Danger Left Out

But there was much left out of the other account. When there are long days and nights and much drinking there can be danger and Cali has it. Yesterday the Chilean couple was robbed in the middle of the day on a busy street, one big black guy grabbing the little Chilean girl while two others pushed away her Chilean boyfriend. There was pushing and pulling and fighting but then a caleña stepped in with a knife to stop the Chilean and they ripped away the little Chilean girl’s bag and ran off. They only lost some money but the Chileans seem to have lost their will to go out.

Not far away the day before, one block from our hostel, as Hector and I were walking back 2 guys and girl came to the window of an apartment building and called out frantically to us to call the police. They had been held at gunpoint and tied up for hours while 2 men and a woman stole everything from their apartment. In fact it was a professional crew, with 5 more well-dressed and well-armed guys with earpieces working the door and the other floors, taking everything out of the 7 other apartments. Computers, tvs, jewelry, cash--they worked all 8 flats of the building and took it all and loaded it into a van parked in front.

And the other night at Menga, after the hottest girl in the club ran up to me and danced with me for 30 seconds then disappeared and Hector and I went looking for her, and when I stopped and stood to study the club from the back looking for her this fat man with glasses walked towards me and stood in front of me staring. I could see from his eyes that he was a bad man and I politely asked him what was wrong and he did not say anything. He did not stop standing in front of me staring and I did not know what to do and then a big muscular black guy came and stood behind the fat man. Hector ran up and tried to work it out and we thought we had settled whatever it was but even Hector did not understand the problem. The pretty girl had not been a part of their table.

Then I went to the bar and Hector to the bathroom and I did not know until Hector told me later that the fat man and the big black guy had followed him in. We had been to JalaJala the night before and Hector knew the bathroom attendant and when he saw the fat man and the black guy he started up a conversation with the attendant, trying to keep the attendant near him. That was when the fat man interrupted and finally spoke. He was a sicario, an assassin of the paramilitaries. It was heavy shit and he still did not know about what and Hector talked his way out of it and exited the bathroom.

We grabbed the Dutch guy who was working some caleña and forced him to leave the club. We were outside a few minutes when the fat man and the black guy walked out and the fat man got on his phone. I had visions of a hit being called in with the sicarios on motorcycles coming down from the mountains and I told the guys let’s walk quickly and grab a cab up ahead where the police were stationed.

The fat man and black guy didn’t see us as we ducked into the one room strip club owned by the one legged old man on crutches and I took the number of the black stripper I had danced with earlier. She was a pro and would no doubt cost me a lot of money if I called her. Then we ran out to a waiting cab and went back to the hostel in Granada, the Dutch guy refusing to believe the story of the assassin and annoyed we made him leave his girl at the club. But he got her number and would leave with her for Popayan the next day.

And on our first night I remember we were in a taxi on our way home from Menga and the short, dark Israeli with long hair was sitting in the passenger seat playing with a glock. He was high and fidgety on too much blow and was scaring the shit out of the taxi driver with the gun. Where did the gun come from? The Israeli talked like he had marbles in his mouth and was incomprehensible, flipping the gun from hand to hand and jittery. The Israeli girl asked him in Hebrew. He didn't know where the gun had come from. She asked him for it and he wouldn't give it to her. Finally she convinced him to give it up and there was a round in the chamber and we all felt better the gun was out of his hands. She sold the gun to a Colombian a few days later for $50.

And there was the other taxi ride the other night when three kids on the roadside hurled a rock at the open passenger side window where the blond haired Dutch guy was sitting. The rock hit the door just below the open window and the driver stopped and started to back up. We were in the car with 3 other girls and I told the driver if he is going to confront these 3 guys we are getting out right now and we won’t pay him a peso. He thought about it and then drove ahead. You had to be careful in Cali even if you weren’t a gringo.

A Cali Story

We were in the Menga club district. It was the French guys from Toulouse, the 3 German girls, Hector the Peruvian, the English guy and girl, and 2 other Colombians. I did a line with the English guy before leaving and am feeling it and I'm talking in a mixture of Spanish, French and English.

We were trying to get into Praga but it was a mess with Linda, the prettiest of the Germans, questioning whether we should go in or not because she was insistent on dancing “crossover”, a music mix of salsa, bachata, merengue and reggaeton. Hector negotiates a price at the door since we plan to buy a couple bottles but then the club cashier doesn’t have change and the night is becoming a mess. It fell apart like this a few nights earlier at Eliptica, the dance club in the jungle on the top of a mountain. All the girls left then too and I danced alone.

Its starting to rain and Hector and I have had enough and we walk off in the direction of two other clubs and walk into an open air bar with 2 dance floors. We assume the others will follow us but it doesn’t matter. Its gotten too complicated with this group anyway. We go in and order beers which come in a huge plastic cup and cost 10,000 pesos and we start to walk around the place.

We’re not in the place 10 minutes when a Caleña approaches us from behind and invites us to her table. She’s sitting with 2 other girls. Two of the girls are sisters, 20 and 21 years old, the younger light skinned and the older one a dark amber color. Hector takes the lighter skinned girl to the dance floor leaving me with the other two. They can’t stop talking about my blue eyes and I’m keeping up with the conversation pretty good until it starts to slow. A guy comes to the table and ask the black girl to dance and she brushes him away. I realize dancing is what I should be doing with her.

Hector and the other girl come back and sit down and the girl is wiping her lips. Hector’s got a grin on his face and I know he’s been kissing her. I get up and drag the black girl onto the dance floor. Its salsa and we’re moving good and I’m getting into it, leading her likes she wants to be lead, spinning her, and then into a slower song and she’s singing along. I dance her into a dark corner and start kissing her, her little tongue working around inside my mouth, her lips soft, her mouth hungry. Then she’s giggling like a school girl.

Back at the table we order a tall vessel of beer for the table and we’re talking some more and all the girls are eating up my stories of New York and Miami and Europe and they keep leaning in asking to look at my eyes. I take the black girl back onto the dance floor and we start grinding. Electronic music and reggaeton are playing now and her ass and whole body is young, voluptuous and tight--all sweet smelling soft skin, powerful hard legs and ass, her breasts natural and soft, pressed up high together in her black dress. She loves to dance and she’s singing along to the songs and we’re kissing some more.

Back at the table Hector says we should bring the sisters back to the hostel. But guests are not allowed and I’m thinking about the next morning bringing this girl out in front of the German girls and I’m not too interested in doing it. It would be fun to do though, Hector and I agree. I am about to mention a love motel to the black girl (named Sandra, I think) but she asks us to come back to their place. All three of them live together somewhere.

First we eat chorizos at a street side stand outside the club and watch the sun come up. I’m having a lot of fund watching Sandra bite away at a chorizo on a stick while sitting my lap, giggling and babbling away to me in Spanish. She's got all kinds of questions about my old novias, whether I have been with black girls before, do I like Caleñas, etc.

We finish the chorizos on a stick and take a cab back to their place and we get undressed and her body is all curves and solid, with a perfect hard shapely latina ass. Her body feels young and packed to burst.

Just as we begin fucking someone starts knocking on the front door. The front door is right next to Sandra’s room and she’s telling me to be really quiet. She’s not answering the door. I’m trying to work her slowly but the knocking continues and we’re trying not to make any noise. I ask her who it is and she says its her grandmother.

