2.06.2010

Butch



"The night of the fight you might feel a slight sting. That's pride fuckin wit you [points to head]. Fuck pride! Pride always hurts. It never helps.....In the fifth, your ass goes down."

2.02.2010

Island of the Shitty Monkeys

"Do you know the story of the monkeys of the shitty island?" I asked Noburo Wataya.

He shook his head, with no sign of interest. "Never heard of it."

Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that have also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle.”

I drank the rest of my coffee.

"As I sat here looking at you," I continued, "I suddenly remembered the story of this shitty island. What I'm trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it."

from Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

B C

Old freewrite

I was in New Orleans recently. One of the lakes that flooded NO is
called Lake Pontchartrain. It's pronounced
pon-cha-TRAIN, which is
difficult for a person like myself to get his head around. No matter
how many times I said it to myself, I lost the ability to pronounce it
correctly a hour later. Now, two weeks later, I see the word and the
correct pronunciation comes back to me immediately. Is that the
transfer of working memory (short-term) to long-term memory? We saw
Lake Pontchartrain on a tour that included a visit to Vietnamese town
of NO where there are Vietnamese po-boys -- hot grilled pork with
cilantro, Creole mayo, Ponzu sauce, salad, on a sandwich po-boy roll.
"The beloved appears unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. […] To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved."

Gilles Deleuze, from Proust and Signs