Fools, Make Yourselves Ready To Behold Your Doom!

No, I don't want to try your updated interface

2011-10-27T00:50:00.000+01:00

The headlong pell-mell rush that they call progress but is so often proved not better but worse by time. Can't you fuckers just relax for a while and quit working on all your so-called "improvements"? Rarely are they.

The phrase that comes to mind is "left well enough alone".

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Oh hell yeah, I intend me some change, but it's about the timing folks. If it's not genuinely better, then it doesn't count as an Improvement. iMprovement.

Rot in peace, S.J.

"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." - Von Moltke

2011-10-17T02:50:00.000+01:00

Life forces us to give up so many of our preconceived notions, our cherished values, our hopes and dreams, all in the name of raw survival. "Adapt to what I offer, or die," is Life's ubiquitous mantra. Like a rock subjected to tide and time, you will be changed or you will be broken. Often both.
There are no other options.

So me make our peace with what life makes us and we go on.

I Faced The Land Across Cold Waters and Yet Turned Away

2011-09-30T05:41:00.004+01:00

A long six weeks of dealing with a unmedicated snap of the mind, the fallout and consequences in that haunted City By The Sea, and a naked revelation of clinical depression that had been hidden by imprisonment in a dark empty land, now lit in stark abjection.

There were two choices. To mindlessly pursue a misstep of timing against confounding odds, or to withdraw to a terrible place to regroup and recoup.
BUT. Our hero insisted upon a caveat. His time of retrial in the land of empty despair was limited to six months. A deal with the soulless cosmos: a reforging of the self, in return for another opportunity.
The universe is well known to renege on agreements made by its silent consent with it but our hero called upon the Great Balance, that Law of Cycles, to avenge his oath. Now, that Arbiter of All Vows, Time, shall decide redress.

Actually there was a third choice. I pondered it long and deep. It was the Final Choice from which no others can follow. In then end, I decided against it. Life may be short, nasty and brutish but it is the single flicker allowed us in the immense eternity of darkness. I thought I'd play the hand as there's always plenty of time to fold later, and often the choice is taken from you anyway.

So. Six months. I intend to rebuild my body from the ground up--I'm in a good place to start. I'm rail thin from the last six months of running and a month of near starved endless walking the hills of San Francisco.
I'm just a collection of wire hangers to frame lean muscle on. I quit drinking. I don't even need my little crossed-off-days calendar I used when I quit in March. I simply am stopping. I had my last drink with a good friend in a bar in San Francisco Sept 26 and I swore than I would not drink again until it was another one shared with again with some good friend.
No swilling by myself in the darkness of winter in a lonely place.

I came so close to a one-way ticket to Bangkok to drink myself to death. I'd be there now, guzzling Changs and taking pills. Kind of miss that parallel universe: it would have been something to behold. But frankly, I'm looking forward to running in the cold of winter under overcast skies.
I almost fear spring as I will not want to reexperience the terrible heat of this summer; I may go to the southern hemisphere to dodge summer altogether. Funny, I always thought I would do the opposite if given the chance.
Lot of things changing like that. Things that I thought I would always desire, always enjoy, always seek out, all my pole stars shifting in their orbits to be replaced by inexplicable stars I never imagined would guide my course.
It is a strange and unsettling wind that turns the ship of destiny in a new direction.

London Bridge is burning down, burning down...

2011-08-08T01:25:00.106+01:00

Safe, sane, civilized London, revealed over a minor incident to be a powderkeg of unrest and violence just waiting to go off. If staid, quiet London can erupt without warning, what does that say about the rest of the unstable world that teeters on the brink?
Lord Curzon, visiting Qom on his tour of Persia in 1889, describing its fanatical inhabitants, said "[it] is one of those places where an accidental spark may be fanned into a disagreeable flame." How surprised he would be that the same could have been said of his great London little more than a century later.

While normally I align myself with those oppressed by the wealthy elite plutocrats, not in this case. These aren't the downtrodden rising against their capitalist masters, these were "feral youth" as I heard one commentator describe them. These aren't intellectuals and poets pushed to desperation by tyranny and responding with violence--these are uneducated, illiterate louts of society, the rabble of the digital age, using modern technology as their torches and pitchforks, flashmob of peasants. The looting is always the giveaway.
Those truly battling authoritarian rulers don't smash into stores to steal videogame consoles and overpriced sneakers. They burn the icons of the power structure, not their own bars and grocery stores. They plunder the wealthy, not their own shopkeepers.
A revolutionary sets fire to the mansion of his persecutor; a fool burns down his own house.

