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november 2002 |
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Hm, Sleep | 2:08am saturday, 30th november |
Sleep. I can't get enough of it. Back in the day, I once slept for a week, straight — waking up only to eat and go to the bathroom. It was heavenly. These days, I don't even get eight hours a day during the week, catching up on the weekends: from four to six hours Monday through Friday, and then I sleep from twelve to sixteen hours on Saturday and Sunday. If I had my way, I would sleep about ten hours a day, I think. Sleep. It is like going back into the womb every night, when you need do nothing at all. And of course, what dreams may come. I think it is not like death — not like death at all — we do not enter sleep with the thought of forever in our heart. Sleep is merely a dip in the wheel that goes round, when we slip into an ether outside the world, inside ourselves — but to wake. The wheel rolls on, and we return from the far land. It is only a makeshift shelter, propped up for a little at night, torn down each dawn and put out of sight.
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Where You Go | 12:01am friday, 29th november |
Where do you go? Did you forget
yourself somewhere, and live as
someone else, to wear a mask all
the days of your life? Did you
wander too far from yourself, until
all you saw in the mirror was an
empty smile? Where do you go?
Have you seen too much of the
world beneath the façade? Have
you done the hidden things, which
you can never confess to? Perhaps
I know where you go. You have
traveled the whole world in search
of yourself, and you never knew
where you had gone. You go to the
place you have been, times without
knowing, that you need only let
yourself believe it to be: home.
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Recollection 6 | 12:01am thursday, 28th november |
I have lost many books. The one on the left there, that was one of them. I recall that I named the place I saw in my mind's eye in that book (where all the cartoon people floated around when they talked to me); I decreed that it would be Purgatorio, and so I wrote in the inside cover of that tome: "Purgatorio, a place of learning." I had a slew of them that I wrote in, in the ones with pictures I scried many a mystic word (mystic to me, gibberish to everyone else). I created a temple of peace within the book Sacred Mirrors, I lost the Archangel Michael in a book about underground comic books, I talked to trees from the pages of an Escher book. And all of them I know not where I left them, or if they were thrown away.
I don't think I read any one of them, those books. I would craft stories from the pictures and my scribblings upon them — or actually, the stories would happen by themselves, as if they carried me with them, and my pen. There was a book on art which starred John Lennon as the primal god "Peace", to whom Rosanna Arquette led a procession to test free will, in the ether previous the world that we know: when Heaven was all there was. (Something went wrong there — she never made it — and that was the start of the Earth and universe, to the tune of the Beatles' "Blackbird".) ...I wonder what stories I'm forgetting, which ones I would remember if I had those pages again. I wonder where lost books go.
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Ask | 12:01am wednesday, 27th november |
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." [Matthew 7:7-8]
These words are perhaps of the most profound things ever written in any book. Their sheer simplicity speaks a volume in just a few phrases, shows a glimpse of an enlightened mind. Indeed, such truth do they have, that many will miss the meaning. For you might say, "There were times when I knocked, and it was not opened; and there were times when I asked, and I did not receive." But these thoughts are miles short of the point. What the man speaks are instructions for living life — for who receives without that they ask for it, and to whom is it opened without that they knock? Therefore, ask; and therefore, knock. It is a lesson in courage: that you do not cease to seek when you are in need, do not cease to look for an answer when you question, and do not cease to live your life in this world in search of something better. Such are these words!
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Dreamwork | 1:18am tuesday, 26th november |
I think a man leads not a life when all he does is dream.
I think, too, that life is not a life when a man dreams not at all.
And I think we cannot ever dream too much — or too little.
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I Was Here | 2:29am monday, 25th november |
I would to stand upon the highest cliff and scream at the stars in the sky, "I was here!" O, that the wind would remember my name....
There are so many of us alive, so many, many the world itself cannot keep track of us all. If we were all to climb up every cliff in existence and scream, the deafening sound would be such that no one's name could be heard in the cacophony, at all. If the wind remembered everyone's name who ever was, there would not be enough time in any one man's life to hear them all, and who would remember even half the list if the wind spoke name after name after name, every time it blew? For the most part, we who live are anonymous to almost everyone else who ever was.
...I will live as if I mattered, for I cannot live in any other way. I will live as if there is a Memory who in secret recalls me — who lives otherwise?
