Dear NASA,

If intelligent aliens should ever send a delegation to earth, it occurs to me that the Japanese would make excellent envoys of humanity.

1) Their culture is fascinated by novelty and innovation. Any peculiarities of the alien form or culture would be therefore more appreciated and embraced. In fact, you'd probably see a new fad in Tokyo of dressing more like the Betelgeusians by the end of the day.

2) The Japanese tendency towards proper etiquette is well-known. (We wouldn't want any British yobs chucking lager cans at the landing craft, for example). We could count on them to at least make a decent showing of human propriety.

3) They have a wonderful tolerance to the grotesque. This is the culture that has given us the terms manga, guro, yaoi, seppuku, and hentai tentacle rape. The aliens could be bloated, screeching sacks of bilious ooze-- I doubt one of the delegates would even raise an eyebrow.

4) You know as soon as they cast eyes on any sort of interstellar craft, within days they'd have a plan to make one smaller, cheaper, and more fuel-effective, thus ensuring humanity's place in the competitive spaceship-market.

5) The collective cultural memory of Japan has already experienced the shock of meeting "aliens", thanks to Admiral Perry landing on the island in 1853. The disorienting steps of meeting highly technologically-advanced "outsiders" are therefore not going to pack quite the same wallop.

What do you think?

I Am Going to Go Through These Fucking Walls

There's another scene in The Men Who Stare at Goats I wanted to tell you about, the first scene, in fact. It opens on a tight close-up of this older army guy, grizzled and grey in the mustache, looking really intently at something.

"Boone," he says, face wicked with sweat.

"Yes sir?"

"I'm going into the other room."

And he gets up from his desk and charges pell-fucking-mell right at the wall, charging with the purest of Intention. And he hits the wall and WHAM, back he goes, sprawling onto the ground.

"Dammit," he says.

Okay, so yeah, that's pretty much what we would expect would happen. But then you have the course of the whole movie, all of George Clooney and Ewan McGregor's ramblings and so on. And in the very last scene (I'm spoilering this shit, look askance if you have a delicate constitution) we see McGregor staring death-rays at a wall, now compleat with mustache of his own, get up and charge pell-fucking-mell right at a similar wall.

Guess what happens this time. (It's literally probably better in your head than it was on-screen).

Anyway, my point is that I feel like I'm staring at walls right now. I'm staaring and staaring and my blood vessels are about to go critical, but that's the necessary part. Because by God, I am going to go through these fucking walls. And I'm not even going to knock them down, because that's cheating, that's bullshit. I'm going to go right through them.

Oh heavens, I am well and truly sick. My head is a veritable swamp of mucus.

So it occurs to me that control is a human invention. To say that everything is under control is that everything is artificial, stilted, jammed, and a whisker away from going completely disastrous. If you really wanted to reassure someone, you could tell them that nothing is under control, because then everything is flowing smoothly and nicely along their natural lines. Nobody with any kind of agency (and therefore greed) has a say in the show.

To try and direct things is to set yourself up for failure. What you can do is look where things are going, or where they want to go, and ride along the top of that like a surfer. No surfer would ever try and tell a wave to move away from the shore. He or she acquiesces to the larger movements, the larger forces, and so travels much faster than is ordinarily possible. If you get really good at it, you look like some sort of genius force of nature, but really all you're doing is riding waves.

I Remember Summer

And love, it would seem, is a skill.

I walk through these summer nights with you

Telling you about my favorite mystery,

Of a cherry petal snowfall

In the hottest days of June

There are some voices, some singers

Who can pull you through time into

A faded and dusty aching feeling

Through the decades you go spinning backwards

Open your heart, it's about to begin

And listening to the radio by the open window

You beam out your purity to the stars

And the unimpeachable feeling

They had it right, it's like white lines

Of rain slashing through a dry night

And if someone did it once,

They did it for everyone, we have all succeeded,

We are all sent reeling, we are all caught up,

And nothing, no nothing can stop us now.

Confession Time

Looking back on it now, I realize:

From roughly the ages of 16 to 25, I couldn't stand myself. There were, of course, periods where everything aligned and the river flowed nicely out of myself and into the air around me, but for the most part, I wanted desperately to crawl out of my own skin. I tried about as hard as any Scorpio can try (which is pretty hard) to eliminate myself, in various ways. I tried not talking to anyone, I tried writing down on paper over and over again how despicable I was, I tried literally starving myself (that was fun), moving far away from people, and so on.

I realize now that I wasn't becoming clear, which is what I wanted-- all that shit just made me dark and sludgy, which only made me want to disappear further. I thought I was killing my ego, but I was only feeding it.

Because there are many disciplines which focus on the dissolution of the ego. From everything I've seen and heard, it's a marvelous, refreshing experience. My artistic hero, John Frusciante, talks constantly about nothingness, emptiness, channeling spirits. The Tao is all about naturalness, the empty cup.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I now think happiness will help you fit into the currents of the air, not sadness. I could've said this at any point growing up, but I wouldn't have believed it. Anyway, it makes me want to apologize to all my friends for all the times I thought I was being humble, but actually I was being a self-absorbed little shit. I'm sorry, everyone. I promise to try and channel light for myself and for all of you from now on.

Humor LAWL

This is ripe for abuse if anything is, it's PETA's blank template for "cruel" KFC signs:

http://signgenerator.kfccruelty.com/index.asp

And here are some I came up with:

(Bonus audio version of the last one! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxeOmD_nVrM)

Not-Quite-Night-Yet

Here, read this hilarious page, it's fandango:

Twilight Parody

It's All Happening Now

What a strange day. I woke up with one of those strange hangovers, the ones that make me feel happy and calm and clear and loving. I felt harmless and helpful.

I should have known, though, that when I feel unprecedentedly strong, that's the universe's cue to present me with a new challenge. In this case, the suddenly-unavoidable need to find a new place to live.

I had been, I think, quietly asking the universe to make this necessary for me for some time now anyway. "Well, it's not so bad," I would say, and it wasn't. But it also wasn't ideal. It was toxic and depressing in a lot of ways. I wasn't doing my best, afraid to be complete. I was falling into a vaguely miserable, but comfortable rut. So my conscious was saying, "It'll do," while my subconscious was saying, "Make it impossible for me to remain as I am, please." And now my wish has been granted.

Which means that it is time to rock and roll on all levels, as I did when I first moved to this city June 1st, and again at the end of that summer.

The first step, I think, is to get rid of all superfluous physical items. Goodwill is about to get some stuff. Oh man, this feels scary and refreshing at the same time.

Open heart, open hands, open mind.