officially. school is over. in properly melodramatic fashion.

it may be a blessing in disguise that things turned out this way. a recurring theme from the past 48 hours: fewer mistakes over time, each one more costly than the last.

most amusing is that two years later, the end looks increasingly similar to the beginning. more knowledge and experience this time, in a contemplated return to the future of times' past.

the dreamy rebellious kid who continually overestimated his own intelligence, aspiring to write 3-d videogame software using the BASIC programming language. who strangely enough, didn't need a profit motive to get out of bed in the morning. the one who found a perverse kind of pleasure in manipulating objects with his mind rather than his hands.

only now it's the shiny new rich client architecture that powers all the hot websites now. so much has happened in two years; awakening tomorrow will inevitably be a release from some kind of self-imposed prison...

...now the key is to make this release into something far less icarus and much more horus. rather than wings that melt near the sun, how to embody the power of wind and sky? overestimation costs.

a reference to greek and egyptian god-myths comes quickly, spontaneously... useful to note also that the melodrama mentioned above came about in part by following a dream. a nightmare, actually. this fearful dream bore direct (or directly analogical) significance. it was an unacceptable, unspoken answer that congested both waking thoughts as well as half-drawn figures of possibility and unintended consequence. when a dream predicts a future of suffering, the present needs to change.

today, then, differs almost completely from sevenhundredthirty days ago: conscious logic not longer pretends to answer questions on its own anymore. logic interprets and rationalizes the decisions that have already taken place, and sometimes exerts a mild influence on an already narrowed set of options. logic counts the blades of grass whereas there is an increasing awareness that there is an entire planet underneath.

now, moment by moment, the shift has begun. and all of those predetermined rules and lockstep outcomes of the past no longer exist. truly, they never did. have i jumped from the cliff toward the sun -- only to realize that my wings are not securely attached? or will tonight's dreams serve as reminder that mythology finds meaning in the mind of the reader, not the searing all-too-real illusions of in an imagined objective reality?

saru seems to be waving his tail on the page again...

audio: leftfield . cut for life [vinyl junkie]

this always seemed to describe one half of what it means to be human.

the crazy people, and the not-crazy people.

two somewhat important -- less important, more time-consuming people in recent memory have been "crazy". in varying ways, they were able to blend in with the not-crazy archetype, drawing themselves as plausible characters integrated into the social landscape.

it takes time to find out what meter a person actually uses to separate, combine and attempt to harmonize their sometimes contradictory parts.

recently, though, the wall between the crazy and the not-crazy seems to be crumbling. personally, reality has never been a static entity.

intrapersonally, levels of consciousness change; the feeling of what happens is a momentary experience, always unravelling in unexpected ways depending on the underlying textures of what came before and it crashes headlong into what could be, would be, can be and will be.

interpersonally, the bounded chaos of shared language hides the irreducible complexity of our thoughts. conversation is often a guessing game of what comes next versus an array of common responses remembered from past experience.

between self and world, it seems that all of the illusions of texture, arrays of shared guesswork patched together into semi-reliable human-as-object orientations, complexity reduced to commonality, all of it is a reflection of the eyes that see it.

the wall is actually semi-permeable. it is a membrane that allows certain compositions of thoughts, perceptions and intentions to pass through while restricting others. not-crazy depends as much on crazy as the second does the first. what of those who sit on the wall itself, who exist on the borderline, and actually comprise it?

not to use the word borderline in the stereotypical psychological sense, either, considering that psychological norms are inherently typed -- typed meaning that they place emphasis on certain attributes while allowing others to fade into obscurity. who decides what elements of a person are worth counting toward the sum of their experience?

it is refreshingly difficult to grasp the possible number of variables that comprise any single individual. not all of them -- perhaps not even most of them -- can be counted, much less fully described. as their multifaceted constellations present in nonstandard ways, according to whom can a person be categorized? if we are all instances of the same object -- the person object -- how can behaviours be isolated and given truth values? are they not simply differences, after all?

of course, these questions apply to non-pathological behaviors. liberating, in a way. maybe.

motion: peter naess . mozart and the whale

...i write a story."

for some reason (or not), the words were sent in an email.

it was near the end of our moment, anyway. as friends.
so the strange impulse took hold and it became a game.

age seems to change some parts, while other parts take their
time. love is one of those other parts?

in a way, love has the same pull as the idea of having children.
either the idea is strongly attractive, or strongly

something else.

it would be an amusing moment to see how many people marry
because they are tired, or have children because they are
bored on some existential level. or how many fall in love
because they've been told that being unattached simply won't do.

what if these assumptions were completely inside out... who would
decide for themselves what outside in looks like, to reverse
the cultural pressure and open the possibility
of other paths through life.

what would those paths be named. or would they need names
at all.

