Sergio sent a simple, mostly repeating electric piano motif to the Whatsapp group GOLD GUNNERS. I am a part of this group because I have been helping (I use this term very loosely) Dani on a film project to be submitted to somesuch contest later this year. I am an actor and a proofreader so far. A chance that some of my music will be included in the final product is also possible.

Sergio sent a simple, mostly repeating electric piano motif to the Whatsapp group GOLD GUNNERS yesterday afternoon. After years, I began using Pocket Band again. It’s ancient title is ULoops. I began composition of a piece sitting on Soundcloud at this moment in 2011. Pocket Band is basically a loop editor. They loops can be arbitrarily complex, but they are firmly bordered from one another. No overlaps are allowed, as far as I can tell. In the aforementioned composition, this limitation is particularly obvious. No matter.

I took Sergio’s motif, extracted a small part, and had Pocket Band repeat it nine times. Each set of three were plastered with different effects. Beneath rumbled and buzzed a sound generator with far too much LFO. This morning, I used Audacity on Galictis-vittata to overdub minimal guitar picking and scraping.

The GOLD GUNNERS applauded the result. Christian even muttered something positive under his breath with enough force for it to splatter spittle on the keyboard, sending me a message with blessings.

How long has it been since I’ve actually sat down and composed something? I reckon January of 2014. That’s over two full years, you lazy cunt. And I still feel excitement, joy and a fantastic wetness in my knickers. This morning saw me go through eight or nine pairs of undergarments.

Sergio sent two other rather crude acoustic guitar meanderings today. I plan to pick and scrape over one of the two tomorrow morning. The objective, however, as always, is to NEVER do the obvious. Therefore, firstly, anything resembling soling is right out. Repeating patterns of atmospheric pattering.

That’s where’s it’s AT, jaw-whore.

Shambal was in the kitchen that day. He’d peeled seven rutabagas. The discarded rind scattered itself around his bare feet. In ancient times, those times when he could actually see his feet, he enjoyed tactile sensations. One could say he had a foot fetish. One could also say that he just loved roughly hewn stone floors touching his soles.

Times did come, however, when a sliver of rock loosed itself. Usually this happened hear the narrow gaps between stones were mortar had compacted itself, retreating further into the flooring. He loved to howl in three precise tones when one a sliver jammed into his bare skin. The tones, translated to notes, were e, f and gis. Upon many occasions, and especially when a slice of stone was jammed into the sole of his foot, he considered writing a ditty, or even a quartet or symphony, using the three tones as a basis. A wealth of chord sequences including them played in his mind time and again.

Now that he is sessile in his bed, drained of filth by tubes to nether places of his land, he can precisely complete this pagan desire. Why doesn’t he, then? Because he is a jaw-whore. That is the sole reason.

Rutabagas were always one one Shambal’s favourite fruits. As a youth, he plucked them from low bushes and from hedges along rock walls separating his pig-land from one of the neighbouring. He’d stash most in his capacious waist-pack, but since they were fresh, he’d reserve one for immediate gobbling. The sensation of juice trickling from his lips, down his chin and neck, along his forested chest and pooling in his navel always soiled his knickers a bit.

As the hardened fruit boiled in this favourite pot atop the plasma-stove, he considered his earlier actions

He had flayed the skin from the feet, buttocks and head of his true love, a Bolivian chick he’d grown tired of during the past months. She had been a squeal in bed, and that had enticed him initially. He’d never been one to think too much before taking the plunge, so to speak. His vast satisfaction in disfiguring her in the wee hours, however, proved once and for all that the bad had profoundly outweighed the good.

The corpse was in the walk-in fridge. It’d keep for days and his supply of lubricant would allow for necro-shagging until he had the gumption and prowess to lure another tart into his lair.

Good luck, Shambal!! We’re with ya!

But then again I wonder if what we feel in our hearts today isn’t like these raindrops still falling on us from the soaked leaves above, even though the sky itself long stopped raining. I’m wondering if without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.

I am in the midst of reading The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. I delight in, apart from the story itself, his diction and syntax. I usually read each paragraph at least twice to drink in first the meaning, then to allow the structure to solidify. Ideally, I’d like his semantic and syntactic forms to germinate in my own writing. I’ve never been much on learning by osmosis, but giving it a try is better than having your femur shattered into fragments by an angry chick on a motor-scooter. Or so they say.