I loved it when David Cameron said that "social media" had to be controlled to prevent this kind of thing. Ha! Weren't the West just recently patting their own backs with smug self-congratulation when this same "social media" aided the people in the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt?
I'll bet Mubarak wholeheartedly shares your sentiment, Mr. Prime Minister.

You don't get to praise the sword when it cuts your way and complain when it cuts the other: hypocrisy.
I love the way technology invariably comes back to bite the ass of its ardent supporters.

The British police responded with such astonishing flaccidity, totally caught off guard. Had I been in command, an unceasing torrent of live rounds would have poured into the rioting crowds. Death toll in the thousands, probably. Fuck water cannons and "plastic bullets" if you have to wait for them, use the guns you've got, now.
There is a big difference between protecting innocent citizens and the legitimate social structure from rampaging criminals versus brutal suppression of freedom-seeking masses by a corrupt regime keeping itself in power; the West has something to learn from the despots, in that shooting into a violent crowd isn't necessarily always a bad thing.
The cops appeared to have no resources at all, not even tear gas. So much for the scary vision of Britannia under the heel of fascist stormtroopers.

Outlying suburbs of Desolation City

2011-08-04T01:50:00.000+01:00

2011-08-01T23:32:00.001+01:00

Still out of sorts. The vile boggy heat, the ennui. A month to go in purgatory. From the dread of certainty to the dread of uncertainty which in this case is ever so preferable.

When I was a kid, I read a lot of comics, all kinds. There was something about the goofy innocence of the Archie comics that had a strange appeal for me, a kid more usually obsessed with gory hard-core science fiction.

I recall especially Little Archie's nemesis Dr. Doom and his idiot assistant Chester; after every failure of Dr. Doom's nefarious plans, he would be seen sailing away onboard a ship named The Pride of Walvis Bay.

When I lived in Amsterdam, I dated a South African girl and learned that if you spoke Dutch, then you came as close as possible to speaking Afrikaans, the descendant of the language of the Dutch Boer settlers. On a map of southern Africa she was once showing me, I saw city named Windhoek, which I knew meant "Windy Corner", in Namibia, and there, nearby, that haunting name of so long ago: Walvis Bay.

I think I'm going to go there. I've crossed the equator twice, but never been as far south as the Tropic of Capricorn. Walvis Bay is a windy desert city cooled by cold currents of the Atlantic shore. My imagination is captivated.

It looks like the end of the world, calling out to me with a siren song. The place where I will die.

All because of a peculiarly exotic place mentioned obliquely in a comic book decades ago that I never forgot.

Funk, but not the good kind

2011-07-28T03:12:00.002+01:00

Have not been able to escape a nagging sense of despair for the last few days. It doesn't help that death is all encompassing, both personally and in the wider world all over the news. It has been weighing heavily on me. Probably just the heat, the slipping arc of the sun, circumstances, the vagaries of biochemical disorders of the mind--still, plenty of bad news on all fronts. I can't recall any good thing that anyone has been able to relate in the last couple of weeks.

"I hear a very gentle sound: very near yet very far; very soft yet very clear. . ." Indeed, the shadows of the evening fall across the years. It seems there is no good thing I can achieve that the world cannot taint and ruin. All my hallowed grounds are soured. I obtain wealth and then idiots cause it to be devalued.
I am beginning to wonder if effort is worth it at all when all accomplishment is so easily made futile by the wicked simpletons who have been given power in our time.
Tiresome, very tiresome.

Rest In Peace, Cecil

2011-07-24T19:22:00.000+01:00

To paraphrase Job:

"He was a byword of the people, for he was righteous in his way and of clean hands, one wise man among you. My eyes are dim with sorrow and all of us, we are in shadow. His days are past, his purposes broken off, even as are the thoughts of my heart: day is changed to night, light is short because of darkness. His grave is now his house, his bed in darkness. Where now is hope? One day, we too shall all go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust."

