Thus Spake Zara Who?

So I was trying to rationalize the idea of ‘acquired’ taste to myself earlier, persuasively arguing inwardly, you know, left brain v. right brain kinda stuff. And one of me was losing badly. This is what happens when I walk home from work and elect not to read, which has been of late the fad, but instead allow my mind to wander along next to me, stopping occasionally, smelling the roses, and catching up at the next traffic signal. Tangentially speaking, it’s always been the time when I write the most. Walking home. When I was in architecture school, I’m sure I wrote more songs during that 15 minute walk home from studio at 4 in the morning than at any other time. In the early morning hours when no one else was out on the streets and I could walk along singing away without feeling foolish, as I do when I try it now. Maybe it’s the chance for your brain to mull over everything that’s happened during the day, and then cram it back down your throat. A sort of waking dream kind of state. Which, after Texas and California, is the third best state. A state where all inspiration strikes. Where Eureka’s happen. I mean, this is solid gold blogging material I’ve got going on here as a result. Stick a diamond on it, propose, and I’m yours forever. Wait. No. I’ll propose to you. That’ll be less confusing.

The profundity of my argument is rapidly disappearing as I forget what it was. See? I’m not walking anymore. All thought has been lost. But oh man it was killer. Something to do with questioning why people first found it necessary to acquire certain tastes. And please note that this follows on from a pub lunch conversation, which are never the most lucid of conversations. But nobody likes coffee when they first try it, as wonderful as it might smell. Nor beer, wine, or any liquor really. And yet we force ourselves to continue drinking it. Social pressure? Maybe. The desired effects worth the initial outlay? Maybe. We, as a species, are stupid? *nods head sagely, even knowingly, incorporating the wisdom of a thousand ages into his piercing glance, and then walks away* I mean, do animals acquire tastes? And more importantly, do lions really like raw meat? If given a choice, would a pride of lions rather feast on fresh-kill gazelle, or maybe sit down to a candlelit dinner, chicken cordon bleu in front of them and a side salad, with a glass of dry white wine and a cheese tray for afters? This is the point where half of my mind gave up the argument on the grounds of the other half’s incompetence, and began reading a Phillip Pullman novel.

As a side note, meaning its relation to the above is tenuous at best, I’d like to add that while an undeniably great amount of thinking occurs when walking, does anyone else find they do their absolute, positively best thinking in the shower? Yes? Good. I thought so. Me too. Something about that blast of hot water clearing and focusing your thoughts, even as the mist obscures everything around you. I bet that’s the secret of all the great philosophers. They prob’ly spent their lives in the shower, emerging only occasionally to propose some brilliant new thesis and then retiring to their steam filled shower cubicles to further ponder life’s great mysteries. Right down the line, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Snoopy, you can tell ‘em all by their well-conditioned hair, their clean smiling faces, their pruned fingers and toes. I really must take more showers. Elevate my own level of thinking. Remember, never trust a dirty philosopher.

And no, not that kind of dirty.

Lend Me Your Ears

I have no ambition. And I used to view this as a virtue. Ambition to me was some dark force that sauntered hand in hand with arrogance through the evil places of the world. And I think this view was in part arrived at due to a play I saw in my impressionable youth. A play put on by my sister’s 6th grade class, taught by my dad, in which Caesar was called ambitious by the narrator, prompting a chanted chorus of students yelling, ‘Caesar was ambitious, Caesar was ambitious!’ The implication naturally being that Caesar’s ambition was ultimately the cause for his downfall. And so to avoid all possibilities of a downfall, I erased ambition from my list of desirables.