In fact, I have come to a conclusion many times and usually during lapses into states of depression that I am incapable of learning by osmosis. A better term may be subconscious learning. I prove myself wrong time and again. An example today was deft fingular movements about the fretboard of my pig-nose. They came without thought. I’m not referring to muscle memory, however, as that is truly the result of the opposite of subconscious learning. I write now of choosing particular tones depending on backdrop. My mind is better and better at expressing itself tonally without my conscious interference.

Motor memory is engrained by pattern memorization. Parts of my mind are programmed to repeat patters in certain contexts. Those patterns are played out by my fingers on a guitar. I wonder if, isomorphically, they could also be played out in other means. A portion of my subconscious could be writing this now using the structure of a guitar phrase translated to the syntax of an English sentence. I would never know in the moment, might after careful cross-analysis, but most possibly not even then. As the untamed beast within Shambal’s finicky hypothalamus says: We are much more than our obvious conscious self. Accessing that great veiled monster beneath our everyday façade is only possible by indirect means.

So what if our feelings in the moment are like those raindrops? They are an imprint of something past. If the storm is capsule of time during which something ocurred, important or not, the splatters from salvaged raindrops lurking heavy on tree leaves paint skeletal patterns. Like a portrait is a two dimensional representation of a human in a phase of a four dimensional existence, the impressions are ultimately false.

But they are simply all that remain.

I also write of memories in Martenblog. Those stories are a sketch of a great, colourful, lost season of life. Especially from pattering words, the reader paints the majority him / her / itself with impressions from the present. More accurate, some say, are video takes of life-scenes. What do they not capture? Internal life is never captured by video the way it is in writing. Perhaps I videotape every scene in my existence for one year. Following, I overdub an omniscient narrator, delving into details of every situation. Long pauses occur frequently during which narration carries on over a still frame. He weaves the internal story for the viewer during these stases. The resulting product would span a century.

The internal life is ultimately lost. To express it is futile, for its complexity is beyond the grasp of our narrative abilities.

Ishiguro allows a very complex story to unfold by focusing on subtle simplicities of certain characters. These characters are always everymen, though that is often not obvious initially. Their experiences during a story that unfolds beyond their control, the nuances of their thoughts and especially their remembrances hover perpetually beneath the straight river of storytelling.

A theme that permeates the majority (if not all) of his novels is slow awakening. A plain amnesia inhabits a protagonist and his / her / its view of the world and of his / her / its own existence changes significantly during the course of this awakening. It is an awakening of memory. Pieces lost resurface first individually and without context. Slowly and at times without the reader immediately noticing, these pieces connect. But they do not always connect in satisfying or immediately obvious ways. I find Ishiguro’s mastery of this technique truly marvellous.

The creeping culmination of subtleties finally creates a mass of wonder. Opinions regarding results vary widely, I am sure. I mostly do not hang out reading reviews of his or of other authors’ works. I do recall Renata telling me, upon handing me my first Ishiguro novel – The Unconsoled, this novel is very unrewarding but I cannot help but feel it is a work of genius. I see her point to an extent. The Unconsoled is built upon a series of bizarre anti-climaxes. It is also my favourite novel.

I shall continue with The Buried Giant in some minutes.

I began reading an article on gynocentrism and was inspired to cough out a few paragraphs. I am yet to complete the article, but shall soon after typing a bit.

I have often faced White Knight syndrome during my life and hold it in high contempt. The kind of sexism it brandishes is usually beyond reproach, especially in the repellent nation in which I was raised.

Still, I have always found traces in myself. I was, after all, raised in the south of a nation-state discriminating against yet at the same time placing women in positions pristine. The thought of matriarchy can make men cringe, but their fundamental selves feel the pull of motherhood stronger than any ambition. This discludes, of course, psychopaths such as your humble narrator.

I’ve spent stretches of accumulated time holding doors for random females over years. This time is dead time in my life. It can never be recovered and had no positive effect on neither me nor said females. Holding doors is a simple example. The curious reader will explore his or her own imagination to conclude other enlightening analogies.

