Blue Saturday

:)

strange the demotivational power of motivational signage

me irl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85jg7E5l73E

i went to a parents' morning today, with all the usual awkwardnesses and sadnesses that entails now, and then i made some sad sack quip about myself and then kicked myself afterwards because STOP DOING THAT even tho Nom was doing it too, and then i got the bus to work thinking about how lonely and blue and unloveable i feel, but i read a book and it wore off a little and i was just left with that comfortable, low level blue that almost feels like peace and acceptance

then i passed the chinese takeaway called Wins on Spring Bank and i thought "too long on ilx" and chuckled a bit and hey ho, life always goes on, goddammit

what a coincidence, I passed a Chinese takeaway called Hungry4Ass the other day

lol

but im p sure that was an assian place, not just chinese

it wore off a little and i was just left with that comfortable, low level blue that almost feels like peace and acceptance

This has been ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing over the last two weeks for me.

I have a mental picture of the staff of Wins with their long flowing locks

suddenly finding myself reading the egyptian book of the dead is why I <3 nv & this thread

this seems like the right place to announce that i am at work thinking about lunch at 9.35am

feel like there is a lot packed into that

In questionably early otoh

Alors! Noodelle!

While listening to that Shamen comp I just bought (don't judge! I know it's terrible! I love it anyway!) I had the sudden thought about the missing link between Management Psychology Speak and ancient magic, and it popped up in the form of: that terrible Terence McKenna speech about immanentising the eschaton. And you will either be really offended by this link or laugh as much as I did but I could not help but think, yeah.

I have the sudden urge to spend the rest of the weekend watching Brigitte Bardot flicks.

Oh. I am being stalked by the word "semiotics" today. OK. Now I get it.

nothing but love for the Shamen, should never be a source of shame! i know more of McKenna as a sample source than i've ever read by him but i'm all for acid casualties trying to construct grand theories, at least until they turn all business on us

Prefer Alan Watts as a grand theorist; he seems to be getting sampled a lot recently as well. HIs voice is so reasonable - no matter what he's actually saying - and I really like his sense of humour and didn't take himself too seriously (e.g he also published a book of nonsense verse), which is always a risk for a guru figure.

pre-acid:

http://www.laurenceplatt.com/wernererhard/alan1.jpg

post-acid:

http://www.prem-rawat-bio.org/gurus/img/drugs/awatts.jpg

(alcohol's in that acid punch as well though)

the Shamen <3

Saturday is a little less blue now I've written an email which should never be sent. Ugh. I would just like one area of my life not to feel like a disaster, is that too much to ask? OK, what I would like is for all areas of my life not to feel like disasters without me having to put any effort in, and that is too much to ask, I know, so why can't I put the effort in?

Yeah, OK, I totally love the Shamen, and I love them *because*, not despite of, the combination of complete silliness (with the winking trickster awareness of "we are being silly now") and faux-visionary bullshit that they might actually *mean*. (It doesn't matter if an artist "means it" or not, it matters if it's a good or fun or compelling or enjoyable illusion, really, right?) But it's hard not to listen to a lot of that stuff now without an awareness that no matter how well intentioned their "it doesn't matter if you're black, white, purple" stuff was, it's still kinda uncomfortable to listen to now.

The Terence McKenna thing is like... (sorry, I'm completely manic at the moment, so I'm having trouble following mine own trains of thought right now, weightless, semiotics...)

I think where I was going with that was just listening to those wonderful samples on that track, and I'm pretty sure that's him on a Chapterhouse track from a similar era (I have a lot of trouble telling apart Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson when they're sampled on records). And the story that he is spinning is *wonderful*, it's really entertaining, about how "history is just shockwaves of the eschaton, being emitted from an entity in hyperspace, which shamen have access to the true forms of..." You know, what a fun yarn. Like, he's building on some very interesting mysticism and spinning it out into pure bullshit. And that's fun, but it's also, you know, intellectually garbage.

