Humans are now hackable animals

Translation: "Evil Noah is Here"

So, I was up late last night, doing what I do, which is either reading my book, surfing the internet, or streaming programs, and taking notes. I'm not blogging too much lately, because I'm on a computer all day for work, and so by the end of the day, typing anything more than a couple of paragraphs can be somewhat difficult, due to issues with eyestrain. 

Anyway, last night I found the picture I posted above, along with the video presentation it was taken from, and I was really disturbed by it. Of course, I was drinking my India Pale Ale and smoking a tiny bit of cannabis, so perhaps I was looking at things from a perspective I normally wouldn't see. But I was looking at the name, "Yuval Noah Harari", playing around with creative word association analysis, and thinking that could read, "Evil Noah is here". Like a doomsday prophecy. I know, silly, right?

I actually have one of his books, Sapiens, which I've previewed but haven't read yet. It's possible I was put off by its atheistic tone. Now I realize this guy is a key player in the transhumanistic agenda. He's not just some obscure intellectual who writes books, he's become this major advisor to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, who is another sinister character in the transhumanistic agenda. 

Then I thought to myself: How could this relate to another news story just released, like this: 

The Human Genome Project pieced together only 92% of the DNA – now scientists have finally filled in the remaining 8%

Then I thought: What other factor could have contributed to this completion of the sequencing of the human genome?

Could it be the pandemic, or rather all those millions of nasal swabs collected from peoples Covid-19 tests, where they failed to properly inform people that they were also collecting their DNA?

CDC Says 10% Of COVID Swabs Sent to Genome Lab, Raising Privacy Questions

So now humans are hackable? What's the plan going forward? I guess I'll have to read Mr. Evil Noah's books to find out. But in the meantime this presentation may offer some clues. 

Will the Future Be Human? - Yuval Noah Harari

In case you don't have time to watch it I will highlight one phrase, which I've taken the time to transcribe: 

"In the coming generations we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds. This will be the main products of the economy. Of the 21st century economy. Not textiles and vehicles and weapons, but bodies and brains and minds. Now how exactly will the future masters of the planet look like? This will be decided by the people who own the data. Those who control the data, control the future, not just of humanity, but the future of life itself."

And another gem:

Yuval Noah Harari: "And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be: what do we need humans for? Or at least. What do we need SO MANY humans for?"

And his answer: "At best guess we have to keep them happy with drugs and computer games." 

My question is: Just exactly who does he mean by "we"? I'm guessing it's not average Jane and Joe Shmoe on the street. He doesn't really say specifically, other than hinting at it's whoever owns the data.

He also said: "History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods."

My comment: So, basically the vast majority of humans will be placated with drugs and video games, harvested for their organs and used as batteries to power this massive 5G enabled supercomputer that you plan to upload your consciousness to so you get to pretend to be God? Am I right? You know this is going to backfire right? I mean you say it will be the end of history, I mean if by that you mean a mass extinction event, which probably will include both you and your supercomputers, then yeah could be. 

Okay, I haven't become some Bible thumping Born Again Christian, but I swear this sounds like the anti-Christ to me. Either way it can't be good. But I'll let you judge for yourself. 

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

I just finished reading the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. I don't do book reviews. What I do instead is give the book a rating, on the scale of one to five, and then make a few comments about it. It's the lazy way, but it works for me. 

Anyway, I gave this book 2.5 stars. It wasn't a bad book, but it felt rushed and incomplete, like the author tried to fit in too much information, without really connecting the information in a meaningful way. It's like he took all his research notes and tried to squeeze them all into this book 'as is' without telling an engaging story. Ultimately this book raised more questions than it answered and left me with a feeling of complete information overload, but I did learn a few things. 

Basically, the idea is that 1) Laurel Canyon, and by extension Sunset Blvd, was the birthplace of the hippies. 2) That most of the countercultural rock stars that settled there in the 1960s had family connections to military intelligence. There's too many names to list, but a few examples include Jim Morrison, David Crosby,  and Frank Zappa. And 3) there was a classified military intelligence facility located in Laurel Canyon, with a fully operational movie studio, which was not made public until modern times. 4) With the hippies, and the birth of psychedelic rock, came the consumption and widespread promotion of psychedelic drugs. There was heavy drug use, promiscuity, and exploration of the occult. To cater to the drug fueled hippies, a drug trafficking industry was born, and with it came prostitution and pornography, and the emergence of hippie communes and satanic cults. 

