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on an entirely unrelated theme...                  - 5/23/2001

when I went home last week I stumbled across one of my old yoga books, and I started going through the rest of my 'esoteric' bookshelf for ideas or stimulation... the end result was that I took up a yogic breath control practice I'd toyed with a few years back. the exercise basically consists of a series of rhythms of breathe in - hold breath - breathe out - hold breath - breathe in etc., with different rations and proportions between the stages according to what you're trying to accomplish... [say, breathe in for four heartbeats, hold your breath eight heartbeats, breathe out four heartbeats, hold breath out eight heartbeats, repeat til you achieve enlightenment...]

the last time I tried this, and in general immersed myself in the world of yogic breathing exercises was in a German youth hostel where I spent three incomprehensibly boring months at the end of '97, all by myself with a rucksack, a drum and a book of yoga, and no functional german. [I've never been so alone and miserable in my life... I still carry the scars: to this day, the combination of dead pig and someone speaking german makes me want to retch...]

so, I spent several weeks practising asanas six hours a day [yoga positions], visualising fiery Tibetan syllables flowing up and down my spine and the Goddess Kali dancing in the Cosmic Void with her necklace of skulls and her chalice of blood and her bladibladibladiblah..., breathing little or not at all, until in the end, in the middle of a spinal stretch with drawn-in stomach, held breath, tiny tiny Kali dancing on her dead husband's corpse in the middle of my brain [visualised, that is] and eyes firmly focused on the tip of my nose I suddenly blacked out, and found myself on the floor, arms and legs flailing, nose bleeding uncontrollably because I'd been banging my face into the floor... evidently I'd overdone it and caused myself a seizure.

needless to say, I chilled out considerably after that...

'why does the anarchist only drink herbal tea?'    - 5/23/2001

'because proper tea is theft...'

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sorry. had to put that in...

some people have remarked the curious lack of emphasis, in my account of the Second Goldfish Incident, on brash's reaction to crank's destruction of the goldfish.

an interesting point. to be honest, I haven't had the chance to find out how brash felt about it, as I've been zipping about and spent the night at gf's last night... from what I know of him, though, I'd guess he was pretty horrified. also, he's not the kind of person who brushes things under the carpet, really, though he's not nearly as confrontational as crank is...

I suppose there may be several reasons why the incident didn't erupt into fisticuffs... one is that we don't want to rock the boat too much. we've got a nice flat dynamic going, and none of us are particularly keen to disrupt this by creating factions, camps or violence... so maybe it's being underplayed a bit, for fear of the consequences a confrontation would have to future cohabitation? ... second, I suppose it's the kind of incident that doesn't really lend itself to resolution. I mean, it's beyond the pale, and unexpected... maybe brash doesn't know how to handle it or what to do about it... three, maybe brash is a bit scared of crank, as sloth suggested...

fourth, of course, everyone in the flat except me is British... *grins*. with all that entails... 'oh don't be silly. have another cucumber sandwich'..

ok, I'm being flippant. all this is unsubstantiated speculation, of course... it will have to be investigated with due tact and diplomacy when I get the chance to... and I will post an update on the situation when I find out more.

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as far as my reaction goes, the image of two goldfish desperately flapping about in the sizzling frying pan ,ith cranks round, drunken, leering face hanging over them, eclipsed the fact that the goldfish being fried were actually brash's property, until much later...

I suppose I don't tend to think of pets as property, as much as I think of them as just non-humans we look after...

so for me the more abstract shock of the incident was linked to the betrayal of a caretaker's responsibility towards those in his care, rather than to the destruction of someone else's property... though this is evidently a case of both...

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the social shockwave of the event sweeps at the speed of gossip through our circles... reactions to the incident largely focus on the 'grotesque' end of the Goldfish Incident spectrum, not the humorous one...

gf's and gfsister's lodger, call him Nuclear Hippy, said this sounded like the action of a deeply unhappy man... which might have a grain of truth to it... but then, Nuclear Hippy is deeply entrenched in the lingo paradigm of psychospeak and spiritual growth... you'd expect that from him.

