Keeping Chaos at Bay: Between The Fixed and Floating Worlds

I find this an indespenisible quote from a book im reading called "The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure" in which the author describes that within the self-imposed formal restrains of society there exists by necessity a magical interzone wherein our poetic, energetic imaginations are alloted time and space to subvert and reinvent what we consider the normal and acceptible.

"Society is a process rather than an abstract system ... [it is] a process in which any living, relatively well-bonded human group alternates between fixed and - to borrow a term from our Japanese friends - "floating worlds." By verbal and non-verbal means of classification we impose upon ourselves innumerable constraints and boundaries to keep chaos at bay, but often at the cost of failing to make discoveries and inventions: that is to say, not all instances of subversions are deviant and criminous. Yet in order to live, to breate, and to generate novelty, human beings have had to create - by structural means - spaces and times in the calendar, or, in the cultural cycles of their most cherished groups which cannot be captured in the classificatory nets their quotidian, routinzed spheres of action. These liminal areas of time and space- rituals, carnivals, dramas, and recently, films - are open to the play of thought, feeling, and will; in them are generated new models, often fantastic, some of which may have sufficent power and plausibility to replace eventually the force-backed political and jural models that control the centers of a society's ongoing life."

- Victor Turner

Handsome Man

I have given $20 bucks to Wesley Clark, simply because he's a handsome man. And, he attacks Bush. You go!

Mind-Forged Manacles #2: The Myth of the Linear Path

There is I think a strong desire for the faithless, religionless person, as they travel through life and begin to notice the temporal linear path their life trajectory will take and ultimately end in death, to feel a desire to give in, let go all their carefully constructed intellectual and rational support structures of thoughts and theories of life, and surrender to something beyond them, to throw themselves on the mercy of the court and ask for a lenient sentence, to ask God to take them and comfort them in their growing fear that all this life they have lived without a clear religious belief might all add up to nothing, to quell the horror that they end up on their death bed with nothing, nothing to comfort them from the coming eternity of darkness that awaits them indifferently. As the non-religious person moves through life, and comes to recognize that their birth was a point in the past, and their death of a point to come in the future, they begin to understand that their parents will die, and though they cannot fully imagine what this will feel like, something in him grows, a deep fear that once his parents are gone the world will fall out from under him, and his lack of faith will cause his sanity to crumble under the weight of uncertainty and fear of solitude.

Brush with Celebrity
When I was in my early 20's, I worked for Amtrak, as a waiter. The trips were 6 days round trip, from LA to either Chicago or New Orleans.

On one trip to Nawhlins, as they called it, there was a celebrity on the train, Michael Gross, the TV father of Michael J Fox, for Family Ties. One waitress on the train, a real doozy of a white trash floozy, told us she knew him, was friendly with him, and that he'd meet us for dinner. We thought she was just tootin' her own horn and fantasizing.

So, we all meet up for dinner at some hopping Jumbalaya Joint in the French Quarter off Bourbon St., drinking, waiting around. Oh, he'll be here soon. As time ticked on, we really doubted her celeb connections. But just when it was time to order, he arrived. The whole restaraunt went quiet and I felt sorry for him, getting all that attention. He goes through his whole life like that, poor bastard. Turns out the trailer trash waitress wasn't lying. He sat down with us, and turned out to be rather friendly.

We all eat dinner, and try as I might to be cordial, I was a young punk, a sarcastic sonofbitch. He makes the comment that me and this other guy are real smart asses. He was right, for we were having fun busting his famous balls with jokes about being "pops." What can I say? We were young punks, train workers in town on a one night tear.

So we go outside and he's with us, walking through the drunken streets, and people keep mobbing him to touch him, talk to him, get his autograph, and it's clear he does not like that. So he says we should keep moving. I suggest we go into this one bar, which was clearly a stripper bar. He quickly agrees while everyone else decides not to. As he and I get inside, it becomes clear that it's a Transvestite/Transexual stripper club, and he and I are the only two non "girls" there. I was wearing shorts, and they liked my legs. There I was, standing in Tranny Ho club with America's TV dad, getting hit on by ulgy, burly "chicks."

We leave, and he becomes warm and friendly with one of the other Christian waitresses and they trail off into the night, escaping the autograph hounds. I take off with other smart ass guys and we drink till morn.

That was the closest I got to fame and celebrity.

Idea for Self Help Book

Make Friends With, Sequester, the Inner Perv

Sequestering the Inner Perv

Mind Forged Manacles: When Habit Becomes Reality


The problem with habits is that, because we repeat them so much and so often, they begin to resemble reality, as if by magic. Indeed, you could say the habit becomes our reality. It's as if the way we walk or sit, or breath, or hold a pen or cup in our hand, perform the same routine day in and day out, were as apparently fixed and absolute as the mountains.

