LSD

Italian Stallion's Answer:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090125204016AAN5VH9

Bodily Rearrangement (Burps):
". I personally tend to get a lot of burping when on the rise of my trips. "

Occasionally people will experience so-called Acid Indigestion on LSD, which usually manifests as minor burping without any real nausea or desire to vomit. This is often easily alleviated by loosening tight clothing and by performing relaxation exercises.

but i would just burp and it would feel awesome

but also like

fundamental

the burps were part of a material rearrangement going on in my body

mainly torso

Spilt Letters
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/10033491

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala

Upon closer inspection the whole sea was filled with letters! Everywhere I saw letters of the alphabet in random patterns and combinations and spiraling in and out up and down flowing like water. I got closer and closer to the 'water' and I saw more and more letters. They got thicker and thicker. It was like those fractal things they use in math. Never ending. It felt amazing just drifting there. 
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=32307

Taipei book review

Nice excerpt from a book review on Tao Lin's Taipei

Paul’s mother thinks that experience outside of the Internet makes a person more interesting, she believes that a mind on drugs is a compromised mind, and she thinks of relationships as two people in love who are nice to each other. Paul, in contrast, lives according to the maximum possibilities of the present: he makes little distinction between the parts of his life that are mediated through his computer and the parts he experiences physically. He also does not distinguish between a physical state of sobriety and one on drugs. His relationships are fragile, tenuous things where petty irritations and insecurities will, with time, always overwhelm the desire to love and be loved.

Conversation with Monk

Context: I work at a radiostation at our university and we have monthly staff community hours we are required to fulfill.

CONVERSATION BETWEEN MONK AND ME

A: Oh, i almost forgot (opens laptop)

M: Why do you feel the need to type that out right now?

A: Because i transcribe my staff hours to a google doc, to keep track of them.

M: but there are so many other important things today that you forgot/chose not to keep track of originally. what is so different about this? 

A: they're my staff hours; i have monthly requirements to meet

M: this month, yes, but then they will just Vanish into the past like everything else.

A: yeah but not immediately.  they might cause a fuss at the station and it would bite my ass for like a little bit before vanishing.  i'm doing this to avoid that potential ass-biting, in case I forget about these hours; listen, it's purely a practical issue

M: what do you do in a given day that isn't "purely a practical issue?"

Practicality is assumed.

We live in an era of dreamers trapped in a duty, a perceived obligation to be practical, functional, tangible (and therefore "real"--the ultimate religious copout, a claiming to the "real").  everything should have a tangible result/object.  no one treats life as an absurdist canvas, an art portrait to create a story with anymore; we are shrewdly ends-oriented.  we are increasingly mechanical.   And I call us dreamers because I do see and feel the yearning in us for something more, something different.  We are just so entrenched in the modern belief in practicality;  i mean it's practically self-evident that we need to do practical things which have real functionality, self-evident tasks which must obviously be done (it's just the most practical and useful thing to do...see the dogmatism here?).  we dont question it, we laugh at those who do (laughing at something with great confidence and certainty is always a sign to be worried about, a sign of ideology).  i go from my job which makes money to my house which provides shelter where I watch TV to entertain myself before eating to nourish my body and falling asleep to regenerate my cells. i have sex with my wife to maintain our physical relationship and satisfy my libido.  i smoke weed to get high and forget about shit.  i only think of things to do, things which have an end.  what isn't a purely practical issue these days?  i think this is an important question to ask.   artists need to hone efforts on politics to maintain any relevance (it's the cool thing now to take art out of abstract realms and hone it in on brute, obnoxious practicality).  poetic terrorism--trapping the absurd in the relevant, the tangible.  Ironically I think this ultimately stifles the creativity we need to achieve a truly paradigmatic, "tangible" change in our current "tangible-change" oriented society.

The question also may be, why did I decide to pause and write this instead of scramble to write hours down right now like I normally would have?

perhaps that's where "I" step in,

away from the humming machine of the masses.

Understanding vs Metaphor: Science Deconstruction

A reflection during organic mechanisms lecture:

Language is evidence that we do most of our understanding through metaphors

We keep talking about how an atom is "attached" to the neighboring carbon.  But "attaching" is a contextually macroscopic concept.  We attach pieces of cloth to each other, we attach vehicles to tow trucks.  We use this term metaphorically to understand molecular phenomena.  The same goes for all of science*, and all human understanding.  Metaphors.

*Science hinges on these metaphors for explanatory understanding, but is very subtle about it.  It claims to be in the business of discovering robust mathematical laws that describe nature, and the explanatory understanding is peripheral.  But if this is true, science should not claim to understand nature, as it does so purely through metaphors.

A Comedian

I once dated a girl who would roll her eyes every time I told a joke and say, “You’re a comedian…" After we broke up, she started dating what I can only assume is a very serious man. I hear they’re very happy.

Source: http://boringoldraphael.tumblr.com/post/160348557/i-once-dated-a-girl-who-would-roll-her-eyes-every

Efficiency Impulse

Way to embrace efficiency.
(Scene that caused thought: was sitting in back seat of car on my phone, an object was passed to me I immediately flashed my phone to the hand in order to illuminate it more as I grabbed it, my friend realized this and was aware of it; also, he had a lighter, and when he put it down, he scanned the car carefully and put it down exactly on top of the center compartment of the car; the most reachable area in the car for all members to be able to grab it without having to disturb each other. I thought, how disgusting, how much we are preoccupied with efficiency (for efficiency's sake). We're just homies in a car, shouldnt we be focusing on more wild shit. Then I thought, embrace the concept)


Man's technicity impulse appeared around the 16th century (technicity as the impulse to categorize and represent the world as variables or quantities that we have power over rather than accepting phenomena/objects as presenting themselves to us 'on their own terms') when rationalists like Descartes swept philosophy and we quickly developed science and then fell into the industrial revolution etc etc. It is nothing new. However the impulse is seeping from overarching collective metaphysics into smaller and smaller cracks of every day life, and as such we could be on the verge of a massive shift to the digital (apparently already occurring with screens and next some perma-backround technology like google glass in which you experience the unique objects and entanglements in the world THROUGH the pulverizing "lens" of information processing) in which these impulses find more meaning and are in a more suitable context. This impulse is a prophecy, a foreshadowing of a new realm from within our Present aged realm, where it currently (as such) exhausts itself awkwardly (anachronistically) like in the example above where the efficiency is peripheral or nihilistic to the current backdrop of meaning it finds itself in. So we take these awkwardities as an anachronistic impulse, as signs of the future rather than a misunderstanding of the present.

Here is a question:  is this consistent with the marxist definition of man, in the sense that man has desires which he actualizes via his material environment, and we are going through this change now?  Or is this precisely antagonistic to the marxist essence, in which we are treating some hegelian geist of efficiency as central and the material realm as a consequence of it.

thoughts language and essence

ok so 2 things:
1. A language is not complete until irony disappears.  Irony exploits vagueness in terminology.

2. From an evolutionary standpoint: the present is a result of innumerable micro-fluctuations reaching equilibrium with each other.  That's why we observe such a symbiosis in the present: so many clever mechanisms we are equipped with for dealing and coping with our external environment, it's like matching puzzle pieces.  Relative to the chaos at incipience, the world has reached a deeper state of equilibrium.  And this will continue until everything gets smoothed out.  So in this sense, many actants have been distilled into forms few and condensed; this is why everything seems so beautiful, and why the concept of "essences" shows up in the world.