when everything’s up in the air it’s difficult to find solid ground to work from. the 15th we got keys (well, technically the 13th) to our new house, which is up on the hill and has a breathtaking view of the city and ocean. but I’m mostly out of breath from schlepping boxes up and down stairs and driving them the two blocks between my old and new places. it doesn’t look like I will have finished the story I wanted to submit during September submission periods, but publication is merely an ordeal to be borne once the actual activity of art is completed, so now merely is not the time. once life is settled into routine I can resume the work of derangement via writing.
listening to a lot of recordings of Terence McKenna talks while packing. I’m someone who before this rather enjoyed McKenna’s thought as a kind of curio, but the more I listen to him talk, the more I’m impressed with his rigor, range, and gumption. the way he explains how the world corporate state/neoliberalism works not only disavowed me of the idea that he isn’t a totally serious thinker, at least politically, but it basically summarized it all better than I’ve ever heard anyone put it, including explicitly leftist intellectuals like Michael Parenti. despite the more harebrained of his ideas generally serving as his calling cards (stoned ape theory, Timewave Zero, etc.), McKenna is an exceptionally lucid and critical thinker who is among a group of maybe four public intellectuals in recent memory whom I still hold in high esteem: David Graeber, Mike Davis, and I guess Charles Bowden, but Bowden is more journalist/writer than intellectual. once I have more time I want to devote it to writing about literally whatever the fuck I find interesting here the way McKenna seems able to discuss basically any topic that comes his way. enough of these little update posts, I want to write multiple-thousand-word essays about quantum theory, alchemy, shamanism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, literary history, drugs, paranoia, apocalypse, aesthetic theory, technology, whatever. I also want to do the s*****s and a**d that are in my fridge, and, ideally, track down some D*T to sm*ke.
currently I’m rereading Dubliners for the first time in years, so maybe Joyce is a decent place to start wrt longer-form blogging. I need practice using way more words than are strictly speaking necessary: my tendency towards concision is a good one, but it should serve to temper a predilection for babbling, which I tamp down for fear of being obnoxious. from now on I want to risk being obnoxious.
alright that’s enough earnestness from me today.
Leave a Reply