Repetition without purpose is meaningless. Have an endgame with repetition.
Don't dawdle. Do reflect.
Take advice but do not be a fool.
Give advice but do not be a moralist.
Know your own aims and know that sometimes you won't know your aims.
And on and on and on.
My name is Jim and the banal precepts and slogans of every era and civilization now wash over me and I can perfectly extract their truth and falsity. I am the ideal no-bullshit individual, a historical-level prodigy of not being taken advantage of.
But a man is only as good as his means and ends. And for a long time I wondered what my ends really were. And I still don't really know.
I come from what some would call a "sect". From the Appalachians of the old United States, that is: there was a group of huddled subsistence-level nomads and the men had beards and the women held spears on sticks. For a hundred and fifty years we'd hunted the rabbits and found our way through vegetation lush and vegetation bare, and we'd survived, and until the zoning incident everyone had a reasonably purposeful and happy life, if relatively short. There isn't much history but from what I've gathered it was founded as a utopian colony harkening back to ancient and modern ideals. And while the colony or its wandering sequel certainly wasn't ideal, I'd look at people in my life after the zoning incident, in the new world of America, and surely they suffered in their homes, just as I did in the wandering. And surely I do today. And the people in the States I know had their own myths to explain the suffering, as we did. And when I'd come into contact at a gathering with those few that yet remained of the nomads, they were not shocked catatonic by our modern civilization - if anything, there's sympathy and a struggle to empathize.
Not that we were mystics or anything, but same as anyone else we had our customs, our beliefs.
July 26, 2013
July 23, 2013
Jokes
I want to tell you a joke. But I lack all comic timing. So I'll have to set it up really well or simply never tell it.
I want to tell you a joke. Not that I have a particular joke in mind, I just want to tell one well. I just don't want to be seen as overbearing and aloof which is what happens whenever I try. I have a sense of humor, and it isn't all rueful and dark and mean-spirited and overly ironic, I promise. I love to tell jokes, and yes, they all roll off pathetically, misunderstood or misinterpreted through no fault of the listener. I love to tell jokes, but sometimes I'm just not feeling it, which is of course exactly when I want to talk about it, like now.
I like "The Simpsons". Jam-packed with jokes. I like what I've seen of "M*A*S*H". I went back and watched the Wayne Brady sketch of "Chappelle's Show" about a hundred times. To me, it's about as good as comedy gets. It moves you in directions you might not want to go, and yet, at the end of the day, you are sent in those directions, laughing all the way. Again and again. That's what humor is supposed to be, in my view.
Humor's a syringe full of truth serum and a mask full of laughing gas but you have to get the timing and coordination right between the two and so few are capable doctors. All I can tell you is that there's a veil of absurdity around the straightforward and a logic to all absurdities that bear upon the real, and any comic worth his/her salt can tap that. What I'm saying is that there's a lot of comedic mileage basically in being alive. And yet to take the stick-shift and actually get in gear with the comedy is the most difficult thing in the world. The art, the science, the... the craftsmanship. I can't get enough of the craftsmanship.
I want to tell you a joke. Not that I have a particular joke in mind, I just want to tell one well. I just don't want to be seen as overbearing and aloof which is what happens whenever I try. I have a sense of humor, and it isn't all rueful and dark and mean-spirited and overly ironic, I promise. I love to tell jokes, and yes, they all roll off pathetically, misunderstood or misinterpreted through no fault of the listener. I love to tell jokes, but sometimes I'm just not feeling it, which is of course exactly when I want to talk about it, like now.
I like "The Simpsons". Jam-packed with jokes. I like what I've seen of "M*A*S*H". I went back and watched the Wayne Brady sketch of "Chappelle's Show" about a hundred times. To me, it's about as good as comedy gets. It moves you in directions you might not want to go, and yet, at the end of the day, you are sent in those directions, laughing all the way. Again and again. That's what humor is supposed to be, in my view.
