On second thought...

I don't think it would ruin my life.

It might just be the best thing I could ever do for myself.

Monday's Excerpts - A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     When I read A Wolf at the Table last December, I was beginning to delve heavily into sociology, and what all the study contains. Sociopathy especially had become a high interest of mine after reading The Sociopath Next Door. I believed I had found what has always been wrong with my birth mother, and strands of me still tug towards that hypothesis.
     After reading A Wolf, I couldn’t help but speculate that Burroughs’ father had a likelihood of being a sociopath as well; I related so closely to how he was treated as a child and in his later years. The excerpts I have chosen today remind me most of what I experienced growing up the few years my birth mother resided in my young life.
     Although now exiled from the gift of enjoying my existence, my horrors of her still pang at my sides, ratting about my ribcage begging angrily to be freed of my prison skin. I imagine this is close to how Burroughs felt, by reading his descriptions of self-agony after the fact of his father’s absence. I can only hope alongside my willpower that someday I’ll find the solace I seek, too.

This Week's Book: A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
     And if I put everything in God’s hands, wasn’t that a copout? If I didn’t get what I wanted I could use God as an excuse, I could say, “He didn’t want me to have it.” When, in fact, maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough on my own.
     If I wanted to be free of my father, it wasn’t up to some man in the sky. It was up to me. (Page 163)

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     I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind—an emptiness—a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn’t even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.
     Maybe, I thought, I don’t need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what’s missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be. (Page 177)

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     Another thing was clear to me in this moment: I was not him. I was me. Whatever wrong thing he contained, he had not passed it on. (Page 229)

Books read this past week...
★★★★☆ Lord of the Flies by William Golding
★★★★☆ Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
★★★☆☆ The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
★★★★★ River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

The Dialect of Love

     Myself, I’m hardly sure of anymore. Where I stand even less, I really do alone. I might as well occupy cow hooves, I’m a fatter, personality artificially pumped sheep filled with garbage nutrients of society. Beautiful, hideous, or bonded to my red, it’s all going to be the same where it stops.

     At this rate I’m phasma mounting phasmatis, and where’s the point of anything without a hollowed out sense of “you,” closing with a face to assign it? If you drown in anything it will be this blood I’m writing, and I hope I could easily wash you away with everything till your last gasping breath while I await your faceless apology.

     I am Chaos upon one of the seven sins of sense, I’m a rainbow array of painful pleasure. Be honest when you admit how you’d love to be destroyed; it hurts when you see anything I’d try to hide.

     The tacking and advertising of two languages—me, I don’t even speak, but bear them all the time. The dialect of love is forever changing.

To Infinitum, the Womb

    Conclusory, there is nothing more I need other than the minimal necessities of my health and a capability to utilize the possibilities that have surrounded me since the day of my birth. Had I been aborted sooner, I would have been carried within another womb ignorant to tools used for human extraction.
    Balance exists on our planet that I decided is ours because I decided balance shall exist and I also decided that I will become an icon. I will decide for society until citizens decide for themselves, and although I don’t have a vice presidential candidate to regurgitate everything including the garbage that discharges from the part between my northern lips, I will be a bona fide maverick.

    Unwaveringly, I hate the color magenta because magenta is the color of the outfit I was wearing when a boy equivalent to my age tore it off my innocent four year old body. This memory is one amongst the few still attacking me in my daily life.
    Having only been able to recollect a handful of the molestations in clarity has driven me to speculate, were I presented with the choice, would I prefer the current torturous memories in the form of nightmares, flashbacks, sexual embarrassment, etc., or the closeted reality of the event?

    Attempts at recollecting specifications of my every encounter with sexual abuse have been nearly impossible. Many of the nightmares I have endured have simply vanished from my conscience mind, regardless of how hard I try to select them from an internal bookshelf affectionately labeled, “Things to be forgotten. With love & reason, Your Sanity”. Clearly, my sanity doesn’t know me very well, probably because we haven’t kept close company throughout the course of my vividly memorable life.

