I've been getting migraines more frequently. The doctor was perfectly charming. I’m afraid to fill the prescriptions because they sound so strong. Take one per day and no other pills of any kind. Spray into your nose and don’t operate heavy machinery. I don’t want to mess with my brain. But Philip K. Dick did all his best work on amphetamines. Maybe I’m taking the wrong path. I had a dream last night. I was back at school and everything was simple. I was sitting next to a girl with dark hair and dark eyes who’s never really left my mind . She smiled at me. Everything was going fine until she leaned on my shoulder and I began to suspect that I was asleep. Sure enough, she kissed my mouth softly and the rest of the class went on writing. When I woke it was so vivid that I wanted to call her, but with a few minutes of daylight, it crossed my mind that she was seeing someone. I hope she’s happy. I wonder sometimes if she works too hard to ever really know. Or maybe she’s just been dodging me all these years and has a fulfilling life; I can’t rule it out. I wonder if I linger in her the way she lingers in me. I wonder what traces I’ve left in other people. I can understand that – the amphetamines – writing it all in a crazy burst. I ’ve written too many fragments. Eventually I start wondering if I should knit them all together just to give some false sense of accomplishment. Anne McCaffrey wrote Restoree in her Latin class but her bio doesn’t say how much Latin she did.

Meaningful.

Willingly or unwillingly, we are in an indifferent universe where the majority of influences on our lives are not only out of our control but were entirely arbitrary based on the circumstances of our births and the lives of our parents. We still have ultimate freedom, the freedom of a card player: to fold, or to play the cards we’ve received. As Camus said, suicide is the central problem in philosophy. But a game of cards can be won or lost; a life can only be lived, and the terms of that life are yours to define. We recognise that meaning is a value we assign to words and hang on objects; we should feel no despair in realising the profound meaningless of reality, because it is precisely that meaninglessness which affords us the freedom to define ourselves. It is in interpreting that we exist. Humans are a creative race, and creating meaning is the first of our great projects to create ourselves and our place in the vast indifferent universe. Humans were telling stories before they were building cities, before they were sowing fields.

Meaning is not inherent, but you can spend your time however you want. It's what you choose to do and what you choose not to do that defines you. We are always making these choices.

She is curled up and.

She is curled up and it can't possibly be comfortable. Her body pressed against the seat and her eyes closed. I am a little ashamed because I find her so beautiful, just in this instant, relaxed and asleep. All of a sudden she is awake, running to the front of the bus, all flustered apologies and flushed skin. I wonder what her smile looks like.

Water!

Today I learned that the drinking fountain on my level at work would be better titled "face hose".

It was fun though.

I am absent minded.

I keep forgetting that I am 22. I just saw my age written on something and I was sort of disconcerted by it. I don't necessarily feel 21 or 20 or any particular age, I just feel a bit funny about my duration being measured like that.

Also I am trying to improve my consumption habits so right now I have organic chocolate, Scarborough Fair brand 70% cocoa. Every time I eat some I get the Simon and Garfunkel song stuck in my head, which I enjoy.

I also came across this singer, I can't quite figure out how? I did a google search and only 6 english-speaking websites even mention her. I believe she is from Hungary.

Péterfy Bori and Love Band - Vámpír

Don't worry, I don't have the dedication or free time to turn this into an obscure I-am-so-indie music blog. Then again maybe this is how it all starts.

Peace!

No Effort

There always seems to be such a very big gap between the things that I daydream about and my everyday life. I do not have any real fear of the future, or of change, or of dying without achieving anything by which society will supposedly measure what sort of a person I was. My fears swirl around living a life in which my dreams are more pleasant than my reality. Where the what-ifs and the might-have-beens take up more space in my memory than the things I did. So I am afraid of dreaming about things that might never happen. Things like being an author, since it is so easy to imagine never ending up as an author. In some ways the issue is that all I'd have to do is do nothing and my life would end up living itself and being empty and meaningless.

I also wish I could fly.

Retcons You Won't Notice

Alright, alright.

It was silly of me to delete my blog while in an excessively morbid mood.
Instead of self-harm I moved onto hurting things I can't get back.

Of course I forget that RSS readers hold onto things and so thankyou Blessi for making me realise I wanted it back and Jess for showing me it still existed. There, I've just thanked 100% of my readership so this should be a new period of popularity and harmony, right?

I made changes. I couldn't not make changes. In some places a title is shorter, in some places I dropped off paragraphs that were good to write but not so good to read. Notably absent; the Adventures of Norman. I haven't decided how to move forward with that so I'll hold off on re-posting until I've decided. They still exist, anyway.

