Keep your mouth closed and embrace the simple life. You will live carefree until the end of your days. If you try to talk your way into a better life, there will be no end to your troubles.

For a great deal of my life, I have been a talker. I find that as the ages pass, silence is more and more my friend. I remember once what my friend Ellen once said in the common room of the house on Enfield. She said that especially when many people occupy a conversation, the space is too filled, too jumbled - heavy with words. She chose to stay silent. It is certainly better to try to sort through a tangle of threads than contribute one of your own to entwine among the others even more messily.

I have always preferred one-on-one conversations.

A rather elitist viewpoint could be this: The larger the group, the more the conversation tends towards the lowest common denominator. You’ve gotta keep the slowest dude up on things, don’t ya? Larger groups do split into smaller, intelligent clusters. I am a fan of this fragmentation. Still, most of the time, I sit alone with my thoughts, sorting through threads, occasionally disentangled from it all. I am oblivious.

I was accostomed to talking immediately about any topic assuming my brain would conjure a coherent flow. As the ages passed, I failed more and more. I became more and more quiet. Keeping my mouth shut was a large step away from my ego. Fuck my ego.

As I wrote recently, I am striving for a simple life. To exist only in the present is divine. This screen before me, beyond the keyboard sitting on the coffee table, is my lowly, burning campfire. A solitary pot sits atop it. Within the pot, a gruel is simmering. The result is unknown. The result does not need to be known. The process is more more important than the result.

I am learning that all things pass and accepting it. Watching my past beliefs crumble is satisfying. The satisfaction, however, is not a feeling of vengence in defeating the ideals my upbringing instilled in me. It is a slow contentment. I can pass the hours without time.

So, I used to be a talker. Is writing in this god-forsaken blog the substitute? An argument could be made for this point of view. The blog is, after all, online for all to read. Though I publish (but never advertise) every entry, the process is what moves me.

One result of writing has been poignant in my life. Like a medicine, it heals me psychologically. During the journey between the first letters and the last mark of punctuation, I am filled with a liveliness. Sleep is shrugged away. Apathy is kicked in the kidneys. Those kidneys fall out and are later eaten by British immigrants. An analogy is vomiting. No. That is not a very good analogy, actually. The process of vomiting is quite unpleasant. It is the antithesis of a healing process. My analogy is wrong. Please behead me. Or just take my kidneys and feed them to British immigrants.

The question of who Shambal is and what he means in my life floats amid the debris of countless other queries without worth. But to be without worth is to be weak. And to be weak is to conquer. Shambal is a vehicle. The fact that I took the original concept from Christián does not matter. His Shambal is a creature of virility. Mine is weak. In the end, he is absorbed by a stone. His insecurity and fears prey on him. But by being prey, his journey has more satisfaction. His end is desolation, but finality is the same as ceasing to exist. A goal oriented life is a life of discrete points. Everything between said points is meaningless to such a being. My Shambal is a creature of the moment. He is eternally on a roller-coaster. He is eternally on that roller-coaster because he never thinks about discrete points, of finalities. Therefore, he is always alive.

On Reddit a few minutes ago, a thread about Kurt Vonnegut piqued my interest. I shall re-acquire what siezed my interest and place it below this line.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

I like to look at Shambal like this: He is riding in a small bubble through a static universe. He has infinite places to visit and infinite time to visit them. The concept of rush or deadline or goal does not exist. In his context, they words are meaningless. In fact, my previous sentence including the word visit also has little sense. Discrete points are not available. Life is a fuzzy wave. Remembering is even not important.

Ride that wave, you bugger, and bask.

The room is dim but for my trusty blue LED lamp on the coffee table in front of me and the television which serves as the monitor for the Raspberry Pi I have not (yet) named. The fact that I have not named the beast is unusual. I have had an obsession with naming inanimate objects for the whole of my life. Well, that is an exaggeration, so I’ll proffer a good deal of my lifetime, instead.

The room is dim except for a lamp and a whitewashed television screen. Since instead of observing my surroundings, I was writing a sequence out of a tepid fantasy, the LEDs from the squarish alarm device more or less below the television also counts as a light emitting source.

And Dunaj has just begun on my headphones. ’Tis a thrilling song.

