i must stay permanently stressed. this is the meaning of life! i don't know how i could have missed it all this time.

[ + ] skin.  

three-hour handspeed

one good thing about three-hour workouts is that the next day, my handspeed feels a thousand-times speedy... shadowboxing with five pounds in each hand. maybe i should compete again, sometimes it feels good to hit and get hit, even though competitions are a crock. the last all-styles martial arts "tournament" i participated in had judges who didn't even practice martial arts... shamming like they could count points ;)

plus: a long-forgotten use for self-hatred -- use it to get past consciousness blocks... want to call a certain female, but just can't pick up the phone? get angry at the whiny little idiot blocking the impulse, and do it anyway... of course, i nearly got into countless fights in the street today just because it's the city, it's hot, nothing in my life is working, and my fists are fucking *itchy*... yeah, that side of me isn't dead, it just sleeps.

catharsis is a smiling dog sitting in a fishbowl :: artistic expression of anger is just a distraction tactic;

repression is a lie :: telling myself that i don't feel what i feel or that it will go away;

sublimation is a joke :: using the aggressive energy for a "good" purpose doesn't solve the underlying problem;

selfless compassion is self-contradictory and transparently pious :: dissociate from my anger and pretend to love everyone unconditionally, when the real purpose is to have everyone love the wonderful huggy bear that i've become... the only achievement there is to create a split personality. i can see people who have "decided" to change themselves, and their bodies always use a different language than their words. i don't consciously understand it, but the physical cues are completely off.

i don't believe it is possible to change on purpose, on cue, as if the self were a character to be played in a theater production. in the theater, at the end of the day, the actor always returns to himself, but where can my sense of self go? the key may be to change through action unconsciously, to learn to select particular ways of acting and habituate them rather than stop and judge at every step.

i don't hate myself. i hate feeling the urge to stop myself. sometimes it's better not to think and just to act; but then, how can i mediate my unexpected "gut" responses to stimuli [punch the moron who shouldered into me on the street, say something that i meant but really shouldn't say, etc.]?

but then, every now and then, trouble can be fun...

audio: tribe called quest . amplified . breathe and stop

tron2.0 

compilation to composition

ah... finally back to downloading songs from the point-t0-point network. not quite sure of the reason, but i suppose that something tickled my ear; i was compelled to listen. once the song had downloaded to the handspring mp3 module, a finger touched _play_ and the l e d glowed a green ember, signalling the beginning of the song.

as the voice of tyrese gibson began to reverberate in between my eardrums, the guitar in the background quietly commanded that i listen to it. then the drums, and the variations of tyrese's voice. examining every aspect of the song that i could hear, the different levels of sound becaming increasingly perceptible, from deep and expansive [the baseline] to quick and pervasive [the guitar] to complex and variable [the vocals]. the differentiated levels slowly returned to coalese into one single entity, branching out to enrapture every aspect of my attention.

at about three minutes and forty seconds into the song, everything came together. there was beauty there, somewhere in the song, and i felt as if i understood from the inside -- listening for the quiet guitar loop as it threaded through the melody, harmonizing with the rhythm, the voice, surface to depth, tying everything together in the flow of moments.

time to find something deeper -- something classical, maybe...

audio: deep dish . yoshiesque (cd1) . tall stories . chaser (ian pooley:lars from mars mix)