freaky ghost masks

Last night I did have a terrible dream. Actually my terrible dreams are not even those with the nightmarish imagery, the ones which wake me up with a sudden skipped heartbeat, and the notion that there is something evil lurking in the room. The terrible dreams are not like that, but worse. They are the ones in which my brain, the centre of my nervous system spends its REM moments chewing over dry bones — there’s no content, no emotional content, just an endless landscape of the same with unvariated dry textures or a random jumble of dessicated “thoughts” which never manage to add up to something more nourishing.

Last night, I had one of those dreams, and I think that it was related to reading this blog . I spent my upper high school life in the very region depicted in this blog. As splendid at the landscape here might be, in all of its potential, how dreary were my days up in the Lesmurdie hills. How souless were they.

How numb I was, throughout the two years of my Australian school education. If any genuine life was being lived around me, then I didn’t notice it. There might have been music to those days, but I, for one, certainly could hear no beat. I spent my days in numbness, feeling very little of enticement to treat what was going on around me as in any way real.

This was hardly the fault of the Lesmurdians. Right from the start, life in Australia had a kind of phoniness for me. I couldn’t really believe its people took themselves so seriously. To my mind, the whole school system had everyone embroiled in a vapid bureaucratic stoogery. The people I met in school were just the whispiest ghosts of the types of people I had gone to school with. I couldn’t take them seriously, at all.

Last night I did dream of one girl in particular. Her face came peering right in front of mine, a mask of “ugly”. I knew who it was after this sudden and strange appearance woke me up, and my then half-conscious mind made the deduction — it was “C”.

“C” sat next to me in one or several classes in the school, and in terms of character and verve, was eminently forgettable. I’m not even sure that I have her name right in my head, although I probably do. Her whole being had been forgettable, until last night.

Suddenly she was in front of my eyes, reminding me of what it was like to feel empty, to be that lost and passively indifferent high school kid, (who didn’t know which way was “Up” because she had lost Africa, and with it, her context.)

I believe that “C” immediately went on to be a bank clerk after finishing high school. I never saw her after that, and had no desire to. I can’t imagine someone with so little vitality could still be alive — anything is possible!

These days my life is overfull with something that feels like a swirling movement and energy. Whereas in high school it was possible for me to imagine life as somehow prematurely “set”, to see us students as flies caught up in a spider web, already injected with death, destroyed before our lives had started, I now cannot imagine anything in life being quite so still as I what I’d seen.

That said, I have a funny attitude nowdays: I feel like the calm in the eye of a very complex storm. I feel pulsing all around, and consequently can’t imagine or perceive even the quietest thing as actually still. I’m more inclined to slip into a military mode, with regards to what in people is weird and seemingly still or apathetic — not quite believing what I see!! Or else half in faith, believing those weird apathetics just have to be resplendent with hiddenl energy.

So I am inclined to address such terrifying, empty ghost-masks these days as “sir” or “ma’am” (just in the same way as those who bust their ass in the military address mere citizens with no rank whatsoever).

In honour of their mysterious self-preserving power (which comes from being and doing nothing), I feel I owe these whispy ghost masks my obeisance.

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The Traceless Warrior: 11/01/2004 – 11/30/2004

The Traceless Warrior: 11/01/2004 – 11/30/2004

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by popular demand……..

Because I suffer from lassitude, I will post the obligatory 100 or so things about me, here, now and today.

I have decided that since this is too fucking easy to do, and that the list needs constraints — or at least one significant one — in order not to be either too bland or simply arbitrary-how-O’m-feeling-today, I will write them in a huge rush. Rushing, in other words, will be my main constraint. Also, I will try to relate it to things that happened today, or which I have thought about today.

Here goes:
(starting from what I am thinking now……)

