" '97 I blacked out, who's been paying all my rent?"

Phone's been in the shop for a week or so, sorry if you've been trying to get ahold of my lazy ass. Shouldn't be a problem from here on out.

So it seems like every week they've got me holed up in some hotel room, feigning expertise and hiding my buzz. Tonight I'm in the SLC soaking up nothing, last night I walked around Boise with this girl in the smiling visage of the full moon. This girl, man. I hope I can stay in Boise for a couple weeks straight upon my return. I'm getting the urge these days to stay up late and ride my bike home in the frost and dark, hints of orange sunrise just out of view. When I make it home I write poems about the promised land and the indistinct nature of the truth, immediately casting them into the trash for the CIA to find. There's something about those moments.

I drove across some beautiful country today, by myself, listening to Kool Keith and thinking up ridiculous stories. Characters and places and events, boiling in a microcosm that somehow explains the surreal world we live in. Simple symbols for something inexplicably complex. At every kink realizing that the truth is far stranger than any fiction I could create.

I'm simultaneously reading the "Autobiography of Malcolm X", "Invitation to a Beheading" by Nabokov, and "The Extended Phenotype" by Dawkins. I have dreams about doing bong hits with the writers in a parking garage. They agree on everything and when I wake up I realize that the revolution will in fact be on television, but it will not arrive as some pedantic telethon, but rather in a multifarious rush of conflicting truths. Crackheads executing senators, scientists escaping in pods, shamans astral projecting to somewhere with more readily available opium.

The answer is none of the above, if someone asks, because we haven't even figured out the right question yet.

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"I'm from the D, I got a whole lotta game"

-Having money is less fun than being broke.

-Current events give me the feeling that I will serve jailtime before I die. Possibly without habeas corpus and without a warrant.

-I am in the least trusted minority in this country

That is all. Sometimes bullet points get across the point better than prolonged paragraphs. Here's a poem I wrote for class:

Pilgrims with mental cases
stage patient take-overs of
radio stations and banks.
No thanks to impotent rage
heaped upon foreign threats.
Locked doors fail to prevent
inside jobs with domestic intent.

I'm waiting for a tsunami
to splinter Our stilted house.
And fill Our condoes of coincidence
with the filth we've trickled out.
My advice? Post-incident
lay amongst the drowned,
recall your fatal instincts
and hide valuables in your mouth.

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Goosebumps

For whatever reason, when I read this story it reminds me of the value of human life and gives me hope for the future.

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Neural nets and the delicate nature of reality

Assuming for a second that this philosophical enjoyable concept, delivered to us by the mystery of quantum mechanics, that observation gives shape to events and characteristics from their former amorphous cloud of potentiality, is true. That something only really becomes factual when observed by living things or the measuring devices they've developed. Now, of course, this isn't the whole truth, but on the subatomic scale there may be no better way to explain it.

With that stated, let's extend this understanding of how things work into the larger sphere and postulate that you and I and all this rest of us are shaping reality via sensory input. What this means is that our lives serve as the interface between possibility and what actually happens. Some theories of quantum physics state that there are an infinitum of dimensions, one for each possiblity (down to the subatomic level). If observation settles this reality in this dimension, then our ability to observe is a key component in the construction of this universe.

OK. So consider observation. If I see something happen, literally anything, what does it mean if I keep it to myself? It becomes part of a micro-reality that exists for me within the larger sphere. It does not detract from the truth or illusion of it. By keeping this to myself, it still happens but what is the event's relevance to the larger sphere of reality? That is what is meant by the "if a tree falls . . ." koan.

What I'm coming to is that I believe that symbolic expression, beginning with cave drawings and eventually leading to the written and spoken word, and all other arts along with the practices it made possible such as the sciences and politics, allows these micro-realities to be networked in a manner that creates a more cohesive fabric. Consider this: human beings have a long and illustrious history. However, up until the point that we were actually able to manipulate elements of our environment with symbolic logic virtually everything about us is unknown. There are literally a cloud of possibilities for what may have happened in those times, narrowed down only by our ability to interpret left-overs, in metaphor just like the swirling potentia of the electron as it exists "somewhere" around the nucleus.

As language began to develop the possibilities began to narrow. Suddenly we know things about ourselves in ways that would have been impossible previously, because our technology has allowed us greater exposure to the observations of one another and managed to mark them "outside of time" (not chronology, but the possibilities for some particular characteristic for some previous time X have been reduced to one).

What's interesting about this reality we've created is that the actual "truth", what holds up under the most difficult scrutiny, can become irrelevant and limp in the face of the "truth" our Reality has co-opted. For instance, consider the fact that the belief in God is widespread. Under close scrutiny the operational definitions of god (those most of the world uses to carry out their daily lives) falls apart. However, the fact that this component of the reality we've created is so strongly reinforced by affirming communication (i.e. the relay of observations through symbolic language) that it is a force to reckon with. Whether or not god exists, he exists socio-politically and any entity who wishes to make some change to Reality must deal with it. In politics we often find smaller cases, for instance the "truth" that the media decides to operate under often becomes more important to the unfolding of events than what would actually be the "truth" under a higher scrutiny (here scrutiny representing essentially more calculated observations and more comprehensive expression with symbolic language).


What's more startling to me than the above observation (and that statement almost feels like a pun at this point) is that if we are to carry this metaphor of observation=reality out from the atom and apply it, making rational decisions about the relationship of components on that scale to components on this scale (i.e. the precise location of an electron=the precise date of birth of an individual or something along those lines), then the question must be asked "If we never learned to speak, could we be sure we even existed?"


