Reading Aloud

Resonance. Sound is in this day the sensation that rules the world. It amazes me. Human beings constantly draw breath, and hardly every think about doing so.  It is a simple thing. Crude and unimportant. Air is, after all, a simple nitrogen and oxygen cocktail with the capability of supporting life. Science makes it sound cold and uninteresting. I'm telling you that it isn't. I'm telling you that breath sustains more than life.

It struck me earlier this week that unflattering air is responsible for words. Hum to yourself quickly, deep in your throat. You hear that? That's air. That's the same air Miley Cyrus and Bono breathe. It's commonplace; worthless. That humming in the back of your throat? That is beautiful. That is something special even if you don't have your face plastered on a billboard.

I don't really know how to use my voice. Heck, I'm an accomplished public speaker, but that's nothing. What I want to be able to do is read aloud. It is more difficult that it sounds. To read something for the very first time and get all the right tones an inclinations is a godly Art, and one I'm practicing daily now. It requires an intuitive knowledge into the writer's mind; in truth, it requires love. To read aloud is to love the world.

It is something I want to understand, desperately. It is one of the Ultimate Truths. It may just be impossible to achieve, but I have to try. Perhaps for others reading aloud is easy. I would not know. For me, it is a quest. It is a journey to find out how to love unconditionally.

Keeping up the daily post ratio

I spent the whole day reading and finished the Spud series, now it's back to the livid despair of Lovecraft after taking a short break to get my head out of horror for a while. I meant to spend the time that The House is empty to read some of the Necronomicon aloud, but my subjectively linear mind demanded I finish Spud first. More about reading aloud in a later post, I suppose.

Remember that reading is a journey, and some journeys must be carried through to the end without turning back. Remember that journeys often stir up memories that you would prefer to let lie. Most of all, remember that a journey can be both of these things, and can send you screaming into a free fall down the barbed corridors of your darkest days with no hope of reprieve.

Regrettably Unregrettable

I spent this morning in bed reading Spud, a book about a kid who encounters havoc while living at a boarding school. To get the book part out of the way, it's brilliant.

The point of mentioning the book is that it drew my line of thought to way back when I was scouting high schools and had the option to board at an out-of-the-city semi-private school, to be technical only if I received a scholarship, which I didn't, but looking back if I pressed the matter and made certain concessions I could have actually gone.

When I think back to my tragic time at the local high school one short bus ride up the hill (but one very long wait for the bus) my immediate thought is that if I could do it all over I would have rather gone to the boarding school.
Firstly because although it sounds snotty I really hated taking the bus; not because I felt like a proletarian but because it was a devastating drain on the amount of time I had at home, and occupied much of my thoughts. I was involved in several extra-curricular activities which all ended at different times. Debating on mondays meant that I finished school at 15:30, which would make me miss the 15:45 bus unless I ran the two kilometres to the bus stop. The next bus usually showed up at 16:30, but occasionally a bus came at 16:05 or slightly later so I kept a constant look out in case I could catch an earlier ride home. This complicated reading, because I needed to look up every few seconds unless someone else was waiting at the bus stop. Tuesdays & Thursdays I did First Aid and finished at 16:30, the next bus was at 17:00. Wednesdays and Fridays school came out an hour earlier than any of the buses so I stayed in the library (in the early years, as a junior I dropped first aid and worked as a student librarian most afternoons) until I could walk down for the 15:15 bus, which was the earliest one with any predictable time pattern.
Needless to say most of my school career was spent waiting for the right time to get to the bus, my constant deadline. I DO NOT work well with deadlines. I get nervous thinking about the ever decreasing amount of time I have left. Rather than motivate me I tend to freak out under the pressure.


The second reason I would have gone to the boarding school is because I am a hopeless PC game addict. I can't really explain it that well... maybe it's because in computer games you actually feel like you're actions have some impact on the world you're living in. Maybe I just like to feel powerful, or brave and heroic and all those things that the real world beats the crap out of.
Yeah, that's probably it. Anyway, I spent almost every moment I could in front of my computer playing games with my brain on 'fuzz' mode. The problem with Virtual Reality, I've since found, is that it takes a vampiric hold over the real world, sucking up time and ensuring that nothing ever gets done, I never developed my social skills or really any other skills because I only really cared about the world past the flickering screen. Trouble is, I realised I didn't want to be that kind of person.
I wanted to care about this world too, and be bold and brave and powerful. Unfortunately, as I said, the real world kicks people like that in the face.


I know that I require a certain degree of forced discipline, and boarding school may have been what I needed. I would have had more time to think of my schoolwork without concentrating on the bus schedule (sounds lame, but it's true) and I would be cut off from my precious virtual reality, forced into the real world, where I might have adapted quicker. If it were that clear cut, it would have been perfect.
I would have spent my days in the library reading books, studying, perhaps even have plucked up the courage to get into a relationship. I can almost feel a happy me in a parallel universe looking back and being thankful for never chasing his emotions to a public school.


