Today I had lunch with Bender-boy and Anne, his wife. We ate at an establishment in Andrews that exhibits properties of an excellent tex-mex restaurant, though it could be a brothel in Kazakhstan for all I know. My general perception of the world around me is coloured my delusions of being in another place - ANY OTHER PLACE.

Though, interestingly enough, Bender-boy and I emanated from this area of the world. Perhaps we even defined it. I can’t say that it defined us, as there is an alien psychology in any other “human” I meet from these parts. At least there has been recently - meaning within the past few epochs.

Today I had lunch with Bender-boy. I hadn’t seen him for 22 years, give or take a month. The cliché holds that our communication was quite like it was back then, as if no time had passed. Of course, we have communicated via electro trans-pacific means during the meantime, so the cliché doesn’t have the same weight as it might were we to have had no communication at all.

Sudden memories rose in my mind of time we defined together, and we did define time itself, as time itself was frozen within those memories. They are photographs and static. They are photographs - a far better medium than video.

In a way, we are ageless as our memory between us is, indeed, static. It is, indeed, a series of photographs. We pass through incremental stages of concrete recollections bordered on each side by hazier half-scenes from possible pasts. It occurs to me that unless I specifically created a concrete mental signpost for one reason or another, my recollections shared with others are the most vivid and significant.

Anne mentioned a death. At first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but finally it occurred to me that Bender-boy had mentioned the dead friend from the past at some moment or another. And perhaps at multiple moments. Lee, of course. So it has been decided that we’ll take a road trip to Pecos and to the grave. We’ll buy a pack of Marlboro Reds on the way.

Amusingly, Bender-boy gets monthly or bi-monthly messages from West Texas oil fields about work opportunities. Best would be he work a rig, lose a few limbs and, much later, after the fourth accident, live in a vegetative state for the rest of his existence - an existence of a mere seven further epochs.

It occurs to me that I only have a superficial overview of the myriad stories Bender-boy has told me about his working life, though from what I know, him toiling at the zenith of a rig amid the dizzy heights in the baking petrol suffused heat isn’t all that far-fetched. After all, he did work at the zeniths of many smokestacks testing the toxicity of their emissions whilst inhaling the fumes and managing not to tumble to his death. He worked at a nicotine “factory” in North Carolina where he absorbed the drug from the atmosphere whilst adding to its potency by smoking.

Did I mention that we are going to buy a box of Marlboro Reds on the way to the grave?

As the brussels’ sprouts bake, I play with the “cat”. Though before I went to the lengths it takes to actually play with the “cat”, the “cat” joined me in the so-called office. Why is it called the office and why was I in there? The room is dubbed the office because that is where my grandmother, hereafter known as Katie, did all the paperwork pertaining to the so-called farm and other parcels of land that were in her “care”. To this day, in the office, there are reams of paperwork stashed in grey, towering filing cabinets - the same type that I locked myself and my brother in when we were children.

These days, my mother is (mostly) in charge of examining and shuffling the paperwork pertaining to said parcels of land. One day, portions of those parcels of land - well, let me clarify here: they are not actually parcels of “land” as most would imagine, but in reality, they are the “minerals” that lie below the surface of what most humans would imagine when the phrase parcel of land is voiced or scribed - yes, as I was saying, or scribing, portions of those parcels of land, or, rather, the minerals beneath, will be mine. Though my ancestry will tumble and whorl in their tombs, I shall immediately sell every one of them. Fuck um.

As the brussels’ sprouts bake, I play with the “cat”. Though, to be specific time-wise, that was in the past. Or, as they say in the homeland v minulnosti. I sat in the office on the same chair on which I sat on or around 23 December 2005 and read The Long Walk, now a feature film starring Ed Harris and Jim Sturgess. Christopher Bender, whom I will see for the first time in 22 years in less than two weeks, send me the tome and I returned it to him, via post, upon completion.

I sat in the office on that very same chair and the “cat” approached me. She uttered a meow utterly unlike anything I’ve heard from her previously. In fact, it was hauntingly similar to a meow that Molly uttered once and only once in the hallway in the flat in Logroño as Marisa and I walked by. We stopped, startled and wondered what Molly was on about. What had passed through her mind? I had similar thoughts when the “cat” uttered this peculiar meow.

Approximately a year ago, I was wandering the sometimes broad and much too sunlit and at other times twisty, tenebrous and narrow streets and paths of Siracusa in Sicily with Marisa. It was a city in which one could find a Jesus in practically every other alcove.

By means of almost universal contrast, I am in the exceedingly American city of Orlando at the moment, albeit sitting on Jeremy’s sofa and thus not exposed to the elements in the dreaded exterior, within which one could waste away in any number of seconds. I don’t write about the decimating plague that has wiped most of the population from the east cost of the states, but of the stifling heat that staunches any impetus for creativity.

Unfortunately, I’ll arrive to Praha in June during the mere beginning of its hot season. Oh, I’ll suffer! However, I’ll also exist in a sort of hazy bliss for the first few weeks. It will be the sensation of being back at home. Praha always yields that sensation. Logroño did, as well, for years, but I think it was more because of the specific people who lived in Logroño rather than the place itself. If I’m ever there again, I’ll have to make note of the suffusion of sensation (or lack thereof).

