Liberty

I got to play my guitar today, it was at my friends where we practice, and I didn't realize how much I missed it, I love playing my guitar, it is made of planets, and is very heavy to me. I attack it with my sharp teeth like Jimi Hendrix, just to get the juices out of it. It burns me bad, and I cry and cry and cry tell I have forgotten all my sorrows, and am just lying there in a pile of sweat and tears.

My friend Andy called me. I told him to come over. while I was waiting I decided to go to Albania press and get a cup of coffee, by that time the sun was setting and my skin was getting colder, after I bought my coffee I thought I would walk to the bluffs. Andy called me on the way. He was at my house I told him I would come back, he said he'd meet me half way.

After we meet up we stopped at the comic book store, Andy bought the final issue of amazing Spiderman. By this time it was already dark. I looked at a comic called animal man, it was grotesque, there were a few indicators that it may have been influenced by Gilles Deleuze's concept, Becoming-animal, one there were many intermediate forms stuck between one animal and another, and 2 there was a character that was just nerves or maybe blood veins, a rhizomic figure to be shore (even if not intended), intention is only one tiny dimension among everything, often over estimated.

If you don't know what Becoming-animal is then I should tell you it’s a figure in many Gilles Deleuze's books, it’s a way to understand identity. Identity for Deleuze like Jean-Paul Sartre doesn’t come before existence, it comes with existence. Only for Deleuze identity isn't purely a human construct, but is one thing standing with everything else, and everything  here is just the some totall of all the interactions.

You are nothing without the things you interact with, so in a sense you are equivocal to all these things, and when you interact with something you share in its identity. For Deleuze ever thing bleeds together. One way to sense this oneness of becoming is to think of how the sensitivity of your senses changes when you interact with something. Like how if you garden you learn the smell of healthy soil, and when you hunt you learn the call of a buck and maybe the smell, this is sometimes called entunement, but it is also what Deleuze calls Becoming.

I think one of the reasons Deleuze uses this terminology is because it plays well off Plato’s concept of becoming and passing away and Heidegger’s dasein, Being-there, the later makes a persons’ Being the way objects in the world appear to her while the formal makes ‘Becoming’ a mere shadow of the real eternal form. The difference for Deleuze is that there is no stable way of interacting with objects in the world, just flux, and becoming and no eternal forms by which to judge that becoming.


So to me one of the "practical" applications of Deleuze's becoming is to actively tune your senses to the world around you in-order to become more then what you are, who doesn’t won’t to become more then what they are, if only for the fun of it.

Any way back to my story, after the comic shop we walked to the Liberty Glass, a bar on Mississippi Street. Andy mentioned the new "add ons’", benches on the road adjacent to the entrance of Mississippi Pizza, at first we made fun of it, but then concluded that the world would be a better place if everything grow that way, by addition up and out, over and around. In this way the world could flower into a more exotics form.

When we got to the Liberty Glass I ordered a shot of whisky, and Andy got a Pabst Blue Ribbon, he asked for chocolate milk, like Kindergarten Cop, but they didn't have it. The Bar tender was one of my crushes from about a year ago, Cute, petit, brunette with a soft patient demeanor. I used to walk over to her house in the mornings and chat about theater and film, then just as it looked like something magical was about to happen she quite returning my calls, and that was that, I was confused and heart broken, but alas this is not a rare story for me, and by this time I've all but excepted this treatment as my fate.

Andy and I sat out on the patio, and I was telling about this, eliciting him for a possible remedy, and she came out and sat with us next to the fire place and visited with us. The topic of new year’s parties came up and she said it was better to just stay home on a night like that one, me and Andy suggested that there might be a good way to participate in the festivities if one where grounded and eager to bring something positive to the world around them. Andy brought up Andrew W.K. and his positive approach to partying.

On our way home we stopped at Mississippi pizza and got a couple of slices of Hawaiian.

After that Andy went home and I recorded music on my power book until it was time for me to go to work.

New Year

It's the first day of the New Year, and it looks like we survived the Mayan Dooms day clock. I never really put much stock in it but now that it's over and done with I suddenly have a faint sense of intrigue, needless to say for most people things work the other way around. I don't often feel compelled by claims of extreme cosmic calamity, but now that it's over I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe we've all been changed in some inexplicable way, like we're all going to live an extra 83 years more than we would have, or we're all going to wake up tomorrow with super human strength, or polymath genius or something to that effect.

Na!

holiday

This is a late entry from the 23th of December. I changed all the names because the events turned out to be such that those involved might not want to be disclosed. Never the less if you know me and my friends it may be easy to pick out who is who, I can't help this, this is my life and I won’t slow down for petty shit like this, for fear that if I continue to hesitate I won’t have anything to show for my life in the end, also I left My brother's and his wife's names the same because if you know me then it wouldn't pay to change their names any way.