Cheeky Cow said semi-seriously that she never wants to be in the flat alone with crank anymore, ever. she wants to be escorted even to the bathroom from now on... can't blame her, really. hordes of giant carnivorous albino mice on the one hand, and their cannibal pet-frying Lord and Racial Enemy on the other hand. kudos for daring to come to the flat, really...

gf was shocked, but not terribly. gfsister was more shocked, and a bit concerned, but I'm not going into further analysis of that since there's a long, slightly touchy history to her relationship with crank. [and BS will be reading this... ]. gfmama thinks colin is mad, but then they have a frayed history of loud disagreements...

                                       - 5/22/2001

certain aspects were revealed to me last night regarding the Goldfish Incident, that shed [even more] disturbing light on the psychological processes of the involved parties... er. party.

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well: apparently crank bit the head off one of the goldfish after frying it...

sorry. it's true. and I'm living with him...

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...I really don't know how to handle this. I mean, most of those who know crank seem to find the incident funny, and I agree, it is funny. but on the other hand, it's also sickening and atrocious. I mean, frying two living creatures is bad enough... biting the head off the corpse is Hannibal Cannibal territory... even though a fried fish is, after all, food...

articulating why, precisely, I found it funny when crank does it, but not as an abstract idea, is not easy... when I got the story the first time, it was from flutter, and she was laughing, so I laughed too... yet at the same time I felt sick...

the situation was, and still is, delicately poised between the absurd [humorous] and the grotesque [sick]. and though it can pivot either way... for me, at least, it seems more and more to move towards the grotesque.

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now: why is it funny. two main reasons, I think.

it's funny because of its sheer outrageousness. its not something that happens in normal life, and shock effects of this kind make you laugh with the unexpectedness of it...

also:

it's funny because it confirms a humorously established working definition we have of crank, as a computer-geek with strong sympathies for machines, for evolution and for natural hierarchies... and little or no sympathy for small living creatures.

the act fits in with cranks lethal interest in mousetraps and other things that kill small living beings... and since his passion for mousetraps is funny, and his talk of cruelty is funny, this thing is funny too... because goldfish are after all in a similar category to mice...

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now, these two points are both funny when they happen within a specified framework, something that keeps them safe and communal and contained.

violently absurd situations on film, or in celluloid reality where no one gets hurt, are fine. as long as they're devoid of real consequences they are simply food for the mind, and stimulation. not destructive. absurd situations in reality, though, often carry the promise of pain, disruption, injury following immediately after the ontological shock that makes you laugh... they have to be contextualised. and when they are contextualised, they are seldom funny for the people involved.

to me, this situation [man fries his flatmates goldfish and bites its head off] is something which belongs firmly in the realm of the imagination. it could have been harmlessly funny on tv, in a fictional setting... the actualisation of this fantasy, like sexual fantasies of rape, doesn't overlap much with the fiction.

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similarly, the humorous stereotype we have of crank is kept in check by the assumption that he won't overstep certain careful, unspoken boundaries we set for the communal set of possible behaviours. I mean, cruelty, and contempt for non-sentient creatures, cartesian beliefs about the machinelike nature of animals can be funny, as long as we can assume that no one is going to act on what they say in a manner that is not acceptable to us. it's funny, as long as we can assume that we all share similar assumptions about what is feasible and what can be done...

this behavioral familiarity is what establishes zones of social comfort, like the flat, and keeps them going.

we can assume that none of us are going to react violently to sarcasm around the dinner table. we can assume we're not going to have rapes, heroin overdoses, gunfights, theft. we can assume that no one is going to put their penis in your mouth while you sleep and take pictures... and we can assume that none of us are going to torture and kill a living creature by frying it, then biting its head off...

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well, we can't.

that's why we found it funny in the first place.

and that is why on reflection it's not really that funny...

[later]: ok, clarification. didn't mean to imply that crank is going out to rape people... what I mean is, I at least have to reassess my assumptions about what crank will and will not do... by doing something that I consider unthinkable for myself, he has stepped, momentarily perhaps, outside the boundary of common assumptions... hence, one has to reconsider.

bottom line is, I don't think he's dangerous, and he's mostly a very nice guy.

but its pretty damn fvcked up to fry two goldfish alive.

crank's complexities                               - 5/22/2001

there is a basic contradiction at the heart of crank.

one the one hand, he systematically argues for a Cartesian model of animal psychology, which I find unnerving, cerebral and somewhat pathological...

brief historical note:

Descartes argued that since animals have no souls, they can not experience pain. they can go through the motions of pain, but they do not have a subjective consciousness on which the pain can register. they are for all intents and purposes machines.