    On the rare occasion my whores provide me mental downtime, my skipping around the beckoning void leaves me pondering if Sanity is hiding from me, or if my sub-conscious has hidden her in an act to secure our entity long-term. Whatever the cause of Sanity’s disappearance was, I doubt I’d have been capable of mustering the courage to do this had she shown up for jury duty the day Overall Judgment sentenced “logical reason” a few years behind bars, sole reasoning being so all those with a desire to attend could come together and finally craft what my bestowment recommended from first moment I realized I had outlasted my first victimization.

Revolution, Revolución

     Today is just one of those rare days where I feel like if I tried to start a revolution right now, the planet would swing into full force at my whim and obey my every erratic command. Right from my front lawn, of course.

     How does a revolution even click into geared motion, anyway? Aside from the aesthetic shivering within the womb, do you waken with the concept crystalline in open palm? Is the day of deranged lucidity the emergence of revolt? Found to be true, how many revolutions have been skipped over due to my indoctrinated madness always being absurdity?

     It’s the luminous clarity that sparkles shrouds over the insanity of my off-chained dream, and today,

                                    I release the dogs.

Thursday's Thoughts - Theme: Good & Evil

     I’ve been considering the concept of good and evil quite a bit these past few days, as I’ve been reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. I recommend it only if you’ve read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, though. It’s not as exciting because it’s not told as a story, but Beyond Good and Evil could be equally enjoyable if you’re familiar with Nietzsche’s concepts. (And enjoy them, of course.) 

     It’s also not a bad idea to begin thinking deeply about the contrast, and more importantly— what truly does take place beyond good and evil.

This Week's Theme: Good & Evil

“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.” - Socrates

“All good becomes a great evil when implemented by force.” - JJ Dewey

“To rid ourselves of our shadows — who we are — we must step into either total light or total darkness. Goodness and evil.” - Jeremy P. Johnson

Happy birthday, my love.

Happy                      Birthday.

Thank you for forever being my grandeur.

You’ve taught me so much already.

I love you.

Nietzschean Love of Marilyn Manson's Toll

    It’s been a long road of speculation coming, I’ve finally arrived at my clearest interpretation of what Manson has been trying to say. His love albums aren’t about love of another, they’re about love of oneself! Surely, inspired by love, there’s little denial in that, no matter how much or how little was cut cut cut into video-shaped stars.
    Manson was correct in titling Evan Rachel Wood his muse; she’s the center of his all, the proof lies in the 150+ times he cut his face and hands trying to get a hold of her, and never being able to reach the sun. Thus, he went under!

    His face has always been his highest form of identity, he was destroying himself in every fabrication of his image. I dare say the mutilation of his reluctantly available realities was not only sincerely explicit and alarming, but somewhat flattering to his altars. We must always consider one’s bent knees to our prideful ego. Thus he went under.

    His hands hold his creation, distrusting, they amused themselves by features unbeknown to him as a reliable option of creativity, and they weren’t. He couldn’t grip his own fingers, because he waited too long. If you’re writing in blood, you have to be able to hold the cup below the drain. Thus he fell under.
    He couldn’t reach her, thus he couldn’t reach within himself to untangle his unraveling tightrope of and by cut up hands. Thus he fell under.
    What is a man to do, a mensch without his über propelling him mightily forward? Bravery can demolish the naturally weak with the ease of Castle Rock’s flying boulders, and it’s no aid that we are all naturally, relatively, weak. We are all days of the week and few of us are Saturdays— but who’s to name the strongest?
    Depending on where you are in the world, the week’s end meets an insignificant weak end. We’re spiraling Yahtzee dice; the heart, our hideously rigged red cup. This is where the heart guides the hand, don’t skip the drain.

    This is my romanticism of self; he didn’t have her utmost and outright. He can hardly love himself because he’s over any normal conception. “The death of me” shall be the birth of a new five or six star, lest I gaze gaze gaze unto the fountain of abysmal black blood. For me, there sparkles my going under.

