bullet surprise

 What is meditation? Dunno honestly, though I think it's the sort of thing that you can never really know if you know it, like all words for personal subjective experiences. In any case, I've done some things called 'guided meditations' where some calm voice tells me to focus on certain things, my body, a spot on the wall, or something like that. The voice leads you along with the aim of good things.

It's all about at least the very experience of it, but also the positive lingering effects. Maybe I have it wrong and it's a whole modern Thing with a whole world of competing meanings and ways to be wrong, but I still think the term 'guided meditation' is what I mean when I talk about the following:

From my perspective, the homonculus can be a little tiny hairless guy in your head or a dimensionless point or coextensive with my whole body and all of these are fodder for reductio ad absurdums (side thought, are reductio ad absurdum arguments positive arguments for soi dissant absurdists?). Whatever it is, I still feel it watching and experiencing stuff and now those two words, watching and experiencing, converge or diverge depending.

The watching/experiencing bit is most often just stuff going on around me in the world that I can only turn off by closing my eyes or plugging my ears. But in the last 15 years or so it's been a lot of screen and speaker mediation, way more and I think too much.

Even a little screen can dominate. The way that the darkened theater curtains cease to exist to my little internal guy when absorbed in a movie, even the rest of the website disappears to him when watching an embedded video. 

I've always thought the portrayal of 'subliminal messaging' as super quick flashes of words or images inserted surreptitiously into video as sort of corny or unrealistic, the sort of thing that just doesn't seem to work. (There's a whole psycholinguistic result cum methodology that employs this and I did some related experiments using it back in the day. The idea here, or phenomenon more accurately, is that given a task where you have to indicate whether a string of letters flashed before you on a screen is a word of English or not by pressing one of two keyboard buttons as fast as you can (you're shown 'blimp' say, or 'grost' say), you'll be quicker on the draw if a semantically related word is shown, so fast you couldn't consciously recognize it, first. You're faster to say 'yes, 'doctor' is a word of English' if the word 'nurse' is flashed on screen for a few milliseconds beforehand.

Make of that what you will. Maybe it's transparent evidence that the cartoon version of subliminal message actually works, or maybe it's evidence that very fragile weak effects, immaterial to the real world, arise out of this sort of priming. I personally don't think it's an especially weighty phenomenon practically, though probably helpful for investigating nuanced parsing stuff. I think the flashy version of subliminal messaging is schlocky paranoid scifi (fun, but fiction))

But continual corporate screens leading round-the-clock guided meditations are more impactful. It's not all bad I suppose. I dig Alan Rudoph, the Cocteau Twins, Nabokov and loads of others. But most is bad, harmful, and even sifting through the endless bargain bin that is mediated life now really sucks and fucks you up.

Books are cool cuz, as guided meditations, there's a little more need for active involvement. But the infantile masses clamor for audiobooks to passivize things more imo. And, god, have you seen what's going on at bookstores these days?!

Instead I daydream about a scenario where me and my family and friends entertain each other in person, in spurts, with folk everything, awkward and ours. Stories written only to be passed by hand or better yet orally retold. Joint painting, personal jingles. default ephemeral.

Obviously this is far from what we currently have, but why not have dreams and aspirations. Most things I write I don't post here. 

I won't tell, if you won't tell

 This is a beautiful phrase to me. Whenever I've heard it, I've felt a zing, this refreshing clarity of anti-authoritarian cahoots. It causes in me a flash recognition of joint freedom, especially if shared with a near-stranger. Anyone I have a real relationship with, this phrase is assumed

twilight: breaking down

 The alley was and has been gravel dirt since its creation and aside from a yearly summer tar streak, remained so. The dirt roads invisibly beyond the alley had all at one time become further reified from the earth into paved solids, making rigid the abstract 2d net that was piecemeal knit to keep people in the right place. This is generally perceived to be a completed process around here of the sort that finished in the dusty naive past. 

But now the alley has been paved, the process is still ongoing, the grid is tightening ever-tightening, in effect easing travel the right way and maximizing time in place. The transition from the old, loose ways is not past, the fetters strengthen and tighten in real time even now.

From the grid grows 90* the fledgling shoots, cells for human stasis. Now there take the form single family homes, but bigger more efficient storage slowly replaces them like asphalt the dirt. Apartment warehousing hasn't fully arrived yet, but the Marlborough glowers eerie waiting its modern incarnations. Individual space capsules for smooth living are being perfected and a tesseracting new direction is gelling, a future hive for production and again with covid it's bining and binding. Water and heat and power are piped into our pods along with propaganda ports to keep us all on the same page. Zip deliveries from ghost kitchens and ghost grocers to feed our sedentary productivity.

The nice places to live are the ones that in some ways resist this tightening. The nice streets don't have paint on them, but harlot garish palettes are ever further dictating the rules on the roads. Unmarked, gravel roads are the weak flailings of the core which is apparatus, left hand twin specific bike cordons and stockpiled people modular strips for dentistry and bbq. Towns, cities that are themselves specialized into the growing world village. Extravagances of self-sufficiency are earthen barnacles on the metastatic nodules of the globe state matrix.

A dead night through light fiber optic why isn't it uniform? why the diversity even now? The sierras are a partially submerged block, sinking below to the west and pushing up in the east. Force pushes the whole earth ascending as if inexorable, ever upward in regiment uniform, but gravity's rainbow counterforce ch. 4s in countervail striating down the slopes in perfect infinite intricacy breaking that fucker down. A glorious carved and glowing green tapestry is a not-to-scale hyperdimensional microcosm of our true human free will and testament to the ultimate futility of this cinching vise. The Counterforce in each of us as given life by our own whims and active beauty. 

Are we still caught? Counterforce regiments rolled out deployed in a numbers game?

The quiet Monday evening in early June is a pink/blue purple backlit sky and light from some other telluric source enlivens the wet green of the boughs and lawns and moss. I'm struck still and stunned by the beauty just as the naval base plays its trumpet record echoing around the town from down the rampart bluff and before the vibrating slate sea.

This is a universal sign I say to myself and stroll on down the street to the park where people gather nightly and I'm blissed gawking all smiles. An arab man and his 4 year old girl smile back and she sprints the grass alongside and pounces to grab the smallest imaginable flower from the emerald carpet and hands it to me in an act of perfect grace as the world dissolves in lightheaded spangles.

A child messenger or the inviolable purity of the will to power I'm not sure but both are God. The park is now an immanence and me too. A few more lolling strides I carve along nearly visible grains of our joint creation and hear a white dad urging his 4 year old boy on a wobbly 2-wheeler to make the circuit yet faster this time. He speeds ahead of me but his grassy turn around bogs him and I emanate an offer to help him and steady the handle bars and hand flat to back push him towards dad. But what did I do there? We were playing at the grid, training play counterforce and conspiracy me and the boy, and as long as we don't give in, unlearning insignificance.