I watched The Lobster last night whilst lying in bed with Marisa. I’m fairly certain that I enjoyed the film much more than she did, though one is never to know exactly the thoughts, fears, delights and scandals of a woman, exactly. Regardless, I did watch The Lobster last night.

In fact, our taste in film is very divergent, as it was with Jana. I tire of endless realism in the same way I tired of Renaissance paining and its anal-retentive need for precision. During the opening minutes of the film, Marisa began asking questions concerning the reasons the people were in such an environment and what forerunning elements might be. My reply was to dismiss such details as irrelavent. The characters have been placed in this situation by the writer. Let’s see how they cope with it. For me, it is the immediacy that is important. Any historical discourse as to how on earth did we get to a state like this in our culture / society means little.

I am reminded of a brief conversation I had with Christián once concerning the film The Road. He asked me to muse about what may have happened to the world that left the father and son in their situation. My reply was similar to mine to Marisa. It is not important to me.

Relationships often sink to a point of lowest common denominator. One central point of the film is that for a relationship to be healthy, both parties have to have a similar affliction. For example, Colin Farrell’s character is myopic. The film states that it is his defining characteristic. His ideal mate has to also be myopic.

One of the first scenes, confusing at the time, was of Colin sitting on a sofa communicating (italicized since the method of communication in this film is staggeringly stilted) with his wife, ex-wife, or soon to be ex-wife. The line he speaks that resonates through the remainder is Does he wear glasses or contact lenses? All relationships most strongly bonded by a lowest common denominator.

I’m forgetting an important detail. Once of a certain age (never specified) and without a mate, one is placed in a hotel with others in the same condition. Gradiations of this condition do exist, as we see couples in the hotel during the course of viewing, but later find out they are experiencing a trial run as a pair. Therefore, they are being closely observed. After a specified time, anyone who do not find a mate and subsequently prove him / herself during the trial run is transformed into an animal of his / her own choice and released into the forest. There, they supposedly fend for themselves.

The film’s opening is a fixed shot within a car of a woman driving. It is strangely tension-building in its simplicity. She eventually stops, gets out, strides into a field of donkeys, pulls a gun, and shoots one dead. Another of the animals slowly moves over to investigate his fallen companion before the film cuts to the next scene. The situation is never revisited.

But back to relationships: the defining factor of one’s existence.

One female is cursed with spontaneous nosebleeds. A male character (Ben Winshaw) has a limp as a defining characteristic. To gain salvation, he fakes nose bleeds by bashing his head against flat surfaces, slapping himself silly and slicing up his nasal cavity. The hotel establishes that the two have similar afflictions. They are allowed to become a couple. They are married. During the ceremony, the management makes it a point to mention their affliction as source of bonding. It is never clear who the employees of the hotel really are, though one is shown in an entirely different context in the second half of the film. They are, however, the arbiters of the guests’ fates. Again, I am not bothered that their role is not made completely clear. Use your imagination to fill in the gaps, ya cunt!

I see pairing off in this regard as a micro-example of group-mind. When tethered to a partner at all times, your level of awakening is diminished. At last, you are only able to see the world through a filter fashioned by yourself and your mate. The affliction metaphor is apt. Both parties sink to the defining point of each others’ maladies. To use an hick expression: a group is only as quick as its slowest member. The expression doesn’t actually originate from hicks, but from Ancient Greece. Again, when tethered at all times to another, it is inevitable to sink into a morass of duonymity. A couple is only as swift as its dumbest half.

Colin’s charcter, too, attempts to fake an affliction, though one much more complex. He chooses a psychopathic guest. His sights are set on her, so after another guest, reaching the end of her days, attempts suicide from a second story window, fails and lies wailing in a pool of blood on the cement, Colin attempts to garner favour from the psychopath by pouring nastiness on the suffering woman’s plight.

The point is extreme. To be solitary is an affliction in itself. The hotel members go on hunting expeditions with tranquilizer guns to drag back loners from the forest. They gain points extending their hotel stay and their chances of appropriating a mate with each kill. Childish, theatrical demonstrations are given by the management illustrating the advantages of coupleness.