Suddenly a slat on the bed breaks with a loud crack, the bed sagging under us in the middle. We lay there laughing silently and now her grandmother is pounding on the front door. But its not her grandmother. Its some guy and he’s yelling out for Sandra and Paola. I ask her who it is and she says its her cousin. We’re both laughing quietly but I’m getting a little worried.

Now the guy is banging on the window of our room, right behind the bed. We pull the mattress off the busted bed and put it on the floor and get back to fucking with this guy banging on the window and yelling. Then he’s back hammering on the door and calling out the sister’s names. Sandra still wants us to be quiet even though this guy must have heard something going on inside.

I’m pretty fucked up from the drinking and with this guy hammering on the door and window I don’t get off and just give up. She’s all over me kissing my dick and telling me its rico and she’s singing that song again which went something like “uno beso para uno marido” and we’re just rolling around and enjoying each other. The attention of a Colombiana is something entirely different. I pass out and when I awake she’s ready for me again and now the guy banging on the door is gone and we fuck properly for awhile but I don’t get off and fall back to sleep. I’m too tired. She sucks and jerks me and wants me to come on her belly and chest but I’m too drunk. She wants to get my leche out, she says, and she wants it all over her. We wake up a few more times and mess around and we talk awhile.

We get up around 2pm and Hector comes down with the other sister dressed in a towel. She’s really cute too and the third girl is sitting on the couch and starts with all the questions. Where are we staying, what’s the phone number, and Sandra is trying to get me to promise to call her and take her to the horse parade today. I’m glad I don’t have my phone working and I give them a little information about where Hector and I are staying but I don’t even know where the hostel is. The third girl writes out the phone numbers for both sisters and Sandra pulls me back into her room to say goodbye. Hector goes upstairs with Paola to do the same. We mess around a bit and we come back to the front door and all say goodbye to each other.

Hector and I walk into the hostel around 3pm with the German girls and the English girl staring at us. They were asking about us all morning. I’m mysterious about where I was and what happened and take a shower and go to my room. Hector and I are planning on going to a concert tonight. He’s my age and a good rolling buddy, has lived in New York and traveled much of the world, and being Peruvian can handle the Spanish when I run into trouble.

Compliment

She will give you no higher compliment than to call you a child: boyish, immature, irresponsible, and underdeveloped. If you can get her to make this compliment with much yelling and crying, or maybe slamming a door behind her or by breaking a plate or a glass, you will have received this compliment in its ideal presentation.

Change

Men cannot be changed, though their circumstances can be. But do not think to change other men. Rather go to where other men are different.

For 4130.2010

At least you have made an account of this nonsense because it is a good account and you have written it truly.

But there are sufferings that a man brings upon himself by choosing a path of conflict with other men and their systems, and then there are the private sufferings which are a man's own, that maybe the world knows nothing about and never will.

I think you bear a private suffering you are as yet not articulate enough to express to yourself--as to express it would be to understand it, to find a language that would make sense of it. Instead you have chosen a public suffering to distract you from what you feel privately but which remains most obscure to you.

It is an easier path to suffer publicly--to suffer among other men, at their hand, to be forced about and prodded and paraded around by their systems. To suffer publicly at the hand of lawyers and courts and jails makes a type of suffering manifest in a way that one's private suffering cannot so easily be made.

I think what you are calling an “adventure” is a placeholder for a more serious and private adventure you do not yet have the equipment to make. You may gather this equipment at some point, but these adventures among other men and their systems (misadventures really) will only distract you from the hard, lonely, silent work of gathering the tools to approach and overcome yourself.

Maximin and I both left the world of men for more than 10 years to perform this work and study. We did it in different ways but it was brutal, exhilarating, spirit-crushing and spirit-soaring. We were both very right and very wrong along the way and we went up the highest mountains that a man can climb from a small, cockroach-filled room in a friendless, empty town. There were no girls, no friends, no families, no jobs, no careers, no vacations, no tvs--nothing. It was 10 years of reading and writing, communing with other men long dead, who had done as we were doing and had left their account of it.

What I am trying say is that you are distracting yourself from some fucking hard work you may need to do. 10 years of hard study is the only way to get to where I think you want to go. Our guy Franz has written eloquently of the jail and trial and the incarceration so that you do not have to. He has written of it so well that you do not need to experience it. Brother Franz was that good.

What you must also recognize is that The Castle has no end. Franz just stops writing it. The systems of men do not have an end. If you choose to adventure inside them it will be your only adventure, an adventure administered to you by other men.

There is nothing private in such an adventure. Saying that it is “in your mind” does not make it a private adventure. It is a cowardice, a retreat, to speak of a “world of the mind.” There is no such world. You--your body--is being pushed around by other men. That is your world, and when men touch you and have a hold of you, when men take your fluids and tell you where to go and you are made to do their projects, then you will be too distracted to ever develop a project of your own, to explore the private sufferings that await you and pass through them, to overcome and to strike a new path and maybe, if you are lucky, to leave some sort of account of this great overcoming.

But as I wrote above you need 10 years of silent, preparatory work to gather the equipment for this adventure. You will find you have it in you to spend 10 years preparing for this journey, or you will not. Most men lack the courage and the will to leave the world of other men and prepare themselves for what is obscured and private. They look for shortcuts among other men, and it often takes the form of a public suffering. These are the unfortunates. Their lives are privately troubled by something they lack the will to engage and express and so they choose to suffer it publicly.

It is my observation that you are pursuing this unfortunate path. But there is time to change it. You must discontinue the public suffering and withdraw from the world of men. You must go to where it is most private and secret, the most lonely of terrains, the higher blue peaks, only sometimes visible in the distance.

When you have climbed that high and lived and worked there for 10 years you may come down from those mountains. Men will seem very different to you, but they will not have changed, for man does not change. This is work best done when you are in your teens and twenties, but it is work that can be done at any age, though it is harder to commit to it when you are older.

The question is how to live and each man who asks this question must develop his own vocabulary to ask it. With hard work and luck you may come to understand the question. The luck I can wish for you, but the hard work must be your own.

Against Sitting

Where reading and writing and it all goes wrong is in the sitting. So when it feels very wrong you get up and you take trips. But trips go wrong too when they are scheduled, and they are scheduled because you have committed yourself to returning to sitting.

So you do something entirely different.

You make a trip without a schedule and you have no plans to return to any sitting. There will be no more reading and writing or any of the other stuff and it is hard at first to think that those things will be gone and as the date approaches that you will leave you wonder if maybe you were wrong to decide to go on a trip without a schedule, a trip without an end. When again would the sitting come? When will the important writing be completed?

But then the trip starts, and it is a trip by bicycle, and it starts in the rain and at a high altitude and you have only a very poor map and a child’s vocabulary with which to speak to the people of a foreign place.

When you see the mountains from the airplane window they scare you, they scare the sitting and the writing and reading all away. You forget those things because you must ride a bike over these mountains. Something now is taking you forward and you must abide by it.

You put your bicycle together in the airport and you ride out into the night. The next day you ride up 2 mountains in the rain and into the clouds and the man who contributed the bike for you to ride has his wish of great suffering for you fulfilled. The contributor of the bike said that you would endure great pain and great suffering and now you are enduring them, but the cold and rain and the altitude forced upon you are greater than the wish of suffering you thought you had received. But you cannot stop to sit.

