The parking lot of this hotel is representative of everything I love about this place. Endless skies, endless heat; endless seas of blond plants mingling innocently with the neutered form of commerce they uphold. A place where you can become lost in the depth of a routine, not merely suspended by it. Somewhere so much less supported by humanly buzz and the electric flare of our newfound patterns it becomes possible to feel the throb of the Earth without working overtime for it. Passions elongate like the shadows here, perspectives distort into blithe naiveté, reassurance is gained through breakfast and the stiffness of your joints. The High and the Deep and the Wide present themselves like the barely veiled breasts of a lover and press you inside the inside with effortless abandon. Only here, it seems, the things of nature and the nature of things grow gradually into one tree and under that tree Life grows richer and vastly shallower; moments become more and palpably less bearable. The parking lot reminded me of this.

Post-Irony as Praxis

I’ve heard a rumor that postphenomenological methodology implicates “mimesis” as sustained, contained and rhythmic interactivity between original and copy. This means, assuming Miles, my vogue informer, was not overreacting to a bad acid trip or excited about a recent victory at pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, mimesis [can be] a dance of discourse. And not just any dance (the deeply scarring “Macarena”, for instance, I find particularly distasteful), but a dance so comprehensively ingrained in our experiential capitulations and collective prehensions [that] it tends to comprise an unconsciously activated means toward the achievement of dynamical meaning and the composite apprehension of various interpretants. It is, hypothetically, one route towards the generation of heterogeneous and socially-autopoietic metanets of (re)unified referents. Buried, copiously re-used informants seeping their caressive taint into our subjective experience to the deconstructed point where unmediated access to “immanent self-knowledge” becomes a (rather obvious) non-possibility. These discursive processes would, again assuming Miles wasn’t yanking my balls around, ironically excise dyadic referents- which are notorious for basking in their inflammatory claims at linear arrangement and aligned signifieds. “Smarmy” I think, is the word.

Under the banner of this deviant collection of perspectives, the following tends to occur: pseudostructural mediacy, encapsulated transivity, desublimated neologisms, the roots of syntax, a series of film clips and mostly anything that rhymes with ‘orange’, becomes a vastly communicative packet: a problem. So many fuckin problems it will feel like you strayed into your grandmother’s obsessive head. “Problematic” becomes a noun and supplementarity becomes a permeable strategy roving the linguistic unconscious for steadied application. Except, wait…!! the linearized operative word ‘becomes' is merely a transient structure crudely limning forgotten correlates to a world to which we relate [absolutely?] secondhand. And if I would not have caught that little distinction regarding the word ‘becomes’, the moral disintegration of America’s youth may have exponentiated to unfixable proportions. Oh, wait… … shit. I’m too late.

This vast underground web that unites us from the moment we say, ‘mom' and before, is not conditional but rather (allegedly) constitutive. The internal assertions of this methodological perspective hint at the creation of a “poststructuralist” epistemology. After all, when all language and behavior or all objects and “noumenon” (shudder) begin to become aware of themselves within noospheric space, there is a shift. Individually, this is a shift of direct experience and tends to include a lot of reflection on… what else? direct experience! This translates into a lot of thinking about thinking about one's self's experience.  Hurray for self-talk! Here is an example of what that might look like after a hard night of drinking:

I often touch the shovel with ‘the Other’ as ‘the Other’ totally digs the irony of using mimetic process to speak of mimesis. I often hear ‘the Other’ listen as I play at reducing human beings to a whole bunch of enactive threads. I often watch ‘the Other’ as ‘the Other’ watches me: pretentiously pretending to see the world through every available filter while simultaneously expressing as much to the best of my ability. I often see ‘the Other’s’ eyes well up as I posture, alone, in front of the reflexive mirror of Irony. I often empathize with ‘the Other’ as ‘the Other’ empathizes with me: pointing out my faults and perpetrating each starkly outlined offense as I do so; painting myself into a brittle simulacrum and trying like all hell not to enjoy it.

Or, after a night of depression following a night of being shut down by droves of hot chicks:

When the contextualization of experience doesn't lead to your escape of its interpretive implications, where do you run to hide from the self-created walls that are crashing in on yourself?

