New Directions

Here I will actually begin to type up and post my daily journal writings, because I realize that my blog has never been a consistent or true representation of my thoughts. Why not make the blog much more casual, with a theme that doesn't demand only the deepest or most curious things to see the surface of day?

With that simple introduction, I give you my journal entries for today:

(This is the beginnings of a story based on a guy that works at UC Berkeley's "Free Speech Cafe", who is fat, pudgy, irascible, and who seems altogether to hate life. Yet it is not so much a satire of him, as a satire of the world that has created such a docile monster.)

The advent of Juan Güero:

Juan Güero is the disillusioned spirit of our age. He works to no purpose, and what's more, he despises the work itself. Not purpose driven, yet uncaring of the moment, he lives in a perpetual state of transience. His joys are all private: things he does at home which we do not know of, but which do not work to make him less fat. He brushes off all advances made by persons who wish to bring him out of his drudge-like sphere of existence, even when they directly concern him and his office. But what of his office? He does what he does only out of necessity (though some speculate that he does it merely out of spite) and in that hardness of un-purpose he would revile all the world. He is the Last Man, though even if a great responsibility were thrust upon him, he would not take it, for he has no vain ambitions nor delusions of grandeur. even if he were the only man capable or fit for leadership (though I admit this is difficult to imagine), he would shrug off his given crown and go back to filling coffee cups full of their mysterious brine. 

Juan Güero calls his own comrades by a variety of slang words; never by their true names. It only so happens that his last name is one of those same slang words he often uses. It was by accident that we were able to discover this and set up an interview with him, pretending that we worked for the university, and needed to speak with him concerning the cultural patterns of Berkeley workers. Here I present to you his narrative recorded on cassette tape, which I have personally transcribed: 

My name is Juan Güero. I live now in Berkeley, California, but I was born in Colmo, a small city south of San Fransisco. There is a phrase in Spanish: "es el colmo", which means: "it's a shame".  I didn't like it there. My mother whipped me around, and I never saw my father eat anything except beans and beer. He worked as a garbage man; my mother worked at K-Mart. As she always said - it was a colmo to live in Colmo. 

(Sorry, this story is too depressing to transcribe! I'll leave the rest to my notebook, unless I find some compelling reason to write the rest...)

Random notes:

What kind of animals are we? Many answers, responses given, but always with the difference - we are not animals as other animals, because we can even ask the question to begin with of what kind of animals we are. 

The professor says: The syllabus I've drafted, wafts into your heart..

"Reader, I married him." - Jane Eyre

The immortal soul has exhausted itself (self-conscious models that are not aware of their modelhood) Give me some soul food, for my body is weak... The bifurcation of ourselves, probably spurred on by culture, that is... We appropriate culture and incorporate it into ourselves, but rarely is it the case that we appropriate it fully so that there is no conflict between self and culture. Culture is created to mitigate against the inclemency of some 'bad' selves, though inevitably the rules it creates suppresses some good things about other selves...

To proscribe things in moderation - drink only at celebrations, for example, - creates a taboo against drinking alone or at other inappropriate times, which can be harmful. The idea of human as humane, an ethical being, I think, may be different according to culture, but there is one standard that prevails against all difference, though perhaps not always in respect of the community - one who does what is most difficult is almost always admired, or envied, which is perhaps a better kind of reverence than admiration, since every preacher-man and cheat-skate can inspire base admiration. 

"The body changes, but the psyche remains the same..."

To achieve personhood, one must breathe in and out, one must speak purposefully, one must feel sympathy.

Mary is a really beautiful woman, but I don't find her personality attractive at all. Anomalous monism? My heart...

Here I drew a picture of an ostrich:

And next to it wrote:

The Ostrich that ran a thousand and one miles..

He won the race...

but in the effort

lost his mind.