The suffering you endure and will endure is what you must ride into. The mountain is in your way and you must go over it on the bicycle. The suffering of the stomach and intestines will come later and so will the gales of the Patagone. The sufferings are all there waiting and your bicycle is riding towards them. You are being pulled along and it is a very different “being pulled along” than what the others are doing in their jobs and careers and marriages and families--because this is a “being pulled along” that you have created for yourself and committed yourself to and now it is done.

You start with a bad map and child’s vocabulary and the strength for 2 mountains and maybe you will die and the bicycle will stop and everyone will cry and then everyone will forget. But there is also the chance that you will endure through all the sufferings and finish the map, and you will depart from this place with the vocabulary of a man and a strength for all the mountains.

Daybreak

Murmur of the Heart

The interpreters of Sophocles were wrong. The son does not wish to kill the father. He wishes nothing on the father. The father is almost nothing to him. Unlike the mother he is mostly unnecessary.

As the son's lust is for many women--any woman even--he does not wish to fuck his mother, though his mother may wish to fuck him. Whether or not she wants him physically, she will have tried to make of him the perfect man, the man she has perfected for herself, made in the image of what she most wanted from the men she has known. Along with the investment of his upbringing she also shares with him half his genes and this makes for a powerful tie between them, stronger than anything she could have with his father. At the very least the mother will want the son to be near to her for life and to replace the father.

It is the father’s realization of her love for the son that leads him to want to kill the son. There is no jealousy or animosity between father and son before this realization. For fathers do not matter to sons. Verily, it is only mothers matter.

Response to a Reader

Darren,

I think your criticisms are correct [of the short story "Grisaille"]. On all counts.

Though you did fail to point out how unsympathetic a character Mooney was in all this. If Mooney-- as in "mooning" someone (yes, another one thinly veiled)-- was intended as a stand-in for me, I am being critical of myself in this characterization. Maybe I am. Or I was. I can't remember. The story was written years ago.

I do not think what I remember of you is very much like Devita and whatever you are today I know nothing about. Although 10 years ago when I lived in Paris and began to write it it was you and I in that first version and that was a very different story then. With editing and time the characters became something other. That Devita has never drunk scotch, sells furniture, is married, and has a pregnant wife (did you catch that?) is how he developed, and you didn't.

It's an early story of mine, and you may be right: it may be no good. I won't get into a discussion of truth and fiction, or what it means to be a true writer, or being a man, or even Chatwin, but I will say that when you try to create something you use the things and people and places you know about and then--and this is the exciting and the difficult part--you change them in different ways for an effect. This is the work of the imagination but it is also based upon some fact. While this story seems to have not worked out, you keep trying and you learn from the failures and you hope that with luck and harder work and better training you can achieve that thing you are after.

Suerte,

SOBER TRUCKER SUTRA

(from the words of E. Cannefax)

I met a couple a guys
all hopped up comin' in from Denver;
One was acting ... I don't even remember―
not too concerned about his health―
Like really, yeah―hard on your body, liver &
yeast in your stomach
compounded by poor eating habits
with nowhere near the proper amount of rest―
a lot stay up all night,
not a good right thing goin'―

Well, this guy he wasn't ready to go
to bed―
he was all zooed up―
your body's gonna give in and shut down.
Something will definitely give way
so watch 'em on that tollway in Ohio.

August 5, 1995

Philosophy / Action

Philosophy, practiced properly, will help certain men to discover how they should act. Though it will not necessarily be the same path of action for all such men. Philosophy, if it is to have any meaning at all, must be concerned with the question of how to live.

The man who understands unthinkingly, unquestionably how he should live--either by never wondering, or by having already discovered it--has no need for doing philosophy. Philosophy would only bore him or confuse him.

He who does philosophy must eventually stop doing it. It must lead to his living in the world in a new way. Philosophy is not itself a way. Philosophy without action is useless (e.g. the academic philosopher who does it professionally for money, or the hobbyist philosopher who does it part-time for kicks). Doing philosophy has nothing to do with using technical language to argue with other men and publish books and papers.

As a result of the philosophical work he has done he will act in the world in a new way: he may begin to express himself differently with language, to lose his friends or gain others, destroy certain habits, leave his job or his wife or his country, wear different clothing, disregard social norms or a particular law--he will act differently in the world. How he acts will distinguish him from other men.

Those who present the work of philosophy as “internal work” expose their cowardice. They cling to a Cartesian myth of inner and outer which while allowing them to live among other men with a minimum of conflict, denies them from achieving the self-satisfaction of action in the world. These cowards will die regretful, having denied their bodies, having been unwilling to act.

The idea of an inner world is a false one, a clever escape, a denial of the body. Just as there are no private languages, there are no “inner acts”. Man’s “inner life” is an expression of his retreat. The moments he calls “conscious moments,” where he feels himself distinct from the world “outside,” are moments of bewilderment. To build upon them something philosophical, to call these moments more “real” or “true” than the way he moves and speaks among other men, is to entertain a path of thinking that privileges inaction, and that will allow him to escape the willful, courageous task of expressing himself in the world.

The men with a need for doing philosophy are potentially great men. Philosophical work is the work of the few. It is the challenge of greatness that these men, to varying degrees, will feel in their need. This makes the cowardice and the regret of their failure to act all the greater. For these men have the opportunity to be something more than men before: to show other men a new way in the world.

On Progress

1. He tends to carry to an extreme an idea that has been shown to work, using it to solve other problems that plague him. What is called 'progress' is the sharpening of an idea. But a blade must be sharpened to the right angle for the work it is intended. Just as you cannot hack at wood with the fine blade of a butcher knife, there are ideas which when applied to other areas will be eventually blunted or broken.

1-2. The idea that there is some science to man is one such mis-application.

1-3. The idea that fails when wrongly applied risks being thrown out altogether when a new idea appears to address a problem (e.g. religion after the appearance of science).

1-4. An idea can be made too sharp for other uses.

2. Pieces of prior ideas and the orders they founded, exist today as shards, relics from other times. They should function as a silent reminder that this blade too will one day break. Yet man's investment in his latest idea is total and he will view it as the exception upon which an ultimate progress is possible.

Projects, Assignments & Systems

1. A project is a doing that is lead by you. An assignment is the helping of someone else with his project. You may have been assigned to his project, or you may have assigned yourself to his project. But he who has a project is doing something of his own--he is assigned to no one.

2. To say a system exists is to say that a person depends upon others for something. The extent to which his life is systematized is the extent to which he needs, or believes he needs, the others. His need of other men is a necessity when he is unable to survive on his own--he is domesticated.

3. When he has assigned himself to another's project it can be said that he has accepted his domestication. He shies away from initiating his own project. He lacks the courage for it.

4. Domestication is a lack. Domesticated man may lack the will to initiate his own project, or be too specialized in his knowledge to complete his project on his own. The specialized man will require others with the skills to do the things he cannot--he will not have an understanding of the whole.

5. That he lacks an understanding of the whole, that he is a specialist, or that he has no knowledge whatsoever, are consequences of his systematization. He is born into a world where men fulfill specialized functions for one another. He accepts that other men will do certain work for him, and that he will be assigned certain work for them. He accepts the need for other men. And the more he needs other men, the more he is domesticated by them, and they by him.