It’s never said outright, but hinted firmly at later in the movie, that the nearby city is filled only with couples (or, rather, families). Solitary hangers-on are not allowed. One scene sees a copper questioning Colin and his (admittedly pretend) wife about papers proving their coupleness. The city is also shown as consumerist heaven. Salvation is being a family and endlessly binging on products, useful or not. These parts are shot in a dreamlike manner to heighten the sense of unreality from the point of views of the outsiders.

When this sort of society comes to pass, as it surely shall, I will be drug thrashing and croaking from my solitary hut on Saaremaa.

Fuck um.

Just earlier, I sent a message to Christián telling him that he is a ego-stroking megalomaniac. I enjoy poking at him about his self-absorbed attitude often. The reason for my abuse is not so much that he really is a ego-stroking megalomaniac but that he is sensitive about it. Jayson told me many times that my greatest talent was making those around me introspect. I’ve always had problems when people around me did not notice their own actions and especially the way they projected themselves onto others. My observation has always been and still is that people in general lack self-observation.

But that was not what I was going to type into this greasy terminal.

I’d not like to think as myself as also a megalomaniac, but I am certainly ego-stroking. I muse to myself many times a day during intellectually idle instants that I’d rather return to activities that make me happy. Activities that stroke my ego. I dislike ego projection and call it megalomania. Introverted ego-stroking is very fecund, however. Were I not to spend many chunks of time every day in pursuit of my own happiness, I’d break down.

I see so many broken men and women! Fuck um.

And I don’t want to break down. Whatever I can say about my mental fragility, supportive or contrary, without following my own possible footsteps I always see receding into the distance, I’d be truly wandrering in limbo. Another discussion that has passed between myself and other denizens of my life is how relationships encircle and prevent one from stepping outside to follow said footsteps. That circle tightens and tightens and finally one loses sight forever of those mythical prints.

Most people inhabit that circle in the name of security.

Never.

Fuck um.

The new King Crimson album is blaring in my ears through my vastly underrated Bose headphones. Why are they underrated? I was mocked with gentle smirks in that windowed office in Boston when I attained them. What was his name? Ah… Jeff. Wasn’t that it? I believe so. He asked were they the ones about which I had raved, though not with a phrase so eloquent. I affirmed and asked would he like to try them. The augmented smirk brushed me off with a declination and shiny lips. Jeff then turned back to his computers to presumeably work. Now he is dead. Poor Jeff.

Red is completing itself. I listened to the studio version of this track many times during journies to and from Clear Lake from College Station. The purpose of those journeys was to see Marcie, who is also dead. I’d like to think that every person I have ever affected in my lengthy days is now DEAD. Shambal would approve. After the winds ceased in his land, all were truly dead but him and the robots running the market. There he was able to buy imported dried meats, fruits and photos of South-Asian kurvy. I was not intending to be sidetracked by Shambal, however, so also wish him DEAD, though it is not in my power to stop the pulsating muscle deep within his flabby form. That power solely resides in the words I type here, and, if Christián is correct, I, like he, have no control over what spills from my fingers.

The music of this album, in other forms, was soundtrack to the years 1993 - 1994. Most possibly, memories are attached to nearly every song. For instance, now plays Epitaph and I can refer again to the DEAD Marcie. In one very clear instance, I see her maw open and rather than receive a glop of manure begin to sing when Greg Lake’s voice returns after the song’s moody midpoint. She had her good points, I admit. In contrast to other females that I shall not name at the moment, Marcie delved into the music I loved and made it part of her life. She certainly did not do it solely to please me, as did Christián’s DEAD wench Sing. My DEAD girl incorporated my lifestyle wholly into her own. Of course, her own personality was itself hardly a personality at all at the time. She was thirteen when we met. She simply borrowed from me to become more whole. I’m sure she’s shed most of it by now. Well, of course she has since she is DEAD.

There were times when Shambal needed a swift kick in his then honed and muscular asscheeks. As they are now, flaccid and spreading to cover the surface area of the sole room in his hovel, to kick them would require tremendous effort. One must always remember that tremendous efforts are not worth their weight in bitcoins during the winds of spring.

Spring gales had tormented Shambal’s zone for centuries. Unbeknownst to outsiders, he had devised a plan to stop them for good. He didn’t contemplate the ravage this deed would wreak on his land, eventually turning it to mostly lifeless desert. The only thing occupying his mind was the present and alleviation of the continual whistling as air sang through the network of tiny tunnels in the walls and roof of his hovel. Various insects, since the beginning of Shambal’s sessile existence, had contentedly burrowed these musical wood-mazes.

