Our latest statistics project was to take a yes or no survey. I, acting like the want-to-be clever contrarian, decided to establish a fake, female facebook (I truly enjoy employing excessive amounts of consonance) profile in order that I could see whether males or females were more likely to add the fake profile. At the time this seemed brilliant. Nevertheless, I was told yesterday that the school could potentially have a law suit filed against it for my foolish actions. You see, in trying to figure out who was more susceptible, males or females, to accepting a strangers profile (the information from said survey could be valuable in determining who is more venerable to sexual predators acting as minors online), I, in turn, became the predator by compromising other peoples personal privacy. During the remainder of the statistics class, I made a list of mistakes I’ve made that I would enjoy avoiding in the future that I will reproduce below, starting with:

- avoid creating fake facebook profile and luring strangers to add you, regardless of how innocent the motive is
- avoid establishing a history of lateness
- avoid carrying a knife successfully onto a flight from Rome to London and then getting caught by Britain’s finest
- avoid falling asleep while writing a lab report
- avoid wandering off on school funcions
- avoid making edgy Spanish videos
- avoid admitting someone into residence while I am not present
- avoid idea-plagiarizing on a school paper
- avoid consistently forgetting deadlines
- avoid hitting someone else’s porsche on prom night while driving dad’s car
- avoid putting anything questionable in writing
- avoid listening to phone when other people butt-dial you

all straight-cut thinking
but we’re beauty seeking
and yet they punish us with silence

we, scarred free
give soulwild call
and stumble to prevent the fall

and to those who wish compose
our sinful meandering and align us,
do avoid silence,
I’d recommend obtund our minds, lest
our souls be unbroken
and our spirits remain bindless

.

I wrote this one sitting in detention, which is nearly one hour of serene silence. But what are the moral and social implications of disciplining kids with silence? Silence is such a beautiful thing, and we usually waste the rare moments we can have it by filling our ears with iPods and so forth. If we’re chastised with silence, then we will view sitting quietly to be a punishment, and avoid it whenever possible. This seems like a counterintuitive punishment if the institution giving it is designed to facilitate our growth and development and desire for knowledge. Seems to me it would be more effective to have detention in a room full of speakers and to blast music at a mind-numbing volume. Just some thoughts.

I think madness is an intriguing word, and moreover, an intriguing concept. Some Monday’s, every now and then, I’ll post a little quote or poem or any other media pertaining to madness, which will be occasionally garnished with my  comments.

.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” -Jack Kerouac in On the Road

“I’ll spend about a year on the road, starting and finishing in New York. When I can’t drive, I’ll ship the car by boat, then fly to the next stop to pick it up.

“The route is sinuous. Cross Central America, then head down South America to Buenos Aires. From there, I’ll ship the car to South Africa, then drive north through Africa to Europe. I’m a native of France, so I’ll stop in Paris to get some paperwork done, then go east through Eastern Europe, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and India. I’ll ship the car to Thailand, drive to Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia, and put the car on a final sailing home to the U.S.

“It is scary to leave your girlfriend, your career, your apartment and people you know to have a year of waking up in unfamiliar places. Many people think I’m insane to quit my job when the economy is so bad. But I’m 33 and I’ve worked since age 18. I came to New York as an artist and ended up as an art director. It’s early enough in my life that I can take a year off, then come back, hopefully pick up my career and start a family.

“I believe a trip like this is something many people dream of. When you’re young and a student, you don’t have money to travel, but when you’re working and can afford it, you don’t have time. I always thought I would buy a place in New York, but when you think about it, is there a better investment than traveling around the world? Wouldn’t you be smarter after doing that? Wouldn’t you have incredible stories to tell your kids and grandkids?”

.

If you read my post about permuting priorities, you’ll know why I think the last question he asks seems so cool to me. If you want to track his trip, I have a link to it on my blogroll.

Here is one I just found about Kerouac’s On the Road:

On the Road by Jack Kerouac is one of those books. When I was reading Annie Dillard’s Wikipedia page it talked about On the Road, and since I thought that I bore some striking similarities with her, I felt inclined to read it. If you’re unfamiliar with Annie Dillard, she is the author of that great quote: “If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we would be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” In the original scroll version of On the Road, there is this character named Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in the other version) that makes you want to just live full out and full throttle.