I like steak.
I am hungry
I like eating.
I like eating some more
I like drinking
I am getting taut
I like watermelon
I like the sun
I like sex
I like…
I want a weapon
I want two
I
Trees are good
and I like them
Sensei C. is funny
and he is ok
Flies are not good and I despise them
I wish I had more space around me
I like that Mike and I live in a flight path — it stirs my imagination!
I don’t like regulation and conformity
I like the way the branch of the tree caresses the earth with every hint of breeze.
I like moderate temperatures (between 25 degrees C and 35 degrees C)
I have a bunch of books but no favourite authors
I have no favourite films I like to watch
I get bored easily, but right now I’m at peace
televison news upsets me these days and I cannot watch it for long without getting up to check my incoming email, or something
I don’t like driving the car I drive, because it doesn’t accelerate fast enough
My own company pleases me more often than not
Drinking shiraz is my favourite activity of leisure
I explore abstractions a lot
I’m not exactly sociable at times
Animals with a surplus of vitality “do it” for me. They revive for me the memories what’s best in life
I find this exercise reminiscent of doing push-ups or squats — and I lose count.
I find women who cry odd, because I don’t cry — or if I do, I cry in different ways
I have read all of Nietzsche’s works — most at least 100 times. I know them sideways and back.
I like aerial views and think a lot about skydiving, although I haven’t done it for 5 years. It also represents what’s best in life for me.
I revel in the motif (and oftentimes the practice) of “taking a risk”.
Mike and I have a relationship which is very “masculine” and direct in speech. There’s not much room for softer feelings here although I’ve tried. Overall, this approach works as so far the best psychological dynamic for oure relationship.
I’m a latent intellectual snob, always looking for that particular intellectual je ne sais quois in my obsessive Internet surfings.
I enjoy and relish seafood platters.
I’m fucking, crying miserable low-down poor
I use the term “ass-head” as a slight-of-tongue inversion of the word, “asset”. At times, I will attempt to be an “ass-head” “to my company” or “to my race”. I don’t mind it really.
I grew up really wild. Adventuring in the African veld.
I read when I am anxious, and do compulsive academic research often whilst drinking shiraz.
I’d like to have eleven boyfriends.
I wish that they could all be skydivers (or in the military).
I’m not very good with weapons training, but like sparring.
I find postmodernists overcultured and namby-pambily refined.
I wish I had some huge, loyal dogs to symbolically protect me: I’m partial to German Shepherds and large boxer dogs, or something like that
I aim to get more flow into my sparring………
I wanna be living in Africa.
I wanna go white-water rafting.

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Deep Sleep

I’m sleeping very well these days — better than I can remember for a long time. For the longest time – except when I was a child, going to school in Africa, and packing a heavy bag of gear to early morning rituals of Assembly, followed by classes. Home again at by 1.25 pm, to eat a lunch of toasted sandwich, and then to wander ’round and start my homework by at least 3.00 pm. Off to see Honey in her field, and go for a ride, always galloping part of the last leg home. Feed her, put her in her stable, close the door, and cycle madly up the hill again, to eat my dinner at around 7.00. Watch some television and do more homework. Fall asleep, dreaming of mystic adventures across African slopes on horseback…..

My father would wake me up in the morning with a cup of sugary tea, and compel me to grasp it with weak and trembling hands, awoken too suddenly.

Sleeps never lasted long enough. I would remove the encrustments from my eyes, slip my skeletal thin body into a huge wade of pinafore dress. Find my hat, and ask Amos to polish my shoes.

I would attach my heavy satchel to the back of my trusty and battered old bike, once again, just as the sun was hitting the frost on the grass, a brilliant yellow.

I’d glide down the hill again, to go to feed the horse, warm drink bottles in my blazer pockets, pummelling my sides, as I freewheeled down the hill. I’d lean my ricketty old bike against the failing bamboo and barbed wire gate — open it by lifting up the loop of wire overstretching one bamboo post.

I’d go inside. Honey might neigh if she saw me first — head nodding vigorously through the top of her stable door.

I’d feed her, tasting the quality of her bran, myself, getting it all ’round my lips. I’d immerse my hads deeply into the bucket of warm grainy slosh, and feel the sensual movement as I stirred it.

Satisfied — I’d make my way on to the school, just as the sun was touching the top of the ugly brown stalks enveloping her field.

I might meet other students on the way — Yoko the demure Japanese, or my other acquaintance, the Swedish girl, whose name I have forgotten.

Then, I’d enter the school grounds, lock up my bike, and make my way up to the second floor, to overlook the students hanging over the balcony, one floor below. Most of these were black girls, forming up a black school class. I would drop popcorn seeds on to the heads, pretending they were bombs, which had to be released with accuracy.

Later, in English class, I would send popcorn seeds as missiles, flicked out from the corrner of my desk into the hair of various and sundry school mates.

I also once put screwed up bits of paper into the ringlets of a girl sitting in front of me, whose hairstyle made a gutter for my collection of various sorts of debris.