Humor's a syringe full of truth serum and a mask full of laughing gas but you have to get the timing and coordination right between the two and so few are capable doctors. All I can tell you is that there's a veil of absurdity around the straightforward and a logic to all absurdities that bear upon the real, and any comic worth his/her salt can tap that. What I'm saying is that there's a lot of comedic mileage basically in being alive. And yet to take the stick-shift and actually get in gear with the comedy is the most difficult thing in the world. The art, the science, the... the craftsmanship. I can't get enough of the craftsmanship.
July 21, 2013
Sensory Experiments
I'm getting mixed messages from everyone I know. They tell me I'm crazy and they tell me I'm cool. They don't know if I'm just trying to be weird or if that's the way God made me and I'm just living the dream. They suspect the former process, but respect the end result just the same.
They tell me I'm not as different from everyone else as I think, but they tell me the way I enjoy things is fundamentally different from the way they do. They tell me the vast tracts of undiscovered land they catch me veering into in every moment of silence is really this common-and-well-worn world we all inhabit, but they wonder what compels me to reach into the undiscovered. They don't get my affinity for the timeless even in the most ephemeral of settings, and they don't get my relentlessly stupid ephemeral humor when I finally do buy in.
They say I'm mad, friends. They say I'm normal, in almost the same sentence. They say it's hard to tell the difference with me, to be fair, and that maybe that inscrutability is the difference itself. Inscrutably polite and inscrutably inattentive. Irrationally there and irrationally not-there at the same moment, I drift and do not. I cannot rationally attain the common knowledges and experiences of others but still, while I'm not attaining, I'm working: ever-better do I make my craft, practicing piano in my head when I should be listening to the song on the car radio and engaging it.
They don't know what to do with me. Everyone I know suspects some sort of odd neurological damage above which they gracefully float while I stumble yet again, but also some sort of odd neurological compensation that makes them the stumbling and me the graceful. You know, depending on the context. And a lot of contexts involve both, and we alternate facilities with competitive anything-you-can-do contests and with cooperative picking-up-one-another's-slack situations.
We get along but I also get the sense that maybe I'm straggling behind for too long and diving ahead for too long for anyone to really identify with my flow. My memory's long and I've got a wicked four-dimensional proprioception w.r.t. my body of work and my mind is sharp, but when it comes to obvious things about life and living, I'm as clumsy as anyone.
They tell me I'm not as different from everyone else as I think, but they tell me the way I enjoy things is fundamentally different from the way they do. They tell me the vast tracts of undiscovered land they catch me veering into in every moment of silence is really this common-and-well-worn world we all inhabit, but they wonder what compels me to reach into the undiscovered. They don't get my affinity for the timeless even in the most ephemeral of settings, and they don't get my relentlessly stupid ephemeral humor when I finally do buy in.
They say I'm mad, friends. They say I'm normal, in almost the same sentence. They say it's hard to tell the difference with me, to be fair, and that maybe that inscrutability is the difference itself. Inscrutably polite and inscrutably inattentive. Irrationally there and irrationally not-there at the same moment, I drift and do not. I cannot rationally attain the common knowledges and experiences of others but still, while I'm not attaining, I'm working: ever-better do I make my craft, practicing piano in my head when I should be listening to the song on the car radio and engaging it.
They don't know what to do with me. Everyone I know suspects some sort of odd neurological damage above which they gracefully float while I stumble yet again, but also some sort of odd neurological compensation that makes them the stumbling and me the graceful. You know, depending on the context. And a lot of contexts involve both, and we alternate facilities with competitive anything-you-can-do contests and with cooperative picking-up-one-another's-slack situations.
We get along but I also get the sense that maybe I'm straggling behind for too long and diving ahead for too long for anyone to really identify with my flow. My memory's long and I've got a wicked four-dimensional proprioception w.r.t. my body of work and my mind is sharp, but when it comes to obvious things about life and living, I'm as clumsy as anyone.
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