Of course, when I look back at who I was when I was thirteen I know I was an arrogant snot rag who learned some important things in high school.
What strikes me with the deepest dread is the books: what if I had never read all the books I read in public school. I'm sitting here thinking that my life would have been a ghastlier horror than Lovecraft could produce if I had never read Herbert, Hardinge, Wooding, or Scott... I would forgo the human beings I met in high school in an instant for a chance to have turned out as a more capable human being, but my books... that would be inconceivable. They shaped me. They are, as only a librarian could say, my true friends.
Anything else that occurred; such as the bus and my PC game addiction, are regrettable, yet my life as is stands as a whole is regrettably unregrettable, because I cannot regret the books I've read.

Protocol

Right now I'm wondering how this is going to work. By suggestion of the web layout, I should have categories and (I've just seen the automatic draft updater and am very impressed. If this were Microsoft Word I would transfer all my writing immediately to be online.) find something clever to put under the post heading. THAT, says me, would be the way a highly organised mind would work. As you may have noticed by the interruption halfway through the first line, I'm a bit moggy in the head and my thoughts are cantankerously erratic. I don't mind, most of the time. I reason that I will think a certain number of things every day and as long as I'm not disarming a bomb it doesn't really matter what order I think them in.

Given the above explanation, I have decided that this blog will grow in the same way as a jumping castle. Have you ever seen a jumping castle getting the air blown into it? It's comparable to a number of perverse things I would rather not name on this site. For now, just sit in front of the luminous screen and let my soothing words take you back to your distant childhood before perverse analogies infested your mind.

Can you see yourself? A shrimpy kid with stringy hair lying flat against your forehead? Good.
You are probably holding a slice of Birthday cake (Birthday always seems to need capital letters, like Christmas or Judgement Day), unless like me you do not like Birthday cake and have opted to fill your pockets with jelly beans. You feel... sticky. And itchy, too.

You are outside on a garden lawn of a house you have never been to before now. The birthday girl, a kid too young to have a solid clique, has opted to invite the whole class to come over for a Birthday party . There are multiple glass bowls filled with sweets set up on a table with a plastic sheet protecting it. If you're lucky, there are individual squares of Top Deck chocolate lying in a dish half-melted, which the kids run back and forth to as if it were heroine . There may be a pool, and you might be wearing a swimming costume. Regardless, your legs itch like psychosis because you've been sitting on the grass, chasing other kids, laughing, falling over countless times.

On the sideline is the proverbial Big Top - not a clown, those freaks went out of fashion years ago - a Jumping Castle. Dads and uncles (the 90's didn't leave adequate room for feminism) are laying it out flat. Someone plugs it in and the turbines kick up a cacophony that is mellow compared to the screaming of kids. You decide to watch as the air kicks the castle into motion. At first it sort of hovers close to the ground... then a turret pops up like a balloon and the patchwork giant is given a semblance of structure. It wobbles, unstable, if someone turned off the generator it would crash in a heap and that would be the end of it. But, for as long as the parents feed those essential kilowatts into the generator, the party continues. The kids will bounce around, get sticky, belly flop, and make memories which they'll half dredge up on a blog site a decade later simply to illustrate the essential notion behind a jumping castle.

I think a blog must be a little like a holocaust survivor. The mind, as the natural centre for concentration, is the concentration camp (or death camp to get technical). I've been constantly gunning down my own ideas under the belief that they are weak and will never succeed in moving anyone further than out of the room to get away from my god-awful writing. It's only by fighting constantly against one's inner gauntlet that any idea can ever see daylight. Which reminds me of one of my favourite sayings, which I read back in the day off a Mirrodin(TM) Magic: The Gathering(TM) card:

"Murder of the living is tragic;  murder of the idea? Unforgivable." -Janus, speaker of the synod.

Paraphrased, of course.

Why did I name the previous post 'Protocol'?

Firstly, because I really like the word. I like several unusual words - and unfortunately many very long ones - like, 'inchoate', 'indigestible', 'demographic' and 'visceral'. This is officially termed a 'lexicon' (another favourite) which means a series of words a specific writer commonly uses. Now I know what you're thinking; inchoate is a easy enough word to slip into a conversation, (ha ha, you so weren't thinking that) but generally people would have trouble with 'visceral' outside of an insult or a romantic confession (I really dare you to tell your boyfriend he invokes a visceral reaction in you). Somehow, I manage it. People don't tend to talk to me for more than a few seconds after I explete the first pernicious conglomerate of striking syllables, probably because it's an intimidating habit. I also suffer the opposite; when I'm not so loose-lipped I transform into a grunting troglodyte who oozes vibes that could make Bambi cry.

