Thoughts & Ramblings

From an email describing myself to a friend; similarly should give you fine folk a slightly better idea who/how I am.

As for now I do still call myself a poet-journalist: I want to capture everything, as best i can, but perhaps more importantly in so pursuing I want to pass indiscriminantly from the fantastical & poetic to the hard & real. I take a lot of this indirectly from Hunter S. Thompson & his Gonzo Journalism, but it's where my own personal philosophy--about which I could and have easily written endlessly elsewhere--fuses into his that the funny business can be found, and by God do I revel in it ;p (Objectivity, one must recall, is a myth--and always was--mehehe >:))

(Mentioned, of course, more fully on Xanga.)

Oh, Hunter S.... I really do need to get back to reading your stuff. Still at least I can claim to have the part that counts here, the understanding of the man's work: his blurring of fact & fiction to make some greater point. (And of course this may sound like reglar ole New Journalism, and often his Gonzo is classified under that movement, but what separates his as with others from the rest is in that scope, definition, and nature given to that "blurring".

As I have written here before, Truth itself does not interest me very seriously. Beauty certainly does, and love. But of course that partly depends on how one divides up "Truth" really; there are many kinds of truth and the kinds that interest me are the ones that concern a single person about himself and his reality most seriously. But I will spare us all that discussion; no need boring you with my "Hyperbolic Solipsism" neither. This is a post about Hunter S.

He also fascinates me for who he was and what he did--not who has and had become or simply how he wrote. And I have identified with him in many respects & ways, especially last fall and again early this past winter, when I went about with aviators of my own and my still beloved London Fog trenchcoat all ready to save the world with my weird strategies and webmag. Or simply hiding; concealing who the scared, softer bits behind the hardened, piss-yellow plastic and (now semi)waterproof material, exterior I wore--brazen & rough but still also motivated, headed somewhere, searching something(s) at least, not at all lost and complacent like me nor still crying himself to sleep over boys who stop talking to me nor failing classes for some grandiose lack of purpose. But it was fun, too; not just exciting & different to pretend to be (like) my idol, but really just the pace, the productivity in itself...was all nicely exhilarating compared with how I feel from day to day now, this past month or so of despondency and listlessness.

But I really think I'll resuscitate the good, the hardy, the well meaning and honest parts of that period. Maybe even the role-playing games, though I might want some better sense of self & grounding before I do that again. But this part, the philosophies that established the gonzoid, the true embrace of "poet-journalist", seems in keeping with who I am or want to be or want to write, especially the more I've thought about it & reflected. So yes. The Gonzoid!

Some Cigarettes

So I was having my bedtime cigarettes after chatting it up with Mani about god only knows what anymore; i was leaning my head against one of those "emergency call" boxes they strap to the bottom of some lamposts and I was staring straight into one of those ads for Heroes they put on the side of phone boths: "It's time to save the world" it said, "04.23.07." Jeez, that's not too far away is it, I thought to myself.

I haven't showered in days. I can feel the accumulating grime in my pores. I'm pretty sure I leave a discernable odor wherever I go, and I haven't gone to class since Tuesday. I'm at best half-assedly trying to catch up on my precious mountains of undone and undoing work but instead allowed my now somehow more generalized and generalizing loneliness embitter and disenchant me of my will to work, to do, to live.

In latin there are two ways, I believe*, of saying "to live." **The one, the more common I suppose, is "vivere" meaning "be alive, live;" "survive;" "reside." The other, usually used more towards 'acting' and 'doing' and 'making [something do something]', "agere" means "stir/drive/shake/move about" (you can see what I meant before about its usuage since all of those conflate, more or less, upon eachother); "revolve;" "live;" "control, ride;" "consider, pursue." I'm sure you see where I am going: therein lies a distinction between a reactive and proactive living, respectively; that is, the former takes up the life as it has been given, the latter goes after the life it wants. It should also be clear how this goes back to the previous paragraph; that is, which kind of "living" has been lacking.

