Notes:
Some things I have learned recently:
Sometimes one can forget about a problem and it will go away.
“The world is an oyster and you can’t crack oysters on a mattress”- untrue! One can crack oysters on a mattress, but sometimes they make one ill.
Some things I have remembered (concretely):
My body will break down and I will die some day. It’s a good thing.
A lamb is frequently more dangerous than a lion.
Some people do not seem to change.
“That which disturbs your soul you must not suffer.” Sometimes.
There are these things called “ethics” which we take very seriously. Then we forget about them and fall into guiltless sleep. But we rise and remember them and become guilty and self-flagellate and become saints through this completely pure act of self-abnegation. The first blood washes the guilt from our backs, and transforms us, these ascetic saints, into angels. As angels, we bang a fist full of gavels. Then someone hits us with a gavel and we call him a hypocrite.
You don’t vomit because something makes you sick. You vomit because you’re full of vomit. (Or the reverse. Anatomically and digestively.)
If there is a place on earth that could fairly be called God’s house, it would be the outhouse.
We throw flowers at a funeral to cover up the smell.
Behold the man. I am mounting a 1990 Cannondale Criterium. The Criterium is a rigid aluminum-framed road bike. I have read that Cannondale frames produced during the early ’90’s have a tendency to crack.
Of late, my body has also had a tendency to “crack,” and I have suffered from a number of petty illnesses. But when my body is not malfunctioning in some way, it does its job fairly well, and it is able to bear the ten mile round trip between home and school.
My home is a ranch house built on a concrete slab and flanked by Guadalupe palms. These palms flower and shed their fruits relentlessly. I often sit around and listen to the tak-tak of the fruits raining on my roof. I imagine that some day, a seedling will grow to maturity in a rooftop crevice, crash through the ceiling and kill me in my sleep.
I sleep often. The beauty of this ranch house is that it is in the path of seasonal winds. In the summer, I open my doors and a mild breeze blows through the house, which nearly eliminates the need for air conditioning.
Winter is another story. My heater is some ancient fire breathing monster from the 1950’s. It is about the size of the automobiles of that era and it has the rear fins and bulbous chrome bumpers to boot. I do not use it. It is probably a danger to every living thing within a five block radius and I should probably be thrown into prison for exposing my neighbors to it.
Recently, the temperature in my town has been hovering around freezing. Given what is above, it goes without saying that I live a fairly spartan lifestyle. But I will add to the pile: I do not subscribe to any internet service or use the internet from my home. Nor do I subscribe to any television service, and the TV that I do have does not have an antenna. I did not buy this television. It is not plugged into the wall, and I have never used it. Additionally, I have no groundline. Please do not break into my house in the middle of the night and attempt to kill me, as we will be forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat until one of the neighbors calls the police.
I like living this way.
I also like to read. I will list some books I have recently read or re-read.
Peter Hopkirk: The Great Game
Ahmed Rashid: Taliban
Hesse: Steppenwolf
Hesse: Rosshalde
Gogol: Taras Bulba (utter shit)
Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Mann: Death in Venice
David Starr: BLOOD: An epic history of medicine and commerce
Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Homer: The Odyssey
Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise
I keep 120 Days of Sodom at my bedside. It is my bed partner and neighbor to Augustine’s Confessions. I usually read him after I read about one of the 120 days.
While cuddling with my colorful bed partners, I often play Arvo Pärt’s choral work, “The Beatitudes.” If I do not play this piece, I may play an organ piece from a Pärt compilation called “Annum per Annum.”
Years pass quickly here and I am often set scrambling to keep up with the seasons. You see, I garden.. sometimes. As an early teen, I became superficially interested in ethnobotany, and I am still superficially interested in ethnobotany. I have grown a number of important vegetables in the past, namely: papyrus (C. papyrus), lotus (N. nucifera), hoodia (H. gordonii - a succulent from the Kalahari which is currently a craze in the fad-diet scene. Morons.) tulsi (O. tenuiflorum) and various squashes and peppers (C. annum and C. chinensis). I am currently growing an awful strain of mint, some puny flax plants, and I will soon attempt to grow molokhiya, an Eastern food crop and paper source.
I am also a cactus fiend. I am especially fond of South American columnars (especially their monstrose and cristate forms) and most of the Mexican “living rocks.” Like most cactiphiles, something about the amazing geometry of the cactus dazzles me.
I am also dazzled by a certain discipline in the humanities. I am lucky enough to do some (paid) work in and around this discipline. I have also co-authored a study (in an unrelated field) which I might some day criticize through the discourse of this discipline.
If you bother to browse through the entries in this blog, you will find many hollow and stupid entries, and probably one or two (or eight) absolutely disgusting entries. You may also notice that other authors once posted here. Well, we had a Night of The Long Knives and those authors do not write here anymore. Nevertheless, their posts remain and will continue to remain because those authors (melodramatically and tritely put) have been a part of my life, and my sole purpose in writing here is to record what sort of pattern I have been leaving behind. The years pass quickly here, and it is very easy to forget. I am probably guilty of not being diligent or accurate in the documentation of my footprints. I suppose one might try to be clever and remark that this is a kind of pattern. Perhaps it is.
So, you will find a lot of little trinkets here; a great deal of junk. I cannot imagine how any of it might interest you. And of course, I glance over at the server logs and see that in some way, it must. You people are really fucked up.
But of course (and I blush), all of those hits in the server log are just from bots.
Paul,
I thank you and the internet search bots thank you for hosting this website. Viva YeEpx!