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I got unstuck from space-time, but only in a sensory sort of way. Not really unstuck physically. Because I can't even imagine what that would be like. I've done it metaphysically, spiritually, and psychologically and a few other allys I might mention.

First, as I left work, staring across the street to the Marriott, the light drizzle dabbling at being rain, blackening the pavement, suddenly transported me to the lot of a Denny's restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I've never been to Florida, but who am I to argue with what my senses tell me?

That's a rhetorical question. That means you don't really have to answer it. But you can if you want to. This IS a free country, after all.

Ah, the sky. Yes, so after leaving Denny's in Florida, I entered my car and drove, and I became unstuck again. This time, I was traveling along an expressway with the purple sky over Tokyo. Everything was bathed in pinks and violets, deep and thick, substantial. Philip K. Dick said God delivered messages to him in a pink laser beam of phosphene. Now imagine most of the sky is filled with it. And it's tangible. Reach out and cut me a slice of neon cotton candy.

Then the sun burst across the horizon like a brimstone demon clawing its way out of hell, and I found myself on Venus at sunrise; the sun too big and too bright, burning away the toxins and impurities of the atmosphere. The sun continued upon its trajectory, the demon eradicating the Venusian meteorological effluence, leaving me with an ordinary Earthling-blue sky.

And I had this thought, how Earth is right in the middle between Mars and Venus, the mythological Man and Woman, the sun and the moon, the yin and the yang, and how everything on Earth, even languages can be broken down to masculine and feminine, binary code, zeros and ones, alpha and omega, cat and dog, Hodge and Podge, Starsky and Hutch. (Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middle with you?)

On a more mundane note, I finished reading The Half-Blood Prince for a second time, and it's still good. I have a metaphorical shit-ton of theories about what’s going on and what’s going to happen. Only two more years to the exciting conclusion. Egads, what will I do?

I've read a few more Terry Pratchett novels. Has he written a book where Vetinari, the Patrician, is the main character? I love how his books overlap and center on different characters, and Vetinari is one of my enigmatic favorites.

I'm now reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a murder mystery where the dead one is the neighbor’s dog and the detective is a fifteen year-old autistic boy. It is amazing and I've only read thirty-eight pages.

This is more than long enough. Oops.
jackshoegazer: (777 Pyramid Eye Sun)
The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese scholars and poets of the mid-3rd century AD who banded together to escape from the hypocrisy and danger of the official world to a life of drinking wine and writing verse in the country. Their retreat was typical of the Taoist-oriented ch'ing-t'an ("pure conversation") movement that advocated freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape.

They play a large role in the Book, and my writing partner has a group on MySpace dedicated to their ideas. The group needed a new icon, and here's what I did.
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Alone.

There's no one here but me. And I could use some company. I spent the day playing Civilization III and reading Truth by Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett is the equivalent of literary television for me. It's not exactly profound or thought provoking (at least not to my over-extended esoteric head) but it's highly entertaining anyway.

Now, I will dive back into the wine and watch Oceans 12 and Sideways. Movie reviews will be forthcoming. I'm going to watch Oceans 12 first because I want to be good and drunk when I watch Sideways, since it's a wine movie. It's also supposed to be one of those "What's it all mean?" movies, and that's what I'm trying to figure out.

Right now, I want to know:

Why am I alone?

Communion

Jan. 24th, 2005 05:06 pm
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"What might be hidden in the dark part of my mind? I thought then that I was dancing on the thinnest egde of my soul. Below me were vast spaces, totally unknown. Not psychiatry, not religion, not biology could penetrate that depth. None of them had any real idea of what lies within. They only knew what little it had chose to reveal of itself.
Were human beings what we seem to be? Or did we have another purpose in another world? perhaps our life here on Earth was a mere drift of shadow, incidental to our real truth. Maybe this was quite literally a stage, and we were blind actors." -Whitley Streiber, "Communion"
jackshoegazer: (Default)
The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.

We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes. We have to save ourselves from ourselves.