However, it’s recently come to my attention that maybe ambition is a good thing. Not the sort of ambition whereby you trample lesser beings to reach your goals and the ends justify the means. Not that sort of ambition. Instead a sort of ambition whereby you have goals. Aye. There’s the rub. Else we’re just going through the motions. And who wants that? Everybody wants some higher purpose. Some ‘reason.’ Well fine. I don’t have the goals yet, but I shall have the ambition. No more will I drift from interest to interest, devoting myself to nothing. Now I shall single-mindedly pursue what will soon be my ultimate goal of the total domination of the world. And so be it if one day, on the Senate floor, you surround me all in your togas on the Ides of March, and close in on me. And I’ll look at you, yes you, who were so close to me and whom I loved, and I’ll say, with a tear in my eye…

‘Et tu Brute?’ .

Climb on Two by Two

The doves have been sent out, and we are currently awaiting the return of an olive branch to reassure ourselves that Oxford does still exist, and will one day raise itself from the depths of the River Cherwell and revel in the glory of a bygone era. That era being last Sunday, before the city sank. And when those doves return I shall once again be able to walk across the meadows to work, rather than face the prospect of a morning swim to the office. And maybe, just maybe, the sun will shine once more on these fields of gold and we can stumble off our ark, splash through the last fading puddles in our galoshes, and get back to digging life and all its thrills. And these will be the days we remember. It's summertime, the wind is blowing, and a sunny day is just around the corner.

So let's be sure these days continue.

London Calling

Weekend in the city, here I come. Or there I went. For I made my way up to London Friday. Running away to the bright lights and swingin' vibes of the big city. Made it there in the evening and immediately joined a queue to buy Underground tickets, and then proceeded to wait there laughing and singing The Shins 'Australia' while a large Spanish family deliberated over what they wanted and finally paid an inordinate sum for whatever tickets they needed. Keep in mind, this day was one of those inexplicably wonderful days where the world turns in your honor, and every dark moment is made golden. So then I paid my own inordinate sum for tickets and shoved my way onto the next train. But I didn't take the available seat. No. Instead I had a romantic image in my head of standing there, swaying with the motion and peering over the top of a high-brow novel, Kerouac's 'On the Road,' at the crowds seething and surging around and past me. But I got distracted and started reading instead. And only just in time looked up to see my station. So then I came bounding off the train with some bizarre, unbridalled enthusiasm and a boundless energy and made straight for the middle escalator, the broken one, thinking I could race up it in no time and skip past everyone laughing. And I bundled onto it, negotiating the first half steps, which I'll add are a beyond treacherous mind-game, and then looked up to find myself on the longest escalator in the universe. I've since checked. Why oh why did I forget I was on the lowest level of the Underground? But it was too late and I plunged on, taking the steps two at a time and passing another wayward, struggling fool halfway up. And I tried to look nonchalant and relaxed and maintain that energy, but it was agony, and I stumbled off the apparently moving half-steps at the top with my legs shaking and crawled through the turnstile and out onto the crowded streets.

'Welcome to London,' they said down to me.

Awareness is Divine

So what I was thinking was, what I was thinking, and yes, thinking being the critical word, and thinking just like this, in these very same words, what I was thinking was this. Conscious thought, not thought itself, but conscious thought is directly linked to language. Or it could be. Bear with me here. This has frighteningly little relevance to your life. Now obviously we can think without language. Whenever we’re walking down the street we might see a squirrel in a tree branch, or hear a bird call, or notice a bright red car driving down the sidewalk towards us, and our sub-conscious processes these, sifts through them, and calls to our attention the relevant data. But it’s not until these things are voiced in our mind, i.e. ‘Holy fuck! There’s a bright red car driving straight for me!’ or, if you’re French, ‘Putain de mon dieu! Il y a un voiture rouge qui se conduit directement pour moi!,’ that they become conscious thoughts. And they’re conscious thoughts because we have voiced them, in our minds or out loud. So the thought that coalesced from this, or the question rather, I s’pose it was more of a question, so the question was, ‘is it possible to have conscious thought without language?’ Is that the crucial ingredient to human’s awe-inspiring discovery of ‘self’? The awareness of our own reality, is that a product of divine intervention? Or is it merely the development of intelligence to a level where communication is possible, and then, utilizing those self-same tools of communication, the creation and expression of abstract thought. Is it possible that it’s not merely ‘I think, therefore I am,’ for all animals think, even if it’s only their subconscious telling them they need to eat or sleep and their thought processes instinctively answering those basic needs, but is it really, ‘I can say that I think, therefore I am’? And if that’s the case, does that mean that I’m smarter in English, since my French isn’t that good? Or is it unrelated? Could I abstract this entire argument, or divulgence, or cacophony of nonsense, or whatever it is, into non-linguistic thought, and then express the same sentiments with complete understanding to myself without the reliance on a single word? Or is it necessary, as in Wheel of Fortune, to talk it out?