And it's true; I get up when I do and go online, either search through the same old faces/bodies and send the same old messages on RealJock, or I sit before my cam and whore my hideous body on Stickam, or I yet bemoan my existence in blogposts or excitedly talk about "someone" or augur some change for the better this time, and always--always, inevitably--can trace the Slip the losing traction on reality again, the downward tug toward chaos, depressive entropy that never left but rather hid while the townsfolk, the survivors, rebuilt again, the fools, and the beast sitting in its cave overlooking, smiling wickedly to itself as it makes list of all their false joys and hope, and mocks them as it readies.

And I remember wondering what would happen if I pushed either or both emergency buttons--if one one would come, or notice. I remember staring at that ad with all my rue, butg also my exhaustion, and thinking "Where to begin, where to begin/When all of it's so done and over...." Because I find it's much like submission, like giving over, the switch from the specifically proactive agere to the more mundane, domestic house-pet esque vivere; it just happens and you don't have control anymore, aren't interested in trying but surviving instead somehow. And don't get me wrong things do get done, just not how you would have wanted them done.


agere somnium volo vitamque carpere meam. sed damnatus semper sum me esse.

Personally I hate it when I try to use my Latin, my weak and ugly Latin. I mean does that even say I what I meant it to say? Likely not. But as with all my life, it always ends up being so much less.... So you can, by that, cut off this post in your mind as having ended during that double return above the latin and perhaps resuming again in the one following (to get the notes, see). Oh well. So much less.


* There are of course others that can mean "to live" as well--though more indirectly, I believe.
** Here and following definitions provided by Whitaker words; interpretive definitions my own.


Supplemental post on my privater blog.

Anyways, cheers.

And Briefly, for Later

That was a good cigarette, two in fact. That was a good...conversation, I suppose is the best language here to use. That was a good day, by the end, in the whole of it. I'm glad...that it all happened. I'm glad for the near breaking down, the further breaking down, the recentering, the realizatin--an of course the conversations, and that one, in particular, that brings me here again. To this place, this sense, I love; to embrace Walt and his and know it for what it really means to me: what it means to love, even in so slight a way as showing Mani as best I can (poor Mani! who by now, I fear, has heard it all from me so unrelentingly so unchangingly that by now it is all but the same, tired lullaby he can expect me to sing if he spends time with me--and, yet!, he does. Neither of us may be right, or wrong as I've realized too, but between us there still hangs something exceptional, something special, something beautiful and right enough to believe again. It is enough to love him and know it; that even when we argue so fiercely we scream out eachother's dumbest faults, expectorate the dumbest errors, "elucidate" the dumbest points, that even then when I want to bite his head off--I still want to suck it all the same.) how I will always love him.

That one human in relation to another--not even so much in sex, or "relationships," or "boyfriends," or anything so particular, but just the mere existence of one man and another and the spatial, temporal indifference there can still between them exist that indefiniteness, that Good, that wonderful and endless human compassion--can show something so beautiful, regardless of the facts or particulars, just the raw actuality of their existences inseparable, is enough to believe again. To live, and love, and be, again.

And I may not have everything I want, I may not have his glorious totality buried deep inside me nor my own within him nor both beside eachother, I may not be the wisest for still forsaking so happily Truth for the painstaking efforts of Love and Loving, opera amoris amandique, and I may look these troubles, this choice, this entirety, straight on and see for all its trouble--for I have seen him commit and fail, I suppose I will always say is how it went, but so infrequently have I felt to have myself, and yet envy him at that even for all his current antipathy, but that is but one piece, one little, petty piece of the mass--and want it, and with a smile take it, and again, amare eum possum nunc iam quoque vivereque agitareque --et volo.

And now shall I seize what I have loved and with it with me live through my days as I have dreamed. And maybe that is how I shall find happiness; in the least I can bring the happiness, if but some, to others, to the ones I love.