The daily flood of ill-logical syntax of events continues to work me over completely.


The truth has been said in this dark place, it's not exactly chaos, not exactly absurdity, but

life making its way pure and simple. Is there a totality to evolution, and can you map the mind of God from a satellite in the sky?

In both cases the answer is unequivocally NO! So there you have it, life is its own meter, and that’s just the way we like it, carry on folks, nothing to see here, the usually polite girl says to the onlookers as they walk past the weeping pile of sparkling dreams usually known by the name of Zarathustra, "carry on!"

And life will.



Today I got back from tri-cities where I spent the week end with the extended family for holiday festivity, we picked this weekend before Christmas because that’s when the largest portion of us could show up. Now I am so far beyond exhorted, working the night shift after a long day made even longer then it had to be by screaming kid siblings who just had to wake me up at 8 in the morning instead of letting their ever graces oldest brother get his much needed beauty sleep. Now I zombie type my journal entry.



I rode back with my younger brother and his new wife. It was a fine drive through the gorge, lessening to the radio fade in and out with holiday tex-mex and classic rock. The snow of the radio was a fine complement to  the skys oun bellows of the soft weight stuff. We where worried that this could have spelled trouble for my red Volvo but apart from getting damped up from overly cautious traffic, the snow represented no real tubal at all.



To pass the time I just basically blabbed my face off, I made a point of it, I wanted to see how loose I could get the wheels turning, and I got them pretty dame loose. Not in a bad way just filling the dead air, with all manner of none sense. At one point I pontificated about the tragedy of the taming of the great Columbia river; as Gregy, an earnest old man I came to know through my work as a free lance care giver, had told me once, "the river used to be free!" He showed me pictures of it and said they used to fish there with nets, "so many fish in those days it seemed you could never make even a dent in them!" The river was so wild then that it was like nothing you'd ever seen, just picture the Colombia as wide as it is now only as a rapid barreling down the gorge with great force. I asked Rolland if he'd ever seen anything like that, he said, "yeah on the top of Victoria falls". I was like "yeah, parity much likes that only for the whole length of the river. Just as that conversation was winding down he was like "do you want to get some McDonalds fries, and I was like, "no, but if you want them then I'll pull over", and I did.

Neither my brother nor I ever really eat McDonalds, he's really into health and fitness, he's a cross fit trainer, and I don't like to support weird clowns who's names start with a syllable that sounds like my own, but I think it was the kind of thing where when you're on the road you have to do things you wouldn't unusually do.

A kind of hedonistic rite of the vagrant traveler, a mass of the holy ass kind of a thing.



So my brother Rolland and his wife Jessica got out of the car, Jessica had previously been sleeping in the back so she was a little drossy, they mumbled in to get their frieze, and within a short moment Rolland came back out, "come in here I want to show you something," I followed him and it was a couple of 5 by 5 pictures of the river taken before the construction of the dam, not a shock that any restraint on the river would be decorated with touristy, historical things of this sort, but when my brother looked at the pictures he said he realized what Gregy said was true, the Colombian was a much more mild river before the dam’s went in, allot more beautiful too. Leave it to a desolate McDonalds franchise to lend light to the plight of the ever torchered northwestern contrary side. Hm, strange bed fellows if you ask me, lady Gaia and Ronald McDonald clown face idiot. Oh well whatever.



I ended up eating a hand full of frieze and they made my cankerfide gums burn. I monde and ground as we go along the road, until my brother suggested we stop and get some kombucha, we did and it did soothe the ache.



Things went pretty much this way, with my complaining, moralizing, and pontificating, until we got to our folks where I was dropping Rolland and his wife Jessica off. When we got there we went to the barn first. The barn isn't really what you would think a barn is, it looks like a barn on the outside but when you go inside it’s a folly furbished apartment and church with all the amenities, running water and wall to wall carpeting, bathrooms and kitchen. Once we got to the barn we noticed that there was some kind of party going on, so we went in, and there where a whole pill of people lessening to music and opening presents around the tree. The occupants of the barn, all 20 something’s loosely affiliated with the Christian missional organization YWAM. They where opening presents that they had pulled together from stuff that people had discarded in the burn over the years. The barn was kind of a place where people would bring things they didn't want but also a place to find truly magical threshers. I sat in a char diagonal from one young lady that I find particularly attractive. She is so wonderful! Quite spiritual in the sense that she excepts the miracles without even the slightest surprise, and when she looks at you, you almost thinks she can read your mind, yet quite in touch with the wonders of the natural world as well, this is the most impressive thing to me she intuitively understands the wonder of incarnate life. And funny too, she has a great sense of humor! she's also quite cute, her lips are like little ovals, light olive completion with light frecals on her nose, sort dark blond hair with fiant red high lights in the simple bob style, in terms of height she's sort a’ short with a soft build, just as cute as a button, and always has the best attitude too, the best attitude I've ever seen, spunky and friendly and kind in all the right ways. Basically I think I'm in love with this girl. She and her fiancé just broke of their engagement, which is sad in a way, but you might think this would be an opportunity for me, only her fiancé is one of my very best friends in the world, an old story, "Jessie’s girl... where can I find a woman like that?" That whole thing, trouble! But I was talking to her and she was petting the cat which was melting in her arms, because she knows the secrets of the natural order. She was talking about going back to Colorado, and the logistics of calling off the wedding. After a while it started to get to intense for me my head started to spine with love sick annihilation, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I left the room, and went up stairs to talk to my cousin who was packing to go back down south to stand in his brother’s wedding.