In fact, the habit is merely a pattern of behavior (and our preception of it) that we have adapted to so comfortably and become accustomed to as the way things are. The way we drive our car, hold our head, talk from one side of our mouth; how we might repeatedly do the same things say after day, month after month, year after year. When these patterns because habit, ritual, they begin to take the shape of our understanding of reality. The habit becomes as fixed and permanent as our own arm, or eye color.

But this is only a case of believing that because we see it, it must be the way things are. This is a tremendously difficult force to work against - it is the very entropic rhythm we all feel undulating us toward death. When habit becomes reality, we are already a foot in the grave. This is why it's so important to change our routines, our habits. Maybe this is why getting sick is so cathartic, rejuvinating: an illness forces us out of our habit and sits our ass down and we have to pay attention to the body. Old habits are dismantled, and we realize that there's another layer to life, reality that we've been missing, just beyond the pale of our perception.

Archaic Torso Of Apollo

This poem still heas tremendous power and relevance nearly every point of my life: Archaic Torso Of Apollo.

Two New Word Coinages

Problesome
Troublematic

Options in an Awkward Moment - Multiple Choice

What do you do when, during lovemaking, your partner calls you by a name that is not your own?

a) Ignore it and continue your progress.
b) Make up a new name for your partner, and assume
it's part of a new game.
c) Get up in disgust and cause a big fight
d) Get revenge by secretly imagining your partner is
someone else, like a movie star or beautiful actor/actress.

Out of Sickness, a New Babe is Born

There's something cathartic about being low, sick, or down, as if after you have gotten over it and are coming out of it and improving, you have a new perspective on life, new possibilities open up, and the present seems filled with promise. I'm just getting over a cold, and I feel energy - life coming back to where it was and where it wants to be - surging through me, jokes waiting to be told, sounds and motions to make, things to do.

It seems though that the only way I got here was by sinking low, being sick and feeling terrible. I didn't feel this before getting sick. This makes me believe that suffering is necessary, a physical law, that for all the happies and highs we have, we need to experience (consciously) lows, sadnesses, sicknesses, ailments (psychic or physical). Before I was sick, I was bland, lonely, spinning my wheels, things seemed dead, lifeless. Now, it's like a mini spring has sprung inside my mind. Old skin has been shed, moon has been through it's cycle, a new babe has been born.

Tearing Apart Social Fabric

In new social situations, I have this tendency to experience a mixture of contradictory emotions: I am nervous because I do not know people, yet I'm feeling cocky and excited because I sense an opportunity to be someone new, as any new social situation is like a small opportunity to reinvent yourself.

At the same time I'm also somewhat disappointed in the apparent artifice of all social situations (i.e., it's all an act anyway, so what's the purpose?) and I get these revolutionary, rebellious urges to break apart the social fabric, the social contract everyone implicitly agrees upon, other wise known as social decorum. (Don't ask me why I feel a need to this.) It's a highly ironic, almost christ archetype mode (i.e., me suffer on the cross, like Jesus) where I like to mess with people by pretending I am more of a loser than I really am and I bait them into criticizing me, and then I revel in that criticism because I know I'm not the loser they think I am. I have engaged them in an artifical "scene" where they don't realize that the joke is on them, like a candid camera without the cameras. By setting them up intentionally, even if it is at my expense, I mock their seriousness and affected coolness. If I am with people that know me, they sense what is up. Clever people in the area will also sense and perhaps laugh, which can be dangerous if the people I am mocking are tough-guy, bruiser types.

What the method is, is that I pretend to be a dumby dumb bunnie, say things that are borderline ironic, where I pretend and act as much as possible that I mean what I say and yet I do not mean it. I try to walk the line between making the person not know if I am serious or whether I am joking. I concede it it not very nice.

I did this last summer when I was at my friend Roger's wedding, while I was trying to scam one of the bridesmaids, busty, portly, voluptuous Nikki, super booty latina single mom, a hottie simple farm girl and apparently quite proud of it. I was dancing with her and it was going pretty well. But, because I was involved with the wedding, something came up and I had to leave to go pick somone up or take them home or some crap like that. Things had been going well enough that Nikki let me borrow her car. We had a thing going on. So I left reluctatntly because this meant lose the momentum and the whole 'make a love connection mojo' with Nikki. When I returned, my fears were confirmed when I saw a couple of younger guys had moved in on her and another bridesmaid. They were cooly chatting up Nikki and the other woman, suggesting to "go get pizza". I assumed I wasn't invited in this plan.

So I'm standing there and I really don't have dibs on this Nikki and yet I'm wanting to be manly enough to move in on her. But there's these fresh-faced mullet boys muscling in. I'm there and feeling awkward and just then I ask them, as seriously and as innocently and curiously as possible (and by now they obviously are giving me mad dog stares and trying to lose me), "So, what kind of pizza are we going to get?" So one guy, the ring leader, says to me in a huff, "Oh my god, dude that is so not relevant." I stand there, having sacrificed myself on the altar of coolness, a slain geek.