Were anyone to ask my advice, I’d promptly state that ignoring any female in the immediate proximity that is not a pervasive factor in your life is beneficial to mental stability, general happiness and blood pressure. Hustle away from there, chap! Don’t engage in sexism!

Most white knights I’ve met are pointedly shitty people. They will slough away any other pressing matter in their immediate surroundings to rush to the nominally needed aid of some wench. I use the word aid rather magnanimously here. These fetid specks of fecal matter discard their regard for anything except gaining favour of the LADY.

Shambal contains no part of this trait.

Christián, being raised in the states by a despotic mother, exhibits portions of this malady often. His death will be welcome.

How do I avoid backsliding into white knightitude? Firstly, I must be observant at all times of my actions towards others. I shall treat every human previously in my midst, in my current midst, and in future midstes equally. A splendid way of achieving this is by envisioning each of them as an identical, squirming maggot. In this fashion, I’ll never block the path of either a prim and spritely businessman or a lumbering and perspiring baglady attempting to hold open the door for some high heeled tart. All maggots. All equal.

Secondly, I shall round them up and place them equally in cells surrounded by electric fences. Each cell will contain between seventy and ninety-six maggots. I’d really like to have each cell filled by an equivalent number, but even my gracious and unprejudiced eye cannot overlook variations in maggot-girth.

Beneath the morass of maggots will be fresh soil to be churned. Future orchards flourish thereupon. When a maggot churns soil, that maggot is of the same social class as his numerous neighbours. In the uniform swath of aromatic peat, envy is impossible.

The cells will have no communication. No internet is possible. If two nation-states are oblivious of one another, neither can have a wish to claim the other’s soil. This model is of a multiverse. Simply a multiverse of orchards, i realize, but a multiverse just the same. I, as the overlord, will watch contentedly as humanity churns to create beauty.

And fruit.

Fruit to feed my fetid face.

Since the world worships at my feet, and among the masses of said word is the lowly Christián Newman, I’m creating this entry to let him enjoy the easy benefits of Hexo and get his BLOG back online for easy access by the remains of the steaming pile of masses. Christián is currently using Windows, so here we go.

(Hexo)

Install Git for Windows, ya doof.

Even a less intellegent rodent than Christián can accomplish this feat by clicking on this link. Being a rodent, Christián also knows how to double click on the .exe once his machine acquires it.

(this)

Any request the machine makes to add something to your execution path, ANSWER FUCKING YES.

I went through this mortally wounding ordeal on Marisa’s box a few days ago and found that the git installation includes a fairly usefull bash shell. Christián is advised to use this during later steps in the process of which I am currently expounding. That is, he should use it if it automagically adds Node.js executables to its PATH. If this is not the case (a case I cannot verify at this moment since even my godly state is denied knowledge of the password to Marisa’s laptop), the rodent that is Christián M Newman can use the shell provided with Node.js. But I am getting ahead of my deific self.

I pause to sneeze. A few of my worshippers are covered by a sticky film. They sigh with pleasure and shall ever refuse to scrub it away.

Install Node.js, ya drip.

Having leaped the first hurdle on the bombshelled path to stickin’ it to the listless internet empty and bereft of a BLOG by Christián M Newman, the rodent that is he scurries in oval and trapezoid patterings to celebrate an initial victory. He places his paws once again upon the keyboard of his machine, and installs Node.js from here.

(here)

Any request the machine makes to add something to your execution path, ANSWER FUCKING YES.

Install hexo, ya noog.

With this installation, the rodent notices there is a command-prompt-type thinghie. It loads the Node.js environment so it is not required to do bullshit Windows PATH orienting. Rodents hate that shit. I did mention earlier that Git comes with a command prompt shell, also. As of this paragraph, I still do not know if it automagically loads the Node.js environment, however.

First he tries the Git shell utility. The rodent finds it somewhere in his well-organized start tab. His paws flash over the keyboard deftly as he types node. If an error occurs, he kills this shell utility and opens the command prompt that comes with Node.js (also found in his well-organized start tab).

However, if, within the Git shell, the command node gives Christián Michael Newman (the rodent to which I refer) another prompt, he continues with the Git shell. He hits Ctrl-D to get back to the normal command prompt.

