I wonder

if people understand the intimacy of what is happening in these pages: a soul lain bare. To pull no punches is a difficult trick to master, but that is what I have attempted to do here in these pages. I’ve been doing this for almost five years now, and if one were so inclined, they would have one of the most in depth understandings of a human being for that timeframe as could perhaps be possible.
What’s on my mind?
What’s not on my mind?
Right now…
Good-bye.
It’s a bit premature, admittedly.
However, what most people fail to understand is that this is my last opportunity to find a space among other human beings.
I’ve been a lot of places, done a lot of things, and want for nothing but time to appreciate the splendors that are granted to the sentient.
That is not, however, leisure time. To appreciate something properly is a lot of work, and that’s what I want to do.
Here’s a secret that nobody knows—soul laying bare: should the venture fail, society will lose me. Not that that’s any kind of significant loss for something as mighty as society, and it would be more like a self-imposed hermitage than anything else.
“Living as if I weren’t even here”
Why would you want to do that?
Do you know how much living you must be capable of in order to make it appear as if you weren’t there? There is no getting around the fact that you are. No matter how much you tell yourself that your “being” is just electric impulses flying around your brain, and that this is all a kind of illusion being fostered by the sensory information that is coming in to the brain, there is no getting around the question that, based on all probability, I probably shouldn’t be, and yet here I am.
What a question that is.
I have investigated many questions. That question wins. It beats them all. What is it about something that makes it seem like there ought to be nothing?
The only answer nature can’t give man, but the only real question we want answered is this: what are we supposed to be doing here?
All right, we are. What now? What comes next? What is it about life that makes me want to do more and more of it? To climb more mountains, to dig in the earth, plant seeds and see what she can grow. To touch what it means to be a part of the natural order of things once again.
Damnit all to shite and fuck!!!!
I’m lost there aren’t I.
GODDAMNIT!
Why don’t I just go write Walden.
Fuck.
But that’s where it’s at, isn’t it?
That’s why Walden is Walden. Nature. She has taken on an entirely new nature in the past couple of weeks as a result of the fact that I am now beginning to look at nature on a cosmic scale. In other words, nature was worked out a system of systems that works consistently and strings these systems together in order for things to keep moving. One of the unfortunate drawbacks of all these systems is that they eventually fail. You could almost say that nature is BUILT with a failure device inside it, constantly acting, trying to fail, if only to learn. At any rate, this aspect of nature repeats itself at the level of cells and at the level of the universe in equal aspects.
It’s actually quite hard to imagine, but perhaps that’s just me. I just had a hard time imagining NOT writing. I think I was actually trying to not write this week, just to see how things went, but then, as soon as I started doing it, the fingers just wanted to keep going. There’s your fucking Hume for you, too. He’s been showing up like a bad rash recently.
That’s how my brain works, by the way, and I know it is: input through reading, process through subconscious (who knows how long this can take), and output through action based on learned outcomes. I read Hume more than six months ago, but my brain is only really now coming to understand the significance of the things he was talking about.
That, and I feel too much. It can be dangerous, sometimes, because I know that there are areas of my mind that I could go into that would make me feel so much I would probably vomit. Caroline. Can’t go there. She’s been coming up in my mind lately, and flashes and rushes of memories go through me so hard it’s like being punched repeatedly in the stomach: the good and the bad altogether. I owe her everything. It’s hard to imagine my character without her in my life.
Being in this place is weird. The rememberer has been remembering things that it hasn’t remembered in a long, long time. I have pity for people who can recall memories readily at any time. Having access to those depths of emotion at your constant beck and call would be too much for me and I’d have a breakdown. Perhaps it’s because I don’t remember the details of things… all I remember are the impressions, feelings, and emotions. The details, where everything was, what who was wearing, and everything surface gets lost in the intricacy and detail of the sketched feeling that I put together in my head to go with image.
Neruda understands: why do I feel the whole of your love at once?
The whole of love is pleasure, pain, bliss, fury, and even things like boredom, consolation, and most things in between. The whole of anything is all of those things. I’m afraid that that’s just the way it works when you take on the whole of something.
Here’s a whole something I’m not sure I’m ready for: another relationship. I’ve been through the mill now. I’m jaded. I’m aware that I’m jaded. I’m aware that I’m full of shit. I’m aware that I’m not very good at socializing. What I want is more clearly stamped in my head than ever. It’s a later-twenties male sexual revolution. We don’t want what we used to want. If we wanted a ho, we’d go to the club and get some chick all fucked up and convince her that having sex with us is a good idea. Vapid is a word that quickly comes to mind. I don’t have time for that. I also don’t have time to deal some old bullshit relationship that isn’t bound for a life together, while, simultaneously know that I don’t want “a life together” just yet AND how painful it is to get into a relationship knowing that it’s going to end.
It doesn’t hurt any less simply because you know it’s going to end, and sometimes it hurts more. That’s not fair. There’s a quandary for you:
What am I supposed to do about love now?

Change

is what’s needed, and change is what’s planned, but we need your change.

In brief:
My compatriot(s) and myself are heading off to the lands of the east(ern United States).
Whilst others might join, the two main adventures are:
Myself (currently employed as sub-vice grill overlord and pizza creator extraordinaire—go to Grinder’s in the Crossroads district of Kansas City…
That’s where you’ll find me, all my fancy degrees and ideas, and great philly cheesesteaks.
Namelessfacelessother: best friend and confidante of myself for more than a decade, and currently about to graduate with what we’ll call a degree in biodynamic agriculture.
The two of us, with other like-minded folks, have a vision.
That vision is based on family, love, care, devotion to learning and effort, the perpetual quest into the character of the human being, and awareness of all that is around us.
We want to see how much of our stamp we can cut out of nature, how much we can develop within her and with her to use the relationship to its fullest, how we can rip ourselves out of the blind numbness of a pervasive ideological culture—and before anybody says anything: they are ALL pervasive ideological cultures…that’s almost the point of a country.
What we want to know is if culture, standing alone and unthreatening, can survive inside the other culture.
We’re pretty sure it can.

So, in stage one, we will build a farm.
It will be as self-sustaining as possible.
It will be biodynamic.
It will be organic.
It will become a part of the nature around it.

Thus the need for change… pocket change… lots of it.

You see, we have the funding for the land and the house already—praise whatever entity it is that pops into your mind when you say your prayers, but we need to find a place in the very literal sense of the term.

So, myself and my compatriot—with his wife in London wishing he and myself the best of luck I’m sure—are going to find a place.

On the ground, in a car/truck/van/camper/whatevermakesitselfavailabletous we will set off to look at lands in the east coast that are near to universities with appropriate doctoral programs (we all want to continue our educations), to hospitals (my compatriots wife has recently graduated from Med School and is looking to be Dr. Mrs. Compatriot in the USA), to fishing (and potentially hunting) possibilities, to mountains (as much as the Midwest is my home, my heart belongs in rather more rugged terrain), and with the appropriate kind of soil for growing the most diverse crops.

We have managed to both acquire one month of time to devote purely to this adventure.

We will be in a car together.
We will scout the land together.
We will sleep in our mode of transportation or camp when possible.
We need only money for food and gas for thirty days.

I, on behalf of—even though he might not approve—my compatriot, therefore plead with you for your bits of spare change, shrapnel, coins, or whatever you want to call them.

Make a little jar and write on it:

Change
For Eli and Jesse’s Road Trip
And Change

Then, dump all that spare change you get into it. We’re not asking for any more than to help us out for the next two months… we leave on May 1st.

If it makes you feel better about the donation, the scope of the biodynamic organic farm extends even further into the future, but you can email me for the dynamic unveiling of that surprise… which isn’t really at all surprising if you are even vaguely aware of who I am…

Anyhow, pocket change please.
Can we have it?

Know that your donation today
Could have a huge impact on tomorrow.

(obviously we accept cash, checks, and gas card donations as well… don’t get it twisted… if you want to help us out like that, we’d be SUPER HAPPY about it.)

{All donators eligible for free stays at “Sated”←potential name for farm}

May all beings be happy,
May all your change be good,
And may the seeds of
Equanimity ripen in your mind.

Peace
Much Love
And Gonzo
Myself

changesated@live.com

Also, go to poeticmindofeli.blogspot.com

Communion

It is now that we break bread.

Here is my body, which I give unto you—residence in the present: body mind spirit.
Take and eat.
Here is my blood, which I give unto you—what can flow more clearly from the soul than words.
Take and drink.

Invocation finished. I mixed them… did you see it?
Damn my eyes.

Everybody I meet seems to want to talk about the soul. Everybody everywhere who is sufficiently aware of themselves, their environment and their culture seems to have a nagging draw toward the things of the ephemera.
A lot of people don’t even realize that what they are attempting to describe is precisely within my personal understanding/definition of soul.
I laugh when thinking of defining the soul.
It’s like trying to define “an.” What does “an” mean?
Well, it’s an article.
I didn’t ask what its function was. I asked for its definition.

Can you see my path?

Function. Utility.
Perhaps we are here to be of some use, but perhaps this use-value goes beyond our scope of understanding and means something on the universal scale.

Seekingly find being.

We must all seek for the thing-in-itself inside the thing-in-itself. As these things—soul, god, and the like—exist as words, it is in the nature of words themselves that the nature of these things can be investigated. If the things of the spirit take primacy over the things of the physical world, then why is the manifestation of those spiritual things in the form of language?
What is god without the name of God?

