Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

What is reality?

Imagine a block of cheese.

Imagine something carves that cheese into different shapes.

Reality is the cheese, the shapes, the carving strokes, the tool that carves, and the intelligence that decides where to carve.

[LastThursday]

On 25/06/2020 at 9:01 PM, LastThursday said:

What would you do if you met God? In the street?

Ok let's tone it down.

What would you do if you met your celebrity crush? In the street?

I think there would be many reactions to this:

• Disbelief
• Joy
• Embarrassement
• Walking on by pretending nothing's going on
• Sign the T-shirt I'm wearing. NOW!!
• Selfieeeee!!!!!
• "...Kiss me gosh darnit..." blush
• Don't do anything Ms Celebrity, just keep looking at me me me

Ok Zooey you get the picture. I mean... Anyhow.

How would you even recognise God?

Does God even bother to inhabit a human body anyway? Isn't God some sort of aloof asshole who decides to interfere with your life when you least want it? Didn't God die anyway, wasn't it Nietzsche that killed him, I think...?

Questions. Questions. Questions.

Fuck. What if you are actually God. I mean everyone else is just a normal run-of-the-mill human, but you are actually The God, The Creator. All those poor souls you interact with every day, the people you love and hug and talk to. And all that nature and all those cities and animals and plants and humanity and oceans and stars and galaxies and all that fucking empty space.

What are you supposed to do with all that stuff? Why you? Why this peculiar body with two arms and legs and a head? Why any of it?

What would you want God to actually do, if you met him or her in the flesh?

I just want God to look me in the eye and say "Hey, don't I know you?"

I came across this YouTube and was reminded of my old post. Keanu and Sandra are so clueless. Nicole Kidman? I would actually die. We're just people doing people things.

 

[LastThursday]

Almost exactly a year ago now I voluntarily gave up working. 

Working for other people has never gelled well with me. It got so bad at my previous job that even just talking to the boss would induce a fight or flight reaction, and I was losing sleep at night. It was a real shame in a lot of ways that I came to the decision to quit, the job was perfect in a lot of ways. The office was down the road a less than a ten-minute walk away, but ridiculously and amazingly I got to work from home four days out of five. And, I mostly knew what I was doing very proficiently. What spoiled the broth was me changing job positions within the company about a year before I quit.

I had been doing work for a particular client (which I'm sure I've written about in this journal), but then that client decide to collapse (their company was sold up) and my job position was gone, my bosses since they ran another business moved me over to retain me. But in that move the whole complexion of the thing changed, most of the work I was to do would be directly for my boss and not for a client. Every relationship is different and this one didn't work out so well.

In many jobs I've had many managers who basically treated me badly. Despite having obvious prodigious ability in coding there is something about my character that rubs people up the wrong way. I essentially know what that is: I'm my own person who doesn't tolerate bullshit, I have a lassez faire "mask" to my demeanour and don't do getting flustered or standing to attention. Some bossy people don't like those attributes. And so I get maltreated as a response. I'm reminded of a little competition we had once in one of my previous jobs where we were to design a spinning roulette wheel for a gambling game in HTML. I ended up being the only person to complete the thing in the allotted time - did the bosses award me the prize? No.

So what have I been doing for a year? Not much. That "not much" has to be qualified however, I have been working consistently since 1996 and the last stretch of non-work I had was around 2001 for about 18 months when the dot.com bubble burst. A year of "not much" is nothing, in fact I want to get another year in if I can, and indefinite is my dream. A friend suggested a job opening at his place in London for mega-bucks with the possibility of working from home. I can't bring myself even to contemplate it, it's just more of the same and it fills me with dread.

But that same friend and I were discussing little project that we had in mind to work on. He wants to create a paid or subscription service to get high-school maths questions posted every month for those parents out there. I had an idea for a phone app for hiking. ChatGPT has been instrumental in getting both these ideas off the ground, my main friction being I've never developed for Android or iOS. But I have a working app now, and have been wrangling with 60,000 UK place names and Welsh don't even talk to me about Welsh. But I hope to push something to the Play Store in the next month or two. If I could make a few thousand a month: an app a month say, then I could stay afloat indefinitely. Please god make my dream come true 🧎🙏

[LastThursday]

Things I cannot let go of.

I had another of my weird synchronicities recently. There was a period in my life when these used to happen fairly frequently and I had a love/hate relationship with them. I've never particular been spooked by synchronicities but damn they're very inconvenient at times.

I remember parking up at a friend's once with the intention of just popping in and seeing them for a few minutes. They live in a quiet residential area, but parking is permit only, which she had but I said but I told her I would be quick and not to worry. In the space of those ten minutes I got a ticket. Bear in mind a physical person would have had to give me the ticket. There was no one around when I parked up, and there was no one around when I left!