The main theory of this book I think is that the whole drug fueled hippie countercultural phenomena was a PsyOp. It did not happen naturally, but was socially engineered. That there was an agenda, and the hippies were actors in a story they did not write. That possibly the whole thing was this massive mind control experiment. Give people drugs, encourage them to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy and immoral, and convince them that what is happening is good, and that there mind is being expanded and that they are being liberated.

Besides the hippies, the rock stars, the drugs, and the cults, there was also a huge amount of unexplained murders and suicides and all sorts of weird phenomena going on in 1960s Laurel Canyon. Most notable were the Manson murders. But there were many more that occurred long before the hippies even arrived on the scene. Maids and butlers that ended up floating dead in the pool or thrown out of windows. Numerous suicides and car accidents that seem a little fishy. There were huge multi-million dollar mansions from the 1920s that looked like something out of an old black and white horror movie, with peepholes in the eyes of paintings, secret levers with hidden passageways behind book cases, and subterranean tunnel systems all over the Canyon connecting different houses and parks, with evidence for occult activity having occurred.

Anyway, since I've never been to California, and prior to reading this book, didn't really know much about the history of Laurel Canyon, which is located in the Hollywood Hills outside Los Angeles, what I did while reading it was supplement my reading with looking up pictures from the era online, looking at archived photos of the people and houses and specific locations mentioned in the book. I also went on YouTube and looked up some of the bands and listened to a sampling of songs. I was already familiar with a lot of the music groups from the era, was a huge Doors fan back in my teenage years, but some of the music I wasn't too familiar with. Most notably Frank Zappa, which I had heard of, but didn't really listen to, and the band Love, which I don't think I ever listened to, or if I had heard it didn't know who it was. I don't know how I managed to not listen to Love before, because their really good. 

This is the best album of there's by far: Love - Forever Changes (1967). 

In closing, here's a sample from that album:  

My Experience With Cough Syrup

In the last post I wrote a few words about my experience taking LSD, and mentioned that I didn't really have any hallucinations from it, and in this post I wanted to talk about my experience using cough syrup, which did cause some hallucinations.

Keep in mind that I'm writing from memory here, about something that occurred many years ago, so pardon me if the description is not as thorough as it would be had it just happened.

Cough syrup is nasty stuff, and is most certainly bad for your health. The recommended dosage for its intended use for the treatment of coughs is a couple teaspoons worth. For accessing its psychotropic properties, you would consume between 2 to 4 fluid ounces. First of all, not all cough syrups are equal, some contain harmful additives that if consumed beyond the recommended dosage listed on the label could cause organ damage and may even kill you. But this post is neither a tutorial nor an endorsement so you'd have to find that information elsewhere, just be forewarned that if you don't know what you're doing it could kill you.

The reason why cough syrup has psychoactive properties when used at a higher than recommended dosage, is because the active ingredient Dextromethorphan (DXM) is molecularly similar to PCP, the street drug also known as angel dust, a dissociative, which can trigger a feeling of being outside of your body. So at low doses it has been described as being similar to the drug ecstasy, and at higher doses is similar to a PCP high.

It takes between 30 and 60 minutes before you start feeling the effects, which last I think maybe six to eight hours, and similar to LSD begins with the heightening of your senses, especially your sense of hearing, but perhaps a little milder, and consequently without the feeling of terror that I got from LSD, as in regards to not being frightened by the heightening of my senses, but there was some paranoia that derived from another source, which I will describe later.

The next thing you notice is that your body begins to feel very heavy, and when you walk or move your arms they feel like rubber, almost robot-like, voices sound tinny and kind of far away, your movements clunky, almost as if your head is separated from the rest of your body, and your body feels like it's not quite you, like some kind of machine, like an inanimate prosthesis, but in my case I did not consume a high enough dose to have a true out-of-body experience, it was more like a partial feeling of separation.

The other thing I noticed is that strangely enough it really intensified my feeling of empathy, like when I watched a movie while under its influence, I could feel the emotions of the people more strongly than I normally do, and I was like picking up on this whole other dimension of the story, the unspoken feelings of the characters, that I either wouldn't had noticed or put much importance on otherwise. And also increased my appreciation for music, you feel it more, it becomes a part of you, soaking it up like a sponge.