In the beginning was THE WORD, and THE WORD was with god, and THE WORD was god. From a purely grammatical point of view, the message here is obvious, and yet it has been overlooked for so long. THE WORD is the subject. God is the object. Anybody who’s studied anything about the nature of the subject/object debate can understand this importance.

Sartre’s gaze: in becoming the object of another’s gaze I recognize in myself my perpetual state of object-hood. To all others I am an object of scrutiny. When we are not subject, our psyches feel terror.

I’m mixing things up again, and I know it, but we lie to ourselves perpetually and explain away our insignificance by making ourselves the most important being on the planet. That is, until somebody looks at us.
That’s how fragile it is my friends.
As soon as we recognize the fact that we are just some object in the mind of the Other, the structure cracks and has the potential for total collapse.

Most people feel all of this as opposed to knowing what they are feeling and why, but their experience with it is similar to everybody’s. The eyes are portals to the soul. When two people’s eyes meet, if they linger there at all, they cannot help but give away enough of their soul for the other to feel them—every piece contains a map of it all.

So, it’s no real mystery why most people want, in the deepest parts of themselves, to discuss the deepest part of existence. What is it about something—the fact that something “is”—that makes us believe there probably about to be nothing? We look around at the great cosmic fluke that has given rise to our various civilizations, and what the reasoning person sees is that based on all probability none of this should be here.

But nature has her ways, and they are not so different from human ways, but they occur on such a magnificent scale that there is no REAL way to comprehend it. Nature goes beyond the Earth: our planet is in the nature of the universe. Nature has a policy of attempting to give as much possibility to everything as it possibly can. In other words, even if the probability were to read something like 1:1,000,000,000—nature can usually supply the billion or two or three that it requires to find that one. The almost billion other attempts are all important, but they are also pretty standard failures. It is the anomalies that need to be investigated. It is in the point-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-one percent that we ought to be looking: these are the ones whose mysterious point of soul has extra-perceptual manifestations of spirit. The probability of YOU, and YOU alone existing is astronomical. Perhaps there is something in the universe that makes of some people’s probability beyond astronomical and places them squarely within the universal. Find these people. Their soul peaks out consistently, no matter how much they attempt to hide it. It emanates from them sub-consciously, spiritually and it carries weight unlike any kind of physical burden—and you’d better believe it’s a burden: imagine the weight of feeling the pull of the universe without having any idea what it is, how it came to be, or why it pulls you in the directions it does.

To feel is an enormous thing. To feel the universe is indescribable.

To those earnestly seeking to know, I bid you seek fervently and find forever everywhere.

I experience the most joy when sending my love through spiritual channels to those I love all over the world. Maybe, sometimes, you feel something good for half a second for absolutely no reason… well, you might’ve just been a part of my daily love dosings. Now, in no particular order, I give my love to:

May all beings be happy.

Timeline

of my life
(Part II).

The importance of my time in New York City should not be underplayed. What made it so important was that my intellectual and emotional development was occurring simultaneously. My body and my mind were going through a phase of intense growth, with the resultant growth pains—breaking hearts and broken minds. The reading, understanding, reflection, and searching into the self of the mind and spirit made of me something else. When I left, I was not what I was, I was what I was going to be: an artist, a writer, a wanderer, and free. I had been writing a book that was making my lose my mind called Fodder… it was suspended until I return to New York City.

That was the summer of 2008. I took a road trip across the country with my ex-girlfriend. We stayed in Tennessee. We were not meant to be. It was fun. We were not meant to be.

In the Fall of that same year, I sent my resume to a recruiter whose job it was to find jobs in Korea for teachers of English as a second language.

In September of 2008, I was on my way to Ochang, South Korea. On my first night in Korea, in a small town where I can’t seem to find ANY English, my co-worker Bon brings me a quart of milk and a two liter bottle of water. I thank him, cry, and nestle into my tiny bed.

While in Korea the most appropriate question might be: what didn’t I do. Most of it I did with one or two other people, but a lot of it was alone… honja.

There’s something called Mudfest which seems to speak for itself.
There’s BIFF—an international film festival in Busan.
I got paid money to play my guitar and entertain people.
I went busking on the streets of Suwon.
I hosted an open mic night.
I learned to hate Seoul.
I learned to speak some Korean.
I met the best human female I think I have ever met in my life (Park Inae… I love you dearly).

However, one of the most important things I did was reading. I read everything. I was in Korea for two years, and in those two years I put such titles as Being and Nothingness, The Republic, A Treatise of Human Nature, Phenomenology of Spirit, Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, and Vanity Fair among countless other novels and books of poetry.

It was during this time that I was also writing a book about the experience of being a foreigner/teacher in South Korea.

It was during this time that I wrote a play in three acts based on Voltaire’s Candide and the idea that man exists in three states: suffering, boredom and work—which became the three acts.

I fell in love with a Super-Korean girl named April. She was lovely, older, and a great lover, but her Korea streak made her need to seek other attentions. It ended.

I met truly good people. I was party to what I’d assume is a felony. Friends of mine who were in a band that was playing in Dagu on the same night as our city hockey team was playing Dagu decided to rent a giant bus and take everybody together. A mini-fridge was thrown out a window. A fire extinguisher was discharged into my room. Fleeing happened. We were involved.

Nights of soju and roses.

After my contract finished in September 2009, I went to another school in November in Suwon, but I took a wee break to visit my recently married friends in London (the aforementioned Italian bird and high school wrestling buddy) and Agent X in New York City.

Korea was a peak of freedom. I climbed mountains. I ascended where westerners hadn’t dreamed of seeing. I searched through the depths of literature and the soul. The very first F1 race in Korea happened in 2010, and I was there for it by myself. It was beautiful. I wandered around the tiny town of Mokpo. They have these little parks and tiny hills to climb. There’s a giant jjimjilbang next a bus terminal where we caught a shuttle to the race. I almost got stuck in the race parking lot… alone… in the middle of nowhere… but hey, we’ve been there before.

No fear. No edge. When having a plan is good, having no plan is fine, and needing a plan is as good as anything, something happens to the mind.

I suppose that it would be possible to say that I accepted the reality of nature. When put into a natural situation, even if harsh, I could survive or die and be happy either way. It’s hard to die in manmade situations if you’re simply paying attention. Be very aware all the time, thinking, “Now I am living in this way.”

The truth holds no fear for me, nor does the bone-crunching power of nature—unless you consider it in the same vein as the fear of god: knowing but at peace with.

It is 2011. I haven’t really been in Kansas City for a decade. I live with Agent X. The future is fuzzy, but I can see an outline. This residence is my seventeenth roof to live under in ten years. May all beings be happy…

and may my loved ones feel the happiness I desire for them in every moment. Share love. Share life. Be well. Be calm. Go forth. Go safely. Do intently. Do proudly.

Let’s Be Very Clear

about something: reading is one of the most productive uses of a body’s time. Perhaps that’s precisely the point: a body’s time. If the body’s time is pondered for a second, what comes immediately to mind is death, so how on earth is reading a justifiable part of that relatively short existence?
The soul.
The soul is universal and eternal and infinitesimally small and infinitesimally large and permeates everything.
But of course there arises the eternal question, the question that has plagued science and religion (to a lesser degree) from the beginning of time—I couldn’t help myself:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Perhaps a better rendering of the question might be:
What is it about something that makes us believe there should be nothing?
The latter question would probably be answerable, and that answer would be that we see the universal structure everywhere: it is present in the very smallest particles, it is viewable in the night sky and our understanding of astronomy, and you can even find it in reading.
What is this structure that we see?
(I can see we’re on a basic ontological search here…)
Mostly-empty space, is what it turns out to be.
At a cellular level, most of the atomic structure is a cloud, a haze, and a constantly moving something-or-other.
Have you ever seen a picture of a galaxy? Looks a lot like a cell to me.
I bet the universe looks like that.
But I suppose I’ve been avoiding the “why” question that I posed earlier.
Basically, I like to avoid discussing why questions because they inevitably lead to metaphysical inquiry, and metaphysics is not my strong suit because it seems to me to be based largely on things like belief. If I were to categorize the different kinds of physics, I would say that general, observable physics would be precisely that: observable. We can watch the rules and principles that we believe to be true actually happen—thereby offering a kind of “proof” for the them. However, metaphysics deals with things that are—rather unfortunately or very fortunately depending on how you look at it—almost always experientially based.
The words I chose to use there are very specific and I want to make sure that metaphysics—or at least Eli metaphysics—is not reduced to a purely subjective perspective. Just because metaphysical understanding has at least one foot in the experiential aspect of humanity does not mean that an entire blanket of personal experience can be thrown over the whole situation: there are always teachers that come before and disciples that come after any kind of metaphysical experience. In other words, you have to be prepared for the experience by some kind of coach who has been there before, and you will be so changed by the experience yourself that you will in turn attempt to guide others seeking metaphysical experience. In a lot of ways, the experiencing of why is a community project.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
“Happiness is the virtuous activity of the soul.” That’s some bastardized Aristotle for you, but he places this caveat on that activity:
over the course of a lifetime.
Inside the body’s time are two other times: the time of the mind and the time of the soul.
One of them marches steadily onwards (the body).
The other two are based on the initiative of the possessor.
The power of the mind is basically limitless, and the same can be said of the soul, but it takes time and dedication to develop either of them. It is for this reason that Aristotle decided that the virtuous activity of the soul needed to extend over the course of an entire lifetime.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that we will probably never know from a scientific perspective why there is something instead of nothing. If we take what we know about nature and apply it to the universe, then our universe is probably just a cell in the skin of the universal fabric that spreads its one fact throughout everything it touches: is-ness.
If God—capitalization intentional—exists, then he must necessarily be bigger than the universe: what good is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present god that isn’t big enough to be everywhere at the same time, able to out-muscle anything, and know absolutely everything?
No good. God isn’t dead, but it’s a fuck-tonne bigger than we could ever imagine, and I believe that her name might be Nature.
We call it Mother Nature and think of trees in autumn or lakes during the summer or snow drifts in winter and giddy springs, but our sight is very short. It is probably more likely that Mother Nature extends to the galaxy as well. The nature of the galaxy is to spin around a giant black hole. The nature of our solar system is to spin around the sun. It turns out that nature is probably extendable to the very reaches of the universe and—perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself here—beyond.
What is the one incontrovertible fact about nature? Is-ness.
Nature is also imbued with a very slippery touch of magic.
Oak trees growing from acorns? Magic.
So, you’re telling me that we bury this in dirt, keep giving it water, and that’s about it? Yup. It turns out that the process (while infinitely more complicated in reality) is basically that simple. Imagine the entire earth as the brain and the products of the mental work the things that make the earth such a beautiful place—trees and streams and whatnot. The core and the movement and all the stuff we don’t see would be the world’s sub-consciousness and the visible stuff would be the consciousness. The planet would be the body. The soul would be the magic of the fact that it is.
Why is there something instead of nothing?
“Nothing comes from nothing.”—Many people said it, but notably Shakespeare
Because without something to work on, nothing gets worked on… the work stops. Realistically, we are probably here to develop as fully as possible the unique manifestation of universe that we are—that what the ancients believed at any rate. The truth of the matter is that we are probably an accident based on a pure numbers game:
“Billions and billions and of planets, huh? That ought to be enough for a while. Let’s see what happens. We can always make more next time. We’re not super busy.” Maybe we’re a product of nature attempting to create something that can overcome her at last, but she simply hasn’t quite gotten the recipe perfect yet.

