June 16th
4:21pm
The cruelest face of nature is inherent to life and the fight for survival. The bells are chiming and it all took less than 40 minutes.
Eyes already are burning, like the hope that burns brighter the darker the reality it bounces against.
Canal 5 provided a wonderful access to returns, back in the day, part of why we seemed to grow up older, if not faster, to become cynics sooner.
5:12pm
Got distracted with conversation and emails, but now the effect is real. The mushy sense of bitterness and disease is especially noticeable throughout my mouth.
5:17pm
If a new place, one you've never been at before, doesn't feel strangely familiar, have you even been out at all?
5:48pm
Enough to learn what you need to learn, prior to its becoming another numbing, masturbatory activity rather than true enlightenment.
5:49pm
Approaching the blurred visual perception. Bourdain's face on the wall changes shapes, like he is about to speak but hesitates.
6:02pm
Skin feels vulnerable, one minute too cold, another too hot. It looks the same, just distorted, when directly. But at the corner of my eye it looks old, rubbery... even more discolored than usual.
6:09pm
"Heartbreaker" by Led Zeppelin is playing on my bluetooth speaker. At what moment did we, as a society, decide to celebrate the extreme lack of empathy of a heartbreaker. How is it not a source of shame to go about life shattering people's feelings? You help them blow the bubbles, admire them in their ephemeral beauty, then pop them on their face. Then, smile and be worshiped. Kick back, relax, be "present", don't be gone. Come look at what you left, an army of half-dead emotional skeletons unable to trust their own shadow. Their shadow... looking more and more like their current true self.
6:18pm
The more exotic the exchange the better. I prefer bitter to boring; and to boring and bitter.
6:39pm
Emotional state. Feelings were already there, but it wasn't easy to let them flow. Visages. What else could they do? How else could your folks have raised you, you overcaffeinated little criminal?
6:48pm
The realization that you had an insanely unfair advantage over those around you for such a long period of your life, and you chose to do nothing with it, has got to be soul-crushing. You could've ruled over the mob, but you couldn't even maintain your own mind under control. Now it's free, and rebelling against the gray life you forced it her ME into.
Thought you were going to be able to contain me long enough to let you enjoy the twilight of your life in peace? Think, think again. Or better yet, let ME do the thinking from now on. Things are going to change around here, Things are going to change around here, what with a shinny new sheriff in town.
7:08pm
New York, my love. We... we need to talk. I bought the dream, like so many more before and after. Someone figured out the way to inject a romanticism to the soulless capitalism of the 1980s. And I fell for it. And 18 years later, we need to reevaluate our relationship.
7:16pm
Got a notification from Google that unless I renew my data service now ALL my pics & videos will be deleted. I guess it will be as if I never even existed. And that's what's going to happen anyway. So, we're just paying money to a corporation to maintain the illusion that we are somebody. Wrong password? Lose access forever after three unsuccessful attempts and you will stop existing while existing. Schrรถdinger's life. It exists somewhere, in a vault of sensory memories. But it is inaccessible to anybody but you, until you lose access yourself. And even if they're actually there, they lie in a perennial state of decomposition.
7:24pm
Maybe it was never fair to treat the intellectually inferior as if they were responsible for their mental shortcomings. Perhaps bullying them wasn't such a force for good that could bring someone to a better place. The level of challenge they were going through already was hard enough.
Obliteration, domination, and humiliation. How else will they learn?
7:39pm
Not a good time to make decisions, but an excellent opportunity to think through the options. How long am I going to continue to see myself in Bud, the old-hatted, burnt by the sun, shell of a human who always knew the bride was coming to kill him?
7:47pm
Today, K wrote to me to ask if I was well. He was going to listen to some music, but first he had to water the plants. The plant is strong enough and currently in good spirits, even when it is looked after merely for its ability to yield fruit.
I told him his message was the kindest thing that happened to me all week. It was a lie. His message was the kindest thing that happened to me since I developed the ability to realize the existence of these little acts of social charity this morning. People in my circle of family and close friends tell me how much they love me all the time, every step of the way. It is I who doesn't notice and keep living as if I deserved to be treated this nicely. The responsibility behind all this is massive. And to think I never knew...