Now this is where the hallucinations come in, and also the feeling of paranoia, while under the influence of cough syrup there is a sense that there is another world overlapping this one, (something I did not get from LSD at all) you get this feeling, even if you are alone, especially if you are alone, that there are other beings in the room with you, watching you, whispering things about you, are clearly non-human, troll-like, dark, alien, almost like their world is in black and white, and I got a bad feeling from them. But I want to make this clear I didn't actually see it with my physical eyes, or hear it with my physical ears, is more like something in a dream, astral, more of a subtle impression, a feeling, like when you're drifting off to sleep and are awakened suddenly right when you were starting to dream, and you still have this strong impression of the dream world, which you know is not based in the physical world, it's in your mind, where you've got a clear mentally visualized image of it, but in this case, I was not sleeping, and I had not been sleeping, but it was similar to that.

I had that experience of these subtle troll-like beings every time I used cough syrup, which was I don't know maybe a half a dozen times, so it was a repeatable phenomenon. It doesn't happen right away, but later, during what you would call the peak, this subtle awareness of being watched by beings of another dimension. That was the closest I came to having a hallucination. Once again, have no intention of ever using cough syrup again, just seems too dangerous, bad for your health. I also think that repeated long-term use could probably cause a person to have mental problems, where they may gradually lose their grip on reality.

But it was interesting, my experience with LSD and cough syrup showed me that our perception of the world can be drastically changed, that reality has many different dimensions to it, that what we see through the filter of our human senses is not the one true objective reality, that what looks like a flower to you, may appear as a spiral galaxy to another, and that what we consider the ordinary human experience is just one perspective out of a potentially infinite range of possible worlds.

The danger of using psychedelic drugs is that they radically change your perception of the world, but without providing you with any way of understanding what you see. It's like suddenly being dropped onto an alien planet without a guide, without a map, without a compass, without a spacesuit, or a backpack with supplies, without any preparation or knowledge about the world whatsoever. You could get yourself into all sorts of trouble that way.

You could get lost, never find your way back home, or maybe even encounter hostile natives that capture you and lock you up in a cage and eat you for breakfast. In other words, it can be dangerous, and that's why in traditional indigenous cultures, where psychedelics were used, it was the shamans and priests, who carefully oversaw the whole operation, acting as guides helping the psychedelic journeyers navigate the waters of the psychedelic realm safely without losing their minds.

They got a whole system of knowledge built up around it to prevent a person from falling off the deep end into the abyss. But when people go it alone, without any knowledge or preparation, anything could happen. It's like jumping off a boat into an unfamiliar body of water and attempting to swim across it without a life jacket and with no idea where the closest body of land is.

Maybe things will turn out okay, and maybe they won't. Either way, it's a risky operation, best undertaken very sparingly, if at all, with extreme moderation, ideally in a safe, comfortable environment, free of hostile influences, and around supportive, knowledgeable people.

*Originally published 4/11/2015

My Experience With LSD

It's been more than a decade since I've used any mind altering drug, the last being marijuana and cough syrup, and twenty year's since I've used LSD. That's about the most hard core drug I've ever used. I don't regret trying it, but in all honesty, I didn't much enjoy the experience. It made me feel crazy, like what I imagine someone with schizophrenia feels all the time, and it was definitely not something I'd want to experience again.

I'll describe the experience for you right now. It takes between a half an hour to an hour before you start feeling the effects, which last over twelve hours. What you notice first of all is a heightened awareness. It makes you more sensitive to everything. In my case, I found my sense of hearing to be magnified to almost superhuman levels. What normally would be considered super soft sounds, like breathing, water dripping in a distant room, shifting your position in a chair, or even the sound of your own voice whispering, sounds like it's magnified over a loud speaker.

I found myself feeling frightened by the sounds, ordinary sounds, because they were so loud, and at the same time I was also paranoid that someone was going to notice that there was something wrong with me, that I was on drugs, that every movement I made was making me overly conspicuous, as if I were being louder than I actually was.  My feelings were also magnified, I could feel people, almost as if I could read their thoughts, and that was scary too, because there was just so much noise all around, like I said everything was magnified, but to the point of it being overwhelming. There was a feeling of being trapped, knowing that this was going to last for twelve hours, and it was like I was hanging from a precipice, holding on for dear life.