    Like Nietzsche, I ramble rave and rabble, like Nietzsche I probably allow myself too much credit, like Nietzsche I will likely go insane. From birth or from today, there exists no dichotomy of self. My destruction will be all the same!

The Impracticalities of Devastation

     I’m not sure what to say other than I’m tired of everything being a goddamn joke with me. I guess everything isn’t, but enough is.

     Pain is humorous when I’m harboring it under my own gilded dock, near my seashells by the deceit-shore of coalescence infringement. Devouring my snails, swallowing them whole, they wallow in their lunch breaks by avoiding my pearly grains.

     My aspects have disintegrated, my quirky traits once loved, well, once lost to gift-giving. Today I am less than bottom-fed jewels.

     Eventually the sunset will prevail over this stark conscience stream, and this will all be but a dream for the deemed worm of a man.

Monday's Excerpts - Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

     The song “EAT ME, DRINK ME” has always been special to me because of all the references made to various works of literature I’ve enjoyed. Its richness makes it so much more enjoyable for the ears and heart.
     From a desire to comprehend with as much clarity what Manson’s intention for “EAT ME, DRINK ME” as a whole, I’ve sought out the works unfamiliar to me. This started with Lolita in December of last year, leading me to I fall in love with Nabokov’s abrasive, yet romantic, no-fear writing style, as well as his concept of a pilot light, and farther into love’s cloudy red abyss, my romantic affair with word painting.

     Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed with Invitation to a Beheading, although not entirely of Nabokov’s fault. The publishing company wrote an entire synopsis of the story for the back cover, destroying any surprise that could have existed, and would have been very enjoyable. However, the length of Invitation’s dull moments cannot be ignored, and justified by fault of the publishing company.

     The best way I can describe Invitation to a Beheading is this: the good parts are magnificent, the boring parts are like listening to annoying gnats fly around your head. You know they won’t go away, so you deal with them, and read on, hoping to spot a butterfly.

This Week's Book: Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

Chapter Four
     “But then perhaps” (Cincinnatus began to write rapidly on a sheet of ruled paper) “I am misinterpreting... Attributing to the epoch... This wealth... Torrents... Fluid transitions... And the world really never was... Just as... But how can these ruminations help my anguish? Oh, my anguish—what shall I do with you, with myself? How dare they conceal from me... I, who must pass through an ordeal of supreme pain, I, who, in order to preserve a semblance of dignity (anyway I shall not go beyond silent pallor—I am no hero anyway...), must during that ordeal keep control of all my faculties, I, I... am gradually weakening... the uncertainty is horrible—well, why don’t you tell me, do tell me—but no, you have me die anew every morning... On the other hand, were I to know, I could perform... a short work... a record of verified thoughts... Some day someone would read it and would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened for the first time in a strange country. What I mean to say is that I would make him suddenly burst into tears of joy, his eyes would melt, and, after he experiences this, the world will seem to him cleaner, fresher. But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’—and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday...’ And instead of the clear and precise work that is needed, instead of a gradual preparation of the soul for that morning when it will have to get up, when—when you, soul, will be offered the executioner’s pail to wash in—Instead, you involuntarily indulge in banal senseless dreams of escape—alas, of escape... Today, when she came running in, stamping and laughing—that is, I mean—No, I still out to record, to leave something. I am not an ordinary—I am the one among you who is alive—Not only are my eyes different, and my hearing, and my sense of taste—not only is my sense of smell like a deer’s, my sense of touch is like a bat’s—but, most important, I have the capacity to conjoin all of this in one point—No, the secret is not revealed yet—even this is but the flint—and I have not even begun to speak of the kindling, of the fire itself. My life. . . .”(Pages 51-52)

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Chapter Five
    “No, not everything—tomorrow you will come,” Cincinnatus said aloud, still trembling from his recent swoon. “What shall I say to you,” he continued thinking, murmuring, shuddering. “What will you say to me? In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsmen and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B… without looking, or, without lifting the pencil… or in some other way… we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.” (Pages 60-61)