Either way, the rodent (who is the Christián Michael Newman to which I refer) points his slightly bulging eyes at the rectangle of the command prompt. It should indicate where he is within his directory (folder to you Windows-lepers) structure. Something like /users/dickboy. He enters the following with sweaty, trembling paws:

npm install -g hexo-cli

Create the BLOG, ya squelch.

Christián, a rodent, dreams up a name for the directory of his BLOG. This name is unimportant. It is just a place to keep the bloody thing locally, you shaft! Don’t sit there fucking deliberating it!

hexo init THENAMEOFTHEFUCKINGFOLDERYOUCUNT

Casually, the rodent follows up with cd THENAMEOFTHEFUCKINGFOLDERYOUCUNT. He then either types ls or dir depending on which shell or command prompt he has chosen to use (Git and Node.js, respectively) to see the files in his BLOG directory. Of course, being a rodent, he also checks it out in Windows Explorer, which displays for him the files also in a non-finicky manner. Christián sees the two files _config.yml and package.json. These files are important, my furry friend.

That being said, replace them with this “_config.yml” and this “package.json” with whatever means you know to replace files. I could explain how to do it simply from the command line, but that would just not be very GODLIKE.

(this “_config.yml”)
(this “package.json”)

Now get your penis out of that goat!

Back at the command prompt (and making sure he is still in the THENAMEOFTHEFUCKINGFOLDERYOUCUNT directoy), the rodent happily enters npm install. Shit occurs. When the shit ocurring finishes occuring, Christián Michael Newman (a cute, furry rodent), installs a new theme by doing the following:

cd themes
git clone https://github.com/hexojs/hexo-theme-light.git light

If this part does not work, the rodent sends a message to the DEITY that is me and tells him immediately.

If it does work, the rodent backs up one directory (folder - yeah, yeah) with cd .. and starts his BLOG server: hexo server.

Once Christián M Newman (a rodent) goes to his browser of choice and thurks to the parenthesized link, he will contact the HIGHER BEING that has written this.

(http://localhost:4000)

(http://localhost:4000)

I watched The Lobster last night whilst lying in bed with Marisa. I’m fairly certain that I enjoyed the film much more than she did, though one is never to know exactly the thoughts, fears, delights and scandals of a woman, exactly. Regardless, I did watch The Lobster last night.

In fact, our taste in film is very divergent, as it was with Jana. I tire of endless realism in the same way I tired of Renaissance paining and its anal-retentive need for precision. During the opening minutes of the film, Marisa began asking questions concerning the reasons the people were in such an environment and what forerunning elements might be. My reply was to dismiss such details as irrelavent. The characters have been placed in this situation by the writer. Let’s see how they cope with it. For me, it is the immediacy that is important. Any historical discourse as to how on earth did we get to a state like this in our culture / society means little.

I am reminded of a brief conversation I had with Christián once concerning the film The Road. He asked me to muse about what may have happened to the world that left the father and son in their situation. My reply was similar to mine to Marisa. It is not important to me.

Relationships often sink to a point of lowest common denominator. One central point of the film is that for a relationship to be healthy, both parties have to have a similar affliction. For example, Colin Farrell’s character is myopic. The film states that it is his defining characteristic. His ideal mate has to also be myopic.

One of the first scenes, confusing at the time, was of Colin sitting on a sofa communicating (italicized since the method of communication in this film is staggeringly stilted) with his wife, ex-wife, or soon to be ex-wife. The line he speaks that resonates through the remainder is Does he wear glasses or contact lenses? All relationships most strongly bonded by a lowest common denominator.

I’m forgetting an important detail. Once of a certain age (never specified) and without a mate, one is placed in a hotel with others in the same condition. Gradiations of this condition do exist, as we see couples in the hotel during the course of viewing, but later find out they are experiencing a trial run as a pair. Therefore, they are being closely observed. After a specified time, anyone who do not find a mate and subsequently prove him / herself during the trial run is transformed into an animal of his / her own choice and released into the forest. There, they supposedly fend for themselves.

The film’s opening is a fixed shot within a car of a woman driving. It is strangely tension-building in its simplicity. She eventually stops, gets out, strides into a field of donkeys, pulls a gun, and shoots one dead. Another of the animals slowly moves over to investigate his fallen companion before the film cuts to the next scene. The situation is never revisited.

