I feel a disturbance in the force
May. 19th, 2005 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
burnunitWhat an appropriately timely phrase to pop into my head. I do feel a disturbance in a force. It's this vague disquiet coming in from almost all my nerves where they're extended into the noösphere.
Gosh, that doesn't make it much less vague by way of explanation. This is really not trying to be one of those vague cloaking posts, which I think all of us write on occasion.
The extended nerves in the noosphere metaphor is actually quite precise: I feel like I've got a lot of long nerve endings out beyond the limits of my skin and that they're1 all dipping into different areas of the world, different zones of luminous fog. I'm finally experiencing the sensations of electric extension of the nervous system2 except that I'm also experiencing the effects of jangly jittery numbness (key to understanding this sensation, for me, is this: "In the electronic age, the very instantaneous nature of the co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious, like the central nervous system itself. Fragmentation and specialization, features of mechanism, are absent. To the extent that we are unaware of the nature of the new electronic forms, we are manipulated by them"). Now that I'm out there, there's things out in the dark with my fraying nerves, gnawing on the ends.
Expressly put:
1. I don't feel relevant. That's not the best word, but it's closest to the shape my present anfechtungen takes. A lot of the rest of this post orbits around that feeling of being irrelevant.
2. I'm anxious about a steady rise in sensation and limited symptoms of my psychological disorders (ADD, OCD, and ...surprise... anxiety).
3. I want to go back to school very badly and complete my MA. This is going to happen, I've been re-admitted. But I have to get it in gear to fit the work into my overall life.
4. At least four of my friends have gone into/are experiencing/are exiting a deeply painful series of life transitions.3
5. I am not getting enough attention.4
6. I'm losing ground in the body war. My back injury last fall, the craptacular weather this spring, and my loosening of the diet strictures are messing with my head. Badly. Some clothes are tightening up and I'm anxious.
7. Music. One song in five months makes Jon a dull boy. And there's the Burn Unit album to complete.
8. I need more help with my writing.5
9. This list. This list is fucking depressing the way it goes on and on.
There's also child rearing, housekeeping, work, etc. But I've got those well prioritized, I believe. It's the next group of priorities. All of these fall together with or can contribute to #1. I just feel weirdly irrelevant. Not like "oh me, if I suddenly disappeared would they notice?" But more like... I'm trying, in my own ways to make some kind of real impact that would cause someone to say , "yes. yes. immediately. this is what I needed to make the next leap." Then they'd tell me they were making the next leap, and did I want to come along. Then I could say, "hell yes, I've been waiting for someone to say something."
Instead, i write in this journal and every so often someone comments and I feel better for a little bit and then I go back to thirst for something more. I need collaborators or else I'm just fucking bullshitting myself and everyone else. Oh, him? That's just Jon with the, you know, the rants and the surrealist mysticism and the occasional ramblings about octopus porn. Don't mind him. I mean, we love him, couldn't stand it without him, but don't mind him.
Oh, maybe I'm not thinking clearly (big surprise). I want public artistic collaborators.6 I'm getting a lot of collaboration in very small group settings, like with Leann and stuff. We collaborate a lot on important personal stuff and even do so on artistic things. But we also both have separate artistic endeavors and agendas on some of the other stuff we do.
In this fragile state, I must describe how significant it is to receive even the slightest gesture. You who have come to my show (Friday & Saturday. $10. Acadia. 730 pm) have done a great service to me and I feel very very warmed because of it. And it's not like I don't know that there's people probably thinking the same thing: Jon, you'd make me feel a lot more relevant if maybe you'd call sometime or email or whatever. And Yeah, I get that. But it's not like I've cut off anybody here. Being clear (preemptively) this isn't about blaming anyone. This is me journaling about how I don't feel good right now and thinking about why. Bugger! I can't even just bitch about feeling bad without clarifying it. I'm fucking mopey and I don't feel very fucking beautiful, somebody do something about it!