Composed on Valentine’s Day

and related to love. These days, I can’t get these Laura Marling lyrics out of my head. It’s disconcerting because they are deeply involved with things that I would like to think of myself as being deeply involved in—if not presently.
I have an unhealthy relationship with love. To say that I love to love love, would be only to understand what Joyce meant. We are all pieces of love. Love is a part of the universal structure. Nature is love. It’s hard, sometimes brutal. Sometimes, when unrequited or scorned, it can be downright vicious. But it can be gentle and humble and sweet and lying dormant for ages. It’s not our awareness that makes us special creatures in the universe, it’s our awareness of our awareness (damned tautology) and the resultant reflection, allowing for reason that make of us unique manifestations of universal energy.
I don’t know if anybody has ever really considered it before, but perhaps humanity, with its layered awareness is actually a punishment.
The great order of the universe is composed of who-knows-what kind of logic. Perhaps it is those creatures that will beat themselves to death—physically or mentally—attempting to understand this awareness they have of the world around them that are the scorned creatures of the universe. Most animals content themselves to the understanding that they need to find food and shelter, procreate, and try to stay alive. Humans are different. We want more.
Perhaps that’s part of where love comes into play. It is a higher level of existence to understand the great cosmic order wherein part of staying alive is creating for one’s mate and progeny the ability to continue existence. It is the satisfaction of one of the highest callings of nature: survive.
In some ways, surviving is the easier of nature’s dual calling. Reproduction, especially for humanity—and this is where it can become quite a trying task to be a human—can take place in two different realms.
While at first glance it doesn’t seem as though these two worlds, as opposed to a unified one, would cause all that much harm: you simply have to pick. Ah, but the problem is, of course that these two worlds (the physical and the intellectual/mental) interact with each other, are inseparable from each other, and even exist in the exact same place at the exact same time. As is probably pretty evident, that one remove brings with it both the possibility of cataclysmic disaster and inconceivable joy—where the former is something like a cutting off of one’s self from their awareness and the latter is something like coming to a kind of harmony and balance within the universal spectrum.
Words, words. Nothing but sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears.
But love and the mind are not strangers to each other, and they are both on pretty decent terms with the body, so why shouldn’t love be the web that weaves them together and makes of itself such a delightful nuisance?
The love of the mind, the love of the body, and the love of the soul are all very different breeds of the same species. There are some people whose genetic makeup just clicks with your genetic makeup, and when your two parts come together there is a whole lot of joy, thoroughgoing joy. There are people who stimulate your mind in such a way that, though they might not be what you are normally physically attracted to, the fact that they stay in your mind—haunting it as it were—for so long and popping into it at such strange times that you can’t help but gravitate toward them. There are people you are drawn to, or who happen to cross your path, whose soul (unique manifestation of the universe) reaches out and connects to another soul such that there can never be a severing: it is as if they could actually communicate with each other through the universal schema of symbolization and communication which renders space and time impotent.
Sometimes vaulting into the heavens leaves one with as tendency toward flights of rhetorical fancy, but never fear because the fall always leaves one bruised and slightly more cautious the next time… slightly.
There are merits to all of them. It is very nice to have somebody there to take care of those bodily needs that seem to creep up as a matter of course for the human body—both men and women get the craving. It is also very nice to have somebody there to talk to, to listen to, to learn from, to teach, and to deal with the things of the mind. It is also very nice to have that soul mate.
Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult to find what people refer to as “the one.” To find a soul mate is incredibly difficult. The soul has so many strands, threads, strings, colors, styles, and whathaveyou that the chances of bumping into one that fits your particular network of soul whatever is pretty chancy I’d say—by which I’d mean nearly impossible. A mind-mate is somewhat more probable, as the mind is based on the structure of the universe—finding a mind that is structured similarly to yours can be somewhat trying, but determination and effort will find you attaining your prize. The body, with its physicality makes just about any tool capable of pleasure. The flexibility, shape, and size of each particular unit is taken into the alternate aspects of their partner(s), and it makes pleasure possible from just about anybody.
It’s hard to say whether or not the pyramid of pleasure is oriented properly with the soul at the top and pointing towards to the heavens with the base of the body holding us steadily to the earth—primacy being sometimes relative—or if it’s not something inverted with the point of the soul creating a fulcrum whereby the body and mind must remain in balance or the whole structure begins to lean and tilt with the potential for falling over completely. Either way, what we see when we look at the thing with the proper set of eyes is that they are all connected, all important, and all necessary of thorough investigation.
My loves are spread all over the world. I have not known physical love in a couple of months. A mind with which to commune would be pleasant in the extreme, but unfortunately the style of my mind makes me too pensive and standoffish to seek these minds out. The nature of my soul makes me a wanderer, a finder, and a perpetual bad bet for the long run. Of course it’s because I’m scared. Did you think I didn’t know that? Fear runs rampant in the parts of my mind that desire my own breed of greatness. The nature of the fear is something that might bear discussion, but it is definitely there.
At any rate, in my present solitude—which is not entirely un-welcome—I reach out to the ones that I have loved, the ones I will love, and those for whom my love transcends time and space. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been loved by those who have loved me—from family to lovers—and perhaps luckier to have loved those same people. I regret none of my relationships. My inadequacies and deficiencies as a human being have made me, unfortunately, a villain of the highest caliber, and I carry it with me every day. No regrets, no surrender. I love those people perhaps more powerfully now I see the effect they have made on my life. Share love today.