He showed me all the presents the he got for his family, cool stuff, 60's vintage everything, the stuff was great: high healed shoes with neon highlights in the sole, and a tan wicker purse with a floral weeve and rollers studs on the bottom for his oldest sister, these incredible matching erring and necklace set glistening multi colored round jowls for his younger sister, and 60s British style cream mod diner cote for his mother. It was gorges stuff, a real thought filled testimony to his loving care for the women of his family.

After he showed me this stuff we went back down stairs where all the tables had been rearranged into one long banquet table, with fruit arraigned along the entire surface of it, and an assembly line of sandwiches, one guy was putting on the peanut butter and another was putting on the jam. At the far end of the table was a bunch of people around a young women about 25 years old, they where praying for her quite loudly and she was scheming even louder, it certainly was a spectacle and I'm shore for some who hadn't seen this sort of thing before it would be quite shocking, I have to admit even for me having been around this sort of thing quite a bit it was a sight to behold, but don't get me rung it wasn't anything to get concerned about, I do believe the ritual was quite helpful, just saying it was surprising is all. I guess by this time in history these things are pretty well known, being a regular feature of Christian network programming for over what 40 some years now. Even if someone hadn't ever in there enter life actually tried to watch one of those programs I couldn’t imagine a regular TV viewer could go long without stumbling a pone this sort of thing on their way from the Saturday football game to the Saturday matinee made for TV movie.



So yeah this charismatic stuff, as far as I understand, is a house hold thing, and has cote a great deal of flack over the years from a wide range of different factions of society. I think most people just think it's weird, and part of me understands way--it is certainly out of the ordinary, but another part of me asks why this sort of thing gets the kind of flack it gets considering the positive review so many similar rites get, as well as just the al around weirdness of human behavior in general. You know? I don't know, I guess at the end of the day everyone gets flack no matter who you are, but I guess it could also be somewhat of a political thing, its common knowledge that this particular type of Christian votes conservative, and is vary out spoken in terms of making converts.



As this situation unfolded the Colorado girl looked over at me, and asked if any of this weirded me out, I said no, she probably noticed a look of discomfort on my face, but if there was such a look it wasn’t in any way authentic, I think somewhere along the line I picked up this bad habit through mimesis, it’s true there is such a thing as society and if you’re not carful it can swallow your individuality. We must fight to keep from allowing these little imitations to over ride our truest understanding of the world, be you’re history not just the most adventitious persona for the moment. We all know from experience far more then we let on, we let social protocol decide how we respond to other people. Really you don’t have to relate to any of this, nor do you have to ever take a side on issues that you don’t understand or even stick to the script on the issues you happen to feel passionate about.

In the midst of all this ‘craziness’, and out of the blue, Max looks over at Jary, one of the guys who was living in the barn and, just asked him point blank, “do you have a problem with me?” It was abrupt, it was a chilling effect, but it didn’t stop the prier situation, that just keep on rolling, but the rest of us where taken back, Jary protested, “I don’t even know you!” “What are you talking about!? I started singing silent night to distract the two interlocketes, Max responded to Jary, “I’ve been living in the same barn as you for 3 months!” Then Jary accused Max of “listening to the lies of the enemy”, at that Max just got up and left. Later he told me that he would never entertain or try to respond to an accusation that he is being contraled by the devil, I definitely agree with him on that, it be a literal “holy war”!!

True this repersents an abuse of religen and a sad missunderstainding, but really we all need to face it these things happen, in religes groups and otherwass, albeit calling on the authority of God in resolving a petty disput is like bringing a bako to fix a leeky foset, a petty disput is a petty disput, and the real problume is that they always get blown out of proportion. I can understaind both parties in this situation; Jary dosn't smile when he starirs, and Max is pertculerly sensitive, nothing rung whith ether of these thing, but its just these sorts of things that cose the most striff in life. So it might sound trite but rather than judge we should recegnice what goes into the conflict in the first place, and then just get on. And somthings will never be resolved, but hay those things make good writing so what the hell.