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Chapter Nineteen
    “Everything has fallen into place” he wrote, “that is, everything has duped me—all of this theatrical, pathetic stuff—the promises of a volatile maiden, a mother’s moist gaze, the knocking on the wall, a neighbor’s friendliness, and, finally, those hills which broke out in a deadly rash. Everything has duped me as it fell into place, everything. This is the dead end of this life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation. Just like a man grieving because he has recently lose in his dreams something that he had never had in reality, or hoping tat tomorrow he would dream that he found it again. That is how mathematics is created; it has its fatal flaw. I have discovered it. I have discovered the little crack in life, where it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else, something genuinely alive, important and vast—how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense… it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in—ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all—the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration—no, again I am back off the track—all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples. Oh, if only I had known that I was yet to remain here for such a long time, I would have begun at the beginning and gradually, along a high  road of logically connected ideas, would have attained, would have completed, my soul would have surrounded itself with a structure of words… Everything that I have written here so far is only the froth of my excitement, a senseless transport, for the very reason that I have been in such a hurry. But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of…” (Pages 204-205)

Books read this past week...
★★★☆☆ Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

The Lakeview Theory

    It seems I had it right (write) from the relative start of this page. Lingering on 1e rests “Ground Zero,” and in case you forgot let me refresh the Pensieve: “The greatest position of control would be using past abusings for my heART.”

    Unkillable; this is me, thus I spoke. Are we not all but less illustriously wordy Zarathustras? I receive the highest honor today and forever always after, although it’s my fault for always ripping it from myself. The possibility of triumph rears its head today.

    I can do this because I can do anything. “The descent had destroyed me, and yet, I lived.” Ravenously I shall return, divine and avenging myself, my committing to revenge upon my “brothers” of equal capability and political opportunity. This handicap has made me more.

    By crippling by venom wings you still-birthed a new five star that I will transfigure to the six letters of my name, and! I am not half-price or on sale. My only clearance is the destruction of my demons, doppelgänging as the ironic dichotomy as the death of you. I will gaze at you—no! I will glare at you, O abyss, for now you shall fear me. The greatest entity to ever live, cloaked in reds of the cosmos. I am Goldilocks today and forever after always, I am man becoming the Übermensch one playful skip of a knitted knot at a time. I shall make the Hiltons hang their heads in shame, I will clutter my Monopoly world with black future paint.

    And now, I’d like to take you with me.

Thursday's Thoughts - Theme: Insults

This Week's Theme: Insults

“The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.” - J. Russel Lynes

“If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.” - George Washington

“The way to procure insults is to submit to them: a man meets with no more respect than he exacts.” - William Hazlitt

Happy 40th Birthday Daddy

-~-~-~-

     It’s strange, when it comes to the crossing of your borderline, things come to pass with little ease; the meat shipments less raw overall. I respect you as an Übermensch, how could I not quiver by the possibility of your inspectional judgment? However, thank you for severing your arms for me all the times you did, and I imagine will again. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity of striving to weave my own tightrope with your sharpened bones. And thank you for trusting me to dance across it without a fear.

-----

Withheld and the Übermensch

     I’m still wearing you even though I’m angry with myself. I wish I knew how to tell you all the things I feel I need to, but perhaps it’s a good thing I lack bravery in this respect because I’m not unleashing the dog you don’t deserve.
     It’s subconsciously the Epictetus thing, and now I ask: should tallies be drawn for a recorded example of my overcoming self? Am I not dangling from the tightrope, but fleeting across it with as much grace possible, save my lacking a balance beam?

     Until I cut off my arms, or until I invite someone to carve them free of my corpse, I will always be my only balance. No one will save us. No one will cross over my tightrope, or dance upon the same one. There will be no opportunity for a fellow aspiring enthusiast to toss me a piteous beam.
     If we throw our beams we sacrifice our axis. We need an arm to sever one off, and what’s the use of a single thrown arm disproportionate to my own? I will always be my only balance, always?