But back to relationships: the defining factor of one’s existence.

One female is cursed with spontaneous nosebleeds. A male character (Ben Winshaw) has a limp as a defining characteristic. To gain salvation, he fakes nose bleeds by bashing his head against flat surfaces, slapping himself silly and slicing up his nasal cavity. The hotel establishes that the two have similar afflictions. They are allowed to become a couple. They are married. During the ceremony, the management makes it a point to mention their affliction as source of bonding. It is never clear who the employees of the hotel really are, though one is shown in an entirely different context in the second half of the film. They are, however, the arbiters of the guests’ fates. Again, I am not bothered that their role is not made completely clear. Use your imagination to fill in the gaps, ya cunt!

I see pairing off in this regard as a micro-example of group-mind. When tethered to a partner at all times, your level of awakening is diminished. At last, you are only able to see the world through a filter fashioned by yourself and your mate. The affliction metaphor is apt. Both parties sink to the defining point of each others’ maladies. To use an hick expression: a group is only as quick as its slowest member. The expression doesn’t actually originate from hicks, but from Ancient Greece. Again, when tethered at all times to another, it is inevitable to sink into a morass of duonymity. A couple is only as swift as its dumbest half.

Colin’s charcter, too, attempts to fake an affliction, though one much more complex. He chooses a psychopathic guest. His sights are set on her, so after another guest, reaching the end of her days, attempts suicide from a second story window, fails and lies wailing in a pool of blood on the cement, Colin attempts to garner favour from the psychopath by pouring nastiness on the suffering woman’s plight.

The point is extreme. To be solitary is an affliction in itself. The hotel members go on hunting expeditions with tranquilizer guns to drag back loners from the forest. They gain points extending their hotel stay and their chances of appropriating a mate with each kill. Childish, theatrical demonstrations are given by the management illustrating the advantages of coupleness.

It’s never said outright, but hinted firmly at later in the movie, that the nearby city is filled only with couples (or, rather, families). Solitary hangers-on are not allowed. One scene sees a copper questioning Colin and his (admittedly pretend) wife about papers proving their coupleness. The city is also shown as consumerist heaven. Salvation is being a family and endlessly binging on products, useful or not. These parts are shot in a dreamlike manner to heighten the sense of unreality from the point of views of the outsiders.

When this sort of society comes to pass, as it surely shall, I will be drug thrashing and croaking from my solitary hut on Saaremaa.

Fuck um.

Just earlier, I sent a message to Christián telling him that he is a ego-stroking megalomaniac. I enjoy poking at him about his self-absorbed attitude often. The reason for my abuse is not so much that he really is a ego-stroking megalomaniac but that he is sensitive about it. Jayson told me many times that my greatest talent was making those around me introspect. I’ve always had problems when people around me did not notice their own actions and especially the way they projected themselves onto others. My observation has always been and still is that people in general lack self-observation.

But that was not what I was going to type into this greasy terminal.

I’d not like to think as myself as also a megalomaniac, but I am certainly ego-stroking. I muse to myself many times a day during intellectually idle instants that I’d rather return to activities that make me happy. Activities that stroke my ego. I dislike ego projection and call it megalomania. Introverted ego-stroking is very fecund, however. Were I not to spend many chunks of time every day in pursuit of my own happiness, I’d break down.

I see so many broken men and women! Fuck um.

And I don’t want to break down. Whatever I can say about my mental fragility, supportive or contrary, without following my own possible footsteps I always see receding into the distance, I’d be truly wandrering in limbo. Another discussion that has passed between myself and other denizens of my life is how relationships encircle and prevent one from stepping outside to follow said footsteps. That circle tightens and tightens and finally one loses sight forever of those mythical prints.

Most people inhabit that circle in the name of security.

Never.

Fuck um.

The new King Crimson album is blaring in my ears through my vastly underrated Bose headphones. Why are they underrated? I was mocked with gentle smirks in that windowed office in Boston when I attained them. What was his name? Ah… Jeff. Wasn’t that it? I believe so. He asked were they the ones about which I had raved, though not with a phrase so eloquent. I affirmed and asked would he like to try them. The augmented smirk brushed me off with a declination and shiny lips. Jeff then turned back to his computers to presumeably work. Now he is dead. Poor Jeff.