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flight

Up until now, my experiences have consisted of long bands of sustained determination and purpose interrupted by short moments of indecisiveness. I’m feeling the ways in which various winds are blowing now. I need to measure the current quality of my strengths or weaknesses against these.

I have felt a new sense of certainty, a readiness for what I have been planning. After these months of “check system, check thermal tendencies, check fuel,I suddenly feel that subtle shift — a shift in mood if anything – which indicates a new resolve.

I’m turning the corner of the runway, now; lining myself up.

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Don Burleson blog: FEMA’s Mike Brown’s history with Arabian Horses

Don Burleson blog: FEMA’s Mike Brown’s history with Arabian Horses

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KI / Chi

Mike and I have been developing, of late, our KI (Chinese term: Chi) through such manoeuvres and meditative postures as shown herein.

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The unemployed ninja

THIS is all rather amusing — although its political points are a bit lame! For psychological acuity and resonance, though, A++.

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driving winds

My father’s deeper emotional voice nearly always betrays the kinds of “truths” he’d like to take possession of.  What he says is in direct proportion to whatever it is he doesn’t actually want to believe in, or realities concerning which he has desire to create new — false — beliefs.Yet, when he speaks of Africa, I see a man revived, reliving once again a blood-coursing life — that long ago father, an actual fleshly being, is born over again. Suddenly, he is self-assured: voice and manner and opinion all concur with one another. There is no more discord; no more sour notes.His very self-denial has, despite intent, educated me. His way of arguing around the case of what it takes for people to be happy, gives me indication that his recipe for happiness is precisely that which turns his misery into despair — that makes him the most bitter, with every thought a denunciation, saying there’s no turning back — no Africa, no happiness!

His advice on work bleeds.  He is a man who has been drained by work, and doesn’t care too much to do a real accounting of his gains and losses in the market processes. That’s why he needs the force of a sublime unreason, in order to dizzy him enough to lose all of his co-ordinates even more — and so forget his pain; ubiquitous.

A dizzying sense of unreality puts all power in “God’s hands” and removes the burden of perceiving what’s around us. Memory can be obliterated that way — and his self recedes, back to shadows — and yet, he wants to convince me that his sense of dizziness is borne of something other than despair: I don’t believe him, for I’ve felt the wind blow in my hair, and noticed it was blowing north-eastwards — exactly at that moment when he violently tried to convince me it was blowing sou’ westerly.

He has taught me of unhappiness, and thus, somehow, despite himself, has warned me of the dangers of denying what I feel. He has tried to teach me that philosophy is suspect — and thereby has driven me, voracious, along an intellectual path. He has tried to warn me that work has to come before having a personality and has informed me why having one’s own sense of being is more vital than pleasing the boss at work.

Had I not understood all of this,  I would have been set more violently in disarray by powerful approaching storms.

wirds

wirds

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thinkin’

Drinking wine before breakfast isn’t exactly normal behaviour, but neither is having fucking menstrual cramps before breakfast.

I have to insist and I insist again: It is a women’s perogative to make up her mind.

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FIGHT CLUBBERRZ

FIGHT CLUBBERRZ

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There might….

I am 55% Asshole/Bitch.

I am abrasive, some people really hate me, but there may be a group of other tight knit assholes and bitches that I can hang out with and get me. Everybody else? Fuck ‘em.

Take the
Asshole/Bitch Test
@ FualiDotCom

I can be nice, too. Context is everything.

***************************************

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Faskinating….

As Pop-eye might say……….

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A time to think

I haven’t had much time to think. Until now I have been caught in a grid-lock of necessity, one thing after another. Just because I have had certain goals — like finishing my honours year — I have chosen to see my situation as made up a series of necessities. Like a child who knows that if she looks over her shoulder and sees a shop full of candy she would lose her necessary focus, I have resisted that urge. Until now.

Now I have time to think, a little time to recuperate. I need not see the future as an inevitable time line /factory line marked by various tokens of production.

I can be me.

And if I make a mistake at this point it’s not going to affect the whole flow of the whole inevitablity of the whole system of necessity I had set up in order to further myself.

No, no — Not at all.

I can take time (some time) just to relax.

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Philosophy is: "whatever we happen to do next"

Q. What is the difference between philosophy and grassroots “culture”?
A. You’re damned if I’m gonna let you know…..


JSM:
> Seeing what is objectionable in Christianity is to see Christianity as
> an attack on the will. It is not even pity as such that is the bad
> thing. Nietzsche is not as such opposed to concern for the weak or to
> charitable giving.
>

An attack on the will — that is correct. Last night, I did spent unhappy minutes talking to my parents at their house, trying to rebut their logical fallacy that because we could not know Everything that will happen in the next half hour, we
could not know Anything that would happen in the next half hour — and that consequently we shouldn’t try….