The room is pitch black if I purposely omit the influence of my blue, LED lamp in front of me and slightly to my right (let’s say at 72 degrees), the television sweltering with brightness directly ahead, and three, green LEDs on the face of the alarm apparatus. Consequently, the house telephone shows the time (20:50) in dim, bluish numerals (plus a colon) directly beneath the alarm apparatus.

The room is still particularly dim, however.

Between the minutes of 18.00 and 19.30, evening is slowly eaten by night. My senses dull along with this consumption as if the encroaching darkness nibbled at my forebrain. For as long as I can recall, this has been the case. One remedy is to, early in the process, provide artificial illumination of a modest to full spectrum variety.

My chump of a blue, LED lamp makes a mediocre job of it.

The room is dimmer, as the television, responding to the lack of stimulus fed from my unnamed Raspberry Pi when said pi itself receives neither stimulus from the keyboard at 88 degrees nor from the mouse at 74 degrees.

The last three days has had me listening to Ruins, especially the album beginning with the letters Hyder. I could look up the rest, but by doing so, I’d stimulate my unnamed Raspberry Pi and therefore the slumbering television. It’s response would be to vomit decidedly non - full spectrum light at me. No way, dude.

I had perused Ruins albums in the past and distinctly recall walking through Letna northwards on that tram-lined street that knew my steps so often. In fact, one song from the album Burning Stone is titled Praha in Spring. It grooves mightily. I must have been living with Habosh at the time, or with Pavel (was that his name?). I suspect the former, however.

Hyderomastgroning…

I have just been informed that in cinco minutos, más no something is going to occur. I didn’t quite catch was exactly that is going to be, but I shall conclude for the sake of my rancid navel.

Indeed, the bacon is frying amid cumin. I will always recall that Acy’s love of bacon is unequalled. Or at least WAS unequalled. I ponder at times whether it was the reason for Ramona’s departure. One of several, I suspect. Relationships are the gradual accumulation of disdain. Miniscule granules lump together to eventually be indistinguishable.

I am reminded of a conversation that Acy and I had in the back, screened-in kitchen of his place in Austin. (Note: A place that is missed - a fantastic place - one I regret I’ll never see again) I was probably cooking some sort of bratwurst and the topic of spinach came up. He comforted me in the thought that if I eat enough of it, I’ll die of vitamin a poisoning. Ha! How many cubic meters a day, Ace-man?

Regardless of his overreaching need to prove his correctness scientifically, Acy is charming and a person that I dearly miss. That bastard should come to Spain. Now!

A possibly viral incessant cough arrived in Marisa’s pecho last night. Now, she lies in bed, suffering. Her voice is nearly gone, ragged. It did not help that her children yesterday created a situation of nefarious stress. Miguel elected to take María and the perro (Uriel, no known as Charlie) to Ezcaray with the vehicle in which Uriel is forbidden.

Miguel seems to buck his mother’s wishes at every slight bend of the corridor these days. In my opinion, it is the direct result of his relationship with Andrea.

Andrea is a controladora, an only child on which attention was always heaped. She knows little of any other life. One is reminded that all of this is from my observations and therefore my opinion. I continue. She has Miguel wrapped in a shroud of fear - the fear of irking her in any manner whatsoever.

Yesterday, Marisa told me that María told her (yeah - indirection) that Miguel is afraid to speak out to Andrea’s face and that he retains his ire to explode upon his friends and family. Well, she only mentioned family, but I know from experience that anyone in a social circle that at any time excludes the perpetrator (Andrea, in this case) becomes a victim.

Marisa has also told me several times that Miguel is the stereotypical good son (cue the Sylvian tune). Whether this means, as the first child, he was babied during his life so far by his mother or just behaved ideally or a combination, I am not completely sure. The conclusion is, Andrea being his first serious relationship, his behaviour has remained the same, but the mother role has been transferred. If this is the case, she has total control over Miguel without the forgiving, understanding attitude of Marisa.

I search my memory for my adolescence. I could not tell anything of my own ire or even more miniscule feelings to my parents in fear of reprisal. The situation is similar, as they had no perception of leniency or forgiveness. I digress.

Marisa furthered her opinion by stating that Andrea is poison to the family, in general. I’d further this by adding to anyone she disapproves of in his life.

Somebody needs to slap that whore around.

I am sitting on my bed as Marisa softly coughs beside me. She is playing a game on her mobile. Perhaps it is Pet Rescue Saga or something similar. It entertains her. It relaxes her. She definitely needs it after the stress her children caused her today.

