‘normal’, ‘true’, ‘real’

After I came back from Paris, my world opened up even more. The workshop I did with Pinkhassov there gave me the chance to experience time and space as much softer, less defined entities. I could feel a melting within, those parts of me that were previously solid or whole, such that I became melded with the world a little more than before.

This is a sensation I’ve been trying to access as a creative or artist, but for a long time I felt blocked. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the blockage is from my mind or from life, but once you feel the physical sensation of being free, you cannot go back again. Or maybe you can, but definitely you are changed in some ways that leave you slightly different.

I believe more than ever in the mundane idea that this ‘normal’ life we’re living isn’t quite ‘normal’, ‘true’, or ‘real’. If you see me on a daily basis, you might not find me acting differently, but inside I feel changed.

A useful image:
There used to be a door at the dam, locked and unopened. The door prevents anything from passing through. Now a key has unlocked the door and it’s been pulled open. Whatever is behind the dam has the force of a tsunami. Once this door opens fully, it cannot be closed again. Nobody can predict what’s going to happen next.

I feel more curious, more interested, more open to new experiences and new people. At the same time I feel more ignorant than ever, like I still have so much to learn.

I declare this to be a wonderful state to be in.

metaphysical

I’m in the process of discarding my skin/mask and becoming the person I was always meant to be. I think it’s got something to do with growing older and going to Paris and talking to the astrologer who lives in London – who said I’d have a big change of identity in mid-2024… or just being fucking sick of not being the person I was always meant to be. But it’d be a mistake to say I’m changing. No. I’m just being revealed. I think ‘change’ is a thing of the world – the result of space interacting with time (I’m making this up). Change is physics. But to be revealed, that’s metaphysical. Again I’m making things up. But I’m feeling real good about this.

22.11.23

“We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.” Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.”

From here.

Quite possibly the scariest paragraph I’ve read in awhile.

16,000 days or so

I’m 37 this year. If I live till about 80, I have about 16,000 days or so left on earth.

The maths isn’t air tight of course. It’s just a rough estimate and a, I think, best-case scenario, provided I retain most of my brain cells all the way to the end.

16,000 days isn’t that many days. I could easily waste hundreds, if not thousands, of them doing nothing much at all.

But maths has never been my strong suit, and I hope 16,000 proves to be a larger number than I think it is.

iain banks

Discovering Iain Banks feels almost like the first time I read Anthony Bourdain. It’s a feeling of pure electricity.

It will forever be an honor to read words written by beings who’re born to write.

People like these are not just writers, but conduits of forces that are spiritual or alien or out-of-this-world. They remind me that the world isn’t just so. There is definitely something beyond, but what? In the meantime art and writing and music and the countless results of inspired creativity will sustain us here, until we get there, whatever and wherever that is.

As always, I’m a little late. Iain Banks is no longer with us. But I read a really beautiful obituary about him in The Guardian and I feel… satisfied.

My satisfaction comes from knowing that he had lived a life filled with most of the things he wanted – books, writing, readers, the chance to live in his imagination, and the ability to warp the shape of this universe through his thoughts.

I’m satisfied, and I hope Iain Banks was too.

thank you for signing my guestbook

I check my guestbook once in awhile and I’m always pleasantly surprised when I see new entries in them. I just wanted to take the opportunity to say, THANK YOU for signing my very old-school-relic of a guestbook. It might be me holding on desperately to the nostalgia-tinged days of the early web, but thank you for indulging me. And also, I lost my password to the guestbook so I can’t reply you guys. Yet. When I find some time, I will log in again and reply to each of you.

In the meantime, if you have included your website/blog link, know that I’ve definitely checked you out and bookmarked you 😉

Stay close!

so many things

A thought related to moving – I have so many things I feel positively haunted by my possessions. Incidentally it’s also the first day of Ghost Month here in Singapore, so I guess it’s kind of apt, this feeling.

But really, why do I have so many things? What happened to wanting to be a minimalist?

*

“Living out my small life in a spiraling megacity, I often feel like an 8-bit creature composed mainly of a mouth roaming a spontaneously generated set of white-walled malls, hungrily swallowing products: ordinary products, but also lifestyle-as-product, ethics-as-product, individuality-as-product. Sometimes the marketing is devilishly creative, and the consumption at times satisfying—the equivalent of haute cuisine. But I am pursued by a hangover that seems to locate me no matter where I am, and an incredible, relentless urge to purge my body of the aftereffects of my things, as well as my job, my ambition, my aspirations, my expectations, and to keep only my little and lonely life.”

Conscience Round

Wow.