I'm currently reading Tom Robbin's "Still Life with Woodpecker" and it's really good. These are just a couple of my favorite lines.
jackshoegazer: (Stellated Dodecahedron)
It's Sunday. I'm tired even though I've been sleeping all day. There are children behind me arguing about whether Jupiter has a solid mass or not. Just so you know, the center is ice.

I'm going to be editing all night tonight, so hopefully I will make decent progress with that. I have to decide if Ethan is going to school or not tomorrow. He caught the stomach flu that's been going around so he was up vomiting last night - not cool. So my sleeping schedule will be determined by Ethan's tummy.

I went out with Nicole last night and had a great time. We did the usual coffee and cigarettes @ Comet, which is always enjoyable. As I've said before, we get along amazingly well and rarely seem to run out of things to talk about. After that we went to dinner with her brother and some other friends of hers. I was nervous all day because 1) I'm shy in small groups and 2) I don't like people. Alas, my worries were unfounded! I felt completely comfortable and her friends and brother are great people. Intelligent, funny, good taste, many of the traits I adore in people. After dinner (Chinese!) we all went and watched the Return of the King extended edition, which was over 4 hours long, but OH-SO-GOOD! All the cut scenes were amazing and let me just say, BAD-ASS! Nicole's friend Allison sent us away with a bunch of homemade cookies which were superb and quickly gobbled up by my household. Nicole, quite unfortunately, started feeling ill about halfway through the evening. She works in a daycare, so she's constantly catching all the little kiddies colds. I hope her illness is short-lived. I'm pulling down the anti-sickness, healing energies for the both of us, so she gets better and so I don't catch the stomach bug that's been rampaging around my house. Anyway, all in all, I had a great night, YAY!

I don't think we're aiming for the giant shin-dig we had originally planned for New Year's Eve. It's more and more looking like it will be a small gathering of friends, so whoever was planning to come still may, but be advised it probably won't be the kind of party you wake up naked on the bathroom floor in a pool of regurgitated liquor and snacks.

Except for sleeping, the only thing I did today was paint. I'm painting two paintings at the same time. One is a face with an amorphous background and the other is kind of like my drawings, but with paint. I'll post some pictures when and if they are ever finished.

Ah, well that seems to be enough, so I will leave this as is and post it for your reading enjoyment. Happy Freekin' Holidays everybody!
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I just wanted to say that I'm rampaging through life like a china is a bull shop.

I don't know what that means.

I will point out that I just started the last three sentences with the letter and word "I" and that this is my first "real" post since, oh, the end of November sometime. All poems, news and quizzes, folks. You'll have to forgive my obsession with Personality Tests. They fascinate me. Am I living, breathing example of the "Know Thyself" principle? Or does that just make me narcissistic?

Attention:
Two Minute Life Update:
decorated for the season, bought and made gifts, worked a lot, slept a fair bit, read the harry potter books, yes, all of them, still deep into parker j. hood's magnum opus, complex psyche, also reading a book called sophie's world about a fourteen year old girl who receives a philosophy correspondence course from a mysterious stranger, it's pretty good so far, a history of philosophy in book format, it's like the celestine prophesy for the hermetic and philosophical schools, it's translated from norwegian, and you can tell english isn't it's native language, actually, i've never read a book translated to english that felt like it was written in english, which i suppose makes you realize how much meaning and depth is lost when something is translated into another language, oh, you get the gist of it, but the true depth that comes from the archetypal root of the original word in it's authored language is lost in semantic abstraction, how odd, how odd indeed, i'm going to milwaukee with nicole on saturday, coffee, cigarettes, conversation, a good three c's for a good time, and i think i'll leave you all right here because my melatonin is kicking in and i really need to go to sleep, thanks, you peoples are great.

TaH-DaH!
jackshoegazer: (Default)
It is once again the early morning and I am of course still awake from the night before. I am fully converted to third shift and I'm doing it right this time. Last time I did third shift, I was also working two jobs, going to school full time and taking a yoga class. Do some math and you'll realize that I wasn't sleeping at all. Even when I did sleep, my friends would come over and say, "Jeremy, you need some sleep! You look like SHIT!" And I would respond, "Shit, I just woke up."