6. The great project will not have any others assigned to it, and its success or failure will have nothing to do with other men. The great project is outside the systems and beyond all domestication.

Frank 6

(Frank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 )

After Frank told me about the coming race war he talked to me about fighting. Two guys could take on many, he said, if you and your friend fought back to back and you were both skilled. You had to get that first guy who came at you and beat the shit out of him. Frank demonstrated how he would beat the guy's face, he grabbed him by the hair and kneed him in the head, kneed him again and then Frank pounded on him some more. Even if the other guys are hitting you, Frank said, you need to make sure you destroy that first guy. Because then you can use that first guy as a shield. Frank was now pushing the destroyed guy left and right in front of him to keep the other attackers away. Then Frank would kick at the others, or punch at them, all the while using the destroyed guy as his shield. But you must stay back to back with your friend, Frank emphasized again.

He and Mike Pereira liked to get into fights whenever they could and Mike was a good fighter. One day they were driving and saw 5 kids and one of them flashed a knife. If a Filipino flashes a knife you are a dead man. But if a kid from Mt Prospect flashes a knife you take it away from him and you use it against him. So Mike says, you want to get them? Let's do it, Frank says. But Mike jumps out of the car without putting it in park and the car is starting to roll and Frank has either got to jump in with Mike or save the car. Frank runs back to the car and gets it in park but when he gets back Mike has been destroyed. Mike got the knife away but they leveled him. Oh yeah, said Frank sadly, Mike was wrecked. See, you got to stay back to back.

Doug 2 (supplemental)

When Doug was 28 an old woman approached him at the bar. She was 65 and she made him a proposition. If he would sleep with her she would buy him anything he wanted. At the time Doug was interested in a fish tank, so he asked the old woman if she would get it for him. The old woman lived alone in the suburbs in a big house with a swimming a pool. After Doug made love to her she said she wanted to see him again and if there was something else he wanted. There was a pool cue made of a special fiber that would last forever and Doug asked her for it. After the pool cue Doug slept with her a third time and, when he couldn't think of anything he wanted, the old woman gave him $100. This made Doug feel guilty and so the next time he asked for another fish tank. He hadn't been able to think of anything else. But he soon tired of the fish tanks. When Doug went to clean them the Lionfish he paid $80 for would sting him. Doug finally killed one for stinging him, and then he stopped cleaning the tanks. He met Heather and he stopped seeing the old woman. He sometimes thinks how his life might have turned out if he had stayed with her. Maybe he would have inherited the big house with the swimming pool. The two fish tanks are gone but he still has the pool cue in his closet.

Prolegomena Fragment: Work Left Undone

But now food, clothing and shelter are in abundance. He has worked diligently to construct a system (through exchange, specialization and communication) to make available and abundant both security and energy, but yet what does he do? He works to expand this system, to make more security and energy, and to reproduce them in new forms. He works ever harder to collect more of the things he already has. His original project of sustaining his own life is merely amplified. Man has the opportunity today for something more, something beyond the base elements of his survival, yet he does not try for it.

Multiple homes, huge wardrobes of clothing, whatever food he wants available to him whenever he desires it--none contribute significantly beyond what has been achieved already. He has simply restated the terms of his survival in more plentiful, more luxurious forms. He has not decided upon any end goal for the achievement of his survival. So he continues to collect more food, clothing and shelter. He is a collector. He never seems to have enough. Western man has become a storehouse of security, with the marginal utility of more security effectively zero.

Today he works ever harder for the latest repackaging of security that is sold to him. Men live in a spirit of competitive collection, each working to possess a better version of what is currently celebrated and promoted.

But after he has his food, clothing and shelter he should ask: “And how now should I live?”

Those who ask the question ask it too late. Man often asks himself how he should live when there are cracks in his system, in old age, or when his health is deteriorating. He does not question how he should act when he has both his physical capacities and the food, clothing and shelter to survive. Hence many men die regretful, with the feeling that there must have been something more to life, something else, some other work left undone.

He remains essentially a slacker, hoping to avoid work or survive with a minimum of it. He continues to despise work as if the energy expended posed a risk to his life--as it once did. Yet the hardest work is to be done after the threshold of food, clothing and shelter has been achieved. The work of greatness is possible then. The work of becoming something beyond the animal that has learned to survive best. It is the work that exists beyond economics and the systems he has constructed. It is the work for which there is no return. It is work that contributes nothing to his security. And it is dangerous work because it will isolate him from other men.

His instincts are those of the Pleistocene, though he lives in a time of abundance.

For 99% of his history man has struggled daily to survive. His desire for food, clothing and shelter is a central component in his genetic makeup, and, due to its overriding power, one difficult to fully satisfy. The work of greatness will be an overcoming of the genetics common to all men, as well as those specific varations he has inherited from his parents. He will need also to overcome the systems he was born into and the other men, both past and present, with whom he shares a culture. There is great work still undone.

Otoño

On Projects

54. The great project will matter to men of today and men of yesterday. He cannot say if it will matter to future men and that does not matter. He might expect that his greatness today will matter to future men as the greatness of Sophocles or Napoleon has mattered to him. But then he does not attempt greatness for men of the future: Today’s greatness projects back through history.

57. Just as in his own time he may try to live different forms of life and to travel and examine much of his world, an attempt at greatness will allow him to live beyond his time alongside the greats of other eras. For that which is great will span time, and men will carry it along with them.

59. Today's greatness determines the greatness of the future. Today's greatness determines the greatness of the past.

67. When he is not at work on his greatness, let him do projects that develop his physical strength or his rigor. Let him do projects--for himself or for others--so that he may eat and have some shelter. But he should do nothing for money that does not contribute to his strength or to his rigor.

82. Making money beyond what he needs for his food and for his shelter should be an accident. It is not why a man works. Money cannot be the reason for a great project, and it is not itself a great project. The project of making money without end is a woman’s project. It is a project for collecting security and collecting things.

83. The great project is the great gift. It is beyond any economics or calculus. Take care to protect the great project from money.

84. It is in the midst of a deep uncertainty that a greatness is born.

85. An excess of security endangers what is great. When he need no longer worry for his body and what will happen tomorrow, he risks losing the greatness he may be working on. But his nature works against him, as a man would rather live with more security than with less, particularly as he grows older. He would rather feel insured than uninsured. He would rather not work than work. He would rather save his energy than expend it. These tendencies in his nature have helped to preserve him through much of human history. But today these tendencies are why he fattens easily, why he suffers from the autism.

89. The great project, preserved and protected, will have the result of sainthood.

102. Be suspicious of the great project that makes much money. Its greatness may only be an appearance.

105. Beware of the project that requires sitting. And beware also of talking.

PRUEBA

Wool, Silk, Steel, Aluminum, Copper, Cotton, Rubber, Leather, Synthetics, and Flesh

Gary 2

Ted was at Tool Rental when a woman ran up and said there was a guy laying in the lumber department unconscious and half-naked. Ted hurried to lumber and found Gary spread-eagled on his back in the middle of the aisle with his penis hanging out of his pants. Ted lifted Gary forward and began to stuff Sour Patch Kids into his mouth, slapping him to get him to chew. Gary chews and swallows a couple before he opens his eyes. Then Gary spits them out. “What the fuck is this?” Gary says. “Who the fuck are you?” Ted tells him to keep chewing, he needs the sugar. “I don’t want these fucking things. Get me a candy bar.” Ted tells him he’s going to eat the fucking Sour Patch Kids. He tells Gary to test his blood-sugar with the device he carries on him. “Fuck that thing,” says Gary. “Fuck that thing.” Ted tests him and the device reads 20. At 5 Gary would have been dead. He might have been near 5 before the sugar kicked in. “Why is your dick hanging out of your pants?” Ted asks. “How the fuck should I know?” says Gary. “Go fuck yourself.” Gary chewed another handful of Sour Patch Kids before he zipped himself up.