The Soul Searching

There is a perpetual hesitancy in the words of those that would attempt to put words to truths which sit outside the scope of language: all translation is loss, and doubly so when translating the matter of the spiritual world.
Science’s biggest problem is that it makes too much sense.
Religion’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make enough sense.
As with most things, the reality is not in the extremes.
There are always anomalies. That’s the point of them, to be. But one example cannot supply enough oomf for a reasoning, sentient being—at least, it shouldn’t. This seems to be where they both get in trouble. The one camp gives proofed evidence, and the other the evidence of faith and belief, which are rationally irrational.
It is at this point that everybody usually picks a side. People start saying that you have to believe this and that. Fuck them. Even that, using that particular word, would be abominable to some. It’s all about control.
So I have become a myopic spiritual vagabond.
I know because I see repeated structures, and that this sits nicely with me.
But I suppose I should tell the story of how my understanding of these terms came to be, so either buckle in for a quick tour of my spiritual upbringing or fast forward a bit to the parts at the end which are undoubtedly bound to be better than this rag.
My father is a music minister. He and my mother attended a Christian college in College City, Arkansas—while this seems like a preposterous name for a REAL city it is in fact a real place and home to Williams Baptist University. At any rate, Sundays were spent in church watching my father lead the music and learning more than anybody should probably need to know about any book (and that’s coming from me).
At any rate, as usually happens, unhappy children rebel against their parents. My morality and spiritual quest took a back seat for a couple of years.
Then, one day I picked up a book called The Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle. I read it from cover to cover. It’s basically about what it takes to build a great society. What do you need? Great men. How do you get great men? Genetics? True, but is it possible to make them? It should be. Education. This is how the ancients viewed education: training the citizen to be the best possible citizen (and therefore human being) they could be. It is inside this desire to create a thoroughly decent human being that we find the questions of morality, desire, turpitude, and, alternately, the place of truth and honesty in the life of the citizen.
This was, in other words, the birthplace of logic. In the course of this logic, there cropped up the eternal question: what of the soul? The ancients went crazy. There is a whole science full of its own signs and significations that the Neo-Platonists got into where they were actually defining the soul—or attempting to do so. Over-zealous as they may have been, they did interesting work and proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that interest in this issue of the soul would probably not die out quickly.
It didn’t. It should also be noted here that, in the language of that era (and I believe most people are dealing with Latin here) soul, mind, and reason all translate as roughly the same word—think about that in terms of the good book for a second.
(Quick side note: I think that Christians are doing themselves a very great disservice in cutting themselves off from other potential readings of their book. There are incredible lessons in that book that get missed because we don’t know how to read it.)
Anyhow, with the fall of the Roman Empire came the Dark Ages and for 1000 years, with many of the manuscripts of the ancients lost, the Christian church grew.
Then came the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the bastions of Christianity started falling and making way for thinkers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Sartre, Kant, Steiner etc etc etc, and the intellectual revolution was underway… but all great thinkers come upon the one question that will perpetually baffle:
“I say my good man, but what of this “soul” business?”
But it was essentially shelved and labeled “a bummer” because there was simply no way to know—I believe this was sort of the birth of Nihilism: if there’s no way to know, then what’s the point? Please, for the love of god, don’t go getting all technical with the definitions of Nihilism because I could’ve just have easily phrased it: if there’s no way to know, then everything’s true! To believe in nothing is actually quite a feat. At any rate, you catch my drift I’d imagine.
Steiner once said that the spirit surrounds the unique physical manifestation of itself, and then went on to describe it as something that actually penetrates through the layers of physical self and extends beyond, out into space. “In his later years, Velazquez never painted things. He painted the space around them.”
That’s where the spirit can be most easily seen. When it gets all mixed up with the physicality of the body, strange things happen.
All things that can be said to be share the similar trait of being. They are all connected by this, if by nothing else. And it could be said that that connection, whatever it is, is the universal spirit. People, animals, planets, galaxies, and whatever else was, is, will be are unique physical manifestation of the universal spirit—a bit like an arm hair or a pimple or a fingernail: never exactly the same, although they look awfully goddamned similar.
Well, I looked all over. I found eastern texts to contain a similar kind of structure, albeit in different words or a different style. It seems like there are four basic elements to human existence: the body (the seat of the spirit and the mind), the consciousness (sensations of external and internal sense), the subconscious (involuntary activity), and the spirit (the answer to the question: “why is there something instead of nothing?”).
Religions are usually a manifestation of a too-heavy emphasis on only one or two aspects of existence. The key is balance.
That’s a lie. The key is effort. Balance is impossible. One of the unique quirks of the universe is that nothing NOTHING is perfect (if only because nature doesn’t understand the terminology), and balance is a kind of perfection. One must try diligently to achieve that which they know is, in the end, not achievable because that is the path that will lead them towards knowledge of the world that lies inside of everything, that universal spirit that pervades everything, tearing through what we think is impenetrable, and making of us all unique universal manifestations, special, and ultimately dead, but that’s okay: to not enjoy sentience would be the greatest sin of all.
Heidegger has this thing about the four-fold: the heavens, the earth, the mortals and immortals. The earth is the consciousness: it makes the sensory world possible. The heavens are the sub-conscious: think the word “god” and you might be on to something. The mortals are the bodies that we receive: our unique manifestation. The immortals would be the spirit: immortality and eternity permeating every thing.

What’s the World Coming To?

A more appropriate question might be: what is it that I’ve become? As a result of the decisions I have made, as a result of the situations I have been forced to deal with, and as a result of the education that gave me the gift of sight I made a decision. I made it a long time ago. If there’s no sense in fighting it, then there’s no reason to fight it, and if there’s no reason to fight it, the best one can do is to simply step outside of it and provide an example of alternate possibilities.
It must be as a result of the possibilities that I have found in my own head that I see them in the world-at-large, but this hardly matters when you consider how narrow each individual path is, and it’s strange to think of how things rely on each other—what is the narrow without the wide?
There are very rarely things that are easily separable into even two. Dichotomies are only ever two by virtue of their prefix, for their further destruction into their own component parts rules out the possibility of ever reaching binaries. There is always a third, and usually a fourth, lurking perhaps unseen.
Black
White
Gray
Shades of Gray
All things mirror the universal structure. There are things. There are things we can sense. There are the things we do involuntarily. There is the answer to the question: why is there something instead of nothing?
Obviously, even this falls in on itself when we begin to see that the things we can sense have a parallel—or perhaps a perpendicular—that runs through the answer to the question when we “feel” one way or another about an idea.
An atom: protons, neutrons, electrons, and the cloud that hides the electrons and their movements… begging the question and subsequent un-answer.
If you’re gone for too long, when you come back you sometimes think it would’ve been better to have just stayed gone forever.
But then you get to hang out with your nephews, you get to spend time with the family that has always been there for you, and you get to spend most of your days doing what you feel like you need to do, the decision becomes a markedly more difficult one, doesn’t it?
It’s easier to be less disappointing when being it somewhere far away.
Or is it that I need my life to be my own, free from the tyranny and rancor of the bulk of humanity. It is difficult to know what to want, but that’s the most fruitful aspect of the human experience. It is inside those questions of what things are coming to, and being able to see them honestly, recite them faithfully, and understand them truthfully that we begin to watch the flower of our humanity take root. And when once taken root, the tendency for most plants—be they of the spiritual or physical nature—is toward growth.
Nurture the questions of existence. Breathe in the death you accept and exhale it as the possibilities of what the world could be.
Sometimes making words is like making love,
One makes meaning in the physical/mental/psychological
And the other the mental/psychological/spiritual
Realms.

A Winter Mind's A-Wandering

I curse time’s non-existence.
That’s a helluva first thought, isn’t it?
It is, at once, challenging, thought-provoking and a statement that comes off like a question. That’s what I can do. That’s about the only thing I think I’m even slightly good at, but a well-constructed sentence, carrying heft and meaning, has very little place in our world any more.
It makes me want to cry. As I wander through my dealings with the English language on a daily basis, I encounter—as one would expect—egregious liberties being taken with it. That would probably be the most politically correct way I could say the thought in my head. However, that particular version would probably not be thought too much of in some circles of society, and it would be rendered otherwise—or at least this might be how it’s registered in the listener’s head: They’s some dumb muthafuckers out there. The reality is, as usual, sitting somewhere between the two extremes.
Personally, I am hyper-sensitive to language. When language is being used in a way other than that to which it ought (verb tenses and the like), my ears immediately perk up. What I’m not doing, by any stretch of the imagination, is making some kind of snap judgment about a person based on their relationship to language; however, what I am doing is becoming aware that there is something unique in the language of my interlocutor. It could be there for a variety of reasons. As you speak over periods of time, you can gather details about whether this is ignorance (having never been taught it), a learned behavior from some external stimuli, or if it is, in fact, stupidity.
It would probably be accurate to say that in all of my experiences with this sort of thing, stupidity has almost never been the root.
The failure is usually in the past. As a matter of fact, I hereby declare that every failure is in the past. Can you imagine a future failure? That’s exactly the point: you’d have to imagine it. The fact of failure is simply that it exists only in the past tense. So, here we encounter the fact that any present misuse of the language has its root in the past. Well, looky here, son: the key to the door of the past simultaneously unlocks the door of confusion—or, otherwise: reflection, refraction, and refucktion.
So, when I hear people flagrantly abusing their own language, as if it were nothing to them, I grin and bear it. It ain’t their fault. They’s jest doin’ what thur pappy taught ‘em.
But all that being said, I fear for the future of the United States of America.
When a county’s people are so comatose from all the drugs and sitcoms and booze that they can get their hands on, they can’t see spectrums of importance very clearly.
There I go, once again professing to have some kind of insight into the things of importance. In reality, the only things I know for sure are related to my experience and my understanding of certain concepts. My understanding.
I could say to you that sometimes one of the only things that higher education teaches you is that getting ahead in this world isn’t worth it—especially if you’re an earnest student of the arts.
I could say to you that money is imaginary and carries only the weight of metaphor—which I’ll grant you is pretty epic, but you’ll pull out a dollar and ask me why something that is constantly unstable can’t be real?
Which will make me think.
When was the last time anybody thought about how unstable the human person is? From the thoughts that occur to us at any given time to the dead skin that is constantly falling off our bodies to the emotions that rock us to the core one moment and leave us indifferent the next: nothing that is alive is ever stationary.
But, then that would mean that money is alive.
Consider the implications of that for just a moment.
What we might be approaching is something like the definition of what it means to be alive.
If something is alive, then it only follows that it should share at least one other characteristic of other things that are alive. It is possible to say that even rocks are alive—especially at a cellular level. What, then, could all living things possibly have in common?
It just might be that they are all constantly in involuntary activity. That’s the cellular structure. At the cellular level, everything is moving. You could even go farther and say that at the atomic level this idea is still applicable.
This definition might, at first, seem too broad, but what if it isn’t broad enough?
The universe is constantly in involuntary motion, isn’t it?
Is the universe alive?
If the universe is alive, what are the implications?
If history has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is that nothing that lives can’t die. All things that are alive will eventually die. Our sun, our earth, our solar system, our galaxy and, yes, even our universe will eventually stop being alive. All you have to do to understand this concept is think about the average lifespan of a housefly (or some such critter) and think about its concept of time. Comparatively, every single day in the life of a housefly is roughly equivalent to 2-3 years of a human life. One day = three years. One day = One thousand days (give or take). Apply this same concept to the idea of us, our solar system, etc, and you’ll begin to see how time ripples out over the cosmos—making the end of it something beyond comprehension but, realistically, well outside of the realm of possibility within the span of human existence (ALL of human existence).
This could possibly be interpreted as a negative situation. One might possibly pose the question: “where then is our importance?” Our importance in the place of the universe is that we have been given the precious opportunity to experience it. Therefore, it becomes our responsibility, our duty, and our obligation to explore it and experience it as much as is possible. The depths of the reality and un-reality of the human experience are the as-yet unplumbed depths of possibility.
“As-yet unplumbed? Are you kidding? Look at what we’ve accomplished!”
And the response is: “It is truly astounding. Indeed, it is one of the greatest marvels of human endeavor that this thing sits here before me, and I acknowledge that; however, I can’t help but think about how limited the things of this earth are. They work nowhere else.
Perhaps the soul is like that as well. Perhaps if we were to manage to travel to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and meet the people there, it wouldn’t matter how different we were, they would’ve by now come to the same conclusions that the soul offers: care genuinely about understanding and being understood, with patience and practice most things suddenly become possible, and that honesty, faithfulness and truthfulness are the keys to establishing and maintaining relationships. Or, as an alternate possibility, they’d annihilate us with their annihilat-a-ma-tron because we’re different and from somewhere else. Either is as likely it would seem.