It's like... think of it this way, right? Since I'm doing this in livejournal, I'll use that for the metaphor. Let's say I friend someone. But they don't friend back. Usually it's just a whatever- forget, don't notice, don't like you, friends list is long enough as it is and there's only so many dang hours in a day to read your tripe, whatever. But until they do or tell you they hate you, there's that tiny tiny evil little dust mite's voice in the back of your head that goes, "why isn't so and so friending you back? I'll tell you why, because they think you're fucking irrelevant." Grr. Would you rather be vehemently loathed or indifferently disregarded? No contest in my opinion. Hate away (as long as you behave, I'm not going to lose sleep trying to change your feelings). I think with LJ particularly, it's harder because you know these people after a fashion. Or you're writing for an audience you can reasonably be confident is listening (seeing the size of your own friends list) and if THEY'RE indifferent, your friends, then your sense of irrelevancy is magnified: how must the whole wide world view me?!
I just keep trying angles on the shit in my head and I keep trying them with this belief that somehow the order of words will cause someone to stop in their tracks: "that, Jon Stark Olsen, is exactly what I needed to fucking hear in the here and now. I'm a gonna go climb a mountain and pee a rainbow into the sky." Sometimes I feel like I'm writing or thinking in code. (yay fat fingers, first time I typed it it was "thinking in coed" hell yes I'm thinking in coed)
Like if I just look at someone, the right someone the right way; and I say to them the burning fiery letters that hover in my mind's eye, they'll know just what to say back. They're pasted all over this journal. Or I've dropped them into conversations. But it's like ... it's like encrypted... but if the other person was listening with their hidden ear or whatever, their inner key would decrypt it and a channel would open up. I've mentioned that to people-- this piece of writing, I believe it points to you, this idea, this made me think of you. And it sort of works after a long long explanation. But it's almost like, some point, I'll say,
"I hear God's voice is the clang of your breath upon my neck, the movement of light through your fine hair and into your eyes. O sky, O brittle dome of night! We are each one soaked in a current of time diving forward through the onrush. Come with me and we'll unwire the fences, write transient blessings in mud on the docks and dance out of the water into the horizon."
and the other person will know exactly what to say back. (I suppose the secret I'm aching to tell everyone is that each person I'm talking to knows what to say back but there's something about the WAY I'm saying things that makes people ... go silent, or feel unsettled or is just... static. I want people to play along. Leap, it won't be blind faith, and your life will follow regardless!)
The other things are, I know how I'm not a great person. Two ways: like I'm not a particularly moral person and I don't really conform very well to society or good order (anarchically discombobulated all the time); but also I mean, I know I'm more like a Salieri than an Amadeus. Get it? I'm tremendously ambitious and almost inexhaustible, and I think I recognize things in the world, but I'm also not great. I'm still confident I'm going to "be something", but that's not Mozart-great, just Olsen-great. Every day I invent a new ambition for myself. Often times, I succeed.
So yeah. That's my sob story. How are you? What do you think of me? I just want to connect, without exhausting people, and without having to join a cult or something. Not connect. Leap forward. Doesn't have to be big, but there should be a leap. (heh. come on, evolve!)
ONE more thing. Look, a lot of this shit might possibly be solved by several sensor re:engine sessions in a row. Live journal is fine and I'm really growing to love you people here. But my community is not livejournal. My community is not a convention, nor burning man, nor seminary, nor academia, nor a writers group, nor the stage. I should be doing those things and associated with those things and integral part of those things. But I belong with the Sensor Re:Engine. I belong with the sensor fucking re: engine. You do too. Our future lies in space! Outer. Space. Brothers and sisters! I think we've been victimized by Doctor Oculus. I think he's rebuilt the cage, but it's a lot bigger now, and the bars are invisible, and there's a lot of really beautiful toys that make it more fun to be inside. But it's still Dr. Oculus' cage, and we busted out of that a long time ago. We can do it again. It's a long dark road, but we've got to scamper down it and gnaw our way back to the light!!!!!
THAT'S IT: That's who I'm saying it to. Engineers, I hear God's voice is the clang of your breath upon my neck, the movement of light through your fine hair and into your eyes. O sky, O brittle dome of night! We are each one soaked in a current of time diving forward through the onrush. Come with me and we'll unwire the fences, write transient blessings in mud on the docks and dance out of the water into the horizon. We'll sing fire out of nebulae and release the tight cords of our brains into the endless pathways of Orion. 'We've seen things these other people couldn't even imagine!' Fly us together against the cataracts and blend our voices into song. Again! Again! It was a good day. I want it ... not "back". I want it forward, new, supple and subtle, your fingers on the keys, your eyes aflame with reflected computer monitor light, your whispers spiking red on a digital delay.7
Jeez. It took me all day to write this, between work projects and child care. I just kept saving and re-saving and editing. How lame is that? Not lame, but it's really really long. And for goodness sake, I think I've been VERy good through the years about not writing very many bloated navel gazing posts. If you count the imagist surrealism as bloated self-indulgent wankery, maybe. But I'm actually trying to produce something. To be more explicit, I've started trying to catalog it more deliberately on my memories page. LJ technology has permitted a way to hypertextualize an already non-linear thing that was striving to be epic, making the maze construct even more intriguing. Though perhaps just to me.