This being only the last of several--mostly manic, terrified, horrorstruck and angry--posts, I cannot swear they will answer to all the questions of the others nor the questions they have raised, but I cannot also swear to care. It is enough after all that horror and pain to have arrived, after all that self deception and fury, to have reclaimed what I do care about, what matters most to me, what drives me and has driven me if only in these, my most cogent and occasional moments. For it is something to love and have loved.

And I can live with that--and find peace in that. As long as I can keep that with me, knowing that, knowing that I can love and that I love, and loving him; will all of it mean so much and affirm so much more than the pettiness of Truth could ever hope to do for me. For that is how I am.

Despite Appearances

So Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato (Sox), and ConWest ganged up on me today and ahd their way with my prone, suggestible form. They've been doing that a lot recently. A fucking lot.

What with that ever trite 'gloom & doom' shit people are always seeing--no, people, just because things look like they're changing neither means the world is ending or going to hell nor, more importantly, is anything even wrong (or changing at all for that matter).

One of few lines from Breakfast Club Salient across the board is that one the janitor tells principal about how the kids aren't getting worse--he's just gotten older.

But you know the thing. Everyone's always seeing degeneration whereever they go--some crash of the customary morality against the ever surging slave revolt, the ascethic trumping the aesthetic (but at what cost!?!), the breakdown of old ways by science/reason/argument/reality/something, an incurable sickness overwhelming the massess--even our children!!--that's destroying the very fabric of humanity or some bullshit.

And I'd been seriously suspicious, as long I have been in even only some minor respect or another, of Truth. And this of course was no resolution to it. But what to do once one forsake truth? Beauty? Love? But how can anyone know tha'ts solving anything?

And then. Just as I was at my most malaised and terrified, at my most doubtful the world could ever seem right again (again), I remembered my good friend Walt, and his endless leaves of grass, and everything was right again, no matter where fell the shadow, no matter if the world ends not in a bang but a whimper, I'll always have love and beauty and that precious moment, each and every one embraced, if only briefly, if only just, if only fleetingly and once.

And I'm not sure, still, what I want to do, nor where I want to go. But, does any of that matter?

[19:26] Tim: i'm sure you'll figure it out
[19:27] Tim: everyone does eventually
[19:27] Me: eh
[19:27] Me: i'm sure i will
[19:27] Me: it's just....
[19:27] Me: i really want to show some of these amazing people just how amazing they are
[19:27] Me: even how much they mean to me
[19:28] Me: you know....while i can, while they're there, while we're still alive and young enough
[19:29] Tim: thats one way to look at it...
[19:32] Me: mm
[19:32] Me: i fear i really am damned to be a lover first, poet second, and scientist third
[19:34] Tim: emo!
[19:36] Me: but what if it's true?
[19:36] Me: esp if i've neither ascribe myself any primacy nor particular uniquity
[19:37] Me: i mean with those two cardinal emo sins aside....isn't it possible for some people's lives to just be tragic...?
[19:37] Me: granted, mine is hardly meritting of any such investigation, but i've often wondered it about other poets
[19:37] Me: actual poets***
[19:39] Me: sometimes it's best just to ignore me, dearest Tim :D
[19:39] Tim: haha

So I'm a lil wore out but actually feeling up beat; i'm tormenting mani with threats of a blowjob in exchange for returnting my book. It's nice to be carefree again, if only for a moment; i hope i don't...vzzzz him with it. I'm only living these few brief moments I have to live, and to love, the dear.

Some Minor Missappropriation, I think?

I wrote this earlier, before Latin; I'm not posting it at 7:42 unchanged as really the only person slighted is my own ignorant self. And Lord knows I do that plenty with my every act of living.