I guess that's what you call a bad trip, oh and I remember grinding my teeth, worried that I was going to break my teeth, and I had no control over it, which suggests the drug was laced with amphetamine, but actually, towards the end, probably about 3/4 of the way through it, the experience became much more positive, the effects were toned down a bit, where I felt the heightened awareness, but without feeling afraid and overwhelmed by it, and the teeth grinding also subsided, and at this point everything was beautiful, I remember it being summer time, and lying on the ground outside under a canopy of trees, hearing the heartbeat of the earth, the birds, the insects, the trees blowing in the wind, and feeling a sense of oneness with everything. Basically, the experience encompassed the entire spectrum of human emotion, from terror to bliss. Actually, I felt a heightened sense of awareness for many days afterward.

Didn't really have any hallucinations though, as far as seeing anything otherworldly or mystical, it was just an enhancement of the senses, accompanied by fear and paranoia, the loss of logical reasoning, and the unpleasant side effect of grinding my teeth.  There may have been a slight amount of visual distortion, as far as lines squiggling a little bit, but I didn't have any perception of seeing anything that wasn't there. A lot of it was I suppose sort of dream like, most of it occurring in my own head, replaying old memories from the past, re-experiencing the feelings, and this sense of just waiting for the effects to wear off. 

This was not a one and only time. I tried it a few times, hoping for better results, but ultimately didn't like it. Would never do it again. I didn't enjoy feeling like a crazy person. Still, it's interesting how it magnifies the senses. I'm telling you, it's not just a self-delusion, it really does magnify your senses, I really had some supersonic hearing, and I think it could be verified by tests. Which makes me wonder if a person could trigger that ability without drugs, like it's some untapped skill that everybody has sitting latent.  Amazing how the sound of a water drop could sound like the thunderous roar of a waterfall, and a whisper like a shout. Also interesting how ordinary sounds when magnified beyond your control can be frightening.

Other than that, what I didn't like about LSD (if in fact that is what I had, as there is some question of its purity, being most likely a mixture of other adulterants), is that the effects lasted way too long, with the negative effects far outweighing the positive effects, that it just didn't seem worth it.  And as far as inspiring profound insights and creativity, I actually had much better results with marijuana, and the only drug induced hallucination, or experience of otherworldly phenomenon, I ever had was from cough syrup, which I will write about next.

*Originally published 4/11/2015

Of Cults and Crazies and the People of Walgreens

I went on my bicycle yesterday to run a few errands. Went down to the old shopping center down the street from where I used to live, which despite being somewhat of a more affluent area, has a much more noticeable transient population, with panhandlers at all the major intersections. Remember those People of Walgreen's posts, like the old Mexican bandito who after asking me for the time in slurred broken English, ended up urinating on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance after I went in. Well that's the same shopping center.

Anyway, I pull into this shopping center, which I've only been to about three times in the past five years, after being a regular there for most of the years I've lived in this city. It's a little public square with outdoor seating for the variety of restaurants which share its space. I lock my bike up at the only bike rack in the shopping center, which is right outside a bagel shop.

There are several people sitting around chatting, but one man sitting alone caught my attention, because he had a long gray Moses beard, dressed somewhat shabbily, and looked to be in his sixties and homeless, but also sending off somewhat of a Plato philosopher vibe. That's what I thought when I saw him, I thought of Plato. Though be careful with that, as appearances are not always what they seem, a long beard and few possessions is no accurate indication of wisdom, but usually is just some dude that is too lazy to shave, or who maybe enjoys the quasi guru vibe, leveraging that to his advantage against less discerning minds who equate beards with wisdom.

Anyway, I lock up my bike and do my shopping without event, but it's when I return to my bike, packing up, getting ready to go, is when he makes contact.

"Do you know what time it is?" he says.

I tell him.

He then says, "You from out East?" Apparently detecting the accent in my voice simply from me telling him the time.

"I'm from Wisconsin" I say, like an idiot, realizing I already gave out too much information.

"Oh, you sound like you're from New York."

"Nope, Wisconsin".

And this is where it gets weird.

He then proceeds to say, "You've got to be careful around here, out in New Mexico and here in Arizona, pretty much the entire western United States, they've got a lot of cults out here. Do you know what a cult is?"

I reply, "Of course I do. You mean like Charles Manson?"

He says, "No, not not like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. I mean Christian cults. The end times. I used to belong to a cult, wasted my life in it. Now look at me. Now, I am a Christian. I believe in the Bible. It's the oldest book in the world, but these cults manipulate the teachings and exploit the gullibility of their members for their own personal gain."

