My Toast to Nietzsche. *clink* then *shatter*

*WARNING* the following hurts my head.  I can't imagine what it'll do to yours.  Wear a helmet, son!!

I think that like first there was the sun.

A glowing disc that moves in the largest arc.  Over and over it slashes across the sky.  
We are founded on cycles.  Our cells in our bodies cycle in and out every seven years or so.  It is only fitting that we sentient beings mar this ancient annulation .  We can't just let the circle meet back to its origin without taking a detour into the abstract, to the digressive, the self-effacing, unrealizable and impossible.  We can shrink the circle, and let it spiral into oblivion.  We can alter the orientation and vector of the circle into convolution, like the mobius strip.  We can even come close to connecting the first stroke with the last, but instead let the end be devoured by its beginning like Ouroboros.  But to have a fully complete cycle?

Here's the catch about hopping on the wagon:  things start to become overwhelmingly clear and precise.  Any opaqueness and notional logic is eschewed by the unhindered focus and attention your brain is now allowed to exercise.   For someone like me, it's barbaric torture.   I thrive on getting lost in my head, searching for the pith of ... the pith of whatever it is that I believe to be bothering me.  Now, acerbity is changed into passivity, paranoia into trust, and worst of all, my mind's mic got unplugged.  Sobriety is silence:  active, like a flat white noise devoid of the frequencies that make it dynamic:  something that equally pleases all pleasure receptors:  a wavelength that is no sound at all that somehow drowns out everything else.  Imagine being hugged not by a person who's arms have strength and heat and calluses, who you can smell, who's hair falls into your eyes, who's too tall and bends down awkwardly, or two short and reaches arms around your neck the way a child would giving you the least bit of comfort, or someone too fat who you feel more belly than arm,  or too skinny so you feel like you're going to break them, no no, imagine being hugged by a luke-warm bed sheet that swaddles around your torso, cocooning you in to an absolutely average vice grip, easy to break free, but still noticeable .  That's what this feels like.
Even writing this right now is becoming a task.  I haven't had this much trouble writing in ages:  things are pragmatic.  The very title of this blog seems to me now preposterous.  What else could there be than what is actualized?   How can the objects and actions exist on any plane besides the absolute atomic and scientific verum on which they were created?  Organic and scientific equations equalling a sum.  Or no sum.  Nil.   That german philosopher fellow.  Who would think that sobriety would bring about nihilism.  I thought that the vice of substance abuse was the wondering inside of your head that lead to insecurity, involuted abstractions and aberrations of reality, but perhaps it was the crutch that can keep your brain searching.   Now, here I am, clear as a bell in spring-time, and things are obvious, and pervasive, and without something greater, without footnotes or an asterisk, without an ominous question mark or ellipses.  My ontological rhetoric is stinted, and without a complete circuit, my light bulb sits, dormant, just a filament that rattles when breathed on.

And here stands my altercation with cycles.   I can't connect the alpha and omega in a cordial fashion.  I am somehow either jettisoned out into the ether, there to ponder where it started and where it will go;  or found at the beginning again, only to realize i'm staring at the jaws of what started this sequence.


Maybe I'm not there yet.

Automatic Transition

A story:

His morning was a Merriam-Webster routine.  Double taps on the snooze.  Releasing himself from a down duvet.  An iambic walk to the kitchen.  Sweats pulled on.  Grind beans.  Auto-drip.  Something called Truvia.  Hobbled gait.  Sit at desk.  Squint.  

And every day there came the silence of the first minutes against the dawn.  It was these acute moments that his consciousness, still infantile, expanded and tried to stretch into the day.  He put his wrists together as if he were being handcuffed and cradled his chin. His lids closed easily.