-~-~-~-

Monday's Excerpts - The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins

     I did another marathon reading of Dawkins this weekend, completing The Selfish Gene at 3 AM this morning. I could have finished sooner, but I procrastinated heavily on Sunday. Shockingly—at least to me—I seriously considered throwing away my goal. Somehow, I pushed through the actual physical pain of my brain being packed with so much information in such a short time span. I am very proud of myself, and I am so glad I didn’t try to justify not following through with what I originally intended.
     I recommend this book to everyone. It’s not as easily understood as it claims, but it’s not as big of a trick as Einstein’s Relativity. The Selfish Gene isn’t capable of anything less than benefiting the human mind, no matter the amount of The Selfish Gene's detailed information it absorbs.
     Science made easy by metaphors; Dawkins finest quality as a writer. It’s easy to see after reading The Selfish Gene why it’s widely considered his “crown jewel,” but my favorite remains The Greatest Show on Earth. If I could have a love affair with a published work, The Greatest Show on Earth would be my dirty little secret.

This Week's Book: The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins

Chapter 3: “Immortal coils”
     It is its potential immortality that makes a gene a good candidate as a basic unit of natural selection. But now the time has come to stress the word ‘potential’. A gene can live for a million years, but many new genes do not even make it past their first generation. The few new ones that succeed do so partly because they are lucky, but mainly because they have what it takes, and that means they are good at making survival machines. . . . Conversely, what are the properties that instantly mark a gene out as a ‘bad’, short-lived one? There might be several such universal properties, but there is one that is particularly relevant to this book: at the gene level, altruism must be bad and selfishness good. This follows inexorably from our definitions of altruism and selfishness. Genes are competing directly with their alleles for survival, since their alleles in the gene pool are rivals for their slot on the chromosomes of future generations. Any gene that behaves in such a way as to increase its own survival chances in the gene pool at the expense of its alleles will, by definition, tautologously, tend to survive. The gene is the basic unit of selfishness. (Page 36)

—————

Chapter 3: “Immortal coils”
     As an aside, one of the good features of this theory is that it leads us to some rather interesting speculations. For instance it follows from it that if we wanted to increase the human life span, there are two general ways in which we could do it. Firstly, we could ban reproduction before a certain age, say forty. After some centuries of this the minimum age limit would be raised to fifty, and so on. It is conceivable that human longevity could be pushed up to several centuries by this means. I cannot imagine that anyone would seriously want to institute such a policy.
     Secondly we could try to ‘fool’ genes into thinking that the body they are sitting in is younger than it really is. In practice this would mean identify changes in the internal chemical environment of a body that take place during ageing. Any of these could be the ‘cues’ that ‘turn on’ late-acting lethal genes. . . . (Page 41)

—————

Chapter 10: “You scratch my back, I’ll ride on yours”
     A long memory and a capacity for individual recognition are well developed in man. We might therefore expect reciprocal altruism to have played an important part in human evolution. Trivers goes so far as to suggest that many of our psychological characteristics—envy, guilt, gratitude, sympathy etc.—have been shaped by natural selection for improved ability to cheat, to detect cheats, and to avoid being thought to be a cheat. Of particular interest are ‘subtle cheats’ who appear to be reciprocating, but who consistently pay back slightly less than they receive. It is even possible that man’s swollen brain, and his predisposition to reason mathematically, evolved as a mechanism of ever more devious cheating, and ever more penetrating detection of cheating in others. Money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism. (Pages 187-188)

Books read this past week...
★★★★★ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
★★★★★ The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Monster in Particular

     Written originally on March 1st, this is as close to my Ground Zero work COSA18 will ever see. This has a child’s handful of edits, no more than five at most. It's taking everything in me to not defend this, and even more to share it publicly. As I said earlier, it’s sick love I have with what I write. If I’m going to cut myself open like God Killing Himself, I might as well show you what's inside.

-----

     What a monster that boy is. Blue jeans, blue lies, this pen is making me so very disillusionarily blue. What’s the source of this royalty, who is blue? Only Skeeter is blue, outside of the Blue Man Group. Group is a wolf pack, I know a wolf and that boy is also a blue hidden monster.

