Tommy and I met up to rock some bass and keys ideas I’ve had rolling around in my skull, including the same tune I was messing with two days ago.
Later, a location scout for the T.V. show In Plain Sight stopped by my (parent’s) house and arranged taking pictures of the house as a possible set location. My parents approved, then let her take panoramic shots of the inside and outside. Eventually I asked her how to get a job on her show. She didn’t say that it’s an easy task, but she was friendly and didn’t seem to judge me for my underlying fragrance of desperation.
Shortly after, I went to go play drums at Brian’s house, watch Battle Royale again, and eat all of his Sweet-tarts that have been in the same place since Halloween.
It’s been months since my last ping-pong game. Unfortunately, my opponents had continued to play with one another all this time while I’d gone off and spent my sweet days doing other things, sort of like the hare in “The Tortoise and the Hare”… except I never really was the hare.
Joel and Joe held their paddles with limp wrists and sent the ball into curves and spins with every single hit. This was new to me, learning to adapt to a new way of playing, where one must pay attention to how much the ball is spinning before committing to send a decent return.
Occasionally I can get lucky and rebound with a heroic recovery-shot, but my opponents merely send it right back with a verbal compliment.
None of the victories were mine this time around, and eventually, Hope quietly fluttered away and my ego felt a little bit damaged.
I borrowed Tommy’s Microkorg to play around with sounds and tones and different voices. I normally use D’s Korg Triton in Coma, but I thought I’d check out some of the tones that Tommy used in His Holiness.
I got pretty attached to a deliciously warm synth sound and kept playing one riff over and over. Then I made a drum loop in Reason to formulate a possible song idea.
I had a 2-movies-in-a-row night. Dustin was going to call me about some bash that was supposed to be happening at his house, but he waited till 12 a.m., then sent me a text saying,
“what r u you doing?”
“Watching a movie. You?”
“just got home”
(long silence)
And that was the end of the conversation.
I watched 500 Days of Summer and Battle Royale. The two opposing genres back to back can confuse the adrenals.
500 Days of Summer is a clever indie romance movie about a boy who never quite gets the girl, a catchy indie soundtrack plays in the background.
Battle Royale is a Japanese movie about a class of 7th graders who are sent to an island to kill each other off, the last one alive wins.
Battle Royale was made in 2000. I could see how much Quentin Tarantino borrowed from it; even one of the characters was cast in Kill Bill (you know, the girl with the spiky ball ‘n chain?). Sure enough, it’s said to be one of his favorite movies of all time.
If you want to see a bunch of adolescents forced to confess their crushes to one another in the face of death and acts of twisted human nature, check out Battle Royale.
If you want to see a guy get taken for the ultimate emotional roller-coaster ride in a nice-guys-finish-last kind of way (amongst heavy Smiths references), check out 500 Days of Summer.
The MVD is never fun, so I psychologically prepared myself for a 2 hour sit-down session in a room full of people who want to be anywhere else but where they are. It’s always a test of sanity to be at the MVD, and this time at every 5 seconds, a robot (female voiced, thankfully) called out numbers, in a completely random order. My theory is that the MVD system seems to have utilized disorder to keep you distracted from how long you’ll really have to wait.
I had to renew my 4-months-overdue car registration. The desk ladies were all very nice, and after I told them my story about failing emissions tests, etc., they waived my past-due fees with smiles on their faces. 1.5 hours later, I placed the $37 sticker on my license plate and drove home. I spent a good portion of the day job-hunting with a strong sense of time-wasting. That’s what the jobless must do, because without money in this culture, a happy life happens elsewhere.
I decided to re-watch Zeitgeist The Movie last night, mainly because it is the new remastered version, and has a little bit extra added to it.
Zeitgeist is not for the feeble, or even strong set-in-stone minded people. It challenges the biggest things relating to the conditioned mind of humanity, and most likely, even you have some of it.
It confronts what many Americans think we know about religion and government. So if you feel offended or irritated by those kinds of things, you probably won’t want to watch it.
I came around to watching Zeitgeist years ago because a friend of mine posted a link to it on myspace. I had a long phase of reading about religion and “the worlds biggest secrets”, and this came at an interesting time.
Whether or not you buy into this stuff, there is a clear sign of insanity in the way things are run in this world.
I feel like I’ve always known it, and have been fascinated by it in a way. Unfortunately, sometimes I’m so repulsed by human behavior that it causes problems of their own and doesn’t really help anything. My theory is that the ego’s problems can’t be solved by the ego. There has to be a new way of thinking, or even no thinking at all; that is, settling down the compulsive conversations we carry in our heads.
If the planet were small enough to study under a microscope, humans would look like little cells. We move about, build things, are drawn to other humans, repelled by others, and we reproduce. Our actions may even be recognized similar as the behavior of cancer cells, because, like cancer, humans are not working in harmony with life around it.
