A cigar in purgatory

Roll with the punches, occasionally throwing one back

Morning,
Hello. I missed you.
And I dreamt last night of sky voyagers.
Who tear upwards in flashes and spirals, carving holes in the black
and peeling the darkness back for light to burst through.
An explosion in the sky.

Morning,
I think, you are good. For the citrus dance in dew drops, dripping into the earth and shooting upwards
over days, months, years.
You are patient. I can learn from you.

I find myself cooped up inside, with this little machine in my lap, playing me dark songs and lovely melodies to accompany the slow pour of my thoughts out onto the screen. Portishead - Deep Water.

"I'm drifting in deep waters
Alone with my self doubting again
I try not to struggle this time
For I will weather the storm
I gotta remember
Don't fight it
Even if I
don't like it
Somehow turn me around
No matter how far I drift
Deep waters won't scare me tonight"


This was a week of intensity. With people. Again, people. All sorts of people I met, caught up with, or hung around with, in silences and laughs, drugs and smiles, boredom and many cigarettes. The car ride up and down California with Robbie in the front seat, reggae blasting, sporadic conversations with depth and some with relative unimportance. The joints rolled up and down, the cigarettes sparked afterwards, sometimes with no music, just the sound of a drag every once and a while. Me, looking straight ahead, but seeing the smoke spiral and dance upwards to different tunes and different moods.
Pool in the city with Nick - his words - "yea, just do that man." With a real look, having been there, struggled through it.
Silence at nights, deep thought often.
E at Thievery Corporation. The drug hit powerfully and came off slow. Too much to say here. This is for my head only. Basically - I remember beautiful smiles, a "foot massage," and standing up at a certain point right as the music dropped in. And inordinate amounts of water, cigarettes, sprawled on the staircase.

Seeing Spencer. Laughing - the smiling life. Where everything becomes a lovely joke. And it is beautiful. And things were natural and good. People people people.
Riding back fast through dry, dying Salinas. THoughts of "East of Eden."

Beach at night in Santa Barbara after arrival. Finding satellites in the sky, building things, stealing a cart. Hesitant. Robbie and termites. Spliff. Jumping in the water. Very fucking cold.

Too much to say after this. Strange how exhausting it can be to access memories and steal them from your mind to put down in WoRds.

I didn't speak much this past week. I played guitar often. I lost myself and grabbed myself over and over again. Whatever this self is anyways - there is some core to it. I know how "i" "think"...And I can recognize the same patterns - ah yes, I remember that thoughtJourney. I've been there before.
I went up and down in violence and tore open new depths within me.
And felt a fool the whole time. For thinking too much. And for whatever else.
And the Portishead lyrics from thread play: "i'm tired of my head. i'm worn out. I'm always soooooooo unsure."
I need to find this Portishead singer and marry her.

Now I move to San Diego. I don't know how long I will be there. I will work, sweating to make money. I will probably smoke copious amounts of marijuana and write pathetic and fantastic songs daily. I will be at the ocean all the time - the Deep Waters. These waters where, this past week, I found refuge on, under and with the waves. Whatever energy the ocean carries, it would crash into me and through me and wake me up from whatever distant place I had been traversing in my strange mind.

When I was in the airport in Sweden a girl came up to me from the study abroad program , we talked for a bit and she asked if I'd ever read "House of Leaves." I said no. She told me I would like it because "You're pretty weird."

It is strange to think that this is me. And that the opposite is true. And really I just do things and analyze them. Some weird kind of animal.
I think I am happy about this. But sometimes I don't know.
Things can change so quickly. And sometimes they never change.
Same old, same old.
We're always returning to things we love and things we hate. For the comfort, for the pain, for the passion, whatever. I'm always stuck in these same spirals - not circles, I am moving somewhere. I don't know where.
But it's okay.
Two steps in the wrong direction takes me right where I need to be.


Life, I love you, but you're bringing me down.

People

When I spoke this afternoon, in the morning first, with new people, tired and sweating, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. Being jolly and laughing. Making people laugh. And then later in the day, more talking more people more more more.

Things were very good. Many good things came from these new people. New dialogues, new topics, new laughs and looks. New books and films. Older people, different jobs. The stories. New stories.

And I also feel like I might always be on the verge of a mental breakdown. Like the walls can just crumble at any point. And I don't know what would happen. If some white cloud would just melt over my brain and soak me in some mist, some confusion, some trip, beyond 'me'.
Or would it be a great lightness, a splendid feathery touch.
What would become of me.
Where would I go, see, try?

