Author: shawn

Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness

all of these things inspired by a cut-rate slapdash slide to ruin ? or, what other archaeological uncoveries might be required? that countryside rumination was left to wither on the vine. like a popsicle draining out the cavity. (which to be sure, today, there was strawberry then bubblegum all over my tongue, courtesy of the company, bootstraps and all) yup.

hurtling through space, like we are, i?d advise the holding onto of hats, for the most part.

gooey unguents are replacing that cold hard cash? we might come to miss that, with all that sloshing down onto counters and oozing out of registers. will vials and vats and viands be making combacks, or are they merely a flash? a wink and then gone? (and why do i get the feeling that the same words keep cycling through, over and over and over?on top of that, thinking of putting all my words in one archival spot?would that be wise, or should i keep them horded in some dusty shoebox?) cloths papered up the wall and clutched in some kind of? disastrous. cavalcade.

Keepmedia seems like a rational way to access information online.
$4.95 a month seems reasonable to me…

set in a stuffy old theatre with mushy old seats and watched some long since gone hong kong fuey with all the catsup fluttering everywhere. and why in the would you ever go to a blood mouth in an all-white suit?

now, it’s still hot. i wish that son (i mean, sun, sotty) would just chill out, leave us alone for a day or two. doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen.

and in all the yesters, i clambered around like a cave-dweller, watched the darkness flutter around my flashlight and brushed my tips against the slimey sides. rocks and rocks and rocks. by the end of it, (after fall once or twice and bashing my leg on a lone rock twice the size of my head) i’m thinking like i’m drinking or dreaming up the sun and that by the time we’re clambering out, dazed, after half day of utter dark, well, the sun’s looking mighty good. it’s only later that we scarfed down meatcicles and such. now i’m sure the trails gone all slarpy.

what to do when there’s nothing to do anyway? all the linkages in the world are uninspiring me these days. that’s why there’s not much ado on that front (all the germans crouched in the bunkerholes, smoking their triste cigarillos and coughing up their yellowed lungs) or any front atoll.

i’m yearning for a storm crane, so’s i can just stand in the midst of a fiery raging water spout and feel that wind and air whirruping about. that would be refreshing. a bit of physical something to patch against the agonistas of the neurochemickals thereabouts or in the neighboring ones. or, contrariwise, just feeling those burning breaths through some dark navvy. and now i’ve lost myself in something…

inspired by cloudclacking brain patterns that i?ve been staring at for years (i mean, minutes or hours) i?m finding strange shapes and giggling outbursts coming out from my lips: dewdrop barricades or dazed rastafarian clown monkeys or hippocratics wallowing in sloughs of mud. so this old salt (or what would we do with new salt anyhow?) so all the time there?ve been droopy whispers coming from the back-center-left pew?the ones housing all the ne?er-say-wells and doodads and hoppenpops?and those whispers are saying some kinds of thinks about unfurling a banner spelling out the? the? hmm.

all the organic hewhaws and geegahs are mouldering in those compostible piles, but supposing there?s some kind of treasured devotion buried deep there and suppose there was some kind of diving suit built for decomposing organickals and suppose you were a platypus: what kinds of eggs would you lay?

so: i mean, the problem with eggs, say, is that they?re lying there. you can say what?s behind that calcium carbonate if you had some x-ray specktacles that could voom right through that intricate protein barrier. but. if you?re lacking in the forementioned specks, you?re scratching your head, thinking: where?s that cretur that left this here? who collected the dash-it-all bits, the ribbons, and flywheels, the corncobs, and hornribbed glasses, the yawning framework that some poor beastie built from all the bits and scrabbles and flimflams that sods and doldhoppers flung everywhere about.

so: you have some strange whistle (i?m cranking backwards, in a thistley tangential way) clutched in your pettifour apron, it?s got flywheels (which we?ve mentioned before) and bells and, hummmm, whistles. it?s got some strange characters (runes?) scorched into the curvy bit of the whistle. who knows what they say anymore? so many languages have been forgotten these days (and even, though we hate to say it, languages that have been forgotten that they?ve been forgotten) that you may never have a chance of stumbling upon those particular shapes and soundbits. neveryoumind. if you blow that whistle, not sound comes out. only the flabbering of your breath and spittle. but what strange sounds might be perpurating below the hearing that you can hear? and what if those perpurating noises that you cannot hear (but which may be heard by others, with otherears and otherbellhoppersandclappers that pick up those soft?or broad?vibrations) attract a strange beastie that looks monstrous to your eyes (those cycling nerve bundles that filter in all your light/nonlight)? what do you do then? with those twirling tentacles, those grumbling tooths, those hidebound scales and yuttering toepebbles crunched up close inside your face?

there’s no call for that kind of lettering… is there? or, contrariwise, do all the snarfles keep on keeping on just because the paint’s gone dry?
i’m sad somedays and other days the exstatical forms just leap over my head, with deep organic trips.