It's something of a coincidence that I restored my blog today. I realised as I was forging the dates of the original posts that it's been almost a year since I started up here. It doesn't feel like a year at all, but I don't know if it feels like more or less. I had my last undergraduate lecture on Tuesday. Hilariously, I skipped it. It wasn't actually that hilarious. I often let style re-arrange what I want to say so that it sounds better. I'm a writer, I'm allowed.

I have an essay due on Monday and one due in two weeks, and I have an exam next week and another a few weeks later. After that I can justifiably add B.BSc (Psych) to the end of my name, well, assuming that I pass. I will do honours eventually. I'm partly writing that so that if I look back in the future, having not done honours, I'll get this little pang of regret, like so, 'pang!'

It's odd, I miss uni already. I guess it's because I remember school and I realise how fun and silly it all was, and I didn't realise until afterwards, this time I am anticipating feeling that way already.

I'm reading James Joyce at the moment. I read Dubliners a few years ago, and then recently I bought Ulysses and A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man. I was a bit bummed out when I did because I found out that what I was attempting with Norman not only has already been thought of, but was thought of basically a century ago, and resulted in a novel much, much better than anything I can write at the moment. That's partly why I'm disenchanted with Norman for now, I feel as though he was just made into a photocopy even though I didn't know the details of Ulysses until recently. It doesn't mean abandoning it, it just means I need to re-think it and put more of myself in it. Joyce is incredible for infusing his writing with both a great sense of the zeitgeist of Ireland of his era and an amazing ability to get across such nuances of character with such trivial phrases. Stepping back from the writing itself, the structure is amazing. I don't know if he wrote it to a plan or put it together as it went along, but it's really something, it feels like the literature equivalent of singing in harmony.

Enough! Suffice to say that secrets remain claustrophobic.


Peace.

Rain Thoughts

It's raining outside, so heavily it feels like the sheer force of it will batter the house apart.

Maybe it will! That would be exciting for a little while, then after that it'd be cold and wet and somewhat depressing.

I feel like I need to come up with something profound, because if I don't, but I write something anyway, it will just end up being angst-ridden crap.


Well, watching a rainbow through the broken ceiling would be pretty cool.

Is There A Word For That?

Inspired by the tiny but well-formed droplets of beautiful writing at 55 Words I’ve been writing some short stories myself, namely, 35 words. That isn’t intended as any sort of one-upmanship, it’s just that the first one I wrote was 35 words and I ran with that. I don’t think I will post them here because I feel like 35 words is too short for a post, and I wouldn’t want to post them together as that would imply a connectedness that didn’t exist. I like writing small things because it's easier to get down a sentence or two without tearing it apart in my head over and over.

So the normal state of affairs is for me to post when I should be doing something else. Right now I should be preparing a 10 minute oral on the a) methods and results, and b) validity of the methods and results, of a relatively complex study. I need to do this tonight because tomorrow I’m going to Ray’s, in order to combine it with his half in a PowerPoint slide show (If it were up to me I’d rather just stand and gesticulate wildly but the lecturer wants PowerPoint). After presenting that on Monday, I then must prepare another 10 minute oral, this time part of a debate, before Wednesday, when I have to rehearse it with my fellow debaters. Suffice to say I haven’t done any work on either.

I feel really fatigued, at the moment. When you’ve been up for a while and you aren’t drowsy but your body is going “…it’s time to sleep, ok?” or when you play a game or read a book for too long and are zoned out and a little dizzy. It can’t really be because I’m tired though because it’s been around for much of the day. Right now, I would really just like to curl up in a ball and be embraced by darkness.


Peace. 

Fragments

A little bird lands on the path in front of me. Nothing else but a puzzled glance, a few brief hops, and then back into flight. I pause for a moment, but my eye quickly loses the bird in the distance. The breeze ruffles my hair just a little. Or,

Inhale the musty odors of old books, eyes closed. Just for a moment, you understand. I open them, and for a moment my eyes meet hers, dark pebbles framed in brunette curls. A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth and she looks away. I smile faintly myself, my mood lightened, and a little gleam in my memory. The curve of her lips, delicate. The secrets in her eyes leapt between us for just an instant. A darkling gaze that I won't forget. Or,

The discomfort of the seat, the stifled hot atmosphere of the theatre, my senses forget themselves, dwelling only on the figures in the light wrapped in darkness. There's a joy in their tragic motions that I share, a love of the shadows and the nuances and the subreal. They'll dance their slow drama every night, each performance a unique duplicate. For me, this moment alone satisfies. For them, it all lies in the instant, a stumbled line, a missed cue, a stolen glance. The mistakes of an actor lie forever in the performance, inseparable from it.

The fragments that make up memories, the experiences that make up people, are not unique, but they are beautiful. Each person in their own realm of photocopied moments assembles them a new way, putting their own captions on the pictures, creating a whole. Here is where the soul lies, within these fragments.