1At this point in the journal entry last night, I fell asleep. When I woke up I had typed a bunch of shit. So it read "I've got a lot of long nerve endings out beyond the limits of my skin and that they're llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllkkkn" which just might express my problem more clearly than the re-edited version of this entry!
2 The Agenbite of Outwit from McLuhan Studies. Here's a wonderful link to the first part of Understanding Media, and one to an html-google-cache version of presentation on media-as-extension
3 Because throughout the process each of these friends has been alternately public, vaguely public (i.e., in LJspace), or deeply private, I'm disinclined to name them in a public forum. I seriously considered it out of simple consistency to the stated goal here. But for heavens sake you prolly know them if you're reading this! The effects on their lives have been dynamic, (in the sense of a complex or chaotic system) with impacts on other people to varying degrees- the circle of friends, livejournal people, friends-of-friends, etc. Everyone responds differently. For me, these complications mean a lot of extra grace has to be extended to everyone. I mean, I'm not a particularly good or moral person, so I have enjoyed greatly being able to simply love my friends without the trappings of judging them. I feel I've made good steps in offering my love and concern, and I've not been shy to dialogue about behaviors. I'm not concerned so much with changing hearts, here, I'm more concerned with helping to ... well, being as supportive as possible of healthy behaviors. But it's incredibly freaking hard to watch or be part of--why wouldn't it be. I also think it's natural: natural to go through really intense changes, natural to find it's hard, natural to long for a different outcome, natural to pour out love. I've never felt under-appreciated by any of them, so we got that going for us. It's still just hard in a different way for each person.
4Not enough attention. That's not it! That is too it! Grr. By this i mean I'm not getting enough of the right kind of attention, or something. I feel like I'm getting plenty of the kind of attention where someone goes, "Jon. I sure wish you'd do a better job of ________________ and ____________ and maybe more __________ and could you be better at _________________? Please improve ___________, ______________, _____________ and _________." That's some uncomfortable attention to be getting. Cuz, damn if I thought I was doing ____, _____, ______ and ______ and also ______. But I'm not doing _______, that's just icky. It'd be nice to get more of the sexy kind, but that's not all of it. Because I just get so tired of everybody pointing out everybody's faults and analyzing each other. I know I'm a total TOOL with that, but people do it all the time. So many faults! We all find reasons to explain why we think someone is such and such a way. And we're intelligent and even wise, but we're not RIGHT. Grr!!
5 God, I love to succeed at writing. I can't seem to finish editing a story I'm working on, finish the play I'm really excited to finish, get started on the article(s) I want to do, revise the poems I have around, or ... break through. I can't break through with the thrice-damned writing! You've seen a lot of the words I'm messing with here in these journal entries. I'm honestly in love with most of them (else I wouldn't have used them) so i'm not being that tortured artist type who hates everything he does. On the other hand, I've yet to write the thing that makes a ripple, demonstrates an impact, pierces the veil or something. That goes not just for people potentially reading it (editors I wish would buy it, friends, you people) but also for me. I have this corpus... no, these corpses of writing. Yeah, corpses. And they're small. And badly re-animated. So it's like I have a bunch of very small things which I've injected just so much life into but not quite enough. My writing is a cloud of zombie gnats.
6I need to feel like I'm someone's Shams of Tabriz. Or someone to be MY Shams of Tabriz. Not in the sense of spiritual guides or that I have a mystical revelation and need a student, but in the way they formed a unifying artistic friendship. Except without the, you know, part with the brutal murder by other students or friends. http://www.sufism.org/books/maqalat.html http://www.storytellingmonk.org/ref/holy_sights/people/shamstabriz.htm http://www.fonsvitae.com/meandrumichittick.html
7You don't quite know how, but you know what to say. We'll work out the logistics later.