In any case, by means of almost universal contrast, I’m in the exceedingly American city of Orlando where any number of stereotypes one picks up about various “types” of American humans comes to life like a surreal comedy skit as one strolls the streets and parks.

The only similarity that Orlando has to Siracusa, or, more specifically, the only coinciding event has been the consuming of pistachio ice cream. I sucked down two huge scoops of the stuff a few nights ago and I felt bloated and vomitous afterwards. The bloat did not even wane after purging myself multiple times into the open sewers that run alongside practically every roadway in the city. That being said, it was pistachio ice cream, which is the only worthy ice cream, and was therefore tasty. Was it as good as the pistachio ice cream I consumed in Siracusa that did not leave me feeling bloated and vomitous at all? I don’t believe so, but memories of a year prior are not an accurate phenomena.

Marisa and I hung out at the corner of a huge Piazza that I refuse to specify. In that corner was an excellent, small establishment that provided us with ice cream. Specifically, it provided us with pistachio ice cream. We drifted through the canals meant for human traffic for hours each day, stopping at cafés and a few restaurants, lapping foam from espresso-based beverages. We enjoyed the odd and liberating experience of not understanding or only partially understanding what the yammering locals were saying to the point that we stopped hearing the sounds as speech. They became a portion of the unique harmonic structure that specified the genetics of Siracusa.

Tomorrow I return to Seminole and begin the endgame. In three months, I shall be in Praha once again. The shapes that drift through mist that becomes more dense with each week will solidify into a directed graph of my immediate future, formulated especially for me by Miss Sweet Entropy.

There were three main trails we took when we were paseando just outside of Fresneda.

Trail One: La Cascada

We took this trail the most often. In fact, Michal and Mirka accompanied us to the waterfall at one point. Michal took a dip in the frigid pool into which the water cascaded.

Michal is fond of “taking a dip”. A portion of his mind feels he is doing a sort of cold therapy. A portion of my mind feels he is just attracted to being enveloped in liquid, much as he was in the “womb”. Or in the “test tube”. These two things are one in the same when it comes to Michal. He was birthed in a womb-like test tube, or a test tube-like womb. It was translucent and one could see his bulbous, quivering form incrementally taking shape within.

The walk from Tres Aguas to la cascada is one of many sensations. Yes, they are sensations of a past and also that of a past which is rapidly filling with holes. Such is the memory of an ancient creature like myself. There is little that I can do but type out the tatters that remains into this and future blog entries.

Butterflies butterflies the way was decorated with butterflies.

One bright memory is that of caterpillars spinning silk from branches above so that at any point, were one not to pay attention, collision with sticky lines came about. It was their breeding season and Marisa was furious at them, or at nature, I suppose. They were known for boring into and destroying certain types of arboles, though which ones I cannot recall. Let’s say beech trees for the sake of their supposéd death. On the patterned earth armies of caterpillars marched to whichever tree was elected for destruction. It wasn’t yet time for cocooning. The butterflies that decorated the atmosphere on that paseo were still months away.

On our initial sojourns to the site, Marisa brought her camera. She had quite a good camera, or so I think, as I am no expert. More importantly, she knew how to use it properly and framed fantastic photos. Even more importantly, it contented her to do so. She reveled in its creativity. These were still the early days of our relationship. Or, rather, the early years. There was still vigour and youth within our bubble. Her creativity waned over the following years, but never completely, though she seemed to more and more fill a good bit of her time with worry and in this manner unfortunately reminded me of my mother. In contrast, my creativity blossomed and never stopped its upwards climb. Perhaps this disequilibrium added to the general unease that accompanied intermittently and then more and more often the years following - um - oh, let’s say 2019, roughly.

Another recollection is of the stones we walked across (I, warily) to get to the “other side”, the side not approachable without forging the river. In fact, to get even to the cascada itself, one had to clamber over a portion of a rocky face holding various branches of ostensibly stable trees to balance one’s way to the edge of the pool.

Marisa is sitting on one of the stones that decorate the “other side” - the “forbidden side” - the side that Bobbus had trouble getting to at times when he was wobbly after a difficult few days alone in the flat on García Morato. There a few infinities of photos of this area of the world in various directories shared between my so-called “devices”. I don’t normally enjoy sharing photos as I feel they detract from the general sensation of reading, but I’ll make an exception on this occasion.

Trail Two: Al Tejo

I have a photo somewhere in the archive of a torre of stones that someone build beside this trail. We encountered it several times and one of those times I took said picture. Tres Aguas is a spot at the terminus of a dirt road riddled with potholes that pierces the main highway out of Fresneda and towards the border of La Rioja and eventually Escaray. From this dirt road riddled with potholes sprouts the three trails I write about. Tres Aguas has a few picnic tables overlooking the river on one side of the terminated dirt road riddled with potholes. On the other side is a small house intended as a refuge for anyone walking, hiking, sledding, tobogganing or stumbling around blackout drunk four miles from the closest village (Fresneda). There was always freshly cut firewood on the front porch and inside, home to multitudinous spiders, I suspect, so I suppose it was maintained by the province (Burgos). Instead of continuing straight towards la cascada, one veers left around the refugio and keeps veering until about 160 degrees later.