Red is completing itself. I listened to the studio version of this track many times during journies to and from Clear Lake from College Station. The purpose of those journeys was to see Marcie, who is also dead. I’d like to think that every person I have ever affected in my lengthy days is now DEAD. Shambal would approve. After the winds ceased in his land, all were truly dead but him and the robots running the market. There he was able to buy imported dried meats, fruits and photos of South-Asian kurvy. I was not intending to be sidetracked by Shambal, however, so also wish him DEAD, though it is not in my power to stop the pulsating muscle deep within his flabby form. That power solely resides in the words I type here, and, if Christián is correct, I, like he, have no control over what spills from my fingers.

The music of this album, in other forms, was soundtrack to the years 1993 - 1994. Most possibly, memories are attached to nearly every song. For instance, now plays Epitaph and I can refer again to the DEAD Marcie. In one very clear instance, I see her maw open and rather than receive a glop of manure begin to sing when Greg Lake’s voice returns after the song’s moody midpoint. She had her good points, I admit. In contrast to other females that I shall not name at the moment, Marcie delved into the music I loved and made it part of her life. She certainly did not do it solely to please me, as did Christián’s DEAD wench Sing. My DEAD girl incorporated my lifestyle wholly into her own. Of course, her own personality was itself hardly a personality at all at the time. She was thirteen when we met. She simply borrowed from me to become more whole. I’m sure she’s shed most of it by now. Well, of course she has since she is DEAD.

There were times when Shambal needed a swift kick in his then honed and muscular asscheeks. As they are now, flaccid and spreading to cover the surface area of the sole room in his hovel, to kick them would require tremendous effort. One must always remember that tremendous efforts are not worth their weight in bitcoins during the winds of spring.

Spring gales had tormented Shambal’s zone for centuries. Unbeknownst to outsiders, he had devised a plan to stop them for good. He didn’t contemplate the ravage this deed would wreak on his land, eventually turning it to mostly lifeless desert. The only thing occupying his mind was the present and alleviation of the continual whistling as air sang through the network of tiny tunnels in the walls and roof of his hovel. Various insects, since the beginning of Shambal’s sessile existence, had contentedly burrowed these musical wood-mazes.

Though also irked by the breezes that fought to topple them, the other inhabitants of the land found their own solace in strolls near to Shambal’s hut. They called it the musical mansion. Like all great titles assigned to famous landmarks, groups of creatures, abstractions and celebrities, Musical Mansion was a misnomer. As stated earlier, it was a hovel, and still is, as far as anyone knows. Also, the music was aleatoric and without apparent repetitious themes, as is the way of natural elements. Rather, so it was to lesser minds than Shambal’s.

With his enormous bottom and expansive brain, Shambal searched the noise-space ages for patterns. He had little else to do. I’d recommend you read his novella How I Shot the Breeze Without Tilting on Tippy-toe. Within is a thorough exploration of the methods of mind needed to amass the quantity of data determining messages in arbitrary weather patterns. I’m sure that your local bookseller provides the tome at minimal cost. That, or you can stand around in the shop and consume it whole with your greedy, bulbous whiteballs while security nano-denizens rip open cell walls of interior organs until you collapse into a heap of bubbling protoplasm.

Delusional, but Quirky was the motto Shambal had dreamed up for himself. Were he an out and about creature, he’d’ve had myriad t-shirts donning it. His motto was accurate. The message he deciphered was simply an echo of words he, himself, had spoken in a different age on top of a hill in a far away land. In actuality, it as probably the very same land about which I write at this moment, pummeled and recreated by elemental forces too outrageous to contend with.

He stood on that hill and thanked each of his serfs (as he saw them in his mind) as one. They were but a cohesive mass, no? Their service and allegiance was appreciated, but it was their time to die. Shambal unleashed fire from all seven of his extremities that seared the hoard to a blackened swath of soil. In actuality, he couldn’t lash out with electric fire from any part of his body, so instead used his thumb and ring finger to first pop open a green, copperish tube, and then to press a button labeled teful. The result was the same. Serfdom became cinderdom.