Aphorisms for a Cleopatra

59. And in this great moment of overcoming he realized that the hunt was itself as stimulative as the piece of ass he would trade the meat for.

62. And for this man, her beauty and her beautiful pussy would not be enough for him to trade the meat he brought back from the hunt. The woman he wanted would need to be more than her beauty. She would need something more to interest him.

63. Just having a pussy is not enough to keep the great man. A woman should aspire to the example of Cleopatra.

73. The laziness of the Western woman is implicit in the history of codified morality (i.e. the morality of the extended order, the large group: the laws of the church and state). Instead of the hard work of maintaining a man’s interest in her, she supported laws and moral codes whereby a man would be punished for losing interest. In order to keep him with the minimum of effort, she worked to make him feel guilt for his deepest impulses; she set up a legal system that penalized him financially for becoming interested in other women; and in the most extreme cases she stripped him entirely of his masculinity (what the game guys call the beta and omega man).

76. For him to be monogamous, she must continually provide him with reasons for it. So few women make a convincing argument. So few women do the hard work of maintaining a man’s interest in them. So few women can offer a man the excitement of the hunt.

98. His mother is the only woman he will trust. His mother is the only woman he will return to.

The Difference

The difference between the sexes is the difference between hunting dangerous game and gathering roots and berries. In the former, he must be talented and precise, studying the behaviors of the animals and developing tools and techniques to kill them. Given his predilection for the largest game he often puts his life at risk. But hers is a leisurely activity without physical risk or exertion. Her gathering might also have been a social activity with much chatter among the women as they picked and dug at the surface roots. The men, in contrast, were silent as they tracked a large animal into new territory, or followed the blood spoor into the high grasses where the wounded beast awaited them. What was spoken would need to be communicated clearly and efficiently according to the needs of the hunt. These hunts were mostly unsuccessful and the men learned about failure and hunger. But the gathering usually went well and the women had much time for sitting and talking and waiting for the men to return.

Aphorism on Consciousness

1. The suddenness of the appearance of consciousness, the disruption with which it appears, is as if one were watching a film at the cinema, being very much inside the story on the screen, the characters, feeling with them and being surprised and excited as the film progresses, when then, suddenly, the screen goes black. The lights come on. There is some technical problem. Suddenly you are aware of the movie theater itself, the others in the audience, and you and the others are anxious that the film begin again. The idea is to get the film projector working again, even if it is some temporary fix. Just so that you can finish this film.

Here Comes Success

1. He speaks of transcendence when he is unhappy, when he feels displeasure because of his environment or the action he performs. Do happy people speak of transcendence?

15. He tells himself he will transcend the world rather than act within it. To act might break certain rules. To act might offend the others. To act would be too risky. Transcendence is a sort of act without risk. The others will not even be aware he is performing a transcendence. Instead of changing his life he transcends.

33. One hears talk of transcendence from prisoners or those working at jobs they do not like. Transcendence is a refusal to affirm the world in which one acts. It is a refusal of the maxim that one is as one does: He doesn’t want to be a prisoner; he doesn’t want to be an accountant; he doesn’t want to be a freight team worker--he feels displeasure to act in these worlds. He would rather be elsewhere. He dreams of elsewhere. He speaks of transcendence when his will is not in some action, yet he still performs that action.

34. It allows him to perform an action he does not to want to perform. He tells himself: I have transcended and thereby removed the pain and I am not really what I am doing and it is now painless to perform this act. I am not really here. I have willed myself elsewhere. Transcendence is a delicate trick consciousness plays on the body to realign it with the world and get it acting again within the world, while removing the displeasure of the action.

51. To act without the full force of one’s will is a moral failing. He should become the greatest accountant, the greatest freight team worker--even the greatest prisoner. Any action can become a project, even a strong project, if he has the will for it.

76. Transcendence might be contrasted with the phenomenological attitude. Such an approach entails the suspension of judgment and full engagement with phenomena. The epoché engages him with the world without regard for his pain or pleasure, his happiness or unhappiness. He does not rank phenomena according to his desire. He does not speak of liking or disliking. The phenomenologist does not retreat from the world in which he acts.

79. Projects direct action. He who has a project will act according to his project, or not. When an action does not contribute to his project, or give him pleasure, he must ask himself why he is doing it. In an economy an action that does not contribute to one’s project invariably contributes to someone else’s: He works to promote someone else’s project. Often this means he sacrifices his own. The stronger one’s project the more painful this sacrifice will be.

81. Greatness is gifted only to him who has his own project.

82. If his project is strong he will only act according to it. A strong project is a strong will. A strong project is its own courage.

83. Transcendence is not a project. Transcendence is an avoidance of commitment to a project and the world in which one acts. To the man with a strong project it will seem the vilest sort of nonsense.

Doug

When Doug was 4 he tripped over a small dog and clean bit off his tongue. The blood loss almost killed him. Doug has no memory of the accident. Of his childhood he only remembers the beatings his older brother gave him. He beat me the day I was born, Doug said. They brought me home from the hospital and he started beating me.

In school they said he was Learning Disabled. They called Doug ‘retard’ every day. He didn’t want to live. In high school he would sit in his car and put a knife blade against his wrist, but he never did it.

Doug met Heather at the back of a bar in Wrigleyville. He asked why her friends were ignoring her. She was only a little fat then and the goiter she has now was not yet growing. This was 10 years ago. Doug started to see Heather and one day he brought her home and her husband was at the door and he threatened Doug. I’m just bringing her home, Doug protested. I don’t see what’s the problem. Soon after her divorce Doug decided to marry her.

He took Heather to the park with two KFC dinners and a bottle of wine. Inside one of the fried chicken boxes Doug had hidden a poem he had written and inside the folded up poem he put the ring. When Heather was almost finished eating chicken she found the poem and the ring and she agreed to marry him. She found the whole thing very romantic.

They moved in together along with Heather's teenaged son who smoked cigarettes and was mean to Doug’s cats. Doug got into it with him and it was decided that the young man would have to go. Doug sees him on the bus sometimes and they don’t talk to each other. He’s got a job now as a security guard and makes $3 an hour more than Doug does.

The best job Doug ever had was working freight at Wick's Furniture. All the guys were Mexican and didn’t speak English and that didn’t bother him. When Wick's shut down he worked at another warehouse where a night manager named Ken would ride him all the time. He would bring Doug into his office every night and tell him he was stupid. One day Doug didn’t go back. He had enough. The day he quit he was thinking of taking the bus to St. Charles and killing Ken with a machete. But Doug didn't go. Instead he stayed home and beat his wife.

