Web of Supermonkey

Okay, we're still going on about druglessness, if only because I'm surprised how much I stick to my guns when surrounded by the influence in social settings, without being "that guy." The party itself was great, almost made moreso by the fact that I had a great time without having anything aside from snacks while there. I walk in and it's some ridiculous girlygirl dance party going on, with all the dudes cowering in the corner. Seriously, you want to see straight dudes get really fucking uncomfortable, start playing obscure musical numbers and dance around in impromptu choreography. There's absolutely no way to join in when a dude's positive experiences with musicals begins and ends with Reefer Madness and The Who's oevure. Once that concluded I ended up meeting tons of great people by discussing art, drugs and music in totally different circumstances. It was a helluva mix of people that seem to follow that strange Philadelphia Social Net rule.

More than a lot of places, Philadelphia seems to create these unusually large social networks, with tons of parties interconnected. I mean, for being the 6th largest city in the US, you'd figure people wouldn't run into each other that much, or that you could actually have unrelated groups of friends, but it all inevitably winds up whittling down to 3 Degrees of Kevin Bacon (a Philly-area native, har har). I've stopped asking how people know each other, and chances are I've either seen or met my friends three or four times before officially meeting them. "So how do you know Sasha?" "Well... she used to be a regular at [insert retail gig], and we worked together at [insert new gig] for a month before the car crash, and we met like a year and a half later one random night at Oscar's, and it turns out I met her boyfriend before at the comic book store..." You get the point. I've stopped caring how people know each other, unless it's a cute girl and I want to know if she's dating someone.

How doesn't seem as important as why, in many of the circumstances that I've encountered. "How" seems almost subservient to figuring out "why," and oftentimes asking the former without the latter deals with the latter being invented in one form or another in the mind of the individual. Sometimes I wish in social encounters more people would ask me why, rather than hound with endless musings and doggedness about my path in life, mostly pertaining to my personal stance on "higher" education. It fits a system I want as little to do with as possible. Being a caveman's cheap, and I doubt I'm going to feel any manner of contentment in retiring, seeing how I tend to fall into a catatonic panic when I have nothing to do with my time (as I sit here blogging instead of doing a host of other useful things).

It's funny: all I want is a second job and I'm making friends, and when I had a full-time job all I wanted to do was spend more time making friends. Somewhere, there's some metaphysical cartoon character laughing at my expense as my wallet dries up and my hospitality needs grow. I'm hoping I don't have to start hitting the street corners just to pay the bills. Kidding, but still... fingers are crossed.

Life outside the Fractal

It would be nice to forget about money for a while. I mean, this period of feeling panic at the very mention of it's getting kind of boring. "Oh, wait, I can't get any new fancy soap because..." "Hey, I'd love to go out drinking and embarassing myself and everyone around me but..." "Oh, gee, getting high as a kite and blowing out the gummed up pipework in my mind would just float my boat, but I might run into a drug test while interviewing for a second job since..." So, I'm out of Lush soap and coming as close to that "good kid" that I used to be soooooo very many years ago when my stiffest drink was shandy (Sprite and Beer mixed together. It was as good as it sounds).

I've learned a lot from this dry period. Going from stoned on a daily basis to cold turkey has helped me gain an appreciation for how much of what I experienced was just my own mind. I chased a lot of phantoms in that period, and a lot of that came from the projection and objectification of the tools I was using at the time. Each dose was a hope that somehow I'd get launched into one of those mind-blowing religious experiences, and frankly, they grew few and far between as time went on. My jaw was always clenched in some neurotic fit, and it was tough not to fall into smug self-reference.

Even though those big enlightening fireworks would go off here and there, and I know that there're patterns I'm missing while "clean," a lot of things I've learned while under the influence have stuck, to my surprise. The time away seems to have reiterated what's really important: it's just a little easier to navigate without the sensory and intuitive barrage. Trust me, I'm nowhere near getting a sensible haircut and getting a cubicle job to find a boring hot chick that'll squirt out some kids before we inevitably split and I lose both custody of the kids and the cool half of everything I own. I'm still not getting a car or going back to college: both seem equally ridiculous straight as they do stoned. Maybe when it's not 1 am I'll get into it more.

