"There is only one thing I dread; Not to be worthy of my suffering

I miss Lou...god damn he was a good looking animal, probably better he died young, I think of him on deck.We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met? Ive also been thinking about not voting ONE PART OF ME THINKS: If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep me disgusted and bored and cynical and to give me every possible reason to stay at home doing whatever... on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote....



If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?



There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.



I suppose an active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize the values of creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fullfillment in expieriencing beauty, art or nature. I think there is also purpose in that life that is barren of everything...Austere . Austerity can shed light on mans behavior, my own behavior, namely in my attitudes towards existence, on a fishing vessel an existence very much restricted by external forces. creativity and enjoyment are scarce. If there is a meaning in life then surely there is a meaning to human suffering. In the face of suffering I can applie certain learned principles or I can act how I am feeling ( surely resulting in a fistfight). Here in lies the chance for a man to either make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. Ultimately this is what dostoyevski meant when he spoke about the worthyness of suffering, this, it would seem is a determining factor."It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship."

Some days boil down to the last of human freedomes, tired, sleep deprived, cup o noodles and granola bar for dinner sore everywhere... the last freedome being the choice to choose ones own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose ones own way! And there are always choices to make, every day, every hour offers the opportunity to make a decision that would determine if you will or will not submit to the circumstances which attempt to rob you of your of inner freedome: which determine whether or not you become the plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedome and dignity to become someone who reacts to the emotions they have about any given set of circumstances. Suffering is underrated in America... fishing provides me with the kind of suffering and provisional existence that seems to feed a part of my soul that goes unfed in the 9 to 5 hours of ordinary existence
It is odd, hours seem like days and yet weeks go by in a flash... A paradox. A 54 year old man was lost in the herring fishery, no one knows what happened, they havent recovered the body yet. My guess: 20 years crewing and he had probably taken 100000 pisses off the aft deck, at some point it got routine and the gravity of the bussiness that he was in didnt seem as tangible and he got sloppy.

A supposedly Horrible Thing Ille probably do Again

Just got back from togiac.
strange place on the edge of alaska, looked like ireland, seals and whales. I
was there for herring, they come in great numbers to breed and we fish for the
females who's caviar is something special in Japan. The other deckhand quit, so
it was just me, and the captain. out there in the otherworldlyness of the Togiac
fishing grounds. eerie, on Deck for 24 hour stretches on planet togiac, having
conversations with dead authors and planning out the next 10 years of my life.
I left to escape the proffesional smile, I cancled my car insurance and turned
off my cell phone, which gets no reception here anyway , and I left. but I
wonder, why didnt they tell me what I was trading, For instance Mike: I didnt
know that after 18 hours on deck one begins to hallucinate. Auditory at first
" why wont my I phone stop Ringing, furthermore how can I here it ringing over
the 80 mile an hour gust whipping around the mast rigging... who would possibly
be calling me at 4 am and how do I get reception...out here...on planet togiac.
After 24 hours on deck awake, grinding, you begin to
hallucinate visually, the authors you were having conversations with moments
earlier, appear on deck. The midnight sun sets and the ocean is as vacant as
your thoughts are lucid ... your rowe incrusted (winners circle) beanie and the
moon, companions in a cloudless sky. Was that you David Foster wallace? ducking
behind the power roller at the aft end of the deck, trying to avoid the
inevitable barrage of tired questions that always follows your presence, the
same contrite, "look at me understanding your work because I feel like your
writing just to me" questions, that every sarcastic postmodern type fan has...
is that why you have taken up residence on the aft end of the deck, to keep me,
and the moon company on this cloudless night... on planet togiac?

I know what 200 tons of herring does to ones back and knees. I know what 50,000
gallons of herring sperm smells like. I have broken anchors and I have no more
delusions about the romance of the working class heroe. Ya dig... I think I lost
my mind... out there in planet togaic... Ille get that salmon... then that
halibut... then some crab, and ille be home.... Hope life is finding you well
your missed

chpt 24 The Advocate (amended for my ego... whats this have to do with me)

Given our discourse and mutual hatred concerning this word, this post is for you Mike...Enjoy

As Tyler Fey and I are now fairly embarked in this business of Fishing; and as this business of Fishing has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of fish.


In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of Fishing is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions ( doctors and layers and other folks). If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a Gillnetter, say; and if in emulation of the doctors and lawyers he should append the initials G.N .F(Gill Net Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.
("This is what happens, do you see what happens" Ive seen Odd shit)

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us fisherman, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the Commercial Fishing-ship at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery decks of a Salmon-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the Berring Sea or the Johnson Hill Line. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

.

The Fish has no famous author, and fishing no famous chronicler, you will say.

THE FISH NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND FISHING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!

True enough, but then fisherman themselves are poor devils; they have no good blood in their veins.



Good again; but then all confess that somehow fishing is not respectable.

Fishing NOT RESPECTABLE? It is imperial! By old English statutory law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*


And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to Fishing; for a Fishing Vessel was my Yale College and my Harvard...Kinda... thanks Melville!

The Lee Shore

Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Dutch Harbor? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!











I forget, tattoos used to mean something about someone, I see a giant cod clipper with st jude on a backpiece in my future. gone are the days. jack london said show me a man with a tatto and I will show you a man with an intresting story... Ive seen strange things done by the midnight sun.

ODILE Ille c u soon cuz even though... your still my arguing partner

MY NEW BED!

They will all be ghosts, as flashing jacklights are tossed over board in arctic twilight, while the midnight sun sets. I will be here wondering how colby is fairing at giddens day camp, has he threatened to kill my replacement yet, I certainly hope so. Those days will fade as salmon the size of kindergardeners come up over the power roller. I suppose I never stood a chance, anywhere that I was required to smile proffesionally is a place I just wouldnt last. My distain for a 9 to 5 is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and no place in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am as a childcare proffesional. But also back at land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile: the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia with incomplete zygomatic involvement, the smile that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee.
Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who's sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald'ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?

And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who has ever bought a pack of gum at a seattle cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Alaska airlines freight office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the seattle tobacconist resenting not the counterman's character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess. And Bay permits climb and climb and I despair of ever owning my own boat, but the fear of not owning a boat is much smaller, much much smaller than what chased me up here in the first place, ...The proffesional smaile, I wont give or get one for 4 months the only cost is not getting to argue with odile

"Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave."

I have a problem, I dont like being 100 feet away from you odile but I love fishing ( so I am so sorry things turned out the way they did, who knows, maybe it was just meant to end this way. It's funny how insignificant all the significant annoyances are, once your away from them. Most fisherman have exwives and children whom they do not know. But then, most men hate women, So i will not dwell on this. We will fish herring salmon and Halibut. sounds like we are getting a good price for halibut 6 dollars a pound with 30 thousand pounds, my shares 8 percent, we will see it fishing not catching.

I know what the fuck she's talking about

They All Meant Well

Going to law school with a faculty who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

50,000,000 elvis fans cant be wrong? I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas

Abstract: I dont get it, the people who send their children to private schools to learn about writers artists and historical figures would do anything in their power to disuade them from following in the footsteps of said artists,writer and historical figures. As if to say " it was ok for them but dont risk it, dont you dare trade security for liberty".Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final.

	50

Such are the trappings of middle class and I would be lieing if I wrote that I wasnt deeply indebted to and angry with them. Part of being the child of parents who carefully designed their life so that you would be able have the utmost ability to, in turn, design the lives of your children ( as we are inevitably expected to reproduce) is sitting down at dinner tables in anonymous and spooky suburbs, to talk about the direction your life should take, and to listen and share about how this could look. Here is how it looks:


We pull into our parking spot in the neighbors driveway, one large home that remains vacant with a giant price tag on it in a faltering economy. I have dawned a pair of Khakis and a j crew heather v neck sweater. February is miserable and I pick and choose my steps carefully as not to get my shoes dirty. A friends father greets us and pleasentrys are exchanged before we are invited to sit at a dinner table and eat a feast of crab, Music from a farther room. Light bends warmly through wine glasses and reflects off of what appears to be josef albers painting of japanese cherry blossoms. The whole of the house is warm and spirits are high and the smell crab compliments it all nicely

Something is off here, before the last crab is cracked I will know why,and with whom. the mood seems to change as I sit at the table,the clinking of crystal and the cracking of crab, the various side conversations are like the sounds one hears while listening out their window to the seasons change. Even the light, the artifical light provided on tracks, as was chic when the house was built, seems to change, to shift on the artificial horizon untill it feals the way it does during winter months. Were talking about alaska in the context of " what have you been doing with your life." My thoughts shifted to the neuter austerity of those fishing grounds with idealism. " Well now that you have done that type of thing you know you dont ever have to go back, no no, I understand, its good to get it out of your system while your young." I think about king crab season.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky

I think about the sunsets at midnight and king salmon as large as second graders.

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats	5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …	10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

My friends mother talks about the fact that education allows us the ability to work with our brains rather than with our bodies, and that fishing is dangerouse and our education gives us the opportunity not to do this...

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;	30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

A toast to a special friend is made and glasses are clinked and conversations continue. a former class mate and friend replies to the mother and things became clearer, the mood seemed less unclear and the host of the evining began to reveal its self.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—	40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare	45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

" Fishing provides no time for someone to have a regualr life, where you can build toward things and show up in peoples lives." It hit me that I am the one who is off, the lives most people want are normal, their not crazy I am... 50,000,000 elvis fans cant be wrong, but freedome is something that dies unless its used, here I reach a crossroads if I am wrong, and the nine to fivers are right then several long held beliefs are wrong as well. I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.

I dont get it, the people who send their children to private schools to learn about writers artists and historical figures would do anything in their power to disuade them from following in the footsteps of said artists,writer and historical figures. As if to say " it was ok for them but dont risk it, dont you dare trade security for liberty".Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final.




No one wonders why Americans have a love affair with clint eastwood or tony soprano, why working professionals return home and watch Deadliest Catch propelling it to number one on primetime. No one says it but it is present at that table, a very quiet fear, a very quiet sadness and lonelieness and desperation. Im not above it, im scared, the only difference between me and the uneducated "who have no choice but to work with their bodies" is that I can be much more articualte about the fear, much more vocal about what it is that scares me... thats the thing my education gave me... but if I am carefull and patient and honest, I can persue eduaction in the hopes that it will relieve this fear, thats the real mark of being schooled, we can transcend it, we can think and it will.

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now."

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—	55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?	60
And how should I presume?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,	85
And in short, I was afraid.

Mickey Mantle

Two years ago, I’m in south Boston, and who the fuck do I run into but kevin Mc bride, I’m wearing a Celtics Jersey to try to fit in right. I’m visiting family but I dont have that south boston accent so, gotta be careful. Anyway, there’s Kevin mc bride with the brogue so thick you cant understand him, Fresh off the boat sounding. And he’s hammered (here’s my mickey mantle moment). I met the man through family friends, we didnt talk much about boxing, he told me about some unfortunate encounters with beautifull prostitutes sporting penises then he tells me a joke. Mind you it’s an enibriated Kevin Mcbride with a thick brogue telling it.
” So this drunks sitting on a bench at the commons, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna pay rent. Up walks a leprechaun who says “it’s your lucky day, I’m gonna grant ya three wishes.” The drunk perks up and says “I want a driver, cuz im wasted pretty much 24/7″ DONE! says the Leprechaun, the man goes ” i cant believe this!” He says he wants to be famous and the Leprechaun goes DONE! wow, I want to be famous, he looks out over the Boston Skyline and goes, I want all this to be mine. DONE says the Leprechaun. “now could ya do me a favor” says the Leprechaun. Ya sure says the old man, anything you want. Well would ya let me fuck ya said the little Leprechaun. The drunk thought about it, he had done worse for his fix at times and obliged the wee Leprechaun. So he drops his pants and the Leprachaun climbs upon the bench and starts going to town. The drunk looks out on Boston and goes “I cant believe this is all mine”. to which the leprachaun says “I can’t believe you believe in leprachauns”. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, It was Kevin Mcbride, that along with the location (OLD COLONY projects) and the previouse comments about swingin penises on tranny prostitutes
and I’m thinking, This guy touched gloves with mike tyson and lived to tell about it, and alcohol did this to him, So what the fuck kinda chance do I stand?
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
Boxing has never gotten its enlistees from the debutant lines from the local country club. Instead its recruits come from the crucible of the streets, boy-men who have fought their way out of the slums, the barrios, the ghettos, expessing themselves the only way they knew how, with their fists… A boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to eachother, cats will wipe your face, hand you water, blow a bloody nose for you, massage your tense shoulders with no shadow of improvity, no question of motive.. this tenderness unseen elsewhere in our lives is nessicary for one reason, the gloves, they are incapacitating, the ungloved help those who are. From this central fact radiates the whole demeanor of the Game.
Some days I wake up and wonder why it’s like this, why Art has become a comodity, rather than ” the excrement of art, the real Art being the person who shit it out. Their lives being the actual art!” I wonder why popular ( and I use the term souly in the vernacular sense) people have to Buy things that other people have made to express their individuality in order to express their individuality. I wonder why it is that I’m Not much but I’m all I ever seem to think about. Its tragic, what passes as a contribution to culture. You can’t be a hipster and an artist, by definition.Norman Mailer’s The White Negroe Breaks it down, James Baldwin Breaks Mailers shit down and on down the line. It Takes Guts to grow up and become the person you were supposed to be, all these scensters got no guts, living out lives of quiet desperation inbetween cocktail hours at hipster hot spots… ALL THE SAME this is art and its fucking ILL, thanx die4

This morning, im at starbucks. I pay for my coffee and the girl is changing my twenty. In an apethetic monotone she rehearses ” hows your day going”. She didnt even look up from her till. I pause and I ask her “whats the standard answer to that question?” she looks at me confused (because thats not the next line in the script) and she says”fine… I guess”
“thats right, fine, thatss the standard answer isnt it. but theyre not fine so why would they say that
“I guess to have a conversation?”
” a meaningless one though.”
” ya I guess a meani gless one”
” so the question is whats more meaningless, the meaningless conversation. or the meaningless conversation we never have?” so later that day Im buying a donut and the attendee goes, so how you doing. I deviate from the script and say, just awfull. Im sorry (she brings it back to the script) what can I get you, without missing a beat.
I straddle the line between humanity and humanoid creatures that are human on the outside but lack hummanity. The line exists souly within my head. Im thinking, one day that donut girl might wake up, much closer to the end than to the begining and she will be scared shitless. scared because death will be definable, it will haVE features and maybe shell think about how the thing she was supposed to do was bring donuts with a little bit of hummanity. So is this it, all of life is reduced to the common ruble of benality and the only thing in between me and the shrieking nothingness is these scripted bullshit motions that im supposed to go through. It’s just polishing the brass on the titanic. So you see it isn’t the school or the car or the life stuff, its all the bullshit details that kill me…
Histeria...

My birthday at the end of january
other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see, even
if those people are stupid and on that note it is possible to learn valuable
things from a stupid person.

Empanadas, Bolano. Good trip to Chile. Fuck Irony

Heavily tattooed is not the norm, tough guys eat ice cream. people payed attention to the tattoos.Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself.What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.
I have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. There are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race' - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
hoffa needs some work, but a good start , im excited. tattoo enthusiasm. this is not supposed to be ironic. And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean." FUCK IRONY... postmodernisms dead bitches thank you Mario Incandenza i love you more than I could ever begin to describe.
Sex with people you dont love is lonely.......It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it
Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.
cafe haiti, where one can get a decent cup of coffee "with legs" and I am told a prostitute.We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met?
September 11th happened here first, kinda cool to see.his is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.
Family. Awesome..in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I'll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight -- 'I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore' -- which evidently makes me look either as if I'm very rude and abrupt or as if I'm semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully...I've actually lost friends this way.
My King Crab boat!I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity....It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out
sweet bird tattoo.There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art
There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness
Acceptance is usally more a matter of fatigue than anything else.The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it... funny I could never do it here, in a church...
Ide say they are looking at whats coming but we never see that ...Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.
a popular question i got was "what do you think of chile". Anytime anyone asks me what I think I have to pause because the potential for me to alienate myself with the response is immense....... Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.
There are very few innocent sentences in my writing... I promise
The Beach House was dope as fuck.Thanx valenzuelas for the red carpet tour of CHILE it was fantastic!

It is within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...even if its jesus
If I worship money and things — if they are where I tap real meaning in life — then I will never have enough. Never feel I have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on
The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.
Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around...because im not any of these things...
Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth... I promise.
I was distracted by whine, and who owns the winery and what the people he has killed to afford the winery might think of the "bouquet " or the body of the wine...No wonder I couldn't appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home....duh...wine
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.... Oh ya...action!
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking? bottom line is that such thinking is a heavy yolk to bear... and ultimately none of my bussiness, what do my actions say, what do my actions say what do my actions say........
It's all very confusing. I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am -- so where does that put me... oh ya, action...
"TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT SED TE EDERE NON POSSUNT NEFAS EST."
"They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier."
Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people
The endless land and sea, the backpack full of books, wallace, Bolano, they got me thinking about postmodernism, as I have been described as such.For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means we're going to have to be the parents. Lets be Honest your shaking your head, but you have no clue what those patricidal works were, dont worry, I am going to explain postmodernism in no uncertain terms in upcoming blogs... so you can repeat it outside of a mtng or in a coffee house and pretend you know what the fuck it is your talking about. thank me later... It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals nativete on this continent...
Mediocrity is contextual. zapallar was gorgeouse.
To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as "senor" in six different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.
Funny, sometimes I WISH I SPOKE SPANISH BETTER AT OTHER TIMES IM GLAD BECAUSE I CAN JUST FUCKING SHUT UP AND BE A PASSIVE PARTICIPANT IN A CONVERSATION.This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc. -- and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of it at any given instant