I'm thinking of my brain as this sort of complex structure, with walls and pathways and whatever. And then all the barriers break down. And you're left with the infinite.
To maneuver within this space of emptiness, but in complete chaos. Of desire, loneliness, temptation, passion, total and burning fear. Most of life is a barrage of emotions, symptoms, thoughts, whatever - but they work within these walls. The chaos when there are no barriers...How we create them, reinforce them. It's a process. And being on the Verge - this is where you begin to understand. When you stand at the edge and look over. And then you know. Where you are. And what you can destroy, where you can walk. This is where thinking happens. Where you actually get somewhere. On the edge.

witches

That witch. And her dirty hands. Stole my bread and scurried away like a mouse. But that is the last time. Mark my words. There is no tomorrow, no tonight, no now.
And if for some reason she spills her face into my world, again, then I will give up.

Perhaps it's time to be done with trying.

in the head today

First of all there is pleasure. What gives me pleasure? I do not think of myself as the type that gets joy out of simple things - I like those intense and great pleasures which come and pass. I prefer the extremes, even when they are painful and terrible. This gives me more difficulty, more depression, more love. This I must come to terms with - and perhaps this is the first time I've written this down...
And why I love drugs even when they make me feel like crap. Intensity. And playing songs because I can really sing into them, they're temporary, they leave me but I play them again, differently, with different emotion, passion, pain, whatever. Why I love to scream.

Then there is the curious life - the life which searches for new things, gets bored with comfort and monotony (but perhaps fails to find a way out...); which thus seeks extremes and finds good and bad, ugly and beautiful, without much satisfaction for in-betweens. There is also the aspect of the curious life being one of dreams and imagination. A taste of some sweetness leads one into a spiral of delicious exploration and creation - of that woman, and what she might feel like, taste like, say, do, love...

But then this quickly becomes boring. More of the same. And so I move to something else.

There is certainly an element of loneliness. I think that will never leave. That Devendra Banhart lyric - "i'm gonna die of loneliness...for sure.."
Where I'm never going to connect completely, even with myself. It's all very strange though. When I walk around and realize that all these things that have been built up in my head, all these structures and desires, likes and dislikes...Mostly just conditioned things, many things I haven't questioned. But if I think of Nietzsche, and think of my life and my body as art, then I know that the real task is to construct a self that I think is beautiful, unique, mysterious...whatever I want. There are certain base desires I have (probably) that cant be escaped, but for the most part it is my decision...To find new things, to follow this curiousness. And to keep adding, subtracting, etc.
I can go down to the way that I stand, sit and walk. The way I smoke a cigarette. The way I speak and smile. What I wear or don't wear. Say or don't say. The type of person that I'm attracted to. To find turn myself on to new and strange things. To be strange. To develop my legitimate strangeness.

URGENCY

Absolutely crucial to keep this in mind. What temporal mode I'm operating under in relation to others.

reformatting

I heard myself laugh loud and hard this evening so that the woman/women downstairs might hear me. Or so somebody might hear me. And immediately a line from the film American Gangster hit me - "the loudest man in the room is the weakest man in the room." This is odd because the movie was not so powerful or good or important for me, but obviously the line went into me, waiting...It had an effect on me.
I'm happy about this and the way film/art/whatever can pop into your brain to reformat your drive.

I miss having sex and I want it. Soon. I will start grabbing women off the street and taking them to my place. Not really, but maybe in a dream or something, this would be good.

Evan moves to Costa Rica tomorrow. He's going somewhere. I finish school soon and I must delve crazily into my paper writing. I have many books and too many articles to go through. Mostly on Foucault, but also this Frenchman Pierre Bourdieu who I am excited to get into. He was unhappy in school, as a child, and he tore shit up intellectually in France. I will write about the function of criticism, the role of the intellectual, and the relationship between theory and practice. This will have implications for scientific policy, but it will not be explicit in my paper. I will also write a paper on black masculinity (and perhaps homoeroticism) in African American Art. This will allow me to research hip-hop (in all its forms and aspects) more deeply. I'm getting a book called Total Chaos by Jeff Chang (I think). There are great political implications here. And I also wonder if I might insert the BLack Panthers and Malcolm X into this research. Mostly I'm interested in identity, gender, and image. Lastly, I will write a paper on the way discourse effects political organization. I might write it about language strategies or about Latin America. This is a paper I am not excited about, but I know it will be powerful and important for me in the end. So, I must enter into a form of madness, as Ben described in the email i just read...It will be a new sort. Perhaps I will also start using ritalin and caffeine more liberally, but more intensely, to spice things up. But it is important that I dig in and actually Think. To reach the borders.
I want to know many things. make sure the questions are specific. And get some kind of answers. Or understanding. Or something godamnit. this is the end of this fuckin university career...
for now.