And why their fascination for this mode of thinking? Underlying it all is Christianity: Another term for moral AND intellectual irresponsibility (Nietzsche would call it “depravity”).

And what conclusions about living does my father accept — based on non thought processes which he wrongfully labels “philosophy”? None other than the concept of an “autonomous herd”, undisciplined, living from one half hour to the next, and yet somehow, unknown to itself — which is to say Unconsciously — being directed by a Divinity, which shapes its ends. (Actually he misconstrues lower-middle-class grassroots “culture” (really, he might have said “simple social tendencies”) as “Philosophy” and so implies that the herd already is endowed with genuine thinking capacities (thus he makes the fallacy of equivocation).

He also seems to “think” that his herd does not require (and “should not have”, viz. the first fallacy listed above) any particular need to reflect on global issues which extend beyond the subjectivity of their own noses.

Hohum.

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Shutuper yer eyes — and Empathize.

Today there shall be no training — and I will devote my attentions to other matters. In particular, I will only relegate 20 per cent of my concerns towards the issue of whether K. has found a second supervisor for me.

Last night I did eat Lamb Shanks at Christina’s Restaurant, and today I feel (even more so than yesterday) slightly revived.

Today I hope the one thing that won’t bug me is anything of a financial sort or origin. This traumatizes as it forces me to face the past in ways that make me hold my breath. Let me move forward.

Today I have cause to reflect on my various recoils from a life of genteel attitudes — folk who have built bridges to me, ostensibly on grounds of empathy — only to become backstabbing wenches. Or, conniving reprehensible parents, who attempt to clip the wings of their young as they’re attempting the emotional feat of flying, pretending this is all their best interests and using “empathy” disgustingly.

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Today

Today I did hit Mike with many body-rips and truly I did feel so much better.

I don’t like that “Mike” — he uses many psychological tactics against me. Like saying the many body rips hardly hurt, although I put my full power into them.

Then Mike did go to have a long shower after he came home, perhaps commiserating with himself about the many body-rips I did inflict. Perhaps he did also commiserate about the right eye damage which I did inflict with my left jab. I did notice that around his eye was red, a little irritated.

Today, I am back to my full measure of energy — the energy I had before I melted it between too many parallel projects and fell into a virtual heap (off-line as well).

Today, at least, I got that Mike. I have forgotten long travails from past adventures — and am ready to start afresh and anew!

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Time passing

It has past — time to get up. I now have on my chemical blue World Kickboxing Federation pants. On top of that (which is to say, on top) I have the ash-grey snuggly fitting dressing gown with hood, the one Mike bought for me from the men’s section at the local Target.

The gown has to be tied firmly around my taut waist. If not, it falls open, letting in some of the morning air, as well as exposing, for my own pleasure, a line of cleavage, thus giving me ideas of other forms of attire which could do this in a more flattering way.

I’m now 37 — and I don’t relate to blogs which mutter about weight loss. I find girly-talk odd. I have become accustomed to the typical woman as being not unlike the women I see in my martial arts gym. Seeing and acknowledging people there comprises most of my social life.

The women in martial arts may be different. Generally they do not wear makeup when I see them — at least beyond mascara. They don’t talk about their relationships .

It is true that I tend not to notice so much the lower belt women, who may be yet unconditoned to a martial way of life. It is the higher belt women who are my inspiration. Sure, they may fight flat footed after eight to ten rounds, but they still make it, in the end. There’s something valiant in that.

Such natural valiance has become a backdrop to my thinking. I no longer consider amazing feats of physical or mental endurance to be out of the ordinary. I’m now set on a trajectory to achieve this.

Yet, I find that this sort of achievement is mostly invisible in terms of its real meaning and intent. If I were to write my subtle reflections and views, for example on a blog, would I manage to draw a host of sympathetic female listeners, to hang off my every word and reassure me of my worth? Is this not the advantage which remains for 20-something women, who are not yet conditioned to more martial ways?

Having visited a number of female-written blogs, the tone is generally one of girly-joy, light frivolity and of light moments of shared sympathy during painful moments of bland hardship. If that’s really where a lot of life’s action’s at, I am screwed.

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The ring is a square!