After over half an hour of walking, passing tricking water on the right and remnants of landslides, the path opens up to a place were one could park a “car” were one to have a “car” with the ability to traverse the pitted track. To the right, the trail continues sloping upwards towards the mythical tejo. This place is where we usually stopped. To the left, the trail slopes downwards to the river, where we picnicked time and again.

We often (often meaning two or three times out of 23) went with Marisa’s sister Marijose on this “hike”. Though she was usually a cheerful sort, her health problems did not allow her to follow the pace that Marisa and I usually set. The advantage of this was, of course, as anyone reading my blog would know, that it gave me time to pause and write a poem, several of which are “featured” in the poem section of this very website. As Marijose rested and chatted with Marisa about what I would term as trivialities and they certainly would not, I’d pull out my “phone” and pluck at it with my index finger, eventually creating a series of words from nothing at all.

As is with most of the people I’ve met in my life, Marijose and Juan (Marijose’s spawn, featured in the photo below) did not want to stray from the well trodden path. Marisa was a bit of another story, of course, or we never would’ve got along in the first place. Whilst the three of them were traipsing ahead towards the mystical tejo (to which no-one actually ever arrived), I clambered up with the dog (Uriel or Charlie - take your pick of a name) a shallow divot off to the side of the trail and discovered a steep descent on the other side that eventually led down to the river. The dog was eager to explore! So was I! And whilst I don’t specifically recall how I convinced everyone else to retreat into my newfound space, they all adored it once they were there.

Trail Three: El Pinar

The way to the so-called Pinar was the most difficult. It was rocky and usually drenched in oppressive sunlight. Strangely, though, it was my favourite. Also strangely, during the last few years I lived in Spain, we never returned to it. In fact, the ultimate time we ascended that rocky dirt road and turned the nigh 180 bend to ascend even more into the shade of the pines and finally to a clearing that was possibly the most beautiful place in the region was most probably before the first time I abandoned my marriage and fled to Praha.

Marisa always returned the same way we came. A few times, however, I continued after the clearing to a path that became increasingly twisty and overgrown. At one point, there is a sharp turn to the left (another nigh 180 degrees) though it is quite possible to continue straight - which I did one time, much to my increasing consternation. Thorned bushes whipped at my bare arms, aiming for my face and eyes, surely. Rotted trunks of giant tree-things crisscrossed the path, forcing me to climb, shimmy and scoot further on. I realized after quite a long time, perhaps as much as 30 minutes or five days or even a whole epoch, that I had made a wrong “turn” and had to double back. As the stunted one says: fun!.

I always had the wish, in fact, that the stunted one accompany me on this back trail and we with us had a wad of marijuana, puffing as we strolled, speaking of absurdities and the fact that we’d never make it back after the totality of epochs under the reign of the elements.

Speaking of Praha and specifically Velká Chuchle, portions of the “Pinar” reminded me of the ascent on another dirt track, potted from rain and combustible goats, namely in, well, Velká Chuchle. It’ll be an ascent I’d like to once more take soon.

Music plays a big part in my recollection of scenes from my past. Though I can divorce myself from the phenomenon when concentrating on a piece or song, I can easily swap out the chip (as they say, and I am paraphrasing, in España) and have myriad musics hurl me back into certain swaths of time. This assists me in recalling the whole event surrounding the listening “session”. The remembrance extends to fuzzy frontiers that are quite likely different for each “song”. The strength of impression varies.

A good example, and one I often for some reason come back to is during a walk from a shop somewhere in Galicia back to the tent I was occupying with Jana One in late summer of 2002. The music was the first few songs on Sometime / Anywhere by The Church. Now, these remind me of another prominent time in my life, also, and it seems contextual which nostalgic event washes over me - meaning the context of my situation in the present as I’m listening. In any case, I’m walking back to the tent along a dirt road that runs along one side of the whole campground. There were signs marking off the distance to the entrance. 200m. 150m. 100m. I thought about the length of time it takes to walk such distances and I wondered if slowing my pace would let me enjoy the moment more thoroughly. I had a bottle of beer with my purchases and knew it would irritate Jana One, but didn’t let it bother me much, as I was listening and strolling. I recall the air, the humidity, the track and the crunch from the soles of my shoes. I remember Jana’s surly impatience in everything as we travelled from San Sebastian to the western tip of Spain.

Music is very important to recollection. Because of this, I am saddened by the fact there is little music that I shared with Marisa. Nothing directly reminds me of her. Perhaps if I heard some of her favourite songs, they may, but there certainly won’t be many situations that come up that involve such a thing. On the other hand, much reminds me indirectly of her. They were all private listening moments for me - as I was in a headphone universe - but she was there in the room and / or we interacted intermittently concerning trifles. A good example was whilst we were in Siracusa and we both lay in bed doing our own things. I was reading (as usual) and listening to Hawkwind’s newest album Stories from Time and Space. Much of it, if I am not active listening, hurls me right back to that bed in that hotel, reading Geddy Lee’s biography. Marisa was beside me, doing her own things, writing, going over plans and thinking about painting.