As you can see by this example, it’s pretty much the funnest thing going. There are only two or three tiny holes. One of them is: I tried it on a girl and it proved as impotent as a baby horse’s penis. Another: it leans towards self-defeating. It enfolds within it the tiniest inclination towards developing into something less useful than Dean Koontz. A mere whiff of a possibility that you’ll actually end up literally having sex with yourself as a result of the continuation of its hold. To borrow a line from Psalty the Singing Songbook, “In God’s eyes, there are no losers. [Except chronic deconstructionists, irony-junkies and people who use humor in essays.]”

I know you’re not as bad off as me. I know you don’t consider yourself blundering through a meaningless existence, bumping into sentences with exclusively denotative meanings and discovering the obtuse need to clear your throat…or being slammed into the depressingly patent genealogies of increasingly boring conversations with “normal people”. I know you aren’t so disconnected you look at a grocery store flyer and start breakin’ down the meat specials- postmodern style. I know you’re not so addled by irony you could read a Deepak Chopra book and not be touched. Everyone is touched by Deepak Chopra.

Occasionally, however, being ox-fucked (by the incongruently enormous incorporation of these perspectives as primary modalities of thought and action) can happen, and when it does happen there are a couple of outs. Ways to regain your potency. Paths up from the slag-pit of overthought and whateverism. I’d like to share them with you.

-Convert your deconstruction into ethics. If you see a subject’s genesis manifesting in the subject’s present state, let that awareness carry its due weight instead of allowing the ignorance of the subject to override your empathy. It’s important.

-Don’t allow the unacknowledged precedence of an occasion prevent you from immersing yourself in it, especially if the occasion is all about love or friendship. It’s important.

-Overlook ambiguous terminology from time to time, especially if the person is really trying to get something across to you. It’s important.

-Take up a spiritual practice. Seriously! If you think Spirituality is a bunch of premodern ass-wipery promulgating and perpetuating its own bizarre ridiculousness in radical fashion (like a monkey with a toy windmill screeching itself into a really sad euphoria) than we are on the same page entirely (or we were, at one time); but the truthfulness of the tenets enfolded within the wisdom traditions are not undermined by a postmodern perspective- merely augmented. Spirituality is more than kick-ass. Please try your best to take that information from me, if only because it took me until today to realize it. It’s important.

-Be vulnerable. Words can make you invincible but your heart will suffer enormously. If you don’t allow yourself to re-open, you’ll die. It’s important.

In conclusion: as with all things, postmodern methodology as a primary mode of meaning-making can be made sustainable. Insanity can be prevented! But, again, as with all things, it takes practice.

With Love,

Brian David, 07

(note: this is an extension of Hotel Saskatchewan.  It contains some recycled phrasing and some original.)

He is Old.  Even a child could see this, and remember it.

His ass is cradled in an eternal resting place where there is no rest. 

His thumbprint is bathing in updated blood. 

A babble of tightly packed images suffer their sums upon a protein soaked crevice of his mind.  Thread themselves, do these requisitely brookable thoughts, into his tear ducts.  Salinity thus produced, the Mindsphere’s grim leavings work their way from the back of his eyes to the sick-black syrup-spot at the bottom of his throat and down again to the base of his spine.  Reverberating there at noxious speeds, he finds, they ache less. 

Never a linear capitulation.  Every picture-word is accompanied by a genesis; the voyage of the image is the image.  In this way the arm of his chair undoes itself as does the sound of his toaster mundanely-orgasmically fucking off its finale; issuing, mechanically, the heated product within it; releasing bread to air. 

There is a moment when his singed slice lingers aloft, suspended, with every conceived law laboring to bring it down again.  Popped it was, aired it remains, momentarily.  And then the crushing descent. 

Now comes an anomalous smell, a mystery in its source and degree of unpleasantness.  Like rotten meat farted.  Like World War II developed a cocaine addiction.  Like a hand-dug basement ruptured a bowel.  What congealing substance, and out of whose asshole?  It passes. 

The old man’s up-to-the-minute thumbprint brushes salty water from hairy cheeks.

He is living in (or on) the Prairies.  Everything he owns is as elementally dusty as his body soon will be.  When he looks out the window, he sees the only version of God that ever interested him.  Endless skies, endless heat; endless seas of blond plants mingling innocently with the neutered form of commerce they uphold.  A landscape that is both uplifted and lost in the depth of routine.  A Place so much less supported by humanly buzz and the electric flare of newfound patterns it becomes possible to feel the throb of the earth without working overtime for it.  Passions elongate like the shadows here, perspectives distort into blithe naiveté, and reassurance is gained through breakfast and the stiffness of joints.  The High and the Deep and the Wide present themselves like barely veiled breasts and press you inside the inside, effortlessly.  The things of nature and the nature of things grow gradually into one tree and under that tree Life grows richer and vastly shallower.  Moments become more and palpably less bearable. 

