A mess with wine stained lips (and something in his teeth: it’s suggested you just listen and forego looking at the disaster) sits too close to the camera and prattles about the following:
Nobody respects your time as an artist – nobody respects your time period – you don’t respect your time
Benefits of making topical YouTube videos (maybe everybody should do it)
Am I too much of a grouch about popular shows like Walking Dead and Game of Thrones
Probably Not – (See: Saw Movies)
Back when I was younger I somewhat considered doing standup way way waaaaaaaaay back in the back of my mind
I’m thirty years old should I start now?
Considering I’m not really funny probably not but still it’s a fun question this age cap thing
My thirty something male friends freaking out about their love lives/futures cause they’ve had a shitty marriage etc…it is to laugh
There’s two types of creators in this instant info world – ones who are reticent due to actual professionalism and ones that do so to cultivate a sense of mystery that keeps audiences guessing
Isn’t it interesting or perhaps more fittingly alarming that we have precious few markers of passage? A letter is such a finite thing. Perhaps no more finite than a tweet but certainly more tangibly finite. Because the leaf, the bit of tree, it will yellow and curl and return to earth. The words that it held in scripts so reflective of the man and mood that etched it, they are so personal, and thus so exquisitely temporal. You can picture these textures in the grand tapestry of time. Yes, of such markers there are precious few.
The modems hum, the screens glow, the constant podcast prattle. These innovations are worth celebrating. Yet as much as they inspire they alter the nature of inspiration. What is the qualia of this novelty?
What sort of poems, novels, philosophies, and sciences will flow from the omnipresent memory of machines? From these mirrors into which we can instill our favorite reflections and gaze thereupon to our heart’s content – can we expect an accurate picture? And if high definition does indeed provide accuracy is it fertile? Or is it merely a reflection of saliencies that serve onanistic solipsism.
It is difficult to tell how we will change. It is perhaps impossible to know how altered we already are. It is definitely impossible to know how altered we were at the advent of the transistor. For such knowledge is ephemeral. It is gone with those that possessed it.
It is precisely this thing, ephemerality, that we must watch.
For a flowers beauty is in the rareness and brevity of its blossom.
A beauty which the plastic rose destroys.
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Not Just Zazz…but Pizzazz
Too high class for regular Zazz?
Help Pizzaz up TFJ!
In any case the TL; DR version of this is every time you sit down to write or learn; you’re not only doing it one more time but also one less. Cause the Grim Reaper is standing right there, playing Yo-Yo, and sometimes he gets real impatient and chokes you with the string.
Recently. Just today in fact. I’ve had to process mortality.
Again.
Fun stuff.
I’m not really emotional about anything. I honestly feel rather clinical. So clinical as to be a bit perturbed. Which is why I mentioned to a friend that some people may find my nonreactivness to be cold and off putting. Or maybe the fact that I don’t really grieve long enough. Whatever long enough is.
I guess what I imagine bothers people is I take death in stride. A fact I attribute to having lost my father at five years of age. I guess I’m bothered by it too since I feel that I should feel something. I do sometimes. But not enough apparently. Maybe.
Anyhow, that’s not what the story is about but rather a framing device or maybe somewhat more precisely – something that helps me take disparate thoughts and tie them up with a bow thus rendering it intelligible as a gift.
Currently, I’m studying the Web Stack (JS, PHP included) as well as Java it’s something I’m doing in a roundabout way. Very roundabout. I started poking at Java in 2008.
My dog has cancer. He didn’t show any behavioral signs at all. At least none that would suggest a grapefruit sized tumor. He did have some weird-looking growths that I didn’t really take note of because they were round his nethers. I thought they were just a skin irritation. And due to the location and my schedule I’d often forget about them. Until they started to bleed. It’s not necessarily unsalvagable but it’s not especially promising since Brownie is old.
So as I’m sitting here looking at arrays, pointers, objects, etc I’m thinking what if I have cancer? How long have I been putzing around with these basic bitch concepts. And why?
Well, if I do have or get cancer or get hit my a car, or assaulted by a gang of enraged hipsters for dissing Ruby…meh so what…whatver will be will be…serah serah…etc.
As to why? Cause it’s fun and I’m doing it primarily to sharpen my attention and logic faculties and most career aspirations are somewhat on the back-burner. Except using my skills to make TFJ less shit.
In any case the TL; DR version of this is every time you sit down to write or learn you’re not only doing one more time but also one less. Cause the grim reapers standing right there playing Yo-Yo and sometimes he gets real impatient and chokes you with the string.
So pet it while it’s alive and code it before the arthritis sets in.
The Regular – Irregular ‘Jeder Rilke ist schrecklich’ Poem with Essay
Hardly are there any hours
Scarcely do they ever stay
Called as if by unseen powers
This strange gift loves to stray
First, it was giddy
Tearing at tinsel
Then it was less greedy
A casual spell
Finally, I learned to see
That unwrapping is entirely unnecessary
Here all my watches blossomed
Every clock was a trade-wind
My steps were more assured
To those who’d say
That’s the mechanical way
Machines with their precision
Are no way to make decision….
Yet, I’ve turned my broken gardens into woods
Our park of long-rusted mistake into understoods
Yes
I am a regular
Irregular
Good-Day
2:16 PM on a Tuesday
Schrecklich
I do recall it. I recall often. Or at least so often as it recalls itself. At times reconstituted from the way that summer rain brings that moisture peculiar to doors left open at twilight.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I’d have never known the name save for a friend. She was a working musician that I’d met at a party half a decade ago.
She had a small room with what I think was a red couch. On one wall there was a picture of Christ with ashen eyes and a crown of thorns. There to watch me sin. On the other a picture of Virginia Woolf to scoff at our lack of gravity. Then some jaunty looking flapper with a black sunhat in hand striking a tom boy’s ‘Jack the Lad.’
It was in that room with the smell of rain that I pulled from her shelf of books a paperback of Rilke’s. At such times that we’d separate ourselves, I’d read. So I read.
It was the introduction rather than the poems that interested me. As far as I recall they tell of a young or perhaps not so young Rilke’s struggles. The point is I at the time imagined Rilke to be about twenty-two years of age like myself.
The struggles seem to have been primarily regarding a lack of productivity. One recounted episode (if my memory serves me well) was about how Rilke would endeavor to sit every day with punctuality to write something. He’d end up doing nothing. Or so was the effect of the tale on my imagination.
The feeling it produced in me was fear. They say that the most fearsome things are unknown. But it was the familiar that struck fear deep within me.
Was my tongue forever to be stilted? Was I merely going to pass my days in such a fashion, caught between worlds, dizzy with the urgency of that which must be said, and fornicating instead? Metaphorically of course.
It did or didn’t help that Whitman was there as contrast.
Yet, I had my gravity. The thing that would pull toward creation, toward a pulse.
Though it has taken some years. I believe that I have begun to manifest the strange momentum of a chance discovery.
The Fractal Journal 