It’s possible that this lack of musical context with Marisa during our time together will make our times dissolve more quickly - memory-wise. I find the thought rather disturbing. Even though I left in the end, the ten years we spent together were filled with amazing moments. BUT I say to myself again that many of those moments were, even though I was with Marisa, spent alone, doing and creating things alone with her somewhere else in the flat carrying on in her own fashion.

Music also sings association with the fetid place that I am in now, of course - Seminole, Texas. And, en realidad, some of those associations are extremely positive. The epoch from 2009-2012 is a bright moment in my mind. I should probably go back and reread Martenblog entries from that period for perspective. Numerous musicks bring it flooding back into my brain. Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat, Carla Kihlstedt (solo stuff), Tin Hat (also Carla related), Phaedra, The Mountain Goats, Incident era Porcupine Tree, some Radio Massacre International, etc. The brightness comes from the idea that I was very prolific creatively during the period. It’s true that Tony and I began working together again (for the last time physically together, unfortunately, I predict). Ajitter came to light and though listening to it now is not a very pleasant experience, the ideas are amazing. More of it will be remade in the future. And Fold will be remade again in the future. I also began writing my so-called “book” in the midst of this epoch. I’m not sure it’ll ever be finished, but, as with Ajitter, some of the ideas are fantastic. During those years, I was in Seminole, Prague, London, Tallinn, St. Johns, and Seaforth. The road trip from Texas to Newfoundland also occurred. Plus, I hung out many times with Justin. Yes yes - The Shostakovich String Quartets! They were part of that epoch.

Though I still have twinges, my feelings for Marisa (and unfortunately for Molly) have receded. They exist, but are distant. I can peer at them, evaluate them, sense them from afar. But the ache is gone. Tony always called me a romantic because after an emotional shock, such as leaving one’s wife or having one’s soulmate (I guffaw) do the abandoning, I am intensely wretched for weeks, months, even thirds of years, but then the ache fades and I am well again. I move on. Tony, on the other hand, never seemed to be able to follow suit. He most likely still pines for Melanie.

This society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children. For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.

This topic has been the subject of conversation throughout my life with multiple posses of friends.

Bender and I went over time and again the idea of his that there are two types. Yes, I know it seems a bit black and white given my love for the grey and the muddled, but given the subject matter, the memories came to the surface and float there still, and besides, it’s certainly not a poor concept.

Bender and I went over time and again the idea of his that there are two types. There are those that stay. There are those that leave. The former remain to keep the traditions and some might say rituals of the village alive. They perpetuate its legacy. The latter are the banished. Well, according to our original conversations, not exactly the banished, but the ones who choose to leave (or are self-banished), though in the context of the quote above, I’d say the choice is heavily influenced by the cognitive dissonance involved in living and / or growing up in said village. The latter may choose to leave, but their choice is in line with their “rejection” by the former of the two types.

One important point here is that those of the latter type - the banished by their own freewill - are not all of the same mind or, shall we scribe, type. Their only commonality is that they do not wear a skin that suits the village. This by no means indicates that these banished are able to relate psychologically amongst themselves.

Most recently, Christian and I have touched on the subject time and again. And it is clear to me that I am one of those black aardvarks who is indeed, in the end, banished from the so-called village.

Well, one must just go out and start one’s own village, then, eh?

When the topic emerges from the morass of conversation, I’m always struck by the fact that I am much more interested in those that are on the verge of or have already been banished from the village. The ones who are out. These are the people I relate to. Or at least I relate to their context. As mentioned above, I may not be able to relate to all of them or even the majority of them personally or ideologically. They are, in a sense, my “extended family”. They are the ones who either couldn’t stand to or couldn’t be bothered to conform enough to fit the role or wear the skin.

Biologically, some would say, and you know who I’m talking about, when those who are out are tossed from the community, only the void awaits, but I am in disagreement. Sociology be damned. Sociology is a kick the pregnant woman in the belly sort of pursuit, in any case. Those busy with riding on the raft that drifts in a straight line down the only river said to be correct by the sociologists are seeing a narrow slice of reality. The jungle springs up on each side of said river and within it seethes creativity - a deviant procession of fractured routines. We, the out, even at times watch as the raft wafts along. And, of course, there are hangers on. Those who tread beside the raft as quickly or as slowly as it goes and keep track of its goings on no matter that they are out. They are the fools of the out. Traipsing through the jungle at our own rhythms, polyrhythms, ever external from that miniscule capsule of so-called “order”, we live on the love to create.

How long is it possible to subsist with no “support village”? I’d say eternally, but most would disagree. I may even disagree with myself at times, and especially during the days after a binge has left me weak of body and of mind. When depression sets in like any illness, the brain behind the forebrain pines for the village. It yearns for support - a structure to uphold it. The solution is to never put oneself in the situation where depression (weakness) reigns. As there are more situations in life than extended hangovers that weaken one’s spirit, the solution is to move to Greenland. It’s obvious.