Consider the Turtle

Or don’t. It doesn’t really matter to me. Seriously. When I think about the things that are worthy of consideration, whether or not you consider the turtle doesn’t even make it on the top 500. But I’m beginning to think that this perspective is not in keeping with the public at large.
Let’s be honest. There are a helluva lot of people out their giving a helluva lot of attention and care to some super serious horse shit.
Bugger ‘em.
Relax, bro. You can’t really help it that you got involved in this situation, now do what’s right and get out.
Simple as.
But why does it seem like we want that kind of thing going on in the first place? It is as if people put themselves in these situations deliberately—if only to have something interesting to talk about.
My most extreme apologies if I don’t give a flying fuck about who’s fucking who. Excuse me if the goings on of Ryan Reynolds or Brad Pitt or one of the new ones that I’m not even aware of don’t have any bearing WHATSOEVER on my existence. Reading about other people’s shitty or glorious lives does nothing for me unless it’s surrounded by a few hundred pages so I can know EVERYTHING—or at least everything I’m supposed to know. This dealing in portions from parties to create a feast always winds up tasting foul.
I am distrustful of law because it deals with types and not individual instances. In higher courts you cite court precedent, but as soon as you do you are saying, “This is the same type of thing.” Nothing is ever the same. Nothing.
On the other hand, it is only through the proceedings of the trial that we can all attempt a kind of more-appropriate judgment.
If you dig too deeply into the facts, the facts will overwhelm you. If you don’t dig deep enough, they all begin to look the same.
What I’m saying is precisely the opposite of the unintended intentionality that you’ve recently been reading so much about.
Consulting slowly now the last remaining brain cells bent on creation, what do we find but that which can be created can create
or destroy and that which can be destroyed can be created or destroyed.
Does that mean we’re all creators and destroyers?
Yes.
Yes, it does.
There once was a man named Roderick Jason Taffeta. Rodi, as his sister called him, was consistently careful.
Careful to jump out of airplanes only when the proper altitude had been reached. Careful to ensure that the bungee cable had been checked thoroughly before dropping 143 meters and screaming for what seemed like ever. Careful to pack exactly two days of food and no map for the three day hike in the mountains. Careful to experience as much as he could as safely as he could.
“Give recklessness a go!” came the din.
“No.”
“Once?!?!”
“I’ll do just about anything once, if it seems to be worth it… which only a vast array of experiences can tell you.”
“You are a strange sort of fellow… saying nothing and something simultaneously.”
“Thirsting I see.”
“Right…”
“We got hotdogs and American cheese on slices of bread with Mac and Cheese for dinner Rodi,” called his sister from somewhere in the distance, “come on down.”
Awesome, he thought to himself… Awesome to the max…

Dear Fates~

I am setting out, embarking as it were, on a new chapter—perhaps a new book—in my existence, and I suppose that this little epistolary communiqué is meant to be a plea. May the transition not be too easy, but neither make it too hard. May it be not unendurable at the very least, and endurable at the most.
You see, I’m especially susceptible to the visceral kinds of emotions and feelings that one encounters when doing what I am going to do, and there is a part of me that is almost excessively worried about what it going to happen to my brain when it begins to settle into a new mode of being. I’ve done it before, you know, and it’s something like a metaphysical hemorrhaging that happens: the spirit opens up, gushes forth, and it is everything a body can do to keep it basically enclosed. By this I mean that particular kind of gushing that is unbecoming of a spirit and makes the body and the mind vulnerable to all kinds of attacks. The gushing of the spirit in goodwill and kindness towards other human beings is downright beautiful, but this particular kind of gushing is dangerous. When the blood is gushing into the heart to be pumped into the lungs, where it is filled with oxygen, then gushed back into the heart and then sent to the extremities of the body where it nourishes needs, we have good gushing. When the skin has been ruptured due to some external force or implement, and blood is gushing out of the body, there is a distinct sense of peril.
Basically, I’m scared. Should we be afraid, at least a little bit, of the people we love? I think so. Love exists in at least two realms, and it has taken me a long time to come to terms with this: the love we share and the love we keep for ourselves. The love we share is combination love. When we love each other, when we say that we love our relationship it is a particular kind of love. When I say that I love ____. That is my love. That person cannot take away that love from me, so long as I choose to hold onto it. The love that is a combination of loves can be ripped asunder as soon as one person steps away from the equation. After all, if there is only one person in a love relationship, in what sense is there a relationship.
Family, being whatever it is, is in the unique situation that it manages to cross those two boundaries. Your immediate family cannot, technically, be ripped asunder. Your father is the man who impregnated your mother, and your siblings are those who were a further part of that union. You can say, “You’re not my father,” but that doesn’t make it any less true that your father is in fact your father. That’s family: even verbally disowned is still blood related. Divorce or disowning is the ending of the first kind of love, but the second kind of love remains as long as we hang onto it.
Is that romantic? That’s what I’m dealing with here. Do you see how it’s dangerous for me? Do you see why I need your help?
I’ve been gone so long. A decade IS a long time, isn’t it? I know that from the high point of knowledge of history, ten years is not a very long time, but on the scale of a human life, and during the formative years especially, a decade can be forever.
I know that all I can do is be the me that I’ve become, and believe me that’s what I plan to do, but I’m just hoping (against hope) and praying (to whoever/whatever might hear me) that what I have become is worthy of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. You have been so good to me already, and it is my ardent desire that the gifts I have been granted, the possibilities I have ridden, and the events of my existence have carved out of the marble block of me a suitable character.
All that being said, I’ll cut you a deal… if you even make deals. I will do my best to continue on the path to becoming the best me that I can be if you continue to offer me the blessings you have so consistently offered and the lessons you have so unswervingly, parentally taught me. The balance I feel in my life is thoroughgoing. For every opportunity I have taken, it feels as though an equal effort to experience that opportunity fully has followed, and I only hope that I am not mistaken in this. So, if I continue to work hard to improve myself: mind, body and soul, will your lot continue to reward me when you see fit and teach me when necessary?
Let my fear be a sign unto your greatness. I don’t know your official title (the title of this piece is simply perfunctory and expedient), and I can’t say that you go by the same name everywhere, but I am quite certain that you are, whatever that may mean. And I will take that old mystic fallacy of the drug culture with me to the end of my days, and perhaps beyond, but there must be somebody tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
I feel you when lost in the music in my guitar.
I feel you in the words that issue from my fingers.
I feel you in the motion of the seasons.
I feel you are everything.
I feel you might be composed of nothingness.
I am afraid of you.
I do love you.
I go to meet you wherever you are.
I am in perpetual awe,
and I think you appreciate that more than anything.
Peace
Love &
Gonzo
Eli
p.s. If it’s not too much trouble, could you find it in your infiniteness to direct my course to people I can help to grow and people who can help me to grow.

Work

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily. Labor omnia vincit improbus.”

“When ascetics stay in one place for a long time,
they begin to languish, stuck in a mire of sloth and intertia.”


“There is no royal road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement of any valuable art.”

People who come up to me after playing a show somewhere often say that they too want to learn the guitar, and, usually, that they even tried, but they gave it up for one reason or another. Anybody that asks me for a free lesson or two, gets them almost immediately because they actually take no time whatsoever to learn:

1) Play every day: the more the better. If you can only play for 30 minutes, that’s fine, but if you can play for two hours, that’s better. Half of playing guitar is the ability for your fingers to hold down the strings for a long time, and if you don’t play every day the muscles in your fingers atrophy. Nobody thinks about finger muscles.

