10/27/06

Mining the Sky in Sagittarius

Do I have a body? No, I don't have a body. I am a body. I'm realizing that more and more now, really feeling it. You really feel it when you go psychosomatic routes. Most of what I associate with myself is the brain, that's where the ego is, that's what it rests on.

I'm feeling like a body when I see, feel it perturb, checking out appendages with my eyes - labeling them as separate in the seamless web. Language may have a rather different relationship with reality than we think. I was just walking through the autumn forest, dezcolors, thinking such crazy things as: what is real? I believe in reality in a sense, there is some objective thing out there, but then there are layers of filters and how is it possible to know what exists beyond the filters? And yet I believe in the idea of the external because I'm not solipsistic. I have faith in it. That doesn't mean I kill or die for it, unless the universe dictates I must. I can be, to some degree, emotionally detached from it (not from my delusions). But I have faith in it. My senses - they tell me things. Interpretation is a child's game, an aeon of spinning marbles.

Deep today for some reason. There are so many attitudes toward drugs. I've held so many myself, they shift with the weather, moods. Sell the kids for food. Like they take the place of religion for me some times, for so many reasons.

Almost felt spiritual when I walked in the woods today. Spiritual. A word I'd virtually excised from my vocabulary. Verboten things. Was Alan Watts a religious man? Of course that demands days of dull semantics to answer. Let's just say he was, and have it mean whatever you want. If so, he'd think being religious was synonymous with a lack of seriousness. Not lack of sincerity, but seriousness. Because religion, at least that zen flavour he loved, is supposed to be about the experience of breathing out the serious and returning to the playful. Or, well, that is my current reading of nirvana, anyway. I have no punchline here, sorry. I was just remembering when I felt strangely light-hearted, and understanding laughter as an ideology. I was smiling, knowing I'd lost huge swaths of innocence, and yet that means my laughter is EARNED now - cynicism, dark humour, it's a beautiful thing. And does cynicism mean secular? Or is it just a squinty cataract pallor, a veneer? Can one be cynical AND religious? Depends on where your faith is, what your faith is. But religion became odious in a way, in certain veneers, for me. I was thinking, does THC make me more tolerant to Richard Dawkins?

"I'm a Sagittarius. The most philosophical of all the signs".

I wish I could wear my freakish roster of paradigms like hats, put on an old favourite whenever the mood strikes me. But the brain is hard to reign in like that. Nevertheless I nearly did that today. I put on my lucky white sox hat, literally, my "lucky" hat, luck, such a quaint old idea, chuckle - and yet I feel more potent, more myself, more aware with this on. But maybe it's that plant I smoked earlier. That changes paradigms too. Different attitudes.

FiveHTP - it's helping me again, I think. For a while I stopped thinking about it. I thought, I still get depressed, and I'm really over-hyping this thing. Now I'm crediting the flux of my moods to a chemical again. Folly? No, I think it's that I've decided to blow off Nelson and get a house in Parsons for a while - spontaneous, debauched, indulgent -- but also kind of cool. Novelty. Maybe that's what's really making me yearn less for comforts I shouldn't expect, bling bling, status, rock star cachet, pussy by the pound. Maybe better that I move in with some cool people in a foreign land and write songs.

For some reason, the idea keeps reverberating loudly in my head that this is somehow the best of all possible worlds. Everything is necessary. But then that means it's necessary to complain. Necessary to change things. So now this is just sounding tautological and meaningless.

"We may die from Medication but we sure killed all the pain" - Bright Eyes. I don't care what people say, he's an awesome singer/songwriter. Nothing musically amazing to my virtuoso progsnob biases, but past that, songs, man, SONGS - taking old forms, making them HIS, things that employ clichés, but somehow transcending them. What else can the new gen do? We're trying to figure it out. Ideas are crusting, new ones are scarce, it's like mining the sky for metal.

Killing the pain. Drugs can kill pain, guaranteed. They are a guarantee. A profound thing. A guarantee that you can die in peace. Just have the heroin handy. Or fentanyl. Or opium tea. Or even ketamine, I think K's really making a strong showing in the terminal scene, a feisty up 'n comer! I often console myself with the thought that drugs will be there for me. If I need them. This way of thinking about them is kind of anti-life. But, life is kind of anti some times. The Dao has gouged itself into my psychology. That sounds kind of pretentious, but it's true.

Religion claims to kill the pain too, but in the proper way, the theologically correct way. Put down the drugs, and get a hug, but from Jesus, not the creepy Catholic priests. Jesus is innocent. What is his relationship to Adam? You know, of Genesis? See, asking a question like that just makes everything look ridiculous. First you're imagining a guy on a cross, taking the punishment, aren't we just horrible savages... and then you're imagining a guy wearing a fig-leaf, stealing forbidden fruit cause a snake told him to.

What they should have done was create a plausible Adam and Eve. Not a Terry Gilliam treatment, although that would be fucking fantastic. But some ancient myth with believable characters. You know, like Jesus is kind of sort of believable, maybe not because he existed, but because either the man, or the myth, has had a staggering archetypal effect on culture, society. He has a complex named after him. But so does Oedipus. But Freud was a fucking freak. I want his coke connection.

Christianity is an amazing thing. Just an amazing thing to behold. It's not all good, not all bad, over-hyped and over-prescribed in strange ways - but a huge, fascinating religion. I just realized this.

McKenna thinks people, plural, transcending the lifespan of ordinary folks, have a nostalgia for the archaic past. It's an epigenetic thing, probably. The garden. If you're a fallen angel, you're not doing too well, are you? But if you're a risen ape, not too shabby. I'm pretty tied to the value system I've inherited from this obscure genetic fractal. Self-important. My SELF is IMPORTANT! It must be comfortable, and entertained, otherwise life isn't worth living. Fortunately poppies are renewable. But oil is not. 

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