So what can uphold someone other than the village? The solution that I see, besides or possibly including moving to Greenland, is the richness of an inner life that resembles a village. It’s a virtual world within one’s mind. One lives in it, eventually, more completely than in the so-called “real” world. It becomes one’s village. It becomes the village (or, more specifically, collection of villages) in which those traipsing through the jungle live instead of creating their own sort of “raft” to let float on some offhand tributary but not along the main stream. “Mainstream”. Queue the song by Kansas.

Keiko in Convenience Store Woman found a trickling tributary to build her own raft on. It was a microcosm that was the Convenience Store. She could relate to no other environment. She spoke constantly during the book about how her family and friends wanted to cure her. This simply meant that they wanted her to reboard the “raft” that floated down the widest river. Unbeknownst to them, however, and even to her until the end of the novel, she had already found a smaller stream that suited her just fine.

As long as you wear the skin of what’s considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won’t be driven out of the village or treated as a burden.

The personaje Shihara is the voice of the out in the novel. He even reflects it in his “appearance”. He is unwashed, voices his thoughts directly without any “filter” and obeys none of the unwritten cultural rules. So he’s basically me. Interesting that he is the “author” of the above quote, but he follows none of its “advice”. He wears only his true skin. He won’t lower (in his eyes) himself to wear the skin of the masses and therefore be accepted, or at least tolerated. His outcome is to find a place to hide from society. He wants nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want anyone to bother him or even communicate with him. So he’s me, or at least me when I’m on a boat in the middle of the Pacific with nobody but the “cat”.

I have severe psychological issues when I feel I have to wear a “skin” to fit into any given situation. I know it is uncommon and one of the major reasons that I am out. I discuss it with Christian often. I also discussed it with Jeremy when last I visited him and perhaps also the time before. If you pluck any arbitrary human from the seething masses, or at least mark him, you’ll observe that depending on the environment he is in, he quickly covers himself with a “skin”. His gesticulations, articulations and diction changes subtly and sometimes not so subtly depending on with whom he is. The portion that strikes me as rancid is that it is a plea for acceptance. It is a form of begging. For without said skin, he would be regarded as someone who does not belong. He’d be rejected, detained, jailed or even murdered, depending on context.

Is the need for acceptance a survival instinct?

It most likely grew from survival. Humans originally had to belong to groups to “make it” in the so-called savage world. Some (including Shihara) say that we haven’t changed much in the intervening years, decades, centuries, millennia. I disagree. The simple fact that one can become a hermit and get along fine “in the world” denies the deniers. The ache to be alone can be fulfilled. It has been able to be fulfilled for centuries now.

Memetic inheritance may push against the wish to be alone. It may scream at us from our so-called primal brain, chastising even the thought of ceding from society. I’ve certainly learned to ignore this so-called primal brain. I suggest you do, as well.

You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange - maybe that’s what everyone means when they say they want to “cure” me.

Being in West Texas, I can’t help think from time to time about growing up, though not in Seminole, but in a similar place - the fetid dump that was (and surely still is) Fort Stockton. Why was it a fetid dump? The smell? The stench? Well, the metaphorical stench was very difficult to abide. The strangeness that I inhabited in my natural skin opposed the idea of elimination of the stench by wearing a new skin, albeit a false one. It would have been a skin that would not just have camouflaged me but would have created of me a new being altogether.

Being that it was High School, I naturally got the curious stares and even the “why are you so weird?” from the token “popular girls” that I shared some classes (notably Journalism) with. They didn’t know it at the time, but they wanted to cure me. Or perhaps they did know it on some level that wasn’t only unconscious. In their universe, the day-to-day was all about fitting in. It was all about conforming. It was all about manicuring the skin that allowed one to flow fluidly with the masses. The masses here meaning the hip crowd, for lack of a better phrase.

So what could I have eliminated during that portion of my life to become something more fluid with the mainstream? An obvious one would have been to stop listening to weird music. Stack all my Pink Floyd, Blue Öyster Cult, Nektar, Jethro Tull and Klaatu records in a heap in the back yard and start a bonfire. I could have invited Sharon Weber over. She would have embraced me and yawped for joy at my new persona. Or at least she would have died of smoke inhalation. I hear that burning vinyl exudes toxins. Fuck um. And, hey, from where I sit now, Pink Floyd, Blue Öyster Cult, Nektar, Jethro Tull and Klaatu really aren’t all that weird. It’s all about context, vole.

I would have eliminated my apathy towards fashion. I’d’ve gotten me some trendy threads. I’d’ve eliminated my desire to read long form Science Fiction and fantasy and taking joy in solving mathematics equations. I’d’ve eliminated my apathy towards sports and joined the polo club. I’d’ve been number one, vole. Number lippin’ one.

Numerous other items’d come to mind were I to sit here and muse. And I’d’ve been cured. My skin’d have been fluid. I’d mingled and melded. I’d’ve been whole.

Cured == whole.

Fuck um.

Today is day ZERO! Amazing! I can only gawk at the implications! And very appropriate is that day ZERO lands precisely on Lee’s birthday. My subconscious also acknowledged this small nugget of “truth”. I dreamed last night of Lee. We met in a commodious transit station full of diaphanous haze. Yes, my dreams often feature ostensibly open spaces with walls or barriers or even membranes in the receding distance instead of pressing against one’s senses. This may be a reflection of my claustrophobia.