Ego appears to be the problem, because we’re so invested in it’s beliefs and self-image. We could still have egos and function fine, but without keeping the ego in check, or even recognizing its behavior, we are owned by its fears and limitations. A false sense of identity is steering the human vehicle. We are not free, but at the mercy of our ego-based neural wiring to make decisions. That includes all of the conditioning of our past, and preoccupations about our future. If you don’t think you’re a prisoner of your conditioning, try to notice when you get angry or defensive about something you believe, and see if it makes any sense to you.
Then there’s affirmations, the attempt at re-conditioning the mind to something of a more positive nature. “I love myself,” or “Everyday, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” Those hypnotic phrases might help you become productive for a while. The problem is, there’s nothing integrative about affirmations. You can pump your mind with positive reinforcement all day long, but you still have the polar opposite lingering around somewhere in the shadows. And when it rears it’s ugly head, you’re like the Patrick Swayze character on Donnie Darko; a self-help guru catatonically rocking back and forth, crying in his bedroom.
There’s an intelligence that is completely unique to our mammal-hood; one where new ideas are formed, intuition is developed, and flow is experienced. And it’s been proven that it only arrives when the mind enters small windows of silence amongst the internal conversational mind-chatter.
In my own rare experience, it’s those times of clarity when a new perception arises, and nothing more is needed. People on the outside even react to your state. It’s almost like the exaggerated portrayal of a monk walking amongst the forest with birds and squirrels perching on his shoulder, displaying an auric sheen. If a person can hold this state long enough, included that past and future are no longer a concern, then new experiences unfold. There is a whole new respect and appreciation for life, nature, animals, even for the squarish assholes on T.V.
I once read something where a guy had an epiphany. He suddenly considered that if he experienced life through another human being, from birth to death, same physiology and life-events, he would BE that person. He would act, look, dress just like them, and completely 100% be them, inside and out. It was a sudden paradigm shift from judgment to compassion. It was Joe Rogan who wrote that on his blog.
What is the part of you that could possibly experience the life of another person? It’s essentially what is experiencing your own life now. The part of you that is aware of what you see, touch, feel, taste, etc. It is what every single human, animal, and plant have. It is awareness capable of observing. It’s the lingering “something” that’s under the mind-chatter, and what steers your cells into the proper places for your body to even exist.
Then there is the trick of becoming aware of awareness. This awareness can expand or we can confine it within our own little mind-based world. But if it expands enough, that’s when we get a sense of being plugged in to the whole, and we start living in harmony with our surroundings. It can only happen when the mind is immersed in the present moment. The same idea is in the beginning of Zeitgeist.
I’m not a big fan of getting entangled in worrying about petty things, or getting involved with human micro-dramas. A lot of people experience a strange pleasure in living dysfunctional lives. I can’t say co-dependency and power-struggles have had lasting positive results for me. Human insanity is starting to rear it’s ugly head at this point in time, I think to the point where humanity might be forced into a major shift in direction before we all destroy ourselves.
Weird times.
So the solution to human crazy-ness is always a foggy one. But I think we can have confidence enough in ourselves to remember an experience or state of mind that may have once harmonized on a much deeper level than any words can ever describe. If we’re lucky enough, we may find it again hidden in our present experience. Then, life may be so kind to bestow the next little piece of the puzzle.
I took my sister and Tim to old town today for some Mexican food with Jeremy and Jodi. We started off with some margaritas, and then hurt ourselves with way-too-much food that I’m much less used to eating these days.
We walked to the Natural History Museum to see if there’d be any good imax flicks playing. A girl named Rachel was working at the front desk, but I pretended that I’d never met her before and that I was unaware she had some kind of history with my friend Ben Standage during his stay in America (instead of England, or Canada). I presented some margarita-induced charm to her, but I wasn’t very good at it, and she didn’t really care for it. And somewhere in the conversation, I think she pointed at the “closed” sign that was being turned at the front door.
Along the way, I stopped to look at a group of statues that had some kind of southwestern significance (?), but I chose to focus on a statue of Mother Mary and Baby Jesus prancing along on a donkey in the midst of murderous Spanish conquistadors while bearing an expression of approval.
We had a family gathering at the house to celebrate my sister’s stay in ABQ for a few days. Tim, my sister’s boyfriend, flew in to join the family bash today. Everyone brought their dogs along with things like chips ‘n dip.
My camera went missing for about 10 minutes, then I found this picture on the camera when I got it back:
Mum made pork loin for dinner. I often get curious about what new company may experience at our dinner table. There’s never really a stable conversation exchanged about usual life-things; mostly a lot of gags based on previous jokes. I don’t even know if our interaction is funny or even understandable to outsiders.
After dinner, Mum and I had a conversation about her encounter with a spiritual medium when she was a teenager, and how most of the medium’s predictions about her life came true. I asked her if she thought it was an overall positive or negative experience. She said that at first she thought it was silly, then later was a little freaked out about it, and came to think it was evil. Intrigued, I told her about past semi-psychic experiences I’ve had where some of my dreams contained events which later came true, which seemed to be positive for me.
These are the conversations I like to have with my mum.
