Magic

A scientist would study a sorcerer’s words and hand gestures, and he would practice and tinker with them in his lab, and when nothing seemed to come of it, he’d conclude that there was no such thing as magic.

Rules

The only rules in life are the ones you set for yourself,
and if you don’t follow them
no one else will.

Lloyd is Histrionic

History is the successful residue of everyone always getting everything wrong.

Conservatives control the radio and TV.

Liberals control movies and books.

Marvin is Happy and He Doesn’t Know It Clap Your Hands

Happiness is when you know some bad shit is about to happen and you're still happy.

Not Lloyd

I went outside to sit and write something, and in the field across the street there were some children learning capoeira. I had never seen them practicing there before and it made me think about how things fill up our spaces.

It often makes sense to define words by what they’re not. You can line up 100 different kinds of trees for someone who doesn’t know what a tree is, but if you then showed them a tomato plant, they might still mistake it for a tree. But, if you lined up 100 things that were similar to a tree, but not a tree, they’d figure it out much quicker.

I think people are like that too. Other people are who we’re not; they fill in our voids. When you move to a new place you always end up meeting people who remind you of people from the last place, or from the place before. Those are your people.

Some people get put off if I open up to them too quickly, but it’s because I’ve known them my whole life.

And events are like that too. They fill in the space you’ve opened up for yourself, based on the stance you’ve taken. Your life is the eddy behind a rock in the middle of a creek.

Some people mistake stubbornness for determination. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s this!”
But the problem is, they’re wrong.
Stubbornness is not budging. Determination is navigating towards something.

I think seeing things as action/reaction or cause/effect only works for very simply things. Not everything is so simple. When I push a wooden block with my hand it moves across the table, so that works. But if I approach more complicated tasks as a longer series of small simple tasks something gets lost along the way.
In order to encourage bigger things to happen, new spaces need to be created for them to appear. Like Duchamp said, “Your chance is not the same as mine. Just as your throw of the dice will rarely be the same as mine.”

Hegel believed that the history of man is a progression towards rationality; that man is an organizing force that improves over time. Like how, for the most part, we end up being our parents, except for the small things we decide to change. Maybe our parents didn’t care as much about the environment, or maybe they were alcoholics and beat us, but we swore we’d never be like them. Man lives the same life over and over again with tiny incremental gains; evolution.

Anx Worth It

Love Can Make You Hostage

Tonight after work I walked down the Avenue to see some capoeira. The capoeira academy is upstairs and there are big open windows so there were a few of us standing outside on a rickety deck watching. Everyone inside was sitting or standing in a circle, there were people playing a big conga and some other instruments I’d never seen before, and everyone was singing and clapping. There’s always 2 people in the middle of the circle doing capoeira, which looks like a mixture of dancing and fighting- if Dairy Queen sold capoeira it’d be their new low fat Brazilian Blizzard, no ice cream, just frozen fists dancing on winds of graceful limbs, stunning you with their beauty. Anyway those words are not like how beautiful it is. It’s men and women, all different ages, and there was even a serious-looking older gentleman in a beret who couldn’t kick that high anymore but could still kill you with those eyes. A guy standing outside with me asked if I knew what it was all about, I said no, but it’s beautiful isn’t it, and he offered me his theories concerning different color belts and various levels of aggressiveness he had noticed, then we kept quiet watching for a while. Then he left and as he walked by he said But I wish I knew the objective, in response to something I didn’t say out loud but that he may have gathered from my smile. Then everyone stood and tightened up the circle and starting singing louder, and a few women did the capoeira really fast and spirited as the circle started jumping up and down- then even the capoeira stopped, there was just dancing and singing, the deck was shaking, and a crazed bald-headed Brazilian man was urging everyone to sing louder and dance a little stranger, and they all pressed close together as the drum was beaten and they all sang the same song. At this moment I was feelin right and felt like I almost knew that Baba was definitely there, I mean here, and that he had chosen to be here on this sweaty deck when he has the whole world, both night and day to choose from, that he’d rather be here on this sweaty old deck than in some pious church adorned with dry prayers, that he’d rather be here on this joyous deck than in some quiet bedroom with people dreaming of themselves. Are there people out there who have dreams without themselves, who dream of some other guy flying, and some other lucky person falling in love? Cuz that would be great. And as I walked away I was still feelin right, but I started feelin some kinda way, that way I used to feel after taking a bunch of drugs, or while spending time with a woman, that feeling of greatness that cannot get any greater, which means it can only get worse. After drugs and women it became a bitchin meditation ending, blending into my restless mind, now it’s the feeling I get when I think I’m saying goodbye to someone I don’t know is with me all the time. And as I was comin down I thought of young Baba bashing his lovely head against a stone till they both were bloody, and they both were Him, and I thought, comin down ain’t gonna get any easier kid, so you better get used to it.