Aside from synchronicity, there is the weirdness with people. It's particularly hard for me to put my finger on it, but it's mostly the I-think-about-them-and-they-appear effect. Many times I will start thinking about someone absent-mindedly and they will contact me soon after or I bump into them in the street. It could be brushed off as coincidence, in that I think about a lot of people a lot of the time, but those particular instances have a "feel" to them that are different, like a feeling of something imminent approaching. At times it's got so bad that I have to purposefully not think about people! As you can imagine that is quite difficult to do, but thankfully I'm adept at both distraction and quieting my mind.

When I was younger I used to attract a lot of weirdos and randos in the street. I would be minding my own business and they would come up to me and ask me for cigarettes, or money, or directions to some random place I've never heard of, or want to invade my space. My girlfriend at the time in fact used to get so annoyed by the whole thing that she would blame me for "looking at them and encouraging them" - my retort was to say to her "what the hell should I look at then?" lol. But I think it was more than that, there was some kind of vibe I was emanating that was being latched on to by others in need. In fact was I followed by someone like that into my workplace lobby once and security had to deal with them - obviously, I got blamed for that too, for "bringing them into the building", all I could think was WTF? Thank god those days have left me behind. People mostly leave me alone nowadays. Although I did have an odd experience on a train a few years back, which I've written about here already.

Then there are the "bad feeling" vibes I get. One especially salient experience was leaving my car in London (where I don't live) to go on holiday. From the get-go I had a bad feeling about leaving the car there, but for the wrong reasons. The area I left my car in was a little rough and I was concerned it would be broken into or whatever, but I kept telling myself it would be ok. A week later I returned and it was absolutely fine. I needed to reverse out of the tight parking space to get out, and realised I might hit the car behind me and slammed on my brakes - at the point there was an almighty crunch and I thought I had in fact hit the car. No. But now I the car wouldn't move, I tried the ignition the engine was going, but the car was immobile. It turned out that transmission drive shaft - which is a big hunk of metal - had broken in two. Nice.

The great question I cannot let go of is, is this shit real? I think it is. The greater question is can I control it and if so how? I have my theories and it's largely about being in a certain state of mind, attentive, but inattentive, focused but unfocused. It's certainly slippery to grab on to.

Anyway, what was my latest synchronicity? I'd had an odd thought pop up about a YouTube channel I watch called Tokyo Lens. The guy there does a lot of stuff about the culture Japan and what it's like there - I like his energy - but he's not from Japan. At one point though he decided to learn to fly and was going through why it was such a difficult thing to do in Japan etc. That was years ago though and it kind of went cold. Earlier in the week I thought "I wonder what happened to this guy's flying aspirations?" At the same time a friend of mine said he'd lined up some sort of surprise for me, as a thank you for all the hours and days free work I'd given him working on his house etc. That was supposed to be Tuesday, then he said no make it Wednesday. I had no idea what it could be. Lo and behold Wednesday morning this Tokyo Lens guy drops a video about his flying lessons and explains that all those years ago there'd been some sort of accident possibly involving him and it was all on hiatus in Japan - he'd instead gone back to Canada to take up flying lessons again. That synchronicity made me laugh.  Of course the other synchronicity was more ridiculous, my friend had got me this flying lesson the same day:

 

 

Edited Friday at 08:41 AM by LastThursday

[MuadDib]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DY2UTSgMoJp/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbLZk36oD0w/

[LastThursday]

@MuadDib I do enjoy your right-brained responses as an antidote to my wordiness, I'll let it marinate.

[LastThursday]

Quote

I am your lover. I am your secret affair. I am the bandit, the pirate, the gypsy. I am the Bedouin riding hard across the desert in white and flowing robes. I will gather you up, my love, I will adore you, I will adorn you, I will praise you, I will serenade you, and when the lights are quiet and your serrated beauty flickers in the shadows, I will caress your hair and lay you down upon silk, upon clouds, and I will put the full weight of my body on your body, and you will bear witness to the picture-perfect reflection of you and me together. This I will do and more. I will delight in your delight. I will give you everything, everything of myself to you entirely, an exhilaration of you and me. You understand all this, don’t you, my love? Yes, I can see in your eyes that you do.

The Alabaster Girl

Damn you Zan Perrion. You may wear a costume, but I can sip coffee.

Quote

 

... the white of the milk slowly sank into the coffee, at first reluctant to mix. But slowly we become entranced with the swirling motion, the tendrils and filigree of forms dancing one inside the other. That physical swirl of beauty in itself becoming ever finer with cycles within cycles until in the limit it seemingly became one motion, one substance. And yet, there was a knowing that the dance still continued at all scales of that microcosm within a cup, never quite one, never quite two, but nevertheless something new and unexpected. We both took to that simple elixir its sensations indelible from our tastes for ever more.

LastThursday

 

 

Edited 37 minutes ago by LastThursday