     Muse, maybe, nights like this I am most alone, beside myself with writhe, unsure exactly what I am doing with myself. I have thrown away everything, but have I thrown away anything? No, not really, I hate the falsities of “really”’s.

     Me, monster, is my truth shining into the darkness, I got what I wanted by asking for it myself and assigning it his beautiful face. No matter the span of the pan of the outcome, that boy is a my, my my my monster.

     I’ve had these Skittles since I day I met you, met you figuratively of course.

     I guess I haven’t really met you, really, I haven’t. You’re a stranger to me and I’m realizing that, especially in the breath of this moment. I’m not sure how I fell in love with a stranger, maybe that’s what they’re always talking about in the pictures. I guess I just unexplainably do undeniably love you with all my “heart,” whatever’s left over of it that I haven’t drowned in my island’s shores of self-deceit.

     Self desperation for self preservation I want to destroy you because you hurt me, but how the hell are you hurting me? You’re not, literally, I’m hurting myself and I’m taking all the blame, technically. Theoretically, I WILL. Eventually I will for real, I promise you, because I would take the blame for you, the blame of myself that I rightfully deserve. I know that we only have ourselves to blame and yet I’m wearing my grey shirt—literally—with five fingers pointing in five directions unsure of what the fuck I’m even talking about besides my desperation to not let you go and not lose myself in the process.

     It’s exploding, this room, everything in it, I AM ONLY ONE NEBULA AND MY BLACK HOLESARE SUCK SUCK SUCKING ME AWAY.

     But! I won’t let you warp into god. I can’t no matter what. I could, with right matter of fact reason, the atomic matter equipped with my carbon number of lucky 6. But! there are no bombs here unless I have gone undetected, I am a futile grenade waiting for you to explode me. So I can blame you.

     I guess when the taste-worthy rainbow has been unweaved you’ll fade too, just prove me wrong, okay? Love is science, you love me, so really, really love me if you mean it.

Ground Zero

     The greatest position of control would be using past abusings for my heART. To conquer such a deficient void, to tread at the precipice of madness without being blown, to glare with ravenous eyes into the deep-throat of the abyss and howl, “You are finished and I must be the Unkillable Monster!”
     Oh, what a frightful being I’d exist as “for” my enemies, lingering in wait for my turn of the other cheek.

     This is historyletting of the latest volume. There is nothing left to be published, nothing left to be published but me.

Thursday's Thoughts - Theme: Tightropes

     Since reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra last month, I’ve been captivated by the concept of man as a tightrope. It floods my senses on a constant basis, the vision of men dancing across ropes is something I can’t dispel.

     I’ve taken to “heart” what Nietzsche has shared with the still-man standing. Nietzsche has inspired me to shove myself in the direction I previously misunderstood, though so longingly desired.

     I squandered about the grounds ravenously, scouring for growing seeds to ride past the mountaintops. I denied that I wasn’t going to someday randomly mount a beanstalk, no matter how long I raped the world.

     The tightrope has strung itself across my recent work, though the majority of it I haven’t yet shared on COSA18. It’s encryption into my brain will become clearer and clearer as time goes on. Some truths you just cannot shake.

     Zarathustra, however, beheld the people and was amazed. Then he spoke thus:

     “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.

     “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

     “I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra

This Week's Theme: Tightropes

“The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.” - Vince Lombardi

“In this day and time, with no competition you are really walking a tightrope. I mean you may think that no competition is good, but in reality no competition is really bad.” - Jerry Lawler

“Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.” - Karl Wallenda

2nd House on the Wright

     I feel sick as I write this, it was something I never wanted to experience again. The hungry fear of pitfall.

     Friday afternoon, I lay studying on my bed, simultaneously hand in hand with Adam Kadmon. I read and reread Strunk & White to achieve any level of utmost perfection I could reasonably reach.