Descartes was the principal reason why I gave up philosophy in my first year at university. the animal argument was just one of the reasons, but definitely a reason.

given the fact that you cannot logically prove that other people have minds [you cannot, as far as I understand, prove that the outside world exists and that you are not a brain in a vat being tortured by sadistic researchers... (might explain GWBush, for one...)]

given this, I don't see how this attitude can not be easily extended to human beings. the lack of empathy, the lack of comprehension of the pain of others is the basic defining characteristic of the sociopath, as far as I understand it... hence, potentially at least, maybe even actually, a pathological trait...

I think, the moment you draw a distinction between 'souled' and 'unsouled', between 'subjects' and 'non-subjects' in talking about living beings, I think you're on very shaky ground...

which is where we find crank in the goldfish incident. hmmmmm...

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on the other hand... crank loves dogs, because he grew up with them. and dogs, according to crank, are subjects and can experience pain.

hummm? spot the contradiction?

the result is, that rather than a coherent philosophical system, I think we have a selective, emotionally charged refusal to admit or incorporate the vast majority of beings into one's emotional world...

*zappppp*: hoho. psychobabble alarm.

what I mean is, I don't know how this position can be defended systematically... I know some nice dogs, so dogs are the exception to the rule that animals are not subjects... all other animals, though, are not subjects...

if you are going to kill and eat animals, I would go as far as to say that any attempt to deny these animals you eat their 'self-hood' and their capacity to feel pain amounts to blatant hypocrisy. feeble self-justification, with potentially devastating, insane consequences...

it's the basic mechanism of exclusion from the set of sentient, worthy, valuable creatures that lead Germany to destroy the Jews, the gypsies, the homseoxuals, Jeohva's Witnesses, Russians, you name it...

some creatures are 'real', some are 'not real', and we can dispose of the latter category as objects, without considering their subjective experience of the way we dispose of them...

I'm not saying that crank is directly linked to the Holocaust. what I am saying is, that we should be [I certainly try to be] on guard against any mental habit that denies to a living creature ontological validity...

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*pauses*...

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*frowns* ... *hmmmmm* ... I see.

there are philosophical problems to this, aren't there... like why aren't we nice to rocks and stones... we're denying them 'beinghood' by force of habit, language and indoctrination...

cranks attitude to animals is just parallel to our attitude to rocks and stones... we don't consider them subject to pain, he doesn't consider goldfish subject to pain...

*hummmmm*... still, I think my point stands... anyway, I need to work now... be well ye all...

the excess of reason produces monsters...          - 5/21/2001

can't turn your back on things for five short holiday days without some unexpected dark atrocity happening behind your back...

while I was gone:

true to his sympathy for the manmade machine and all things not biological, crank asserted his position at the top of the foodchain, adding another chapter to my goldfish saga in the process...

the story is very simply that one night, alone in the flat and possessed by the vicious demons of solitary drunkenness, the ones that blur the lines between inner fantasy and outer reality...

crank picked brash's two goldfish out of their tank and FRIED them.

alive.

he. fried. two. goldfish. alive.

then he put one of them on a little plate in brash's room, with a suggestive note along the lines of 'guess where the other one is', in a disturbing quid pro quo replay of the pickled mouse over christmas incident [long-term readers will probably remember that]... talk about the lex talionis...

I still haven't quite 'digested' the implications of that fact. so many questions... did he use butter or olive oil? did he eat the corpses?and does this indicate that crank lacks certain fundamental mechanisms of inhibition, and that he might extend his hunter-killer appetite for live flesh to other, more exciting, more challenging prey?

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I'm going out to get an asbestos pyjamas. now.

also, I'm glad we didn't get a cat in the end...