And really, I mean deep down honestly, we’re talking pure as a lamb soul-bared truth, is it really necessary to ask so many bloody questions?

You Make Me Blush

I fear I haven’t been living life to the fullest recently. Too many days have passed unseized. So I’ve decided to rectify that situation and, with the aid of a new credit card which gives me near limitless spending capacity of money I don’t have… buy the world. Started yesterday with chicken, pasta, a rose wine and a cucumber, but tomorrow I might just buy the grocery store. And they say that money can’t buy you happiness. That the best things in life are free. That money is the root of all that kills. Or maybe that one was just Everclear’s feeble attempt at poetry hidden within the verse of a high school anthem. Art Alexakis might well have been the worst lyricist ever, and calling it poetry was beyond a stretch of the term. I mean, after Santa Monica it was just a downhill slide. What? What the hell are you talking about Davey? It’s a left at the next street, then second crossroads hang a right, and, wait, oh for fuck's sake. Just take me back to the start.

The topic was carpe diem’s and all their accessories. So what does my buying groceries have to do with seizing the day? Absolutely nothing, but dinner was wonderful last night. And as the sun disappeared over the horizon it lit up the cloud line; a last defiant blood red dripping across the sky. I was suitably awestruck and pretended that I couldn’t see the construction cranes over the treetops, or the row houses running along the field, and pictured myself watching the end of the world from a fencepost in the middle of nowhere. And we toasted each other, me and the sky, and drank our wine in a companionable silence.

And it’s possible, just barely possible, that it went straight to my head.

The Fabric of Our Lives

So I’ve discovered an obvious wormhole into a separate dimension. There’s a fundamental tear in the space-time continuum, and it’s already claimed my favorite belt and, more worryingly, my house keys. Somehow, and I remain wholly confounded as to how, both items have disappeared within the confines of my room. And I must say that, while it’s not a particularly small room, it is rather a sparsely furnished room on account of my having begun a new life half the world away with two suitcases and a backpack. Not enough clutter for their disappearance to simply be explained by a lack of organizational skills. No. This hints at something much darker. Something sinister. Douglas Adams once told me that there’s an entire planet inhabited by missing fountain pens that have quite simply fucked off to the stars. Apologies for the profanity there, entirely my own and not the good Mr. Adams’. But the point remains that my leather belt is now sunning himself with an iced mojito on some beach resort island three galaxies down the road and my jeans are falling down, all on account of an accidental wormhole located on 39 Ferry Road, Oxford, OX3 0EU. Happily though, the other dimension for my keys was just down the stairs and around the corner and I have since reclaimed them. Ever notice I use the word happily a lot as a conjunction? I like to think it says something positive about my inner psyche. I also use the phrases ‘ever notice?’ and ‘I like to think’ to the point of excess. Everything in moderation said the wise man, and then slowly drank himself to death. But the truth is I’m just frightfully unoriginal. Happily though, yes, happily, about half the time I’m plagiarizing myself, which in this legal world that’s insidiously destroying us, is considered relatively kosher. And the other half of the time I’m simply plagiarizing people you don’t know. Leaving about twenty percent for poor mathematics skills and obvious pirating of well-known material. The truth is out there, just not here. This is changing the subject, but have you ever been reading something, and someone says something completely loony without even realizing it? What do you do? Do you let it slide?

I say just punch him then and there.