lately, it feels like all the words are draining away or maybe they’re walled up back there somewhere. plugged up with a corklike stopper.
fathermore, instead of cold calculation, it’s been replaced with a feverish mumbering (and a 1 and 4 and …) that doesn’t sauce in quite the same… or maybe the trick is happenstances which can catch the colder fetching place.

killing the babies, likeso. what’s the world to do with all the past and history that crowds us into the future so fast the present becomes an afterthought? likeso, who wants it anymore? when all that flowersmelling comes and goes, doesn’t that old bus keep trucking?

also, likeso, if all the dashed vital hordes of thought kept inside create the fantasized value-added, etc. whatsit. then what happens when all that currency falls out on the floor, devalued like, de-inflationized. or to put it another way: what’s the value in getting everything you’ve always been wanting to get at? does that desired thing (being pristine/pure in the mind’s head, lurking in some dream/imagined place, sparkling like all the (fool’s?) gold in all the hordes of pyrite movies) upon falling into the cold hard light outside the skull lose all its lustre? or is this a non-dilemma dilemma? one of those tricksy puzzle boxes that only bollix up the mind by some vacant voluntary stumbling?

contrariwise, there’s some small phenomenal axing which chops the heads of chickens or by which i’m meant to say the very thing that i never wanted saying.

Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby
These stories were wicked groovy. From the meat towers to the solid clouds to the monstrously huge sound gun (setting: make dead = ruptured bowels) dragged along by mules to the couple who lose their child (permanently) in a shopping mall to the red-buttoned uterine flaps to the watchmen delivering eggs in their giraffe-suits.

It’s all groovy. I laughed and laughed and laughed. As always, here and here. Or just, you silly, go to your local public library–the place where you can read forever for free free FREE!.

is it ok that all the light is on this side?

“Saving the Net” by Doc Searls
Good essay on the need for reframing the terms regarding copyright and fighting to preserve the (our) internet as it is and not how broadcast media companies would have it be–a uni-directional, one-to-many broadcast medium like television, as opposed to the multi-directional, many-to-many medium that the internet currently is.

It’s important to elect folks who understand this. Who will stand up for preserving what the internet is.

The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? by Slavoj Zizek

I’ve no idea what I’m doing reading books like this. I think that I picked the book up on some whim because of Roger’s mentioning of it a couple of weeks ago. Hell, I don’t even begin to understand most modern philosophy and this guy’s talking about Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Foucault (among countless others that I had never heard of). This book mostly left me in the dust, with the feeling that I had as a child when adults would speak around me and I felt like I *wanted* to understand what they were talking about, but the words just skipped over my head. (Now that I am an adult, of course, I find this sort of amusing.) Similarly, this book danced and skipped over my head, occasionally hooking down to leave some small residue inside my brain.

Some residues that I can recollect:
1) Art = Art because of some, erm, void (Void?) that the Art fills. (True Art being the noumenous Art, which inspires.) But without the void it isn’t art. Modernist art (and all art) being an attemt to define the void which makes something art. But the least Art-things are the “beautiful” objects which are produced by capitalism. Hence, the use of trash (literally) to create Art, to describe (or define, in terms of sketching its outlines) that frame of the void.

2) Drinking Diet Coca-Cola is drinking the essence of nothingness (its 0 nutrional value) and is a perfect symbol of the all-consuming (ever-consuming?) nature of capitalism. (For reasons that I can’t quite recreate.) This seems like a ridiculous thing to remember.

3) Regarding Pagan, Jewish, Christian thought: (this is the crux of the entire book; if I don’t get this, I’ve totally flummoxed the whole reading of the book) Fuck. I think I’ve flummoxed it. It almost made perfect sense when I finished the book last night. But I can’t seem to recreate it. Maybe I’ll try again later.

I have no idea if Zizek actually has good arguments for what he says. It certainly seems well-reasoned, but the reasoning is so far above my head that I can’t quite grasp it. For a marxist, atheist, lacanian writer, he makes the excellent point (I think) that fundamentalist Christians betray the true radical (revolutionary?) nature of Christianity [the rejection of those definitions (nationalism, tribalism, classism, sexism, historicism) which create tensions and hatreds between people] by re-creating the old adherence to the Law (definitional states) that pre-dated Christ.

There’s this fellow (don’t know his name, but I think of him as squuby) who wrote this thing about atheism, agnosticism, etc. I like what he has to say. I’m not an agnostic and I’m not atheist. Actually, I don’t really know how to define what I am. It might depend on what kind of socks I’m wearing (day to day sort of thing). Having been raised in some kind of Pentecostal thing, I’m definitely not THERE either, but I’m not able to easily just dismiss that totally either, the way some people seem to do. I mean to say, it’s easy to dismiss something about which you have no experience or, especially, have no desire to experience.

However, it’s another thing entirely to dismiss something that you HAVE experienced or desire to experience again. If you have perceived to have experienced something “real”, does it matter if it is “real” or not?

At any rate, I find myself in a very strange position. So what else is new…