Okay, I'm thinking to myself, this is kind of interesting, but why is this guy talking to a complete stranger about this? Why does he feel compelled to approach a complete stranger in a shopping center parking lot getting ready to leave, to warn them about a major cult presence in the Southwest?

Does this guy think I'm a sucker? An easy mark? Do I look like a tourist? I've been here for almost twenty years. At this point I'm realizing that I've got to get out of here, actually I have a legitimate reason to make a quick exit, as I have a quart of ice creme in my pack, and it's eighty degrees outside.

So, I quickly hop on my bike, thank the man for his warning, wish him the best of luck, and get the hell out of there.

Constipation

This is a spontaneous insight I had last night, didn't post it then, because it was already really late, and didn't want to dilute the waters, having already posted my post for the night.

Okay, so apparently there currently is an epidemic of heroin addiction in the U.S. I thought of this because I saw something on the news about it yesterday, saying just that, but also mentioning the fact that heroin causes major constipation, where the addicts may go weeks without a bowel movement.

I myself have never tried heroin, and based on what I know about it, probably wouldn't if given the opportunity, but I've known a couple addicts in my life, and I remember them saying that that first hit of heroin was the best moment of their lives. We're talking religious ecstasy, in their words better than sexual orgasm, the most blissful moment ever, but never again reproduced. They get the best high of their life, but it's only a one time thing, each time they use they try to reproduce that original moment, but to no avail, and from this point forward the more physically dependent they become on the drug, they need it just to feel normal, but never again feeling super normal.

My spontaneous insight is that perhaps the reason why heroin causes constipation is because at some level it is a mental/emotional laxative, which fools the body into thinking that it has already let go of the biggest BM of their lives, but in actuality it was only in their own mind.

They are constipated because the drug fools them into thinking that they already emptied their bowels, when in actuality they merely descended into the bowels of hell, masquerading as heaven. They let go mentally and emotionally, but physically, not so much, making the letting go no more real than an illusory dream. Which is why in this sense most drugs, perhaps all drugs, don't have the power to make you enlightened, when the enlightenment gained is at a dream level, which rarely, if ever carries over to actual physical space.

Fake News, Real Commercials

This is a spontaneous insight.

A thought occurred to me today, a question, a speculation, just a thought, that sometimes what we watch on the news is put there not because it is newsworthy, but because someone paid money for a particular story to be aired, because they had a vested financial interest in one particular point of view being promoted.

Of course, this is self-evident, right, that the presentation of news is subject to commercial and political manipulation, but did it occur to you that maybe there's an actual underground market going on with the mainstream national news, where news is bought and sold like commercials, much of it totally scripted to fit an agenda. Not always political, but purely commercial. Meaning, that maybe people are meeting behind the scenes, to discuss the buying of national news slots, meaning we'll cover this story if you have enough money to pay for it.

Example #1

The Martian movie is released, coincidentally there is a big story on the national news about finding new evidence of life on Mars, namely a source of water, which would make colonizing Mars a real possibility.

Speculatively, you could call it a covert infomercial, where the producers of The Martian movie made a deal with the network to air a news story, backed up by science, which would surely generate interest in and boost sales of their product.


Example #2

Online fantasy sports betting is the latest rage. Stories of people winning millions, some making six figure incomes. I'm thinking wow, I don't really watch sports, but maybe should get into this. I used to play poker, but the site I used to play at got shut down by the Department of Justice. While there is still some legal online poker, it sucks compared to what it used to be, the earnings potential are just not worth it in my case, is heavily taxed, fewer players, etc.

But now we've got fantasy sports betting. Not necessarily new, but lately it's been getting a lot of media coverage. Just today I saw a segment on the news about a guy, with an economics degree, probably in his twenties, claiming to make a six figure income from it, and just this morning made $12,000.

I'm thinking wow, I've got to get into this. I've got a knack for this sort of thing, recognizing patterns, strong intuition, looking for profitable loopholes in the system. But then a spontaneous insight occurred to me about this particular news segment about the guy claiming to make six figures from this, that that kind of endorsement must surely be good for business, beneficial to the fantasy sports betting industry. Do you know how many sales that must have generated? Probably a lot.

Point is, maybe that story was planted. I mean maybe the guy was telling the truth, and he really did make as much money as he claimed, but how common is it really? Likely it isn't very common, but maybe the guy isn't just lucky, but is maybe also a shareholder or something, and for each new person that signs up, as a direct result of hearing his success story, he takes a cut of it. It's like a sort of insider trading. How much does this happen? Probably all the time.