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Stranger | 12:19am saturday, 23rd november |
I am something of a stranger to myself, I think. It is as if my soul is half attached to this body, half floating around in some astral plane. Sometimes I feel like I am a replacement for the person who once inhabited this form, that the real person who belonged here was pushed out, and I secretly took his place. It goes along with this trip, that Philip K. Dick (whose experience was so very similar to mine) was replaced by Elijah, and I was replaced with the Antichrist — or, if you want to get technical, the person who inhabited this body once is now gone and I am the Antichrist. I dunno. It may be, if we play amateur psychologist, that it is just me having trouble with completely accepting who I am — that I have trouble with the concept, "I am me" — and that's really all there is to this thing.
It probably is that the phenomenon is not an uncommon one. I think there are many out there who haven't completely accepted themselves — who can't. And in my condition, I merely have an out of the ordinary perspective on the issue. For me, it is as if I can actually feel the substance of the soul, and that it is somewhat detached from this body, something like a part of me detached from my whole self. As I have spoken before, this is more or less the amplification of a rather mundane experience. So it goes, I guess. I have a little ways to go (and perhaps I always will) before the madness is completely lifted from me. Hm. Maybe I'm actually normal, though, right now? Maybe everyone is at least a little mad. Perhaps only he who is dead fits completely into a given mold, after all....
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Real | 12:02am friday, 22nd november |
I think life is not a dream —
that the world is not illusion,
after all. I think these things
really happened: that I have
done the things I have done,
that I have seen the things
before my eyes, that I have
felt the love of those who
loved me. And I think pain
(which will not follow me
into eternity), if that be the
cost for life — my suffering for
the days I have lived — let me
comprehend that if I suffered
much, I have lived the more.
There are many things realer
than pain. If it comes to it, let
me summon the courage to
believe it true of my being:
if the account books of the
world were erased of the
total I had paid, I would suffer
the whole cost over for not
one more day of living, of life.
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Away | 12:01am thursday, 21st november |
Have you ever felt that desire — just to leave your whole life behind, get into a car and drive away from all of it? I know I have. Perhaps through history there have been some people who have done this, but I for one always had trouble. Even in this last episode, I fantasized about it. When I had all my clothes off, I was going to wander the earth, naked (or at least until I could get people to give me some spare clothes), for the three and a half years that the Antichrist was going to reign (it having been the apocalypse or something like that). My memory is a little fuzzy as to exact details, but the gist of it all was to just take off and not look back.
There's always some trouble a brewing when I try that shtick. Once (about here), I was going to wander the streets of Seoul, Korea as a penniless beggar. In so deciding, I threw away my watch, shoes, and wallet (I guess I was working up to the naked thing for some time, there). All it took was a little hunger, though, and me passing by some restaurants along the street — their aromas — and I hightailed it back to my aunt's place for dinner. So it goes, I guess. I dunno. In the madness, I believed I could do it — leave family, possession, everything behind. What a dreamer. My belly knew better, though, knew where home was the whole time.
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If/When | 1:07am tuesday, 19th november |
It is written in the Good Book that paradise will be a new heaven and a new earth, and that the former world will neither be brought to mind nor heart. Does this mean, then, we will never discover the meaning of our being here? All those silly, stupid questions I had (and still have), will they never be answered? I hope it's not that that it's saying, that we would simply not think about the old things, this old life that we live today. Before we put the whole thing to rest, I sincerely hope that our Supreme Being will take a little time with each of us (we have all eternity, after all), and tells why the @#$%& this all happened like it did. If there were a line for it in Heaven, I'd wait. I'd wait a million years for that.
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Endgame | 2:07am monday, 18th november |
On sometime a day did I wait for the endgame of time.
I awaited the stars they to blink out, and the moon turn to blood.
...the world clock strikes a many midnight before the hands shatter.
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A Reminder | 1:21am saturday, 16th november |
The heavens open, and I am terrified. I thought I was past all that weirdness, but this last week I had a minor little scuffle with my old madness. It was the Antichrist trip, as usual, this time as the culmination of all the minor sins I have committed in the last few months or so adding up to one big thing, an assault of paranoia that was perhaps building up behind the scenes this whole time. The wages of sin, I am reminded by my Good Book, is death, so I suppose however bad this juju was that I was getting off easy. It definitely wasn't fun, though. I was sitting at my computer at work when it happened, listening to a Swiss radio station I found on the internet. I thought that maybe I was going to have a freakout right there, in front of everybody. I didn't though; I knew how to handle it, even if it's been awhile since the last one of these. I just stayed quiet, switched to a different station, just waited the little episode out.
I was once told in my madness by the Jesus Christ cartoon in my head not to seek a loud, "thrilling" life, that it was a quiet life that I should desire. It took some years for me, but I think I now know why: the devil can't hide anywhere in the quiet — I think it drives him crazy.