The first time he beat Heather he just pushed her around, pushed her against the wall, and then he threw her down. Doug pushed her around this time too, but then he grabbed her around the neck and he strangled her. She was stupid and lazy and fat and she wouldn't stop nagging him. She didn't work and she just lay in bed watching tv and ate all the food while he was away. It must have been before he was strangling her that the neighbors called the cops because when he was strangling her she wasn’t making any loud noises. Heather didn’t want to press charges but she was so marked up that the cops had to take him away. She was pulling at him and crying to let him stay.

In jail the black guys called him Billy Bob. One black guy called him Slim Shady. There are no doors to the bathroom and you pull the garbage can in front of the stall when you use the toilet. Everybody waits their turn for the shower. Doug walked on the shower floor in his bare feet and got some sort of athlete’s foot. It still comes back sometimes. The food was terrible and Doug doesn't eat lunch meat anymore because of the memory. Doug says he’ll never hit her again because he doesn’t want to go back. I’m not a good person, he says. I hate my fat cow wife but I deserve her. It’s my punishment for hitting on her.

The one vacation Doug took in his life was to see his father in Las Vegas. But it wasn’t a good vacation because his father was dead when he got there. His father had gone to Vegas to drink himself to death 6 months before. Now he keeps his father on top of the TV. When Doug shakes the TV the little wooden box leaks a little of his father onto the carpet.

Doug and Heather are on their second bankruptcy. After their car was repo-ed a man came and told them they owed 20,000 dollars. The bankruptcy people tell them they can’t ever have any property. They want proof of their wages and they want receipts for everything they buy. Doug doesn’t think he will be allowed to buy any more comic books or cowboy hats. They just started garnishing his wages too. The last few days before paychecks Doug has no money for food and doesn't eat.

Last week Doug and Heather pawned their wedding rings. Doug used his money to get a large tattoo of the Gemini symbol on his back. But the tattoo looks more like the pi symbol and there must have been some misunderstanding because the tattoo artist had added wings to it. Doug refuses to show anyone and doesn't like to think about it. It's on his back so he doesn't see it much. Anyway, says Doug, he plans to kill himself when he's 60. He doesn't want to be like that old man he sees at the bus stop. He can hardly get up the stairs onto the bus. 60 is long enough.

Two in the Wilderness

"Too many men work on parts of things. Doing a job to completion satisfies me."

--Dick Proenneke

Who lived inside a dilapidated bus from the civilization he fled, who left for the same wilderness as Proenneke but without the proper gear, who died stupidly and youthfully and is celebrated with 2 films, 1 book and countless articles and tributes.

Aphorism for a Mother

1. A culture can only be as healthy as its mothers. And, from the teat at which he sucks, mixed in with the mother's milk: faith or faithlessness.

Aphorisms for Michel

"The turbulence of a river flowing around the supporting pillars of a bridge is stucturally unpredictable, but no one would think to describe it as being free."

--Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

122. His is a life in pursuit of comfort and pleasure, and a turning away from what is painful. His body has a particular feeling about his environment and he will act to avoid what hurts him and makes him insecure. The life of most men is little more than a quest for comfort and pleasure in an unpredictable world. How adventurous this life will be will depend upon the predictability of the environment in which he lives and the particular genetic demands of his body.

123. What then could the philosophers have possibly meant by freedom?

149. If we can say anything at all about it, we may say that consciousness is a reflecting upon an action that has happened or is about to happen. It is an awareness that has the effect of separating one's body from the world. The moment of consciousness objectifies the body and leads one to think he is not his body, that it is something foreign to him--a sort of container that consciousness is trapped inside. It may lead him to wrongly conclude that consciousness is the primary director of the body, or the seat of a man's essence.

151. Consciousness appears and through rationalization and justification of some action it effects a realignment of the body with the world. Consciousness often appears when a gap emerges between how a man wishes to act and what other men expect of him. Consciousness proceeds to justify a man's action in a world that he worries will find it disagreeable.

155. Consciousness appears as the separation of body, world, and action. It appears as an interruption of life. With rationalization and justification his body, his environment and the action he has taken, or will take, is reunited. He regains the confidence to act. He can live again. He need no more question his body and the world. And with that consciousness again disappears.

158. Consciousness is subject to the body, a tool in the body's pursuit of comfort and pleasure.

160. When an action cannot be justified consciousness lingers. His body, his environment and his action remain strangely suspended. He does not feel of the world. His body is a sort of familiar object, immediate yet strangely distant. He is bewildered.

161. How curious that some philosophers would see in this moment of confusion a deep truth about man and declare consciousness to be what is essential, what is most meaningful about him.

179. A man with desires that fit neatly with his environment has little use for reflection. He does not need to rationalize conduct that his environment can easily satisfy or that men around him consider acceptable. It follows that he has little need for or experience of consciousness.

184. The less a man experiences moments of consciousness the healthier and happier he is.

Initial Aphorisms On Overcoming

21. Where your body is and what it is doing is what is meaningful. The activity called “transcendence” is for he who lacks the courage to act and to physically change the world; a mental exercise for the physically weak, the decadent, the degenerate: a denial of the body and the world. It is a trick men play on themselves to get through the day.

44. If your project is strong enough you will sleep alone. Even when she sleeps beside you.

76. One is 50% one’s father, 50% one’s mother. In the absence of dramatic environmental factors (the breakdown of society, for example) or life-changing accidents (i.e. a choice that improbably changes your life--the outlier), it is likely that you will trend toward the average of your parents. By your mid-30s your life will have narrowed to an approximation of who they were.

77. Research on adopted children shows that by their mid-30s their lives are significantly more similar to their genetic parents than their adoptive ones. Additionally, studies of identical twins separated at birth show them by their mid-30s living very similar lives in terms of education level, occupation, number of children, and lifestyle. Should one choose to do what feels comfortable, one should expect to become his parents.

83. One’s development, as guided by genetic and environmental triggers, is mostly complete by the age of the 30. The genes involved in physical development have gone dormant and his hormone production begins to slow. He settles into life as his parents. He acts and responds to the world as they did. He is human, wonderfully human. And he lives without any knowledge or experience of what it is to overcome.

87. He who overcomes acts outside the society he was born into (his environment)--he does what other men do not and do not consider. He who overcomes acts beyond his parents (his genetics), doing as they never did. He who overcomes becomes alone, without other men and without parents.

89. To overcome other men is to exchange nothing with them and ask nothing from them in return--it is to act beyond economics. One becomes a gift to men, a sort of saint or messiah, and just as likely an outlaw.

95. But only he will know if he has overcome his parents. This overcoming will not be apparent to other men. Perhaps it will not be clear to him either?

On the Equality of Minds (Prolegomena Fragment)

The West views the body as the cause of inequality among men: discrimination based upon strength, age, ethnicity, sex and physical dexterity. To correct these inequalities the following steps were taken:

1. Abortions: Women can now enjoy the pleasure of sex without the responsibilities of pregnancy, and can thereby act as promiscuously as any man.

2. Debt financing:
a. Which made conspicuous consumption available to everyone regardless of work ethic, ability, or income.
b. Which moved manufacturing jobs to poorer countries and replaced them with knowledge worker jobs. Such jobs leveled the career and economic playing field between men and women as physical strength and coordination are not necessary for success. (One might even argue that women are better equipped than men for the work of management, communication, and organization.)