For now, the impaired sustainability of his consciousness is forefront, the kinky ‘depleted endurability’ of Saskatchewan’s equation is asserted, but its dissipation is imminent.  I am not a piece of wheat.  I am not an intolerable affect carried by dry wind.  I am not a slack husk, inexorably trapped in skin; a crudely enlivened grouping of tubes.  I am not my thirst.  I do not defy you, Lord.  I am not what I see out my window.  This is a meditation toward renewed sanity.  A Prairie special.

The man rises, now, to retrieve his toast, with the greasy rigors of aged breath against him and the particularity of his moth-brown carpet threatening to hypnotize and befuddle.  It is a swim, this day, across reams of subtle channels and unorthodox communiqué.  He is wallowing in his youth, sinking into the sanguinity of his middle years; remembering every lover- forgetting every lover.  He is seeking coalesced crumbs.

There is an audial excrete, a lump of sound, on the kitchen counter, limning a yellow block of inquiry.  The sound is the man’s voice, ironically de-familiarized in his final hour, and it is enabling the volubility of things he’s never recognized.

----Where’s that frigging butter, now?

I offer proof that the pace of life as a human being continues to thrum along at dissapointing speeds: imagine waking up tomorrow morning. 

What's changed?  If you overslept, you probably netted some of the beautifying effects of slumber.  Assuming you did not ingest moonshine until an alcoholic lights-out bid you a fair debut to the great beyond, you probably feel somewhere between awful and great.  You're alive!  Chuck Norris left you alone in the dark watches of the early morning, and he spared most of the people you know too.  The fabled Rapture of the Bible never happened because those things are intended only to make children's lives more enjoyable!  The Apple team worked another day on some new product that will blow your mind and put your balls in a vice until you acquire it.  Somewhere in Africa, a crocodile farted.

As some of you may know, I recently took a drive to the Denver/Boulder area.  My agenda was simple, my itinerary- a lesson in flexion, my expectations- veering from skewed to minimal to blunk*.  I went, with my brothers and my cousin, to new and re-new connections.  For fun!

Did it, too.  And it was fun.  Incredibly so.  Every phase of the adventure was marked by seered relational limits and a cascade of vigorously substantial moments.  My bent towards unnecessarily fragrancing these moments, even now, cannot be circumnavigated.  So good, was it.  Indeed.

It comes, then, the obvious: the mask of tragedy.  What do you do when the blood-pumper is so damn awash?  When after a mean two days, your own room doesn't look the same?  By seeing my friends, I see (that much more viscerally) how little I see them.  It would seem, then, that I should find my way back. 

And so I will, as has been said, play the fiddle of events, until the tiny tide of person-to-person flow brings me back to water I fairly near drown without.  ;-)

* - past tense of 'blinked-out'

Even if I was slightly intoxicated at the time of this photo, even if I had put away four imported cans of draught beer and shelved another six empties of Rickard's White- there is clearly a long-suffering, far-sighted hope in those glowing orbs.  And what is it's articulation?  Just this:

A large, large apartment in downtown Denver.  A storage of light, organic American Spirits, several forty ounce bottles of Disarono and numerous cases of glass coke bottles.  A closet full of designer jeans and tight-fitting tee-shirts.  A VISA to stay as long as I want.  A brand-new iMac, a brand-new iPhone, a brand-new iPod.  Cabbing out to evenings spent at 18+ clubs, until that fateful 08/08/08 when I turn 21.  Everything an improbably perfect distillation of contained awesome.  Are you ready for that level of cool?  I am.  I am.

Did you seeeeee?  I have been published on kenwilber.com  Check it out.

You don’t know delusions of grandeur until you’ve envisioned yourself flying, without ropes, on the Oprah show. A made-for-this-moment Robbie Williams cover of Moby’s Lift Me Up reverberates throughout the bright n’ focussed room as you ascend to the ceiling and bust moves round the studio’s chic chandeliers. Then, with the style of a young god and a sexiness fetched from beyond the beyond, you glide downward and proffer your hand to Oprah. “Fly with me?” The crowd grins stupidly and silently as Oprah, with all the composure of a Queen, takes your hand and the two of you whoosh about the room in a purple glow. This is going to be fun.