But thinking about the similar relationship between people like CG Jung... OK, Jung was a real ~mystic~, a visionary, someone who sifted through all the crazy shifting chaos of human thinking and culture and tried (with more or less success) to pull out some patterns. Then you get these other mystics who sift through the crazy shifting chaos of human psychology and pull out *good yarns*. (And in the "good yarns" there are some real lessons, like e.g. the idea of "reality tunnels".) This is all good!

But then when it comes to, like, Management Theory and applying these principles that come out of visionary mysticism (which is where "self actualisation" comes from) to Working In The Corporate Structure. That's not spinning fun yarns, that's pure garbage. But the reason they read so similarly is because they come from the same source. It's just absurd when one is pointed at "be a better human and live a more whole life within a functioning community" and the other is "make loads of money and drive your competitors into the ground using ~human psychology~" because the latter is so completely pointed in the opposite direction from the former, but painted up as if using the same language and symbols, and...

Nope, sorry, my cognitive function has gone again, and I'm a step off barneywaves. I am struggling to express something and lacking the words right now. Sorry!

"Got any salmon?" "SORTED!"

I wish I could turn my thoughts off. I have too many of them. I wish I could hire out my spare thoughts, like computer servers hire out their spare processing capacity when not in use. Like, lend all these thoughts to Spacecadet, because they are really good at *effort* but they are just taking up room in my head, with nothing to act on.

i always mean to read more Watts, he seems closer to genuinely trying to find a way of being, informed by the historical practices around Zen, rather than just "OOOOH MANNNN THIS IS STRONG SHIT" vibe you get off some of his fellow travellers

the connections between Jungian psychology and management theory are all over the place, and you're right Branwell, it's about near-identical techniques being used for good vs evil, but one thing i've felt over the last few weeks of reading/browsing is that whereas Jungians (including Jung) have always been aware that they are story-telling, reanimating myths and constructing metaphors to create perspectives on the cosmos, management speak generally tries to disguise itself as science, with an according shift in language - this is how the world works, and you can use these secrets to manipulate it

it's the age old story of people who treat the Holy Grail as a spiritual journey vs people who think it's a lump of magic gold, basically

and hi spacecadet i reckon having completed one unpleasant task ought to be an excuse to indulge yrself for the rest of the month day anyway

Yes, yes, this is exactly it, and this is the same thing that I was getting out of that big book of Alchemy that I read last year.

The idea of the Holy Grail as a spiritual journey, a quest in which the journey (and the things on which you learn while on it) is the destination, and the Grail is knowledge of yourself and your connection to the world around you.

Versus the idea of a lump of magic gold to be attained by applying the right methods - with the corresponding bizarre belief that a lump of gold will somehow make you happy?

Neither ~mystic spirituality~ nor ~science~ are bad things in and of themselves and both have their places, but ~mystic spirituality~ dressed up as ~science~ is the absolute worst and most dangerous thing in the entire world. That is where the evil lies. (Is this the meaning of "weightless semiotics"?)

i can't answer that last bit, i feel like weightless semiotics wd be the kind of hall of mirrors of signification that we were talking about re: Baudrillard and images on the Image Band thread. whereas weighted semiotics wd imply a hierarchical dualism where the signs point at real things which are by their nature more important than the signs.

whereas really, things are also signs and the hall of mirrors isn't an illusion as such, because the mirrors are real and the reflections are real and your reflections on the reflections are real and it wd be presumptuous to assign a preference for one over the other because they all exist in some perceptual sense, and are part of the field of your experience

reduce everything to PROCESS RULES PRODUCT DROOLS tbh

mysticism always seems best at trickster/disruptive to me, or aware of its own contingency or limits - i feel like it's prone to being (o god deep breath for this one) instrumentalised (by management, marketing etc) because of its loose connection to general conditions of community life now, or praxis, or similar + maybe its ethical ends are less implicit, or more disconnectable than we'd hope.