Despite all that, the real reasons I want to get this money situation handled are still a) getting drunk, but with friends. b) tripping out, but only to face some demons and get to know myself and c) Lush products, but... more of them so I can smell frilly all the time.

Pin in the Grenade

New Year's Eve.

I watched the TV at the bar as flames spat up behind Dick Clark-bot on the screen, Robbie Kinevel wheeling his way to set up his jump, his success and failure set up like a trick Groundhog's Day tradition: "If he lives, it'll be a good year! Hahaw!" The Patriarch and Matriarch of the Clinton Dynasty initiated the ball drop, to show us who we really elected. Somehow, it seemed like everyone at Times Square represented humanity waving farewell to itself like the cast at the end of a play to the audience.

The seashells in the bathroom. The octopus necklace on the waitress handing out champagne. The purple background with growing spirals on the screen. The Mollusk was speaking, and it was time to move away from the bustle and into the blackness. I stepped outside the bar, to see a single, scallop-shaped purple firework go off just off to the right from across the street. All is well. It's time I learned to trust the Mollusk a bit more, ask it more questions and make fewer observations of an ever-changing figure. I was saved, I feel, but from what I have no idea. Maybe it's best to save that question for when I'm ready.

I'm going to take advantage of that second chance. I have so much life, here, and if the world's going to end, I have to make sure I'm comfortable where I am as we all fall down, if only to justify a painfully slow death. I want to know that somehow, somewhere in there, I lived for at least a little bit during the time my heart pumped.

Refusing to Die

Much of this has been said before by folks with a better grasp at language.

Magic can be one of the hardest things to break. How does a person smash an already flexible view of reality? It’s something that needs to be hardened and then cracked for the gooey unspeakable phantom crap to burst out like a New Orleans levee. I mean, we could pretend for a moment that magic is the aforementioned unspeakable phantom crap, but all I’ve found is that magic is just a way of comprehending it. We can argue ad infinitum about what events constitute magic, and that, in and of itself, makes the damned thing invincible. Some of it we hold onto tightly; we make legions of conjectural structures on a handful of philosophical points. Some of it we let slip through, hoping that the wash of nonsense will accumulate a universal, true structure that underlies all things. That last one’s the most arrogant and tragic. That view has this arrogance in believing that the measly, slapped-together human mind really can perceive a structure greater than its senses or the cultural structures created in the former work. Isn’t it all just reaction to a spooky world beyond experience? Is it just angry dismissal and reaction against experience? Can we really just sit there grinning about how there’s “just this moment”? I can tell you, when I’m puking my guts out from food poisoning, I’m praying for the moment when it’s out of my system.

Our experience left without validation leaves us without any drive. As a superorganism created from deformed monkey stock, this self-aware and variable mental framework became fragile after separation from direct involvement with natural threats. Apparitions compose most of our societal taxations and structures. Separation from the toil of the hunt has come to the toil of a possibly meaningless occupation of time to receive imaginary liquid assets in order to acquire nourishment that’s been killed on an assembly line or in a threshing machine. Guilt over this lack of participation leads people to go to great lengths to “buy organic” or “fair trade,” in order to assuage their guilt over a total lack of interaction. This framework develops arts of combat, still beholden to rules that keep true savagery at arms length. It brings people to create preposterous tools in order to tackle the ordeal of a natural structure that those who live alongside it would rather just respect and let alone, as the hardship of that environment is a regular occurrence. Many of these excursions leave those primal sources of danger worse off. Who will clean Everest of the litters of oxygen tanks and non-degradable thermal jackets from dead mountain climbers? Still, when pressed to hear the story from a person who has been in physical peril, envy creeps in, then guilt, then defensiveness. The drive to prove the worth of one’s traits by besting the throes of death still lives in the furthest abstractions of life, no matter how divorced it is.