The Desolate Part of The Wastelands

2011-07-21T05:39:00.000+01:00

Despite the wretched heat, I noticed today that the sun was waning, now where it was May 21. The day visibly shorter, the sunlight paler, the solar arc lower in the sky. It shouldn't depress me, but it does. The symbolism of death. How many more rebirths of spring do I get to witness? I think I'm going to Argentina this winter. It's the only place the dollar seems to be rising; god only knows what that says about those poor bastards. I want to move to a place where there are no seasons. I hear Quito, Ecuador, is the City of Eternal Spring. That sounds nice, someplace that just wobbles sedately on the equator. Although checking the weather there now (ain't the internet grand?), it looks like perpetual rain, high 62º, low 42º, every day: miserable. Par for the course--eternal spring turns out to be shitty.
I read today that the Dead Sea is drying up, the waters of the Jordan and Galilee diverted for agricultural uses. Jesus, we manage to kill even that which is already thoroughly dead. I remember the sweet cool waters of the oasis at Ein Gedi, splashing around and laughing under the burning December sky with a girl I'd met on the tourist bus.
I have a photo, I'm floating in the Dead Sea, holding a Heineken. "Look, Ma, I'm at the earth's lowest point!"
But not yet at mine.

2011-07-18T23:14:00.000+01:00

I try to keep up to date on neurological research. From what I've read regarding the hippocampus, sleep and the formation of long term memories, I wonder if dreams aren't perhaps part of that process, the mind's resorting its memory banks and they're the screensaver. They certainly never to seem to have fuck-all to do with the day's events or anything remotely relevant to what's being processed. I'm not a Freudian.
I woke up at 4:14am from a vivid dream, starting awake like a rubber band snapping. I realized I'd been approaching this hellish swampy humidity that makes the heat so bad all wrong. Cowering like a petulant invalid in a darkened room, that was only making it worse. How I got this from a dream about being in Amsterdam and the ATMs closing at 5pm, I couldn't tell you. (I had no sense of smell in the dream; no olfactory element when I was in a smoky coffeeshop and my waking mind noticed the lack.)
I decided to embrace it instead. I ran even longer today in the putrid 99% humidity, and then sat outside in it throughout the wet, pestilential, buggy heat of the day, reading and swiping at the flies. The dew on the grass never evaporated.
Tiresome, but what can you do. Learn, if not to love it, to tolerate it. So bring it on. Do your worst. Let's see it.

"That which does not kill me only causes me countless miseries and suffering."

- Joe Bob Nietzsche

It really is "the humidity, not the heat". It's not desert heat, it's swamp heat. Florida rather than Nevada, all the difference in the world. Just keep thinking, "Never again, never again. . ."

I felt better just having decided to slog through it until it's over. Some of that serenity prayer action occasionally works wonders.

Eepy seepy, here comes Creepy

2011-07-17T22:50:00.000+01:00

Depression, like a vampire once invited across the threshold, can come and go forever after as it pleases. After six good (mostly) months off the SSRIs, depression has come back. No darkness visible this, no indeed, it's quite colorful and lively in here.
I don't think it's so much biochemistry as a potent combination of illness, heat, circumstance, lack of sleep...as well as the horrific nightmares. Last night I was up for good at 2am after OK Corral meets MacBeth on a stage that was like the inside of a Land of The Lost pylon: much larger in my head than the physics of the outside would lead you to believe possible. I particularly liked the slowly rotating spotlit diorama displaying all my past failures in life: nice touch, subconscious. Listen, pal, that "wasted potential" and "what might've been" schtick gets old fast. I get it already.
But from whatever source, most probably genetic disposition, capital "D"epression is engraved on the stone of my soul like an epitaph.

I can smell the sickness in my sweat, on my breath. It's a sunny summer day and I'm hidden inside, shrouded in darkness and cool shadows. That itself is enough to indicate that something is very very wrong: I've always hated winter and longed for the summer's heat but now I crave the cold biting wind. Pure insanity. I can't have this kind of bone-deep personality shift and still be sane.
But I can't tolerate the sweat pouring off me, the rotten stench in the obscenely humid, thick air, the relentless insects and their maddening buzz. I'll never again hear cicadas with anything other than horror.

Maybe if I didn't spend the first hours of every day running in it. But on this, I won't compromise. I run, no matter what. I won't stop.
I keep hearing that voice echoing in my head: "One day, your life will depend on how fast you can run. . ."
To which my own always adds ". . .and how far."