School shootings, overexposure of gun violence, bought and paid for by the anti gun lobby. There's all kinds of factors, but I'm beginning to think that the majority of news is bought, nothing more than a paid infomercial pretending to be news.

The Putrid Smell of Disease

You know how old people have a tendency to smell bad? You know, that whole cliché about smelling like an old geezer, or an old biddy, smelling like urine, BO, bad breath, and dirty crotch. Sorry to be so blunt, but you know what I mean.

The elderly. Usually it is assumed that the smell is the result of poor hygiene. Being unable to wash properly, either due to poverty, of not having people care for you and unable to care for yourself, or of laziness, not having the energy or the strength to care, each breath a hardship, getting up is a struggle, walking around, a struggle in balance, a broken hip waiting to happen. They lose their hair, and their coordination, and their ability to reason, their ability to speak, like their reverting back to infancy, like a drooling baby, with no knowledge about the world, unfamiliar with their body and the laws of gravity, totally at the mercy of the elements and the goodwill of strangers.

But the difference is that the bright light animating the infants zest for life, being open to it all, smiling, because everything is new and wonderful and beautiful and brilliant and creative, and they are eager to learn, to love and to be loved and to become a part of this life, a wonderful adventure awaiting them, is missing from the elderly falling apart, dying not because they choose, but because it is a written death sentence; the ground is breaking away beneath their feet, the organs are collapsing, the skeleton support of life is disintegrating, and it is entirely out of their control, and they are unprepared for it.

Disintegration while still living, little by little things stop working properly, like an impending computer hard drive failure, things slow down, start acting strangely, chaotically, programs don't boot properly, they freeze up, like a glitch in the system is causing complete chaos and malfunction, and eventually the computer is dead, it just won't boot anymore, nothing you can do but replace it.

The insight is, that the horrible smell so often encountered in the elderly, is not simply a matter of poor hygiene, poverty, or laziness, but rather, it's the odor of decay, of disintegration, of sickness and disease, of organ failure, and of death, eating them away as they live, gradually gnawing away at them, until nothing is left. You see, you start dying long before you actually die, sometimes even before you actually start living, in the sense that life is experienced in the full awareness of your heart. It can go on for years, this disintegration, being a very gradual process, but the signs are there for those who know what to look for, what to smell for, and what to listen for.

The smell of urine reveals much. A great depth of insight can be had, for those trained, or intuitively receptive, to know the signs, to recognize the differences between healthy urine and unhealthy urine. The smell of death and disease is always unpleasant and putrid. No perfume or cosmetic can cover it up, it is exuded in the pours of the skin, in all bodily fluids and secretions, it shows in the eyes, in the nails, the complexion, the voice, and the breath. It is fully visible with no place to hide, except in plain sight to those who fail to see it.

Seeing Orange

Been reading The Adding Machine, a collection of essays by William S. Burroughs.

Some essays are pretty good, most are nothing special, but there was one essay that described a writing exercise, or rather an exercise in paying attention, in observational awareness, that he used during his brief stint as a creative writing teacher at a college in New York City. Which was to pick a color, take a walk, and look for the color. Look for any traces of the color within your field of vision. 

So if, for instance, you choose orange, you spend the next few minutes or hours, paying attention to things that are colored orange. Seeing orange cars. Seeing orange lights. Seeing orange t-shirts. Bicycles. Flowers. Paper. Billboards. Balloons. etc. etc.

That's what I did today. Well, not the only thing I did. Only did it for like twenty minutes, en route to running my daily errands: post office, bank, store, library, etc. etc.

Thinking maybe I should do an exercise in seeing green, try to materialize some money out of thin air. Yeah, next time, I'll keep you posted.

I go to the post office to buy stamps. I leave, walking through the parking lot, I hear somebody shouting: "Can you push my wheel chair for me?" I keep walking, then realize that there is a woman in a wheel chair on the storefront sidewalk, not wearing orange, nevertheless, she is speaking to me. And I'm not the only person around either, there are other people walking to stores, cutting through the parking lot, but this woman focused on me. Me. She wanted me to push her wheel chair to the post office, the post office I just came from, to buy stamps. How weird is that? I'm hardly saying anything, and she's just talking non-stop, about needing surgery, where she lives, which is just down the street, about her husband being ten years younger than her and having stage three cancer, etc. etc.