...being a brief explanation as to the meandering whereabouts of that squire of the realm, known as sangreal, whose voice hath not been heard in these halls for quite some time now...

just to bring things up to date. since wednesday night I've been at home, back in norway, recouping and regrouping my scattered energies in preparation for what I expect will be a scorching round of hardcore interviews...

I've now started submitting the applications for my next stage in life, the bit where I wander off the path of enlightenment and stray into the waiting arms of confusion and materialist darkness... 30k+ a year, company laptops, suits and power lunches and presentations... expect to (hopefully) reemerge in my late twenties, with at least the approximation of transferable skills that will allow me to retire peacefully to some broadband-enabled little island in the pacific, therefrom to pursue a career in freelance consultancy or programming wizardry...

hey, life's about overcoming yourself isn't it... upgrading from a pawn to a bishop in the chessgame of global capitalism is a self-overcoming, in my book... *wry not entirely convinced chuckle*...

so - one application to PandG, one to a media strategy and research consultancy based in London, [slutboy: this is to be kept quiet for the moment, yo hear me? ] and I'm working on my gigantic application to Accenture... which is by far the most desirable alternative at the moment... also considering McKinsey, Ernst and Young, etc. ... why not. if they take me, good, if not, interviews are part of life too, and probably the source of amusing anecdotes in the future...

The other avenue that lies half-open in front of me, to the LEFT, is that of volunteering somewhere warm over winter, to hibernate, and come back to think about my 'serious' so-called life this time next year, when things get bearable again... spotted a nice little job clearing paths for a national park in the Dutch Antilles, in the caribbean... mmmmmmmm...

going home this time I got back in time to celebrate Norwegian national day, rather half-heartedly because of rain and adverse atmospheric conditions, and catch up with my friend, Prototype Irony Lenin, who looks a bit like a bald nisse... I'm catching my brother on his way back from the states on Sunday, just as I'm going back to London...

and tonight I'm going out to catch the Mummy's [cinematic] Return, with Prototype Irony Lenin, Beefcake [another local friend of mine] and his girlfriend Lolita [he's 24, she's 17. ew...]... and a girl I haven't gotten around to naming yet because I don't really know her that well...

and the sun's been shining all day. all in all, things aren't bad...

HURRAH everyone. happy norwegian national day.

much flagwaving throughout OD realms, I should hope...

be well ye all.

I'm about to buy an orgone generator cum bioelectrical zapper, complete with crystals, 'rare earth magnet' etc. good ol' style 'weird science' stuff.

orgone generators were invented by Reich in the 1930s, but his books were promptly burned by the FDA / US government / New World Order... [immediately stimulates your interest in the subject, doesn't it...]

skeptic's dictionary entry on reich and orgone: here

article on the subject: here

orgone research: here

now, the device I'm looking at combines an orgone generator with a circuit that transmits a low-intensity electric current through the body, pitched at certain frequencies that apparently destroy the bioelectrical fields of noxious, invasive and parasitical organisms.

while the theory of the gadget is based on the work of R.R. Rife, again a 1930s US scientist, who claimed to have identified the 'mortal frequencies' of a number of pathological organisms, the actual model is based on a diagram published by Dr. Hulda Clark, a Swiss scientist and developer of Rife's theories, who published a book ambitiously entitled 'The Cure for All Diseases' a few years back. In the book she made the claim that all diseases are caused by parasitic organisms, organisms that can be destroyed by a device that pumps a mild current through the body, scanning through the various frequencies of the most common invading organisms.

Clark research association website: here

Skeptical article on Clark: here

Relatively comprehensible website on Rife: here.

haven't got the time to develop this train of thought properly here. interested parties can read up on their own, I suppose.

the point is, I'm about to buy this device because my half-cousins fiancee has been diagnosed with bad-prognosis liver-cancer and I have an empiricist mindset. the device can do no harm, it is relatively cheap (102$ with shipping charges for an enhanced orgone generator w/ zapping device), it is acclaimed by a number of laymen, and importantly, the claims of the debunkers are theoretical and emthodological objections, not objections to the practical usefulness of the device. in fact, as far as I can see, they largely ignore the actual device. and the fact that the inventor published the diagrams for it in her book, and on various websites, thus undermining a possibly immense source of future income for herself.

curious, that, isn't it. open-source, cheap, non-chemical medical science for the layman. bypassing . you can see why the medical and pharmaceutical companies might not be interested, heh...

pretty much like what the government responded to the Leary LSD situation with in the 60s. claims to personal gnosis and empowering anti-systemic knowledge are the mortal enemy of systems of government. oppression, repression and a refusal to engage in reasonable, scientific, rational discussion. fear, economic motives, vested interests, sickness.