I'm dying for some intelligent conversation, so if this spurred any thought in your head, please share.

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My fellow Romans

The cinema of me sitting
on a hotel bed.
Lights out. Televised national event.
Thinking of what I'll say
at Tuesday's city council meeting.
Dreaming of molotov cocktails
and seeking the contrails
and epiphanies of my youth.
Red-eyed at a failed institute.

Something changed inside of me last night.
On official business I took spare time to wander around this strange town I found myself in. In the dark. In the rain. I scrambled up a privately-owned foothill, smoked my smoke, and looked down at the past. Seeing still-burning memories in the way puddles caught streetlights. Felt the burn of lost love in the curve of the road away from me. Remembered that I once felt some terminal connection to the Fatal Elements. That I once knew inter-dimensional travelers by name. That I once changed everything within my sphere, and then did it again.

I returned to my room, high on contradictions and clean of history. Falling out of my clothes in anticipation that I'd shortly write the greatest sentence of my life. And I did. And I can't share it because it was only meant for me.

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Madness, Mythology, Morality

It hardly needs to be said that we live in interesting times, compared to the past we cannot say definitively whether today's madness exceeds that of any past generation but I believe we can comment on the potential for worldwide consequence to localized mistakes. We are far more capable of fucking up everything than we have ever been before. I posit that developments in virtually every relevant arena suggest a shift towards a new Dark Age in our consciousness, despite the fact that many individuals and truth-seekers have fought so hard to maintain the loftiest of trajectories. Such a claim can not go unsupported, and so here I detail the evidence:

We, at least in the US, are growing more stupid and we're proud of it.



We are, in fact, less likely to trust our goverment and it's becoming
more difficult to do anything about it.


Our government is practically run by oil companies with no long-term plans for what happens when we run out. This while energy consumption and population around the world skyrockets.

Our media is in the hands of relatively few corporations, many with political interests or motivation to sell you crap. For this and other reasons the media has been uncharacteristically and detrimentally easy on the current administration

We live in a "free country" that has a higher proportion of its population in jail than any other nation on earth.

Take a look at the way we divide federal money. We spend over half of our money on the military, paying off debt (frustrating in light of the Clinton-era surplus) and funding a corrupt and inefficient healthcare system. Very little of our dollars goes towards education.

I could go on and on about these sorts of things, but in truth we are all already quite familiar with them. I do not propose any solution, but I'm mad as hell. I'm embarrassed that we've mucked things up so badly and further humiliated that we seem to be doing very little about it.

I would argue that our social consciousness has failed us. For a multitude of reasons we seem to look the other way. In a compartmentalized society I suppose its easy to assume that the job of administering the human experience must belong to someone else because our parents and bosses never suggested we do anything about it.

It occurs to me that, while all of these problems are worth working on individually, there will never really be any change without a revision to the social consciousness and a return of responsibility to the individual. To my mind, the only way to do this is through the increased efficiency of the transmission of ideas. More effective art, systemic encouragement of new ideas, and motivators other than the broken system of capitalism that go us into this mess.

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"If you ain't saying nothing you the system's accomplice"

As mentioned in the previous post, I've presented my first piece of writing to workshop. It was a modified version of a poem you can read in the aforementioned post as well.
The reaction was positive all around. The girl that has something negative to say about everyone's work seemed to really like it. The out of place (look who's talking) guy who never says anything talked for several minutes about it and actually starting talking about his personal life. He thought the frustration and impatience I expressed in it were particularly poignant. The professor, contrary to his normal MO, went around the room asking every student what they thought of it (usually he simply allows the conversation to arise organically). He also changed our reading assignment after discussing my poem because he thought we were ready for "poems that are about ideas". This was all very encouraging to me, and I'm starting to feel like I'm doing the right thing.
I volunteered to be the first person to present material for workshop in my fiction class as well. So we'll see how that goes.

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I've often said, to myself at the very least, that I feel my morality and sensibility was informed more by Nietzche and the Buddha than my father. As such I know the value of plucking attachments from your wings and I know to expect agonizing loneliness when you try to do what your soul is urging. I'll stop short of saying I wish I never moved here and leave it at the statement that I'm not sure what I'm doing here. There is no time for remorse. But I will admit one thing to a sympathetic audience: I'm lonely as hell. I'm shoring up strength, finally, but the last few weeks have been difficult.

I've had two full days of class now. A radical transition from both my previous idle weekends and my last academic foray. I share the room now with a mixed bag of objectives, people who think differently than me and young professors who did what I should have. I am honestly trying to connnect with them. I submit my first piece of writing, a poem, for critique this coming Saturday. You can read it below:

Feel the fade into existence
as one thinks of
wasted time in patience.
A phalanx of idle listeneres,
an overreaching blanket statement.

Every bureau drawer
another form to prove statistics
or unexplored foreign soil
dismissed as overly simplistic.

And everywhere I go
I get the sense I've barely missed it.

I'll say only one thing for it, that its very different from things anyone has submitted so far.



I'm looking for a group or organization to join to either somehow contribute to this community or at the very least feel like I'm part of it. And yet, it seems audacious for me, an alien, to get involved in politics. Every charity is operated out of a church, and the Idaho Athiests have limited their activities to cleaning up trash along one short stretch of road. Boise State has nary a single organization that piques my interest. If anyone has any advice at seeking these kinds of opportunities out, I would appreciate it.

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