Re:Birth

One of the absolute greatest people I have been honored to know for most of my life's wife just had a darling baby girl. Not wanting to infringe with but the tiniest of curiosities I asked him to sum up the experience of the new fatherhoodness in seven words or less:


"I can't remember life without her"

Mindlab proper

Somewhere in here there's secrets waiting to be born, mysteries unravelled by song for the pleasures of loving exchange between consciousing molecules. Gone forever is the past where our masks' deep roots held together our identities as names for the few who took care to investigate the manner of matter.

Such sympathies used to be draped upon trees of misery where the glimpses beneath yielded divine madness from the cup fashioned in the restless tail end of infinity. Now the paradox is no longer embodied within those who have glimpsed the recent echoes trailing God's countenance (its nothing to be tied up in visions this day and age), it has sprouted wings of imagination to fly swiftly over the spaces between mortal pains that integrate a life into the last human mystery.

But there is no imminent death waiting on its wings of time to take from us everything we've leaned our flesh towards. Its only us who have brought the depths of death into some higher place. The growth of imagination requires fanciful playing of generation to fold upon generation that the desires of the helix threaded through our genes may spiral out tighter complexities.

Are stars creating more stars? Not around here! Our star is creating something very different from it's elf. So too is our common experience cresting into a diversity from even things strictly human.

The Mindlab is a realm of ideas fashioned from the hollow backside of a waterfall. Over this wet cliff fall all the churning bubbles caught between the waters of this river's life. From this secret hollow I can hold out a net and gather a slew of foams and deitrus accumulated by the waters' journey upstream. When I enter the lab I'm sifting through these flotsams and foams for some deeper essences. Sometimes it may be the murky yellow of a foamy froth that sets a memory free. Maybe I'm extracting rusty nails and the way the driftwood groans the metal out of its grains trips my focus into the last time a groan expanded into me. Whatever it might be, the Mindlab is where the mind can experiment with the synthesis of the myriad layers of sense.

2008 extended tagline

Philosopher emerging from accounting pulls a quick one on demons who were counting on a free lunch - washing them away, clawing and thrashing, in a river of booze. Our intrepid adventurer takes to the road following the strands of friends he has spun over the web of years. Each friend has created a different life towards their dreams. Experiencing slices of others' passions and doldrums serves to melt and chip away whatever parts of his post-divorce heart are left in his chest. He's dying to the past and growing a heart towards the future. This ripples into his days slowly because liquor is thicker than the blood of a fresh heart. But, as he allows it, understandings expand self and the relationships thereof. Upon settling back onto the world he finds that the techniques of structureless days rounded by inebriation's thick bubble have been used to their maximum advantage but must be let go of now so that he can move back into the society of humans. Journeying gets lonesome tiring.

In response to a friend's quiestion of what not drinking was like...

As far as not drinking it came upon me suddenly. I had been down in Naples FL visiting an old friend a few blocks from the Gulf coast. The sun doesn't set in Naples until a hundred people are drinking on the beach. So I, being my mother's son, bought a box of wine; though not her preferred brand. A box of Pinot Noir is 4 bottles worth of wine and only costs about $12. Drinking from the space bag for a few days led me to the discovery that it was horrid wine. I even had to buy beer a few times to alleviate the destruction of my stomach lining; but I persevered and even kept it in the vestibule of the tent I was sleeping in in the backyard so that I would have to face my nemesis first thing in the morning.
The flight back I spent in my journal. In my deepest sense of self there dwells a story maker and teller. As I wrote I sipped whiskys which brightened the noonday sun, but dimmed my head. The sentences weren't coming out smooth like a sunbeam's moment through a moving cloudhole, they were coughing out like a coal train's smokestack. The bender had crested the 14 month wave and was beginning the curl that will lead to a collapsing in on itself. The spree was no longer a story to tell but a rut chunnelling me through each day.
This, box of wine and all, has recently revealed itself to be a genius plot in the disguise of an alky's soulrot. I didn't crystallize any of this into wordable emotional categories until I woke up back in the hills the next day. I was in a low state of revulsion towards the effects of the beach alcohol (beach alcohol, in the winter, is much saltier and even more dehydrating than even altitude alcohol) inside my body. The sluggish character it was festering into as I continued to feed the monster; 4, 5, 8, 12 drinks a day, more, more, was seeping out of the heels of my feet and I walked through the day with a squish and wet squeaks.
So as I squished over to the fridge of bestowing that first evening of February, I found this giant sentry carved from the stone of my deep will. My desirous, sluggish, cravenly thirst - so diffuse in its methods, so scattered in its doings - has no chance of direct confrontation with such a condensed form of my's elves.
"It seems," I said "that there has been a vote within me and most of the energies of feeling have sided with this formidable intent to uncrave the numb of alcohol."
It mostly turned off, like a switch. I am treating myself to things like candlelit piano music warming the air around a mustard bath (its a bath salts mix of mustard and other herbs that open up the pores of the skin so that nastiness like alcohol residues can be released) and then a dark room and complete relaxation in the Mindfold.