You run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking

September 13, 1999

2011-07-13T22:08:00.000+01:00

I wonder if the world may have ended August 1999 after all. And I just didn't notice. Sometimes it seems that way.
The 1990s were the Golden Age. And for me, the last of it drained away like sand from an hourglass August of 1999. The world might just as well have ended September 13, 1999 (google it, if you don't remember your classic science-fiction tv). Fucking useless Nostradamus; I was depending on that asshole to have gotten it right.
But the world shuffled along blithely until it was made evident to all on September 11, 2001. Since then, it's been all downhill, despite flashes of occasional redemption.
Since then, it is as though I have orbited a dark star. I have pushed the trajectory outward intermittently but have never been able to escape.
The time is drawing near, when, like Kirk against the advice of Scotty, you have to burn through every bit of power remaining, because you know that it's pointless to hold anything back this time. If you don't break out of your doomed course now, anything held in reserve won't matter except to delay the inevitable death spiral to oblivion. Countdown commencing, ignition sequence initiated.
I will either walk new roads or else my path will end in the clearing but gratefully will I never walk these roads again.

I once said I hoped to have a ringside seat for Armageddon, but I should've known you people would fuck it up, the way you do everything: by half-measures, like a stumbling blind drunk, too incompetent to even get the end of the world right.
As the saying goes, if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. Just one more DIY project.
Even if it's only my own.

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly..."

Regarding A Visit to The City Which Has Been Desolate All My Life

2011-07-08T22:24:00.000+01:00

Mommas, don't let your babies grow up to be Desolate

2011-07-02T16:13:00.000+01:00

For the 4th of July holiday weekend, I'm back in the miserable god-forsaken Mississippi delta town where I was born near and lived in for a many (sadly formative) years growing up. In the intervening years in which I moved away, it has strangely thrived, like a particularly virulent tumor. I never thought this place would amount to much, but due to its location as a major transportation, industrial and health care hub, plus the area's university, it has continued to grow. Albeit in what I consider an unwholesome, yet oh-so-typically American way. A friend who has temporarily been back for the last two years recounted overhearing two girls chatting about said progress in the form of an Olive Garden arriving in town.

Per Shit My Dad Says: ""You don't have to be good to succeed. You just gotta be the least shitty option. Example: We're eating at The Olive Garden."

And that perfectly sums up this place: you don't have to be good to succeed. This place just showed up at the contest and won by default. It was a magnet for the surrounding rural area, and people who came to college here stayed. It grew. Like the stages of cancer, this town thrived accordingly.

I suppose, honestly, it's not that bad of a place. I've seen worse. But for me, this place epitomizes so much that I can't help be biased. It's the kind of town that one just can't seem to do anything else other than leave. Thomas Wolfe said "You can't go home again," but Mr. Wemmick, Jagger's clerk in Great Expectations, said it better: "Don't go home."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
seachange is a poetic or informal term meaning a gradual transformation in which the form is retained but the substance is replaced.

And that is what I'm experiencing. There's a silly psuedo-scientific notion that the body's cells are replaced entirely every seven years. Even a rudimentary knowledge of physiology renders that idea sheerest nonsense. But, on the other hand, I have that sort of feeling. It's strange: for years, my convictions have been unshakeable and my goals, so I thought, were permanent. I thought that I would always yearn for the same things, that my ideals were a fixed star in the firmament of my life. But even Polaris won't be the north star forever, due to the procession of the earth's axis.
Suddenly, without warning, I find that the things I once wanted so fiercely mean nothing to me, and goals I would have never contemplated are the new propulsion of my self. It's baffling. And while this is going on inside me, all around me the world is in the midst of upheaval. Everything I thought was constant is shifting.

It seems all the rules are changing. Maybe they were all along and I just didn't notice. But, pow, now I'm struck by the awareness that the game we're playing now doesn't have the same rules as the one we started.
What's the opposite of rolling with the punches? Being caught flat-footed? Now suddenly I'm required to constantly duck and bob and weave.
At least I'm still young enough and mentally flexible to try to ride the wave, instead of having fossilized and have it just crash over me while I stand gaping.

We Always Had Amsterdam

2011-07-01T00:53:00.000+01:00

But not anymore. I'm still achingly saddened by the Dutch government's fuckery, but it's not really about the pot. I've barely smoked in months. As much as I love the stuff, it's not like it ever had the fierce hold on me that alcohol has had.
It's more a psychological trauma, the sudden absence of a constant that was always there.

Amsterdam was my sanctuary. It was one of the few places in the world I've lived that I have no bad memories of. Whenever life's rough and I've been brought low, there has always been Amsterdam, less than a day's flight away, waiting for me with all its joys that I've loved ever since my first visit. Just knowing it was there, waiting for me, has gotten me over many rough patches. And sometimes I said "Fuck it" and I took that flight, and there it was.