that disconnectability is probably an important distinction between mysticism and religion tho - the former isn't telling you how you ought to live, it's offering (possibly fictitious) maps of (possibly fictitious) places to visit

it feels more of a leap to transform "thou shalt not steal" into business speak than it does to use the Tao te ching

yes - i see that - I'd have fuzzily optimistically hoped that there's something in mysticism that comes out in action as 'be excellent to each other', not 'fulfil yourself and fuck em all', but I don't think that's so. I guess that's ok – good in fact – if the 'fuck em all' is a contingent/fictitious space we can look at, acknowledge - but yeah it leaves it prone to 7 Secrets to Success of the Shaman in a Business Suit.

haha I know these are fish-in-a-barrel books but...

Hi NV! The email wasn't an actual useful task, it was a diary-like catharsis of bad thoughts which were in my head and which are now in an unsaved Notepad document, never to be sent unless I have a severe lapse of judgement (which I may).

Doing my laundry and making small rearrangements of the sea of mess in my room, which I like to class as productive tasks even though the former gets done every weekend and the latter has made no visible difference as yet.

btw I love the mythic quests of mystic self-improvement vibe itt too, just have nothing to contribute (and I totally mean to read the Image Band thread one day but that's a lot of posts and I don't quite have the energy yet)

OMG, "7 Secrets Of Shamanic Success in The Semiotics of Suits" this is too too much, I love you guys, NV and woof you are the best!

x-post <3 to you, Spacecadet, you are also the best, and "writing emails never to be sent" can be really important emotional work, actually.

a recent phd graduate from my philosophy programme has gone on to be a kind of corporate astrologer for hire, seems to be making a living from it too. i'm not sure if it's less or more creepy than his previous cult leader guise.

(I also don't know why I am hung up on "Weightless semiotics" so much but it is just one line from a lyric which is going round and round and round in my head like a weathercock in this wind, not like a stuck musically earworm or even an OCD earworm, but more like an important message from my subconscious that it is trying to get through to me.

Signs pointing at other signs, and signs pointing at things is an interesting idea, and we end up back up at the hyperreal again (cue the Shamen track...)

This whole "process rules, product drools" thing is something I argue back and forth endlessly with my shrink when she tells me to stop moaning and go and sell coffee mugs with house drawings on them instead of databases bcz I will be so much happier or whatever, but it's like... The process is what is interesting, the work of art is some husk that's left over so why should I try to sell that, don't be silly, it'd be like selling fingernail clippings. Dumb, I know.

Disconnection from ethical ends is what's also *good* about mysticism as opposed to religion, because so much of capital-R Religion just gets co-opted to propping up the status quo "Natural Order Of Things (TM)" rather than lessons of "be excellent unto one another" or "thou shalt not steal." The disconnect is important when Religion becomes just another corporate business concerned with propping up power. (Which you can use "Science!" for propping up existing power just as easily.)

yeah. mysticism as map (in a Deleuze/Guattarian sense) is more hopeful than religion as tracing

Just have to say, CD2 of the Shamen's Hits+Mixes is absolutely amazing. Such a trip down memory lane, all of the remixed grouped thematically ("Alternative" -> "House" -> "Acid" -> "Drum'n'Bass") and mixed like a DJ set. Oh, the nostalgia. I feel like I'm the dancefloor at the QE2 without leaving my bed.

I want 2 dance

Was at mates' gig last night & had to dance for vid shoot but in that stilted TOTP2 swaying way, was not allowed 2 wile out in trademark fashion. Will dance in my head on train mereckons

-

Jesus, Nostalgia is a powerful drug.

