The Savage God

“Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make, for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.”

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Philosophically speaking, Schopenhauer is assuming an answer to the question, namely, that with death is the end of all. However, if there is something after death, an undiscovered country, then one will get an answer. Of course, Schopenhauer is presumably right in presuming what he does. I am just saying.

My old three-hole puncher

My old three-hole puncher still works, after wiping away the cakes of dust. I've decided to make use of my binders, after all, for my Three Journal and the other items taken from my show blog. The material is starting to become voluminous and unwieldy. My pages of quotes got mixed up somehow, and I realized that it was time to do something a little more involved than just pile the pages away in folders.

Live and Let Die

Elvis

High school days. Elvis was a little shy in manner but not in personal style.

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But if Presley’s mouth wasn’t arrogant, his appearance was. He would spend hours in the school washroom combing his ducktail to perfection. When he wasn’t wearing a leather jacket and jeans, it was some outrageously colored pair of pegged pants. In the sea of 1,600 pink-scalped kids at school, Elvis stood out like a camel in the arctic. Intentionally or not, his appearance expressed a defiance that his demeanor did not match.

Red relates: “It was that hair, man - it got him into all kinds of trouble. If he had a regular haircut like the rest of us, he probably wouldn’t have been bothered. But I guess the other kids thought he was trying to show off or something. That hair has always been his crowning glory. I have never known any other human to take more time over his hair. He would spend hours on it, smoothing, mussing it up and combing it and combing it again.”

-- “Elvis: What Happened?” by Steve Dunleavy

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Donald Trump and Jon Stewart

Donald Trump and Jon Stewart are having a little grudge fuck.

If Jon Stewart is so above it all & legit, why did he change his name from Jonathan Leibowitz? He should be proud of his heritage!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 3, 2013

I didn't know that Stewart had changed his name.

[ONTD

The Two Journal

I came so close to opening a Twitter account. What got me thinking hard about it is a news story about an author tweeting a novel, just writing out his novel tweet by tweet. And I started thinking about my old urge to lay out these late years of my life in a clean, straight narrative. I never seem to be able to do this with these LJ-type blogs, as I always find myself wandering off in strange directions. I don't seem to be able to keep it simple.

Accordingly, I was wondering if the Twitter form might keep me focused. But then I started realizing what my string of tweets would look like - tweets about the personal life, about my personal life. What fun that would be, eh?

Why do I want to keep broadcasting that? I should be doing everything I can to hide it and keep it buried, and try to pretend to others that I am a normal guy - with girls, friends, a career - and just be a complete fraud.

Besides, I suspect I would find it easy to wander off on Twitter as easily as I do here. They say it is a great news-harvesting tool. I might also find myself tweeting to the celebrities that use Twitter, and there's a lot of them. I can see myself waving my e-hands to Bret Easton Ellis, "Hey, hey, notice me!" Not to mention Miley.

But I still feel some of the temptation. If Twitter doesn't do it for me, my old blurty is still there, I think, unless the site finally imploded under the weight of all those spammers.

I am already imagining the parameters. Keep it about the home life: no news, no celebrities, no pictures, no links, no books either. And nothing about e-life; it would be like the Internet never existed. Keep it within 50 words. No more than one blurt in four hours.

Here's a good restriction: no dwelling on the past, not on life with Bo and mother, or childhood, or school days, and nothing on the old e-life with Sugar and Gabe and all of them. The focus would be strictly on the present. Well, we might have to parse the term 'dwelling', because a passing mention, say, a clause of some half-dozen words, might be worthwhile - a grace note that gives a little heart to the barren days.

I am awfully curious to see what that would look like.

But I am nervous about using Blurty. As much as I love the sentimental value in the idea, and even though the place is still sailing well enough in cyberspace, you really cannot invest any trust in the place. If it disappeared tomorrow, you could not honestly claim to be shocked. You would be more surprised that it had stayed up as long as it did.

Since we are talking about limiting blurts to no more than one in four hours, it might not be too inconvenient to use the Two Journal here on Dreamwidth for this, instead of just having it sit there as the repository for my old LJ entries.

There remains one reservation: I would hate to strip this blog of my personal notes. Remember, this journal began as an exercise that was intended to be much like what is now being contemplated. We didn't have all these restrictions in mind back then, but this was largely the spirt of the enterprise.

Do I just make this blog a more expansive show blog, the stuff that I don't care to push on my LJ audience, extra celebrity gossip and extra news items?

Or can I distinguish between personal journal entries that I am content to fit within 50 words and those personal entries that I want to be expansive on? That seems arbitrary and inconvenient. And I can now see exceptions to my self-imposed limits if I start a new personal blog. For example, if I have a dream to relate, I probably couldn't limit myself to 50 words, but I would also appreciate that it really belongs in the new personal journal.

I am leaning strongly to opening up the Two Journal. But I can see most of my limits turning into rough guidelines. The main boundary would be the one between the personal homelife and everything else, including e-life and even reading life as well as news items.

I am also thinking of a sharper organizing principle that harkens back to when I was thinking of opening a Twitter account: to think of this new blog as a novel-like narrative of the remains of my life, a kind of 'death' story. This might focus things better. True, this may open the door for melodrama - "I'm dying, I'm dying!!" - but that may be in keeping with my character. It is a ridiculous story, yet one I feel compelled to write.