Hey, Brother.

That’s what the song just said. I am cleansing my “main” phone. Rather, I’m changing its cache of music. A new epoch demands new listening habits. The music I’ve been binging this whole year has Logroño infused within its rhythms, textures and questionable melodic leaps. It must be put to rest for a time.

I must be cleansed from all my sins.

So says the song. I agree, in a very abstract sense.

I dreamt (consistency is for the weak) last night of Lee. We met in a capacious interval of space-time. It may have been some sort of transit station, as possibly all places in dreams are. It had been years or decades or epochs since we had last seen one another. In fact, he didn’t even recognize me. Of course, Lee looked exactly the same, his youth unchanged, the same as it was at the age of 23, in November of 1993. Many things rush back at me from that epoch. Lee’s presence among us was one of the most piquant of those things. He and I’d take a synth and his guitar and some sort of amplification device from the Enfield house (why didn’t we work on music there?) to the Bright Building on the A&M campus, into an empty, spacious lecture hall. The only concrete memory of music toil was the guitar solo of Yesterday’s Train, but it’s quite possible that we also explored A Fool Fancying Cliches, a tune that will be remade by Flavigula soon, along with its companion piece Sonata for a Sombrous Spirit. We did record the guitar solo to Yesterday’s Train at the Enfield house on that battered 6-track, a machine of which Tony has a replica. If I’m not mistaken, and I may well be, I have the cassette containing that “take” and that cassette is ripped, sitting somewhere on pCloud. Sounds like something I should listen to tomorrow. Something to etch into my charcoal scorched spirit.

Lee’s login on the server called Picard at the Statistics Department at the University was leel. He was fond of palindromes. The piece of cardboard or paper or plastic hanging on the door that entered into the most claustrophobic room in the Enfield house read Otto. It was his place of repose. A very temporary place, for sure, as he stayed with us for perhaps six weeks at most.

Still looking for the hat peg you can hang your hat upon.

That is what the song says. Lee would have enjoyed Peter Hammill quite a bit. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover his music until half a year or epoch after Lee’s demise.

One simple but deep regret I (still) have is the evening of Lee’s or my birthday, or even the day in between them, during which we were going to get drunk together. Unbelievably possibly at this point in my life, but not from the point of view of my 23 year old self, it would’ve been the first time we would have experienced such a thing. It did not happen, however, because Marcie called and kept me on the telephone for hours. I chose badly. My days with Lee were numbered. My days with Marcie were numbered, as well, but in a different way, a more capricious way, a more essentially pointless way. What I should have done and would do as my present self was just begin drinking whilst on the phone with my nubile teen until I didn’t give a fuck enough to continue the conversation.

An excellent strategy! In fact, it can be used in multitudinous contexts! I shall etch it into my charcoal scorched spirit.

Bow down to the Jargon King.

So the song states.

We walked along a passage with translucent mamparas to each side, again allowing washes of light. I said how are you doing, vole? and realized that I’d have to integrate thirty years of accumulated shibboleth into Lee’s vernacular. What was his response other than the sardonic grin he always wore, even in times of deep displeasure? The dream becomes vague. Or its pellucid light is dimming in my mind. Either way, much like the human, it is gone. It was a glimpse of a parallel reality, as perhaps all dreams are.

I say “Nothing is nothing!”

Bellows the song.

The restlessness is peaking and has the savory smell of anxiety. I welcome it. It comes rarely enough that even its unpleasant edges are a stimulus. At this time tomorrow, I’ll be on the way to Soria (or, rather, Rollamientas) with Dani to shoot the last scene I’ll most likely ever have within his productions, soundtracks not withstanding. On seemingly infinite occasions in receding epochs, I’ve chosen to let life displace me from everything I’d previously known, or at least displace me from everything within a defined chunk of time I’d previously known. I don’t mind. Take Sweet Entropy’s hand. Let’s go.

Fuck um.

The problem with day ONE is that there is still 48 hours to go, vole. Well, counting is for the weak, in any case, so I shall take it in stride.

I just created a rather pedestrian improvisation using the Syntrx II. My original intention was to explore the so-called Holloway Melody that I plan to use in heavy repetition and with moderate modification ongoing throughout the yet to be named 40+ minute piece that the semi-primate that calls himself “Christian Newman” will have to do some singing over. What kind of singing, you ask? Well, we are going to go full Zeuhl on this one. Zeuhl, you say? Well, not full Magma Zeuhl, but more along the lines of Weidorje Zeuhl - a type of Zeuhl that drifts through my mind in dreams and supplicates to be scribed into a long form composition. The Holloway Melody will play a vital role in the chant.

Speaking of Zeuhl, I’ve written one Zeuhlish part within Řeka (working title) that the aforementioned semi-primate will also be forced to sing. He’ll do it with all the eagerness of a wingless, caged raptor. That piece will be saved for the original electronic album that won’t be very electronic at all, at least on the surface. And surface forms are the only forms that matter to the gobbling hordes awaiting their musical meal.