     Suddenly, the airs shifted. A sound unknown to the Valley of Death flooded its caves, choking my ears and drowning all of my senses. Victimizing myself into the vulnerability of it, I stepped a moment outside that door to where the world stood impatient to conquer me, to see it had already beaten down a chosen door of it’s own, exposing my private Duat.

     The existence of my emancipator isn’t what hurt the most.

     The fear of whether I could live or die long enough to breathe in the next moment is what grounded my wings and handicapped me into BVT A WORM. Time had ceased to exist.

     The descent had destroyed me, and yet, I lived.

     The bowels of my tallest horror had not yet swallowed me whole.

     I learned: even when weakened by life’s meticulous events, it remains my duty to stand unaffected and unafraid. I paraphrase—all events are impersonal, even if drowning against the weaklings in the Lake of the Dead.

My Exceptional List

     I am in an exceptional mood today. For the first time in months, I slept in until twelve, I completed my day’s workload over an hour ago, and I’m probably going to the beach tomorrow with one of my closest friends from middle school. Maybe I’m just on an Adderall high, who knows, it definitely wouldn’t be the first or the second time. Frankly, I don’t even care. I’m thrilled about a lot of things right now.

• In less than a month Becky and I will be picking up Jonathan and Ryan from the airport for crazy Orlando adventures, video making, and hotel bathtubbing. Babalon meet-up, say what?

• I’m getting my hair bleached again this month. I won’t feel self-conscious about it anymore.
• I feel cuter everyday because I keep working out and eating right.
• I’ve already read four books during the month of March. I have to read seven more to achieve my goal of beating January’s record of eleven, with plenty of time.
• Proudly, I read Climbing Mount Improbable in a single weekend. When I read Dawkins for the first time last year, it took me months to complete The God Delusion.

• Yesterday, my dad bought me a solar system kit that I’m going to construct today or sometime soon. I finally get to claim that childhood experience. He also shared with me a German book containing really neat science experiments.
• I’ve written a plethora of beautiful metaphors in my “ground zero” notebook that I’m excited to share with everyone.
• I’m undeniably, irresistibly, in love, even if I didn’t want to be.
• Animal Farm (1999) will be arriving tomorrow from Netflix.

• Jonathan’s birthday gifts are in the mail (claims my email from Amazon). I’m excited to wrap them, other secret stuff, “etc.”
• Ryan made me a bad ass signature (full size) for Babalon that has Darwin in it, and one of my favorite, personally held, quotes by Viktor Frankl.

• I’m still laughing at this part of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” that I watched the other night: “Life on Earth might have been created by lightning, or whatever it was…” Hahahaha! Or whatever it was!?
• My dad is taking me bathing suit shopping tonight. I haven’t felt confident enough to wear a proper bathing suit in over eight years.

• I’m backlogged in emails and comments about COSA18, and although stressful at times because of how guilt-ridden I grow for not responding to everything quickly, I’m proud that people are getting something out of my writing, and that from simply reading my blog, they feel comfortable enough with me to trust me with their personal, innermost thoughts for me to forever cherish. Thanks you guys. I may be a one man wolf pack, but I cannot get over you fellow wolves.

Monday's Excerpts - The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

     I’m so glad my dad has such an expansive collection of books, especially classics. It would be irritating to have to wait a few weeks for the library to deliver every book I wanted to read. Luckily, quite a few things are easily plucked from his shelves. The Great Gatsby was no exception.

     I read The Great Gatsby for the same reason I read The Catcher in the Rye last week—it’s one of Jonathan’s favorites. I enjoyed Fitzgerald more than I did Salinger, his word painting was phenomenal and reminded me of Nabokov. Although, if The Great Gatsby’s plot stood alone, it wouldn’t have been worth reading or remembering.

     There’s spoilers this week, so beware.

This Week's Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distance for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” (Pages 49-50)

—————

    He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs. (Page 92)

—————

    “I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her . . . Well, there I was, ‘way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” (Page 150)

Books read this past week...
★★★★☆ Anybody Can Write: A Playful Approach by Roberta Jean Bryant
★★★★★ The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White
★★★☆☆ The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
★★★★☆ Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)