Some Unnecessary Observations

-The night. The strange reflections of different colors of dripping metallic grafitti on the matte-black walls of the bar bathroom. In the private bathroom of a dirty bar, you receive a new perspective: solitude, cloistered estrangement, authenticity of private life. Your own thoughts return in the shapes of grafitti in the dark, left by strangers.

-Gravelly-voiced Hasidim lecture.
Anarchists conjecture.

-SCHOLARS:: BARNACLES

Maria, Elisa, Emma

His "predilection would always be for ladies well-upholstered and dark." (Brown)

Sheer Literariness

("During the Apartheid years Coetzee’s novels were regularly passed by the South African censors not because they did not deal with material that might be construed as critical of the state, but because their potential threat was thought to be ameliorated by their sheer literariness." - from TLS)

Flaubert in 'Memoirs of a Madman':
"I've never liked schedules, set times, a tick-tock existence, in which thought stops with the ringing of the school bell, and everything is wound up beforehand, for centuries and generations."

From Frederick Brown's fucking teriffic biography: "The only straight line for which [adolescent] Gustave seemed to display enthusiasm was the one that traced the progress of a civilization wearing itself out as it scraped its bourgeois way toward oblivion."

"After wearing out its feet on city pavements," Flaubert wrote, "man will die on forest floors. This vapor of blood must cool..."

Awesome, awesome. 'Wild mares and she-wolves' await man in his exile, and 'a great guffaw of despair' will issue 'when men behold the void'. He thought of these things sitting, like, in study hall and wandering the corridors between classes. He was bored. "For this darkly eloquent collegian, the end of time was more agreeable to contemplate than the doomsday of graduation." Why do people read literary biographies? I could be e-trading right now or polishing my resume, or volunteering at the dog hospital across the street.

Ecce puer!

Anyway and ergo, civilization was already exhausted for the sensitive splenetic by 1838.
Today we have gangsta rap and stuff and like beer, but it's still all so annoying and it sucks dick to punch clocks. To wit, record of a corroded intelligence wedged in tight between 'leisure' and productive labor:

• "It's the monotony of the work--not being absorbed, so I get drawn into all the theatre of everything in my own lightless brain. Then, I become sad and mysterious, longing for death, or I get very angry that I'm spending all my time alive and my faculty for human feeling to perform these tasks, and then at myself for being incapable and at 'everyone' for colluding in the great regime of common sense, self-discipline, and bourgeois respectability."

[these are all verbatim from post-its and little scraps: an indulgence since forever]

• "I'm overmastered by a lot of thoughts that don't come from anywhere. -What would his ideal life look like? IT WOULD LOOK LIKE SOMEONE DESCRIBING SOMETHING."
• "ANGER: Can't remember what I wrote down. What if you took a whole cocktail of focus drugs? Just a big handful. With something else to take the edge off and smooth the bumps out, a draft beer. One wonders, is it faster to take the 1 all the way to 66th? The alternative is to transfer at 14th, 2 stops to Times Square, and get back off, ride 3 or 4 stops. Possibly, because there are about 5 local stops between 14th and Times Square (18, 23, 28, 34) so that the added time would be greater than 2 intervals of waiting for the express."
• "INFINITY: Why do I write in this small, shitty thing? Every task and each record made this way--my familiar process of living--seems pointless and stillborn: the effect is like vertigo but very immanent and plastic. Dizziness but in a firm way, it feels good--not as goodness exactly, but positive in a little way. (Drugs) That the dizziness and the ridiculousness of everything is so frontal, so unconcealed, such a monolithic emergency that it is possible to relax in its presence, like a Marxist wearing a fine silk tie."
  

• "What will be the next step I take? I thought, ---to avoid lingering around if nothing else comes along that I may turn my hand to. --Taking control of my life and living. For ten minutes this morning on the subway I was happy and felt like a soul, I had taken drugs. Happiness of the world to feel itself, it blossoms collectively like an anemone."
• "To sense: That there is nothing to ADJUST to. 'It is silly for me to keep coming in and having episodes of mental illness. Who does this.' (Another thing I describe over and over:) I have worked so long to be so sensitive, it is to be expected that I founder and wreck like this. (SHOUT:) Point to the problem! Where is it? Where is the physical stress, the physical sign of weakness? -Mostly, it is embarrassing. Another little thing to the list of little things: shame or whatever.
  
• "I do have a kind of ADD. I am aware that I do at certain times, in public spaces, I have behaved outwardly like a crazy person. I'm slightly aware at the time of this, and afterward it's very clear. (I would be treated as a matter of course like a person in the grip of craziness.) I feel this is very different to the way I actually appear, and feel, through the great part of my daily life. But there is a full checklist, a full gamut of symptoms and bad indicators. What sort of clinical language, or language of productiviy-psychology, or American cliché, do I find to narrate with? The condition needs narration. To be sure: it is ITSELF NARRATION."
• "I, I SAY I: I have bizarre ways to indulge myself, then. Sort of a neurotic, dramatic personality. Dealing with the anxiety of social exposure, the traps and doubling. -But to create art you have to step outside the world a little bit! Check yourself--Restrain your involvement, fight the seduction to enter and discourse and slake and perform!"
• "And you find quiet again so easily, as soon as it's a nice day and you change your environment a little."
• "Write a lively little thing, like James Thurber! Sweet, honey-drenched irony and warbling humility."
• "EVERYDAY HUSSERL: You can stop (finish) the cycle at any time. Any conscious time. Conscious conclusion."
  
