Well this is a little sobering- it’s 3:36am- the time that I said I would be done with all 4 word vomits, and I’m just beginning my third one. I guess this is what happens when we forget to factor in the downtime in between things. I finished each word vomit and then spent a few minutes online talking to people and listening to music and reading letters of note (I read one from Ronald Reagan to his son, who was about to get married, and it’s a rather beautiful letter!) I also got reminded of a powerful letter from a mother to a daughter, days or weeks before her execution for political purposes. It’s heart wrenching but it’s also beautiful (and then it’s doubly heart-wrenching to think about all the parents who never share such a moment with their children, whether in person or in writing, and how that girl, while unfortunate to lose her mother, is luckier than a lot of little girls out there… that’s some SERIOUS heartwrenching stuff for me, just thinking about all the stuff that we don’t even know. Ouch, man.)
Okay I just did that weird thing I sometimes do where I pause a word vomit halfway and end up getting distracted by the internet- now it’s 4:23 am. What the actual fuck. Time fucking flies. I have no ability to keep track of time, I need it tracked for me. I should have an app or something. Alarms. All that stuff. That doesn’t matter now though, my current priority is to write and keep writing.
Anyway somehow or rather I ended up watching this video on YouTube of this African guy doing a review of that advertisement with this Singaporean uncle complaining about sexual harrassment from hot young girls. It’s fantastic. I find myself thinking, wow, I wish I had an African friend. Again, we’re going back to how much of life on Earth we’re missing out just by spending all our time in Singapore. I want a genuine African friend, and a Mexican friend, and a French friend and a Spanish friend and a Serbian friend and like a Texan who plays country guitar and there’s just so much of the world I haven’t friggin’ seen, man, and I’m 22, and I’d better get bloody started, I think. Before I start setting roots or something. Too much of the world to see.
I just read something by Scott Adams (the guy who writes Dilbert, who also writes fun lateral-thinking-evocative pieces that, to some people seem like gibberish, but he strikes me as my kind of genius- the kind that’s not interested in doing what everybody else is doing, so he sees himself as a sort of imagination-provoker, someone who asks seemingly nonsensical questions and presents unlikely, absurd situations… I love them, but I’ve found that not everybody does- some people come away going “Well, that wasn’t very sensible”, or “what was the point of that”, or “that obviously wouldn’t work”. I think that’s missing the point, and I find it hard to enjoy the company of anybody who can’t indulge in some judgement-suspended exploration of the adjacent-possible- what might not be possible right now because of this reason or that, but perhaps might be possible in the future, or in some variation that we might not have considered, or perhaps it might not be possible at all, but in the process of exploring the idea, or train of thought, we may find something interesting or useful that we would never have encountered otherwise.
We can’t move forward in a logical step-by-step manner- the best progress always happens through unexpected collisions and leaps, and it’s only on hindsight that we pretend that everything was neat and tidy. What a load of tosh. Who predicted Facebook? Well- biology watcher Lewis Thomas kind of did, from a biological perspective- he described how minds would inevitably coalesce together, in a way… but I’m talking about the literal product, and how it as become such a large part of our lives. I did not expect MySpace to be so utterly SLAIN by Facebook. When I first signed up for it, it seemed somewhat quaint, but I certainly didn’t care for it too much- I was invested in MySpace (being a musician/artist wannabe- i spent so many hours there every day at school, it wasn’t funny). I never expected Diary-X to go down. These are just little things, but think about how penicillin was invented, or how X or Y or Z really… everything amazing happens with a touch of randomness and serendipity inside, and we really lack that, I think, when we have such structured paths.
It’s 5 am now and it’s clear to me that I’m not going to be able to do ANOTHER word vomit- well technically, I could, but I think that would be strategically unwise, I should stop at 3 and go to bed, and do another 3 tomorrow, and I would have covered the missing 2 on friday (assuming this fills up saturday, and I will write for Sunday once I’m going to bed)
I read something on Scott’s blog where he wrote about how being interrupted is creative death or something like that- when you are in a state of flow, and you are writing or creating or whatever it is you’re doing, you want to be obstructed as little as possible- you want as much to flow from your mind through your body through your fingers into your instrument or your pen or your keyboard into the text and you see the words or colours or sounds emerging almost naturally between your mind and your instrument
i was thinking about how we walk and talk and interact and utilize our fingers as if they were a part of our body- I mean, they are, but how would these be any different from say, how a car or plane or motorcycle feels? I realized, at some point, that when high level guitarists or pilots say “my instrument is a part of me, a part of my body”, it’s not just a figure of speech- after a while your brain literally learns to work with the inputs and outputs of the signals in a way that is fluid and natural and subconscious
and it LITERALLY becomes a part of you- your brain can’t possibly tell the difference between the guitar or the plane and your actual feet, for instance, and many of us (who play the guitar) are better at playing the guitar than wiggling our toes