Plegh. Enough of my self pity for now.

I'm pretty sure that when I named the post 'Protocol' I was thinking "the standard thing to do right now is to say who I am and give an idea of what this blogs about and (water) just be honest really thats what this is all about so make people feel at home and make them like you stop caring if no one will read this is you make just one person happy it will be worth a million words"
You will have noticed two things from the above:

• I do not punctuate my thoughts. There is just a long rambling line of stuff that crashes around the infinity between my eyebrows and my scalp. If there could be any punctuation mark I could inject it would be the ellipsis (...) because the ellipsis never signifies an end, simply a... continuation of thought with a random pause. Hmm... I wonder what really fills the space above those three dots in my mind?
• I think in very small words. Most of the time, anyway, and only in passive thought. Active thoughts demand I slow down, extrapolate my verbosity, enunciate and punctuate every neuron. I guess that I should find some way to think at a comfortable median, and if any Buddhas are reading this blog, I invite you to tell me how.

I guess that in this instance 'Protocol' simply meant I was doing what I believed I should do to make a blog that seems blog-like. Critics will say, "No true art follows protocol", to which I will reply either, "GRUNT," or "I understand. You mean to proclaim that all artistic endeavor springs from an individual mind that cannot be inhibited by external viewpoints. I disagree, as art relies on perception, and perception will always hold an infinite number of diverse external viewpoints. Individual thought, under consideration, does not exist in a boundless universe. There is only Idea, and art is a manifestation of Idea."

(Slipping into a readable debate format)

Critic: Yes, naturally all art is centred around Idea, but it is the individual take on an Idea that makes the art art. Two men see a cow differently, but the Idea is still a cow. Picasso and Dali could both paint a cow, but their work would not be considered identical.

Avatar (You're really going to love this): I concede, description is the root of all individuality, but you must also consider the nature of the subject. A cow, by common description, is a four-stomached, mammalian, herbivorous quadruped. This is the Idea; the rule on which all variations of the cow spread. Picasso then says that the cow's dimensions are flat, desecrating one of the fundamental attributes of the Idea. Dali paints the cow with a curly moustache, annihilating another sacred tenet of Cow. Individuality demands the alteration of the original Idea.

Now I'm going to revert to my old friend philosophy to ask a personally variant question. What says that Cow as a four-stomached, mammalian, herbivorous quadruped was the original Idea?

Critic: A bloody wellspring of religious warfare lay claim to the answer. By common terms, the thing that names the Idea of cow as a four-stomached, mammalian, herbivorous quadruped is none other than God.

Avatar: Pass the man a banana! The answer is indeed the shimmering protector of Earth, or if it pleases you, giant lizards, machines, The Force, and the heroes of other argumentative religious factions. Or science, for the god damned atheists.

So this Creator invented the basis for all interpretations of his Idea, but we have to admit that his Idea of a cow as a four-stomached, mammalian, herbivorous quadruped is immutably his interpretation of his own thoughts. The only thing that makes people insist that he did not colour the cow with his own fancy is that he created the Idea of Cow rather than corrupting it.

Next I have to point out that God did not make a cow with a moustache. Dali is the creator of the mustachioed cow, just as Picasso is the creator of the flat cow. Their Idea of cow is di

Sweet bleating platypus, I've forgotten the point I was trying to make.

(Sometime later)

Their Idea of cow is based on what God said a cow was, in a fancier term, God's PROTOCOL is the SCIENTIFIC cow. To draw any variation of original cow is to adapt from protocol. My point is that protocol is required. Rules, laws and regulations are required. In the words of the rattiest whiskey-swilling scoundrel known to man, "Rules are made to be broken." In art, this is true.

Every human being has the Creator's Ideas thrust in his face from the moment of her/his birth. We can't help but look. What we can do is adapt. We can break the laws through artwork. Perhaps Art, as a defiance of God's law, should be seen as sin.

(Dialogue over)

To the creator of this Blog site, you have formed a method of creating further Art. That is an art in itself. Your protocol is a suggestion of a certain beginning to one's blog which I think I've kind of stuck to. It is orderly, it makes sense, and it promotes the welfare of the Idea you created. In order to use the instrument you have wrought I followed the given protocol. Beyond that protocol and past the Idea of what a blog should be - that is up to me. Thank you. You are a liberal creator.

I think that's enough fatooting for now. I understand my discourse was circular, and that there was no true victor, but it is through such investigations that I learn. Personally, I see all Ideas as original so long as there is any kind of variation. A cow is not a cow with a hernia is not a cow with a moustache, so to speak.

There was more fatooting after the fatoot comment, so I'll put another fatoot comment at the very end so that it actually makes sense.

I think that's enough fatooting for now.