(no subject)
Just skimmed some information about setting up the style of your lj. I would like to understand all the "special for programmers" stuff underlying the appearance of lj, and probably could if I spent a while staring at it and asking people questions and such, but the funny thing is, I don't actually care what my journal looks like at all! This is perhaps the problem that is impeding me from really putting effort into learning computer programming; I don't at the moment have any tasks to achieve with it that strike me as actually important or valuable or even pleasant, I just have this abstract desire to understand more about how computers work. But the lack of larger purpose makes me feel like I'm wasting time whenever I start playing around with programming. This seems perhaps related to larger issues I have with life, but I'm too tired to figure out how.
Something freer, something freer
these days there is love floating around in all its strange and varied forms, full of potentialities, all of it setting me on edge, not unpleasantly yet. At moments it strikes me as such a bizarre magic, how could it exist?
I...was staring at a pot of soup (where? ah yes) staring at a pot of minestrone boiling on the stove, bubbling with beans, zucchini, rice, cooking with my mother in our New York kitchen, we had chopped the vegetables. And things converged strangely in the soup, there was some thought of hallucinations that I have never had and of the intensity of flavors, and then the association of food and the erotic, and wondering if this association is present for everyone; how could it not be? Trying to remember which mouths I have fed, and what it was like. We used to pass truffles between our mouths, or bite them in half simultaneously, kissing as they divided. Whom else have I fed?
Hallucinations I have never had and never will have (unless my brain produces them on their own), because I don't trust my mind to not be one of those with a tendency towards madness, and its not safe for those minds, they say, to drug themselves to visions; but I am aware that I am someone who could appreciate the heightened perceptions, aware that I feel the blandness of things without them; yet aware also that at times that natural perceptions can be violently incredible on their own and that this will be enough: the flicker of a flame in deep darkness, flashing off the surrounding faces; the miles of air and land rolling away from the peak of the mountain you have climbed; the sharp yet painless cold of Lake Michigan in late autumn with moon sparkling in the lake and the sound of breath within your chest; the snowflakes coming towards you from an orange sky, your head tilted back, until it feels like you are flying.
Here alone in my childhood room drowning under the layers and layers of my past gathering around me in the piles of papers and journals and old artwork and stuffed animals and the novels I grew up inside of and despite all my intentions of getting everything done I end up just soaking in it all, aimlessly. And yet you, my people of my present, are with me in odds and ends: I am reading White Noise for MA and trying to find a way back to work in New Orleans because inspired by AC and learning to cook this minestrone to feed you all back at home and talking all night with A about everything we are and have been and yet the talking all night on the phone, under those same old sheets, on the phone I bought to replace the one I threw across the room when the voice on the other end made me snap; that same nausea of an exhaustion that has exhausted itself and turned into a sickly wakefulness- it brings me back to a high school era I want to forget and
stop, find something more beautiful
life, life, life!
I feel in danger of mania; I am/could be so aware of the fullness of everything; its not fair its not fair that I can't let myself experience joy fully because of the everpresent fear that its some form of madness; because I've never felt that wildly intense joy and fearlessness before without afterwards seeing that I hadn't been seeing clearly at the time; hadn't been seeing clearly, hadn't been truly myself- hadn't been a person, at least, that I could recognize as myself afterwards...
the clock is crawling on towards three am
put me to sleep, darling
(that last I typed instinctively, as if to somebody; yet there was no-one in mind, simply the desire to say it; to see who felt spoken to by it, perhaps?)
Something freer, something freer
these days there is love floating around in all its strange and varied forms, full of potentialities, all of it setting me on edge, not unpleasantly yet. At moments it strikes me as such a bizarre magic, how could it exist?
I...was staring at a pot of soup (where? ah yes) staring at a pot of minestrone boiling on the stove, bubbling with beans, zucchini, rice, cooking with my mother in our New York kitchen, we had chopped the vegetables. And things converged strangely in the soup, there was some thought of hallucinations that I have never had and of the intensity of flavors, and then the association of food and the erotic, and wondering if this association is present for everyone; how could it not be? Trying to remember which mouths I have fed, and what it was like. We used to pass truffles between our mouths, or bite them in half simultaneously, kissing as they divided. Whom else have I fed?
Hallucinations I have never had and never will have (unless my brain produces them on their own), because I don't trust my mind to not be one of those with a tendency towards madness, and its not safe for those minds, they say, to drug themselves to visions; but I am aware that I am someone who could appreciate the heightened perceptions, aware that I feel the blandness of things without them; yet aware also that at times that natural perceptions can be violently incredible on their own and that this will be enough: the flicker of a flame in deep darkness, flashing off the surrounding faces; the miles of air and land rolling away from the peak of the mountain you have climbed; the sharp yet painless cold of Lake Michigan in late autumn with moon sparkling in the lake and the sound of breath within your chest; the snowflakes coming towards you from an orange sky, your head tilted back, until it feels like you are flying.
Here alone in my childhood room drowning under the layers and layers of my past gathering around me in the piles of papers and journals and old artwork and stuffed animals and the novels I grew up inside of and despite all my intentions of getting everything done I end up just soaking in it all, aimlessly. And yet you, my people of my present, are with me in odds and ends: I am reading White Noise for MA and trying to find a way back to work in New Orleans because inspired by AC and learning to cook this minestrone to feed you all back at home and talking all night with A about everything we are and have been and yet the talking all night on the phone, under those same old sheets, on the phone I bought to replace the one I threw across the room when the voice on the other end made me snap; that same nausea of an exhaustion that has exhausted itself and turned into a sickly wakefulness- it brings me back to a high school era I want to forget and
stop, find something more beautiful
life, life, life!
I feel in danger of mania; I am/could be so aware of the fullness of everything; its not fair its not fair that I can't let myself experience joy fully because of the everpresent fear that its some form of madness; because I've never felt that wildly intense joy and fearlessness before without afterwards seeing that I hadn't been seeing clearly at the time; hadn't been seeing clearly, hadn't been truly myself- hadn't been a person, at least, that I could recognize as myself afterwards...
the clock is crawling on towards three am
put me to sleep, darling
(that last I typed instinctively, as if to somebody; yet there was no-one in mind, simply the desire to say it; to see who felt spoken to by it, perhaps?)