Ochus Machus

home again...

2004-12-01T11:14:00.000-08:00

During all these months, I've been working at a tedious office job that I can only describe as intense and only semi-rewarding. The website is a sprawling octopus of jerry-rigging, comprised of multiple overlapping and redundant technologies that only grow creakier and more entropic with time- but fortunately, I am now away from it and am in the preliminary steps of regaining my sanity. My other central preoccupation is my VOD website, although that too is at a temporary standstill such that I can spend my days at home again.

Things have been going really well with Maggie lately, especially since she got her own place and things feel more organic- having someone in my life who I don't have to immediately fear is going to suddenly go disappearing with some sort of emotional epiphany has been new, and the newness feeling seems to stay. Maybe I can again concieve of my day to day reality as something that could possibly have fun in it- a sense I've not had in several years as everything has seemed always to have been about some form of crisis management, or possibly some form of self-inflicted punishment. We went to a capoiera class together, that was fun and there needs to be more little adventures like that.

what i'm thinking...

2004-10-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

mmh. first of all, i think that writing is best approached when hungry. i just had a big lunch and now i feel languid and full.

i had an interesting conversation with blumberg last night. yesterday, it just so happened that there were no stressors *whatsoever* happening that day. not particularly stressed about either of my jobs, living situation, Maggs seems happy and make me happy, finances taken care of and and everything is good.

In a larger sense, I am happy that the elements of my life that seemed wildly competitive seem to function together smoothly every once in awhile- the continuity of: having Lem in the apartment, the opportunity for him to work with Filmclix, the potential for that to become a successful side business, feeling successful at work and capable of getting another job if need be, as well as having a career path that is mobile- all this feels very appropriate. I am even enjoying feeling sociable again. creativity has to come from setting aside time to be creative. in a perfect world, i would somehow be writing, although the actual decision of how to do this eludes me.

Part of this has to do with proximity to people. You see, at least for myself, I am starting to wonder whether or not I'm not situated exactly on the cusp of introversion and extroversion, because I think a major source of disquiet in my life has been in judging the appropriate distance to maintain with regard to people. It's a bit like the centripetal pull of orbit- where the need for people to be around, and the fact that they interest me and I need them there is the mass of an object and the inner turmoil and resistance produced for fear of being subsumed into the morass of personalities is the velocity, which results in this negotiated orbit that, if ever achieved, feels like balance. But since balance is only relative to the fact that you're always then constantly in motion, it's a process that involves a lot of energy.

creativity comes from play, I know, and planning for the absurd is impossible. And that's the trick in all of this, and the most important connection to make.

I was talking to Robin last night and she was telling me about how much more grounded she felt, and her love of the Heebie Jeebies this past year, and this kind of thing. Robin's version of Heebie Jeebie caused me to note that Disturbia had always struck me as an ominous foreshadow of twenties-hood not reigned in and perfected into something developed- metaphorically the distance my respectable life this past year (technoshamanry notwithstanding) has meant. I think my interest in yogic philosophy is related. But there is something about balance and breathing, and focus that for me- is not far off from purely logical actions- and obviously we know that truth is something more than that. What I mentioned as my issue at the moment is that yoga seems to be about the universals, whereas life is just as much about the particulars. Lem, for instance, gets as much out of life from the particulars (as does Kleinfeld)- in that the singular point of view of film is something that really characterizes the intimacy of the human condition for them. Film is about happy accidents, and gets at this notion of distinctive experiences and play that maybe other people see as perfectly contiguous with the things I see as part of meditation (for instance, michaelson is always going on about how he did a thirty minute 'food meditation exercise' that involved chewing food for long periods of time), and right now, I see that as the spark that's needed.

blumberg asked me if I wrote, what would I write about? I said that's hard, but there've been a lot of things on my mind and that I've been reading about in the past few years, when I get the chance. I awkwardly fumbled at this point, and said that I've just been trying to read different versions of what's going on around me. Right now, what I've been reading has been information about the world around me politically and culturally, but before that I was reading various versions of the time and place that we live in as told by people my age and in my circumstances, and then there was spiritual reading, or reading about people's dealing with fitting themselves into society as told from other cultures. Then reading philosophy...

I said that film, theatre, and essays all interest me, but if I had to choose at this point short little essays would be more my urge. I jsut wish I could take from my experiences and readings and connect them together, because those would be happy accidents.

bear with me

2004-08-27T12:07:00.000-07:00

I know it's been awhile since I've written anything, but sometimes, I feel like I simply do not possess the words to articulate what goes on in my head a lot of the times.

I'll try though.

John Phillips Sousa

2004-07-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

I got back from Virginia for the 4th of July, it'd been the first time since I'd set foot at the ancestral home since february. I'm sure it was as sweltering as up in New York, but the chattering insect factor always manages to make a trip to Virginia feel like it might as well be Central America, for all I know of the wilderness these days. My mother gave me the grand tour of all the planting she'd done- the peach tree and deodar cedar, the rose of sharon and the crepe myrtle- then, of course all the azaleas, chysanthemum, forsythia, japanese maple and box cedar. Another big topic of the weekend was the dog.