In the movie Return To Oz, when Dorothy went back, she found the Emerald City a shattered ruin. It was my Emerald City, the capital of my psychic mindscape, the place where all things were right in the world. It was my Undesolate City. And now They have made it Desolate like the others.

It was so simple. Land in Schiphol, buy a sixpack of Heineken at the airport's supermarket, drink a few cold ones on the short train ride to Centraal Station, and perhaps even before I check into my favorite hotel on the Dam, a brisk stroll to coffeeshop Siberië, and though they don't serve alcohol, the smoking bar The Doors right around the corner does, so I'd walk over, have a seat, order a large draft and get thoroughly stoned, listening to 60/70s psychedelic rock.
A homecoming as welcoming and familiar as the intro to any 1950s American sit-com.

Gone. Oh, the city is still there, but it's only shattered ruins to me, just another north middle European city now, dull and staid, a Cologne or a Prague. I'll never have my ritual again.

Goodbye, yellow brick road.

Upon the shore of The Icy Sunless Sea

2011-06-28T02:39:00.000+01:00

"You maniacs, you blew it up! Ah, damn you, God damn you all to hell!"

Col. George Taylor, Planet of The Apes

Yesterday I spoke to a Dutch friend that I hadn't spoken with since last August. It was not a happy conversation. I had been hearing a lot about the Dutch talk of changing the marijuana laws, and not for the better, but I hadn't really believed they'd do it. But according to Joop, the maniacs of the far-right party have finally gone and done it: already in the south of the Netherlands, city by city, falling like dominoes, they are starting to shut the coffeeshops. By 2012, no longer will foreigners be able to buy marijuana. Only adult Dutch citizens will be allowed, as members (with drastically limited memberships) of a single dispensary, to purchase marijuana.

Joop was terribly despondent, very bitter. I sympathized with all my heart.

For years, the Netherlands were a bright and shining city upon a hill at the heart of civilization. Marijuana, the most harmless of all "drugs", was, in that singular corner of the world, a something, like chocolate, or a hammer, or gasoline, a commodity that you could simply walk into a store and purchase. Known, indeed proven, to be less deadly than aspirin; study after study showed that legalization not only brought no harm, but actually proved beneficial to society on many levels. Chocolate, hammers and gasoline are more dangerous.

It was a golden moment in the otherwise grim 20th century, that swell hundred years that brought us The War To End All Wars, followed right on its heels by one of a magnitude worse by far, Fascism, Nazism, totalitarian dictatorships, genocides on a scale unimagined in history, the atom bomb, all those joys of man's progress. In the early 20th century, zealots and pinheads had stripped people of their rights to alter their conciousness as they would, culling the options one by one until leaving us the worst of the worst, alcohol and tobacco. Out of all of the world's pharmaceutical options for pleasure, they've left us with a legal poison and an addictive carcinogen.

The Netherlands defied them and said "we can do better" and they did, for all the world to see. But now a retroactive tide is lapping at their shores like the higher ocean waves of global warming upon their below-sea level country.

The door had been closing even when I last lived there in 2006. The year after I moved, they finally, after a series of every increasing restrictions, had done away with mushrooms, that safe bastion of the psychoactive open doors of perception. No matter what concessions and appeasements the reactionaries got, they were never satisfied.

Fools might consider this a mere pothead's lament, but this much more to those with understanding, another symbol of the rising dark tide in our world. As Joop said, "It's like your country, despite everything they know, allowing a group of small-minded ideologues to turn back the clock to Prohibition in the name of a false morality. How can you justify turning backward?"

Now, at last, truly I understand. I had not, in my heart of hearts, believed they would do it. The Dutch are cheap, and I couldn't believe they'd abandon the vast inflow of pot tourism money that pays for so much of their socialist paradise. But they let ideology triumph over rationality, and they're really doing it. And if they're willing to do that, then the underpinnings of what I believed people will and will not allow are sea changed.

I'm like a priest who's lost his faith. There really is nothing safe or sure in this world, no hard-won progress that madmen may not successfully conspire to snatch from our grasp.

If this can happen, what can't? Now at last I see that we're just one slip of a sane grip away from the re-banning of abortions, of the reopening of debtors' prisons, of legalized slavery, of burning witches. I finally understand there's nothing these people wouldn't bring back upon us all in the name of their beliefs.