• "For a long time, I was really miserable. For a couple years. I guessed I would just have to wait for a different world."
• "LET EM CLUTCH-FOR ME-AT STRAWS"
  

"Ego Dominus Tuus"

Let me just say, I'll speak this and go hide:
I never thought I'd fukin see the day. Your bothered pride--
Your deep reserve of militant reproach:
Your self-aggrandizement burnt to the roach.
--You ain't my master; I love rock and roll:
The streets aflame, the heart in resltess gyre
I like to pump the stereo to 'FULL'
And melt down all the shackles of desire.

Heroic couplets filling in for head,
And syncopation beating out one's bile,
I could bring a harem home to bed
Or smoke a crack vial.

You really want to know who's better off?
It's you, cause you're the furniture of Life--
To me, who'm caught in solipsistic scoffs
Whenever someone talks about his wife.

I do go back and forth between the poles
Of wanting courtly love and wanting holes.

RL (pursuit in fragments)

I do not know to what end.
But the taste of the actual idea
Of the matter itself, matter and thought in distinct alternating frequency, was on his lips and inside the space of his mouth, it was filling his cock, filling his mouth with blood:
And chiming.

(Wodehouse)

"I pressed down on my mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea."

Flake

In 1870, during the upheaval presaging the Franco-Prussian War, George Sand described to Flaubert her achievement of serenity at last in old age: “I’d sown my volcanoes with grass and flowers, and they were getting on well.”

Writing, I stumble over myself more than ever. I’m afraid my own serenity won’t hold, and so I’m reluctant to waste time picking out words.Contradictions arise naturally from the human sensibility, appearing as urges to check one’s line of thought: intellectual stammering. I worry that my own peaks and troughs are of a different order. They have the tenor of manic compulsion I associate with mental illness. It’s one thing to have mood swings, but it’s hard work being discomfited by your own happiness because you detect the seed of decline in it. Lately stress and squalor are attended by familiarity and security, while inspiration, which I lived off once, comes only with an ominous taint. But why all this fuss over happiness?, the intellectual wants to know. After all, what would make me happier than to finish tracing out my system of thought, finally and conclusively, in all its barbed, pitiable wretchedness?

Drinking doesn’t help. Cigarettes don’t, either. Smoking in particular is bad for your short-term mental health because it requires a forceful self-delusion to carry out. You have to suppress the healthy logic of mortality and life’s continuity—the philosophical corollary of any addiction.

The [plangent] question is not ‘Why do people practice self-destructive behaviors,’ since sufficient explanations are obvious and ready-to-hand, but ‘Why is life on earth such': Why do we find ourselves living according to imposed conditions of being and of conscious experience, and made to hunt for clues to the nature of our over-determined self-destructiveness. It is demanded of us that we answer the question, Why does life appear at odds with living, and then the demand has been accompanied at turns with strains of the profound, tragic, comic, or felicitous.

To combat these practices: It’s to ask, Why does life seem to be at odds with living. (‘Life does not live.’) Life is just a shining chip embedded in death, a flake (say, in cool hematite).

Adverse conditions. Hardship, danger. Inhuman forces trying to rub out the bright stain of life and free will.

More Greatest Individual Lines in Hip-Hop

"Up in the 'oolie', yo, wit' who you know:
John Bizzy, Ghost-Deini, Rollie Fingers and they toolies, yo"

(Aphorisms)

The bad instincts of humanity will win out in the end, because they strengthen regimes of life under which the indifferent instincts vitiate the better instincts.

(Regan)

I would like to be a part of another person, their hand or their leg.

We have to die: I can't believe it, it's too sad. What are we to do? What can we do until then?
The things my father told my brother and me, the constellations of a foreign sky.
All of the galaxies, my goodness.
I remember the boy, and he must die the way every other man born of woman.

Sets the bottle in the streambed.

Yeah--indeed. The stars say.
All of the galaxies. And Schubert says it.
Pariah dogs out under the night insects.
The dawn. So polluted. It's so beautiful, I'm so full. The universe passing away and coming back, as if it was never anything interesting at all in the first place.

My job I hated. My boyfriend was a pain in the ass. City life was a big hassle. None of it matters.

What do we do with our deaths? I smell the beautiful scent of flowers, and the movement of the fresh earthy river, and fish underneath churning it with the movements of life.

Well, we must die. I see my death, as if it were a girl who looks like me but blonde.
My blonde twin.
Striding across from another galaxy. To meet me, here of all places; where I live.