ConWest can really get me down, y'know? All 'gloom & doom' (never, interestingly, did I expect I'd find prudent use for that cliche; just goes to show you can never know...) But now, with the baneful Writing The Essay between, I think I've found a little solace? The same solace, I think, but does that actually so diminish its worth as to lead you all to disregard this post, my words, my continue though ardent flailing? We'll have to see, I suppose.

I feel something inside of me; in the same places as always. My head is heavy, that's not so usual but likely I'm hungry or should take a lil ibuprofen--oh the heathenry of medicine, eh? `sigh` But there is a sort of pressure; in the past it's been hollow and imploding so I find this particular somewhat interesting. There's a sort of somber restlessness, a certain breathlessness--but that could be from the that cigarette. Oh, misappropriation, likely, so silly of me again and again to allow you to seduce me.

Downright crazy. But part of me is wondering if that may not be the point instead. It's been said--with more trite words so of course with only more trite thoughts--how so often artists are so insane. Poets too. I want to add philosophers too, but that's hardly new. Look at Nietzsche--he fucking lost it (and with what equanimity he introduces the first swear! it's like he's barely thinking as his fingers tap away at these keys in Upstein, watching the comings and goings of people he will never know nevermind never love! and yet he's supposed to love them still? care in the least? and by his own volition?). And it's be also tritely, of course, said and with cynical sneers that so often these artists and poets and philosophers--all these personages, perhaps not even just the few who are actually crazy, actually broke down, actually collapsed after what could probably turn out to have been years of devoid madness--are all hacks misinterpreted. And I wonder if perhaps the trouble goes further--perhaps they are all hacks terrified of their hackdom and trying by despairing and increasingly vain efforts to grasp this wild purpose of their lives, their souls, their hearts, their minds, their all-consuming ever-present madness. (And somehow keep a lid on it, too.)

I asked myself randomly, not that I have ever supposed myself to be among his fans but today found myself almost preferring Nietzsche to Kierkegaard (I know! The horror!) but still I remain among those too illiterate to answer their own questions with the vast wealth of answers many madmen have put before him, "What does Nietzsche believe in...?"

And you know something, I don't think he knew any better than I.

Have you noticed his roving question(s)? His brilliance leaves no stone unturned and why. Outrage? Bitterness? Utter-prickdom? (that one's for you, Mani; I know how you feel or felt last time we spoke on this still baffling philosopher) Truth?! HAH. He seems no more friendly with/to Truth than Kierkegaard or Socrates (Plato)--all of whom worship it. Is it not in his third essay from The Genealogy where he ends asking, more or less, "Where has all this Truth-chasing and Science gotten us? Are we any better off, any nearer to it?" And Socrates (Plato) seems too to see its ephemerality, its elusiveness, its perhaps intangibility {heh, 'perhaps'--how many times I've wanted to slap all of Science for its dancing about "Truth," as Dr. Renzi would put it, all that "hand waving" (which he used to describe, alternately with "passes over in silence," Augustine's dodgery; and perhaps it's true, or perhaps it was a ploy to make us laugh instead of question his own--Renzi's--"hand waving" and "silence," here perhaps more because he's dealing with college freshman in what amounts in the esteem of so many of them as a joke of a course--tell me, how many of the readings did you ever read, hm? Plus Renzi is a Philosophy Professor; well, so was Nietzsche, wasn't he?) so don't get me started on Philosophy--for all its trashtalking of sophistry, lawyering and politicking as it all is, why do I always end up so suspicious of it for the same sins? the same double-speak and rhetoric?} with those damnable (and likely unfairly named, but we shall passover that in the pejorative silence of "so-called") "Platonic Ideals." And Kierkegaard, over all his books and writing and characters/pseudonyms (I remember when I used to look up to him as a model in that respect; of course I still do, but do realize this is the same man who, between the flurrious efforts as writer/philosopher/theologian/whateverthefuckKeerkywas* dress up and stand around the opera-house during intermission to appear to be "a man about town" only to dash home for more of his own madness, his own dissociative/-ed/-ing Christian insanity.) wants me to up and believe! That's his grand message--to believe!? Faith is the answer!