I dislike the idea of dismissing, rather than disproving, a harmless device with a significant following, on the principle that it counterindicates present theory. go scientific revolutions, I say. only way to resolve this, I think, is empirically.

besides, I do this for ideological reasons. any dissenting voice against the medical industry, with something going for it, that is being refused the right to scientific validation of its claims on semi-religious dogmatist grounds has my immediate sympathy.

it's the aristotelian physics question of the sack of feathers and the leadweight all over again. go galileo.

so there.

...the little voice in my head that warns me against consorting with people who say they'll 'awaken my kundalini'...

but at the same time, I'm well-versed in the Mystic Lore that concerns itself with these things... I could recite to you the seven chakras, their colours, psychic function, resonances, names in sanskrit; give you twelve techniques to purify your psychic nadis and awaken the coiled serpent goddess at the base of your spine; I could place and name most of the meridians of the chinese medical system, along with their five elements, organs, tastes, directions, qualities, colours of the rainbow and poltical systems (whatever...); the theory and practice of qi gong meditation, postures, attitudes, points of concentration, states, 'Extraordinary Powers' like flight, immateriality, telepathy, pyrokinesis... the philosophical principles of tai chi, bone marrow washing, etc. etc. ; I could discuss the esoteric anatomy of Chinese inner alchemy, leading up to the birth of the spiritual embryo, the Transcendence of the Matrix and the attainment of the Indestructible Diamond Body with ensuing physical immortality and utter timeless omnipotence... I could even disclose to you the secret meditational technique of the buttplug... (no, you don't want to know)... yogic techniques to prolong life, reverse the flow of semen and 'pump it up the spine' on orgasm [yeah, I know, anatomically dubious. not going into a complete discussion on 'subtle energies' etc. at this point...], absorb liquid mercury through the tip of your penis. ignite the psychic fire, take over the minds of others, transcend the physical body throught the top of your head and occupy the body of a newborn child...

I can still name the ten sephirot of the Tree of Life, most of their correspondences, the 22 paths that connect them w/ letters and some of the correspondent cards in the Crowley tarot... the 24 letters of the runic alphabet, with etymologies, concrete symbolic significance and wider cosmic significance. as well as some of the postures of a ridiculous school of 'runic martial arts' that I was exposed to in the. I am familiar with the breathing techniques of Pranayama, the Tao te Ching, and Christian saints...

and so on and on and on...

I say 'still', because all this weird, obscure and relatively esoteric (though how esoteric can it be... I got most of it from books. hardly old enough to have spent 10 years in a Tibetan monastery, am I... particularly because the Chinese occupational government pretty much razed temples to the ground, plugged red-hot metal spikes into the foreheads of the monks and raped the nuns with dogs when they took over... not leaving many people to transmit the teaching-outside-the-doctrines, heh...) lore belongs to a previous state of existence... my lean hungry days of studying the occult... up to about two years ago. then I got a bit bored and decided to move on to other things. such as getting a job, sorting out my material activities etc. as the qabalists say, you should be at least 35 and married with 2 kids before you attempt to seek the True Countenance of G-d. or you will be driven mad... *shrugs*.

anyways. on the theme of 'quack quack'...

1. douglas adams died today. a sad day, I think. hate it when bright, funny inspiring visionaries die. one less bright light in the literary universe...

2. I'm doing the washing-up (very intermittently since about 4pm); alone in the flat, in a sarong, with a fetching black shiva-scarf wrapped around my head. housewively bursts of diligence interspersed with browsing through a guide to java for the mentally challenged that crank has 'casually' left on the hub. not to convert me, obviously...

3. estonia won the annual eurovision song contest kitsch-fest. terry wogan on good form. I liked the spain entry, myself.