The pedestrian improvisation I mentioned as recently as two paragraphs ago is playing again. I’m not too impressed, though that is to be expected. The days leading up to Sweet Entropy’s smack on the back of the head are always fraught with creative problems. I don’t feel specifically distracted, nor do I have a sense of anxiety or kinetic imprisonment. The hidden mental modules that feed my need to create are somewhat muted. The restlessness, not apparent when I practise guitar, perform household duties, walk to & fro about the neighbourhood or worship the local ministry of ungulates, plays havoc with my creative prowess.

Thus the pedestrianism of the improvisation. I’ll juice a few ideas from it, though the quantity may be meager.

Not much is left to do before my departure. One large box will go containing clothing, books, cds and miscellaneous knickknacks. I’ll buy another roll of bubble wrap to ensure the Yamaha monitors are safe during transport to Dani’s place. The original boxes vanished at some point. Since my “Decksavers” never arrived, I’ll be constructing cardboard cones to tape securely over the joysticks on both the Syntrx II (whom I need to name) and Gutter Fiend. I have excellent BAGS for the both of them. However, one must always care for joysticks. Joysticks are essential. I may need one at some point for the Modular system (which also needs a new name). “Perhaps”, as the semi-primate going on lumpish putty sometimes says.

Oh yes - I must copy my static Flavigula site over to nuevo thurk, my current cloud server. Why? Yak, the Raspberry Pi that hosts the flavigula site, its gemini counterpart and the Dobruszka bot, will be packed in one of the three suitcases that fly with me. After doing so, I have to temporarily change the Openresty config that points to Yak along the wires of my mesh network and point it instead directly at a directory structure on nuevo thurk itself.

Oouh baby.

After my ostensible final entry on Day ZERO, meaning tomorrow, I’ll perform this duty.

Now to urinate.

The dream found me, or the eidolon of me, in a diaphanous and capacious space like a high school gymnasium that extended to infinity in all directions. A song by Tears for Fears sauntered into my ears from the sound system. It was nothing that I know on this side of the dream reality, but my eidolon had it placed on the first album, despite the fact that the lyrics had something to do with “happy endings”. I’m aware that Tears for Fears has an album with a title that has something to do with “happy endings” and that my eidolon twisted the origin of musical sources. I’m not very familiar with that album, as opposed to their first, which I know intimately, like I knew Melanie’s skin during the months we lived in that hovel in Washington Heights. Oh, the nostalgia! Not that we listened to much Tears for Fears back then. But I have desviado, as they say in the ancient lands.

A human who was a combination of Jesus (not the historical figure) and Rostej (the historical figure) was at my side in the dream. Other humans were dotted around the shadow dappled interior. Whether these other humans were historical figures or not is open to interpretation. The Jesus-Rostej insisted the song that flowed around us had an aura of positivity and that it lifted his charcoal scorched spirit. As I am wont to do, and sometimes without adequate rationale, I disagreed. As if I could disagree to whether something was lifting his charcoal scorched spirit or not. I disagreed because the lyrics were in contradiction to any conceivable positive message. Anyone familiar with Tears for Fears’s first album can do a mental verification.

What followed was a discussion about how each person hears music differently depending on many factors. Rostej-Jesus argued that because of the physiological sameness of humans, everyone has the same listening experience. The intervals and rhythms are all interpreted by the brain in a way that could not result in anything but equality.

As anyone with more than a brain stem knows, and as my eidolon knew, the experience of art involves much more than the physiological. The emotional place a human is in within that human’s existence is essential. That is, the emotional place one is in at the very point in the day / night / crepuscular haze plays a role. But that emotional point doesn’t play the most important role. The sloshing chemicals that interpret music into both emotional and intellectual responses are subtly different in each human. Sometimes much more than subtly. Listening to a song by Tears for Fears and it having an affect on both the rational and wubby wubby parts of a charcoal scorched spirit is an extension of every experience one has had up to that point in one’s life.

Humans who have similar taste in music have either had very similar experiences since birth (such as growing up and never leaving the same pueblo or even state or país or bubble) or have arrived to where they are by convergent evolution. The latter is much more likely in the case of me and my compatriots. But despite my point, Jesus-Rostej continued his insistence and introduced into the conversation a range of homogenizing therapies and especially drugs. He was a proponent of today’s psychology, a rat-ass pseudo-science if there ever was one - and you can quote me on that - and of today’s psychologists and psychiatrists, a rat-ass pseudo-human collection of entities if there ever was one, and the propensity of today’s psychology to modify the perceptions of humans chemically. And especially to modify the perceptions of humans chemically so that humans all perceive the world in the same way.

The grand evening-out.

The grand evening-out is blasphemy in the face of the individual charcoal scorched spirit. It is repellent to me. The beauty of humanity is its diversity and especially the ability to interpret art (and to interpret, well, just about anything) in a manner that arises from the intellectual and emotional accumulation of a life’s unique path.

I’m going to shank the next psychologist I meet.

Day five. Amusingly, I miscalculated on Day 14, which should have been Day 15 if I planned for Day One to land on the day before I depart. It turns out that the day before I depart will be Day Zero. Well, why not?