Also, I am downloading an image of Archbang linux to test. I am of the opinion that I will like it, being minimal and supposedly very quick, and shall replace Ubuntu on galictis-vittata. I’ll have that mustelid back in my arms on Monday or Tuesday. Well, so I hope. Bastards.

I realize that I will never know true silence. The ringing in my ears prevents it. Have I ever known it in my lifetime? Surely at some point in Fort Stockton, it presented itself to me. I spent much time on the outskirts of things, literally and figuratively. I’d gamble both of my kidneys, my liver, my larynx, left femur and all of the pine martens in Canada, however, with the assurance that in my casa in good ol’ Fort Fucking Stockton, Tejas, there existed to silence.

The television blared perpetually.

And usually it was American Football - a constant favourite. My days visiting my parents during the last years confirms my win in this gamble. Noise pollution from the tele punches forcefully through the door of my pseudo-bedroom and assaults me.

Deaf bastards.

What is the best manner in which to motivate myself in the morning? I once had a book that I bearly got into entitled The Artist’s Way. It suggested the concept of morning pages. I suppose that is exactly what this is since it is thirty-one minutes past nine in the morning. The writing should be free flowing, almost stream of consciousness. Or, rather exactly stream of consciousness. I get to an initial point.

I feel particularly demotivated. I believe it is lack of stimulation, in general. I do my best with programming challenges, but they days rush by and I find I’ve little to be greatful for in the late evenings. I used to make lists of goals, but they rarely came to anything, so I’ll just mention here a few things I should do everyday without fail.

Though I am demotivated about my guitar playing and feel my course is in retrograde, it is a tool to creativity I should pick up and pluck every day without fail. Without fail, you fuck. I’ll go ahead and call this a morning page and can write every day. It’s not difficult. Just put aside time, you cowardly cunt.

More generally, don’t interrupt yourself with menial tasks during creative or thoughtful periods. DO NOT come whenever Marisa calls. DO NOT be daunted. Openly say, I am in the middle of something at the moment. Give me time. Multitudinous articles point to concentration dissociation killing the creative brain.

I am fighting against the inevitable. Age and my years of alcoholism has atrophied my abilities to gush creative associations. I know this ability can be rebuilt, but the only means I am sure of is proper concentration. Do not let petty interruptions deter you, vole! Marisa lives in a world of constant distraction. She rushes from one task to another in a state of perpetual multitasking. Let in be known that multitasking is a detriment to anything resembling mental progress.

My original idea for this martenblog entry was a stream of consciousness ramble about Shambal Brambel. I was deterred by a stupidity: The hangouts app in my phone will not allow me to search through my conversation with Christián. Whilst I was waiting on the female medical persona that some may dub a doctor a few weeks back (sitting on the cold tile floor of the hallway outside her closed office), I wrote a few lines to Christián that could have made a jolly introduction to a short Shambal saga. I shall attempt once again to find them now. Note: This is not a distraction, but rather a furthering of my current endevour.

Shambal stood atop the hill. He was sihlouetted in the strange double moonlight. He surveyed his vast crew, their work now complete, their faces upturned and expectant.

~ You are the egalitarion goats ~ he smirked down at them.

~ I am your shaman. I say your job is done. So it is done.

~ Now die.

The spell that he cast was a simple one - one of words. They were not kind words. However, instead of rage, the crowd expressed slow bafflement. During those moments, they were all grannies on the drip. Unexpected words can be soporific. They woo the mind into foggy oblivion. The crowd knew not what it was. As well as ceasing to be individuals, they finally ceased to be Shambal’s flock at all. They became the mute sheep of another pasture.

His command die mayhap could not be taken completely literally, for any flock without a shepherd will wander away to unkept fields. The flock will gradually scatter and scattering means, like with any corporal being, disintegration. They were never individuals in the first place. They only became a proper entity in a clump. Cells die alone.

Shambal ambled back to his one room hut. The door hung open and he didn’t bother to close it after he went inside. The raw earth floor oozed a mossy odour. The sod walls and densly leafed roof accentuated humidity. He sweated freely. On the solitary table against the back wall was a book. He walked two meters to have a closer look, as he did every day after dismissing a flock. It was the only copy left on his world that he knew of. He had written it in another age for another age, in a time where pressing matters let individual sheep or cells survive longer outside of nurturing mobs.

