Topics

1

Or Kill Me / sense beyond senses

« on: February 01, 2012, 05:43:29 am »

I often wonder what it would be like to have a dormant sense outside the usual five (and proprioception), and like to think it could be awakened with careful effort. You can't know what it will be like. You need to go about creating the necessary mental categories and relaxing the habits of your perception and thought to let it take on a reality as sharp as sight or hearing. I tie my mind in knots trying to figure out what it would be like, and then I remember that every skill ever acquired is essentially that, a new sense. A nonmusician cannot hear what a musician can, and a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. There are countless examples and I won't bore you with the details, but I was looking for some kind of transcendence because life is too fucking good to end.

But the meatbox will break down and the filthy, stinking television show called your life will be cancelled. We retreat into tales of pearly gates and life eternal but what's the point of heaven without a fucking body? There is nowhere to run but in this life, and the pain and the pleasure are ours alone. The dead cannot live in stories.

At least the Road Runner could escape into Wile E. Coyote's paintings. We hide in the fetid castrated nether regions of the afterlife when we are up to our necks in shit, but the shit never goes away. It's what we're really made of, after all.

2

Apple Talk / Bath Salts

« on: January 23, 2011, 06:36:49 am »

...are apparently far more addictive than previously thought

hxxp://www.wmctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13855613

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Bring and Brag / Shafted! chapter 1 - My Feet on Dry Land

« on: January 16, 2011, 01:40:55 pm »

Visit this url for the first installment of a radio play by my good friend DCBSupafly. Hope you like it! Feedback appreciated.

http://dcbsupafly.com/Shafted/

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Apple Talk / Irate Cash4Gold letter to a lewd prankster

« on: December 08, 2010, 04:15:17 am »

Legit or not, I lol'd.


http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/05/irate-cash4gold-lett.html

5

Apple Talk / ATTN: RWHN

« on: December 08, 2010, 12:14:37 am »

I saw this, and thought of you.

Sir Apropos of Nothing

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Apple Talk / So I was googling orgasm...

« on: October 25, 2010, 05:28:28 am »

...when I found THIS

Oh, Tucson. 

7

Literate Chaotic / Books I Wish I Had Known About...

« on: September 03, 2010, 03:47:15 am »

Books I Wish I Had Known About A Few Years Ago But Not So Long Ago That I Would Have Annoyingly Regurgitated Their Content:

• The Outsider by Colin Wilson.
  
  I picked up this book for $1.25 at the local library, after the name on the spine caught my attention. It turned out to be exactly what I hope to find, but never do--amidst the random sea of text in libraries and book stores, the titles are on the whole more inspiring and imaginative than their content.
  
  The Outsider is one who "sees too deep and too much", who cannot accept the noxious, meager worldview we are spoon-fed from infancy, who does not need religion to be religious. This is not an endorsement of the obnoxious, co-opted "spiritual but not religious" crap that came later, because practicing at self-delusion is anathema to the Outsider's mission. The essence of religion is the affirmation of life (which can be reached from an initially life-denying trajectory).
  
  Because the concept of the Outsider and the goals of the Outsider are somewhat nebulous, Wilson's exposition draws heavily upon examples of real-life outsiders and characters from fiction. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Van Gogh, and Hesse are among those who fill the pages of the book. The result is a survey of pertinent philosophy and literature that whets the appetite for reading.

8

Apple Talk / FUCKING MAGNETRONS HOW DO THEY WORK?

« on: August 08, 2010, 11:50:52 pm »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK4Vj2YXHU0

9

Or Kill Me / Netherword

« on: August 08, 2010, 05:50:26 am »

I never had a mint julep until late Thursday afternoon, a fact I  made up for with enthusiasm.
It was my friend's going-away party, and I wasn't here for the company. If this was going to happen it had to be quick. Work the next morning would not be gentle, and I dismissed the thought of calling in sick as soon as it occurred to me.

Taking a personal day always seems like a great idea until you remember you're getting paid by the hour. You needn't wander far to find something more expensive than mountains of edamame and a bottle of cheap thrills.

Soon I was sufficiently shitfaced to stagger on home--with a quick stop at the convenience store for junk food and milk--just a little more than I wanted to be, and just a little less than it takes for the spins to overtake you.

Raw experience can be shaped in different ways. An itch can become an orgasm, if you know what you're doing. The thing about physiological states is, beyond a certain level of intensity they become irresistible. Right now the spins were a Jehovah's Witness persistently knocking at my door while I pretended not to be home.

A little time, a little more digestion, and that Jehovah's Witness could turn into a SWAT team. I was living on the edge of self-induced vomiting, and if I had let myself fall, maybe I could have gotten some sleep. As it was, I couldn't manage rest until five, which left me little time, but it was time enough to dream.

I kept fading in and out of sleep, and rather than present a coherent story--or mood, as my dreams lack the direction of a storyline proper--disjointed dream-images would flash into my mind. I would react, awaken, fall asleep. Again and again. Not with a start as with night terrors, but a different place biochemically and therefore mentally than my usual fare. Seamless.

I tried to affect the dreams, but they just melted away. I don't know if you have ever been awake while in a sleep state, but everything takes on a greater intensity. Your skin is positively humming, waves of sensation moving up and down your spine, and you find yourself surprised by everything.

When it was time to get ready for work I felt this in a strange variation: sights and sounds did not tire me, but my nose was overwhelmed by the vanilla massage oil I still hadn't gotten out of the carpet. I found causal reasoning difficult. And all I wanted to do was write about the experience.