Gosh, that doesn't make it much less vague by way of explanation. This is really not trying to be one of those vague cloaking posts, which I think all of us write on occasion.
The extended nerves in the noosphere metaphor is actually quite precise: I feel like I've got a lot of long nerve endings out beyond the limits of my skin and that they're1 all dipping into different areas of the world, different zones of luminous fog. I'm finally experiencing the sensations of electric extension of the nervous system2 except that I'm also experiencing the effects of jangly jittery numbness (key to understanding this sensation, for me, is this: "In the electronic age, the very instantaneous nature of the co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious, like the central nervous system itself. Fragmentation and specialization, features of mechanism, are absent. To the extent that we are unaware of the nature of the new electronic forms, we are manipulated by them"). Now that I'm out there, there's things out in the dark with my fraying nerves, gnawing on the ends.
Expressly put:
1. I don't feel relevant. That's not the best word, but it's closest to the shape my present anfechtungen takes. A lot of the rest of this post orbits around that feeling of being irrelevant.
2. I'm anxious about a steady rise in sensation and limited symptoms of my psychological disorders (ADD, OCD, and ...surprise... anxiety).
3. I want to go back to school very badly and complete my MA. This is going to happen, I've been re-admitted. But I have to get it in gear to fit the work into my overall life.
4. At least four of my friends have gone into/are experiencing/are exiting a deeply painful series of life transitions.3
5. I am not getting enough attention.4
6. I'm losing ground in the body war. My back injury last fall, the craptacular weather this spring, and my loosening of the diet strictures are messing with my head. Badly. Some clothes are tightening up and I'm anxious.
7. Music. One song in five months makes Jon a dull boy. And there's the Burn Unit album to complete.
8. I need more help with my writing.5
9. This list. This list is fucking depressing the way it goes on and on.
There's also child rearing, housekeeping, work, etc. But I've got those well prioritized, I believe. It's the next group of priorities. All of these fall together with or can contribute to #1. I just feel weirdly irrelevant. Not like "oh me, if I suddenly disappeared would they notice?" But more like... I'm trying, in my own ways to make some kind of real impact that would cause someone to say , "yes. yes. immediately. this is what I needed to make the next leap." Then they'd tell me they were making the next leap, and did I want to come along. Then I could say, "hell yes, I've been waiting for someone to say something."
Instead, i write in this journal and every so often someone comments and I feel better for a little bit and then I go back to thirst for something more. I need collaborators or else I'm just fucking bullshitting myself and everyone else. Oh, him? That's just Jon with the, you know, the rants and the surrealist mysticism and the occasional ramblings about octopus porn. Don't mind him. I mean, we love him, couldn't stand it without him, but don't mind him.
Oh, maybe I'm not thinking clearly (big surprise). I want public artistic collaborators.6 I'm getting a lot of collaboration in very small group settings, like with Leann and stuff. We collaborate a lot on important personal stuff and even do so on artistic things. But we also both have separate artistic endeavors and agendas on some of the other stuff we do.
In this fragile state, I must describe how significant it is to receive even the slightest gesture. You who have come to my show (Friday & Saturday. $10. Acadia. 730 pm) have done a great service to me and I feel very very warmed because of it. And it's not like I don't know that there's people probably thinking the same thing: Jon, you'd make me feel a lot more relevant if maybe you'd call sometime or email or whatever. And Yeah, I get that. But it's not like I've cut off anybody here. Being clear (preemptively) this isn't about blaming anyone. This is me journaling about how I don't feel good right now and thinking about why. Bugger! I can't even just bitch about feeling bad without clarifying it. I'm fucking mopey and I don't feel very fucking beautiful, somebody do something about it!
It's like... think of it this way, right? Since I'm doing this in livejournal, I'll use that for the metaphor. Let's say I friend someone. But they don't friend back. Usually it's just a whatever- forget, don't notice, don't like you, friends list is long enough as it is and there's only so many dang hours in a day to read your tripe, whatever. But until they do or tell you they hate you, there's that tiny tiny evil little dust mite's voice in the back of your head that goes, "why isn't so and so friending you back? I'll tell you why, because they think you're fucking irrelevant." Grr. Would you rather be vehemently loathed or indifferently disregarded? No contest in my opinion. Hate away (as long as you behave, I'm not going to lose sleep trying to change your feelings). I think with LJ particularly, it's harder because you know these people after a fashion. Or you're writing for an audience you can reasonably be confident is listening (seeing the size of your own friends list) and if THEY'RE indifferent, your friends, then your sense of irrelevancy is magnified: how must the whole wide world view me?!