He turned back the cover. It rose with a gooey sound like mucousy lips parting after slumber. A page came partly with it, then fell away silenty as it settled to the table. He saw what he saw every morning, less and less discontentedly every morning. Where paragraph upon paragraph once stared boldly back at him were only congealed smudges. His words had joined their own flock long ago.

A message to Christian earlier today, recorded for my own amusement in the distant future:

That being said (and what it was will be lost in time, like peacocks in the rain), I believe that doing laundry during the night is the correct moment to accomplish such an important task.

1. It allows you to prance around with an exposed, lye-caked penis as you do calisthenics in the neighbourhood.
2. It provides a time for zen-rapture as you stare at whorling linens whilst baked on quaaludes.
3. It earns you the respect of your landlord’s teenage daughter, who secretly wants you to scour her orifices with your raw, lye-mottled penis.
4. No shaving (the most boring process known to mustelidkind) is necessary.
5. There is no five.
6. Every time one of your pieces of linen is sufficiently clean, one member of any of the number of marching bands practising for the Easter parade in Logroño explodes into a shower of gore.
7. You grow an additional nipple on your left buttock.

Many broken souls should band together and write a self-help book entitled How To Raise A Gifted Child In A Hick Environment.

I have no conclusive evidence, though it would be rather simple to just put the question to Christian, but I am convinced that in the cesspool that is Cold Brook, New York, he was raised to believe he was a kind of prodigy. I remember snippets of conversations with this cesspool of a man roughly between 2004 and 2006 claiming genius-like abilities and guaranteeing success before the age of forty.

Well, he is forty now.

Heaping praises on children because of yet undeveloped ability is a curse. Expectations pile to form an insurmoutable mound. Most likely, tunelling through it would be more practical. Sluffing off the baggage of youth becomes harder with each passing year. My parents also promised me blinding future success. I was even presented with a plaque (of sorts) by my mother’s best friend that stated Scientest Bob. A portrait of a boy with a bubbling test tube in hand accompanied the declaration. Expectations were built from an early age.

And did I turn out to be some prodigy? No way, vole! Certainly, I chose a different path from most. That fact can be directly attributed to the expectations foisted on me during youth. There was even a time during Middle School when I rejected intellectual progress altogether. I recall telling my brother and my mother in the car on the way to school that I am not bothered by not being as intellectually competent as others. Not in exactly those words, most likely.

Christian took a path somewhere between mine and the one mapped out by his family’s encouragement. He entered the opera world and has worked in a number of places playing insignificant parts in insignificant productions. Nothing has lasted. A series of temporary jobs has been what Christian has waded through. He’s mostly turned to his obscene desire to produce lettuce products for cash. Well, that and borrowing from his family.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d suspect he also had the expectations of attaining and keeping any woman he selected. He saw himself as a type of superstar, able to elect as he liked from the seething mass of female-kind. The sting that was Sing dumping him came late in life - at the age of thirty nine. His attitude towards women hasn’t changed, so it was a lesson lost. Or it could be he is set in the ways his family molded him in.

I told him the other day in a message that at this point in my life I am happy to never accomplish any thing in the western sense of the word. I’ve slowly turned to my own hobbies and the satisfaction tiny successes bring. Just solving a difficult problem on 4clojure makes a half an hour / hour / day worth living.

(4clojure)

Small successes. No pressure. No expectations for a grand overture or finale. I like that.

The sound of tape unsticking itself from its roll, being severed by a razor, and then applied to rough cardboard fills the air amid the music of Amarok that spills from my telephone to my right. More and more often, I find myself, during these days bereft of Galictis-Vittata, listening to music in the manner of teens on the metro in Prague. They blast from the tinny speakers of their mobiles crass dance music engineered for precisely that environment.

And I am doing the same now.

The pitiful difference is that what I am listening to, and what I usually listen to, has a dynamic range that prances over the music of those oblivious teens. It prances then tramples their music to mulch. How I wish it would trample the teens, as well! I can see their twisted bodies protruding shards of bone. Their faces are frozen in screams of incomprehension. This mental picture allows me to smile for the seventy-third time today.

I am a happy mustelid.

I increasingly see a gulf between the lifestyles of Marisa and me. The main contention (I call it a contention now, but it is really no more than an observation at this point) is that I am a lazy, easy-going marten who has little to no stress affecting his furry life. Marisa, on the other paw, goes few waking moments without an air of hurry. Time is not her friend. In fact, she is a slave to it.

