How pretentious do you have to be to actually title one of these things?

So, I'm thinking if I actually write all this down, maybe some of it'll actually get done

Songs to record:

1. Rancheros de La Fuerza Metal Theme

2. Rancheros de La Fuerza Banda Theme

3. Rancheros de La Fuerza incidental accordion music

4. Brighter Than the Sun

5. Every Time She Fell

6. Lady from Siam

7. Childhood (need to get voice recording first, tho)

Songs to arrange (Ed Vector, etc.)

1. Best Day Ever

2. Jimmy the Cubist

3. Leipzig

4. Friends Like These (prolly not gonna happen.  It's not even totally written yet)

5. Aqueduct Song!

6. Ryuichi inspired Jap-pop-funk song

7. Sad Burrito

Other projects I really oughta finish:

1. Suddenly Perfection

2. Mechapope

3. Sitar thang

4. Circus Series

5. Rap collab.

6. Heaven

7. Electronic Series

Look, they have titles now!

Howdy-hum.  Beat on the drum.

I find myself, somewhat to my chagrin, becoming a drummer.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, at  least not inherently, but it's not where I saw myself going, musically.  But, meh, sallright.  I need to devise a manifesto, though, or at least a philosophy.  I mean, I have a philosophy for guitar and a separate one for bass, so as percussion/drumming has come into one of the instruments I specialize in (sigh - not good enough on violin yet), this is my credo: Drums are a textural instrument.  They do not carry a song melodically, and even tuned drums such as timpani cannot carry a melody, but merely emphasize certain notes in the bass section of a piece of music.  Therefore, when playing drums or any kind of percussion, they must be tuned, played, and set up with texture foremost in mind.  Even chimes and bells, while fully tuned, are too numerous and awkward to play any slightly complicated melody, at least a lead melody, and must therefore be delegated to emphasizing the sweeps and progressions of the piece, perhaps melodically, but in addition to its textural qualities.  Banging on drums, pounding them with a sudden whap of brute force, removes from their textural quality.  It forces the heads to vibrate, sharp and quick and loud and together, but within that one certain playing style, each drum is only capable of one or two sounds.  A drummer must be fully aware of his heads.  They must be set up somewhat comprimisingly, so that perhaps no one tone is absolutely perfect, but there is  enough variety on each head, near the rim, in the centre, in front of each tuning peg, that with a single tom, the drummer can create an interesting beat.  If necessary, other objects must be utilized for texture, and when one looks to alien objects, they should not be restricted to items meant as percussion.  Hubcaps, water bottles, and waste paper baskets have remarkable acoustic qualities.  Items may be utilized, even indirectly, if they contribute to the acoustic ambiance.  A thin pie tin, attached to the floor tom, produces a tone that is almost liquid, yet subtle enough not to distract from the beat.  A beat should be simple.  It is meant to act as texture.  That is the primary duty of the drummer, and secondary duty is to keep time.  The proper compromise between these is a beat that provides foundation for the other musicians to build upon, while deciding on the emotion of the house their instruments build.  In short, percussion is emotional infrastructure.  What that building is, how it looks, what it's used for, are all duties of the other musicians.  Use a light touch, vary the tones, be aware of the emotional peaks and dips of the song, where they should be, and always HAVE FUN.

Ed Vector and the Orthogonals.  Phantasthma better watch their backs.