I'm not entirely sure how or why I ended up at this odd position. I do not mean to doubt, and really I don't think that's the fundamental mission, do you? (One does not end the above paragraph, whether with no end to its cynicism--i've come these past hours to identify cynicism with some sort of disillusionment/reillusionment--on Kierkegaard and now somehow retain awareness that pulls us through the Gap Inevitable again and again and again. For it seems that gap has plagued everyone since everness--do you recall the last section of The Hollowmen? Do you recall how terrified that poem has always left me? For my life may just turn out to be nothing but a whimper. The same with every artist--thus the truth behind Richard in The Hours--wanting to do everything with his art, his poetry, his book, but in the end "coming up with so much less." Jump-Gap dynamics. That's what art is. Philosophy. Science. Religion--all of it.

For maybe the reason we do not know is that there is nothing there to be known.

For what is there of life that I can ever hold on to. Not you, apparently. Not me. (Though there is some respite, some life after the madness: Joan Didion {yes, i've been reading her; can you tell?} "Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages ofa notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor.") And I know this. The vastly degenerating world we cannot help but see isn't really there at all. It's in our heads. It's in the heads of the madmen at their quills and brushes and celluloid reels. For there is nothing now that wasn't then. NOthing that actually matters. Love. Beauty. Life. Even Truth.

We've sought them all all along. And never have we found them?

And so my question for you--reviled reader--in all of this, just who the hell are you?

But my mission; my mission. whatever do you suppose it is. Do you know? And that's just it, that's the joke of it, that last post, why I gave up in suicidal nihilism, what I'd hoped in some small gesture to elucidate with that last post--that failure!--was some sense of my purpose. But never could I say it; never could you hear it. But having put it aside and lived some of the day instead, it all comes back--how hard and wretched.

(And you wonder how I came to be such a pedant--life is too hard for living; I can sit and tear apart my passive periphrastics so much more easily than I can ever begin to approach your heart!)

Because that last post, where it was headed I realized as I reflected on my way to ConWest, was how it's all been such a failure. Even as I wrote it--in my usual language of superlatives and hyperbole (and of course let's not forget 'faux-lemic')--how so much of it was missing my point. How all I really am is just another mad poet hanging off the words--nay, barely the lectures, those few classes I actually ever attend, for I certainly of all people hardly read the readings through or beyond what get the paper written!--of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, a sodden jack-of-all-trades with a flair for writing and apparently some keen wit, such talent that--Madness!

And so I've thought of the description for this blog: Below the title shall soon appear: In some respect anyway: Do feel free to suggest a better wording--even flairs burn out:

"I hate my life--but, oh, how I love living it."

*I'm slowly going to slip into my nicknames for them; just you wait and see.

Content = Yummy.

I had wanted to follow that other post up with something...meaty. What follows is a meager approximation, I think, though I'm sure even approximations deserve some credit, eh? (I was writing it around 8:24, the timestamp of this post, and hadn't slept at all--and I still haven't.)

(Brief mental note: I can actually bold and italicize with just hotkeys in this editor--even while using Firefox!? ...o0o0o0o... Points for dem apples, Google...)

So I'll keep this brief. Or leave it as a draft and save it for later. Either way. I'm mulling over possible purposes, templates, models, et cetera, for this blog such that it will yield the most satisfaction at the least expense/anxiety/extra-chores; this is beyond obvious. Well actually the reason is; the process--the various sorting of various structural/stylistic aspects I variously began {heh} the previous sentence with--isn't necessarily so obvious unless I tell you, which I just did. The undlerlying reason however is immediately apparent--or at least too likely to be on simply equal footing with any other possible reasoning, even at the outset of the apparition {heh}--and that is what is obvious. It is important, sometimes, to realize this fatal flaw in modern (perhaps, baser, merely human reasoning)--that simply because the cause is flagrantly apparent, its mention still doesn't negate effects that perhaps weren't--and under no circumstances does this principle waver.