I refuse to be.

Only predetermined spans during any particular day allow her to relax. During these segments, she disconnects. She is a different person. Besides sleep, which is always something altogether alien to all else, it seems to me that only these two modes exist:

• Hurry hurry run run corre!!!
• Disconnection

The latter can involve trancelike states with either films or a book. I find it hard to imagine her enjoying many acts that give me joy. Take cooking, for example. I have not actually seen her in her day job, but I imagine the atmosphere is pretty much the same. Her preperation of meals is not an art or even a craft. It is a race with the hands of that nefarious clock that hangs on the wall adjacent to the kitchen’s exit into the garden. Every task in state number one is marked by an alarm (silent or not). She is a slave to time.

I ponder, as says my newly created Clojure / lastfm web application, that this vascillation between two poles is normal and I am of the outre.

Bipolar is a frightening status quo.

I don’t like to think of them in this manner, but at times, Marisa’s explanations to me come across as lectures. She was, after all, a teacher at one point in her life. Not only that, but she was a teacher of children. I am certain this sort of profession can skew one’s personal relations for a lifetime.

I don’t like to be lectured.

As Shambal Brambel would say:

I force my veined member into her orifice. She can say no more. Except for shuffling and a slow gurgle, all is quiet.

The Fresneda Family (as is called both the clan and the WhatsApp group) is a stable compoud. The nucleus is the grandparents. According to Marisa, they worked to secure a place (or places - there are two more or less adjacent houses) to which the family, or clan could come congregate. It is a place to be together. It is a place to perpetuate bonds - to wrap and rewire circuits that are not even tattered.

I told Christian the following earlier:

They attempt to keep this cluster of humans tight. Their efforts to integrate me will never be successful, as I am too much of an intrevert and loner, much to many of their chagrins. Some seemed baffled that I was leaving to go visit others during this time.

Even though some (like Alfredo this time round) try to encircle me in conversation, I am still an outsider. He presents topics that he thinks that I will appreciate, from which I could gain knowledge. I listen. I am still an outsider. I mostly just listen. I am not comfortable enough with Spanish to retort or even agree in a scholarly fashion most of the time. I need to choose my words deliberately. This is another reason that I am outside of the circle. The clan.

My best bonding experience in Fresneda was over one and a half years prior, with Ivan. I believe one reason that we bonded was that he is also an outsider. He is the boyfriend of Anna - neice of Marisa. So he is too far from the foci (grandparents). We related almost immediately and created our own mini-clan within and at the sametime apart from the home-clan.

Remember: CLAN GLAND – slant rhymes, and oh so fine. They reverse to relate in a handly slanty fashion, baby.

Considering that I have no idea what will happen at the aeroport on Sunday, I am not very nervous about my impending voyage (doom) to Praha from Madrid. Originally, I thought I’d leave Fresneda tomorrow via bus from Belorado and arrive in Logroño at an unspecified time in the evening. I would then have an evening in the casa in Paseo del Prior alone to collect my rational and recharge my hungry power supply.

At the moment, I am sitting on the bed in Marisa’s room in Fresneda (as opposed to the bed in my old room in the other house that I had grown a bit acusomed to) trying to ignore the people shouting fragments of conversation at each other to and from the upper floor (where I write). We shall embark on a paseo to get away from the closed spaces and multitudinous warm bodies.

At least, that is the relief it will give me.

As the room is being populated by others who must conduct conversations no matter if a proper topic exists or not, I am a bit distracted and shall continue like a proper mustelid later.

I am not Shambal Brambel, but I know him. He is a greasy spic who sleeps on park benches beneath seven month old newspapers. You smell him from several hectometers away. He produces expansive and even at times artistic puddles beneath his place of rest simply by drooling during his slumber.

I plan to kill him. Perhaps I already have and do not remember.

The purpose of this post is to test whether blog_to_mongo.js still works on my new system. If it does not, I shall kill Shambal yet another time. The good thing about immortals is that you may slay them various times, each with pleasure.

During the next few internet blackout days (in Fresneda), I want to rewrite the bulk of martenblog in Clojure. The original was in Clojure using Noir, which has not been maintained in ages.

However, blog_to_mongo.js, if it is still functional, will remain, at the moment, as a script to be executed in Node.