring balconies, you can be sure to smoke it and get right back on the idea as it's hitting you in front of the screen, or notebook.

One's attitude can be as important as one's words. In this written universe, we can feel the futility of words to other mediums in everday life. We're constantly attempting to use words to 'convey' to 'denote' things like emotions, attitude, intentions, all the things which are so much or expressive and easily available as a human-being through other mediums like facial expressions, or the voice.

Words, words, words.

They rattle off in the mind like the sound of dice falling wherever they may. It's either luck, or some divine monkey on a type-writer keeping me going as I'm barely conscious in this drunken-commando haze. It's hazing, but I seem to do the best writing on the verges of passing out. There's something just so right about not being able to stand it any longer, and succumbing to slumber that makes the whole experience less than self-aggrandizement and murder at the same time.

Writing Early in the Mornings

There is something to be said about writing in the mornings. Surprisingly sleep came early last night towards the break of midnight, and I awoke to the early Chinese (I'm guessing from the way their language sounds, but most likely) joggers in the playground behind the house and of course my friends the rats. While I've thinned their population to say perhaps the last family in the house their complete extermination/removal/relocation has been elusive. They're now wise to my traps and I must change strategy (which gets me thinking why rats aren't symbols of cleverness like foxes; probably bad PR). Any suggestions?

    Unfortunately, the early sleep did not yield scribbable dreams. To me this is a night lost. From the dream comes my best work. What is better; waking up tired with ideas but unable to write, or waking up fresh without a idea to begin exploring, but able to write? Perhaps a schedule could be arranged to have both, yet I have a sinking feeling that one is cheating the other.

I finally feel in the right position to be able to discuss certain other books finished, and work on current projects. A nice beginning to another hopefully productive day.

Have we built a life complete for human existence? Have we even built a life sufficient and necessary for ourselves, our individuality?

I don't know why I don't just publish the blog posts the day that I write them. Perhaps I figured that I'll do some editing. Alas there is rarely time for that. The mind moves on, and you can never step in the same river twice. This was a couple of days ago. It's almost been raining every single night.

I don't know why but I seem to write better when there is a thunderstorm on the horizon. Perhaps the weather is appropriating my mood. Or perhaps the prospect of rain in this superheated city has cooled down my body temperature and thus my brain enough for a steady stream of coherence through the voltage storm between these ears. Whatever it is I should waste the feeling.

 

Reading a narrative fiction which wanders about and rambles on and on, if you do fall in love with the writer's voice then you're sold. It brings a lot of things into perspective with a coherence of vision that is much in lacking in this century of cut-off time. The pause button will be the motif of this generation. We're always in the middle, in between a thing and another while live grows more passive and passive each day. The spectacles are all around, and unbinding me, my thoughts, my dreams, and desire from the simulacra is puzzling. Constantly I am asking myself this: how did I become so fragmented? How did a life once whole, honest, and straight become so twisted in false dichotomies and complications? For my weapons I have my instincts, which in a pure past perspective has guided me better than future projections of failure and disaster of fear of instincts. For one, it has guided me to just the right books that I need to be reading now. And now that I'm reading them I begin to understand that what modern society had fundamentally broken was: life.