Though also irked by the breezes that fought to topple them, the other inhabitants of the land found their own solace in strolls near to Shambal’s hut. They called it the musical mansion. Like all great titles assigned to famous landmarks, groups of creatures, abstractions and celebrities, Musical Mansion was a misnomer. As stated earlier, it was a hovel, and still is, as far as anyone knows. Also, the music was aleatoric and without apparent repetitious themes, as is the way of natural elements. Rather, so it was to lesser minds than Shambal’s.

With his enormous bottom and expansive brain, Shambal searched the noise-space ages for patterns. He had little else to do. I’d recommend you read his novella How I Shot the Breeze Without Tilting on Tippy-toe. Within is a thorough exploration of the methods of mind needed to amass the quantity of data determining messages in arbitrary weather patterns. I’m sure that your local bookseller provides the tome at minimal cost. That, or you can stand around in the shop and consume it whole with your greedy, bulbous whiteballs while security nano-denizens rip open cell walls of interior organs until you collapse into a heap of bubbling protoplasm.

Delusional, but Quirky was the motto Shambal had dreamed up for himself. Were he an out and about creature, he’d’ve had myriad t-shirts donning it. His motto was accurate. The message he deciphered was simply an echo of words he, himself, had spoken in a different age on top of a hill in a far away land. In actuality, it as probably the very same land about which I write at this moment, pummeled and recreated by elemental forces too outrageous to contend with.

He stood on that hill and thanked each of his serfs (as he saw them in his mind) as one. They were but a cohesive mass, no? Their service and allegiance was appreciated, but it was their time to die. Shambal unleashed fire from all seven of his extremities that seared the hoard to a blackened swath of soil. In actuality, he couldn’t lash out with electric fire from any part of his body, so instead used his thumb and ring finger to first pop open a green, copperish tube, and then to press a button labeled teful. The result was the same. Serfdom became cinderdom.

The obvious parallel was that the shrieking gales were his final words to his ex-minions. Obviously now, any reader can conclude that the great, bleak plain that surrounds Shambal’s hovel for as far as any ogling telefinder can see is the result of the dearth of wind.

The bed comforts my sore buttocks. I have been tortured once again by having to rise from my solace and go into the world. The day was balmy and quiet in the interior, but outside, sleeting. In my youth, the sleet never bothered me. It was another sensation for my skin to relish. Now that and other sensations are far in the past. In fact, the concept of feeling now is only going through the motions. I can pretend an emotion at the touch of a certain element, but it is entirely fabricated.

My buttocks need the bed more than I do. They have grown to enormous proportion. Time and again, I believe I am turning into Shambal. I curse my fate, but know I had many opportunities to turn from it. I let each pass me by and these days I curse every moment away from my bed as a torture. I am sure, for several decades now, he has not risen at all. The system that flushes his bowels provides constant vigilance. Perpetual consumption coupled with perpetual excretion is the norm for beings such as Shambal.

Tales tell of a different being. He was deft on his feet, they say. I doubt if his lower appendages do anything but take up space now. But once upon a time, he stood on a hill during each mid-morning and made the serfs cry with pain and wonder. How did he accomplish this? In the past, the peasants did not labour as machines, but had a smattering of emotions that only a strumpet like Shambal could set afire. He’d get them romping and dancing with a few claps of his pudgy paws. His booming voice, now only a distant croak, scribed as in ink on their minds phrases their grandchildren repeat to this day. I laugh at myself a little at these words, since these grandchildren are little more than infant minds in bodies of able-bodied grunts.

(some minutes later after talking to Marisa about the themes of my writing)

I had to go out into the falling ice because of a broken socket. Sockets are to many, things of a less automated past, things never to be thought or worried about. Two hundred or so years prior, they were common to connect onself, or the machine that was the comforter for onself to either a source of power, or a signal of communication. Even further back, they were strangely less used. All electromagnetic radiation was banned, or, rather, all creature-made electromagnetic radiation was forbidden. Before that, thrust forth from communication sockets were devices that showered an area with myriad radiations filled with streams of chatter. This, that, bing, bong, gobble, gibble, grunt.

