101218 ## Why do we make it harder than it is? 1. well if you keep telling yourself how important it is to do the task on schedule, every day; if the admonition “succeed or quit” is something you’ve taken to heart, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the “thing” about which you’ve said that must be some pretty base-level, survival-urgent, important type of stuff? And then comes in the fear that if it’s too easy, you’re probably missing something—“there’s trouble at your door,” ya know? 2. could it be the fucking Puritan virus? That pretty much every European-descended American probably has (citation needed)? That thing that makes us deep down in our bones KNOW that pleasure, that simply spending time on something that’s not morally toilsome and ball-bustingly laborious couldn’t POSSIBLY be OK—Indians, the woods, the devil are all around every corner of your own brain, just waiting to descend and destroy, and keep you out of HEAVEN, admission to which you paradoxically simultaneously have to EARN every day of your LIFE and also CAN’T ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING ABOUT; it’s all been decided for you. So maybe that’s actually also why doing something that doesn’t have an immediate practical, civic, or monetary reward seems suspicious as well. 3. probably because it represents time. you get in the golden glowing moment of free time, and here comes a thing that, even though you made it, still represents some kind of restriction on behavior. If the restriction on behavior involves something difficult or unpleasant, there do you have reason to resist it. If it involves something super easy, then you kinda figure it must be pointless—why do it if it’s just this mechanical action that does nothing but spend some of your time—and *there* dost thou have reason to resent it. So either way you slice it. ## Things you could play around with during these sessions 1. experimenting with concentration and memory; like for instance always trying to carry forward at least one thread, any one thread from a/the previous session. OK, now I’m going back up to the other thing I said I was going to go back to. I’ll get back to this list of things... later? 2. expanding pigeons -- did that like once, and as I recall it was pretty good. pretty good in an ashley man cow sense? or pretty good in like a wonderful fred sense? I don’t know; maybe neither. Maybe pretty good in a Fucking um Fucking um Mister Grenache sense? Could be. But he’s not really that bad a guy when you get to know him. I mean yes, he’s *sensitive* and he *stares longingly at girls walking across bridges* and he *can’t type worth a shit because he always insists on buying Apple-tastic Brand Computers only* but he’s honestly not that bad to, you know, quote get a beer with unquote or whatever. This one time, him and me went down by the beach behind the game lodge and just picked at snails and tiny pebbles and bits of colored glass all afternoon. I mean it was really kind of nice. I was surprised. I wouldn’t have thought it wouldn’t have been awkward. But I guess because we were both out of our fucking minds on some rancid truffles, maybe that’s what made the differents. I DON’T KNOW. 3. dsfgdfg OK, we’ll come back to number three later. It’s too laborious to say where in the time thread we are right now. I guess that’s the sort of thing you could keep track of quote automagically unquote if you paid the right amount of doggie dollars to the right bright young quote nerds unquote with their glasses and their little beards and their refined but unpretentious tastes and their dorky laughter that’s the only thing about them out of place because they live in a loft and like to pretend they’re roughing it but really it’s nothing but straight pink Tellurians that could possibly live there anymore because they tore down the laundromat and tore down the funky head shop and put up a fake funky head shop in its place. And you can’t even go into the italian market anymore without spending five bucks on a coffee and looking at somebody’s idea of artistic pipes and ducts and plaster and shit. Fuck me with a stick. I miss the old days says the young baby who wasn’t even here when Sam was. When Sam was here, now THEM was the old days, says the young guy who wasn’t even here when the beer barons was tearing up the woods and fields and dumping railroad cars and boulders and entire cities into the marsh so that they could lay a single electric train track across it, to take whatever the hipsters and the people with the expensive but unassuming tastes were in those days. SO yeah. Whatever. There’s a martian somewhere twirling a martini glass, in the red red sunset, staring with his eye stalks and the way the ice slowly unrfurls into the paint thinner that he’s about to drink the rest of before he goes on into town to annoy some humans. Ha ha ha before you know it, no martians will even be able to live here anymore. Note to self: check to see if you stole “unfurls” in the context of two different temperatures and admixtures of ingredients in a beverage. I know he had something like that with the teabag in the almost-warm-enough water, but I can’t remember if he said “unfurls” or not. Plagiarism of this sort is basically like silverware: temporary possessiveness. It’s not like nobody’s ever going to use “your” fork again; they just shouldn’t be using it right now, at *this* meal. Okay so what do we want to do? Disguise the march into oblivion as a satisfying unwinding dinner with a beer and toke after a long good day hiking? It was a good hike, even if a little rushed at the end. We didn’t see the train. I wonder where the train was. I did both of my sessions on time today. That’s something to celebrate, or at least something to fail to self-immolate about. Yay! Puritans and fire! A conflagration! Let’s go to their party and just kind of stand there in the middle distance, looking savage. See what they do. Ha ha. Some of them are secretly drunk, We are secretly stoned. This is how little wars start. And when little wars start on the edge of the wilderness, there’s usually no one left to tell about it. For a little while, anyway. Said the snail. The snail that Mr. grenache picked up and put in his pocket, not realizing that it wasn’t just a shell but was an actual snail. Should we check in with that snail and see what he thinks about little skirmishes near the edges of things? Woods. Water. Cliffs. wet rotting logs. The atmosphere. Every living thing that we can relate to is some kind of layer-dweller. Peel away the layer, and the organisms squirm a bit, insensate with unimaginable howling unreason, and then die. That’s gonna be us in a few minutes. SO yeah, so I guess fucking kill me if I decide I want to have a guinness and a bowl of smoked salmon chowder while i still have the chance. This is the first time I came back to this document since a couple of days ago. If you zoom into a couple of days ago, you’d see me threading up and down within it. Then zoom out and you’d see the blank space (black in the fractal generator) between then and today. Today there’s a smaller pattern of weaving. I don’t know when the next time I’ll come back in will be, but whenever it is, it will fit into the pattern too. Or will it? Words are funny; there’s really no way to know for sure. Try telling a football player. Try telling a true hunter. Try telling a blowing stag. Try telling me that I should be sitting here pecking at keys and focusing my attention on little symbols instead. I’d probably tell you you were fucking crazy. And yet, here I am. Here we all are. After text, what’s next? Cel’s in the bath; I told her I was gonna heat up some chowder and did she want any, and she was like, “Well— what *kind* of chowder? Salmon chowder? Clam chowder? What?” She wants some answers, dammit.