living through themes. i give up on any sort of adventure-lens, sponge-eyed and bleary, and am now generally working with one of the following:

-religion (icons, idols, false idols, faith, objectivity/omniscience);
-justice (martyrdom, penance, punishment/reward, law, chaos/order, futility);
-cycles (addiction/withdrawal, laundry, routine, habit, and spontaneity)
-creation/consumption (mostly Art but also valuation, self-sufficiency, inspiration)

as in: randomly running theories of postmodernism as the idea-child of capitalism; rule of law as a miniature, imperfect version of the justice (karmic, caste-d, or judgment-day'd, eg) that underlies contemporary religion - or lack of; fairytales and folklore as precursors to a wikipedia-like institution (widespread popular consensus, or shared paradigms, usurping the place of an ivory-towered encyclopediac knowledge - see also the martyr question, where justice lies in the vox populi, as an earthbound substitute for omniscience - isnt it funny how popular opinion is so dirty, how no one wants it stuck to them, like a dog humping your leg?).

tomorrows plan being to go see the corpse flower at the brooklyn botanic gardens (free on tuesdays!) - latin name being amorphophallus titanum: gigantic deformed penis (the victorians werent nearly as stodgy as we think...?), and that smells like rotting dead stuff. no, really.

meanwhile, finding that the first-beat emotional response is not to be messed with, that the harder i push for emotional generosity the less capable i am of actually relating; knowing that what i want for other people often isnt what i want from them; if and how im going to bridge that gap between how they want me and how i am. that no ones going to revere my dirty little secrets the way i do - theyre not secrets any more, after all - and that, when push comes to shove, im going to take whatever is given me, for the least altruistic, most hard-suffering reasons, on both sides. again: when are we going to stop using each other? but theres a lot of beauty that springs from that rotten source, so maybe i just keep working with it in the hopes that it will purify itself, that our motives fall more in line with each other. my mother's breast was thorny, the constant war that underlies even (especially) the most intrinsic of our loves, and defines it (but im not arguing that now; im going to bed).

deerhoof (...packed. and they took my camera batteries, fuckers. bunny bunny bunny) and ice cream yesterday, positively nothing today except for the letters of flannery o'connor (i cant even speak of how much love...), and im curious about tomorrow, wondering what these relationships-in-transit are going to do in a different light, whether that gut reaction can be overcome, for being unearned and involuntary, by something that may take a little more time but is, at its core, more genuine, and certainly more kind (here im torn between the importance of kindness - lets not jest! - and the almost certain unimportance of a few sentences to a longstanding friendship, right? oh whatever, ive never really been good at seeing the forest anyway, i ought to know that much by now).

thats quite enough. bonne nuit.