Toned down for mortal consumption

I just can't do it. The thoughts come so fast that I have been guzzling beer in an attempt to slow things down, but the practiced tolerance of drinking for 2008 (for honest, I have averaged, AVERAGED, 7 alcoholic drinks per day - I can drink two bottles of wine and then wake up and do it again the next day, hangovers are non-existant and somehow I can still eat one full meal throughout the day, keeping my weight at the sultry 125lbs.) has left my attempts flat on the brain lag and too expensive to continue without more income.

So the last couple of days, playing The Financier have left me face to face with the fear that i have wasted the last 8 years of my life trying to learn the game that rules the world; and now that I have no upward option but to get back into finance and accounting and making money from numbers; I can see the future: it involves me drooling in a straight jacket. Have you seen the movie Quill? All I want is ink and a pen. All I have is a calculator and a new haircut.

The desire of my soul is to dive into psychology. The bent of my mind is to think of philosophy. But the skill of my training is the opposite of these.

I thought I could reconcile all opposites in myself by playing along with them but have found I am only human, though I don't seem to have a human mind, for it dreams of things that are not in this world. How can I have ideas that are not compatible with the present situation of the world? Do the dreams that drive me mad tumble into the psychic compost for more determined minds to grow from? Is my role that of the pioneer and then to be forgotten? What do I care if it is? I won't be making it out of here alive, be it in a coffin or legends, its death all the way down.

I don't want to reproduce because I could never give possibility to these sorts of pains in the heart and head. I have seen that most people admire my ability to think, but can I tell you what a curse it is? This seeing the extremes of all these worlds that make up our variance; this obsession to explain the feelings that posess this damned body of mine. And the knowledge that there are things worth this pain and rewards worth the troubles, but from this troubled mindstate, I can easily discard them to make room for more of the sharpest feelings that I know, those of the extremest of extremes. Sometimes a loving hug draws me, but in truth its no more interesting to me (although to my biology is another story entirely) than a funny tv show...so says the downside.

How i've tried to speak with professional mind-explainers and verify that I am human, but to my chagrin i know more about the mind than those who have received papers saying they know more about the mind. Its not like I am a genius because I don't know how to apply all these marvelous thoughts I live for, but there is undoubtedly some intelligence that is beyond the normal, or at least, habitual, human comprehension - leaving me to rot under the glory of my imaginings.

(I will likely regret posting this later, but its not stopping me...)

Let us pay homage to Rene Magritte

Rene Magritte is my favorite painter. He is the analogist of the canvas.
(if you open the first link in a new tab or page it may be easier to just use the sideways arrows above the paintings than these links, I can't decide so here's both)

Clairvoyance--egg is to bird as i am to self portrait

Not To Be Reproduced--mirror is to face as perspective is to vision

The Listening Room--size is to memory as apple is to room

Mysteries of the Horizon--moon is to individual as soul is to man

My personal favorite, Homesickness where views are to nature as black is to wings

and of course, The Treachery of Images where painting is to understanding as word is to mind.