Sunday, August 3, 2003
Tom at Plasticbag writes:
At one stage while I was at University, I went through a bit of a phase of reading other people?s books on why they didn?t believe in ?god? either. These books were routinely extremely boring, because fundamentally the intellectual labour involved in making a highly convincing ?anti-god? case is so fundamentally trivial that it feels out of place in the mouths and books of scholars. Or at least that?s how it feels to me. Bertrand Russell?s Why I am not a Christian was one of those books. I read it to see if I could find a new way to translate the obviousness of atheism to the people I routinely found myself in argument with. But fundamentally, it was the same as everything else. Obvious. Self-explanatory. Tedious. Repetitive. I still, to this day, don?t understand why religious people just don?t seem to get it.
Et Cetera
// Rolling list of recently browsed.
- » Great URL for a Travel Company
- » Creatures In Someone Else?s Head
- » Only half of those allegations against me are true.
- » Simulated Reality
- » Sexual Writing Differences
- » Build A Home Network From Scratch
- » 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq - (Only 10?)
- » Google = God
- » Antique Sex Change
- » Homos and Morality
Monday, July 28, 2003
I dropped my camera when I was in Cancun and it broke. Henry Miller said to me, "Good, that?s one less object in your life."
Pondering the wastefulness of nervous habits -- a thought brought on by an email from John Quintus -- I sat in class and held down my legs and kept my hands quiet on my textbook. When my tongue started to wander over my lips, I reeled it back in. Instead of the energy growing, caged, as I expected, it dissipated and I felt calmer.
It?s almost like I?ve spent the past five years acquiring, accumulating, and now I work on eliminating, cutting the fat, ridding myself of physical burdens, objects, bad habits, stuff.
And as I?m doing all of this, I pick up my camera, having been left in my desk drawer all these months, and turn it on to discover that it?s not broken after all. I?m convinced these these take on a life of their own after a while.
Sunday, July 27, 2003
I took a week off from work. That much time without productive activity makes me feel coated in thick oil, a hydrophobic slick that slipped me through as though it was only a few days instead of seven. The deluge of incessant nudges from my conscience and the daily afternoon thunderstorms rolled off of me in drops. When I don?t have a routine, time means less; I haven?t decided yet whether it pales like a vampire at daybreak (exposed) or wanes like a new moon (obscured). Ignorance of time is sweet and beautiful. Ignorance of time helps to dream.
This encapsulation that I feel, this distance from the world, keeps me from experiencing anything substantial, however. I look at the paper lampshade on my nightstand as I attempt to read and then realize that twenty, thirty minutes have passed and I?m still on the same page. When it takes mental effort to focus on the present moment, I know it?s time to return to my routine of work, school. It?s all a cycle. I?ve been dreaming long enough. Time to realize those dreams.