Philippe Petit and Neal Cassady lived without an aversion to death. They embody Anges DeMille’s idea that, “living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never knows. We Guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap into the dark,” and Boris Pasternak philosophy that, “man is born to live, not to prepare for life.” And because they embody these wondrous and awe-inspiring perspectives on life, they fulfill the idea that “he who would teach men to die would teach men to live,” that Michel de Montaigne wrote. These great men teach us that the value of life is not in the years but in how we live during those years.

Life cannot be about self-preservation alone, because then the life you have, which may be duly long, will be barren and consist mainly of selfishness. Life is meant to be lived to the fullest.  No matter what God or lack of God you believe in, there is no reason to try to live as long as possible. There is reason though to live on fire and with purpose, to take risk and have experiences.

When talking about stepping on to the wire, Philippe Petit says something along the lines of, “If I die, then what a beautiful death, to die in the exercise of your passion.” To me that death has greater appeal than expiring in a hospital, carrying the burden of regrets for things left undone on your chest, the weight stifling your breathing.

A lot of these ideas that have been raging like a storm in my head manifest themselves in the poem I just wrote featured below this post, so this acts as a nice segway.

and I can’t shift my weight
for safety, I exist sedate,

for comfort, for security,
what a damnable reply!
I want to live,
teach me to die.

.

.

.

And as a side note (its funny because I’m talking about things on my sidebar), if you are wondering what a hat list is, or for that matter, what the definition of permuting is, please consult the two pages I have posted on the left in addition to a dictionary.

In fact, I was playing around with that dumb compare your friends app, and it would pull up a picture of one person, let’s call him Bob, and one of another person Bill, both from my friends list. In almost every case I was completely unfamiliar with one of the people, many times even both. It would ask me questions about “who is a better friend, Bob or Bill?” or “who do you trust more?” or something like that and I’d say “I don’t trust either of you two strangers, because I don’t know you, nor do I recall adding you as a friend, and therefore you became my friend without my consent, and I’m against most nonconsensual things.”

But to be perfectly honest, I had a “friend-off,” with a friend, to determine who was more popular (under the assumption that facebook friends divided by one minus the square root of the number of pictures you have posted of you, but not by you, equals how popular you are). To say the least, I was the victor. But to get there I slunk to such lows as adding all the females on one of my more popular friends profiles (which was in excess of 500 females right there), or noosing (note-seducing; and the fact that it sounds like noose probably doesn’t make it any better) girls to add me. I became a shameless self-promoter. I developed a standardized note which went:

(insert girls name here), I don’t know you but you came up in the “do you know this person” thing on the main page, probably because we have some friends in common (innocent reason). To be honest, I am currently in a competition with a friend to see who can acquire 1000 friends first, and I’m fairly determined (kind of true). And I thought you looked pretty cute so it seemed like a win win (definitely true). There’s my long winded explanation. Since you don’t know me, if I were you, I would definitely decline my request (self-deprecation).

…and if you think that’s funny, it’s funny ‘cause it’s true.

Point is, I need to purge my facebook profile of people I don’t know before I end up in purgetory. Someone please add me as a friend so that I can at least be at 667 and not feel like my soul is in jeopardy.

Also, speaking of really creepy things I do, I drove by a friend’s house the other day and decided to text her saying “I just drove by your house and I imagined you crouched over your laptop mad-typing awesomeness into your blog with a cup of coffee beside you and Paolo Nutini in the background” to which she responded “That is almost precisely what I’m doing…” which led me to the conclusion that being a lucky person or a generally good guesser can simultaneously make you a really creepy person–but the supposed creepiness is in reality just one big misunderstanding. This may be, in part, why day-traders and fortune tellers are considered so sketchy.

riding
in a car watching
the red rain run down the windshield

I had
simply planned too much
stepped into the future but was losing touch

watching
steam drift from
the engine that is my future

I refocused my eyes to see the
sunset through the
rainlets

Brilliant,
Red, and
Boundessl.

Knowing that your whole life is contained within the snapping of your fingers discourages dawdling and promotes a fiery, wind-shaped life. And this, moreover, encourages us to prioritize our time appropriately. Just some stuff to muse over.