One of mine:

A soft kiss is beautiful.
In the moment before the kiss, there's nothing else in the world,
only warm breath across your face and a slight tingle.
It feels a little like static electricity, but it's mostly anticipation,
released in a small spark, which like saliva,
moves between you and I.

"Five days, leaving me wanting more."

Moonlight

There always seems to be such a very big gap between the things that I daydream about and my everyday life. I do not have any real fear of the future, or of change, or of dying without achieving anything by which society will supposedly measure what sort of a person I was. My fears swirl around living a life in which my dreams are more pleasant than my reality. Where the what-ifs and the might-have-beens take up more space in my memory than the things I did. So I am afraid of dreaming about things that might never happen. Things like being an author, since it is so easy to imagine never ending up as an author. In some ways the issue is that all I'd have to do is do nothing and my life would end up living itself and being empty and meaningless.

I first realised reality was utterly devoid of objective meaning a little over four years ago. For a little while it would overcome me, until I hit upon the realisation that reality didn't need meaning. The whole concept of meanings, values, representation, is entirely a constructed entity. It stems, I suppose, from the nature of language, and symbols more generally, in their habitual way of assigning order to things. Things isn't a particularly good symbol itself, I should have used a word more like "entities" or "objects", damn. So anyway my point, or my realisation, was that the whole idea of things holding meaning was not a native expectation about the world but was tied up entirely with the construction of symbols and languages. So the objective meaninglessness of reality is just a ground state. Without the minute vibrations and movements of subatomic particles the temperature of the universe could reach absolute zero, or, if the temperature of the universe was absolute zero, subatomic particles would cease moving and perhaps cease existing, or, you know, another interpretation of quantum mechanics along those lines. Likewise without thought the universe can reach a state of absolute meaninglessness, or, without meaning, thought is impossible. So I'm not in a void of meaninglessness, because my thoughts are creating a meaningful reality. It's a subjective reality, and it's not necessarily externally valid, but the upshot of it all is that I can find for myself the ideas that I want to hold, the thoughts that I think are worth thinking, the beautiful moments that I want fragmented through fading memory cells. From here there is no chance at all that I can become permanently unhappy because it only takes sun shining mutely on my face or wind pressing against me like a lonely animal, and I'm back immersed in the pure wonder of it all. This doesn't stop me from being unhappy at times. It doesn't make me feel any better when I am unhappy. In fact existing is pretty much just as beautiful in any mood, it's just that a lot of moods tend to block out the good bits of existence and focus on the ugly ones.

So.

The problem is that I am afraid that I am going to fail to meet my own standards of how I think I should live my life.

It haunts me when I imagine the myriad ways in which things could actually be other than how I think they are, and those ways are always the sorts of things that would hurt terribly.


Peace.



 

Karl Norman

I knew that I would inevitably leave long gaps between writing here, but somehow I didn't think it would only take me two posts to exhaust my immediate supply of handy anecdotes. Considering that I don't have a job and that I am on University holidays at the moment, it's really almost bizarre how easily my day becomes occupied.

Last year, in the same situation, I resolved to write a movie script based on an idea that I was throwing around with Ray towards the end of the semester. The plan was that I would write it, and then when it was done, we would film it (badly) using camcorders. Except, as normally happens with my projects (novels #1-4, screenplays #1-3) I began the work, and fleshed out roughly the structure of it, and then abruptly lost drive. In this case it was mostly because I was unsure of who would play the main characters, and I didn't feel as though I would have enough friends involved to fill the roles. So I lost a reason to work on it constantly, since it probably wouldn't be filmed even if I did finish it, and without a good reason to work on it, it quickly started to gather dust. The problem is that while I love the creative process, I usually get completely frozen trying to work my way through what I see as irreconcilable flaws in how it is unfolding. I'm very aware that I should just get it written and then agonise over the editing later on, but it doesnt make it any easier to move onto a new section when I feel as though what I've already written is awful. More to the point I feel like what I wrote hasn't really done the idea itself justice. I am fond of some of the dialogue, though. I'm trying to continue it, I wrote a new scene a few days ago that I quite like. Here is part of it.

JEREMY (V.O.)
(as he writes)
Dear diary. Today, I decided that I would start a diary.

Jeremy scowls at what he’s written so far. He waits a little. He tears out the first page and screws it up.

JEREMY (V.O., cont.)
Today, at work, I-

JEREMY
NYAARGH!!

FEMALE VOICE
You actually wrote “Nyaargh”?

Jeremy looks around and finds Herpsma looking over his shoulder.

HERPSMA
Yes! Me!

JEREMY
Uh… what?

HERPSMA
Oh.

JEREMY
Oh?

HERPSMA
Hmm!