Los Angeles

is a decrepit city.  It is a blight on the golden coast of California, a mistake in conception, an abomination in planning, an utter failure in execution.  Yet, somehow, it has become one of the major hubs of this, our modern world, blending commerce and industry to establish itself as a major player in the world market.  It is, again, a blight.  Towers rise obscenely from the murky depths of the smog bathed city, awash in the orange glow of a trash filtered sun, groping for heaven like great phallic symbols, an arrogant display of wealth and power.  This is Los Angeles.  See our golden beaches where the rich play?  See our green hills where they live?  No swamp can stop the development of ego.  No forces of nature can stop a masturborial display of the machismo and relentless grit that fuel such a town.  Let God spite us, let nature spite us, let humaity spite us, we shall make ourselves great.  Gigantic lighters in the shape of fuel companies, immense men in the shape of launderettes, waste and wonder, create something that is at once unattainably futuristic, never in the here and now, but one step beyond humanity, but that something is also apocalyptically ancient, its crumbled basis wheezing from bubonic plague and consumption.  Los Angeles was never meant to be lived in.  Its art and spires intimidate those who might settle, its crowded streets and dirty lowlands are uninhabitable.  Yet, despite impossible conditions, despite every force on this earth working against them, from swamp to plague to fever to seismic doom, man, the great parasite, abides.  He abides underneath benches, in the crevices and cracks between the side walks, in the jambs of doorways ajar, he survives, and lurks, to shirk the sun as it rises over the mountains, illuminating the silhouette of Saddleback, and creates his own darkness, a private hell in which to recluse until the world has finally assimilated to the grim reality that is Los Angeles.  It is a city founded on waste, on arrogance, on greed.  Its people rest, contemptuous, not content until all the planet squeezes and maims the oceans, the rivers, the lakes, as Los Angeles does.  This is what it must do to support the parasite.  The parasite must suck dry its host.  The land becomes barren, the earth cracked hard and dry, the clouds dark and heavy, to sustain such life.  So the parasite grows, and spites nature by becoming more great and powerful than any other, only shortening the time before the host becomes too weak to continue, and dies.  Los Angeles is a city of fluctuation.  The goals have never stayed the same formore than a few minutes, and the city is conscious of this.  The music must keep pulling, heaving, quivering and pulsating its way into a million different patterns and pieces, to keep itself from falling into the inevitable void.  It changes so much, because it knows its own phoniness, the smarmy conceit with which it conducts itself, and it must forever try to upstage itself, for fear of stagnation.  It is not a city like New York, like Chicago, like San Franciso, in which the history shines and glimmers, like remnants of a nostalgic past.  The glory and guts of former days hold no piety or assuredness in Los Angeles.  It is not revered an celebrated as in the great towers of the bay, the park bound statues of Long Island, or the architectural arches of the windy city.  The past is an embarrassment to Los Angeles, and is despised.  It is old, it is out of style, it is faux pois, it is the regretful notion of some recherche and distant age, to be swept into the ever growing and glowering black heart of the city.  Once, oh in those days forgotten, Los Angeles was no more than a way station, a convenient enough spot off the river and near the sea, that could recieve what poor gold diggers and migrant workers would offer themselces up, hustling or heaving, on the forever golden shores.  It was once a playground, a city of high culture, where the wealth of an age crescendoed in a gaudy cacophony of sound, colour, light, and architecture.  Rococo rooms inside of hopelessly art deco building, faux eighteenth century structures leaned up against noveau medieval cathedrals, all testament to the playful rich, the pride of the famous, the greed that could turn a whole country on its axis and slam it right back into the side of the planet.  There, on the wrong side of the San Andreas fault, daring the earth to give that mighty shudder, to toss all that hard work into the ocean, to challenge the ingenuity of man.  Oh, in those once glorious days, Los Angeles made itself an open threat to  the natural order.  Once it was a jailhouse, a prison for the poor and misunderstood, those who had come a millisecond too late or tried to leave a millisecond too early.  It was once a gallery, a shoddy attempt to breathe life back into something that was stillborn and hideous.  Los Angeles never suffered itself under the illusion of unity.  Los Angeles has always been a clash of culture and prejudice, of class struggle, of bigotry, of hatred quelled long enough to keep a generation or two at peace, before violence would erupt once more.  Such art as came, such culture as existed, only served to widen these gaps, embitter the foolhardy, and empower the fools.  Any soul Los Angeles had once wielded had already moved on, to become middle aged and depressed in the suburbs, to reiterate a vicious cycle at the port, to live and pray for death in the valley.  Art was a joke, with no more creativity or inspiration than an acting contract.  Now, Los Angeles is something intangible, and will remain so until the next age dawns, when the learned and supposedly knowledgeable of the future can look back and order yet another misconceived label on where we are, the here and now, when what they don't understand is this.  Every age is the same.  Every era, every fluctation, in beautiful symetry, leads to the same whole.  Despite the mindless cacophony, despite the stripped morals, despite all principle on which the city has been built, it is still a testament to some type of human spirit, and that is what each age amounts to, in its infinite myriad of fashions, styles, opinions, times, that vary from inch to inch in a city as great and ghastly as Los Angeles.  It is never.  It is forever.  It is the something of material existence, and the nothing of Cartesian ambiance.  And this is beautiful.