A form of eccentricity evolved in creatures that made them spastic and unreliable. Multi-tasking was a name given to the crime. Those too afflicted were cut down and used to feed the remaining agriculture. Sockets that vomited into machines that spread this desease were converted to only connect a single apparatus with a certain focus.

I have meandered from my point, alas. Sockets still exist, of course, or I wouldn’t have had to leave the solace of my bed. Sockets line each floorspace, corridor, atrium, entranceway, tube, tram-capsule and IKEA. They are just not visible. They spew forth lines of invisible focus that are threads with diameters miniscule beyond the senses of creatures. Passing through suits, under-comforts and flesh, they drink each their type of input from all who pass.

Like Shambal, most of my time is spend idle, so sockets have fixed threads impaling my being at all times, even during slumber. Another anomaly of the past was that dreams were forbidden to the socket’s threads. Now, it is commonplace to have a profession that assists in the combination of datastreams from multitudinous creature-dreams to form films and video arcades for the entertainment of creatures too young to be healthily put into stability without damage. When earlier in the day, the socket that gushed threads into my cerebellum, facilitating the perpetual flexions of my muscles, exploded with a pop not unlike that of a creature exploding in a cell accidently turned quickly to vacuum, I harumphed in momentary despair.

Thankfully, my lower appendages still function, unlike what I guess to be Shambal’s. I rose from my comfort and danced along the mildly glowing bluish track that led to the rectangular prism that cleaned and depilated me with gusting powder. Some, also like Shambal, have had their hormones that grow hair deleted, sparing them frequent cleaning. Another machine stamped me with appropriate colour and pressured me outwards into the tube. A bubble-tram awaited. I climbed in.

My first destination had to be for porridge. When one is forced to leave his premises, one must at least have porridge. In the past (yes - again during that distance!), other warm comestibles were available, along with something called fruit manufactured in long forgotten factories. Porridge is what remains of that part of a deceased culture. I am not sure of its actual contents and honestly don’t enjoy putting in into my gullet, but it remains one of the only links to the past and I am stupidly sentimental in my middle age. Being far more decrepit, I’d imagine Shambal to be even more so.

He was developing the neuroses of the rich, the non-workers — or would start to, if he wasn’t careful.

The quote is from a novel I finished late last night: The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. Yes, it has the same title as the Hawkwind song. I first picked up the book in 1993 (or 2?) at either a book fair or a used bookstore in College Station. Some sort of convention actually occurred featuring Michael Moorcock. I reach back with my deft mental prowess and pick out myself talking to him as he stood behind a low table stacked with paperbacks. His breath was fetid. I squeamishly remember.

A fellow student (I laughingly call myself a student) argued that Moorcocks newest (?) novel Mother London was a vortex of dung whilst Behold the Man shone like an emerald. Those were not his actual words. Or mayhap they were and the coincidence of typing them in this paragraph is truly cosmic.

I never read Mother London. I read Behold the Man, I believe, for the first time, in El Paso in that hollow room in that busy house next to Lacey’s. The month I lived there stretched on for decades. I love it when time crawls. Raun complained over two years later that the book was too lurching. He did not use that word. Or mayhap he did and the coincidence once again of me typing it is TRULY COSMIC. I recall the book seeming very fragmented. The concept itself is amazing.

Perhaps Moorcock had excellent ideas but, in general, poor execution. Everyone has ideas, as my deadicated reader surely knows. Few place those ideas onto a page. No matter the quality, I admire those who do. Quality is a terribly subjective, in any case.

Fuck um.

I never finished The Black Corridor in 1992 (or 3?). Perhaps I sensed then that it was low quality. It did not toot my muffin at the time. I grew bored very easily in those days. I paced the apartment when bored, in hopes that my jittering thoughts would coalesce into something other than mediocrity. Did they? Possibly not.

I did finish The Black Corridor this time round. I copied three quotes into another file. The second is the one above. What does it mean to be rich and have the ability to be idle when one wishes? To nap days away? To stroll along the lakes or beaches with your pinkish umbrella and pinkish girlie-friend?

This begs the question - what is it to work, anyway? What is work? Is work just a means to subsist monetarily? It provides victuals with which we can stuff our faces and not emaciate away in a shack in a village in South Moravia. But what about subsisting psychologically?