Sound crazy? As crazy to me as recurtailing marijuana, even in the face of the financial, social, medical benefits it offers.

Joop said the voices of the Netherlands who talk of the negative aspects of marijuana tourism, have, typically of those types of people, blown the issue all out of proportion, much like the rabid but clearly loony brand of moralism of the pro-lifers ("we've got to kill the abortionists to save the babies!") espouse.

My world is shaken. To think, I could have invested years in building a life there, in what I thought was a place of permanent reason, only to have it snatched away. I would have been as deluded as a Jew who stayed in Germany after Kristalnacht, each time thinking, "well, this must have finally been the worst of it, things will not decline further."

My complacency is gone. As in the famous Pastor Niemoller quote, when the housing market collapsed, it didn't matter to me because I didn't own an house. When the economy sank, it didn't matter to me because I didn't have any investments. When the jobs dried up and unemployment soared, it didn't matter to me, because I didn't have a job. Before all that, no tsunami drowned me or hurricane flooded me or earthquake killed me, because I wasn't there, I was elsewhere. Safe.

But now, no place is safe. How stupid I've been. Everything I have could disappear in an instant, in the blink of an eye. Tomorrow gas could be $10 or $20 a gallon and the grocery store shelves could be empty, and not only because of an untrustworthy earth but because of evil men, of wicked Powers and Principalities. Having weed will be the least of my worries. Starvation, disease, war, they could all be here overnight--it's happened all throughout history, time and time and time again. Now is neither special nor blessed against the past.

After this conversation, I thought these thoughts and became despondent. Joop, unlike Americans who claim every time a president they disagree with is elected that they're "by God moving!", is putting his mouth where his heart is. He's in the process of moving to Portugal. The only laugh I got was the fact that he's furious that he's put up with shitty Dutch weather all these years because of his patriotic belief in the progressive thinking of his country, its people and the politicians.

Our shared disillusionment.

I slept poorly with dark dreams.

Today, for the first time in weeks, I really wanted a drink. Not a drink: a lot of drinks. I wanted to get stinking, shitfaced drunk and drown my sorrows. This afternoon, driving past the liquor store, my eyes were hungry and ferverish. But I've resisted. I know that the only thing booze drowns is hope; sorrow, like shit, floats.

Now what? This is no doubt a sign of the times of Europe, of the world. Goddamned European Union: many cooks spoil the soup, and nowhere does the soup stink as much as in Brussels, that heart of the bureaucratic plague spreading across the continent. Bless the Greeks, fighting back against the theft of their birthright, their independent native land, defying the threat of the imposed IMF yoke upon them.

I'm to old to be a soldier or to fight in the streets, but the trigger finger of my hot heart still yearns to shoot soulless bureaucrats down like zombies in a movie.

To my credit, I warned every European who would listen, an American Cassandra, that the euro was bad news and they'd come to regret the EU. I laughed sourly at the expression on the Dutch pusses when prices shot up 50% overnight when the euro actually became the currency.

I think the only thing that has kept them from bitching as openly is the Europeans are frequent and long travelers and their strong euro has, as much as it has wrecked their economies at home, made the whole rest of the world ridiculously cheap for them.

I feel like it's the early 1930s again, the depths of the depression still unplumbed and the war clouds over the horizon yet unacknowledged, but there nonetheless. Just waiting.

If nothing else, I should thank the Dutch for their idiocy. It has quashed my long delusional love of Europe and my silly plots to someday return. Old Europa is dead, New Europe lives, and I am not anymore, nor probably ever will be again, a lucky resident or happy transplant. The EU and 9/11 have conspired to make life there off-limits anymore, barring some improbably fluke of life-changing luck, like winning the lottery or having a European woman fall in love with me, a marriage and relocation. So I'm ungratefully grateful for the eye-opening. Barring the wildly improbable unforeseen, the dream is dead.

Wrestling with my own mind

2011-06-26T03:14:00.000+01:00

For a long time, drugs and alcohol substituted for introspection. What little self-examination occurred was bleary, cavalier and self-justifying. There's a theory that homo sapiens developed its intellect in order to provide rationalization for its actions.
For the last six months, I've been giving the old noggin a real going over. I have a serious problem with reality. My moods and emotions color every aspect of my perception; my mind is like the shifting rainbow of an oilslick on a puddle. It's very frustrating when clarity is the goal. What seems solid one moment is ephemeral the next. Memories blur, fade or reconfigure themselves.

