Dreamin'

Last night I dreamed that I was in Australia, and the cuddly koalas came right up from the eucalyptus, moving so slowly. The sunlight through the trees made them look like leopards. I took some pictures with a soft center focus lens, and for once it didn't look like shit. Almost immediately after, we were all back at my house listening to Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet mixing drinks and acting out like the Kids in the Hall.

Reading List

I don't feel like posting any of my writing. It's been a while.

Here is a reading list instead of things you should check out if you have not already. It is far from exhaustive, I'm sure I will make additions as more come to mind.


The Invention of Morel [Adolfo Bioy Casares]
Invisible Cities [Italo Calvino]
The Aleph [Jorge Luis Borges]

Franny and Zooey [JD Salinger]

Exile and the Kingdom [Albert Camus]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Friedrich Nietzsche]

Civilization and its Discontents [Sigmund Freud]

The Iliad [Homer]

1984 [George Orwell]

Hunger [Knut Hamsun]

Blessed Assurance [AG Mojtabai]

The Ascent of Man [Jacob Bronowski]

The Ramayana [Valmiki]

Dracula [Bram Stoker]

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress [Robert Heinlein]

Œdipus Rex [Sophocles]

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym [Edgar Allan Poe]

The Island of Dr. Moreau [HG Wells]

Moon in a Dewdrop [Dogen]

The Death of Ivan Ilyich [Leo Tolstoy]

Things Fall Apart [Chinua Achebe]

Barabbas [Pär Lagerkvist]

King Lear [Billie Shakespeare]

The Declaration of Independence [Thomas Jefferson]

The Elegant Universe [Brian Greene]

These are largely representative of their genres and their authors. And they're all gateway drugs. Get addicted.

Beware: Close reading of great literature will change your relationship to the world around you. Only get into these if you are prepared for that.

The City on the Moon

Sometimes in the middle of the long night a few will rise, and from their regolith waste they stare across the chasm into the face of that scarred planet and imagine--playfully as they dare--that they see some life sprouting like wisps of grass.

And as their hearts pound and they shiver in the stagnant cold they turn away, resigned.

The Cosmonaut

In motionless disconnect, he hung waiting. For a while there was nothing, barely even darkness, barely even silence. He counted seconds to himself and could only imagine they were passing. No breath came to him, and few thoughts crossed his mind.

Have I died? and, Is it over? and after, Will it yet be long...?

The emptiness remained unmoving, and he forgot his weightless limbs. Distantly his heart beat, and his skull buzzed with electrics. The sounds made such a biologic ruckus, he nearly lost his count.

25,032... 25,033... 25,034...

The waves of noise soon slowed and then subsided, and the fluids in his veins felt cold and thick but very far. He hoarded his seconds in their exactness in his brain. Briefly he felt a terrible anxiety, oblivious for a time of anything else.

Was that it? and Could this be all? and again, Will it still be long...?

On and on this awful silence went, until he perceived without seeing or feeling or sensing that a great maw of it was around him. To his horror, he realized it was not closing--would never close--but rather it opened so infuriatingly slowly and always into more of that black infinity.

3,115,524... 3,115,634... 3,115,744...

In a raging fright, he began leaping quickly ahead, seeking some end. He rejected arbitrary weeks from his precious memory. Months passed in muddy clumps of seconds. He felt nothing but the overbearing mass of them now piled everywhere.

It hasn't happened yet. and, I am still waiting. and then, Will it finish soon?

Long after he had calmed and his count retreated to a slow and ordinal march, his mind began to overflow with the names of every number. His skull felt too full to go on. He shaped every second in his trove into an empty piece of nothing, and they floated, miniscule and meaningless, from his grasp into the enduring night--gone. He could not tell now if his eyes were shut or open. It seemed he had been floating there for years as the black space spread around him. For a moment he thought of dizzying color, but it faded quietly away. He imagined himself stretching indeterminately in all directions, flat and enormous as the moment he had metered with his ignorance.

Was I once a living man? and How long is it now? Then finally, I will be dying here forever.

Sisyphus

I lay in the pinstripe street light darkness into the early morning, and my bed did not seem big enough for me as I turned in uncomfortable thought. I strained, but the state of things appeared to me so pitiful that I could not make a sound. All day I had spent working and the day before and before--and forever before, I imagined in horror. My heart pounded as I pondered my terrible mirror future and a lifetime struggle between these two infinities in vain.

I graffitied my thoughts with hope; the red and white word whispered in my mind,

“Escape...!”

The Aquanaut

Last night I dreamed that you'd learned to breathe underwater. Is it an awful thing to imagine? You told me that all you had to do was swallow up the water and spit out what you didn't need. I said I couldn't do it; I wanted to, but I'm still too terrified to ever swim again. After you went down, I stared forever at the spot where you descended. I sat for hours watching every bubble float along the surface. If only I'd jumped in, dared to break all the pretty water tension, everything might be different. It felt like days to me, but you know how watches never really keep time in places like this.
When you finally came back and stepped out of that frigid, empty water, I didn't know whether to cry or just shout at you. I really thought you'd stay down forever, and all I could remember when you were gone--the only thing that I could see when I peered so far down--were your cold and lifeless eyes that Tuesday morning just a year ago. And when you showed me all that golden treasure you'd found while you trudged along the bottom, I finally started bawling. You couldn't understand, and how could you? I just laughed and said that there was mud in your shoes again, but this time I was just too glad to have you back.

A quick note:

I decided to change the blog around a lot. Maybe better, maybe subject to further renovations. Wuteva.