'When they ask to see the inside of your palm, show them the veiled planets in the sky'

- Andre Breton

I have noticed that the people I am closest to seem to share a habit of mine, we like to escape. Escape isn't the right word because we are never fleeing from anything, but more so building alternate places to wander. We create worlds of our own, worlds within our worlds, each opening up into another like the undressing of a babushka doll. When you have mastered the art of escapism it is as though your mind begins to unfold like the creased edges of a hypercube and you come to realise the infinite nature of thought. Thought, a simple thing that is always there and yet never exploited to its full mental potential. The human mind is a frighteningly powerful weapon.We are given a riffle of imagination, don't waste it shooting blanks.

'Ecstasy, its a technical term that refers to the souls ability to stand outside the body.'

- Aldous Huxley

Some people know how to live. It is not a thing that can be taught or learned or bought. It seems like a simple concept, find what makes you happy and do it. Some people will spend their entire lives hesitating like a waterfall before its plunge. In a world that is driven by control perhaps the hardest thing to do is to lose it. I think there are two kinds of cognition that determine our actions, the first is rationality and the second is passion. One of the best pieces of advice I have ever been given was from my philosophy lecturer who advised me to have an ego but not become addicted to it. What he meant was for me to indulge in the highs (and lows) of this reality but to realise that I am able to transcend everything, to let everything go when I need to escape the clasps of realism. Later on one of my favourite authors advised me to do everything with passion but with detachment. I see this as my life mantra. When I say detachment I am not talking of distance or coldness but more so of what my lecturer meant, which is that all things can be indulged passionately but you must not become addicted. You must always want the kick but not need it. Because if you need something than you become plagued by the fear of losing it and the desire to control it and the passion that once existed is scattered into sharp fragments of its once smooth form.

The Good Life

'I am so glad you have never done anything, anything outside of yourself. Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.'

- Oscar Wilde

What is it that keeps you spinning? What keeps the blood rushing to your head? Sometimes I need to be up-side-down, just to get a different perspective. I have walked out of the house with my shirt on inside out four times this week. What does that mean? Do I want everything to be a little more shaken than stirred? Am I asking too many questions? staring out too many windows? Last night when I was riding home I let go of the handle bars and closed my eyes for a moment. I could feel everything drifting along side me, moving with me, and I was calm. Calm in my reckless abandonment, calm in knowing that I am not letting anything pass me by.

'It's hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world'

- Lester Burnham in the film American Beauty

The characters in my stories are you, they are me, they are a amalgamation of all the stuff of my personal universe all meshed and sunken into one another. My characters are everyone and they are no one, they are a theory-fiction, a pawn in the game, always playing. They are paradoxical and they never say what they mean and sometimes I am the pawn, a vessel by which they speak, a slave to their every whim. Then and only then do they become real to me.

'Be Here Now'

- Ram Dass

Beach House at the beach house..

Fast motion makes you feel so good. The rush is like no other. When you fall or trip there is always that moment of thrill, that thrill is uncertainty. Will you land on your feet? Will you break? these questions are left behind, caught up in space and time while you collapse into the motion like a rolling stone. We are taught to hold on to gravity and people until we are left with nothing but rope burn on our hands. Let go, that's the secret. That's what they don't teach you; to let go, remove your armor, enjoy the ride, hit the bottom, feel the impact, check your pulse - yes you are here, Now.

'How To Disappear Completely'

- Radiohead live. listen here and you will completely disappear

'Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion?'

-Thomas Pynchon

Today nothing was mundane, a hyper perceptive day, ultra vivid. Someone told me that some crazy people just think they are becoming more perceptive and that they shut off from the world because they begin to see through the colored cellophane. Me? I like the cellophane but I don't need it. I see the colors with the eyes closed. I'm not willing to unlearn the dirty devices of this world just yet. We are thrown into this world, starving, hysterical, naked, wanting everything at once in all shades, never full until we are burning with desire, burning in the landscape that moves us, burning in the ones that we love. We will be remembered for running through hell in a gasoline jacket just to play with fire.

And through the ages I've ached for you,

Ive preserved myself in hot water,
studied the necessary physics,
I've sat with witches
and pushed glass with my fingers
To feel your spirit again,
To be at peace, to be ourselves again.
Because of course, through all this time
I haven't blinked, haven't parted a lip
To renounce my obsession,
And yes, through all this time,
even though Ive been every one of them:
Priest, Judas, whore,
and despite my romantic discord
I've been bored with it all.
Without you, it's all been done before.

- Jessica Alice (a poetess from my creative writing course)

'For a long time she had lived the life of the world without belonging to it'

- Herman Hess

I walked home in the rain today because it felt good. I don't know why I did it, to feel awake, to feel alive, to feel. I don't want to fall asleep at the trigger. I have a good friend who quit law school this year to live in an Ashram. Now he devotes his life to the practice of transcendental meditation. I think he'd been pushed to the edge, the edge of his intellectuality, the edge of his rationality, and so he leapt over. Antigravity, that was always my superhuman power of choice. To transcend, to go beyond the stuff of this world. It will never be enough, but that's OK. You will always want something more, more knowledge, more experiences, your hunger will never cease. Truth is a fable, stay curious. Every sentence should be finished with an ellipses rather than a full stop...

'Mind Flowers, pretty mind flowers'

- lyrics by Ultimate Spinach, Mind Flowers. Listen here

'We, staring through thick glass, pray not only for their daily bread, but also for their daily illusion.'

- Thomas Pynchon

Live music is disarming. It is like no other art form because you are experiencing creation and exhibition simultaneously. You are part of it, and it is a part of you; two entities running parallel, both entangled in the same sound energy. In a good performance you will have no control over your submission, the feeling will be insatiable because you are witnessing something that lives, that is why your body quivers with the sound vibrations. A good live performance will rewire your sensory perceptions and you will be aroused before you are able to intellectualise what you hear and feel. You will become mentally and physically enslaved. In this sense, live music questions the nature of creation in that it captures the purity of a creative moment. Which is, something that is never tangible, always suspended in time and space, and dissolves immediately after into ash; a collection of dried bone fragments where a topography of the mind once hung.

'Thoughts from moving mountains'

- lyrics by Autolux, Highchair. Listen here

Fuji

A shadowgraph in the shape of a woman
Constellations hanging loose over her shoulders;
discarded fairy lights
Her palms creased by the sea
Tear ducts shaded in with led
Tectonic plates shifting under her heels
Waiting to be pulled out from underneath
The earth a rug, textured with life
- sigh