Los Angeles guards its secrets, and its greatest secret is itself.  A native may visit it, may walk hte streets, may drive from place to place, take the metro back and forth, work, sleep, eat, live, love, and die in Los Angeles, and still never know what the sity truly is.  La Placita, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, are only facades of the diversity and structure that characterize Los Angeles.  Fairfax is a town immemorial.  Hollywood only insults and patronizes those brave enough to trod its stardust-brushed walkways.  As the streets shine with diamond treasure, so do the buildings glint with sinister malice.  Los Angeles could have aspired to greatness.  Once, though none shall remember, once that was its aim.  I walked along Broadway, I walked past the Rosslyn and Million Dollar, I walked past the poor and haggard, the young and hopeful, the old and resigned, the homeless and happy, the homeless and bitter, the homeless and dazed, past whole social structures built up from credit and carmraderie, past old toothless women vomiting into shopping carts, past dirty old men with hands underneath blankets, past dirty and broken windows, through a doorway framed with thick plexiglass, marred forever with the initials and symbols of those who would make wild the streets, those windows that could never again hold glass, throughthat dark doorway, with broken bottles and broken people asleep on its braces, into the Alexander Hotel.  The place is an anomaly, a strange memoir of a Los Angeles that stopped exiting long ago, as well as a sick display of a Los Agneles that refuses to accept its own truth today.  The Lobby is dark, hardwood and chandeliers, brushed leather seats and polished brass buttons, cieling medallions with renaissance flavoured tinges and accents that could send any baroquist into tears, hardened fixtures, no  stone unturned, nothing spared.  And yet, upon this onetime testament to luxury and extravagance, sit the heroes of vagrancy or lunacy, homeless with nothing to do but wait until they are removed, residents whose straits are never much clearer, elegance and refinement used as ashtrays, shat upon, covered with fluids or human waste, badly cleaned and obviously stained, in some cases glaringly left to dry, rather than disposed of.  The room is a dull hum, its unwashed denizens lost in a type of delirium, the disease of choice along these streets, mumbling or muttering, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with others, never really communicating, but maybe, for an instant, connecting on the same wavelength of sad confusion, sharing an understanding that goes far deeper than any type of kinship, the brotherhood of suffering, the crux of sorrow.  Gold leaf lions wave crackled paws over the reception desk, where a shitty handmade sign is taped to the bulletproof glass.  It reads "laundry service no checks."  The R is backwards.  The hallway shows an elevator system, floor indicators and desks of fine black marble, mouldings in calcium grey, floral and frilly and decaying.  Inside, the elevator is all faux wood, poorly varnished, poorly put together, poorly done, yet expected.  The whole hotel is full of strange ballrooms and halls, where hints of the legance and wealth are painted over, covered in cobwebs, or else simply passed on.  In one dark room, empty and with a low ceiling, the carvings along the wall depict images of a young girl's crying face.  The hotel is essentially unchanged, the same accents and refinement as it had on its opening day in the 1910's.  And yet, it has now fallen to ruin.  Old bag ladies keep rooms, and bums roam the corridors.  It is a crumbling symbol of wealth, as powerful a demonstration of the ephemerality of all display and hope as could be imagined.  I leave the building, my head full of history, and too many images than I can process.  It is Los Angeles.  It does not process its history.  It lets it rot.