2) Give it time. Perhaps in 6 years of steady playing, you will be competent. Even if you’re playing it as a hobby for thirty minutes every day, you will be decent enough in a few years. If you’re really serious and play two hours every day, sure, that time will probably reduce, but if after one year you can play a C and a G chord really, really well, you probably don’t understand how far you’ve come…

Most things in this life could probably be boiled down to these two little rules: practice and be patient. As a matter of fact, I personally guarantee that absolutely anybody can learn absolutely any skill with enough practice and patience. Admittedly, we’re dealing in the world of the physical here. By that I mean it might not be possible for anybody to learn the details of string theory or quantum mechanics or neo-materialist literary theories, but if somebody wants to learn how to bake, having had no previous experience with flour or ovens or cutting in butter or anything, with enough time and enough practice, they will eventually be able to bake about anything you could want.
As a matter of fact, I would say that anybody CAN learn about quantum mechanics or string theory or anything else if they are determined to. It might take twenty years of daily effort, but if they want it badly enough, they will get there.
Therein lies the nut, though. Desire is something that we generally consider to be the major player in the world of the physical. I want your body. You want to kiss me. I want to eat delicious food. I want to see something beautiful. I want to learn how to play the guitar. I want to learn to bake. What gets lost in the melee of growth and development that happens as a result of desire transmuted into effort for the acquisition of the desired object(ive) is that desire is mental. What happens when you learn something new or put effort into getting something? The mind expands. The mental world that you have developed for yourself grows in conjunction with the skill or effort required to possess the object petit a.
Sometimes what we think we want has nothing to do with what we really want, and the only possible remedy for such a situation is the attempted acquisition of what we think we want, because only then will we be able to have the truth of our desires.
Oh, let them talk about the constant motion of desire and the inability to ever have what we want, should we decide against ever attempting to acquire our desires, the human experience seems to get lost. Perhaps it is that we have become too accustomed to our inability to have what we desire:
--Beautiful celebrity bodies being paraded on every channel
--Unobtainable automobiles
--Skills obtainable but requiring a lot of effort
--Advertisements for things not everybody can afford
Perhaps we try for a while. We go to the gym. We save up every month. We practice for a while. We play the lottery. But years of failure have taught us all that we can’t get most of the things we desire, so what’s the point in trying?
We are all ascetics. When we languish in our mires of sloth and inertia, our resolve grows weak, and when once resolve is weakened, the dam might as well have already been breached.

All Things Come to an

end, but not all things get finished… or at any rate finished in the way that we want them to be. It’s funny how instructive our middle school years can be in this arena. Thinking back on timed group projects where the winners were the first people to completely finish their project, I remember the dejection of looking at an unfinished project when the time came to an end.
On the other hand, it also seems as if when a things finishing time and ending time coincide there is a moment of something-or-other. It’s that moment when you look around and see that everything is as best as it could be for the moment, and something like a touch of pride comes over you for having done what you set out to do in the allotted amount of time.
My time in Korea is coming to an end. In just over a month I will board a plane and return to the land of my birth, to the land of pounds and inches (good-bye the simplicity of a system based on tens), to a land of expansive emptiness and massive cities (although Seoul puts them all to shame in terms of mass), to the land of freedom, and to the land of beer that’s worth drinking.
I think part of why I am okay with leaving Korea now is that I have finished my project: a book reflecting the culture of Korea (emphasis on reflection), noting personal adventures, and full of cogitations on what it means to be a human being in general.
Freedom comes up frequently in these thought-sessions, and it occurs to me that freedom is a concept that exists in the two worlds of existence: physical and mental.
In the physical realm, it is usually pretty easy to tell if you have freedom: are you confined to move in a small space, do you wear shackles, or do you live behind a locked door that you didn’t lock. On a larger scale, there are the geographical confines of the country in which you live and the reality that other countries are different: language, culture, values, morals, etc. It’s amazing how much of a factor fear plays in the reality of freedom. I find that a lot of Americans have the attitude that there is probably no better place to live in the world than America, so why should anybody ever leave. From a psychological standpoint, I believe it’s that they fear their paper towers might be torn down from the reality of another country being… better than America. On the other hand, Koreans aren’t afraid of that. Most of them don’t like Korea and want to go somewhere else, but they don’t because there aren’t many places where speaking Korean is going to get you very far… so they learn English. Physically confined, whether from an institutional or geographic sense, is usually uncomfortable for the other side.
Freedom of thought is an incredible thing. The ability to have a revolution of the mind is perhaps the greatest freedom in the world, and it must be owned that western people are generally the people that have this characteristic. From an early age, we learn that it is entirely possible to defy our parents. We say, “No!!” we bear our punishment, and we learn that it will be just fine—and perhaps all of this because it’s what we see all over the culture (especially in the media). This one characteristic of Western thought carries itself through to moe in the adult manifestation of our ability to change our mind and be independent. Perhaps that’s what we don’t understand when we are children, but the defiance that we pay for is exacted from us in the future as well with the independence we must all bear. On the other hand, Korea is a country where when father or mother says you “should” do something, it’s the same as saying you “must” do something. What seems like a hint or a nudge in America is an edict in Korea, and you can probably guess what an order feels like to a Korean. If mommy or daddy says you must do something, there is really no not doing it. What they get from it, though, is essentially a lifetime of dependable dependence. They’ll live with mom and dad until they get married, and mom and dad will determine if the boy is worthwhile or not—usually depending on how much money the boy has and what prospects he has for the future.
At any rate, my time being associated with these cultural differences is coming to an end, and a whole new period of being culturally different from the place I am is going to begin. I am afraid of this particular ending.
I’m afraid because it feels finished. I’m afraid because I have changed so much. I’m afraid because I plan to be in a place that I haven’t been, steadily, for ten years. I’m afraid I might like it. I’m afraid I will find it odious.
Sometimes beginnings are far more terrifying than endings.
What I have gotten used to, and what is coming to an end, is simply (yet complicatedly) this: everything I now know is just a little different. Did you catch the most important word in that sentence? EVERYTHING. Every single thing is just a little bit different than what I used to know, and now everything I’m used to is tinged with the dust of being just slightly different. Everything from McDonald’s special sauce to the grocery store experience to the pub experience to the restaurant experience to the food experience (which is sometimes VERY different) to walking down the street is different. There is nothing like seeing big groups of Koreans standing on opposite corners of a vacant street and not daring to cross because the sign is telling them not to… I always think that my mighty western ability to think logically tells me that there is no danger, so I can probably run across. Also, I know that’s called jaywalking, but tell me the last time you saw somebody get a ticket for jaywalking… much less a foreigner on a neighborhood street in Suwon, South Korea.
It’s all ending. The parts that remain unfinished are simply my relations with the people I have met here. The people I’ve become acquainted with are very special to me. It can be difficult to make lasting friendships here (look up Aristotle’s three types of friends) and this is because there is that nagging, lingering reality in the back of your head that reminds you of the ending of your time here. Generally speaking, you can come away every year with about two or three truly good friends. The hundreds of others that you wind up meeting all fall to the wayside eventually—for me at least. Once again, the physical aspect of the friendship is coming to an end, but the mental aspect endures until such time as the physical can be re-ignited.
All endings are beginnings, but not all finishes are. When you finish a race, you don’t immediately begin another race. However, at the end of the race, you begin a period of not running. I’m not sure if my logic is spot on in this aspect, but I think it’s something like all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Finishes and endings are certainly related, but why do movies not end with the words: The Finish. Even the French “fin” or the Italian “fine” that comes at the end of movies translates to “end.” What is their relationship? Finishes, it seems to me, are those brief periods of elation or dejection that come from small victories or defeats on the way to the end. Life will end, and whether the bulk of your experience comes on the side of defeat or victory, remember that what’s important is growth, learning, and the ability to free the mind from dangerous constraints while developing it into a muscle for good.