4. I'm starting to wonder if I should try to get a life.

5. tony blair is deploying a weird, twisted sacral pop-god schoolgirl icon thing (cfr. newspapers a few days ago). reasonably unhyped election statements though. visionary but not over the top.

6. the tories grunt their way with sheer ugly populism and 'foreign land speeches' and racial scandals... I mean, prominent MPs claiming that Britain is turning into a mongrel race, or a 'foreign land'. ridiculous, nay even obscene. hopefully, the british public is not so intolerably thick, ignorant, intolerant, hateful and narrowminded that they get into power. one must retain a bit of faith, must one not...

7. but then, that's what I said before the US election too...

I just hit my front page at 1666 hits on my sitemeter. whether this be the fire of london in 1666, the first and real Great Fire that stoked the metonymic furnace fires of the industrial revolution...

and by extension, the fire of greed that feeds the blessed earth by spadefuls into the fiery furnace of moloch, intangible yet all too real god of the soulless global marketplace...

maybe the cold fire of hell that will consume the guilty unbelievers, [ie. those who fail to gratify my ego by leaving notes when they pass through]. the fleshburning flames that sear the entombed bodies of damned heretics in avernus.

either way, I hit 1666 in a London office. surely this means something. fires of global greed or heresy, or languid hellish flames of boredom licking my sluggish frame...

my time is coming. expect cataclysmic monsters to rise from the deep to adore me. very soon, I tell you.

1000 notes. woo-hoo.

and on that note, cheerful news.

a mexican woman is suing the Banco del Atlantico for 44 billion dollars, in repayment for $10 000 she placed in her account in 1988, money that was taken out and used by the bank in a massive financial salvage operation in the 90s and never repaid.

this accounts to an overdraft, to be repaid at 149% interest rate / year, accounting also for inflation etc.

the amount exceeds the capital holdings of the bank, and equals one third of Mexico's foreign debts. it would make the poor woman, who is 83 years old with 19 children (16 surviving) and lives on 150$ a month, one of the richest women in the world.

yeah right. fat chance.

the amazing thing is though, that the claim was upheld in a local court! Banco del Atlántico, the offending entity, now has one month to decide whether they want to take the case to a higher court...

ueber-verbosity about nothing, really.             - 5/9/2001

rustpot pointed out yesterday that I'd been very quiet for a few days. hmmmm I thought, a quick flash of multicoloured OD screens (with or without soundtracks) before my inner eye; true across several modes of expression...

I have been very quiet for a while now. in everyday conversation I notice the little wriggling retorts and witticisms and contributions forming in my head, but I can't be bothered to lift them out of their misery and over my lips. I don't write e-mails (too tired, uninspired) to people, I don't really communicate things. seem to be busily closed up in my own head. mildly autistic, in the sense of a retreat from some aspects of the world. benevolent though. not unpleasant.

why this sudden and apparently unprovoked state of fugue?

not entirely sure. could be because my malignant wormwood concoctions have finally started to erode my higher brain functions. brain damage, seizures and death, after all... maybe the st johns worth ("nature's prozac") I'm taking is sedating me into a state of blissed-out happiness (why aren't I happier then?). maybe the entire flask of black walnut extract I glogged before going to bed last night has affecte me in bizarre ways. maybe my brain, inspired by recent events in the political arena, has taken the short and efficacious route of direct action against herbal hobbyroom chemotheosis:

*megaphone* "take me back to the old days you thief of dignity!" *picket picket picket* "the good old days when you didn't skulk around like a thieving psychedelic shadow in the aisles of organic supermarkets, hunting for that elusive, legal engine of siege to deploy against the fortress of the mind! the days when you proudly paraded the illegally altered visage of your psyche on street corners, chatting to police officers with your brains floating gently out of your ears and the ground morphing like a heaving beast beneath your feet..."

oh be quiet brain. don't plague me with your rambling sentences. it's 11am. not the right time for longwindingness.

however ridiculously my metabolic functions seem to fluctuate under the wide array of influences I bombard them with at the moment... I don't think it's that simple.