I've thought sometimes that the inside of everyone's head is different, with this analogy: some are like office buildings, functional partitions into places of business and commerce. Some are like homes; some cozy and comfortable, some austere mansions. Some are banks, some are libraries, others are churches, castles, garages, prisons. The symbolic gamut of human endeavor.
Mine, I think, is a carnival, with its funhouse, its hall of mirrors, its freakshow. And beyond the lights of the midway, the music of calliope and laughter, the dark empty silent fields surround it in the night.

A friend told me recently that I've said many times that I was quitting alcohol and pharmaceuticals. I was surprised: I don't remember any real efforts at it. I was all talk, no action. That, perhaps, is this difference this time; I'm not speaking of what I will do, but of what I have already done.

When I stopped the SSRI and the rest, the melancholia of old came back, but fleetingly. I wouldn't call myself jolly, but neither am I depressive. Some of it I attribute to my focus, my preoccupation with an attempt to clear the Neptunian fog the pervades my thought processes.
I don't think I'll ever be able to bring it under control. At best, I can divert my imagination to more productive channels. Then maybe I can achieve some degree of perspective in my day to day life.

Neuroplasticity

2011-06-25T23:19:00.000+01:00

I won't go into history of man's conception of the mind and how it functions; that's available with minimal research. But historically it was believed, once the mechanics of the brain were rudimentarily understood, that the brain was fixed after the pliability of childhood.
Modern neurological science has killed that concept. The brain continues to grow, to change, which gave rise to the idea and the word itself, neuroplasticity.
From birth, experience alters the structure of the brain. Addiction theory is being revised by new understanding of how the brain functions and adapts to changes in consciousness.

The rain of life's experiences falls on the plains of our minds, cutting channels as we learn to think. Rivers form in our consciousness, cutting into the slate of the tabula rasa. Ruts begin and every new moment either joins the stream or forms new paths.
We can change the way we think by merely thinking differently but it requires effort, a Corps of Engineers of our cognizance.

But there's a terrible caveat. As water follows courses already carved, so does our new input tend to follow the old riverbeds that have eroded into our awareness, our way of thinking. If we don't exert the effort to divert our new experiences from the hollows of our old patterns, they dig them deeper, out of habit and convention. We respond to the new with the old.

And that's the struggle I'm undergoing. I have realized it is time for the great undertaking of the reshaping of my mind, of the way and flow of it. Because the old paths aren't serving the new times.

Now not only must old habitual thinking be forced into new channels, to carve new neural pathways, I need new experience in order to shock the old rivers of ritual thinking into new realms of conscious behavioral modes. You can remake your brain and mind by merely thinking about it; science has proved it.
That is the challenge. By merely acknowledging the need, I take my first step on the new roads. El camino nuevo.

Fin de siècle

2011-06-12T03:55:00.000+01:00

It's the end of a long cycle. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to reconnect with my old friends. I don't know if they feel it; maybe it's not so much the same for them, or perhaps they're just oblivious to it. Some are aware it, they've told me so.
Times they are a'changin', in a profound way. A way that won't be obvious except in retrospect from the perspective of the future. The generations to come will acknowledge that we lived through the Chinese curse of "interesting times".

"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."
- Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene 3

Tempus semper fugit, ergo carpe diem.

I'm not big on metaphysics, although the more I learn of quantum mechanics, the more I understand how blind we are to the fundamental nature of reality. If there's anything history has shown, humans and their science are inevitably always proven wrong in retrospect, especially when they're most confident that they've understood it all.

In the summer of 2009, a friend received a call on a lazy do-nothing day while we were lounging around the farm: there was an Indian (subcontinental, not Native) at her friend's work, doing "readings".

"Let's go!" she said, and I said sure. We jumped in her Prius and drove down to Santa Rosa.

He was a wizened dusky little man, doing what amounted to fortunes, but he brooked no skepticism. If you weren't worthy, you got sent away. He accepted no money. It was peculiar, I couldn't figure his scam. He really didn't seem to have one.

He told both my friend and her friend things, privately, that they took seriously, and didn't discuss afterward, or maybe they did and I just don't remember it. When I sat down, he asked my birthdate, if I knew the time: I did. He sketched quietly for a moment, consulting a book in Hindi.

"For the next two years," he said, "you are better off than nine persons out of ten."