I must apologize at once for the seeming verbiage of the above paragraph. It would seem my pedantic nature got ahead of my good intentions and taste; that my humility was lost to the project, and I patronized the readers I so humbly respect. Goddang, man. But there was a point to it all--afterall, in fact, as it turns out--a point that itself is so easily overlooked--if not by "Society" or "The Children Of This Era" then by certain persons who are, perhaps, too dear to my heart, or in the least too dear for this consideration to be forgot so easily by myself or anyone who claims to love; or if not any of them, then perhaps simply, lastly, by me.

For I must I have some meaning in all this blithering, shouldn't I? I mean I seem to think so, like it or not (Which is of course irrelevant: It's not that I don't like this having something to say, that I don't like my having anything or something--that is to say, mainly--or putting it before you--offering, I'd of course rather--but that when I'm not forgetting the impulse in the saying, the living, the relieving,--the doing that is the action!--, I'm often finding myself at a loss for what to have maybe done.), but say still I do seem to do. But my little life, this little bit of meaning I must be eeking out by living, I insist on sometime having eeked {heh}, should have to it then some little value by the day I die (so that I may walk up to my parents with it in my arms and say "There! There it is--the life you gave me, and This is what I've made of it!") I pass on remembered some, if only once--not so much to allay some fear of death, some terror of Oblivion Inevitable, but that I know my life had meaning, imprint, in the lives of those around me, I knew, I cared about, I loved.

I do so live for Love; I've long since suffered warily at the hands of Truth, but Love! You may beat me back, break me down, tear me limb from jubilant limb, and I will always come back for more--for those brief moments unclouded, untouched by human incongruity but wholly replete with human longing and the Love we all share! The only thing we can ever share! While Truth is dirty and mean; Truth doesn't have any worth, really--what's true now may not be true later or, worse!, only ever have been true for you (How lonely!). But Love--Love is always. Love anything at all and ergo everything you ever need. It's all I ever need--to know and feel Love with all the scientific understanding and religious leaps-of-faith I can manage, with all the force of my life and all the breathes of my days. And it may hurt me more than any silly truth, but loving every moment of life--the first part of True Love--then loving every person--the second--and then loving ever act--it looks like the first but only if you forget how to count; the third--until you know what you love--the fourth and...--what your Love is like.

And see, there was a point in that, too; May seem like utter nonsense--less of the Nietzsche-Kierkegaard bastard-lovechild from before, more Rousseau? I pray to god not. Well whoever it is flavoring it, there's still a point to be had, before it's missed as more of the same, before it's lost to more of the same, before it's written off as "more of the same" and disregarded (again as to who's disregarding, I'm not sure; it could be me still, but I think I know what I wanted to say. And I think my audience can figure it out too.)

I wish I could say I'd spent a lot of time on this and therefore could guarantee it's all exactly as I meant it. I wish too I had spent enough time to at least have the ones I love be loved as best such Loves deserve. But alas, I am Human, and just! And don't forget--Lazy!

I think I will start another post for these weird thoughts in my head right now...

Well, here I am. Again.

I stole my blog's name from some Washington Post thing....* It means:

Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

Oh yeah, I think kinda highly of myself. Ever since my good ole xanga.

I've been thinking though about switching to a service that allows anyone and everyone to comment; doesn't blogger do something like that? Even so far as annonymous comments? We'll just have to see, obv.

In the meantime I must remain infinitely lame and get back to y'all later--I'm supposed to be doing homeworkz, not playing about as y'all can see I'm plainly doing. I shall reassert my coolness thusly:

Cuz, like, Europe's cool. Tetris is perhaps even cooler. But nothing--not even a Tetris dance/beer/orgy--is quite as cool as "Tetris: Syncronized Swimming Things."

* "The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition."