today, i felt that we live in an age beyond everything
i thought
it is not that we have passed some threshold
it is that there are no lines left to cross
we are not even moving on that axis
any more
the future was, once
i sometimes think of it fondly but with no hope
the thin tracery of its memory
used to be hard and full of light
but now we have almost forgotten it.
Going to see Truckstop Honeymoon at a house concert in Denver tonight.
It is Wednesday night at 11:06 Mountain, and p1k3.com is no longer broken.
I just read Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live. It was pretty good. I especially liked the parts about being from North Dakota, and the part about Led Zeppelin. I had a slightly harder time with Klosterman's extended metaphorical comparison of his important relationships with women to members of KISS, but this is probably because (forgive me, Rivers), I have never been able to shake the impression that KISS are an incredibly shitty band.
Yesterday I had a very thoughtful phone call from the Mayo Clinic, who noticed that I scored unusually high on the depression scales when I filled out a survey they are doing in an effort to determine the heritability of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
I have a stack of five books on the floor by my desk. Four of them are Learning Perl, Programming Perl, Linux in a Nutshell, and Ruby in a Nutshell. The fifth is an anthology called Questioning Technology, edited by John Zerzan and Alice Carnes.
This last book is an appealing object. It does not have a nineteenth century
woodcut of an animal on its yellow cover, but the design is simple and striking.
On the front it says READ ON: MANY HANDS PRESENT THE OTHER SIDE
and UNPLUG FROM THE SYSTEMS AND SWITCH ON YOURSELF
. Along one edge of
the back, it says This cover done with two fingers in two hours by Rufus
Segar on a Macintosh Plus with Pagemaker but the machine can't draw
pictures
.
There is a poetry to all of this.
Inside, we have Russell Means:
The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken.
And Morris Berman:
The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment. The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging. A member of this cosmos was not an alienated observer of it but a direct participant in its drama. His personal destiny was bound up with its destiny, and this relationship gave meaning to his life. This type of consciousness ... bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene.
There is also a poetry to this sort of writing. Its special quality may just be that of being almost (but not quite) entirely wrong in a very literate way. Possibly something more than that is going on. Superficially, at least, I'd be hard put to think of a set of ideas more perfectly contradicted by their own expression — which adds a special flavor to the whole enterprise. Anyway, it's all kind of fascinating.
the giant white cross at
maranatha bible camp,
the feedlot stench of
bovine deathcamps
the glare of a western sun through
jet contrail haze,
center pivot irrigation &
dead brown median
truck traffic —
tractor trailer whine
— convex in my cheap
gas station aviators
we shift in our seats;
bugs die on the windshield
like thrown ketchup packets.