Appypollylogies

This is once again bound to be more of a journal entry instead of a serious inquiry into the state of the human character, but perhaps there is something inside the things we do that helps us get a glimpse of what we are.
I’ve been on vacation for a week. It all started last Monday. We just had to get through Monday, and then we were all free for a week—Korean Thanksgiving… thank you for falling smack in the middle of the week this years instead of on the weekend like last year. So, as was usual, I made some tentative plans: off to the mountains on Tuesday, in the mountains on Wednesday, back home Thursday, pub quiz Thursday night, Friday – friend’s going away party, on Saturday my band was making its debut, and Sunday was a day devoted to time well spent with an important person in my life—my intimate friend.
But Monday came first, and Monday morning I found that I needed to clean my apartment because I was hosting a small gathering that night. This took up most of my morning. Work is six and a half hours of teaching small children the intricacies, delicacies and preposterousness of the English language. Then, the gathering began with one. Then, there were two, and then our party was complete with four, and we decided to eat grilled pig intestine and drink perhaps too much. After much, much, soju, beer, and bokbunja, it was time for pool and the continuation of the imbibing of quantities of the aforementioned. Once again… vacation. Celebrate now, because to wait for even a moment puts you in danger of regret.
Tuesday morning was rapid packing for going into the mountains. It was easier packing than usual because we didn’t plan to rough-it as much as we could have—by “we” I mean myself and my Chinese best friend: just a couple of nights camping but not having to cook. More expensive, but we were in celebration mode as it may or may not be one of the last times we ever see each other.
Unfortunately, when we arrived in the city that was the gateway to the mountains, there was one of those… what’re they called… typhoons. That’s the one. Camping became a last resort very quickly. So, we took a bus to the base of the mountain range where there was a small village and stepped into a hotel and out of the incessant rain: 30 dollars for a floor with pads, a TV, a fridge and a bathroom. Grand. I have an idea…
Because this room had no beds, it turned out that it was the perfect size to pitch our two individual tents and have our camping experience right in the motel.
First, we’d eat and get a little tipsy, because there is nothing like putting up a tent when the odds are most against you.
The night ended on a jocund note: the pure enjoyment of good company, good food, good drinks, and the knowledge that this moment is significant.
Seoraksan National Park in South Korea’s Gangwon-do has had a very special place in my heart for a long time. The first time I went there, I went with a friend, and we managed to find perhaps the most difficult hiking experience in Korea. The second time I went, I once again went with a friend to tackle the beast again and test it and myself; however, we were turned away because of lingering snow on the top which we were not prepared for. The third time I went, I went alone, and conquered that trail with something like aplomb, and including a brief dip in the river along which I hiked. This was my fourth time in the park, and for the first time, because of some safety concerns involving the slippery nature of the large rocks Korea uses to create their trails, it was time to stay at the base of the park and do all those things that most people usually do when they go to the park.
The rain ended in the morning, and we woke up prepared. There were waterfalls to see. Just past the entrance gate to the park, there is a left hand turn that leads to a series of waterfalls which terminates in something called The Rain Dragon Waterfall. It had rained heavily for almost 24 straight hours. The streams were swollen and the river was heaving. Essentially, somebody very big had seen that this series of waterfalls actually resembled an entire dragon: smaller falls all the way up, curving, jumping, diving, leaping, powerful falls in themselves, to a powerful fall that became a nexus point for the entire stream. All the water that went down to the valley came from this point. Magic.
Then we took the cable car to the top of a mountain where, with a little rock climbing, you could literally stand on a rock that you had no doubt was the exact tippy top of this mountain, and the expansive views were definitely incredible—but I’ll contend that when you walk all the way up there it seems even more moving. We ate some stuffed squid and took a little nature walk for a couple of hours, left the park feeling how powerful the sight/smell/touch/taste/feel of nature could be, had some more stuffed squid and beef stew, and then we went camping.
It isn’t quite fall in Korea. It’s just around the corner, and it usually lasts for a week, but every once in a while, mother nature likes to send previews of what lies in the future, and after a typhoon seemed like the perfect time: it froze. We froze. For the first time in almost 6 months, I believe that it was actually 0 degrees celcius.
Thursday was about the trip home. When I got home, I got a surprise visit from the girl I’ve been seeing, and, after a couple of hours, as I was putting her on the bus home I got a reminder about the pub quiz happening that night. “I’ll be there man.”
Fortunately, we took a cab—it’s an hour and a half walk, but I was tired. Unfortunately, we lost the pub quiz. Unfortunately, we decided to walk home. When I arrived at home, I literally fell on my bed, not feeling well, and having an uncomfortable presentiment about the following days.
I woke up Friday, or rather I should say I finally got out of bed at 7pm. The truth is that I woke up at 8:30am to vomit, and spent the rest of the day not doing anything or talking to anybody, because I sounded like Tom Waits with strep—band performance tomorrow… I’m the lead singer…
It’s always strange to watch someone go away from Korea. You know they all eventually will, but you never get over the sense that your time here is transitory, your days here ARE numbered, and that very soon it will be you that’s the one leaving. At any rate we looted our friends apartment after a night of debauchery—a strange, soothing, mollifying process that lets you know they’re gone and pacifies you with things you need but haven’t been about to acquire.
Saturday consisted of 18 cups of tea, cold medicine, and rest—not to mention loads of emails to the band members about the probability that our show might not happen then deciding that it’s going to happen no matter what. It happened. It was our debut. Considering that it was our first ever performance, that we practice once a week (sometimes 2, sometimes 0), and that I still sounded like Tom Waits with strep, it went over pretty well. At the very least, we got a lot of sycophantic praise that we stuffed into our caps and walked away with. And we did walk away, too… 45 minutes away to a chicken and pizza restaurant. Booze kept me going, and when I got home, it ensured that sleep was almost immediate.
Sunday was a day devoted to the girl I’ve been seeing, but I hadn’t unpacked from Seoraksan, I hadn’t done any cleaning in almost a week, the dishes were still piled up from the last two days’ extended couch stay, and I had promised to make her food—the ingredients of which were absent from my apartment. So, I did what needed doing: dragged myself out of bed, forced myself to ignore that my body felt like it had been through a meat grinder, went to the supermarket, cleaned my apartment, and started cooking. Galbi jjim, look it up, it’s delicious, and it uses grated pear in its sauce.
Essentially, it was another day in bed… essentially.
She left at 8pm. At 10:30 I was asleep. I woke up at 10:30 this morning and played guitar for 2.5 hours until I had to go to work.
That’s it. That’s the end of another week…

I am

exhausted.
But that’s how I like to be.
I have been so active in the course of the last couple of weeks that I am finding it difficult to function right now. What I need is something like fourteen hours of uninterrupted sleep in a cool room with no thoughts of doing anything other than sleeping. That’s what I plan to do, too.
But I’ve performed twice in three days, been heroically drunk, done things that a good boyfriend ought to do, and I am the proud owner of a bronze medal bearing the mark of a bodybuilding competition in which I took part in the bench press competition.
I think it’s entirely possible that drinking beer from noon until 2am the night before the competition seriously affected my performance, and I actually feel pretty bad about the whole thing because the team that took second place earned that spot by virtue of the fact that they did one more rep than my team.
Jam session
Open mic host
Going away party
Pool hall adventure
Outdoor music and beer festival
Bench Press Contest/Open Mic
Now I’m at work. It’s not that I don’t like work, but I’m certainly not that fond of it that I want to be there while simultaneously being completely exhausted. It’ll be fine.
Unrelated note: I think that one thing Asian animation has going for it is that it does still no how to make a body wait for the action. It understands how to build tension by making you wait for the smoke to clear, and, what’s more, they’ve even managed to make so many of these similar situations that a body is still not sure if the maneuver just pulled off will be successful or an utter failure. Sometimes the smoke clears and it’s all over. Sometimes the smoke clears, and it’s just beginning. That makes for a pretty decent life metaphor, doesn’t it? I’m waiting for the smoke to clear and I’m not sure if what I’ve done here will have been successful or fruitless.)
I have 9 weeks left in Korea—that’s the outside figure. The inside figure is six weeks. These facts are playing wild tricks on my mind. You see, I’ve gotten so used to being in Korea and on my own that it’s difficult to imagine how I will adjust to being in a place where people understand not only my language—well, for the most part—but also the way my mind works.
What’ll it be like to take the spirit that I have developed for adventure in Korea and turn it toward my homeland: every day is an adventure here, and I will desperately attempt to keep that same frame of mind for the return home.
For example, the other night I was busking in Seoul near Gangnam station, when a group of foreigners came up to where me and my friend had set up shop and started talking to us about things and stuff. It turns out that they were also from Suwon and just happened to be visiting Seoul. Two of them had been in country for two weeks and were still wild with the excitement and newness of things. Well, we had stuffed our earnings into a backpack and decided to head home. When we got to the bus stop, we realized that we didn’t have the bag. We trooped back to our home base and noticed that the bag was gone. We assumed/hoped/prayed that the people we’d just met had picked it up, but as none of them had phones, and only one of them asked for an email address, it was still a bit touch and go. Anyhow, we consoled ourselves that all we lost was money, some extra clothes, and a small day pack… in other words, nothing too important.
The next day I was having dinner with my girlfriend when I received a phone call from a friend of mine who had received a phone call from a friend of his saying that he had a backpack that belonged to a certain busker. Ah, the way the universe moves is sometimes extremely intriguing. At any rate, that which was lost on Saturday was returned on Sunday, money and clothes in tact. As a bonus to the story, the guy who picked up the bag (and you’d better believe I treated him to a few beers for the effort) is also a pianist, and it has been mentioned that the band I am currently fronting could use a good keys player… I’ve invited him to our practice. He does also play the saxophone, which could be interesting.
What kind of equivalent story will there be when I wander back through the world of the United States of America. Could I, like I did at the music festival, walk up to the organizer, say, “Could I play a few songs?” and wind up as one of the performers? Could I win 3rd place at a weightlifting competition? Could I find out how small the world is meeting good ‘ol Midwestern boys while busking and having it turn out that they are all somewhat musically inclined? What are the chances?
If I remember correctly from two years ago, it is sometimes hard to meet people attempting. It can be somewhat difficult to encounter people that are actively seeking out newness and freshness and coincidence and beauty and truth and going and doing and being. What I seem to remember is complacency and apathy and an entire generation of people that forgot about Rage Against the Machine and are currently growing fat and illusioned and sinking into the illusion and loving it. Plato’s image of people staring at the shadows on the wall and believing that the shadows are the things themselves rings in my ears when I see the vapid reality of modern culture all over the world. If you’re not going to attempt to see the objects for themselves at least take the time to try to find the light source.
Damnation, I do get preachy sometimes, but forgive me for being invested.
So, perhaps I have just answered some of my own questions. I have a unique “in” to the generation I’m talking about. The children of this country are being daily corrupted by an educational system that is focused on attempting to gain funding for things they’re not even sure about: when the business of education becomes the business of making money the business of educating slowly moves down the rungs of importance. The older generations are too set in their ways. It is the generation of affectable human beings between University and their mid-thirties to forties that hold the keys to the future of this country and whether or not we will become a nation of dunces or a nation of people committed to understanding the reality of things. Are we ready to take up the struggle? My plan is to put down in print the reality of things and attempt to wake up the slumbering juggernaut of the energy of a generation with so much power it has been purposefully lulled to sleep by the powers of the people that that energy would slaughter. Words should be our weapons. Our battlefield is the field of the mind. When that’s been won, the physical dominoes fall into place. This blog was all over the place… I’m not sorry…

