The Whole Kit ‘n’ Caboodle

The blank page intimidates even the sturdiest stalwart of the written word, and I am no exception. I always have some kind of phrase rolling through my head, and a majority of those would be good to record and expound upon, but I rarely have the energy or simple chutzpah to begin that act. I don’t know quite why, honestly, because every effort in this field effectively solidifies my place in the writing world amongst other people with whom I would love to someday meet and swap ideas.

Can you imagine a world where transportation were not an issue, and everybody can be close to everybody else at the drop of a hat? I know it’s coming soon, and I’m wagging my tail. Whenever I make social plans of any kind, the foremost question in my head is usually: “How far do I have to travel, and will it be worth the time?” It’s not that I doubt the sociability of my friends, I would just prefer not to exert so much energy in order to cross their thresholds when I could be sitting and writing with a mug of green tea.

I hope to see the written word become the closest equivalent to currency as my life progresses and our world becomes ever closer to enlightenment. No, I’m not too much of an optimist to think that everybody can eventually work on the same ideas and goals for a peaceful and virtuous world of sharing ideas and things with everybody else. I really do believe in this race, and if we get rid of the root of all that is evil (corruption and greed stemming from applied monetary value to chunks of ore and ground tree pulp), we’ll make a huge step in the right direction for people to grow regardless of location, color, beliefs, sexual orientation or ANYTHING else.

In my writing and reading experience, there seem to be two main schools of poetic operation.

The first combines extensive research and unwavering editing, always intently paring down the product to the point where it may become unrecognizable from the initial idea, and usually the result of all that work is a beautiful nugget that makes readers scratch their heads in wonderment.

The second is an organic process in which an idea may have been conceived before writing, but every word put down holds a new possibility for the very next word, and the process continues until the writer feels the image or message has been achieved. This method takes much less time, and in many ways meets or exceeds the quality of the researching and agonizing.

I prefer to write in the second style, but if I get a must-write idea that requires further thought, I’ll be voracious in my research and try for a polished product.

How can you not love poetry?!

If I take a pill and expect to fall asleep, will I doze off even if it’s just a placebo? Perhaps I will, assuming I’m unaware of its sugary nature, if I can convince myself that sleeping is in my best interest at that point. How long I sleep is a different question, and if I’m a part of a sleep-aid study, maybe my ability to fall asleep on command will corrupt the data recorded, though hopefully the fraudulent results of one person’s participation won’t harm the overall value of the patients without my wizardly capabilities. But you know what? Screw ’em, I don’t really give a rat’s ass as long as they give me my five hundred bucks. I’ve been yearning for an iPad for a couple years now, and if swallowing some pills will get it for me, I don’t care how long I end up urinating blood. It doesn’t hurt, does it? I imagine it’s just in the urine as a result of faulty processing or something. Is it actually internal bleeding that drains itself through the bladder? Wow, I have to pee really bad.

So let’s assume that the dominant force in the universe is the desire to do good and that everything under its jurisdiction had the altruism to do the right thing every single time. Would existence be nearly as interesting as it stands today, the way the universe ultimately panned out, and since the universe did turn out this way, was there any other possible way for it to have turned out? Of course there is always that possibility to ponder, but is there really any reason to? It gets the brain going, sure, but is there a fundamental reason to stimulate your mind if all the thoughts will just end up polluting your head because they come up with impossible situations which you then convince yourself are possible, simply because you’ve gone through the act of thinking about them? That all sounds like a mental disorder, but we all do the same shit to ourselves, and the way we mess ourselves up becomes apparent as we deal with the other people in our surroundings, because we begin to project our insecurities and ignorance to everybody with whom we speak, and those people then have the choice of either dismissing it as bullshit, considering it carefully and making an informed decision, or jumping on board with it at the tip of a hat. There are many people from all three groups, and I think it’s terrifying that there are so many millions of people in that third group, because you never know what kind of whackjob will come up out of the sewer and spin a few phrases to get a strong following of fairly unintelligent people, which turns into a large mob of almost not unintelligible people that defends their creator’s ideas like they have rabies, and there’s nothing any sane person can do about it except point and laugh. When we speak, we always have an audience, be it ourself or even just the fact that when we talk we emit sound waves that bounce off of things and physically affect them (especially if they’re particularly concentrated and loud sound waves). When we speak, our field of existence shifts just enough to accommodate those words, a modification that may lead to infinite other possibilities for change–most likely none of those possibilities will come to mind, because we can’t actually see what our speech does to our surroundings; we can only see what happens after we let loose, and we often think of any connection between the speech and what comes directly after as completely circumstantial (which it is, because of the circumstance of our changing our plane of existence with some words), and then, therefore, everything is random because we cannot see the direct cause and effect of over 99% of everything (the >1% being those strange coincidental stories you’ve heard your friends tell dozens of times over the years). Can we alter our perception and see things more clearly? Well, shamans have been tripping on shrooms, peyote and salvia for thousands of years, so there’s a basis for that school of thought, but every civilization manages to find a different meaning for what happens when you enter that state. Is it a spiritual realm? Is it a merging of adjacent dimensions into a psychedelic blending and patterning of our surroundings? Nobody has been able to reach a firm consensus, though neuroscientists have been able to pinpoint the stimulated parts of the tripping brain (from which they can probably deduce why we feel the way we do when we enter these spaces, but not what the spaces are). I think that since we still consume these psychedelic mind-enhancers, there must be a lingering sense of magic from those ancient times when many things were inexplicable (and most of those things were then called magical, for lack of a better reality), and no matter what kind of technology we may develop, there will always be a strong pull towards the organic experience of ecstasy and colorful visions, because when you boil it down to the history of human interaction with Earth, the things we use in our modern technology has been relatively inaccessible for the majority of our existence, made of things like aluminum and plastic, while hallucinogenic drugs have always been organic, edible and available to us, affecting the human lifestyle for an extended period of time. Since we have the capacity to grow such a fondness for a kind of plant, perhaps we will develop an affinity for technological materials, and our bodies will slowly integrate more metals into them and perhaps run more efficiently than the older models. Whether or not we’ll have had any say in these changes is irrelevant, because I really don’t care about some postulation of the future that I know has a chance of happening, but it’s so inaccessible to me and the rest of this generation that I’ve pushed the thought out of my head altogether.