I think it's a shift. the structure of my thinking has changed a bit. it does that quite often. this time, I can venture to guess that it's because of two factors. one is, I started writing on paper again over the week-end. I know this sounds silly, but the indelible movement of a sharp pen on paper (dead wood), rather than the steady, broad cannonade of typing fingers launching endlessly retractable phrases and combinations of cyphers into the magnetic ether of cyberspace...

they're two very different modes of thinking, carrying very different connotations, associations, ideas, habits, mental reflexes. you name it. they're different. like speaking and writing. the approximation, in my head of the two modes of speech and the typed word has been steady, over the last two years, to the point where my written voice and mannerism are not that dissimilar to my spoken ones (except in entries like this); but this has come at the cost of an almost complete (superficial) atrophy of my use of the physically written word. I've grown quite eloquent typing, but writing a page of linear, carefully constructed arguments with a pen has become virtually impossible.

all because of the lazy turpitude of 'post-ejaculatory' visual thinking that comes with word processing. spit the words and letters out, then think. the screen becomes an extension of your mental processes. in fact, most of your cogitation takes place on the screen. your physical, organic mind is simply a stuttering spring of semantic units, fragmented images, words and phrases, vomited forth and to be organised once they're out in the open. an entire layer of mental processing has been relegated / delegated, so to speak, and is no longer "inhouse"... it takes place on the monitor. to all extents and purposes, the screen and the cpu are extensions of my own thinking apparatus...

how bizarre. I am, technically, a cyborg. according to some definitions.

anyway. the point was, writing on paper after long periods of neglect sometimes does funny things to me. like kickstarting different parts of the brain that suddenly cut into the nutritional flow of rich oxygenated blood feeding the parts of my brain that can be bothered to deal with neuroses, social interaction etc. start thinking in terms of associations, structures, abstractions, arguments, chains of thoughts...

second reason is, I'm still a bit phased out from spending the week-end at gf's place. "blissed out", almost. the exact opposite of the previously described process.

whatever. gotta work now. hope you're all well. sorry to ramble. can't seem to express myself in sentences of less than 50 words at the moment. it'll pass.

first, however, a cup of KUA-fee and one of my yummy new 'Natural American Spirit' wholeleaf additive-free naturally grown 100% organic cigarettes. so natural they're actually good for you. and they clean the environment up, do your groceries and stage peace conferences in the middle east.

yeah right. cancer it is. but a nicer, smoother, cleaner, milder, less chemically riddled cancer perhaps.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

yowza. friday night.

following a saturnalian dinner of mango chicken curry with rice, living room is a heaving human coctail of drugs; coke, potent skunk ("stinky", as the nameless dealer aptly named it) and MDMA powder, neatly trimmed into straight lumpy lines on mirrors, snorted through 20£ notes... giggles and hyped-up highly funny conversation.

I've eloped for a bit. to let the chemical forces do their work and reorganise the the synaptic processes of the flat in my absence. fearful of inflicting the curse of selfconsciousness on sensitive flatmates, maybe, who worry about being "dingy druggies"...

obviously, an unnecessary precaution, as the unbending will to power of the flatmate in question would prevail quickly anyway, over whatever damp shroud I might automatically throw over the proceedings, being the only sober entity in the household...

two flatmates "on the pull", as they say in this country, with some obscure implicit reference to the tug of animal magnetism, who knows... with moderate success. some disparity in chemical vectors. animal lust may still be able to leap across the boundless abyss between the chemical worlds of the participants.

but I doubt it. you never know though.

either way, quite an enjoyable night. *nods*. much discussions, with bright-eyed eager young aspiring science journalist, about science as a situated practice, the dynamics of social change, the political situation.

prodded myself in the middle of it to point out I was a mid-20s londonite hosting dinner parties, working in an internet company and discussing politics over food.

how sad.

then I thought "hey, why be ironic about it. I'm quite enjoying it!". and flatlanders entry about the sickness of postmodern irony came to mind.

and I chattered happily on.

yay. an early triumph for the next stage of history: post-post-historical socialisation... :-)

whatever. 'nuff crypticism. think I might post a picture now...