JEREMY
What?

HERPSMA
I thought you were going to say “YOU?!”

It's a silly sort of movie, mostly about taking things lightly and making life decisions that are relevant to yourself, not ones that are based on other people's concepts. It's also just a fun sort of thing with (hopefully) lovely characters who are fun. I want to blend a profound sort of love of the life experience with a recognition of the complete absurdity of it all. If you've seen Garden State, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and Amelie, you have some idea of where it's aimed. Not that I am putting this on the same level as those, just that I think I'm dealing with similar themes.

Incidentally, if anything resembling the script excerpt I quoted shows up anywhere else, there will be hunting, this hunting will involve blood, and that blood will be yours, dear anonymous reader. I am extremely possessive of my writing. Just so you know.

Hmm, it is Christmas. Paganism meets commercialism and they have a party together. Not that I have anything against paganism, mind you. I don't know - despite my cynicism about the ceremonial sort of side of it and the crass consumer ethic which gets rubbed in everyone's faces in the days beforehand, I do still like it. Anything which has people being decent to eachother can't be all bad and it is good to have things in the world that keep it beautiful. The thing I like about Christmas is the together-ness, the feeling of community or of unity. I just wish that it didn't take a yearly holiday to bring out that side of us. Share the love all the time, not just when it is deemed culturally significant!

Anyway that will be all for now. I shall try to write more often because I do enjoy it.



 

The Silence Of Noise

Talking to someone, and they leave, perhaps fetching a drink or joining another conversation. For a moment my thoughts are still on the conversation, and then the background noise saturates me. All the other conversations in the room are crawling over me. My conciousness could flick to this one, or that one, and select just those voices, and hear just these words, but for now it stays drifting. So there's no comprehension of any of it. Odd phrases, fragments come and go, like ripples across the surface of a pool. I let go of that, and I have just a wave of sound. In this raw mass of conversations overlapping, without any meanings to latch onto, it is suddenly as though I am alone in silence.

It was a nice party, I imagine. Putting aside the introspective detachment that seems to sometimes dog my steps like, well, a dog, I had a generally pleasant time. It is always lovely to see long-time friends, and all together, in pleasant moods. The loud, rather awful kareoke singing was fun. I was tempted to have a turn myself, but this feeling was beaten out of me by the repetition of awful pop music. A pleasant time for a diversionary phonecall.

Later, some of us took a walk through the dark streets. It was a lovely night, nary a cloud and nary a breeze, though rather cold. For a second time, I found myself between (or betwixt, if you prefer it that way) two groups. It was less alienating the second time. I am fond of the night. There is a quietness to it, and an intimacy to it, that daytime lacks. Daylight has distinctiveness too of course, it is more lively and unashamedly happy, but I am fond of the dark smile and the quiet moments.

Also, my sleep patterns are somewhat asynchronous, so I tend to see the night just as much as the day, anyway.

If my previous entry was a soliloquay on what I love about the morning, then equally this is what I love about the night. Sometimes it is difficult to know what times I would really like to be awake, because they all have impressions, and memories.

If anything, the big memory that tonight's walk triggered for me was a cumulative one, of the various night walks on the various camps through school. What I loved wasn't the destination, but the walking. Night in a quiet place, or night in the wilderness, is one of the few things in the world that still has a quasi-mystical, otherworldy or spiritual essence at its core (two others that I can think of are sex and music, though I am sure there are more). During the day everything is reducible to elements and things are simply what they are, but at night sounds are sharper, vision is deceptive and there is an elusiveness to the world. It is something to enjoy, I think. Except when the imagination makes sounds into monsters.


Peace. 

Hello, Sun

If there is one thing to be said for irregular sleep patterns, it's that it completely changes the way you experience times of day. It has been a long time since I have been awake at this time of day; recently my sleeping pattern has been something along the lines of six in the morning until three in the afternoon, and I had completely forgotten what mornings look like, beyond the cold hint of sunrise that tells you that you should be in bed at six. So here I am, writing a sociology assignment, and it's only now that I realise that I had forgotten what the mid-morning looked like.

Do I expect that to be some sort of profound insight?

Well, I suppose not. Consider, though, that someone who wears glasses is just a tiny bit more amazed by sight than someone who has always had perfect eyes. If you follow me on that, you can understand what I feel, because seeing the light outside at midmorning, like a warm blanket and a soft embrace, is something that I am appreciating right now, in its immediacy, much more than I ever did when I got up to go to school every day and looked out the car window without ever quite noticing it.

So though it does sound a little odd, I am experiencing morning in a way that is new for me. I am going to regret it later, when I will be reminded more strongly that I didn't sleep, but for now I would rather just enjoy the sensation.

I suppose that is a reasonable way to start a blog.



Peace.