Los Angeles embitters its urban residents.  It takes a million dreams, a million hopes, and shatters them into powder, to be carried out and blown across the continent.  The homeless are angry.  They are unsure.  They are hopeless.  They walk up and down fifth street in a daze, randomly putting quarters in parking metres, and incoherently shouting at times.  And it is impossible to tell whether they are drugged out, psyched out, burnt out, spun out, freaked out, hazed out, lifed out or deathed out.  MAny are in wheelchairs or boxes, asleep for as long as they can be each day, and feigning sleep for the rest.  Some are loud and sociable, interacting with the resdients of the street, but yet these are the most hostile.  They follow an odd social structure.  In times of great need, when reduced to a more primitive mode of living, man will rally behind an alpha male, create some demigod, an idol to follow, to blame, to be ridiculed by, and to allow the greater public to fall into a numbness that comes with the absence of thought, that most dangerous and harmful enterprise.  Yet the bums of fifth street make no leader.  They make no community.  They associate with each other, know names, recognize and acknowledge status and situation, but at the heart of each association is a deadness, an situational necessity that puts all homeless in the same patched boat, wherefore they must tolerate each other.  One area has a particularly high concentration of homeless dwelling places, whether defecation stained boxes,  platic bags, or the occasional tarp.  In such locales, the stench of urine is always heavy in the air.  Rather than form any leadership, community, or government, the bums refer to a strictly dog-eat-dog credo, being at best cordial, but at worst ignorant, of the world and each other.  The man who has two wooden braces and a tarp, the man who has his own tent, rather than being a member of the aristocracy among the homeless, is somewhat excluded, without visitor or friend to his home, and without associating himself with any other man.  Indeed, the independence of the homeless is fierce.  They are not looking for a handout.  They do not take change.  They are spiteful of the accomodated world.  They are spiteful of education, of those with homes.  They exist on their own terms, and resent that one may try to set or influence those terms for them.  Despite their condition, their greatest need, and perhaps their greatest pleasure, is the freedom to choose how life is lived and what motivates themselves.

I arrived at the station, uncertain of where I was or what I was doing there.  My undying belief in man's intrisic goodness, in the tendency of such to arise in his most primitive, dire moments, had been shattered.  I had made myself a failure, I had succumbed to everything I so hated.  Sloth, indolence.  I was the good for nothing.  For the first time, I was the non contributor.  We ran through the station, trying desperately to make a non-existent deadline after I had led them around the wrong way.  I had made myself a fool.  Days before, I had read someone's goals.  All academic.  I asked someone else.  College.  I had wanted to explore the human psyche, to understand all sides of a fallacious argument.  I had wanted an ally, but I had made a series of foolish choices, yet again.  I had wanted to ascertain myself, through someone else, to be the soul who reaches out and grasps another.  Yet I had no such luck.  I had allowed myself to be merely dragged along.  I had ruined everything I had touched.  And now, I was tailing a large group of people running across a huge station.  And that's when it hit me.  THat's when I realized that life is beautiful.  In this world, it's all we have, it's all we can be sure of, and every moment wasted is a crime against the nature of our being.  I had not allowed myself to live.  I had been too timid, too stupid, too doubtful to latch onto something deeper and more meaningful.  Meaning isn't a number on a test.  Meaning isn't a seat on a bus.  Meaning isn't a plaque on a door.  Meaning isn't a room in a building.  Meaning is feeling.  I numbed myself once before.  Three years ago I stopped being cold.  Not until yesterday did I realize that I had not yet thawed.  I want to feel.  I want to live.  I will take that initiative.  I will create my own image.  I will take control.  I will come into being.

