I Wrote This Short Piece of Fiction (I Swear) While I Was Asleep

I was really typing while asleep. I remember thinking when I woke up that it would probably have all sorts of trippy leaps that made no sense. But it seemed to read okay. It's louche prose, sure. But I wanted louche.

I think it might qualify as "exciting porn" in Japan. Not sure.

Adjusted

I often wonder, when asked to give one's number of friends, whether one is to adjust for those friends whose interest in one is "merely clinical?"

(Hopefully, the adjusted count will not zero out.)

(From a Dream Conversation with Kafka)

"Inasmuch, as such an ancient concept from the planet's childhood as 'sin' might warrant even two or three short, annoyingly complicated breaths:

"Are there not some sins in which the preparation for the sin itself is the true and great--if disguised--joy? And isn't it strange that some sins are pleasurable and some sins are nothing more than self-inflicted pain? There seems to be  no 'philosophy of gain' in sin. Rather, it seems the process of loss is the real seduction. Something is given away, some sort of moral defense, and that feeling, a childish joy of transgression, an inhuman feeling of lightness, a giddiness, is the real origin of the misery.The misery that follows pleasure and the misery that follows pain. In other words, the usual fun.

"We still don't know how to situate sin, such an ancient and complicated concept, anywhere near childhood. Although adult sinners may be seen as childlike in their destructive naivete, we don't feel a legitimate permission to exonerate the behavior by resorting to the model of some ideal childhood of which the committer of sin was deprived, so mitigating any ensuing or preceding evil wrought by his or her hands. Yet, in the real world, monsters sometimes beget monsters. So we feel the culpability snaking back through generations. We know the real culprit has sometimes lived his life out and died. And we are dealing with carnage created by a ghost of a human being walking around like an automaton doing the bidding of the vengeful muse of his volcanic, subconscious injuries."

(childhood memory trigger)

People often tell me I am “this way” because I spent my childhood almost exclusively in moonlight. I was never allowed to leave the family home while the sun was shining. I rarely believe them. Maybe they are correct. They’ve also said that it was my extreme poverty or my ridiculous silver spoon wealth. Depending on which story they have been told, which story they have believed. They blame either poverty or filthy lucre. But fiction can stunt one’s growth. This is true. Other people’s fictions, their beliefs, can stunt your growth. In this sense, one can understand the rationale of the recluses of this world. Why not hide away from everyone, to discover who it is that you really are, or should be?


When I was young, I sought the companionship of the very old. They alone seemed to have the time to contemplate the things which interested me. Oh, not just any old person. I mean the ones who had studied life, those who were now uselessly wise. My family needed answers. We were blue children, we were sometimes ashamed, we gave our first set of furniture away. But we ate such interesting meals, read such interesting books, captured such interesting animals: baby storks, alligators.


Other children said that we were not from the same planet as them. And this was true. We were extraterrestrials, in a sense. And we did spend much of our childhood in the trees, climbing barefoot. When I met another child, by accident, in the woods, say, I would run as fast as I could, to hide in my bedroom. My wild breathing could only be calmed by looking at the book with the life-size, hand-painted illustrations of birds. The one which my ancestor made with his one good hand (the other severed by court order on a sunny afternoon in a public square).

Bones, Issue 12

The twelfth issue of the haiku journal Bones is out.

I'm very proud to be a part of this issue and I really love the poetry the editors selected for this issue.

Why not visit and see if you agree?

These haiku are the sort of writing I use to spark drawings when I'm in the mood to draw abstractly. They also color my photography.

I think it's interesting that the art the editors use is so often asemic, minimalistic, calligraphic, so that the line between drawing and writing becomes a dream line.

I was asked to be featured artist in an upcoming issue of the mag and, of course, I said, "heck yes, thanks!"

So Here Are Two Great Sensible Ideas. I Hope the Future is Listening.

I would love to see the implementation of two symbols in food merchandising to help consumers make ethical choices.

I would love to see an A and a P employed to indicate that the food so marked includes, respectively, animal-derived ingredients or animal products. It would be much easier to use these symbols only in a negative sense, to indicate absence of animals or animal products. Or you could design it as a positive/negative system where the symbols show the varied makeup: animal product but no animal, animal but no animal products, animal and animal products both, neither animal nor animal products. This information could be easily communicated by printing an A and P in red circles on the packaging of the product.  A diagonal strike-through would mean absence of that category of ingredient. So a simple binary system with that. This could help vegetarians and vegans find products quickly, without having to read tiny ingredients lists.

It takes so much time to scrutinize ingredients and find those "hidden" animal components like lecithin. Is it animal-derived lecithin or soy(a) lecithin? Ugh.

And here's an idea to make you super-rich if you are enterprising and tech-savvy. Design a phone app which reads ingredients lists in stores to assist shoppers in this process. Have a database which instantly scans all ingredients for safety, healthiness and vegetarian/vegan evaluation. So the consumer could just pick up the product in the grocery store, swipe the phone over it and then instantly get a spoken feedback letting them know the issues of concern for that particular product. In other words, cut out the laborious reading/Googling/reading that food evaluation requires.

Postscript: Oh. I see apps actually do exist that do most of what I describe above. Maybe the "UPC Food Scanner"  app is closest to the one I'm imagining. It does scan the products and you can get it to check those ingredients lists for allergies. I'm not sure it does all the other particularizing with the "A" and the "P" I mention above, or whether it scans those lists for "controversial" ingredients.  I wonder if the UPC only works with better known product lines? I was thinking more along the lines of optical recognition technology of the ingredients list itself. "Fooditive" and "Open Label" also look like interesting food apps.

So There's Been an Avalanche

So there's been an avalanche of death. I, myself, am a pupa in a chrysalis at the moment. It seems okay to ask the universe a favor at times like this. So I'm making a request for the Cocteau Twins to start writing/recording again this year. Please. While there is still time. Before night falls. You're all very grown up now. It's time.