FIRST ENTRY (from whenever this was). ADDITIONAL ENTRIES WILL DESCEND.
Okay. So is this how you use this thing? Is this what you are supposed to write on three times a week? Technology generally confuses me. I had an i-pod but it stopped working one day. I don't use it anymore. My cell phone is about two days away from death because I have gotten it wet so many times. And my digital camera got stolen. So, this is a stretch, this... blogging.
Please someone tell me if I'm doing it wrong!
So, I found out that I really love Burroughs. As an author, as a visionary who has something very unique to say, and from a perspective that could not be mistaken as anyone else's... except maybe Kerouac's. The feel of Junky was similar to the rambling, drug infused intertwined tales from On The Road, which I read when I was way too young to read it. Actually, I take that back. Kids are actually adults before adults know they are actually adults. You know?
But Junky. What are we supposed to take out of that? The tragedy of a man who is so, so consumed by an addiction that life outside of junk is unfathomable. How did this man have time to produce other works? How did he maintain relationships? For god's sake, he had a wife and a family? I thought it was a joke the first time he checked into the vet's hospital and said something about getting clean for his family.
The tragedy of the story is that, we all know yage is not the answer. NOTHING is ever the cure. An addict is an addict, according to Burroughs. It is sad to read with him as he nonverbally, perhaps subconsciously comes to this revelation. He made a mistake, he made about two months of mistakes, when he started down the path of becoming a heroin addict ( a phrase which is never, I believe, actually written), and he gives up on himself. You're in, and you're hooked, and that's it. There is no such thing as a joy-hit. He knows it better than anyone.
One passage that particularly struck me was when Bill Gains is first introduced. Burroughs says that most dealers get pleasure in seeing a new, clean person forming a habit, because that means more business for their commodity. However, Gains is a special exception. He took a special joy at taking young kids up to his room, and watching them get hooked. 'And pay off for the rest of his life'. That is chilling. Because I see it in little ways everyday.
No one wants to be alone in something. So they will bring anyone else down into the muck with them, like that will make it better for them.
I need to think a little bit more about what Burroughs' ultimate message may have been. I don't know yet.
January 28th:
HEY - A question for you guys. Have you ever heard of something called I-doser? It is an online website that plays sound waves through headphones. I've tried it out (illegally) and it is a combination of noise, something that sounds a little bit like a sound machine that you would fall asleep to, and some tones that vaguely resemble music. You have to use headphones because the technology uses binaural beats, or different tones that are being played in each ear. It certainly sounds creepy, and it does lull you into a deeply meditative state. Anyway, the point of the product is that supposedly it mimics the effects that drugs have on your brainwaves. They have opium, marijuana, coke and heroin. And then they also have coffee, or relaxation. And one called Genesis, which is supposedly the most intense one, and it simulates the end of the world.
Here is what someone had to say:
"I have been listening to these off and on for over a year. They do work, but not as well as real drugs.
You have to sort of shut your brain off - conscious-wise. You know that place in between dreaming and awake? You need to get as close to there as possible, without going all the way. You’ll be close enough to dreaming that you won’t have the inhibitions anxious for this to work. You’ll just hear it and go with the flow.
Before anyone tries it, make sure you aren’t using mp3s that someone ripped. WAV files are fine, as they don’t use the quality - the DRG files are just WAV files with an encryption - but mp3s are compressed and the average person wouldn’t know how to do it right.
I have the best results with Nitrous. After a few minutes, the muscles in my thighs and arms start twitching, then I lose the sensation of things underneath me, and get the most awesome cold-tingling over my skin. Very nice.
The ecstasy also works nicely;)"
interesting, because it never worked for me. But maybe I'm no suseptible, as they say some people aren't.
http://www.i-doser.com/storev3/index.php
February 9th:
So. Surveillance. Is someone always watching us? If they are, are they judging us? How should we react? SHOULDN'T WE BE PANICKING?
Or maybe not, since we have been trained since we were tiny little kids that someone is always judging us, rewarding us for doing right and punishing for doing wrong. Maybe thi is party how children begin to develop a moral compass, begin to get that voice inside that starts to whisper that something doesn't seem entirely just. Maybe it starts with parents who can pratically read minds. Then Santa, then teachers with eyes in the backs of their heads, or good hearing. If you're religious then you know that God is ALWAYS watching your every move, and I guess that could be extended to all of your dead relatives. This concept used to terrify me, the idea that my grandma was watching the things that I was doing. It would be enough to drive someone insane.
In any case, I am pretty certain that we have been conditioned to simply accept the idea that some unseen entity is wacthing our every move, so is it that much of a stretch for the government to place actual security cameras everywhere? When I was in London over New Years, I found out that 75% of the world's CCTV camera's are in London. And London is not that large. As a resulut, every person inside the city limits is captured on film some 86,000 times per day.
I found this out after being in the city for about a week. During this time, I had helped someone skip through the underground (subway) line upwards of five times and had spent a very drunk new years eve just outside of parliament. If someone really was watching all of this footage... I was probably wanted.
Despite my fears, I had no trouble getting on a plane and back to America, where we don't need to watch someone's every move. Sure, we might tap phones, but that's an issue of national security. There are also those signs on Beaver Avenue which say "activity in this area may be monitored". I've learned to ignore those. If we were being monitored then I think they would have a much clearer picture of wrongdoers on the night of the Ohio State riots.
Surprisingly, most Londoners don't seem to mind that they are being watched, CONSTANTLY. The overwhelming sentiments seemed to be that it generally keeps crime down and keeps the community safer. Maybe, like little kids and santa, they have just gotten used to an idea which still puts me on edge.
I don't think Mr. Burroughs would approve.
FEBRUARY 19th:
So I was thinking about something like this for my article for the Zine, something like, in a Burrough's kind of stream of consciousness style. I think one of the issues that he deals with in hsi literature is.. what is the point of it all, and how do people become addicted. I am interested in this, and I wanted to write something about the necessity of having a purpose. This is a sample of the sort of stream of consciousness chopped up style that I would be going for:
A purpose. Is it that singularity which drives most people to action? The concern, I suppose, is uselessness. You might try to find a job, but I could guess (hypothetically, of course) that it is tough to work for an hourly wage at a Home Depot when your adult life was spent walking around construction sites and knowing at a glance what was sound. Your wife says things like, “this is a good break.” “You really needed this time off.” People run out of niceties. Volunteer work? Internet porn, if you can figure out how to turn on the computer. So life becomes this: it is Father’s Day, and you have six kids. And you get up in the morning with your wife who works five days a week providing for her family, providing for them quite nicely, and you have coffee. The concern, I suppose, is growing old. You run a farm and take care of these lives that depend on you, and you are strong, you are a hero The steel mill. Gritty, iron-made men, white-hot heat pounds on their faces all day. Your hands are bear paws that, gloved, thrust glowing embers into a fire, ungloved fit a bridle around the tender softness of a colt. Those hands, those hands, that have cradled premature babies and orphaned calves, held a bottle up to nurse life back into the starving innocents. And yet your life has become Daughter: (depressed, see above). Daughter: (uselessness, see above) Wife: She is dead now.
I added a word above, because the lack of which annoyed the hell out of me. (Can you guess which one?)
Best,
The Carousel of Progress
haha, that's funny, because we all knew what word was supposed to be there, right? So what was the point of writing it?
FEBRUARY 26th
So interesting Burrough's-esq development happened to me today. Today was a weird day. I finally finished Watchmen this morning (PLEASE READ IT!), which has given me about a million ideas for things that I would like to write about in the Burrough's blog. It's weird, in one of the final chapters, we see one of the characters reviewing the world by watching a hundred tv screens with channels that change every one hundred seconds. He sees images of death, impending war, gratuitous sex intersposed with teddy bears, hearts, old and new comforts. He observes: "Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs' cut-up technique. He suggested re-arrangnig words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through . . . an impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally. perceptually, this simultaneous input engages me like the kinetic equivilent of an abstract or impressionist painting . . . phosphor-dot swirls juxtapose; meanings coalesce from semiotic chaos before reverting to incoherence. Transient and elusive, these must be grasped quickly . . . an emergent world view becomes gradually discernible amidst the media's white noise." (MUSIC, ADS, TV) Jigsaw fragments of tomorrow align piece by piece.
SO! in the right hands, Burrough's cut-up method could be used to make predictions, shift, rearrange, make hypotheses that could be misinterpretted as phycic mysticism.
Back to the book: "As an afterthought this method has an earlier precursor than Burroughs in the Shamanistic tradition of divining randomly scattered goat innards."
Shamanism is based on the premise that the visible world is pervaded by invisible forces or spirits which affect the lives of the living.
SO! in the right hands, Burrough's cut-up method could be used to make predictions, shift, rearrange, make hypotheses that could be misinterpretted as phycic mysticism.
Back to the book: "As an afterthought this method has an earlier precursor than Burroughs in the Shamanistic tradition of divining randomly scattered goat innards."
So. All that desereves more consideration, to say the least, but back to my weird Burrough's moment today. Yeah, that wasn't it. So I finished the book, the last line, being, obviously, the famous "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes," -Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347, Quoted as the epigraph of The Tower Commision Report, 1987 (Iran-Contra Scandal)
"WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?"
This is what my best friend texts me the minute I am reading those lines, finishing the book. Why did she text me then, at that exact moment, the very words that I was reading?
This is not what my blog was supposed to be about today, it was what it was forced to be about. You know what it was really gonna be about? That study conducted by a psychologist who could predict to the day exactly how long a couple would stay together, based on his observations of them together. Based, maybe, on cut-up subliminal tells that they revealed without even knowing it. So, like a psychic, he made his calls. But his reasoning was based on Burrough's on science. The future is already written, it already exists, and we only need to collect all the pieces of the puzzle, which lay scattered across the globe, in order to understand.