3. Government subsidies and legal protections to assist underperforming or underrepresented groups: ethnic minorities, the handicapped, etc.

4. Language purged of physically identifying adjectives: Politically correct speech. It became derogatory, immoral, even illegal, to identify a person by his physical characteristics. (The body is not considered to be the person.)

5. Science created ways to extend the lives of the sick and decrepit, to keep their minds alive inside their dying bodies.

In these ways the mind was thought to be finally separated from the body--a great triumph of Cartesian philosophy. Disembodied minds can be equals.

Supplementary Note: Abortion is justified on the grounds that the unborn baby is not yet a person. Said differently, the unborn child is a body that does not yet have a mind. It is in no way the equal of a child who has just emerged from the vagina and been granted legal protection as a person. The mind appears to be defined as a pool of memories and demonstrated intentionality in the world, excluding one's experience inside the uterus. (The idea that women carry a ‘world-less place’ inside them called the uterus is a puzzling one.)

At the other extreme, a tremendous effort and expenditure is made to keep alive the aging and the sick. Certainly the fear of death and desire for immortality guide the expenditure of resources in this regard, but the argument is also made that the elderly and infirm are equals of the healthy and that they (their minds) have a right to carry on. Yet there is little outrage that the West has chosen to accept the destruction of unborn children, while expending countless resources to extend the lives of the dying. This is perhaps one of the greater ironies of the hegemony of Cartesian thinking.

Last Images from a Golden Age

Lookout Mountain descent

Denver view from Lookout


Deer Creek Canyon

Ted 2

Ted was telling us about his previous employment as a secret government agent. He had been at every major conflict of the last 20 years: the first Iraq war, the Yugoslav wars, Kosovo--he was there when the Blackhawk helicopters went down in Somalia. He knew those Delta guys. He was there gathering intel. He was once in Africa on safari and got lost from his guide. Follow the river is what you are supposed to do and that is what he did. Clans of bushmen attacked Ted and he repelled their attacks. He followed the river for days and back to civilization. Did we know that he laid 100 girls during spring break 1992? No, we did not. A young blond with a huge ass walked by us and Ted stopped talking. I laid her when I was in high school, he whispered. But Ted, she's in her twenties and you’re almost 40? What does that got to do with anything, he replied.

A History of Yesterday

Images of Glenwood Canyon

Aphorisms at a 6:11 Pace

108. The tragedy of the American woman: It wasn’t enough to be the gatekeeper of the species. She wanted also to be a man.

167. We might say the world is wonderful, and mean something by it, if only there was less to say about it. But what then would we do about it?

171. The man who sits and has a word for everything: the liar.

192. My concern is with what is invisible--with what cannot be bought and sold. My hope is to understand it through action--to sweat out what the philosophers have said.

199. The longer a man sits the larger his vocabulary.

222. No physical training will harden the body like silence. Nothing will weaken it more than talking about a woman.

What You Learned On Lookout Mountain

Only the greatest project will replace the child.
Have children and families.
Obey the body.

Amazing

The view from Lookout Mountain is amazing.


The descent is amazing too.


The Chatfield Loop is certainly amazing. It amazed me.


Even without color the Chatfield Loop amazes.

This is Glenwood Canyon and it is amazing. It was here that stupid fuck caused me to crash and break my elbow.

Another amazing image from Glenwood Canyon.

Amazing video from Deer Creek Canyon

Amazing video from Lookout Mountain

Freight Team Update

1. Congratulations to Mauro the hot dog guy who was recently promoted from keeper of the outdoor hot dog stand to a member of the freight team. Mauro has also gone into business as a Spanish-language vitamin salesman for a sort of ponzi-scheme vitamin sales organization. During break time he studies from a large binder containing summaries on hundreds of vitamin supplements. He believes there is great upside to the vitamin business. America is a wonderful place.

2. Ted has been angry now for over a week following the theft of his gummy bears. After confronting most of the daytime staff he now believes it was the freight team who stole them. He glares at each of us when we see him.

3. Frank has stopped tearing out or smudging away the face of Barack Obama in the newspapers left in the break room. Since he was hired the newspapers have had carefully torn holes where Obama's face would have been. Frank was even careful to remove the ears. It is not yet known why Frank ended this practice.

Aphorisms For A Golden Age

10. The human is not different from the other animals because of his speech, his domination of the earth, or even his culture, but that he has the capacity for a deep unhappiness. His unhappiness is the expression of his domestication.

11. The child is father to the man.

12. The great man is once a man, but he is twice a child.

33. There is no courage in the risky act of the child. Only a man who takes such action--passing through risk, understanding it and feeling its danger--has acted courageously. His fellow men are apt to call him underdeveloped, immature, even childlike: A grown man should know better than to embrace risk. A grown man should know better than to act courageously.

34. What is courageous encourages the derision of other men. What is courageous cannot be acceptable. What is courageous cannot be explained.

51. How much stupidity is confused with courage? How much courage dismissed as stupidity?

La Pelea

"I loved myself more than I could love her. She hated herself more than she could love me. Of course, it didn't work out."

Men Hunt, Women Gather

From The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley.

99% of human history is that of hunter-gatherer tribes with the characteristics described above. We no longer hunt and gather in this sense, and Western women now perform much of the work that men do (knowledge worker jobs). It makes sense to ask, were we biologically ready for this dramatic change in the sexual division of labor?

On Sick Babies

The following are hypotheses I developed after speaking with my mother who, other than working many decades in the school systems with damaged children, I take to be an expert on many matters. None of these observations are the result of scientific study--the causations and inferences are entirely speculative--though I hope that one day some scientist will take up a study with them in mind.

1. It is now a confirmed trend that women are choosing to have their first pregnancy in or after their middle thirties. This trend has correlated with a dramatic rise in the birthrate of autistic children and children afflicted with a variety of syndromes not known before (these are facts, numbering well beyond the bar of statistical significance). Correlation is not necessarily causation, but a link between autism and the greater frequency of older first-time mothers should be acknowledged and investigated.

2. Women who do not use their reproductive organs during their peak reproductive period (approximately 16-28) are more prone to cancers. Powerful hormones within the female urge action and reproduction, and a woman ignores those hormones at her own risk. The reproductive systems require use and practice and undirected, ignored hormones lead to imbalances--cancer.

3. Men have a responsibility in this as well. As a man ages his sperm is reproduced as an imitation of the prior vintage of sperm. Thus an older man beyond his peak sexual years (essentially the same as a woman’s) is impregnating women with sperm that is the copy many times over of itself. These copies are never exact copies and are often copies of sperm which is defective or not as strong as younger sperm. Such “old sperm” could be a contributing factor to autism and other emerging syndromes.

4. Never should a man and woman participate in artificial insemination. In such a case certain sperm, sometimes one individual sperm, is favored by a doctor to enter the egg. However, this is probably not the strongest of the male sperm during an ejaculation (only 2000 of millions and millions actually get anywhere near the egg; some ejaculations even contain no sperm strong enough to reach and penetrate the egg) and any pregnancy induced in this matter has a greater chance of producing a damaged child due to defective or less than ideal sperm. This is to say nothing of the risks associated with the doctor choosing where to place the egg inside the woman, the health of the egg, etc etc.