I just keep trying angles on the shit in my head and I keep trying them with this belief that somehow the order of words will cause someone to stop in their tracks: "that, Jon Stark Olsen, is exactly what I needed to fucking hear in the here and now. I'm a gonna go climb a mountain and pee a rainbow into the sky." Sometimes I feel like I'm writing or thinking in code. (yay fat fingers, first time I typed it it was "thinking in coed" hell yes I'm thinking in coed)
Like if I just look at someone, the right someone the right way; and I say to them the burning fiery letters that hover in my mind's eye, they'll know just what to say back. They're pasted all over this journal. Or I've dropped them into conversations. But it's like ... it's like encrypted... but if the other person was listening with their hidden ear or whatever, their inner key would decrypt it and a channel would open up. I've mentioned that to people-- this piece of writing, I believe it points to you, this idea, this made me think of you. And it sort of works after a long long explanation. But it's almost like, some point, I'll say,
"I hear God's voice is the clang of your breath upon my neck, the movement of light through your fine hair and into your eyes. O sky, O brittle dome of night! We are each one soaked in a current of time diving forward through the onrush. Come with me and we'll unwire the fences, write transient blessings in mud on the docks and dance out of the water into the horizon."
and the other person will know exactly what to say back. (I suppose the secret I'm aching to tell everyone is that each person I'm talking to knows what to say back but there's something about the WAY I'm saying things that makes people ... go silent, or feel unsettled or is just... static. I want people to play along. Leap, it won't be blind faith, and your life will follow regardless!)
The other things are, I know how I'm not a great person. Two ways: like I'm not a particularly moral person and I don't really conform very well to society or good order (anarchically discombobulated all the time); but also I mean, I know I'm more like a Salieri than an Amadeus. Get it? I'm tremendously ambitious and almost inexhaustible, and I think I recognize things in the world, but I'm also not great. I'm still confident I'm going to "be something", but that's not Mozart-great, just Olsen-great. Every day I invent a new ambition for myself. Often times, I succeed.
So yeah. That's my sob story. How are you? What do you think of me? I just want to connect, without exhausting people, and without having to join a cult or something. Not connect. Leap forward. Doesn't have to be big, but there should be a leap. (heh. come on, evolve!)
ONE more thing. Look, a lot of this shit might possibly be solved by several sensor re:engine sessions in a row. Live journal is fine and I'm really growing to love you people here. But my community is not livejournal. My community is not a convention, nor burning man, nor seminary, nor academia, nor a writers group, nor the stage. I should be doing those things and associated with those things and integral part of those things. But I belong with the Sensor Re:Engine. I belong with the sensor fucking re: engine. You do too. Our future lies in space! Outer. Space. Brothers and sisters! I think we've been victimized by Doctor Oculus. I think he's rebuilt the cage, but it's a lot bigger now, and the bars are invisible, and there's a lot of really beautiful toys that make it more fun to be inside. But it's still Dr. Oculus' cage, and we busted out of that a long time ago. We can do it again. It's a long dark road, but we've got to scamper down it and gnaw our way back to the light!!!!!
THAT'S IT: That's who I'm saying it to. Engineers, I hear God's voice is the clang of your breath upon my neck, the movement of light through your fine hair and into your eyes. O sky, O brittle dome of night! We are each one soaked in a current of time diving forward through the onrush. Come with me and we'll unwire the fences, write transient blessings in mud on the docks and dance out of the water into the horizon. We'll sing fire out of nebulae and release the tight cords of our brains into the endless pathways of Orion. 'We've seen things these other people couldn't even imagine!' Fly us together against the cataracts and blend our voices into song. Again! Again! It was a good day. I want it ... not "back". I want it forward, new, supple and subtle, your fingers on the keys, your eyes aflame with reflected computer monitor light, your whispers spiking red on a digital delay.7
Jeez. It took me all day to write this, between work projects and child care. I just kept saving and re-saving and editing. How lame is that? Not lame, but it's really really long. And for goodness sake, I think I've been VERy good through the years about not writing very many bloated navel gazing posts. If you count the imagist surrealism as bloated self-indulgent wankery, maybe. But I'm actually trying to produce something. To be more explicit, I've started trying to catalog it more deliberately on my memories page. LJ technology has permitted a way to hypertextualize an already non-linear thing that was striving to be epic, making the maze construct even more intriguing. Though perhaps just to me.