these can be statements or questions, depending on how
they are read.

it was starting to feel a bit strange, being in school again.

even moreso that for the most part, it was a positive experience.

starting out part-time was too easy -- so suddenly half-way through the program, a headlong plunge into the fever pitch of full-time student madness drew upon all available resources; in the process, molehills were made of questions that had once loomed large enough to hide the sun.

and now those questions return, somewhat smaller and more focused. what they lose in enormity is redoubled by their pointed relevance, compounded by the fact that time for decision-making runs shorter by the day.

one undeniable side-effect of being released from an intensive curriculum: the return of creativity and time to explore it (for the time being). suddenly memories resurface, images arise from unlived futures and ideas become full-color visual simulations.

the problem, then, is not the return to creativity, but rather, a nagging feeling that more "education" is necessary to complete the program. it seems increasingly clear that to reach any level of skill, learning must be a lifelong, self-motivated process. institutionalized pedagogy does not hold a viable answer to the desire for knowledge. in this sense, then, education means:

• time compression,


• navigation of the vertical command structure called "higher education" (or something like it),


• delay of the creative impulse that is the oft-forgot engine behind all of this.

hm... the brain... sulci and gyri, hills and valleys inside the cranium... all of the folds create increased surface area, allowing for more brain per square inch. is there a way to fold the perception of time in on itself as well, allowing for more experienced time within a given interval of clock time?

of course, the answer is yes. but hypnotic techniques require structure, precisely vague language, and ample practice to become habitual... learning can be quick; hallucination is not necessarily what it seems. perhaps more about that later.

audio: groove armada feat. stush & red rat . get down (calvin harris remix)

purpose, again.

the question is elusive, the answer even more so.

one educational process seems to have ended, only to culminate in a sense of incompleteness. what next?

-

walking down the street, cracks in the asphalt seem to be deeper than before; the familiar path is strewn with fragmented shadows and uneven surfaces. the heat of the day shimmers from the concrete in a tumbling sea of mirage-images gathering and dispersing at each footstep. an ankle turns suddenly on the cracked ground, causing momentary loss of balance. the resulting adjustment restores equilibrium only for a moment, as the waves of heat begin to penetrate into the earth rather than travel along its surface, soaking the cracked asphalt with vibratory tones of separation and dissonance. the deepening rifts become impassable abscesses, the traveler's gait interrupted and disrupted. navigation becomes a feat of concentrated awareness, as all other thoughts quickly recede into secondary importance. balance, agility and speed must be maintained in the face of vast stretches of yawning darkness that appear at the whim of unpredictable waveforms rippling and crashing into nothingness underfoot.

finally, the traveler is surrounded by echolalic depths of emptiness, supported only by a trembling jagged shard of crumbling earth. the illusion of rhythm has given way to the truth of chaotic instability; the comfort of routine is now an impossibly abstract notion with no referent in the present reality.

-

movement, influence, agility, fluency, response.

when an uncrossed chasm stretches to the horizon, how can a drawbridge be successfully thrown to the opposite side?

i suppose the first step is to find out exactly where the horizon lies.

audio: this is sander kleinenberg . cd 1 . chymera . arabesque

deprivation imposes creativity.
distance accelerates love.
chaos unleashes exponential variation.

ends create beginnings.

dreams incubate logic
sleep engenders prose.

grammar comes later.

audio: md11 . ascent

"What is better?"

"What do you want to do?"

These questions may outweigh all of the negatives that could take their place.

Saying "no" to activities that are best left alone can become a snowballing process -- one that eventually stifles decisions that would be useful as well.

Instead, it will be worth trying to ask "between option x and option y, which is better?"

or

"between them, what do you really want to do -- which option will help you more? In the short term, and of course, in the long run?"

It is a question of knowing what path to take. Interrogating decisions in positive terms can help to clarify the intentions in light of each step and fork in that path, rather than using artificial rules and strictures to force self-compliance (which apparently does not work for very long).

What... do you want... to do?

he hears murmurs. the wall itself is just thick enough to obscure the words, but porous enough to allow intonation's meaning to seep through. Misgivings, ambivalence, persistent disbelief in the possibilities of what lies ahead. he hears his own vision put to the test, feels the sound of his ideas being pulled apart, dissected, inspected for validity and soundness in the face of impending reality. this is the shadow of bright curiosity, the intrusion of logic and the apparently impregnable illusions of pragmatism in their relentless assault against weightless formations of unspoken dreams.

-

and how does one side lie to the other, anyway? inside one mind, it seems impossible. vague inclinations of unrest are much more disquieting, in some ways, than the inevitable war of symbol and meaning that such discontented whispers always precede and often predict.

"You sometimes have to perform a little lobotomy and cut people out of your mind or they will drag you down," Truman said by way of explanation.