I don't know this woman, but I've seen her before, at the library, at the grocery store, I helped her once at the library reach a book at the top shelf, a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Intriguing, but honestly the woman is annoying. She talks too loud, in what I believe to be either a Long Island or New Orleans accent, and she stinks. Sorry, it's true. I tend to avoid her, but I helped her out today. Seeing Orange.

Reading Bukowski

I've just finished reading my third Charles Bukowski novel, which are all semi-autobiographical. The first, and so far the best, Ham On Rye, I read last year, and the last two, Post Office, and Factotum, I read this week. I was originally also planning on reading Women, his sequel to those books, and started to, but gave up, having concluded that reading Bukowski is a waste of my time.

Why? Because it's all pretty much the same. If you've read one, you've read them all. Bukowski is an alcoholic. All he cares about is getting drunk and getting laid. Sure, he writes about different job experiences, from working over a decade for the U.S. Postal Service, to working dozens of temporary menial labor jobs across the country, but it all centers around his obsession with getting drunk and getting laid. That's pretty much it, the end all be all of his existence. And it gets a bit tiresome after awhile.

Perhaps his essays are better, I may give them a try, but his novels are shit. I really don't get their popularity. Maybe it's because he uses the word "fuck" a lot, and gives graphic descriptions of his sexual experiences, at a time when perhaps few did, which maybe gave him a sort of countercultural appeal, I don't know. He does on the other hand have a very easy to read style, but ultimately its very shallow, that when its over you feel like you've gained nothing.

The only thing I really liked about it were some of his insights concerning the absurdity of certain types of jobs, and the humorous ways people adapt themselves to it.

Here's a good quote, probably the best quote out of the entire book, from Factotum:

--- "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"

"I had elaborated on my work experience in a creative way. Pros do that: you leave out the previous low-grade jobs and describe the better ones fully, also leaving out any mention of those blank stretches when you were alcoholic for six months and shacked up with some woman just released from a madhouse or a bad marriage. Of course, since all my previous jobs were low-grade I left out the lower low-grade." ---

I've been there, unfortunately, if you are a hardcore alcoholic who follows this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you'll likely end up an unemployed wino sleeping outside on park benches or living under a bridge begging for spare change and eating out of dumpsters. Or if, like Bukowski, you happen to win the lottery and manage to make millions of dollars off of mediocre writing, you can drink yourself into an early grave without ever having to work another day of your life and without ever becoming homeless. But you'll still be just as pathetic, except you'll be too drunk to care.

That's Bukowski, everybody: alcoholic, sexaholic, bum; with an occasionally good insight, but mostly not worth reading. That's my assessment. It's something that would only appeal to alcoholics, sexaholics, slackers/bums, or people under 25.

Well, it's not like I didn't already know that going in, but was hoping that maybe there was something more to it that I might have missed had I not read it. Guess not. Most people read this shit when their sixteen, I waited until I was in my thirties. Better late then never, and good riddance. Burroughs is a dirty old bastard too, but definitely more interesting. I'll be reading him next.

The Yage Letters

Just finished reading The Yage Letters, it's the fourth book I've read so far by William S. Burroughs, and it was a major disappointment. Not good at all. It sounded intriguing, the search for a drug that is said to stimulate sensitivity to telepathic communication; that's something that is totally up my alley. In fact, if you know of any books that deal with that subject matter, please do send them my way, via email or the comments, I'll look into it immediately.

Anyway, Burroughs lived many years south of the border in Mexico, mostly to escape prison time in the U.S. for long-time opiate addiction and dealing, and during his time there traveled extensively through Central and South America. This book, presented as a series of letters to friend Allen Ginsberg, chronicles his search for the hallucinogenic vine Yage, also known as Ayahuasca.

His experience with it was nothing special, and mostly negative. Though I have to say his documentation of the experience, not only of using, but the whole process of finding it, and the cultural folklore, encounters with shamans and such, acquired along the way was very brief and incomplete. Read more like informal letters to a friend, rather than an anthropological survey, which of course is I guess all that it was intended to be. But based on his other writings and ideas, which I believe are best captured in his interviews, where his extensive knowledge and intellect really shines, he could have done a lot better than this.

It's just that there wasn't really enough there in my opinion to even publish it as a book. The whole thing was less than eighty pages, and most of it, despite the title and description, centered not around the search for Yage, but the search for casual sex with young men, who in some cases were still what you would call boys, teenagers, barely legal. Okay, I don't care about Burroughs' homosexuality, doesn't bother me, but men who are over forty-years-old cruising for one night stands with 15 year old boys is in my opinion disgusting.