My social calendar is full

and I hate it. I’m essentially a reclusive ascetic content to spend my days and my time in the comfortable research of what it means to be a human. Every so often, however, it crops up in my research—and in my existence in general—that part of being human is all wrapped in being a part of humanity: the community aspect. Roughly, I am engaged to be functioning in society (as opposed to the gentle autocracy I wield over myself in my own residence) every evening for the next week.
These times are always important for me, and they remind me of how lucky I am that have the opportunity during the other times of my life to pursue those things which seem to fulfill me most fully: study and practice. However, study without application and practice without the game are exercises in masturbation. So it is that these moments of putting what I’ve been studying and practicing have special meaning for me.
I hate the fact that I have to get myself away from practice, but practice is very safe. If you screw something up, nobody’s watching you and quietly saying to themselves (and sometimes yelling loudly): “You suck.” That’s the beauty of practice. It’s the quiet advancement of the self in whatever area you are attempting to improve; however, it is in the game that what you have been practicing for so long really makes itself known.
Okay, it has just occurred to me that what I am differentiating between when I say study and practice is precisely what Plato is always on about: the visible versus the intelligible realm. When I talk about study, it is the reading that takes up some of my time every single day of my life. Whether it be a novel, an academic work, or language acquisition book, the thing I am exercising is my intelligence. When I talk about practice, it is the physical labor involved in acquiring any kind of skill. So, my practice is going to the gym three times a week, playing guitar/singing, and walking.
This is kind of strange, but my intelligible realm and my physical realm seem to have awkward counterbalances… damnit, I’m looking at myself through a strange lens… I would say that walking and language acquisition make up a duo, going to the gym and reading a novel are a duo, and playing music and reading academia are a duo.
When I go walking, I tend to do so at a particular pace and with the express purpose of being in the midst of a walk. Every time you go walking, you can find something new. Oh, that restaurant looks awesome, I’ll have to come back here. Oh, that’s where the library is. You’re picking up the language of the place where you are. The language of where everything is. You’re drawing a map inside your brain by engaging with the physical reality of the thing. This is what the acquisition of language does. Language is the drawing of maps with the mind toward meaning. When you “get the lay of the land” by actually traversing the land in question, this can be likened to getting the lay of the land of language: the more you traverse it, the more you feel comfortable with it. The bulk populace: temperance/consciousness
Going to the gym is something that happens three times a week, and it’s basically always the same. It’s comfortable. I know what I’m going to do. I know how it’s going to feel. I know that it is going to require some effort, but I know that kind of effort all too well—thanks to years and years of practice at it. In short, it’s become something that is basically just a part of my existence. Having spent the last ten years of my life almost insatiably reading novels—for pleasure or for academic purposes, my life would feel naked if it was void of a novel to read. In short, reading novels is comfortable, I know how it’s to be done, I know how it’s going to feel (especially if it’s a good novel—Proust was an exception (I’ve never felt anything like that from a novel)), I know that it will require some effort (or, at least, it should), and I know that effort all too well. The auxiliaries: courage/the body
The practice of music and the study of academia are paired because of the strenuousness of the activities. They require more effort than the others because this is the active attempt to learn something, to change the way I think about myself and the world at large. Music has the special, magical affect of being effective to the mind as it watches harmonies and melodies fall into place. It is basically sensory practice: it has a look, a feel, a sound, a touch, and (in some cases) you can almost taste it when it’s done well—perhaps that’s why we call some music tasteful and others disgusting. Reading scholarly works performs the same actions for the intelligible realms. It helps the mind see more clearly, feel more appropriately, hear what people are saying more thoroughly, touch the inner recesses of the self, and taste what it means to be human. The guardians: wisdom/sub-conscious
It occurred to me (and Gad how I love how writing does this) that writing pervades them all. They are all doing their jobs, and writing is somehow related to all of them. Walking is one of my greatest sources for writing fodder, and one constantly learns about themselves at the gym (if they are paying attention), which means words to be made. Novels are chock full of meaning that needs to be struggled with, and there is nobody out there who would deny that acquiring a second language doesn’t affect the way we write and what we write about: we are language. Finally, the deepest sources of writing whathaveyou comes from the strenuous exercises of practicing music and studying scholastically. The community: morality/spirit
I am just a writer who is doing the job that I’m most fit to do, and it is with this in mind that I bear the labor of pulling myself away from my practice and study in order to gain the knowledge that comes from the combination of theory (that which results from practice and study) with experience. I will bear the inanity and mundanity of a society that has moved away from a desire to truly know what it means to be human and finds itself floundering in a world of trivialities involving which celebrity is wearing what designer and wondering what it must feel like to be a millionaire. I will taste the fruits of the lifestyle I’m battling against in just the same way a flu shot works: a bit of the infection so the body knows what it is fighting against; and I will breathe the air of a freedom that looks good on the outside, but bears inside itself the seed of slavery that will one day ripen. To be the slave of a slave:
Brannigan: I'm de-promoting you, soldier. Kiff, what's the most humiliating job there is?
Kif Kroker: Being your assistant.
Captain Zapp Brannigan: Wrong. Being *your* assistant.

Teacher and Student

These two labels seem to follow me around and lurk in all the corners of my world. In this moment I’m a student, and fifteen minutes later I’m playing the role of teacher. Even in the sub-conscious realm that writing comes from, it becomes apparent how I see myself:
“I’m a student.”
Vs.
“I’m playing the role of teacher.”
I don’t feel worthy of the title of teacher. To be a teacher is an incredibly important job. It means that the lives of young people are in your hands. I am absolutely certain that the importance of the role of the teacher has been almost completely lost in the bulk of the civilized world—although it might be preserved somewhere in the uncivilized world (although I can’t say for sure). We’re talking about a person who, for an extended period of time, is in control of how our children are learning to think. Imagine the importance of that. Is school important? Hell Yeah! I’m afraid that both schools and teachers have been tainted with a healthy dose of economics and politics, which basically serves to render them impotent.
(In a side note: if you are interested in a world where the educational system is something else, check out “The Glass Bead Game” or it’s alternate title “Magester Ludi” or it’s German title “Das Glasperlenspiel” by Hermann Hesse. It’s… educational, and it won a Nobel Prize for a good reason.)
Being a student is one of the greatest situations you can find yourself in, and what I call “terminal students” are all over the place. I once new a guy who was just heading back to school in order to get his third Master’s Degree. Don’t get me wrong, what I’m talking about here is the fact that I absolutely love being a student, but what I have learned in the last couple of years is that there are most definitely two different kinds of students.
One of the greatest pieces of advice that was ever offered to me, was given by a college professor, and it was just as I was finishing my Master’s Degree and trying to decide whether or not I simply wanted to continue on with my PhD or do something else before jumping right back into academia. She told me that being a professor is more difficult than it looks. Apart from all the academic knowledge that you must be up on: proper ways to make your paper comply with the MLA, tidbits and factoids that you must know, metaphor analyses, and language components (she was definitely an English Lit teacher), there was the fact that so many students from so many various backgrounds walk into your office, and, in a way, it is part of your job to ensure there success somehow. This goes for all subjects and all levels of education, but it is especially true in the studies of the humanities.
With that advice in mind, I embarked on a quest to become a student of life.
Of course, the ironic part of becoming a student of life is that to do this I became a teacher in Korea, but I’m going to be very honest and say that teaching English in Korea is not the most academically intensive occupation one can do.
I have been a lot of places and done a lot of things in this life already, and I feel confident that I have experienced enough to be able to teach some people some things; however, I don’t want to simply be a teacher, I want to be THAT teacher. You know the one, right? The teacher that actually affects their students. Oh, you accept up front that you won’t be able to affect them all, or, what’s even more depressing, even most of them, but I know that I remember the name of my high school English teacher to this day—well, one of them. I don’t know how many teachers I actually had throughout my education—countless perhaps?—but I know that I only remember the names of a few of them, and I’m sure that this is the case with most people.
It is with this goal in mind that I set sail for some of the most random occupations that are available. When I tell my mother that I’m going to be a long distance semi-trailer truck driver for a while and then I’m going to be a farmer, she is—as is certainly appropriate for a mother who is concerned about the state of her offspring—*ahem, concerned. You can imagine the conversation:
“You’re wasting your education. You should be teaching not farming.” Etc.
I know that she means well, but I am getting my graduate degree in living right now, and once I have that, then I can return to the world of academia knowing that I will be well-prepared for the baggage that students will be carrying with them into my office.
Everyone’s path is different. This is the struggle that maintains the parental/progeny battle. As soon as parents understand that their children must be allowed to go their own way at some point, the sooner the world crumbles. They never will and never should accept this because they ARE the owners of years of extraordinarily valuable experience, and it is their job to be the voice of reason that their children disregard but come crawling back to—or not. They represent a path that has been taken, tried, and found acceptable. Children naturally rebel against this path. They want to find themselves, so they must move away from the teachers and be what they’re going to do, be their own teachers, and become students of the world.
Here I sit: studentteacherstudent. I learn daily from Plato and William Thackeray and the guitar and exercise and run-on sentences and inappropriate lists and my students. Meanwhile, I teach the nuances of essay writing, grammar, reading, listening, and writing to some eager and some not-so-eager young faces. Then I come home and try to learn from everything I do.
What I want most in the world is to be a conscientious student, but I find myself to be lazy sometimes.
Have you ever wondered what happens to a mind that is constantly engaged? I want to be very clear and state that engagement and entertainment exist in different realms. Because I have a Korean girlfriend at the moment, last weekend I went to see Step Up 3 in 3D, and I quickly realized that when something is visually stimulating or impressive, the story, the engagement, the challenge (which is a word that I would love to have perpetually associated with the word engagement), and the effort are not necessary. If you’ve ever seen a movie from Hollywood, you can guess the story from the first fifteen minutes.
I digress… Engage the mind and see what happens. It responds remarkably well to challenges. Remember all those people that said they wrote twenty-page papers in one night and got good grades on them. That’s the effect and power of adrenaline mingling with the brain juices. You can accomplish a helluva lot when pressed to do so, or you can accomplish nothing with a lot less effort. Something or nothing seems like a pretty simple choice to make, but effort is something else. For now, I will remain mostly student and look forward to the day when I will be able to say that I am mostly a teacher. Until then, I am always a writer.