'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

'I'm tired of standing here casting shadows'

'Write the imperishable in the sand'
- Andre Breton

Every pull must be counter balanced with a push, like the great suck and blow motion of the sea. Every word written, every footprint left will be brushed away with the swoop of an omnipotent hand. The canvas will be clean, pure, undebased and you will be free. When the time comes, the invisible ink will swell and you will feel the indents like braille under the thumb. A labyrinth of lines and shapes for you to follow, but you will not be lost, you will know your way, with a compass in your chest, ticking. The echo will sound in your ear and find its way down the back of your neck, your spine, the tops of your thighs, and you will tremble, and the world will tremble with you.

'I am fascinated by the fact that the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover..'

- Aldous Huxley

Lake Kamiguchico

I will live here one day

I am beginning to understand what the Romanticist poets felt in regards to nature, that a higher understanding can be found in everything, in the molecular structure of all things belonging to our pantheistic universe. Everything is so shamelessly entangled, so helplessly erotic, so inevitably complex and essential to the harmonious ebb and flow of the universe. And yet we simplify it, mimic it with our technology, producing only two-dimensional versions. After decades of evolution we remain estranged from that which birthed us, forging a deep ravine between the inescapable connectedness of man and nature. Governments can not supply the air we breath and yet they question why people turn to the environment for thanks, question why we exchange in an intimate dialogue between nature and the Self by means of altered conscious states induced by psilocybin: natures lucid little jewel. Man's incessant need for division, for detachment, for disenchantment will be his ultimate demise. Meanwhile she (mother nature) will wait patiently at the doors of perception for him to knock so that she may open him up to the infinite.

Shirohama Beach, Japan

'I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains'

- Italo Calvino

Ever have one of those moments when you feel like your inside a descending elevator? You look up to get a different perspective and see the buildings around you flicker like white noise on a television set. There's someone watching, flicking your channels so you don't know what to feel, comedy or tragedy? Shakespeare used both - are you at the theater? You read the lines but the volume is muted and now your shouting into a sky that can't hear you. Your chest clicks like the destined arms of a wristwatch. Something falls and you hear the smash, you know it is real, that you are awake, alive, moved. That is what brings you back to a point of serenity; the echo of a million splintered pieces.

I come to a fork in the road and wonder which way I will be pulled, like I'm a flimsy piece of metal waiting to be magnetized. And what even, is that magnetism? Have my footsteps walked this path before and will they walk it again in my lifetime of eternal-recurrence? Am I spinning round like a mouse on its wheel, waiting for the next experiment to be conducted. Who is the scientist? Am I the experimenter or experimentee? Before the thought snowballs I swill the ice around in my coffee, suck on the straw and feel the sugar syrup find my tongue. A sweet sensation. Is that all life is? An elaborate fun-house, a sweet sensation. Does the mind use the experience of sensations as a drug that gets the imagination so high that it has manifested a material world? All the textures, black holes, planetary systems, pleasures, language devices, love, war, all reduced to a bud on the side of my tongue and a sweet sensation deep in my throat. They say we live in a Fools Paradise, well, if I'm a fool and this is my paradise - it tastes sweet.