Well, we did boxing corner defence yesterday and in my niceness of heart, which was really my desire not to be paired with the bird-like woman but also to give her the option to make up a suitable pair, I ended up relinquishing Mike to her, whilst I was partnered with the 6 foot tall guy — long reach, calm of temper.

We has spoken briefly before class — enough for Mike to establish that he was an African “like Jenny”. “Where are you from?” asked the British 50-year old, sharing the bench. “Zimbabwe,” I muttered. “WHERE?” she began, again. “Zimbabwe,” I muttered, looking at the ground.

“We are all foreigners here,” summed up Mike.

The “ring” is square and three meters each way.

How do you keep someone in a corner of the ring? You use push kicks. Once you’ve got them there, you close in with punches.

To be crowded by an opponent in the corner uses up a lot of psychological and physical energy — even when the rules restrict sparring to touch-contact.

Blood heats the body intensely for close quarter defences and attacks.

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Ramblings

Ramblings

A feisty femme.

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today I did learn: some merits of boolean logic

Today, I did learn about a practical application of Boolean logic — and indeed, my learning took a few (more than a few!) minutes of my time.

Today, I was a “progress recorder” or something effectively of that sort, for the under 17s tournament sparring. For this purpose,I was given funny diagrams on sheets of paper, filled with firey adolescents’ names, as well as names of upper primary school children. I had to state who was to fight next, and to have them called up in the proper order.

Only, this process involved boolyean logic in a way that your sincerest imagination would not have thought.

The reason is that there are “winners’ rounds” and “losers’ rounds”, and its important for the children, if they’re losing, even, to fight it off for third place, and to have a chance of placing.

Winners go on to spar each other for first and second place, but losers, too, must spar again, for third place isn’t a default position where there are more than three participating, but must itself be awarded on merit.

So, I turned up today, and watched the blunderbussers attacking one another, from my position on the ground, oh yeah. And sitting ringside, waiting to propel the fighters off me with my feet if they landed on top of me, I practiced logic on this rather violent — indeed sometimes terrifying — spectacle.

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The Assimilated Negro

The Assimilated Negro

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inbetween good and evil

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The Traceless Warrior

The Traceless Warrior

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Dire straits, health and finances

Today I did wake up with an allergy situation. Perhaps Mike and I both did. Both my ears were slightly blocked and my head pounded with extensive sinusitis — mucous flooding down the back of my throat, back of neck all tense, and deyhdrated tingling feeling emptying the contents of the back of my skull.

Mike’s right ear was completely blocked upon his waking.

Today I missed training, but Mike attended. The cause of his particular ear blockage may have been wax — mine was certainly more mucoid and alarming.

I have no particular goals at present — none which I am driven to achieve. For literally months I have worked hard to stay in one spot.  For years, I have been pining for a holiday. Perhaps one is on the horizon?

Today, I feel incredibly alone — and yet I do not long for company. My life is full — at least with as much as I can handle: My head, my brain is full — my nasal passages still inflamed with bottle brush intoxication.

My arms, my muscles hurt today — a kind of tired hurt. I’m stuck — there’s nowhere I can move to. Once again I feel like the frightened distance runner, looking down and looking back on all the territory I’ve covered, thinking, “How did these events of life — of mine and of those all around me — transpire so fast?”

I can’t believe it! Last time I flashed my eyes, I was much younger, more unsettled, incubating thousands upon thousands of impossible hopes.  That was before I turned inwards and to books. Count Dracular could hardly been expected to awaken.

Now realism has settled in to some degree: I am content enough to blink upwards, cursing the bottle brushes (or whatever tree it is that has caused my affliction!)

I am afraid — afraid for the vulnerability of things. My parents look old — my mother, especially, as she dropped $500 off this morning, part of a very small inheritance which lays upon me guilt ten times its actual value. My family, my ancestory…things I have been trying to escape, and which appear to be patiently tracking me, nonetheless, despite all the extensive efforts of this long distance runner.

I don’t care to calculate too much, anymore: I live one day at a time. Tomorrow Mike and I will go and officiate in some as yet unknown capacity, just down the road: A martial arts tournament. We have to meet at 10 am for the tournament’s 11 am start. Our evil scheme — actually, more a feature of human opportunistic reasoning which our Sensei and tournament promotor consciously capitalised on — was for us to get in free by being volunteers. That way we could avoid having to pay the $25 or so we would otherwise have to advance, to watch.

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