1At this point in the journal entry last night, I fell asleep. When I woke up I had typed a bunch of shit. So it read "I've got a lot of long nerve endings out beyond the limits of my skin and that they're llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllkkkn" which just might express my problem more clearly than the re-edited version of this entry!
2 The Agenbite of Outwit from McLuhan Studies. Here's a wonderful link to the first part of Understanding Media, and one to an html-google-cache version of presentation on media-as-extension
3 Because throughout the process each of these friends has been alternately public, vaguely public (i.e., in LJspace), or deeply private, I'm disinclined to name them in a public forum. I seriously considered it out of simple consistency to the stated goal here. But for heavens sake you prolly know them if you're reading this! The effects on their lives have been dynamic, (in the sense of a complex or chaotic system) with impacts on other people to varying degrees- the circle of friends, livejournal people, friends-of-friends, etc. Everyone responds differently. For me, these complications mean a lot of extra grace has to be extended to everyone. I mean, I'm not a particularly good or moral person, so I have enjoyed greatly being able to simply love my friends without the trappings of judging them. I feel I've made good steps in offering my love and concern, and I've not been shy to dialogue about behaviors. I'm not concerned so much with changing hearts, here, I'm more concerned with helping to ... well, being as supportive as possible of healthy behaviors. But it's incredibly freaking hard to watch or be part of--why wouldn't it be. I also think it's natural: natural to go through really intense changes, natural to find it's hard, natural to long for a different outcome, natural to pour out love. I've never felt under-appreciated by any of them, so we got that going for us. It's still just hard in a different way for each person.
4Not enough attention. That's not it! That is too it! Grr. By this i mean I'm not getting enough of the right kind of attention, or something. I feel like I'm getting plenty of the kind of attention where someone goes, "Jon. I sure wish you'd do a better job of ________________ and ____________ and maybe more __________ and could you be better at _________________? Please improve ___________, ______________, _____________ and _________." That's some uncomfortable attention to be getting. Cuz, damn if I thought I was doing ____, _____, ______ and ______ and also ______. But I'm not doing _______, that's just icky. It'd be nice to get more of the sexy kind, but that's not all of it. Because I just get so tired of everybody pointing out everybody's faults and analyzing each other. I know I'm a total TOOL with that, but people do it all the time. So many faults! We all find reasons to explain why we think someone is such and such a way. And we're intelligent and even wise, but we're not RIGHT. Grr!!
5 God, I love to succeed at writing. I can't seem to finish editing a story I'm working on, finish the play I'm really excited to finish, get started on the article(s) I want to do, revise the poems I have around, or ... break through. I can't break through with the thrice-damned writing! You've seen a lot of the words I'm messing with here in these journal entries. I'm honestly in love with most of them (else I wouldn't have used them) so i'm not being that tortured artist type who hates everything he does. On the other hand, I've yet to write the thing that makes a ripple, demonstrates an impact, pierces the veil or something. That goes not just for people potentially reading it (editors I wish would buy it, friends, you people) but also for me. I have this corpus... no, these corpses of writing. Yeah, corpses. And they're small. And badly re-animated. So it's like I have a bunch of very small things which I've injected just so much life into but not quite enough. My writing is a cloud of zombie gnats.
6I need to feel like I'm someone's Shams of Tabriz. Or someone to be MY Shams of Tabriz. Not in the sense of spiritual guides or that I have a mystical revelation and need a student, but in the way they formed a unifying artistic friendship. Except without the, you know, part with the brutal murder by other students or friends. http://www.sufism.org/books/maqalat.html http://www.storytellingmonk.org/ref/holy_sights/people/shamstabriz.htm http://www.fonsvitae.com/meandrumichittick.html
7You don't quite know how, but you know what to say. We'll work out the logistics later.