It was cars he saw, just cars.  A line of traffic filing into a beltline, one whirred by, then two, then six. It was mesmerizing, and the accelerando of increments made him plain giddy, more and more, a Boléro of cars.  Soon it was a paralytic rush hour, complete with a cacophony of horns and screeching rubber and tiny clouds of exhaust from each of the stalled motorists.  Frozen in his creaky chair, he stared a thousand yards through his wall, the coffee's steam whisping into his nose, looking at these cars grid-locked on an eight-lane freeway.  Every day, as true as the sky is blue,  this cerebral traffic jam occurred, without fail, just like his coffee and slitted eyes.  Cars of all kinds piled in: an '02 Ford F-150 with subwoofers so loud it hurt your balls,  a '97 Grand Am who's sporty headlights were about the only thing sporty about it,  a '92 Buick with rust creeping up from the bottom but comfy seats, a '93 Ford Taurus with a faded maroon exterior and interior to match; a '97 black Honda Civic with not a sun- but a moon-roof;  a stick-shift '98 Dodge neon who's speedometer always seemed far too big for the dash, a BMW motorcycle with leather saddle-bags, a white VW Cabriolet without power steering; another Ford Taurus, black, with faulty weather-stripping so inevitably when the car accelerates above 30mph, you reach for the automatic window roller-upper button only to be reminded for the x-ieth time that that hissing of wind won't go away.  More and more and more the cars sat, bumper to bumper, and he sat in stasis bemused at the tonnage of memories.  Each car idling in his head while the day inhaled and held its breath, and while to any other level-headed human the idea of a packed commute would be simply ingratiating and create a rage-laden anxiety unparalleled by any other worldly occurrence, but to the man, it was a time of clarity and understanding.  There they all were, together, a pile of steel that stacked from the bottom of his heart to his throat humming the tune of an engine in waiting.  He wished he knew where they came from and more importantly he wished they didn't have to get to where they were going, but in these first minutes against the dawn, he would bring all the cars together, pack them in tight, and look upon the love that each vehicle held.  His face went numb, and heated as if just coming in from the cold.  He smiled.  Soon, with the exhalation of the a.m.,  they would disperse and speed away, exiting off various ramps, continuing on.  He tried to hold on, to keep them crammed in, but they would leave just as they came, in small groups, then six, then two, then one. 

And throughout the day a car would zoom by, hard to recognize what it was, though.  Maybe a Mazda 626 that took him to a concert in high school, or maybe a Dodge conversion van where a friend's step dad smoked while he drove, or was it that hatchback sans a rearview mirror.  The anxiety of loss and the emptiness of his highway left him but to finish his coffee, shower, dress, and get into his car, and take the morning drive to work.  And as he idled on the freeway, he looked at the other cars, and knew no one, and it just wasn't the same.

Musings of the Annular

it has been a tumultuous few weeks here in the larson camp.   between opening a big old show at CSC and creating a psycho-reality for myself that is utterly nonnegotiable and debilitating, i feel like a failed piece of saran wrap trying to be stretched over a casserole dish, ripped in the middle, slowly collapsing into a small sticky heap ready to be discarded out of knowing 

frustration with a sense of ‘doesn’t this always fucking happen with this two-bit stretchy piece of shit plastic?’

but, mind you, that this is not reality. not the reality that i know i’m living in. i've since punched a ticket for a harrowing journey into my head, there to ponder annular dialectics, ontological rubix cubes, and a 'stomach level sadness' that exists there.  this is the lovely and radiant anti-truth i’ve created for myself, due in part and with many thanks to Infinite Jest, a (from the back cover) ‘…gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America.’  well who doesn’t want that?  i sure do.  i've talked about this book previously in it's infantile stages of reading, but now as i reach the, oh let's say, the 40% mark at round about page 360, i need to freeze this frame and take a breath before i let this Jetsonian treadmill like whirl out of control, leaving me helpless but for a plea to stop this crazy thing.  

'How do trite things get to be trite?  Why is the truth not usually uninteresting but anti-interesting?'

i told my friend with whom i'm concurrently reading this book, 'what's hard for me is that i think [david foster wallace] despises all of his characters.' and she corrected me and said that 'no, only in that he may despise himself and see himself for who he is.'  the characters are naked, translucent facets of himself; authentic and arrestingly honest and become, for any engaged reader, facets of my/oneself .  i am hal,  orin,  pemulis, James O. but more accurately, i see myself hovering over this book, encompassing and embracing its whole context.  i see my thoughts expressed with such acuity and precision that it just often pisses me off, like that anger you get when you bite into a moist brownie whose taste transcends compliments and praise and just makes you get angry 'fuck you, that's a delicious treat'.  its infuriating how he's exposing me like a frat boy hazing me, making me run naked through the commons trailing behind me a roll of toilet paper set afire and attached directly to my ass 'figure it out, larson! run! run!'  it's infuriating exposing my surroundings  as a cyclical exercise of addiction and competition and entertainment.  and what plans does he lay out for escape?  professional sports, terrorism, suicide, weed, psilocybin, DMZ ( 'the Yale U. of Ivy League acid') or live a life of trite little cliches, One Day At A Time, Hang In There, Fake It Till You Make It.  

[that , up there, right what you just read, *needed* to happen.]

but like i said supra-supra-, this is a reality i've created for myself.  this is not the new way, the new leaf i've turned over, but a temporary insanity that i'm choosing to commit to until an opportunity of escape presents itself (that, for the love of g.,) doesn't include the aforementioned options.  this, too, shall pass. 

the last thing, that i always forget: it's hilarious.  i laugh, out loud, every day reading this book.  what joy it gives me

in other news, i'm 99% positive i'm attending Sasquatch this year, which i couldn't be more excited for.  camping, seattle, and a whole megaton of bands that i'm gonna be aching to see.
job still in limbo.
but, at the end of the day?  i'm happy.  very, very, happy.