    I did not understand it fully at first when I read the Elementary Particles, but I got the sense at the end that the author had made us question the possibility of a human existence as we know it (or perhaps a humane existence) at the turn of the 21^st century. What do I mean by this? The characters showed fragmentary humans, attempting to find that whole. As if that whole could make their life more complete in a society which had categorized them, marked them, tagged them, and projected their futures all on a time line. All of them could be a statistic. That hollow feeling of fate closing upon the characters felt so inhuman and alien that one wanted to rebel against the character's impending fate. Yet, I the reader derived a satisfaction from witnessing the characters succumb to their fates. I judged it proper, and would have felt cheated if they didn't. That gave the writing a quality of verisimilitude which modern commercial writing so dearly lacks. The characters were driven into the pit of doom by their own hand, their own devices. Their fundamental flaws, despite all abstraction, lead them to their fall. They were not merely foil for the main character to chop away, shoot, or blast with a special effects explosion. There is a logic to them that elevated them from mere puppets on a puppet theater to living, breathing human-beings for moments, more real than social reality. For those of us that live in cities, walking down the glam street (or glam streets as the case may be) we do not live anymore in a human reality but in the belly of a machine. You can feel the edges of this machine on the outskirts, churning away, non-stop, but to be in the middle of it, to see each interaction as income, exchange, output, commodity fetish, etc. to see abstract rational economics conducted by a human hand, a human face, a human voice devalues that of the breathing man and adds to that of abstraction man. But the worst of all is the sense, when watching from the outside, that absolutely nothing of worth is going on in shopping. For the shoppie, dominated in minds, possibilities, dreams, the brain is kept alive on the static glow of remembered advertisements and TV screens. Pictures of products never touched never smelled, never taken in by other sense than the ears and the eyes become… real? The minor of ah-ah of witnessing the phasmagoria in the flesh. But I who does not watch TV, having only perceived this piece for the first time, know it is there, not knowing its qualities and its labels, not understanding why this or that design looks better than this or that see small, same looking bottles, and not understand the difference until I try them. Yet even when I try them there are just things… in others I see their lives have been taken over by the Thing. Everything needs to resolve itself around The Thing. All constructed human conflicts; belonging, lifestyle, choice of mate, presidents all revolve around the acquisition of The Thing. And if we are all just objects swirling around the phallic symbol of The Thing, the indeed the abstraction of it has taken over Life. Hence I finally understand the title of Minimum Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life.

    If life, an eventual abstract thing to come into existence can be said to be human then the definition of that, the asking of 'how' questions, and finally and importantly the limits of what constitutes human. A good definition should be; sufficient, and necessary. Therefore, what is the necessary for a life to be human? What sufficiently can we call a human life? These were the questions addressed.

    Have we built a life complete for human existence? Have we even built a life sufficient and necessary for ourselves, our individuality?

May 20-21

The first part is not spell-checked. It was simply written on the spur before passing out. Somehow I like it that way better. The second part is only moments ago. I'm either going to pass out again, or get back into veiling my ideas in their letter body bags.

--

Rage is boiling inside of me at what had happpened yesterday. I'm at a point right now where everything is coming together. I understand now that I'm gong to have to type with my eyes closed to get the world out. I see the visons of this inner world where the stories ring true, but I can't neglect to keep my eye out for this one. This one world this one where the moment can pass ou by just liethat. There's no inifinite time on a plane to be wsting waway getting drunk and hihgh and unreactive. There's been too long that I've just said to myself that I'll take antoehr drink then I'll do it, but then I don't I justkeep watching the next damn thing on TV trying to hide from what I have to do , but no more even if the desire for alcohol take me I'm giong to keep on writing, I'mg going to write no matter what the keep the images moving inside of thi callibir head of mine. I'm going to keep the whole lot from falling with my mind. I'm going to use this vison that I see the vison in the dream.s that come to be from night on to the next to keep guiding me towards the next revolution in rightiong. If I it isn't a revolutonfo or them it is a revolution for me, because I can feel what everyone shall being feeling that alineted from this sense of reality proud nad ostaligic, the mood and lthe listening, it's in the music in is in the underground... am I making the right choices, but I'm only the writing the novel that I can write right now in this moment . I'm only going to use what I know right now tot keep myelf going. I'm going to high speed the hell out of wriitng meocride crap, and keep heading toward the benveable goals. I know what I'm gong to hve to learn to type faster to keep with the flow of my thoughts into language. This lagnuage which spikes and thrills. I 'm wiriting electicity off from my head into my fingers.

2:23: AM Can't sleep. The rats are always knawing at the roof at 3 in the morning and it's too damn hot even with two fans on me. Since I can't sleep I decided to read some of Henry Miller's letters. Now here is a man who knew about making art by writing. Unfortunately I'm almost at the end of the book when I discovered where the injuries foretold in an earlier blue ink warned. The bastard had cut out and stolen most of the last chapters! He's so damn indecent as well to steal the pages after the letters have begun! I'm left hanging... and cursing the bastard who had the gall to call me motherfucker in his note! Whoever you are, I have to say I had been amused reading your note but I want those damn pages back and damn your scrap book or whatever you chicken shit! I can barely read your handwriting, and the sentiment was fine, until you had to insult me, carr.
Well on the bright side it got me back in the new office chair to write. Meditations upon the visions in the back of my eyelids. What is writing? The question simply popped into my mind as I finally got up to drink some water. What is writing? I could ask: What is art? But: What is writing? Is writing some sort of special medium, where working with the very basic tools of language we are sending straight bolts of telepathy hurling into the minds of others? And what constitutes good writing? I know commercial success appears to be what everyone around me is striving for. I'm wondering if we're simply a verbal puppeteer, dragging characters out of the closet to enact our private pains for another audience. What people want to read about are other people, doing human things. That is the sphere of fiction. We have the scientific language which leaves one bored to sleep, maintaining that detached 'objective' perspective. Yet what is 'good writing'? I'm clearly unresolved on the issue.
I dream of a style being variations on a theme. There is the main concept, and then the small parts. Yet to create something totally new, something original, I see that one has to work with the basic colors, the nuts and bolts of the craft. And yes, despite everything being so uncertain there is certainly a craft to doing this.