Los Angeles

is a decrepit city.  It is a blight on the golden coast of California, a mistake in conception, an abomination in planning, an utter failure in execution.  Yet, somehow, it has become one of the major hubs of this, our modern world, blending commerce and industry to establish itself as a major player in the world market.  It is, again, a blight.  Towers rise obscenely from the murky depths of the smog bathed city, awash in the orange glow of a trash filtered sun, groping for heaven like great phallic symbols, an arrogant display of wealth and power.  This is Los Angeles.  See our golden beaches where the rich play?  See our green hills where they live?  No swamp can stop the development of ego.  No forces of nature can stop a masturborial display of the machismo and relentless grit that fuel such a town.  Let God spite us, let nature spite us, let humaity spite us, we shall make ourselves great.  Gigantic lighters in the shape of fuel companies, immense men in the shape of launderettes, waste and wonder, create something that is at once unattainably futuristic, never in the here and now, but one step beyond humanity, but that something is also apocalyptically ancient, its crumbled basis wheezing from bubonic plague and consumption.  Los Angeles was never meant to be lived in.  Its art and spires intimidate those who might settle, its crowded streets and dirty lowlands are uninhabitable.  Yet, despite impossible conditions, despite every force on this earth working against them, from swamp to plague to fever to seismic doom, man, the great parasite, abides.  He abides underneath benches, in the crevices and cracks between the side walks, in the jambs of doorways ajar, he survives, and lurks, to shirk the sun as it rises over the mountains, illuminating the silhouette of Saddleback, and creates his own darkness, a private hell in which to recluse until the world has finally assimilated to the grim reality that is Los Angeles.  It is a city founded on waste, on arrogance, on greed.  Its people rest, contemptuous, not content until all the planet squeezes and maims the oceans, the rivers, the lakes, as Los Angeles does.  This is what it must do to support the parasite.  The parasite must suck dry its host.  The land becomes barren, the earth cracked hard and dry, the clouds dark and heavy, to sustain such life.  So the parasite grows, and spites nature by becoming more great and powerful than any other, only shortening the time before the host becomes too weak to continue, and dies.  Los Angeles is a city of fluctuation.  The goals have never stayed the same formore than a few minutes, and the city is conscious of this.  The music must keep pulling, heaving, quivering and pulsating its way into a million different patterns and pieces, to keep itself from falling into the inevitable void.  It changes so much, because it knows its own phoniness, the smarmy conceit with which it conducts itself, and it must forever try to upstage itself, for fear of stagnation.  It is not a city like New York, like Chicago, like San Franciso, in which the history shines and glimmers, like remnants of a nostalgic past.  The glory and guts of former days hold no piety or assuredness in Los Angeles.  It is not revered an celebrated as in the great towers of the bay, the park bound statues of Long Island, or the architectural arches of the windy city.  The past is an embarrassment to Los Angeles, and is despised.  It is old, it is out of style, it is faux pois, it is the regretful notion of some recherche and distant age, to be swept into the ever growing and glowering black heart of the city.  Once, oh in those days forgotten, Los Angeles was no more than a way station, a convenient enough spot off the river and near the sea, that could recieve what poor gold diggers and migrant workers would offer themselces up, hustling or heaving, on the forever golden shores.  It was once a playground, a city of high culture, where the wealth of an age crescendoed in a gaudy cacophony of sound, colour, light, and architecture.  Rococo rooms inside of hopelessly art deco building, faux eighteenth century structures leaned up against noveau medieval cathedrals, all testament to the playful rich, the pride of the famous, the greed that could turn a whole country on its axis and slam it right back into the side of the planet.  There, on the wrong side of the San Andreas fault, daring the earth to give that mighty shudder, to toss all that hard work into the ocean, to challenge the ingenuity of man.  Oh, in those once glorious days, Los Angeles made itself an open threat to  the natural order.  Once it was a jailhouse, a prison for the poor and misunderstood, those who had come a millisecond too late or tried to leave a millisecond too early.  It was once a gallery, a shoddy attempt to breathe life back into something that was stillborn and hideous.  Los Angeles never suffered itself under the illusion of unity.  Los Angeles has always been a clash of culture and prejudice, of class struggle, of bigotry, of hatred quelled long enough to keep a generation or two at peace, before violence would erupt once more.  Such art as came, such culture as existed, only served to widen these gaps, embitter the foolhardy, and empower the fools.  Any soul Los Angeles had once wielded had already moved on, to become middle aged and depressed in the suburbs, to reiterate a vicious cycle at the port, to live and pray for death in the valley.  Art was a joke, with no more creativity or inspiration than an acting contract.  Now, Los Angeles is something intangible, and will remain so until the next age dawns, when the learned and supposedly knowledgeable of the future can look back and order yet another misconceived label on where we are, the here and now, when what they don't understand is this.  Every age is the same.  Every era, every fluctation, in beautiful symetry, leads to the same whole.  Despite the mindless cacophony, despite the stripped morals, despite all principle on which the city has been built, it is still a testament to some type of human spirit, and that is what each age amounts to, in its infinite myriad of fashions, styles, opinions, times, that vary from inch to inch in a city as great and ghastly as Los Angeles.  It is never.  It is forever.  It is the something of material existence, and the nothing of Cartesian ambiance.  And this is beautiful.