My mind needs this work thing rather perpetually. I am rarely idle. I feel useless when I am idle. During long walks in the streets of Logroño, my mind is racing. I have to concentrate to follow the music seeping into my ears. My bane is a fragmented mind. Simple meditation on music spilling into my orifices needs effort. I have drifted from the subject. Fractured. Fracture. Cracking. Crumb. Blunt. Bum.

You are referred to another recent entry concerning focus. flip back and read it now. If you don’t, you will be the next hobo tied to the tracks tracing out someone else’s destiny.

A major theme of The Black Corridor was surviving isolation. The mind of the main character literally begged him to be creative. It fooled him time and again out of his severely routinised life. He caught himself varying his course time and again. He fought against his own subconscious during the one hundred twenty or so pages. Constantly. Finally, hallucinations almost destroyed him. Or maybe they actually did. The ending was rather ambiguous.

Being free of the burden of mandatory work would only convert hobbies into work. The travels of creation would be satisfying, as opposed to solely for nourishment of the corporeal tissue.

Drip. Drip. Splatter. My mind has drained away.

I just whipped out A Passion Play by The Tull after finding that its flacs I uploaded to Gulo yestrday evening do not work (on Gulo). Vittata plays them nicely. I noted, as I surely have oodles of times, that the album begins with heartbeats echoing The Dark Side of the Moon. Gonwards begins in this manner, as well. If one thinks it over a bit, normally, an album about the journey through a life should begin thus.

Sitting here writing when I should be working, I am enjoying this band to which I used to listen in my adolescence. Pink Floyd was another and I did enjoy Animals thoroughly the other day. Conversely, I have absolutely no interest in revisiting The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon once again. Was it overexposure? They don’t tittilate my nipples like they did in my youth.

Yet, A Passion Play and Animals do. I’ll resist making a pun, as I mostly consider puns a product of sloppy thinking.

Sitting once again at the head of the table, one of the ghosts (it is Shambal) is pushing his women one by one onto the stack - and as his life slows and declines to death, he’ll pop them off one by one, finally getting to Karla, then to Ashley.

I wrote that quote whilst sitting on a bench in the fantastic park in Seminole. I had a ritual during which I stopped at one (or sometimes at two!) benches on each circuit round its perimeter. I sat and typed a short adage into Thinking Space, a mindmapping application that doesn’t seem to exist any longer for Android. I still have the antiquated version.

Resuming this ritual again using whichever type of writing application is a grand idea. I occasionally take walks through Logroño. Benches are available. I am still vital enough to boast a creative countenance. My protoplastmic alter-ego yaks in my ear: So do it, cunt. That bastard rarely shuts up. In this regard, he is similar to Shambal. Shambal doesn’t even quiet his stream of consciousness ramble during sleep. It comes out as grunts and snores, sure, but I am certain they are still the half-baked ideas resembling those spouted during waking hours, just without enough proper non-dormant muscles for articulation.

One can see Shambal’s life like a stack of relationships. He measures his life by his relationships. I have done so before, as well, though these days I’m more apt to place the borders between epochs at changes of long(ish) places of residence.

The quote also presupposes an exact midpoint in Shambal’s life. At this median, he will stop pushing and begin popping. Much like my regurgitation the other day, whilst living the upswing of his life, he pushes women onto said stack. This act signifies that he is temporarily finished with her. He may have another in his immediacy register or just a vacuous cell. At times during the upswing, he’ll pop the most recent off for another go (naturally when the register is vacant). That chick’ll be pushed onto the stack once again, soon enough.

So, Shambal is standing at his apex, peering into the white backwards and then into the black forwards. He doesn’t have the ability to actually travel into the white, but only to observe. Being predominately white, the distance is increasingly blurry.

He carries his stack like one of the stones mentioned in the aforementioned entry. So he begins his descent.

Reviving the dehydrated relationships is a chore. Some are dessicated beyond hope. Since Shambal still has the ability to mature, the creatures in his stack are revelations. They dare him to confront his past self. They are distorted mirrors into layers covered by the murk of his ascent.

The entities are eidolons. Whatever beings in reality they symbolise is not important. When he pushed them onto the stack, they were frozen. He begins all of his relationships once more, but in reverse. These times round, he thrashes in an ocean of despair with no land in sight. Yes, in the manner they ended, they start.