The Book is now back in my possession and I am in deep-edit mode. I've read through it once and I really like the major changes that have been made. There are some smaller changes that I was iffy about, but I'll see what I think when I get that far in this editing pass. I'm taking a heavy red pen to this version and I'm really working to make every sentence sound like a perfect gem all on it's own. Especially concentrating on the first chapter since that's what has to drag everyone in. I've put down so many books and never picked them back up again because they couldn't catch my interest in the first three pages. I'm so obscenely excited to be working on this, but the Book is now almost complete. This is probably it's final real edit, so it's almost grown up and ready to leave the nest. Unfortunately, this means that it is like an unruly teenager who can't wait to turn 18 so it can move out. What am I going to do? Send it to bed without dinner? Ground it?

This weekend is going to be pretty busy compared to my usual hermit-dom.

I am meeting Anna on Saturday sometime in Madison to just spend some quality time outside of work. We've been keeping a journal at work and have been writing three to six page letters to each other almost every day, but we work no overlapping shifts, so there's no face-time in this friendship right now. We have also been formulating ideas for a book, so Saturday, I feel, is going to be a huge brainstorming session and we should really try to work out a schedule or plan for doing the writing. The ideas we've exchanged so far sound like a fun literary experiment, so, needless to say, I'm damn curious to see how this turns out.

On Sunday, *N* is coming over and I'm going to initiate her into the wonder that is Aztalan. What is Aztalan, you ask? Well, it's a three-tier pyramid about fifteen minutes from my house, which may date back as far as the Bronze Age or before, which means like 3000 - 4000 B.C. The Aztalan peoples also built stone pyramids which are in the bottom or Rock Lake, just down the river from the Aztalan site. The Aztalan people used to mine copper ingot and float it down the Mississippi to the Gulf and then take it across the ocean to Europe and the Middle East. Also, cocaine has been found in Egyptian mummies, and the large Egyptian reed boats have been discovered to be ocean-faring vessels, so these bits of evidence are building up to be a very solid case for trade across the Atlantic at a much earlier time frame than originally supposed. So anyway, the main three-tier pyramid was the religious temple of the time, and for me, it's like the Navel of the Earth. It's very "powerful" there and gorgeous to boot, so I'm sure *N* will enjoy it.

I noticed that I hadn't posted a real journal entry in a week, so I forced myself too. Sometimes, I'm just not in the mood to write, and this has been one of those weeks. I think all my writing power is being siphoned by the Book. So, here I leave you until next time: J7E*R7E*M7Y
jackshoegazer: (Default)
Welcome back, friends, to a new and exciting episode of the Jeremy-Babble-A-Thon! Do not confuse this with the Jeremy-Babel-A-Thon. That's where I speak in forty-two different languages at once. It's really hard to do, trust me.

I wish I could say in this interim of postings that I've discovered the cure to cancer or the meaning of life, but alas, I have not discovered a cure for cancer. The meaning of life is to discover the meaning of life. Try to worm your way out of that one.

Down to business:

My co-author has finished his edit of the Glorious Book, and it will soon be back in my hands for my final edit and then a little polishing and it will be done, as in well cooked, as in not too pink, but no hard carbon crust either. I can hardly wait to dig in. Yum.

I downloaded an alternate audio track for the first Harry Potter movie. It's a funny satire called "Wizard People, Dear Reader." Like the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz thing, you start WPDR right when the Warner Brothers logo starts and just sit back and enjoy the tale of Harry Potter and his cousin Roast Beefy and his uncle Saltpork. One of my favorite lines is when Harry says to Hagar the Horrible (Hagrid), "Can't you keep a fucking secret, you hairy peice of shit!" You can get it here, but you need BitTorrent, which is also available on the site.

Otherwise, life things aren't that different. Still broke, not sleeping enough, working too much, not getting paid enough. Synchronicity has been giving me a little bit of the rough and tumble and my angel has been sending me some nasty memos. Verily, verily, I say unto you fnord.
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Okay, a real update:

I've changed my work schedule so I get every other weekend off, but the down side to that is, I have a seven day strech with almost no time off. The positive is twice a month I get an alomost five day weekend. Rockin.