The obvious parallel was that the shrieking gales were his final words to his ex-minions. Obviously now, any reader can conclude that the great, bleak plain that surrounds Shambal’s hovel for as far as any ogling telefinder can see is the result of the dearth of wind.

The bed comforts my sore buttocks. I have been tortured once again by having to rise from my solace and go into the world. The day was balmy and quiet in the interior, but outside, sleeting. In my youth, the sleet never bothered me. It was another sensation for my skin to relish. Now that and other sensations are far in the past. In fact, the concept of feeling now is only going through the motions. I can pretend an emotion at the touch of a certain element, but it is entirely fabricated.

My buttocks need the bed more than I do. They have grown to enormous proportion. Time and again, I believe I am turning into Shambal. I curse my fate, but know I had many opportunities to turn from it. I let each pass me by and these days I curse every moment away from my bed as a torture. I am sure, for several decades now, he has not risen at all. The system that flushes his bowels provides constant vigilance. Perpetual consumption coupled with perpetual excretion is the norm for beings such as Shambal.

Tales tell of a different being. He was deft on his feet, they say. I doubt if his lower appendages do anything but take up space now. But once upon a time, he stood on a hill during each mid-morning and made the serfs cry with pain and wonder. How did he accomplish this? In the past, the peasants did not labour as machines, but had a smattering of emotions that only a strumpet like Shambal could set afire. He’d get them romping and dancing with a few claps of his pudgy paws. His booming voice, now only a distant croak, scribed as in ink on their minds phrases their grandchildren repeat to this day. I laugh at myself a little at these words, since these grandchildren are little more than infant minds in bodies of able-bodied grunts.

(some minutes later after talking to Marisa about the themes of my writing)

I had to go out into the falling ice because of a broken socket. Sockets are to many, things of a less automated past, things never to be thought or worried about. Two hundred or so years prior, they were common to connect onself, or the machine that was the comforter for onself to either a source of power, or a signal of communication. Even further back, they were strangely less used. All electromagnetic radiation was banned, or, rather, all creature-made electromagnetic radiation was forbidden. Before that, thrust forth from communication sockets were devices that showered an area with myriad radiations filled with streams of chatter. This, that, bing, bong, gobble, gibble, grunt.

A form of eccentricity evolved in creatures that made them spastic and unreliable. Multi-tasking was a name given to the crime. Those too afflicted were cut down and used to feed the remaining agriculture. Sockets that vomited into machines that spread this desease were converted to only connect a single apparatus with a certain focus.

I have meandered from my point, alas. Sockets still exist, of course, or I wouldn’t have had to leave the solace of my bed. Sockets line each floorspace, corridor, atrium, entranceway, tube, tram-capsule and IKEA. They are just not visible. They spew forth lines of invisible focus that are threads with diameters miniscule beyond the senses of creatures. Passing through suits, under-comforts and flesh, they drink each their type of input from all who pass.

Like Shambal, most of my time is spend idle, so sockets have fixed threads impaling my being at all times, even during slumber. Another anomaly of the past was that dreams were forbidden to the socket’s threads. Now, it is commonplace to have a profession that assists in the combination of datastreams from multitudinous creature-dreams to form films and video arcades for the entertainment of creatures too young to be healthily put into stability without damage. When earlier in the day, the socket that gushed threads into my cerebellum, facilitating the perpetual flexions of my muscles, exploded with a pop not unlike that of a creature exploding in a cell accidently turned quickly to vacuum, I harumphed in momentary despair.

Thankfully, my lower appendages still function, unlike what I guess to be Shambal’s. I rose from my comfort and danced along the mildly glowing bluish track that led to the rectangular prism that cleaned and depilated me with gusting powder. Some, also like Shambal, have had their hormones that grow hair deleted, sparing them frequent cleaning. Another machine stamped me with appropriate colour and pressured me outwards into the tube. A bubble-tram awaited. I climbed in.

My first destination had to be for porridge. When one is forced to leave his premises, one must at least have porridge. In the past (yes - again during that distance!), other warm comestibles were available, along with something called fruit manufactured in long forgotten factories. Porridge is what remains of that part of a deceased culture. I am not sure of its actual contents and honestly don’t enjoy putting in into my gullet, but it remains one of the only links to the past and I am stupidly sentimental in my middle age. Being far more decrepit, I’d imagine Shambal to be even more so.