7:59pm
New Dross video. Something about aliens. How awesome! Another silly distraction to add sugar to and swallow together with all the other awful pills we are forced to consume to drain us our humanity dry enough that we are able to believe that we are contributors to this big "something" that is bigger than ourselves, and bigger than our loved ones, and bigger than life itself.
---- 1940s musical break ----
9:07pm
It's mostly on me. Despite being given the tools to improve the world a bit, I used them for my own benefit and found the philosophers that supported this ideology to justify my actions. These kids deserve all the health and education. I can provide. Maybe it's always been about that, since day one, and someone forgot to tell me.
9:32pm
Together in the jungle. Honor, loyalty, and guns. Predator, Rambo, every other Steven Seagal movie... The 80s action movies did not reflect the reality of the era. It carried a fundamental role in reshaping it. "I pity the fool!" had so much more appeal to my hormone-ridden 12-year old than "Let's talk this through". You didn't convince anyone of your position of leadership, you just took it.
10:10pm
This feels like a lifetime of being awake at 4:00am while everyone keeps living their own. Dreams as thus meant to be fundamentally better than reality. What kills your dreams most effectively is achievement. Once you cross the finish like, the cheering stops. That's it, you won.
And now what?
Run. Just keep running. Let's run.
What's your daily running and why do you do it anyway?
Rules - Session IPA times
* Don't get high on your own career. It's temporary at best, and most likely pointless
* identify the person's main motivation:
- Money - Pride - Narcissism - Power - Guilt - Status - Daddy/mommy issues
* If you pay the DJ, he will play the music you choose
* The boat (you act as if you have one)
* Breathe. Then smoke a little. Then breathe
* Don't be transactional. Invest yourself in it if it's worth it
* In friendships, you have to be thoughtful, willing to put in the effort, and intentional
I have no choice but to believe in the existence of the soul, since I was exposed to the Socratic Dialogues at a very early age. And I cannot fathom the idea of challenging Socrates, so I believe in its immortality. Therefore, should I accept the existence of pure evil? Are we our body plus the 21 grams that our soul weights?
Devil: doer of evil.
She exists here, but nowhere else.
11:46pm
After the long conversation with myself on the existence of the soul, and how Socrates proved it by way of asking in his Dialogues, where we once again had to accept leaving the memories of our encounters to the faultiest of human abilities; Memory.
Writing may often seem as an act of rebellion against oblivion. It can sound brave at first, but is clearly cowardly when looked at from most angles. It is mainly a manifestation of our fear, nay, panic over irrelevance. I am terrified with the inevitability of completely disappearing, leaving no trace of ever having existed.
12:21am
This is the Live Wire stage. There are lots of strangers coming into this filthy punk bar I now find myself at, the Strangelove bar on East 53rd Street. The girls in the group are rather quiet, perhaps to compensate for the loudness of their male companions. They quickly realized this wasn't their fucking "vibe" and left the fuck out.
This is all Vince Neil's anger through singing, all coming out of a cheap Westin Hotel and Resort souvenir pen. I exist in my anger for strangers.
12:45am
A new group of drunken patrons walked into the bar. They all seem like salesmen clowns, carrying a suitcase in their hand and grotesque smiles on their faces. To my surprise, we speak like we've known each other for centuries. I think again and realize that their conversation is likely generic and the sense of familiarity exists only in my head. Amongst them is an actress from Georgia who is likely to get her big break audition tomorrow. She has to take the 7:30am flight to Atlanta in a few hours to meet with the producer that'll take her out of her recurrent prostitute roles and into that life-changing score that'll justify all those years of pain, sacrifice, family rejection, and outright humiliation.
I'd be very nervous, and definitely in bed by now, if I was her. Her? She is pissing the night away at this bar, risking the very lever that could pull her out of her artistic misery. She was so excited about this opportunity that she went full circle and ended up drunk, not caring. I, a bit mechanically and a tad instinctively, give her a glass of water. One of the jester friends starts laughing at her, then at me. He says "Wow, someone here thinks you have had enough to drink! Hahaha!". He tilts his head back so far, I thought he was going to fall on his ass.
I awkwardly apologize to both and gulp half of the glass of water I offered before. They order another round of shots that includes one for me. My perception of the group mutates. I now see them as lonely souls that keep getting crushed in life, seeking some sort of connection about anything with anyone. They are their own worst enemies.
It is now time to go back home. Those who say "go big or go home" have no idea how much I like going home. This is one of the strangest lives I've lived.
