Keep it simple.

You run
You fall
You bleed
You get up again

Repeat, often.

That is the instinctual ambition cycling through the DNA of a HUMAN.

I want to run, fall, bleed, and get up again.

So don't ask me why I'm going to run so far.

We're on the same course.  Mine just might have more dirt than most.

Murakami’s Fire

I re-read all the time.

Some people are impressed with reading.  I’m not.

We read all day, long.  Billboards, ketchup labels, any item manufactured for that matter.  So I am not impressed that your read a book a week, or day. 

I’ve re-watched the movie Man on Fire probably 75 times.  I’ve re-read Emerson’s Self Reliance at least 25 times.  These things never get old.

We take for granted that we actually perceived something when we take it in the first time.  The brain registers a stop sign, and you stop at it.  You got it right.

But what about more complicated things like Beethoven’s 4^th Symphony?  Or a conversation?

Things are never as they seem if we examine them. 

I think I used to believe I was smarter if I read 25 different books in a month than if I re-read the same book 25 times. 

But these are one and the same.  Reading the same book 25 times is reading 25 different books.

I thought of this as I made a fire this morning.  I piled the kindling and logs and it took off marvelously from one match.

Maurakami wrote a short story where he descries a trio of individuals building a bon fire on the shore.  I never understood it the first two times I read it.   

Now I understand.  I can't wait to re-read it for the first time again.

Arvo's Tempo

I was introduced to Arvo Pärt in 2001 by one of my philosophy mentors, Dr. Daniel Kolak. 

I would do research with Dr. Kolak on lucid dreaming.  I’d sleep at night with this fucked up face mask that flashed red LED lights into my eye sockets when I was in REM sleep. 

Blasting through my eyelids and into my visual cortex shit would get mixed up.  A traffic light in my dream would go crazy and I’d have a ‘cue’ that I was dreaming.

Let the lucid dreaming experience begin!

(But this will be another post.)

One day when talking about Wittgenstein, Dr. Kolak name drops this cat Arvo. 

I now use Pärt’s music during many routines.  Mostly for strength and balance routines.  Always when stretching.

Pärt goes into a tempo few can listen to.  Particularly in Für Alina, a masterpiece of an album. 

Essentially 3-4 arpeggios are dissected at an absurdly slow tempo for 45 minutes or so.  Part plays with your sense of reality and calls into question the scary question our perceptual time, our spectrum of awareness, is really that significant.

How do things sound to Mercury in her orbit compared to Pluto shambling along.  We hear things in as humans on Earth in BPM:

Beats Per Minute.

But what if it were beats per million years?

What if a song, a series of numerical values, was at relayed at such a tempo that it took centuries to wrap out the Morse code equivalent of “a”? 

And then imagine this signal had to be broadcast 10’s of millions of light years to find a listening ear.

I’m sure the music is out there.  I’m sure we are surrounded in it right now.  I’m certain of it.

We are saturated in celestial strains beyond our Beat Per Minute mind. 

Maybe a phrase get’s transcribe in history every few centuries.?  We can hope.

Arvo Part taps into this slowed world, this stretched out yawn of a sentence.  It borders being nonexistent.  It’s a white noise of space. 

The same kind of sound you find when you let sand fall across glass:  a drumbeat of 10 million beats per millisecond. 

I just soak it in and stretch.  And breath. 

Thank you Arvo.  Thank Dr. Kolak.

I’ll be snowshoeing 100 miles steep mountain gradients in less than two weeks.  I can’t wait, but I’m not in any hurry.

Today's 2nd workout of the day:

Ready For Bed:

20 minutes yoga

50 burpees

200 squats

20 minutes jump rope

Stretch

You missed some fun out there at 4am this morning. 

The Drop

By 4.15 Skrillex is raging throughout my secluded home in Pittsfield, VT.

