Looking Through an Old Notebook.

"This circle is an elusive one. Having drawn one curve and acknowledged it, the other half shies away. How to start the wheel? Who spins the Tao? What hand puts it in motion? It is infinitely big and infinitely small. It always spins around itself, never sticking, never catching. Never stops or starts, always locking, always latching. The more you advance, the more I retreat. The snake that swallows his tail. The desire for reunification of principles spins the wheel of life. There will always be two forces, two wills, two desires, one waxing, the other waning. Each is already present within the other."

"At that point all the rabbits took a turn for the worse."

"Your halo has begun to rust."

"Pages turn but the form of the reader stays unchanged."

I also found a few of my instructions, when I was trying to come up with new ways of thinking how to write a song. I had a very clear vision of a city singing to a person-- that is, all the little machines and devices we have around us coming to life and singing a song. (I was listening to a lot of Fennesz at the time and found his use of digital distortion refreshing and contemporary). I remember trying to imagine what it would sound like if an elevator sang a lullaby, or an ATM tried to seduce you with a soulful tune. I still think this would make for an interesting project, if I had some more technology and time.

Advice

If something pains you, the remedy is simple. Simply tap the discipline spike in your chest a few stout whacks with the hammer of your heart. The benefits are twofold: self-inflicted pain distracts you from the pain of external sources, and the spike will have been driven deeper into your core, which can't help but do you good.

Saddle Up Pardners-- Matt's on his High Horse

Building a "13-story mega-mosque" on the site of Ground Zero would indeed be a provocative move, if the building in question weren't already constructed 600 feet away, and if it weren't already owned by the Muslim outreach group the Cordoba Initiative, and if it weren't under theoretical plans to be reconstructed as a community center, and if the United States was ever planning on getting around to erecting so much as a house of cards on Ground Zero, yes. It's not so much that we want to build anything ourselves, it's just that we can't stand to let THEM build THEIR stuff so close to what THEY did to US. It's just insulting.

A slap in the face, you might say-- which is really more our prerogative than theirs. In case you hadn't noticed, we've been raining retribution and spitting blood and thunder every fucking which way now for years, with no signs of stopping. If we really had a problem with constructing religious facades on the sites of mass slaughter, I'm guessing Europe would be severely lacking in cathedrals.

Okay, but a mosque is a bit much-- advertising the same religion as the attackers. But I'm going to go ahead and claim that the people who organized the whole catastrophe and flew the planes into the buildings were about as "Muslim" as I am a fish. They weren't any more adherents of any kind of sane religion than the Nazi's were truly Christian. So whether they build a mosque or a Buddhist sanctuary or a kiosk where the adherents of the Right Reverend Sun Myung Moon could hand out pamphlets is really missing the point.

Anyone who brings rampant pain and destruction isn't religious so much anymore as they are a Total Fucking Looney. Anyone relinquishes their right to any kind of respectable spiritual banner as soon as they cause a building to explode (that's kind of my rule of thumb). And no one's proposing to build a monument to Total Fucking Looniness. Mostly because we have scads of them already, in lots of places... Wall Street springs to mind.

Actually, that brings me to my last point, which is to ask What are you Afraid Of? And I can understand where a lot of the anger and vitriol and resistance is coming from. Lots of people are afraid of The Other. Those Strange People, who are so damn sneaky and violent and untrustworthy, who want to stop you from doing what you want to do and force you to do what they want you to do. They already hurt us plenty, and now it looks like they want to hurt us some more.

But you might want to consider how well that last paragraph describes Pfizer, or Enron, or BP. And I'll be honest-- I am far, far more afraid of white men in suits than I am of scruffy men with AK-47's half a world away. One of them could actually hurt me.

What Have I Done

Tonight I made the terrible mistake of playing on my guitar:

• Every Neutral Milk Hotel song I know;
• U2's "One";
• Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"
• and Jeff Mangum's cover of "I Love How You Love Me"

and now it's dark and I'm in deeper emotional waters than I meant to get into and I think I need a hug.