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Dreamers... | 12:01am friday, 15th november |
Dream with me. We go to where the sky meets the earth, at the end of the horizon. Past the reach of any rainbow, there flows an ether out of time, where beginning does not begin and ending does not end. Let me take you to where the geometries of all moments are intertwined, out in the architecture of the grand wheel of fate. We may even touch the lips of eternity, just before the exhale of forever. No boundaries: neither the gates of Heaven nor the gates of Hell can keep us from seeking the know of true life. Dream with me. I think we will never understand the meaning of our meanings without there should be the dream, where we may glance into the world from another place.
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Drops | 12:32am wednesday, 13th november |
I will throw a million words in the air
and see if poetry will seize its own.
The rhythm of the deeper philosophies
resounds within the still of silence.
A sound within a dream will not echo,
and a vision will not stay motionless.
Fold the universe in half enough times,
and all the stars will fit in your pocket.
I wade through a river of flowing light,
pouring from mountains of pure fire.
Darkness may collect in some corners
too deep and heavy ever to be moved.
An eternity, it is true, will never end,
but there are times when one begins.
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Thinking | 12:07am tuesday, 12th november |
Life is hard. That this is so I think I forget, now and then; when one has a run of good days, sequence of time with barely a care in the world, one gets the impression that perhaps it has always been like that, and we were just not aware of it being so for some reason. But no, life is a mess, a concatenation of haphazard guesses at what things should be, a series of misfit hypotheses strung together with random chains of reason. No one knows why this should be instead of the other.... Into this mess we are flung, some with less support than others (though these be guesses, too, the canned wisdom of most others) to weave for ourselves a cat's cradle of rules through which we desire to view the world.
That which we know — these things are not wrong, per se, but they are none of them right, either. I think that we cannot know the meaning of life because in meaning itself we only pretend to make sense. We accept illusions as reality until there is no reality but the illusion. And nothing stays what it is; the things we believed yesterday hold no sway in the day that is today. In the shifting of illusions, we will misunderstand — for this is the nature of the beast — and misunderstanding costs us dear: none of us are surprised when we say that life is hard. And no one knows why things are this way, for we do not know how this all started, or how we got here — this because we cannot at any time truly know anything.
So, what is left to us against the harshness of the world? The answer will displease some of us; I think ten years ago I would not have accepted it: all we have left is faith. A certain trust that things are as we believe them to be. And perhaps, if we consider this whole thing through, it is all that we ever had, to begin with.
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Despair None | 2:20am monday, 11th november |
In the things that I have suffered, I think I have never known despair. The worst of all of it perhaps was a numb of non-feeling; that there would be pain was preferable to feeling nothing at all. Though in the numb was not despair, I suppose there was no hope there, either. There was no sense of utter futility if I kept on, but no sense, too, that things would get any better if I were to continue living. It was not truly life, I think, for life is a kind of dynamic, a motion, a non-equilibrium state of actions and reactions. Perhaps it would have been better to despair, better to feel than not to feel at all, that there should not be a shield against the world's motion nor the sensation that something is happening — for good or ill.
No, I have never known despair, but that there was no promise within the days I walked, I know a little of what that is like. My dreams in times past all died quietly, if they died: as if I had never dreamed them at all.
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Somewhere | 2:02am saturday, 9th november |
I see in your eyes the rhyme to my silent wondering.
Be with me: I forget who I am and know only that I love.
The farther away you are, the closer to me your whisper....
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Recollection 5 | 12:07am friday, 8th november |
I remember one very curious phenomenon that in my madness it was a treat to experience: I saw out the eyes of other people. There was this bible that I had, one of the Gideon variety, King James Version — I looked upon the first page ("In the beginning...") through the eyes of Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, and Jesus Christ. It was quite interesting that the texture of the paper seemed different for each of the viewpoints that I saw it in. The coolest one had to have been da Vinci's, the most mysterious, that of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The paper, through Leonardo's viewpoint, seemed as if were aged a hundred years, and it had gained an arcane quality to it — a stain of venerability. The paper, through Christ's eyes, I could not fully grasp what he saw; when I looked at the page of the bible, there hinted in the ink of the words a depth which was beyond my comprehension.
Albert Einstein and Vincent van Gogh (the cartoons of them floating around in my head) were my best friends within the madness, the best imaginary friends that I had. I loved them both quite a lot. Looking through the eyes of Albert Einstein, there was this sense of great peace there — I looked, and everything calmed down. The texture of the paper reminded me of pipe smoke. And then, Vincent van Gogh (or VvG, as I called him): his point of view was possibly the least of the ones that I had viewed, but he poured it out into my sight more than anyone else — he was a great giver of himself. I talked about this before, how his painting Starry Night came to life for me; I stared at a print of it through his very point of view. It was like wine, his eyes.