Los Angeles guards its secrets, and its greatest secret is itself.  A native may visit it, may walk hte streets, may drive from place to place, take the metro back and forth, work, sleep, eat, live, love, and die in Los Angeles, and still never know what the sity truly is.  La Placita, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, are only facades of the diversity and structure that characterize Los Angeles.  Fairfax is a town immemorial.  Hollywood only insults and patronizes those brave enough to trod its stardust-brushed walkways.  As the streets shine with diamond treasure, so do the buildings glint with sinister malice.  Los Angeles could have aspired to greatness.  Once, though none shall remember, once that was its aim.  I walked along Broadway, I walked past the Rosslyn and Million Dollar, I walked past the poor and haggard, the young and hopeful, the old and resigned, the homeless and happy, the homeless and bitter, the homeless and dazed, past whole social structures built up from credit and carmraderie, past old toothless women vomiting into shopping carts, past dirty old men with hands underneath blankets, past dirty and broken windows, through a doorway framed with thick plexiglass, marred forever with the initials and symbols of those who would make wild the streets, those windows that could never again hold glass, throughthat dark doorway, with broken bottles and broken people asleep on its braces, into the Alexander Hotel.  The place is an anomaly, a strange memoir of a Los Angeles that stopped exiting long ago, as well as a sick display of a Los Agneles that refuses to accept its own truth today.  The Lobby is dark, hardwood and chandeliers, brushed leather seats and polished brass buttons, cieling medallions with renaissance flavoured tinges and accents that could send any baroquist into tears, hardened fixtures, no  stone unturned, nothing spared.  And yet, upon this onetime testament to luxury and extravagance, sit the heroes of vagrancy or lunacy, homeless with nothing to do but wait until they are removed, residents whose straits are never much clearer, elegance and refinement used as ashtrays, shat upon, covered with fluids or human waste, badly cleaned and obviously stained, in some cases glaringly left to dry, rather than disposed of.  The room is a dull hum, its unwashed denizens lost in a type of delirium, the disease of choice along these streets, mumbling or muttering, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with others, never really communicating, but maybe, for an instant, connecting on the same wavelength of sad confusion, sharing an understanding that goes far deeper than any type of kinship, the brotherhood of suffering, the crux of sorrow.  Gold leaf lions wave crackled paws over the reception desk, where a shitty handmade sign is taped to the bulletproof glass.  It reads "laundry service no checks."  The R is backwards.  The hallway shows an elevator system, floor indicators and desks of fine black marble, mouldings in calcium grey, floral and frilly and decaying.  Inside, the elevator is all faux wood, poorly varnished, poorly put together, poorly done, yet expected.  The whole hotel is full of strange ballrooms and halls, where hints of the legance and wealth are painted over, covered in cobwebs, or else simply passed on.  In one dark room, empty and with a low ceiling, the carvings along the wall depict images of a young girl's crying face.  The hotel is essentially unchanged, the same accents and refinement as it had on its opening day in the 1910's.  And yet, it has now fallen to ruin.  Old bag ladies keep rooms, and bums roam the corridors.  It is a crumbling symbol of wealth, as powerful a demonstration of the ephemerality of all display and hope as could be imagined.  I leave the building, my head full of history, and too many images than I can process.  It is Los Angeles.  It does not process its history.  It lets it rot.