As my departure approaches, my emotions churn, as I knew they would. They are affected by everything from what I have for breakfast (or if I have breakfast at all) and lunch to the temperature of pockets of air I walk through as I make my way from the building that houses “our” flat to my guitar lesson or to the supermarket or to the post office.

In an ancient epoch, let’s say sometime in 2004, I was drinking wine on an embankment overlooking the Vltava with a certain Zuzka. This certain Zuzka was the same Zuzka that was in a relationship with Michal and who also was the “best friend” of my then girlfriend Jana One. This certain Zuzka expounded at me about emotions. Feelings are the only thing that matter. Act upon them. Act upon them at the moment you sense them welling in your blackened spirit! She left out the blackened spirit part, but I’m sure it was implied in her delivery. I admit that I have left my spirit to roast upon the charcoal for far too long and far too many times. Be that as it MAY, this certain Zuzka insisted that I should obey impulses of sensations the chemicals sloshing around in my head give me and at the very moment they give me these sensations.

Right now, I cannot think of poorer advice from anyone I’ve known.

But I have taken this advice, subconsciously, time and again, and especially during the throes of recuperation from an alcoholic binge. Alas, those are the moments when my psyche is most fragile and I am wont to obey impulses spawned from quickly shifting emotions, mostly of sadness and solitude. In fact, I’ve made decisions that drastically changed the course of my life several times in that state. Were I only to wait a few days for my mind to clear and for discursive thought to reign again!

My point is that that certain Zuzka’s words were poison.

I’m not in the throes of recuperation from a binge, but I am feeling doubts, twinges of despair and other slow oscillations between questioning myself completely and knowing there is no other way forward. Discarding the hillocks and valleys, I strive to focus with the precision of my mathematical mind. It sorts through every event of the last ten years and makes comparative analyses. The conclusion is, of course, that there is no other way forward.

The extreme would be to say that sloshing chemicals should never be one’s guide, but I understand what is happening now is an edge case and emotions have to be discarded. In so-called normal life, I attempt to temper them, but not necessarily consign them to the pit.

Exuvia by The Ruins of Beverast bellows from my studio monitors. Black metal is certainly cathartic.

Day seven and there is still a proliferation of random objects in arbitrary locations around my place of “work”. The word work is a slippery one, especially on the lips of the American humans I grew up around. Though it never quite implied the same thing each time I heard it, it was almost regarded as sacred. Our indoctrination during childhood was to always focus on work. Work was the road to a “successful” future. Work was the path to salvation.

From the perspective of adulthood, this shifty word comes across as an quasi-religious form of self-enslavement. And I’m not just referring to being employed by another person or entity. The guilt that our indoctrination induced when we were not constantly doing or in the search of doing something that generated income indicated that no matter our form of work, we were subconsciously electing enslavement.

Of course, this has to do with class hierarchy, a concept that came into play millennia ago when striations had to be created for the good of agriculture. The lack of machines in that epoch created machines from men and birthed the peasant class, not to mention middle management. Yeah. I’m not a fan of anything relating too strongly to sociology, so I’ll leave it at this:

Humanity perished with the advent of agriculture. It’s been slow decay since.

The idea of work ethic my father tried to instill within my trembling spirit had nothing to do with the work I do when I am focused on music or even programming (for money!). The work ethic my father tried to instill within my shuddering spirit had nothing to do with contentment and everything to do with participating in a system too large for him to see. Well, I can’t say for sure that he never thought about the sauntering beast that was / is Western Culture and its insistence that we all be cogs within its machinery. He might well have, though somehow I don’t think he was trained up that way. In any case, when I went against this work ethic, I was punished. As a child, I was punished by my father, and later by a series of institutions: elementary school, high school, university, and employment after employment after employment.

Yes, following the work ethic kept me out of trouble, which is a form of contentment, but it never made me happy. I suppose glory be to the man or woman or machine entity that can BE a cog in the machinery within the sauntering beast that is Western Culture and BE that cog with contentment. Glory be! Of course, there is the question of indoctrination, brainwashing, whathaveyou with reference to said individual, but still - Glory Be!

The concept reminds me of the show Severance. The system (Lumen) is researching a manner to create cogs that know nothing other than the work itself and therefore have no comparison to how it may be like to exist in another manner. I’m certain their downfall will be ignoring the power of the human imagination. Well, unless they figure a way to suppress that, as well.

Backing up a moment - of course, had agriculture never come about, it’s likely humanity and thus society would not have evolved in a way that would have allowed me to be typing this. Probably I wouldn’t have even existed, at least not in this form. Whether humanity / Earth / the universe would have been better off is another speculation. The idea touches on something I’ve thought about more and more in recent years - that of systems evolving to be what they are in the same way that life evolved on Earth from simpler constituents. Humanity, at its base, is a system. And it is made up of other systems. That is, political states, empires, religious organizations and oxen like me making music that no other oxen will likely listen to. Each of these systems, including humanity itself, change constantly. They evolve. At some point, it is likely they reach a threshold and beyond that threshold they are an abomination. And they begin their decline.

As they say in the old lands: Fuck um.