I fell into a real hole of it last night. Shouldn't have got out those old records. Shouldn't have googled photos of the ~legendary drinking dens~ I used to habitually haunt back in the 90s. It's funny how memory plays tricks on you, that places I think of in my mind as powerful, evocative of nights of mischief and ruin, and then I see a photo of them, 20 years later, shot during the daytime, and I think... "that's *it*?" (But I guess the smallness and the apparent unassumingness of them was part of the appeal.) Memories flood back with the music. But then I fell into the old trap of romanticising the epic drunkenness and feats of drink/drug bravado. It has such a pull, this kind of "wow, what japes" in my memory (and I very nearly started typing out some "wot-ho, what japes!" anecdotes on another thread before stopping myself) but when I start thinking about what actually *happened*. And just started thinking "Jesus fucking christ, what an *asshole* I was." Yet so many people around me encouraged me because of how amusing, how legendary, how ker-azy it all was. (Or, worst of all, because they liked the English accent that came out when I was so fucking wrecked I no longer had control of my actions.) And like a fuck-up, I believed it.

And for the first time in my life, I'm looking at that period with this double lens. Of yes, nostalgia is a powerful drug, and thinking, not about the dirt, the vomit, the times I got mugged or assaulted or did serious fucked up shit, but about how impossibly glamourous we thought it all was. But suddenly realising, no, I am fucking lucky to have got out of that alive (lots of people I knew then, aren't) and how badly I screwed up again and again.

But it's hard to pull yourself out of the nostalgia trap when you have *nothing* in your present life.

I barely drink any more, so I no longer have that social lubricant any more (because "ker-azy" is a cute look at 25; it's insane at 40) and I feel kinda jealous of people who stopped drinking through AA and all that, and actually have a support network around them of chums and buddies around them to replace drinking buddies. Without alcohol, I'm terrified of everything.

I get like this when it's been, like, 4 days since I had a conversation with a flesh and bloody human being. When I've slipped so deep into nostalgia I can no longer see the real world around me. But what real world is there to see? Nostalgia is a powerful drug; was it really worth swapping those other drugs for this one?

i have to live with the part of me that wants to just keep partying forever. and by partying i don't mean a very glamorous thing - just the life of pubs in daylight, the clique of sodden émigrés from the "real" world or the work world or the mundane or whatever we choose to call it, the steady reimmersion into intoxication that puts you at one with everybody then without warning cuts you off from everybody, the way time works when you're drinking or taking whatever else comes to hand.

(this is a different social space. men can do this easily, walk into the men's world of the single pub drinker. women find this harder for all sorts of reasons, which is why you rarely see women drinking alone in public.)

i also have to live with the part of me that knows the price of that life, knows that it's unsustainable or refuses to pay the cost of it - which is everything, really. i have to live with the part of me that's got nothing more positive to offer than staying alive by staying sober, that organizes my shit on a mostly day to day basis, that sees my own fears in everybody else even tho they're probably not there.

i had to choose the latter because in the end i wanted to be around for my family. but as far as i can tell both are equally valid choices. maybe the reasons for choosing one and not the other don't bear too much scrutiny.

I guess this is one of those things where I never felt "like a woman" and I always felt "like a man" because I was the kind of person that was fine with drinking alone. Partly it was the heady glow of alcohol, and partly it was a drink-fuelled ability to walk into any situation and make friends with anyone (how could I do that then? why can I not do that now? oh yeah, bouze) Partly because drunks are weirdly antisocial yet herdlike creatures who prize the familiarity of a known space, where everybody knows your name and I always went to the same places.

They always say that "drinking alone" is supposed to be the problem. Nope. It's drinking with other people who are also scared of drinking alone which is the real insidious beast.