.

why am I here
sidelining my perennial aspirations,
day-dreaming of backpack vacations,
as Death whispers in my ear.
how dare you now teach me to fear?

this is counter-intuitive
but I’m western-ingenuitive,
I spitsmith words westward, skyward.
I won’t say sorry, so don’t forgive

and so while they’re rambling
I just start ambling
through the wordless worlds within.

and that whisper’s like ceaseless drumming,
“live,” breathes Death,
“I’m coming.”

Journal, final entry: “Thought of poem, will write later.”

She questioned his question too late.

Dear Levi J. Weston,

As prominent members in the blogging community, the Heterosexual Male Blogging Organization, or HMBO, would enjoy your attendance Sunday, April 18, in the chat-room “Male Bloggers (not gay)” in order to connect you with other male bloggers that share your sexual preferences. Due to the results of a recent investigation of our former president, Kip Bollock, the chat will primarily focus on changes regarding the closet-homosexual policies as well as the appointment of a new president. During that time it would be my pleasure to introduce you to the remaining seven members of the HMBO. Your attendance would be greatly beneficial in raising moral, and will (but this goes unsaid) work to build a strong network around you. As they say, a cord or seven strands is not easily broken. Unfortunately, however, as we discovered in the case of our late president, a cord of eight strands is in fact easily broken by the old spice man. I speak on behalf of the organization when I say we look forward to meeting you this coming Sunday.

Cordially,

Lance McGlee

So it’s nice to meet you, one. From now on I’ll be using this to simultaneously communicate with you and clarify my thoughts. It’s curious how writing does that, the power of pen and ink, or I guess binary code and pixels in this case. Anyway, what I’m trying to say it that this is why I find myself desirous of everything at once; I want to read it all, hear it all, watch it all, experience it all, to take in as much as possible—to try everything once. Which reminds me of that quote Mason Cooley had that goes, “’Why not?’ is a slogan for an interesting life.” Hopefully I can get most of my wood-chips into this piece of the internet.

As you, one, may have noticed, I tend to digress quickly, and if I know myself well enough, each post will simply be a combination of tangents. Nonetheless, my point is that reading zing’s blog will provide you a reserve of creative energy to sustain you through the day, or through writing a paper on why consumer debt leads to divorce and depression and how we can fix it by encouraging greater debt education and by discouraging entitlement mentality by making sure the American Dream stays a dream, and isn’t considered the American Promise. Such a paper, as it so happens, is due tomorrow, and I should be writing it now.

And in case you’re interested in Heart of Darkness at all, here is the quote that made me read it twice. It’s a bit long, but completely worth it:

“’I had immense plans,’ he muttered irresolutely. ‘Yes,’ said I; ‘but if you try to shout I’ll smash your head with — ‘ There was not a stick or a stone near. ‘I will throttle you for good,’ I corrected myself. ‘I was on the threshold of great things,’ he pleaded, in a voice of longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold. ‘And now for this stupid scoundrel — ‘ ‘Your success in Europe is assured in any case,’ I affirmed steadily. I did not want to have the throttling of him, you understand — and indeed it would have been very little use for any practical purpose. I tried to break the spell — the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness — that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations. And, don’t you see, the terror of the position was not in being knocked on the head — though I had a very lively sense of that danger, too — but in this, that I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had, even like the niggers, to invoke him — himself — his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air. I’ve been telling you what we said — repeating the phrases we pronounced — but what’s the good? They were common everyday words — the familiar, vague sounds exchanged on every waking day of life. But what of that? They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. Soul! If anybody ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear — concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance — barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn’t so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had — for my sins, I suppose — to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it — I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. I kept my head pretty well; but when I had him at last stretched on the couch, I wiped my forehead, while my legs shook under me as though I had carried half a ton on my back down that hill. And yet I had only supported him, his bony arm clasped round my neck — and he was not much heavier than a child.”

say they, “absence makes the heart grow fonder,”
yet patience breaks the heart from wonder.

as so you are now from me ceding
now it’s I that’s hill-top bleeding,
perfection won’t need my construction
for wherever you are, there is Eden.