The Election: Did you REALLY think Kerry would win? I didn't. I hoped, I prayed, I campaigned in my own way. I convinced undecided voters to vote for Kerry, even getting them excited about it. But did I really think the Bush Machine was going to let Kerry win. Fuck no. So I'm not as devastated as everyone else is. I called it just after Kerry got the Democratic nomination. I said, watch, it'll be 2000 all over again. 50/50 split, with a Florida-like fiasco in a state with a Republican governor, complete with voting fraud allegations, eventually leading to the Democrat conceding. And look what happened. Maybe the "Illuminati" are bugging my house and stealing my ideas. This shit's too uncanny.

Anna and I are contemplating and putting together plans to write a book. It's tentative title will be "A Tangent within a Tangent, but I digress". So far the concept is a fictionalized auto-biography of the narrator, who keeps going of on tangents, and tangent off of tangents, stories within stories, etc.. until the narrator "digresses" back to the original story/plot like and links everything back together again. We've got a plan to meet later in the month and drink a shit-ton of coffee and do some brainstorming. Could be fun!

I have plans to go to the MIlwaukee County History Museum & IMAX theatre with *someone* I met through MySpace. She's apparently very intelligent and cute, so I'm excited to say the least. That's this Saturday. Ok, I'm a little nervous too, but I'll get over that. That museum is one of may favorite places. I know there are better museums in the world, but I have a sort of affinity for that one. Set and Setting, as Leary preached. Set: I have a positive mindset about this meeting/outing. Setting: A comfortable place I like. Sounds like I'm all set. (pun not intended)

I'm all out for now. The SleepyTime DreamLand beckons me at this early hour!
jackshoegazer: (Magick Phone)
Good Morning!

I REALLY need to go to sleep. I've barely slept since Tuesday because of the drama with my vehicle. I think I'm crashing all day today. My kitty, Eva, is in heat and annoyingly loud, so I pray she will, pardon my French, shut the fuck up!

My father, quite unexpectedly, is saving my ass with the car department. He paid to have my car towed to his house, he's buying and installing the dead parts and bringing my reanimated car back to me. It will be like magick as far as I'm concerned. I, of course, have to pay him back, but at least I don't have to come up with over $400 instantly. My father's wife - no, not my step-mother, there's a difference - my father's wife was against the idea of him helping me at all. How completely fucked-up is that? She gets mad at him for helping his son, but she will use my father's money to pay for her daughter's home owner's insurance for a year. Can anyone think of a better definition of the archetypal Evil Step-Mother? This is the same woman who made me get rid of (hide!) my religion and occult books and called me a Satanist because I study religions other than Christianity. I swear, some people! Anyway... My housemate, Brian, also lent his support with my vehicle situation, loaning me his car in the interim so I could get to work. It's just like Qui Gon says, "Another solution will present itself." I feel pretty blessed right now.

I finished and framed Kiwikat's drawing. It's beautiful, one of my favorites so far. The framing was amazing too! And apparently she finished my trade painting as well. I'm excited to get it later in the week. Because of work, she's gotten to see her picture in progress almost daily, whereas I've only seen mine once in its very early stages, so conclusively, I'm curious!

On a final note, I read an entire book last night called "Denial" by Keith Ablow. What a last name! The book was a psychological thriller/mystery, and a pretty good one as well. It was graphic, both with sex and violence and had quite a bit of drug use, mostly cocaine. I've come to the conclusion this is the Grand Trinity of American Media: Sex, Drugs, & Violence. The psychology in the book was excellent. It helps the author is a psychiatrist, but it was absolutely engaging nonetheless. I did, after all, read the book in one night. I'll close this post with a quote from the book, which I loved and find to be one of those things that could arguable be called a Universal Truth:

"We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the Soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war. But a very few people, who we may call Angels, appear unpredictably in our lives and help us to stop running from ourselves. The brightest Light greets those brave enough to open their eyes to the Darkness."
jackshoegazer: (Default)
Good Morning to All and to Me a Good Night!
I've finished "earthly powers" and overall it was a good book. I'm still thinking about it two days after finishing it, so that speaks a volume in itself. There were some interesting twists in the end, and like all fictional biographies covering long spans of time, I had to watch a lot of characters I grew to like, DIE. But "that's life" as they say.
As much as I've been avoiding doing so, I've recently started reading all the conspiracy theories surrounding the 9-11 attacks. Like all conspiracy theories, there is a lot of complete nonsense and kooks. There are a lot of 'weird' things surrounding the whole escapade, so like with all conspiracies, I'm taking the whole thing as a beautifully complex and fanciful story. I always find it interesting the machinations of the human mind when it tries to engage a Mystery.
I am, however, about to go to sleep, because I must be up by 2pm Central Standard Time, and my brain functions are running at a very low wattage right now. We've had 'workers' replacing drywall in the downstairs bathroom, so my sleeping, like my brain functions, has been low as well.
Tah-Tah.
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Yet another long night to burn away... I never got around to writing last night. It will just have to wait until I'm finished with that book, "earthly powers." I'm almost finished, it's winding down, and like the rest of it, I have no idea what to expect next. I'm finding it most enjoyable to read a book that I knew absolutely nothing about before I read it. No expectations whatsoever. It's almost as good as having a preconcepted expectation completely blown asunder. The book follows the exploits of one Kenneth Toomey, a British novelist, play and screen writer. It has really made me realize that I should be writing more than I am. I have at least two or three decent ideas for novels every week, and rarely do I even write down the idea let alone start making plans for them. I sorely need one of those tiny pocket notebooks, the infamous writer's notebook, to keep my little ideas in, with a tiny little pen to jot said ideas and notes into the aforementioned tiny notebook. This French mystery writer I heard about, whose name I can't remember off hand, used to clip bizarre articles from the newspapers and keep them in a file until it was time to write another book, and then he would lay all the articles out and find a way to connect all those disparate stories into one coherent, if not absurd plot. He was known for breaking all the rules of writing a mystery. For instance, Don't introduce new characters after the first 1/3 of the book. He had a book where the killer in this particular mystery wasn't introduced until the last chapter. There were many more examples, but alas, I cannot remember them off hand. This mystery author has an apparent cult following, and his books have been out of print for years and years now. Several publishers are looking into reprints and translations and such, but no one seems to know who owns the rights to the material any longer, as the man's family seems to have vanished from the planet. That could be a plot of a book in itself... a literary agent's hunt around the world for the long-lost relatives of a famous writer. It could be a great farcical goose chase, absurd and romantic, filled with mystery and intrigue. Some day.
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Oh, it's that time again. I'm technically conscious, but that could just be an illusion. I'm still tired even though I slept a good 7 hours today and 9.5 yesterday. Everything seems distant and unreal this evening and the thought of staying up all night does not, in the least, appeal to me. I know there are things that I'm supposed to be doing, but I can't for the life of me remember what they are. Oh yeah. The Book. In this 'final' edit of the Book, my co-author is doing a major restructuring to balance out character appearance a bit more and make it a little more linear. (For instance, we have a character that appears in chapter 7 and then doesn't reappear until Chapter 24) So I have to try and split and enhance chaper 24 into two chapters, one of which is to appear somewhere between 7 and 24. Wish i had some writer's soma :P I may do that tonight, if I get the urge. Although, I'm quite down on my writing right this moment because I'm reading a book by someone who can really write. It's called 'earthly power' by anthony burgess, the guy who wrote A Clockwork Orange. He is one of those old school writers who could actually write. I mean, no one writes like that anymore and actually, it's quite depressing because it seems like the age of the good writer has died. Sure we have commercially successful writers these days, but none of them write like this. There will most likely never be another Burgess or Aldous Huxley. Makes one think we've all gone retarded, that we are all truly dumber than those years ago. Fuck.

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