I managed a paragraph on the bus before the strictures of routine and the world around me won out. Whatever it was, the strange state diminished into normalcy over the course of the day, until nothing remained but the memory. Much of my writing is intended to capture a state of consciousness while experiencing that state. This isn't it, but it's close.

10

Or Kill Me / Summertime Blues

« on: July 30, 2010, 12:49:54 am »

When I was a kid I always looked forward to the summertime. I was brimming with creativity and the certainty that all I needed was a little more free time to create a masterpiece. Summer always came and went like a dream, and somehow my projects never happened; the ideas evaporated from my mind as soon as the school year ended.

Eventually I came to realize it is adversity that gives inspiration. You need to get your ass kicked, in order to create art.

Today was very inspiring.

11

Apple Talk / Transvestite had sex with a dog at English Heritage castle

« on: July 24, 2010, 01:15:25 pm »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7902348/Transvestite-had-sex-with-a-dog-at-English-Heritage-castle.html

12

Apple Talk / Bumper Stickers

« on: June 08, 2010, 06:00:19 am »

FOR SCIENCE!

13

Apple Talk / TV show recommendations?

« on: May 24, 2010, 02:03:56 am »

It's not like I need to waste more time watching tv, but if I do, I want to waste it on something good.

So, which tv shows do you prefer, and why?

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Or Kill Me / Subway Walls

« on: May 10, 2010, 03:09:16 am »

Graffiti is a conversation. If you don't believe me you should check inside the bathroom stalls at school. It was the second birth of the forum, between the Internet and Ancient Greece.

Graffiti is not really about anything but has the inexorable process of a bowel movement.

Growing up I always preferred to read something when I was eating my breakfast cereal: mental roughage, I called it. Dietary fiber for thought. Because it didn't matter what the words said, only that they where there.

Your eyes move across the wall, humanity turns the page. There are few ways in which progress is more than illusion. All those hours wasted playing Final Fantasy...All you do is fight and level up, fight and level up. Then after a bunch of fighting, the game tells you a story about how you defeated the villain! But oh no, the villain was actually not the real villain but just working for him! This repeats until some point at which credits roll and storylines conclude. Somewhere in there, is a game?

I graduated, and nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about at the dinner table, and all Grandma had to say was "When are you going for your Master's?" I did not raise my voice, but laughed because her world is made of shoulds. Somewhere in there, is a life?

We are little more than monkeys preaching from our respective pulpits. You know this, friend, but have forgotten that you, too, belong to the Monkey House. You live in a darker world than mine, wherein you are an all-forgiving martyr and saint. The trials you endure are terrible indeed, and all because you play Wile E. Coyote to our Road Runner. You are a certified genius, and yet somehow you keep crashing into the painted landscapes on the rock faces by which you think to entrap us.

The women were all over each other and me, and all you could do was complain about roughhousing on the furniture.
Life is full of people and opportunities. Don't use your Magnum Opus to put a bullet between somebody's eyes, Coach.

Whatever crisis put you in this place, it's high time you crawled out of your hole and entered the Blue World. At least you'll be able to see something, at least you'll get laid.

I finally got smarter about writing when I stopped worrying about the possible pieces I wasn't creating.

15

Or Kill Me / : Lighting

« on: May 04, 2010, 10:23:52 pm »

"Modern man," said the Professor, "is only capable of understanding in terms of montage."

The words floated across the lectern and into my mind like a radio broadcast. He wasn't speaking to me, but to us; it's just I was the only one who came to class that day. You were out taking a nap in the sunshine. Everyone else must have been at the race.

The words felt right. Rational inquiry is the tool of choice in the excavation of truth, but speculative epistemology is what we do. Drilling holes deep into ideologies and dropping sticks of dynamite down to the bottom, blowing the fuck out of them on the off chance something shiny will pop out and nail us squarely between the eyes like a Bhakti of the Three Stooges.

I cannot say exactly what is down there, but truth makes me tingle just like the music when the hero finally steels his resolve and sets out to vanquish the enemy to whose advance he had all but resigned.

Spurious words are a dissonance. Among them, those I would most like to believe carry the subtlest diminutions.

Just like the music of the soundtracks of our lives. Depression has little to do with melody, everything to do with rhythm. The chord progression of your crisis of faith rings shrill and urgent over the conference table of your soul. (Now you know why meetings are held indoors.) The picture on the painted sheets that swaddled you since birth clashes with the scenery out here.

You and I are completely biased, of course, by virtue of having a nervous system. The world can only ever be containers and tubes, tubes that shuttle us between the containers. All the people-objects of the world are within.

You lift the painting and examine it. With the right picture frame you could accomplish a great deal of blending, mount it on a nonexistent and invisible wall which will nonetheless hold. You don't have to live inside the picture. There is scarcely room to breathe, inside the picture. Your every breath, heartbeat and act will be stolen by this picture, transformed into an homage to itself.  If you should choose to reproduce, you will with child birth picture. And your children shall someday do the same.

But you were born into this, enfolded within this. What else do you have but mortality, futility? Without this draped over you, there is nothing to stop the wind but your naked flesh, and mine.

The painting asserts its reality precisely because its reality is not obvious. Faith is the cruelest game, the perpetual sense that you are losing everything. The house always wins.

The house always wins, and home is the container that you keep your life in.

Still, there is a measure of safety here in the suburbs of reality, where you are a not-so-obvious target for rogue metaphors. I urge you to hang the picture in the air. Let it be an anchor to this place, that in all your wanderings you have somewhere to return.

With faith and strength and underwear we stride into the sunset of our lives.