Basement

what are you doing with your life

Life is a game

"life is a game
play it well
every thing is
a test! anda copy
after copy after copy"

-AMW, female prisoner

These Quotes

"The secret is to do a thing badly. If you serve someone spinach that is cooked the way it should be, no one notices or remembers that they have eaten the spinach. Wheras if you burn it, it shocks their taste-buds and they become immediately aware that it is burned spinach and they gain new insights into the characteristics of spinach, cooking, etc."
-Jean Dubuffet

"I have no idea what the meaning of work is in our epoch, but I believe virtuosity is an infirmity, knowledge a dangerous asset, and I am well content to have some genius and no talent, which allows me not to work and to play like a child. Work is an ostentatious thing, ugly and bogus as Justice."
-K. Van Dongen

"Pursuing innovation is meaningless, and pursuing noninnovation is also meaningless, because 'pursuing' is the source of all meaninglessness."
-Huang Yong Ping

"I gave the man a coat. I gave the woman a brassiere. I gave myself an electric current. We were all happy and full of delight. Take the coat from the man and remove the brassiere from the woman and take the electric current from me and we will be sad and full of anguish."
-RACTER

"If only sex could be like coffee. Perhaps then we would see the beauty of the young, which it is traditional to admire- their unlined features, their unworn flesh- for what it is: merely an incipient form of life, and nothing to emulate. One view of the young body is as an ideal. The other is as an unpressed blank. The young are beautiful, but they are stupid."
-Mark Greif, Harpers, Nov. 2006

"School is not so pleasant or valuable an experience as it is made out to be in the theorizing and reminiscing of elders. In a sense, it is not an experience at all, but a hiatus in experience."
-Wendell Berry

"There are three ways of knowing a flame. One can be told of the flame, one can see the flame with one's own eyes, and finally one can reach out and be burned by it. In this way, we Sufis seek to be burned by God."
-Unknown

"So fear repetition not; there remain many seas of blood and cream to be traversed. If this advertisement be not sufficient, I can only protrude my wormlike tendrils of apology, craving forbearance on the ground that a writer must write about what he knows, and since I know nothing about any subject it scarcely matters where I dabble."
-William T. Vollman

Interests (partial list)

Cave art, Noise Music, Shamanism, Repetition, Duality, Spiritual Experience, Tunnels, Love, Bodies (this body, permeable body, body lesves a mark, when a body touches), Contempt, Underwater, Haircuts, Polyamory, Social Dancing, Sobriety, Platonic Friendship, Cerebrality, Hate, Open Hearts, Work, Repetition, Farming, Sustainability, 2012, Connoisseurs & Elitists, Fetishism & Fetishists, Explosions, Meditation, Guns, Vomit, Gasoline, Shelac, Paint, Fish, Birds, Restraints on Free Will, Obsessional Artists, Primitives, Psychedelia, Schizophrenics, Autism, Angels, Nice Quiet Music, Banality, Asceticism & Ascetics, Libraries & Librarians, Collectors, Prostitution & Prostitutes, Overeating, Reading, Submersion, Routine, Sensory Deprivation, Fasting, Moderation and Middle Paths, Special Treats, Good Friends, Gossip, Yonic, Phallic, Obsessed, Disconcerting, Fabulous, Enamored, Flaneurs, Boredom, Structuralism, Maximalism, Repetition, Fugues, Wanderlust, Jogging, Photosynthesis, Time, Gurus, Mentors, Photography, Ritual, Memory, Arousal vs. excitation, Pavlovian Response, Fucking (including & chiefly comprised of all leadup and parody), Drinking, Working when I do not hate it and every sensation following work, Movies, Music, City streets, Auto driving, Animism, Beautiful bellies, The earth from the air, Morasses, Dark humour, Everything

Slow Tuesday Night

Slow Tuesday Night, by R. A. Rafferty

A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.

"Preserve us this night," he said as he touched his hat to them, "and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?"

"I gave you a thousand last Friday," said the young man.

"Indeed you did," the panhandler replied, "and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight."

"That's right, George, he did," said the young woman. "Give it to him, dear. I believe he's a good sort."

So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars; and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.

As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.

"Will you marry me this night, Ildy?" he asked cheerfully.

"Oh, I don't believe so, Basil," she said. "I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don't seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that."

But when they had parted, she asked herself: "But whom will I marry tonight?"

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

Statement of Purpose

Occasional nuggets of personal observations of the world (i.e. the Internet is an expression of the collective self-conscious) interspersed among media nuggets. All this for the purpose of sharing and remembrance. It's easier than bulk e-mail.