Brain Cell

You must catch the dream before it's all gone. It's all gone now. Damn it, it was so fresh just a minute ago.

I had a dream of soliders. Of being soliders in an enternal struggle. An ember, and ember what is that? Is that me

Everyline is me burning out another brain-cell.

City-Drift, Bangkok (Raw)

Here's a city-drift I did of Bangkok walking home drunk one night. I typed it in a raw text file, to be edited later. Enjoys.

Some people would call this city, the city of Angels. I would call it the city of lies; but then all cities lie. Underneath all the bill boards, LCD screens, and facades, it's a mess of congrete, swet and exploitation. There hasn't been a major city I've been to that isn't built on the backs of provincial indentured servants. Attracted by the lure, the glitter and glamor from the electrotube they come in trains, buses, even sometimes planes. In beat up cars they come, walking in on the mass transits. They walk the street brown skin, and stinking, or sell trinkets on the walk ways in front of department stores.

They are my companions in the night.

Some people try to make it in the city. They say there's more opportunity. This is a city where people who fail come. In Isaan where havest season comes only a year, people move to the city to drive taxis. People will always need a taxi, as they say. Because walking is so passe.

People think it's dangerous to walk at night there. Watching the news, they spread the fear. Yet as cities go this one is quite safe. Of course, that usually a function of how you dress. Black supermarket Tees and my mom's hand me down jeans, a chain for the wallet and a fist full of change. And only fools joj down dark dead-end alleys. It's safe until you meet a police man. After all, you know that one has a gun. There's usually a problem when one man has a gun, and not the other one.

Most of all it's important to smile. Especially to the waiter boys, the flower merchants, to give them a small time, don't wince, but smile. Smile don't say a word. Let the smile say that I know the struggle brother.

But I stand apart.

People have confused selling themselves to art. Its all self-promotion, the propaganda people say. You've got to sell, make money, slave. You don't need that much money to live, you probably need more to die and expect to be burried.

Those that never wrote, and tire of their souls wouldn't know. They wouldn't know, nor taste the bitterness in this, the sweetness in that. Each line a hit of acid, searing away memory, rewriting history. I'm uncovering the secret... my secrets. Those that I hold so dear that I won't let myself know.

You can look at a mirror for your own reflection; but the mirror lies those aren't my eyes. Faded innocence.

Encarta used to call it the city of whores, until the government had it removed. Many things are removed. Like rotting waste food on city streets, or glue bags, child prostitutes. It's all the same really.

I stay up and watch the street clearers wait for the sunrise. They recycle the plastic, the glass. Rubber gloves, and face masks, the brooms, the sweeps. A water truck and gardeners.

The trees can't water themselves, someone has to do it. That someone also had to sleep with another or not get shelter?

But it is a city. For one that barely sleeps, to walk a city that never does, we know the expression is a lie. You and I. It's always you and I. Do we dance to regret?

I dance under the city light post, tracing the shadows with my arms. You could learn to love the spots in the shadows of the canopy.

It's a drug hallucination; charm.

We were built as a fortress.

I refused to work. I don't want exploitation. I come from a cross the river and the cannals. I say. A place far and far away.

I couch surf, and I lie still for days, looking out at parking lots; nursing the drug. The drug that shafts my hands, and burn my eyes.

Some would call it sleep. I call it a compromise.

I'm fighting for this existence, every minute, every hour, ever day. I'm fighting to keep these eyes from shutting. From the dream of being dead and gone, from the dream of being forgotten.