These apparitions and theoretical compositions still have major ramifications. A lack of an arbitrarily decided trading unit in a given area can devastate a population, no matter how hard it works, due to a handful of individuals in decision-making positions attempting to increase the stock of that trading unit for themselves in an overvalued sense of self-preservation. That these individuals will have a legacy of terror means nothing to them; the idea that they will have a legacy at all means everything to them.

Without connection to natural events, cycles of psychological development have become just as dangerous to the individual as the external. Without justification for existence, and without a close connection to nature’s randomness to experience survival instincts, the individual falls into what many call depression, characterized by the passivity and irresponsibility of early development and/or desire for the termination of the existence deemed invalid by the evaluating perspective of the individual. One way to posit depression is to perceive both the passivity and the thanatoic drive as methods for the mental framework to alter itself. Without perception of separation between an individual’s own structures, the perceiving function can draw the action to encompass all levels of an individual being, that function could easily judge the entire structure as invalid. However, the separation of those structures can allow the perceiving function to articulate changes in the individual framework and how the being can respond accordingly.

While the separation might seem inauthentic, perhaps untrue to humanity, this current state nonetheless exists. Once externalized, an idea rarely becomes undone. Often, a flow of events renders this idea obsolete in the acting structure of the psychological landscape of humanity, yet these “obsolete” ideas become valid either through revision or through a separate psychological landscape adopting it for its own means of development. As much as humanity lives in a physical world, its imaginary world seems to equally affect its existence, and often this concept becomes marginalized. Responsibility for the psychological environment equals that of the physical environment, as one often reflects the other. In the darkness of modernity and in the possibility of global devastation, some small fragment of meaning must be found, or the thanatoic response will have the capability of extinguishing the entire species, if not much of what can be considered life.

Snarls from Beneath All Things.

The thought of walking out into the cold and freezing to death seems so appealing. Closing the mind off from the body and letting it die... it's coming around again. It's been years since I've been this depressed. It's getting harder to rationalize my way through it.

I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.

Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.

I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.

Der Hexen and Old Timey Crotchety Business

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Homunculus Now.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we dicuss homunculi.

Now, legend has them created by mandrake or chicken eggs, in some spermatogenesis goofiness. However, the notion of personified elements as posited by Zosimos seems at least more feasible to my sensibilities. Still, it's just as silly, thinking about little men going "arrrrgh!" all of the time in some constant gory torment.

I've experienced homunculi in the same manner as nature spirits initially, faces that appear in just about everything while I'm in what folks call the "receptive state," or what most folks perceive as being "zoned out." Eventually, certain faces kept repeating, or had a particular series of advice voiced in those moments, and were a bit more accessable, more obviously drawn from some bit of absurdist creation on my part. That little bit of personalization took those faces out of the matter and shaped them into satellite beings in the mental sphere.

This comes almost as a form of depersonalization of particular traits, making a parapersona to observe, understand, and manage before reabsorbing those traits back into the home persona, of course to move in and out constantly. Much of this relates to dolls, toys, and stuffed animals as a child. In fact, most magic comes from things we used to do as kids put into some comprehensible way of observing and understanding reality in a constantly changing manner, opening up new possibilities. It's admitting to madness and using its trappings to find sanity and completion.

One method I use to understand homunculi is beginning to draw the vague pretenses of a face, and watching what happens from there, in a trance. It isn't always symmetric, it's rarely pretty, but the imperfection of manifestation in any reality is the point: these beings are a part of that massive, multidimensional matrix, and manifestation shows merely one small size of an infinitely-sided being, with that imperfection acting as an attempt to stretch or fold that shape into something understandable. That's the point of paradox: let it happen.

Once the face is finished, put it away, and do something that relates to its manifestation while still awake that day, and don't look at it. Let it do its thing until something says otherwise. It's like a sigil with a personality, relating in that human-to-human fashion, touching on the concept of progeny and creation of life.