The juxtaposition of pastoral landscapes cast in mountains against  the dubstep heavy thumpings from a cabin is never lost on me but I find it rather uninteresting.  (I think that's why I fail to blog much.) 

I bought www.confusedhipster.com.  I think it might describe this post emo-boy musician syndrome of being an urban dropout.  I never managed well as a cool kid.

*

I'm shy and passive.  Confrontation with people scares the crap out of me.  No man, I'm not going to 'throw down' with you. 

But a mountain?  An event designed to break me?  I've been throwing myself into brutality week in and week out for 6 years now.  I'm confrontational every fucking day - it's just on my own time where I can't bother anyone else.

And every time I say, "Damn, I must look fucking insane to the world" I think instead:  "I have arrived.  This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing at exactly this time."

*

I don't know why the hell you are reading this.  In the back of my mind I write assuming that obligatory readings are probably the norm so I want to make the experience as painless as possible, and therefore brief.

There is a story I think I've felt that I've needed to be telling and have, just not been ready. Start exhaling.  I think my training really suffered because of this reality. What is training but an expression of our internal honesty?

I don't know what that narrative is but I'm grateful I realize it doesn't have to fit neatly into a category or pre-fab module.  Thank you for having it unfold by reading my posts.  Please share them if you'd like.  I'd like that.

And somehow we all will get from introverted musician to alter ego rock n'roll singer to Barn Beast of Vermont to a man just laughing at it all and hoping for a modicum of wisdom.

I Shit Sunshine

I shit sunshine because I eat sunshine.  I don't see an artichoke.  I see some sunlight that crash landed 93 million miles from where it was born.


The End

Working Stiff

I have a 168-hour work week.

So do you, actually.  Yes.

Are you working on your sleep so that you can be a happier person?

Are you working on organizing your closet 10 minutes today so it could give you 1 minute more time with your family for the next 20 years as you get to the breakfast table faster?  That's over 6 hours a year...and you are no longer a slob.

People say I have OCD or I'm like that guy Monk on TV.

I just think things are beautiful the way I see them in my head.  And, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone, I'm going to try and make the world match up with what's in my head.

Letter to (X, Y, & Z) & ~ (X, Y, & Z)

Dear (X, Y, & Z),

Sometime something inside you melts and then you understand. I just wrote the following in the last hour. I'm so exhausted I'm not going to look at it again. It might be nonsense but it was like taking a great dump, I feel better. Constipation is an attachment disorder.

        How I Understand Understanding
        by me

        (A): "You CAN do it."
        (B): ""YOU, can do you it".

        (The punctuation of (A) is only a fraction of the picture. I can't post on Facebook the linguistic and logical notation that will reflect the discussion to follow.)

        Spoken, there can be an emphasis on "can", as is the case with (A), and there is a case when you put the emphasis on "you", as is the case with (B).

        In (A) we are doing something analogous to: "I'm supposed to encourage you now, but I'm really thinking about myself."

        In (B) we are saying something analogous to: "I believe in you."

        However, on the meta level the whole thing functions around a person's mind set.

        Say (A) is said while the person is aware of the difference of (A) and (B):

        This speaker is also aware of the difference while he is saying it, he is aware of: "the awareness of the awareness of the difference." It can be expressed mathematically as a repeating decimal, maybe?. This is the mental repeating decimal of the mystical.

        This is the crux. 'Being' a repeating decimal is profound while .333333333 is less so. This is what understanding understanding is.

        It is understanding a paradox.

        It is understanding when "A & ~A" can be understood. The place of the excluded middle is perceptual?

        That is what I'm going with here. We can have empirical knowledge of a paradox but we lack the tools to express it.

        To demonstrate:
        If you are feeling what I am saying, if I have transferred understanding of my understanding, then there is objective proof that we are feeling the objective feeling of the intangible.

        How? Because you believe in me.

        You are going to speak (B) when you speak to me. So we must have a mutual understanding on some level.

        That is what I'm reaching towards. That objective subjectivity.