Instead of a maelstrom of encroaching desolation sucking his time and his energy, he finds himself more and more satisfied. His smiles pervade days. He is nurtured. The tumble downhill is simple. He rolls with the flowing avalanche. Then, all at once, during emotional ecstacy, everything vanishes.

He still has his stack, however. It is not yet empty. Perhaps he’ll ease himself slowly down his hill in vacuity. Perhaps he’ll immediately pop another woman off.

He has choices.

Christián loves to point out the fact that I have asperger’s disorder. I am not particularly convinced at the accuracy of his claims, however, as he is of a certain class of people who convince themselves they are correct about certain issues and are never to budge from their position evermore despite any evidence to the contrary.

I would go as far as say this class of people is the status-quo. It is much easier to fall back on long held beliefs no matter their accuracy because of comfort. Further education for most ceases after certain points for topic after topic. One is set in one’s ways, the rubicon is crossed, and the future is as static as a portrait hung in the basement or attic. Well, it does tend to collect dust, but that, too, just tends to place a coating over hardened beliefs, weighing them further.

In any case - asperger’s. A significant, ongoing impairment in social interactions with others, as demonstrated by at least two of the following symptoms:

Significant difficulty in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as the lack of eye contact, few facial expressions, awkward or clumsy body postures and gestures

I’ve always be self-conscious about the manner in which I’ve held myself. Slouching is a problem, for certain. I have to pull my gut in a bit these days. However, the origin of this behaviour is from elementary school. I was always the scrawny one in gym class. (And gym class was an ongoing nightmare.) I wished I had just an inkling of pecs. My nipples seemed inverted whilst those of fellow gym-mates protruded proudly.

Although I strive to always maintain eye-contact during one-on-one banter, I often find my gaze straying, especially during monologues. Marisa asks me to tell her stories at times about my life or even in detail about my day. Of course, part of this is to practise Spanish, but, on the other side of the wormhole, she rattles away at length, herself, so it is encouragement that I do so, as well.

Eye contact has always been something people noticed about me. Only during meandering soliloquies, my view drifts. In these cases, my mind is turning inwards to live the words that dribble from my lips.

Most everyone knows (and in many cases dislikes) my wild gesticulations during conversation. The immediate conclusion is that our first symptom of this portion of asperger’s does not apply to me.

Asperper’s is quite a long way from introversion, honeybunch. In fact, they are not even intersecting in the venn diagram bubbling through my mind at the moment.

Lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g., by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people).

I’ve been criticized for pointing out the obvious many times. Unfortunately, I believe I contracted this habit from my father, and it certainly irks me when he does it again and again and again and again during road trips from (always the point of departure) Seminole to (select one from the set of points of arrival) Ruidoso, Hobbs or even Ft. Worth / Dallas. One thing I truly enjoy doing is letting my companions know about objects or situations close-by with interesting attributes. My friends do the same for me. I enjoy observing situations, especially, but never trying to predict outcomes. I want the bandera to unfurl without suggesting I might know beforehand its colours.

A line cannot be drawn distinctly between citing an obvious object or situation and one that may be more obscure. Trying to find novelties in even the mundane is enlightening.

Failure to express appropriate and corresponding social or emotional reactions, such as when conversing or playing with others. For example, a child who shows little or no reaction, feelings or empathy to another child talking with them.

The article from which I am pulling these quotes uses examples with children often, as it is noted that these symptoms are often first seen in youth.

I think Christián has been exposed to a darker part of my personality more than most other people have. Drunkenness has pervaded much of our proximous relationship and drink can make my ego burn. I become much more self-absorbed. Christián, being a self-absorbed cunt in general, as well, usually encourages this behaviour with his own misogynist and misanthropic ravings. What remains is the memory of sociopathic rants both from myself and from him. I can certainly see how a lack of empathy towards other humans in general could be determined from multitudinous enjoyable yet insane hours together.

It is easy to confuse empathy with guilt at times. Is my sorrow for the woes of my faraway mother guilt or empathy? Is it empathy spawned from guilt? When is empathy on longer empathy but some secondary emotion spewing from a ruptured self-esteem?

It is true that I find it easier to feel empathy towards animals than towards human animals. I gather this is because I feel most humans have the ability to change their situation but elect not to. Then, they proceed to bitch and moan at length. I have little patience for such diatribe. Is this lack of empathy? I’ve been told upon thirty five billion, nine hundred seven million, eighty two thousand, four hundred and seventeen occasions that I am an intellectual elitist. How this coincides with having asperger’s, i cannot ascertain (if it is even true in the first place).

Restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities, as shown by at least one of the following symptoms:

A significant and encompassing preoccupation or obsession with one or two restricted topics, that is abnormal either in intensity, subject or focus (such as baseball statistics or the weather)

On this point, I could argue that Christián, himself, has asperger’s since the majority of times (again whilst sloshed), the only subject that gushes like a waterspout from his maw is of the evil and manipulative nature of women and how to tame them. This tendency asserts itself in Christián’s actions in other forms, as well. I have observed that he becomes obsessive about a certain band or small circle of bands and listens to them relentlessly for a time before moving on to another. I’m not sure this is a good example, but it is a trend that does not let up.

As I grow older, I do not lose my hair, but instead let fall away past foci. Fewer and fewer topics envelop my interest. I attribute this paring of hobbies or occupations to the ongoing press of time. My mortality presses its flattened palm down on my skull, pressing me into the softer and softer earth. It will bury me. I shall parish not by the flame death, but by simple stagnation.

When only the foreskin of my scalp in left to smell the air, there may be only one obsession left. What will it be, I wonder. Music?

Seemingly inflexible adherence to specific routines or rituals that serve little purpose.

I know I have a few of these, but none come to mind immediately. The majority of my time is spent avoiding routines, however, since their mere existence cause time to seem to pass at a pace that is uncomfortable. I follow the Tao, cariño, and strive to be as water. I flow without routine to the lowest places. I do not choose the past most easily navigated. It demands that i flow along it.

Routines have to exist to facilitate improvement in any activity, but shuffling the details of those routines helps to slug time in the paunch, make it pause for you. Everyone needs for their mortality to stub its toe now and again.

Morality, too.

The bridge would collapse even before he got half-way, Shambal thought. He’d been thinking the same for years. Realistically, he’d been crossing said bridge for years. On the way to the center, the point at which he figured the collapse would occur, he’d been collecting. His mother had always told him to goal in life is to collect.

To accumulate.

His feelings now were not just presentiments. He could actually see the absolute center. The apex was obvious because his life was a simple one: A series of crests, each of varying heights, that wore him thinner in preparation for a collapse at the peak.

In a sense, his life was only a half-bridge. He had no intention of descending in ease and good-humour the more or less descending second half. Nah. At the zenith was the place to climax. In slumber and in waking, that climax meant loosing every drop of accumulation.

His mother would have been proud at his accumulation. To accumulate is to be divine. So, in the proper manner of his fore-folks, and being the last in a long line of hoarders, the universe will welcome the imminent explosion. Possessions will rain down into the abyss. The wretched wraiths below will scrabble for the shattered pieces - the ones who are not pummelled by weighty debris.

His mother would have been proud, but she was dead. Or perhaps she is among the wraiths now, waiting to snatch greedily at the air as bits and pieces she once owned hail from the sky. If this is the case, Shambal can see her spittle run down a chin fouled by tough, white whiskers. She has that silver chain in her left hand. It fell directly into her left hand. The amber pendant swings listlessly. Two drops of spittle patter soundlessly in the dust.

Every crest on the way to the top has been a mini-goal of accumulation. At times, these accumulations have been literal, but mostly they consisted of filling empty vessels in his spirit with assembled stones. Once assembled, these stones were static. They did nothing but sat in his chest and on one hand augmented his stamina and strained muscles, but on the other weighed more than solely physically.

Easily, upon each crest, he could have lain stones aside. Then, at the apex, he could look back and see his marked progress. He could even colour each completed stone according to whatever aesthetic an individual climb had instilled in him. He never did so.

His discrete goals stayed with him as eventual burdens. And, as over each hill he went, to lay any of them aside seemed more and more of a task that to carry them all to the zenith.

Oh, what an explosion it will be!

Christián once again clarified his love of goals to me in a message a few hours ago. He had just left some sort of movie premier. Some of the actors (including Brenden Gleeson, woo hoo) were also there, and his titillation shown through even in messages. I resisted the urge to mock it. The urge was strong, however, since I have a deep hatred of star worship. The deification of celebrities is repugnant to me.