I don't feel like I'm in any danger of falling back into that lifestyle. Drinking at my age is ugly and unglamourous. But I am in danger of romanticising that lifestyle so heavily that I fall into a hole of nostalgia so deep I cannot climb out. Living in the past is harder to quit than bad Trucker Speed. I cannot keep my head out of the Infernal World of memory mixed with imagination and romanticisation. But it's powerful because there isn't really anything to pull myself out of that space for.

i don't think i have much of a support network around me but it's mostly of my own choosing, and most of my friends drink and i don't want them to take responsibility for deciding what i do or don't do.

nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but tbf mine usually gets tempered with the same things you've said - what an idiot i was

I should stop listening to old records, maybe.

working out what to live for is the killer, of course, once you've asked yourself that question.

my preliminary guesses are: some kind of creative activity; the possibility (however faint) of some future loving connection with somebody; continuing my vision quest for the hell of it; fear of the alternative

i think BB there is a time to swim guiltlessly in nostalgia and a time to GET OUT OF THE POOL AND DRY YOUR HAIR and only ourselves can be the real judge of that

not making assumptions about people's hairedness, let's just say "dry whatever bits need drying"

I found my "reason to live for" when I was 15 and locked up in the loony hutch. Some local theatre class at a community college decided it would be an awesome idea to put on their dress rehearsal of a musical at our loony bin ("let's do the show right here!") It was Fame. I was a 15 year old in a Sid Vicious shirt. I *HATED* it. But I looked at those fuckers on that stage singing that stupid "I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly... HIGH!" bullshit, and I thought "if they can get to do this, with that crap, there is a place for me to do my crap." My parents had to get a special dispensation from my shrink to bring in a guitar, just in case I hung myself with the strings or something, but when they put a guitar in my hands, I came *alive* again, and I found a reason to go on living.

Without that, I got nothing.

^^^this of course, is a lie, and one of the biggest thoughtworms I have spent LOLtherapy deconstructing.

Future loving connection: LOL this is a joke to me. I've never found it in the past, why would I find it in the future? Who wants a crazy mixed up boy-girl whose idea of foreplay is wearing waistcoats and watching videos of Image Bands? Well, some people, in the past, but either I had the wrong genitals or they did. This is a pipe dream. I need bouze to overcome the revulsion of mine own body enough to have sex, and bouze is a no go. So not gonna happen.

Fear of the alternative: DING DING DING DING DING DING correct answer buzzer.

I don't know if this is swim guiltlessly in nostalgia time or if it's GET OUT OF THE POOL AND DRY YOUR HAIR time. (That is a great metaphor, BTW.) I think it is "see some people in the real world" time but my few friends are busy, busy, busy and I am so terrible at contacting people and saying "I know I suck and am hard fucking work but can I have an hour or two of your time?"

There was a ~Makerhood~ thing in Streatham last night, and I should really have gone, and talked to people about opportunities and how to print tea towels and fridge magnets, but I didn't find out about it until this morning when it was all over.

Anyway, I fucking hate the ~MAKER~ cult and all its artisanal bullshit, I mean, fuck capital A Art too but fuck ~MAKERS~ even more ugh ugh ugh and the talk was on "how to keep your creativity flowing" which is such bull bull bull crap. I do not need talks on how to ~keep your creativity flowing~ I need talks on how to get your ~creativity~ to STFU and go the fuck to sleep because it is 2am and I need to do stuff tomorrow. When's *that* talk on, huh. Blech.

i guess all that stuff is just other people's way of dealing with the pointlessness, to a large extent. it's still bollocks, obv.

True. On both points.

Today's salient lyric is "timeless like a broken watch" but I don't need to deconstruct that like "weightless semiotics"; I just know.

<mumbling>This is apropos, I just realized last night that since quitting drinking, I've been going back and listening to old high school favorites nightly. Maybe I'm subconsciously trying to recapture some electric feeling that is shared by booze and melodic/anthemic rock.
One big realization I have come to is that my alcohol intake was a surrogate for meaningful activity/interaction.. or more precisely the cravings for booze were just masking/distorting my cravings for satisfaction/peace/happiness.. So yeah, the power of the social aspect of AA/etc is something I didn't fully comprehend until recently.. it's as if there's a lot of material/baggage that the booze suppressed for years and you need some kind of social lattice to grab on to so the torrent of thoughts/emotions don't overwhelm..
Good thoughts, both yall.