Its value is primarily autobiographical, but as far as providing information about Ayahuasca, and being a travelogue of 1950s Latin America, its value is minimal.

I don't know why, but I always seem to gravitate to reading dirty old men, people who, like Burroughs, Bukowski, Miller, in real life I would find so repulsive and degenerate that I'd have nothing to do with. I guess it's my shadow, such interests, that manifest purely in literary form, a fascination with inferior men with brilliant minds, tarnished by perverse, decadent habits and thoughts.

I'm not done with Burroughs just yet, but this one has turned out to be the least interesting and most disappointing book of his so far. Though I have to say, his books Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters should all be read together, they were all written, though not published, around the same time, and deal with the same subject matter, that of addiction, gay cruising (despite the fact that he was married to a woman) and travels, and read like they could have been combined in one big autobiographical novel; with The Yage Letters being better as an appendix, rather than a stand-alone work; though I can understand why they did it that way. Junky was, after all, his first novel, and almost wasn't published. Its autobiographical value wouldn't be realized until many decades later.

I'm looking forward to reading more of his interviews, his novel Naked Lunch, and then moving on to other things for awhile. But I will be back.

Everybody is Watching

Watched a movie last night, its name is unimportant, but what caught my eye was that several people in the movie were using smartphones, taking pictures and video clips of strangers on a plane and uploading it to social media; which would later be misconstrued as proof for a crime, used against them, making them look bad, but who would later be found innocent.

It could admittedly go either way, amateur video footage has both helped and harmed, but the fact of the matter is that it's everywhere, and there's no escape.

Everywhere you look people are doing that, or have the capability of doing that, of being amateur journalists and spies; filming people without their knowledge or consent, and sharing it online. This, coupled with the fact that reality TV is becoming the most popular type of television content, is normalizing this intrusion of privacy, making people more comfortable with the idea that it is okay to be watched, to always be watched, and to have our private lives a matter of public record.

I had this insight that the prophecy of the Orwellian Police State, where everybody is under constant surveillance, is not necessarily something that must be imposed by governments or corporations, but is more likely realized by the hands of ordinary people equipped with smartphones and blogs, doing the dirty work for "them".

Timelessness

What is timelessness?

It comes down to perception. How fast or how slow time appears to move, or not move, depends entirely upon your perception of it. Awareness shapes reality. But what shapes awareness? Like dreams, it may seem like a few hours have passed, but in actuality, or rather on the objective level of ordinary reality, perhaps only a few seconds have passed.

It is possible for a few seconds to feel like a few years, and for a few years to feel like a few seconds. An entire lifetime looked back in retrospect from the perspective of old age, viewed as a memory, may feel like seconds, like many years compressed into a few seconds, highly dense, concentrated, instant knowing, super fast data compression, that is memory, and without memory there would be no awareness of time.

Timelessness is the perception of stopping time, or of time moving very slowly, or perhaps so fast, that it appears to stand still.

What remains is the now, containing future and past, overlapping the present, not as separations in time, but one vast experience of potential energy, of what happened, what could happen and changes along the way, modifications of actuality, modifications of memory, modifications of perspective.

What has happened has happened. Can't undo anything, ever, just as the blowing of the wind, or lightning striking, cannot be undone, but you can change the way you see it, the way you remember it, what you look at, what aspects you focus on, what you consider important or unimportant; that is entirely changeable, alterable, malleable.

The experience of timelessness removes the boundaries separating the importance between yesterday and tomorrow. They are like wind currents and waves in the sea, changes of direction and velocity, like boundaries on the map; countries and capitals; points of reference useful for navigating the world in abstraction.

Memories are a lot like dreams; phantoms, yes it really happened but, after the fact, looking back, it's like a shadow. The reality of it has evaporated, has become as seemingly intangible as the wind.

We have time to measure our lives, to give us a sense of order and coherence, and a feeling of permanence and control, but ultimately the actual essential experience exists in a state of timelessness, real life lived in the now, what we experience in any given moment without regard to past or future.

You read this now. Ten minutes later. Tomorrow. Next year. Whenever. It doesn't matter. If you are here, whenever you are here, reading this, you have just transcended the barriers of time. Congratulations: you are a time traveler! Different times, different positions in space, and yet we are both perceiving it as happening now.