I can try to see it from Christián’s point of view. His apex, of course, is to be a successful, and therefore, famous opera singer. Or a rock singer. Or a writer. Or just about any sort of famous thing possible. I’d suggest to him to become a famous pursuer of sexual relations with goats, but he’d probably just laugh it off. Cunt.

He wrote this:

We seriously need to get our stories out there. The world thirsts for them.

And I replied:

It’s not really my objective to get my stories out there. the journey is much more important to me than any destination.

Impermanence pervades life. I admire the artists in San Sebastian who create sand sculptures and relish the moments when they are washed away by the tide. They build them purposefully below the tide-line. I respect these humans.

The idea of Shambal’s bridge is an echo of what I typed the other day about discrete points of life and goal-oriented living. I find it to be a terrible waste. To crush an existence to a number of points with the passages between being only means to those ends makes me at times literally weep.

I was raised like Shambal by a mother (and a stubborn, niggardly father) to create a life of discrete points. With what I have left, the journeys are for the savouring.

At times, phrases from songs have an astounding impact on me. For example, the subject of this entry is a line from a song from the Strawbs’s album Dragonfly. I am hearing this album for the first time in my existence. It is folky and predictable, but strangely nostalgic. Possibly, it recalls other Strawbs albums of which I used to listen often during the primeval years (1996 - 1999).

My mind shifts suddenly to Christopher Bender. We have not chatted in more than a week. The last few things I sent him could not have been decisive in any way, however, and I suspect he is a busy, house-purchasing boy. Yes, he is / has purchased a new house in Wellington.

A very vivid dream haunted me. Brynn had bought tickets for ME to see Bruce Springsteen in New Zealand. Time was short and my flight was leaving within weeks. I don’t think I was to meet her there. She simply supplied the tickets. Why New Zealand besides the fact that Bender-Boy lives there? Images of an unknown aeroport strobe in my mind. Most likely, it is a collage of images for multitudinous aeroports assembled into some haunting ideal.

I used to love aeroports.

Perhaps I still do. At least, I enjoy occupying them. The feeling of rivers sweeping round me as I sit with a beer at a pricey bar entices me. I used to write during these times. That gradually morphed into sending absurd messages to whomever might be willing to read and reply.

However, in an aeroport in London (Heathrow?), I awaited a flight to the states. I was sitting in a restaurant sipping (guzzling?) a beer and writing on Mustela-ermina. That laptop now sits in a chest-of-drawers in my ex-room in the ex-house of my dead grandmother. Had I it here, it would be running some sort of Arch.

In that restaurant, I wrote plenty. It is one of the last times I recall writing in such a situation clearly. I was overjoyed. Emotions rush back with such memories. I even rememeber, without searching for entries from that day in the Martenblog, that I was listening to one of the albums (probably the first) by Fripp and Summers. And I recall writing about listening to that album. Urk.

One of the last things I sent to Christopher was a link to a recent entry in the Martenblog. In fact, one from a week or so ago. I was still writing on my unnamed Raspberry Pi then. My mood has markedly improved. Creativity has not spiked, but my routine has subsumed it. Many improvements can be made, for sure, and for one I have not accomplished writing every day in the Martenblog. Nor do I practise guitar every day. I did manage a hurdle today, however, by doing so whilst Marisa was still in the house. It is Saturday, after all, and her days off work are filled with constant scurrying.

WORK

WORK

SHRIVEL

I’m not complaining because she did not bat an eye at me practising gueetar whilst she furthered damaging her back working in the garden. At this moment, she is in the trastero below rooting through whatever there is to root through down there, punishing the knotted muscles in her lower back even more. To be idle is not a state she desires EVER. Her finite state machine merges that particular state with to be asleep and to be watching a film.

I’ve put the aforementioned album on random play along with Brother Where You Bound by Supertramp (one I had not heard in several years and never actually appreciated in detail - not that I am doing so currently, as the majority of my mind is focused on the screen before me and words coursing from my bouncing brain to my fingertips). They make an awkward couple. Then again, I am a fan of awkward couples. If it is possible for the two to grow to inhabit each others’ lives in harmony, I belive such a coupling can be more fecund that one that starts simply on the same plot of earth. Harmony signifies mutual encouragement and cracks never forming that ooze emotional blackmail.

Fuck emotional blackmail.