5. Never should a woman abort a pregnancy as a matter of convenience. Not only does the abortion of a healthy pregnancy pose risks to the reproductive health of the woman, but it does not allow her body the practice of giving birth (see 2. above). Put the child up for adoption if healthy. Or, if born sick, dispose of the baby as the Spartans did by placing it in a cave to die. A healthy woman can within a year have another baby to replace it should she choose to.

6. The West has embraced women giving birth later or not at all. This has enabled career-minded women to forego child-bearing to compete with men and make money during their most fertile years. The medical industry has expanded rapidly as a result of the afflicted children born of these career-minded mothers. There is big money in the sickness and long-term care for such children born of old eggs and old sperm. Choosing to make babies when it is convenient for your career and not your body is a mistake.

Additional Notes On Autism:

7. Those afflicted with autism are often technically gifted, excelling in the fields of science, mathematics, and computer technology. These gifts come in exchange for a lack of emphathy towards other humans and social ability. Given that the Western world is one dominated by technology and science (in the service of capitalism) the career opportunities for those with autism and rare technical abilities are many. With autism afflicting males at significantly higher rates than females (1 in 70 vs 1 in 110) there are many more technically gifted autistic men who are successful career-wise (making money). And given that women prefer wealth in a man to most other characteristics it follows that there are more autistic men giving birth to autistic children than in the past (autism is 90% hereditary). Autistic men, once ostracized for a lack of social skills, are now viewed as suitable mates as result of wealth gained through their technical prowess (e.g. Bill Gates).

8. Might the intricately systematic nature of modern life be in fact triggering the development of autistic instincts in individuals? Could a culture enamoured with science and mathematics and control be turning on genes that are related to autism? (One might say it takes a mild form of autism to excel in a systematic culture.) Could successful careerist (read: some form of systematized life) adults be passing along "turned-on" autistic genes to their offspring? It would figure the older the parent the more likely the autistic genes have been triggered, the more active the genes, and hence the more likely a child with autism is produced.

9. Might autism be related to a sort of system building gene?

Aphorisms: Entrepreneurs of the State

1. Without intervention by the State there would be economic prosperity.

2. Without intervention by the State there would be moral prosperity.

3. As the State grows through regulations, prohibitions and social programs a new and growing entrepreneurial class makes itself the beneficiary:

3-1. Think of the health insurers who will bring in millions of new policy holders under threat of federal penalty for not having health insurance.

3-2. Think of the accountants and lawyers who constitute the professional class of interpreters and explainers of federal accounting and legal codes, regulations and laws.

3-3. Think of large retailers such as Walmart, who support healthcare regulation and other business regulations, that while resulting in an increase in its own costs will do more damage to its smaller competitors, thereby gaining it market share.

3-4. Think of the environmental companies (green builders, electric car makers, windmill designers and such) who today lobby for environmental laws that will result in the economy being remade to their personal benefit.

3-5. And lastly think of the welfare mother, who by giving birth to receive State payments, is the entrepreneur of the ghetto.

3-6. These are all exploitations of one's productive neighbors made anonymous and guiltless through the facilitation of the State.

4. No work that exists as a result of State intervention can be considered economically productive, or moral.

Other Machines: Slip Sheet Forklift

I only recently began driving the Slip Sheet Forklift. Its operation is similar to the Reach Lift as one uses the wheel control in the left hand to turn the machine right and left, while operating the joystick with the right to move the forks. Similar to the Reach it operates using a dead man's pedal, with backward and forward movement controlled with the joystick. Unlike the Reach it does not have feet that protrude or the ability to extend the forks, making it closer to the basic Fork Lift in actual operation (though battery not liquid gas powered). Because the cockpit controls are set fairly close together on the left side of the machine, one needs either to turn sideways in the cockpit or operate it with one's right arm crossing his body, making it awkward to use. I cannot understand what this machine is used for given its redundancies when compared to the basic Fork Lift and Reach Lift. In fact, I would prefer having a second Reach to this machine due to its better maneuverability, fork control, and handling in narrow aisles.

Aphorisms Delivered By Telephone

39. I imagine my body inhabited by myself at 22 and at 75, and how each version of myself would direct me today. I do this to realize there is no one my age in control. Today is only an understanding of what I think were the dreams of my past and a speculation on my regrets of the future. Living to satisfy both I will have lived.

67. The limits to what a man can accomplish philosophically are the limits of his experience: his language, the time he was born to, and the courageous action he takes or fails to take. If he is lucky his action will allow him to see more clearly the difference between his instincts and those of the other men. It is this difference that is philosophy. One might say his skill as a philosopher is a matter of articulating a courageous act.

68. I write at a time when the human systems are shaken and cracked, and what is natural and untamed has begun to shine through. Is it time almost for the return of the saints?

Howie Blakely (Part 2)

Part 1 here.

“Hey Frank,” says Paulie, “Did you ever get revenge on Howie Blakely?”
Frank smiles. “I did have my chance. We were both at court for probation at the same time.”
“Whatd’ya mean?”
“We both got arrested for the fight. We were sitting next to each other outside the court.” Says Frank, “I thought, I’m gonna take him right here. My face was still really beat up then. I felt humiliated every day. Here I have my shot and right outside the courtroom for our probation hearing.”
“So whatd’ya do?”
Frank smiles. “Right about the second I'm going to jump him, Howie Blakely turns to me. He says he’s sorry. He’s had a lot of issues in the past year. He didn’t mean to do what he did. He asks if I want to go to breakfast with him.”
“He asks you to breakfast?”
“I said okay. Then he says instead of going out for breakfast he’d like to make me breakfast at his place. So after the hearing I follow him back to his house. But his brother is there and I’m ready for shit to go down again. His brother is a wrecking ball just like him. But nothing happens. He makes me breakfast and he does this special thing with the ham. He cooks it in syrup. It's delicious. Best ham I’ve ever tasted. I’ve been cooking ham in syrup ever since.”

More Aphorisms

34. I repeat myself to make my thoughts clearer to myself. And because I hope that they will one day feel natural.

99. Men who act the same, speak the same. It doesn’t matter that they act and speak the “same”, in the rigorous sense of the word (whatever that means), but only that they try to, and believe that they do.

118. As I do philosophy I sometimes feel that I am saying nothing at all. That bothers me until I remind myself that I must be onto something.

133. Trying to show not with language but with a new form of life. To live so that new words are brought into being, or that new definitions attach to words. To make of your life a philosophical example.

200. That the idea of evolution for many implies the strongest and best surviving and not the luckiest, is a misunderstanding that perhaps overwhelms the whole of the idea of evolution’s contribution.

211. The idea that this is not the only way to live--why does this not bother a man more?

221. When he is not working in the service of others, a man is encouraged to act in his own way in his leisure time, what he also calls his “free time”. Yet this leisure activity, which he believes is his own, often constitutes the economic life of another man. Examples: getting a gym membership to use weight machines; going on vacations in structured environments; going to bars and restaurants; watching television programs; etc. But a man does not act on his own unless he acts outside an economy. A man assumes a sameness when the totality of his action is an economic exchange within a society. He is nothing more than a member, a counterparty, a client and a customer, even when he believes he is acting on his own in his own free time. The irony of his sense of freedom is that it has been reshaped as an exchange with other men.

254. To be free is to refuse to be human when it is offered to you.