[couple of hours later] ooo. you'll never guess what happened... flatmate "pulled"!

oooo. not gonna say which one it was, leave that to your active 'lil imaginations... but yo!

blazing fuming libidinal volcano action!!!

good stuff.

otherwise, bright-eyed aspiring young scientist was also considerably less brighteyed a few hours into the debauchery. rather absent, in spirit if not in the flesh.

flesh which, dare I say it, was connected in mysterious ways to the rampant display of chemical gravitational fireworks we had here tonight. in the midst of it, so to speak.

yo.

"If you could be reincarnated as any animal species, what would you come back as? Why?"

Dolphin. enjoy sex. always wondered what the inside of a closed can of tuna looks like. want to prove to the world that dolphins don't have to be flipper. get my blowhole pierced. eat raw fish for the rest of my life.

if not, then:

one of those weird amazonian fish that follows the warm trail of your urine in the water, swims up your urethra and attaches itself to the inside of your penis. because I hate people who swim naked and piss in the water.

what happened today. hmmm...

unwittingly, I had a conversation with the education minister of kenya. this because some reckless temp had put his direct office number as the contact details for an event I was checking. [this means that anyone who reads the article and wants to know more will be phoning him up for information. lucky sod.]

I was called up by an IT recruitment agent who'd found my CV on a website. looking for multilingual web developers. hmmmm. could be? might make a welcome change. though I have to say, there is a certain inertial attraction in staying where I am, reasonably well paid and with plenty of spare time. maybe I should learn a programming language...

as biblical slut and crank pointed out last night, I'm a born techie. into hobbits, wizards and sci-fi; computer games [Final Fantasy VIII being a prominent example; haven't tried IX yet...]; disreputable appearance; developing pot-belly; anarchic disposition; theoretical mindset [in full recession at the moment, due to lack of use]; relatively clear thinking, when untroubled and not drunken and drugged in some way; prefer my own company to that of strangers; irregular sleeping patterns, most productive late at night...

the only thing missing, realistically, are the tech-skills... I mean, I did a few lines of BASIC, in my days... but I'm not really conversant with the dark, powerful versatile languages that risen from the deep since then...

hmmm. the more I think about it though, the more attractive it seems. freelance technomancer... *wistful sigh*...

biblical slut discovered my OD, inferring its address from an extract I sent him via e-mail. the little sleuth... yo! slutboy! reading this slutboy? or does yo phat mama have to read it out for you?? sorry I can't write anything INTERESTING in PERL, goatmolesting son of a...

*ha-HRM*. ok. actually, I don't mind. he said it was 'fvcking cool', so he's forgiven for the intrusion.

I've now got two RL presences hovering on the periphery of my potential audience whenever I write. and yanno? I couldn't care less... *grins*. it's not like you get to hear much compromising intimate personal stuff here anyway, is it...

[...[

and finally

I got me a new literary golden calf... reading my way through a completely obscure novel that blitzed me out of the blue sky in a second-hand bookstore... Simon Louvish, 'The Days of Miracles and Wonders', subtitled 'An Epic of the New World Disorder'...

Jewish writer, and though I hate to stereotype, or typify, or label, there is something about him that reminds me of the likes Joseph Heller [other famous Jewish writer, obviously]. a certain combination of dazzling wordplay and wit, deep, articulate erudition, epic scale, Hebrew imagery enmeshed with humanism, and dark surreal subversive humour.

highly compelling stuff, in short.

had negligible sleep last night. gf came around at about 1am, precipitating one of those selflessly hungry, hungry all-nighters. very rare for me, so all the more enjoyable when they do happen.

obvious consequence being drooping eyes and general exhaustion now. karma or what.

today and tomorrow are workdays in the ambivalent sign of tedious and repetitive work, but on new material. got to go over a list of 40 african festivals and events, verifying the dates for this year and rewriting poorly entries...

given the general lack of broadband internet access in places like Zambia and Tanzania, this means calling up organisers on their bush telephones to get dates that are usually set by tribal elders  in accordance with semilunar calendars, harvest cycles and omens in the sky, up to two weeks before the events happen... tourist offices are usually clueless, unless they can afford to send representatives out in the bush to confer with the council of Ogoni elders and get the dates down for the brochures...