Los Angeles embitters its urban residents.  It takes a million dreams, a million hopes, and shatters them into powder, to be carried out and blown across the continent.  The homeless are angry.  They are unsure.  They are hopeless.  They walk up and down fifth street in a daze, randomly putting quarters in parking metres, and incoherently shouting at times.  And it is impossible to tell whether they are drugged out, psyched out, burnt out, spun out, freaked out, hazed out, lifed out or deathed out.  MAny are in wheelchairs or boxes, asleep for as long as they can be each day, and feigning sleep for the rest.  Some are loud and sociable, interacting with the resdients of the street, but yet these are the most hostile.  They follow an odd social structure.  In times of great need, when reduced to a more primitive mode of living, man will rally behind an alpha male, create some demigod, an idol to follow, to blame, to be ridiculed by, and to allow the greater public to fall into a numbness that comes with the absence of thought, that most dangerous and harmful enterprise.  Yet the bums of fifth street make no leader.  They make no community.  They associate with each other, know names, recognize and acknowledge status and situation, but at the heart of each association is a deadness, an situational necessity that puts all homeless in the same patched boat, wherefore they must tolerate each other.  One area has a particularly high concentration of homeless dwelling places, whether defecation stained boxes,  platic bags, or the occasional tarp.  In such locales, the stench of urine is always heavy in the air.  Rather than form any leadership, community, or government, the bums refer to a strictly dog-eat-dog credo, being at best cordial, but at worst ignorant, of the world and each other.  The man who has two wooden braces and a tarp, the man who has his own tent, rather than being a member of the aristocracy among the homeless, is somewhat excluded, without visitor or friend to his home, and without associating himself with any other man.  Indeed, the independence of the homeless is fierce.  They are not looking for a handout.  They do not take change.  They are spiteful of the accomodated world.  They are spiteful of education, of those with homes.  They exist on their own terms, and resent that one may try to set or influence those terms for them.  Despite their condition, their greatest need, and perhaps their greatest pleasure, is the freedom to choose how life is lived and what motivates themselves.

I arrived at the station, uncertain of where I was or what I was doing there.  My undying belief in man's intrisic goodness, in the tendency of such to arise in his most primitive, dire moments, had been shattered.  I had made myself a failure, I had succumbed to everything I so hated.  Sloth, indolence.  I was the good for nothing.  For the first time, I was the non contributor.  We ran through the station, trying desperately to make a non-existent deadline after I had led them around the wrong way.  I had made myself a fool.  Days before, I had read someone's goals.  All academic.  I asked someone else.  College.  I had wanted to explore the human psyche, to understand all sides of a fallacious argument.  I had wanted an ally, but I had made a series of foolish choices, yet again.  I had wanted to ascertain myself, through someone else, to be the soul who reaches out and grasps another.  Yet I had no such luck.  I had allowed myself to be merely dragged along.  I had ruined everything I had touched.  And now, I was tailing a large group of people running across a huge station.  And that's when it hit me.  THat's when I realized that life is beautiful.  In this world, it's all we have, it's all we can be sure of, and every moment wasted is a crime against the nature of our being.  I had not allowed myself to live.  I had been too timid, too stupid, too doubtful to latch onto something deeper and more meaningful.  Meaning isn't a number on a test.  Meaning isn't a seat on a bus.  Meaning isn't a plaque on a door.  Meaning isn't a room in a building.  Meaning is feeling.  I numbed myself once before.  Three years ago I stopped being cold.  Not until yesterday did I realize that I had not yet thawed.  I want to feel.  I want to live.  I will take that initiative.  I will create my own image.  I will take control.  I will come into being.

I saw a fly on the windowsill

Not a significant fly.  A housefly, wings the dirty gold colour of rain-diluted urine, bloody fillings, and gooey candy wrappers.  The wings were broken, or one was missing, or perhaps some alien substance had become affixed to them, and deprived them of the capability of flight.  It was resting on these wings, sprawled on its back, the tiny head straining skyward for some blind deity, while six spindly arthropodal appendages waded furiously in the air.  By vibration and determination, it managed to travel several hopping centimeters along the window sill, but without its legs, without its wings, without even that most satanic belly to crawl on, it was unable to sustain movement, and could only inch on in the most  pathetic manner.  The legs arched and flexed grotesquely all the while, at times gathering in the terral aura to its abdomen, but more often flailing, cutting the air with feeble chops of hairy legs, struggling in vain to right  itself.  I watched its movement, over the rim of an unwashed glass, and observed the nature of the legs, fat bases stretching to prickly, jointed spindle feet, observed the nature of the body, a hard shell, grim facsimile of a Trojan's armour, observed the head, expressionless fear without knowledge or reason, more terrible than the most despairing face could be, observed life, with a dull horror.  An urge welled deep within me to squash it, put it out of both our misery, let the heavy rim of glass pin underneath it the tiny body that could never sustain such weight, and finally remove the insect, tossing it into the garbage.  I wanted to take a needle, and pin it right through the beating bundle of nerves that was its abdomen, crack that demon shell.  I wanted to cry out and beat it with my fists, crush it between my fingers, or spray it with an avenging  green mist, as I had to so many vermin in the dying heat of summer.  But I did not.  I could not.  For a quarter of an hour I watched in terrible fascination as it writhed and screamed silently, begging me to bring swift death, retribution for its pitiless existence, but I would not heed this cry.  I merely watched, somehow fascinated, but to enthralled by such organic misery to move, and when I did, to lazy to act.  For all I know, the creature may still be there.