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Mindswirl | 1:09am thursday, 7th november |
My mind swirls, sometimes. It is not madness, I think, merely the inability to focus — a relatively common thing. Perhaps it is a little amplified, considering it is happening to someone who has a history like I do, but my madness is for the most part checked. I am lost sometimes in the muchness of the world, the manyness. My mind swirls, filled with possibilities, probabilities, and pipe dreams. (That last thing — it is sometimes hard to let go of illusions, n'est-ce pas?) There is much I want to do with my time in this world, now that I have a life again, now that I have potential in me, now that my life is not draining away as I sit in a room talking to the voices in my head. The potentials need actualization, need action — all of them want to happen now. My mind swirls.
It is that I am waist deep in ideas, if you please. And it is a good level — not too low that I tire of their shallow tide, lose interest and step out onto dry land, and not so high that I cannot breathe, clawing only for escape. It is just enough that my mind is in a pleasant swim.
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Night and Day | 12:24am wednesday, 6th november |
Night is a shadow that has
climbed over the roof of the
sky. Day is a blanket of light.
They are as lovers that touch
only in the short minutes
of twilight, when they kiss,
when the world is suspended
between their lips. Day
wanders over the distant
mountains, and Night is alone;
Night ascends like a curtain
at dawn, and Day is alone.
And when each is solitary,
each wonders if that kiss
that they kissed was merely
a dream, if the other one
whom they touched ever were.
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Paranoia | 12:19am tuesday, 5th november |
The paranoia I think I have a grip on. When I see two management types at work, I get that paranoid thing where I think they're talking about me. There's no reason they would be; my mind makes these aberrant assumptions that everything relates back to me. It may have something to do with those delusions of grandeur I had such trouble with in the past (like when I thought I was Christ, for example, or God) — in those times, I thought that the whole universe revolved around me. But these days, I can pretty much talk myself down: calmly, I say to myself, "You're tripping," and it would more or less be literally true, as this psychosis is something like one big acid trip I never came down from. I realize that I am not the center of everyone else's lives, and they're most probably not talking about me.
Now that I think of it, it was the paranoia which, back when, set off the Antichrist trip. The trigger would vary, but ultimately, this was the delusion of grandeur backfiring, given my beliefs about the world and what I thought of myself. Me thinking I was the end all be all of all existence, now that I knew I was not God nor Christ, made my paranoia believe the worst: that I was so great a man that I must be the Beast, who it is written warred against the saints and overcame them — and that I was destined to be thrown into a lake of fire after my three and a half year reign. Curious enough was how this played on me. This acted on me as sort of a negative reinforcement therapy; it helped me to be humble, to not think I was all that. Strange how things work out....
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Best of 5 | 1:11am monday, 4th november |
These will be what I call my favorite entries in this journal from August through October of the palindromic year, 2002.
Love Note - A love note to my true love, whom I've never met.
Why Anything? - Why is there something instead of nothing?
Words from Where? - Some more words from the visions in my head.
Diagram - What happens to us in Heaven and Hell.
A Little Faith - A little idea of faith, in my imagining.
Goodbyes - Regarding our goodbyes, or when we never get them.
O Night - A farewell to the darkness.
Imaginary - My imaginary family, and the imaginary world.
I Recall - A couple things I recall, from back when....
In the Dreaming - Things I discovered in the dreaming.
Dawn - Regarding the dawn, how it chases away the monsters.
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Forget | 3:11am saturday, 2nd november |
I am an imaginary thing; I never existed. I never walked the Earth in search of any meaning to it all; I never sat through the night in insomniac angst, not sure of why I suffered at nothing. I am less than a dream, I think, not quite even a ghost — I am a whisper the breeze might speak in a forgotten forest, an afterthought of twilight that no one thinks enough to mention. I travel from no place to no place, and I take a thousand years to get there. I am a sweet nothing that is not so sweet. I once had half a name, but I had to eat it, lest I spend an hour being someone. I am to all you passersby a goodbye without a hello.
You will forget about me when you finish reading this. Then, you might believe what I say.
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Fragments | 2:48am friday, 1st november |
These fragments of experience we gather them a life —
the interlocking pieces, a puzzle that will never be solved.
The teeth of destiny bite out raw chunks, chew up strange stories.
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