The fireworks were rained out by a surprisingly violent thunderstorm, which meant we were to decide on a movie to watch in the good 'ole entertainment center instead- eventually we settled on "Pirates of the Caribbean". As per my father's taste's, we also sat through "The Hunt for Red October", and discussed the book "Dutch" which my parents are reading in lieu of Ronald Reagan's death. It's interesting getting this angle of opinion again, which I seldom if ever hear see in New York. However, when a news report about Iraq came on my father groused "I just can't believe they thought they could go into a country with 5,000 years of history and just set up an American democracy in six months. I understood when I voted for him that Bush wasn't the smartest President we've ever had, but that Rumsfeld fellow was supposed to be smart."

The other salient marker of the weekend was meeting Rahul's baby. Rahul was by best friend growing up, and meeting Alden- the first baby I've known personally, was amazing and unsettling, especially the fervor with which my mother tested her new camera phone on me holding Alden.

I began the day learning that among other news, Colin Powell really just doesn't care anymore.

I survive a terrorist attack

2004-07-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

Took in the Stoppard play "Jumpers" last night, with my friend Jay.

The play was a sort of philosophical treatise, set in an alternate reality Britain of the sixties, wherein a dithering academic professor of moral sciences attempts to write an essay positing the existence of God through conceptualizing infinity, and argues the inherence of good and evil- all in time for a symposium he has that evening. While he spins himself in circles of symbolic logic and theosophy, his loopy young wife- a prematurely retired musical actress- entertains a troupe of "Radical Liberal" acrobats in her luxury bedroom, resulting in the murder of one of the acrobats- who happens to be a rival professor of the protagtonist. Farce ensues, and the play breaks down as the characters tumble into moral confusion, relativism, absurdist spectacle, and the conventions of the play come to seem ever more contrived. One running gag which I really enjoyed had to do with random televised news reports describing the plight of a doomed British moon mission, where the astronauts land only to discover that their spacecraft has been damaged. Devoid of the context of civilization, the one astronaut reacts to this by shoving the other astronaut out of the way, retracting the ladder, and blasting off in the impaired moon lander. The news anchor describes "the memorable image of Captain Scott standing alone on the moon's surface, waving forlornly."

After the play, we were headed through Times Square when all of a sudden I heard a series of violent explosions. For a split second I thought the obvious thing every New Yorker would think under those circumstances, but looked up to see an enormous three story assemblage of jumbotrons radiating the image of a new brand of Coke called "C2"- and spurting geysers of fireworks and flame in every direction. An enormous bandstand had been erected in front of this, with hundreds of Coke dignataries ooh-ing and aah-ing appreciatively- apparently this was some kind of publicity event to dedicate the new sign and the invention of C2. The bandstand towered over the center of Times Square, and then someone struck up the soothing, bittersweet jazz stylings of a Kenny G imitator (or worse, Kenny G), which drowned out every other sound in the vicinity. As if a trip through Times Square could not have been more apocalyptic, Jay and I then were accosted by a cleancut young blonde kid cheerily thrusting his 'Jesus Saves' material- and chirping "where ya gonna be on that big day when it's time to go to heaven?" Answering his own question, he said "crawlin' outta your grave sayin' 'Take Me!' Take Me!", as he pretended to be a reanimated corpse clambering out of a grave, then toddled off.

Jay bought a cut of steak au poivre from a kosher steakhouse, and drove me back to Brooklyn.

'I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not.'

2004-07-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

And, I figure quoting Bertrand Russell is at least as good a starting point as any for my very first blog post ever.

It's a knotty little fact of existence that he brings up, and if I hadn't started with recognizing at the outset that what keeps me busy these days is trying to tease apart those knots that worked themselves into their slips and kinks throughout the course of my life, than I wouldn't be setting this scene honestly. I'm getting ahead of myself, but there it is, cards on the table, that this blog is going to be about what it means to me to be conscious and alive; living the same joyride on the same mudball as everyone else, and trying to figure out where that particular swirl of chaos ends and the one that's inside begins.

That being said, yes- I am Putting This Up For Everyone In the Whole Wide World to see, and, you know- it's just basic human decency to take that into account. I want to believe in things, I want to entertain and be creative, and I want to be generous with all y'all.

I want to avoid turgidity of style, recursive irony, and nihilism.

I want to actually do things, be in the world, and put this down in case I ever look back on this in the future and wonder who the stranger writing to me from 2004 is.

Will it be true? See quote above.

That's my promise to anyone that finds this. Beyond that, it's still pretty much open season as to what gets put down here. There's a whole cast of characters, though, waiting in the wings. And dammit if they aren't getting restless.