Odds and Ends from the Vault

i feel like i should apologize for the lack of pictures or links in this blog, but that would disingenuous because there won't be any of either in this post.

last night i was moving some things around on my bookshelf and came across three old notebooks. so of course i cracked a couple open and had a look. i should first say that it's been over a year since i've touched these, the most recent entry of any kind was from our west coast trip last august. but the most recent notebook was positively full of great nuggets of all sorts. and i thought i'd post some of them here, not all right now necessarily but as it's convenient. (i really start a lot of sentences with conjunctions.) most of what's in the notebooks is journal-y, but i'll try to only post stuff here that is interesting independent of my contextual feelings or doings. where possible, i'll try to relate when it was written since i date stuff almost by habit.

oddly now, the first one wasn't dated but must have been written sometime between may and november of 2005:

The idea, most usually, is to let the art in you become real, and not to create new art. It's a postpostmodern world. Every artist has at some point done everything, frequently as well as it can be expected to be done. However, no one has ever been you and no one knows you as well as yourself. Let the art bake into you like cancer into skin and revel in the melanomic masterpiece.

This is from the same unknown mid-2005 time period and i think could be labeled a poem (it was written as a paragraph but let's see how it looks now in line form.):

Sit and sniff.
Murky cool drear air,
Sprinkles and whiffs,
Heat created never related.
Heavy breath and slight drip ooze of regret,
Tender and passive and yet--there.
Head rocks like a shifting fishbowl,
Coated and dry, alternating sublime
Until drug-filled breaths mimic sand-filled steps.
Time stops slowly making trivial tics into tortuous tocs.
A need to release like a cannonball arises,
Panicky searching standing scratching for the fire,
Too much sleepy head make body dead,
Slouch and pout wring what's left from your hands.
Grit and grin and bear it,
Wear it on your sleeve,
Pet peeves give reality
Some sense penance and patience as I stay tense.

This is marked Nov 28 2005:

Do I need to synthesize my reality with any "real" reality? If not, is there anything "real" that exists? Perhaps the end evolution of existential philosophical thinking is thta all existence is mere idea. All that we will ever see is imagination. All we experience we create. We each are God. And why not? We all live our own lives completely within our ideas and imaginations, and all human actions interconnect in a quantum relationship. I can punch a person in the face in my reality but instantaneously that same person can punch me in his reality. We both have personal experiences, but in the dimension of myself, what I see and feel is a function of my idea and my brain.
Time, as an invention of man, is the single most effective means of control of these infinite dimensions of hyperrealism. It allows everyone to synchronize and grasp their own innate senses of connectivity and "shared" experiences. It is the subjugation of the personal existence to the will of the drumbeat.

Last one for today, this is from an undated time between 11/30/05 and 1/8/06, and it's the most contemporarily interesting one so far:

I hide my emtions mostly and then I burst in an oddly unprovoked supernova, confusing the unfortunate soul who picked the wrong time or place to nudge me.
I like to think about myself and how great I am, how intelligent and witty, how intriguing, how generally infallible, how charming and magnetic to strangers and acquaintances alike. Am I the actor or the rememberer? Am I the writer? Am I the misfit mute? I don't like using "I" so much.
Albuquerque. Amanda Natalie Pike. Reality is out there somewhere but I haven't found it yet. I don't want to find it, but I want to look.