He was developing the neuroses of the rich, the non-workers — or would start to, if he wasn’t careful.

The quote is from a novel I finished late last night: The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. Yes, it has the same title as the Hawkwind song. I first picked up the book in 1993 (or 2?) at either a book fair or a used bookstore in College Station. Some sort of convention actually occurred featuring Michael Moorcock. I reach back with my deft mental prowess and pick out myself talking to him as he stood behind a low table stacked with paperbacks. His breath was fetid. I squeamishly remember.

A fellow student (I laughingly call myself a student) argued that Moorcocks newest (?) novel Mother London was a vortex of dung whilst Behold the Man shone like an emerald. Those were not his actual words. Or mayhap they were and the coincidence of typing them in this paragraph is truly cosmic.

I never read Mother London. I read Behold the Man, I believe, for the first time, in El Paso in that hollow room in that busy house next to Lacey’s. The month I lived there stretched on for decades. I love it when time crawls. Raun complained over two years later that the book was too lurching. He did not use that word. Or mayhap he did and the coincidence once again of me typing it is TRULY COSMIC. I recall the book seeming very fragmented. The concept itself is amazing.

Perhaps Moorcock had excellent ideas but, in general, poor execution. Everyone has ideas, as my deadicated reader surely knows. Few place those ideas onto a page. No matter the quality, I admire those who do. Quality is a terribly subjective, in any case.

Fuck um.

I never finished The Black Corridor in 1992 (or 3?). Perhaps I sensed then that it was low quality. It did not toot my muffin at the time. I grew bored very easily in those days. I paced the apartment when bored, in hopes that my jittering thoughts would coalesce into something other than mediocrity. Did they? Possibly not.

I did finish The Black Corridor this time round. I copied three quotes into another file. The second is the one above. What does it mean to be rich and have the ability to be idle when one wishes? To nap days away? To stroll along the lakes or beaches with your pinkish umbrella and pinkish girlie-friend?

This begs the question - what is it to work, anyway? What is work? Is work just a means to subsist monetarily? It provides victuals with which we can stuff our faces and not emaciate away in a shack in a village in South Moravia. But what about subsisting psychologically?

My mind needs this work thing rather perpetually. I am rarely idle. I feel useless when I am idle. During long walks in the streets of Logroño, my mind is racing. I have to concentrate to follow the music seeping into my ears. My bane is a fragmented mind. Simple meditation on music spilling into my orifices needs effort. I have drifted from the subject. Fractured. Fracture. Cracking. Crumb. Blunt. Bum.

You are referred to another recent entry concerning focus. flip back and read it now. If you don’t, you will be the next hobo tied to the tracks tracing out someone else’s destiny.

A major theme of The Black Corridor was surviving isolation. The mind of the main character literally begged him to be creative. It fooled him time and again out of his severely routinised life. He caught himself varying his course time and again. He fought against his own subconscious during the one hundred twenty or so pages. Constantly. Finally, hallucinations almost destroyed him. Or maybe they actually did. The ending was rather ambiguous.

Being free of the burden of mandatory work would only convert hobbies into work. The travels of creation would be satisfying, as opposed to solely for nourishment of the corporeal tissue.

Drip. Drip. Splatter. My mind has drained away.

I just whipped out A Passion Play by The Tull after finding that its flacs I uploaded to Gulo yestrday evening do not work (on Gulo). Vittata plays them nicely. I noted, as I surely have oodles of times, that the album begins with heartbeats echoing The Dark Side of the Moon. Gonwards begins in this manner, as well. If one thinks it over a bit, normally, an album about the journey through a life should begin thus.

Sitting here writing when I should be working, I am enjoying this band to which I used to listen in my adolescence. Pink Floyd was another and I did enjoy Animals thoroughly the other day. Conversely, I have absolutely no interest in revisiting The Wall or The Dark Side of the Moon once again. Was it overexposure? They don’t tittilate my nipples like they did in my youth.

Yet, A Passion Play and Animals do. I’ll resist making a pun, as I mostly consider puns a product of sloppy thinking.