Day: January 26, 2005

With the days the way they are, you will probbaly be seeing much more of my life than reading about it in the near future. I promise this will not turn into a wholesale photoblog, but expect a good peppering.


I did not forget the face of my father-
My aim was true and straight,
like the path of the beam.

I did tremble at the voice of my father
For it was terrible-
Not in words or timbre,
But in rammification.

The shadow he casts is like
The scowl of a cloud, deciding to
Deprive a city block of sunshine.

Perhaps, like Russian dolls,
The Men of my clan are destined,
Or doomed,
To each be a little less than the one before.
Each one of us marveling
At how our predecessor could
Hold so much in one
Life.

I have so many things I have to do today. I mostly need to pick up my dry cleaning, and work on getting some sleep. I want to write (see above) but don’t have the energy. I feel like a bricklayer with too much sand in his mix. What has come and gone in my life these past few months has left me realizing that I have, in good faith to something I was hopelessly optimistic about, strayed away from as a central tenet of my belief structure.

Oddly enough, it was rereading Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho that made me realize part of the reason I have been unable to drag myself out of the funk that is my life. My expectations were too high. Dennis Leary, in his show “No Cure for Cancer” has an enormous bit about expectations of happiness. Some of it was echoed by the last Lewis Black show I saw.

Happiness is not a permenant state. To attempt to attain a permanent state of happiness is to invite strife across your threshold. Granted, strife doesn’t need any invitations, but, like a 6 year old left home alone with warning, it delights in wreaking havoc when you are dumb enough to hold the door.

Leary’s words:

“Life sucks, get a fucking helmet, allright?! “I’m not happy. I’m not happy.” Nobody’s happy, ok!? Happiness comes in small doses folks. It’s a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm. That’s it, ok! You cum, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to fucking work, ok!? That is it! End of fucking list!”

Lewis Black’s bit (which I only saw once) basically illustrated the insanity of taking drugs to neither feel happy nor sad, out of fear of being sad all the time. He went on to compare the insanity of maintaining a constant styrafoam existance to recreational drug use, and pointed out that smoking a joint or popping a pill once in a while to lift your spirits or unwind is vastly preferable to taking a pill every day as a preventative measure.

Either way, it is the denial of the transitive nature of existance that makes us hairless apes so goddamn unstable in numbers greater than one. I need to get back to living in the moment, and stop feeling shitty about the fact that I don’t have what I once did. I had a run a good bit longer than 5 seconds there, and I should shut the fuck up already, and be content with that.