"After that?" I asked. He was right--I was riding high, flush with cash, sedate and secure in my position at my job that I loved doing.

He circled his hand in an impatient "wrap it up" motion--"then it is a time of endings, before new beginnings. The old will pass away, it is the end of a great cycle, of many years. Make peace and prepare. All will be changed for you, and the many."

"Avoid investments in property," he added cryptically, and that was it.

And so it has come to pass. Everything is in flux. I'm ending my job, and many aspects of my life. Whether they are over because I decided it or it was just going to happen without my choice in the matter, I don't know. I should be glad I'm rolling with the tide, having chosen before it was decided without consulting me.

I haven't been back here in three years, and haven't been back to City Zero in six. City Zero is entirely transformed, though the bones of it are starkly visible against its new skin.

I suspect as much for all my old haunts, even Desolation City, where I have never returned since I left in 1997. Ah, but perhaps it t'was not the city that was desolate, but I that dwelt therein.

First, six months ago I quit drinking. Then, I figured that while I was at it I might as well stop the Prozac and tricyclic antidepressant and the tranquilizers and the sedative-hypnotic sleeping pill. Why do many little cold turkeys when I could just do the big one. It wasn't as rough as I thought it would be, in the short term, though the long term readjustment to being my old self has been traumatic. After a couple of weeks without drinking, it occurred to me that I had probably done some considerable long term damage over the years with the booze and the pills and the weed. Perhaps some "smart drugs" were in order, something that would boost my battered neurons back to life, revitalize my poor abused grey matter. I started taking piracetam and hydergine (they are reputed to work synergistically to revitalize the brain). The research states that the combination "counteracts degenerative vascular cerebral pathology" and "improves the symptoms of mental deterioration through increased metabolic cerebral function." Just what the doctor ordered.

It was a kick to the hornet's nest of my memory banks. A dam broke in my head and the past flooded my mind. The world took on a frightening clarity. Still I hung on. The waves of the open sea were a good analogy: the come and they pass. You just have to ride them out, crest by trough. But for the last few months, I've been awash in memories, haunted by them, even.

I think the worst of all is I don't sleep like I did. I took long deep effortless sleep for granted. Not anymore. Sleep is shallow and uneasy with unpleasant dreams that are troublesome at best, ferocious nightmares at worst.

I started running desultorily in 2009 but since I quit drinking, I committed to it in a big way. As hunger is the best spice, so the best sleeping pill is exhaustion. As a part of the general scheme, I wanted to get into shape, and I needed sleep. I haven't been this fit since the early 90s, whippet thin, pounding out ten miles every morning, minimum. More if I'm agitated, and that's often. I have my old 30 inch waist again (something I never thought I'd see again since high school) and weigh 165 (though weight is irrelevant--it's how much muscle you have as opposed to fat). My old fighting trim. Gaunt again.

A summer storm just whipped through, and I went out and stood in the rain and watched the lightning thrash the sky as the warm wind tore wildly around me. It felt good.

Time for a nice glass of chamomile and decaffeinated green tea, ready for bed.

Weary old bones

2011-06-12T02:09:00.000+01:00

Getting old is hell, but, as they say, it beats the alternative (by which I assume they mean the grave rather than some other positive theoretical option like eternal youth).

I'm in the process of getting back in touch with old friends after a six year hiatus, except for my oldest friend whom I've always been in touch with, if sporadically. Hey, can't an old friend be forgiven a psychotic lapse of friendship? I just want to let bygones be bygones and keep in touch for however many years are left in our allotted spans. John Donne's bells are tolling. I'm not the grudge holder I once was, and it was my fault anyway.

After multiple computer crashes, I'm combing through email accounts for photo attachments for pictures I sent that would have otherwise been irrevocably lost. Just scraps here and there, but better than nothing. One of my favorites that sums up so much of my life:

This photo says everything about me that can be said. It really is quite definitive, literally a thousand words if not more. A snapshot of the soul, a lifetime conveyed in an instant.

Here I am, back again

2011-06-10T23:56:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd rather just use this old one than set up a new one.

I'll be updating it regularly now that I'm back online in a reliable way. I opted for a netbook instead of a smart phone, since wifi is everywhere. Hell, this thing is only slightly larger than a smartphone, and I can make calls with Google and Skype for free instead of fucking with the cellphone companies and their onerous contracts.

I'll describe the past few years and the lacunae thereof.