Communiqué

Last night in my dream I was talking to a pair of gangster types, who informed that if you're planning on hitting someone with a baseball bat, you really wanna choke up on it as much as you can. Holding it too near the knob slows down your swing (because you have to take a bigger windup), meaning you're not going to be as efficient, plus the weight imbalance will create "wrist drag", which means the bat puts stress on your wrists in a downward direction, which leads to joint problems later on in life. So if you're planning on hitting anyone with a bat, maybe try this out and let me know if they were right.

We also agreed that the worst thing was when you found the toilet unexpectedly backing up on you while you were at a friend's house, or at a party.

What I Did Last Night

It's kind of like hypnotizing chickens...

Last night I dreamed about a gang war erupting at a school. Kids were getting shook down in the principal's office for any weapons they might have had on them, and things were pretty fraught to begin with, but then this one kid whipped out an Uzi or some shit, and things got real quiet real fast. He said he'd only give it up to the administration if they reimbursed him the $7000 and change it cost him in the first place, and it looked like one of the counselors was totting up some numbers on a calculator in a serious attempt to maybe do just that, but just then a group of kids from a rival gang burst in, so the kid snatched his Uzi back and some serious fucking bullets started flying after that, boy.

Then I dreamt about a woman in a fugue state in solitary confinement who, while deliriously singing to herself, managed to steal keys from a guard and instigate a prison-wide revolt, and the prisoners then took over the compound and rather than escaping to the four points of the compass, decided to fortify the prison itself, and they started holding brawls in the courtyard, for entertainment, and there were fires in oil barrels, and one of the prisoners attacked another one with a huge iron spike on the end of a chain.

And then I dreamed I was the Incredible Hulk being chased around by Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross and having "gamma grenades" thrown at me, but it turned out that the reason Gen. Ross had such a personal vendetta against the Hulk was that (get this) Ross was actually harboring latent homosexual tendencies, and the grotesquely-masculine figure of the Hulk was causing these latent feelings to manifest themselves in ways too obvious for even the general to ignore, so rather than deal with these feelings in any kind of integrative way he decided the best thing to do was destroy the figure that was causing him all this distress. Plus the fact that Bruce Banner, the Hulk's alter ego, was going to marry his daughter Betty, was just another layer of frustration and annoyance and too-close-to-home-ness which caused Ross to (in my dream) mutate himself into a weird three-legged creature (like it was just three legs and pretty much nothing else) in an attempt to destroy the Hulk once and for all. (In other words if he couldn't be "Mrs. Banner" then not only could no one else, but there wasn't going to be any Banner at all).

Then I dreamed I was some young governmental agent in some lady's apartment reading about the events of the aforementioned dream-segments in the newspaper. The lady herself looked like Meg Ryan, but was not specifically Meg Ryan, just Meg Ryan-esque. We talked a bit about Gen. Ross' avowed intention to destroy the Hulk using nuclear weaponry, and I expressed shock and dismay and mentioned the huge amounts of collateral damage that would surely result from such a tactic. The apartment was small and cozy, and apparently we must have had some sort of intimate relationship because I realized I had her in a clinch and the dream shifted over to a sexual sphere, which I'll spare you the details 'cause modesty.

After that I woke up.

OH GOD FUCKING DAMMIT WHY AM I READING A FUCKING ECLIPSE REVIEW, LIKE I FUCKING NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS SHIT. HERE LET ME SUM IT UP FOR YOU: YOUNG PASTY BORING UNREMARKABLE UNATTRACTIVE GIRL CAUSES ANCIENT POWERFUL BEINGS TO FIGHT FOR HER LOVE, NOT ONLY THAT SHE'S SO CAPTIVATING SHE CAUSES THESE ANTEDILUVIAN INHUMANLY GORGEOUS KILLING MACHINE CLANS TO PUT ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES TO DEFEND HER ROBOTIC MILQUETOAST SOMEHOW-IRRESISTIBLE ASS, AND GEE WHIZ AS IF THAT WEREN'T ENOUGH, GRADUATION FROM HIGH SCHOOL IS COMING UP WHOOPS!! LIFE SURE IS TOUGH!! I CAN'T EVEN BEGIN TO FUCKING IMAGINE WHY THIS SERIES HAS CAUGHT ON LIKE GANGBUSTERS, CAN YOU?