It was five years ago that I first read the collected short stories of Kafka.  As an 11 year old child, I could certainly grasp the anger, the fear, the disaffection and brooding self hatred that ran throughout each story.  It was written by a dark man, an unwell man, a man who not only had no respect, but no belief for the world and himself, and could continue only as a shell, a hard  carapace of what he thought a man should be, if indeed it should be at all.  This I knew, and I'm sure, all who have read works such as The Penal Colony and A Country Doctor have had similar initial impressions.  However, I could not delve deeper into the true  meaning of the story, interpret the symbolism, decipher what aspects of the psyche the author was pursuing.  As time has gone by, I've learned enough of the author to understand the political context in which some stories were written, as well as certain greater personal aspects.  But, from the humanistic point of view, not until today have I understood that author's communique.  Two factors have gone into this.  Firstly, as Kafka wrote, "A good book should affect you like the death of someone you loved more than yourself, a pick to the iceberg of your soul."  Recently, I read a book which affected me so, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.  But, even moreso, my encounter with the insect has changed me.  In the metamorphosis, a young man who works only to pay off his parents' debt to the father's employer, who has no hope in the world, transforms into a large vermin.  The family, unable to depend on the lad anymore, grows to harbour a certain loathing for the creature, grudgingly keeping it alive until the freedom of its death.  This was the fate of the immobile fly. Upon its back, dealt a cruel blow by fate, the fly jittered and writhed in vain, wanting at first to right itself, to attain some of its former glory as an insect unlimited by the ground, but which degenerated into merely a desire to end such incessant suffering.  I was drawn to kill the fly because the fly wanted me to.  It desired an end.  But I, in my disgust, in my sloth, would not provide it that release.

This was The metaphor of the metamorphosis.  Man is that fly.  I am that fly.  Kafka was that fly.  We are all immobile, blind and trapped on our backs in the middle of a moving world.  We are not bound to one place by ropes, by force, but by circumstance and obligation.  Man has a unique capacity for greatness.  The great intelligence of earth, it can see, survey, and take all the world around it, any environment, any event it so desires because of its aptitude.  It can soar above the realm of beast, the capacity of a chimp, a lizard, a bug to lead, and go out into a high position into not only its own society, but the global order.  But, man does not, will not, chooses not to set himself in so lofty a place.  It holds itself to duty, to circumstance, to its own ineptness, and perception becomes law, capability god.  Man is on the verge of immeasurable greatness, on the edge of an unimaginable new paradigm, and is trapped on that edge, clings to that edge, till its senses dull, its ability slackens, and it becomes blind, twitching, groping in the dark of a depraved consciousness for a light that was never there.  All existence is this misery, in one or another way, and the man brings it upon himself.  He cries out, wails, prostrates himself, begs for some heavenly entity, a divine power, one who creates and destroys, to take away such misery, not to set it right, but merely to extinguish the endless bane of an existence.  This is seen in the dead looks of workers' eyes, the crises of mid-life professionals, the weepy lament of mothers, the sloven resentment of the unemployed and slackers, the fret behind the entrepreneur’s smile.  They kill themselves, not for pity, but for impatience, endless waiting for some greater intelligence to do the ultimate service.  But, they are subject to the cruelest fate, an indifferent god, with mild interest, perhaps, if they are lucky, contempt, for such creatures, who will not move a fraction of reality to knock a spitelock of self inflicted suffering.  They are subject to utter loneliness.

So are the thoughts of one has seen, but wishes it were not so.