I am a finger scratching a head—a head that I may or may not be. Then I start to think and I am surely the head.

We’re not the same I’m afraid. But then again, I might be more afraid if we were. See, I’m alone. And so are you.

We are, all of us, as far as we know, in unchartered waters. That is, this has never happened before. And for that matter, this will never happen again. What a marvelous moment; it is ours!

What if “why” had no purpose other than argumentation with those who still believe in it? What if Dionysus is the true God? But no, surely there is order, and therefore there is “why.” And even without order, there may still be “why.”

I feel now as if I’m living for the first time: as if I’m really just starting to listen, actually, and see, actually, and the whole world flows through me.

I feel something crawling on the back of my neck, I think it is a bug. I reach back to pull it off but it is attached to myself, I pull and pull and unravel.

People say, that sounds like Whitman. But I have never read that Whitman. So who sounds like who?

You have the same type of clothes in your closet, the same work on your desk, the same friends. You live one life; you have one mask. That you have one history is not the warrant for this, for your one history is filled with multitudes. You chose a singularity because they told you to.

It is social, I think, that we each choose one identity. So that we might belong. Birds of a feather flock together. In the queue, thankful for comrades, ahead and behind, in order, buffering, letting him know he is in his place. A cog, on the correct gear, in the correct machine, in the correct factory. Because a cog that fits everywhere fits nowhere.

For the same reason I thought to write my books under pseudonyms, I give each idea its own point of view, its one whole identity. An eclectic personality makes people uncomfortable. Because it makes readers uncomfortable that such disparate styles might exist in one mind. At least because they do not know which of their own masks to feign, or for those who have only one, whether or not to smile.

My childhood I spent finding myself. My youth, losing myself. Now, noone, I will spend the rest of my life finding everyone else.

Fight the fleetingness, but what persists? Even the most principled man, do his habits fade? And the smartest; he eventually forgets. And the strongest; he eventually grows weak.

In the shower, like a waterfall, with peppermint soap stinging and smelling like sharp air. In the shower, in the bathroom, in the apartment, on the floor, twenty two floors above the ground—what delivered me here? What delivered us here? So high above the ground.

I dreamed like you last night. It was raining, like every drop was a shape or color that gave space and light to the world, like a whole garage sale full of high school band instruments bouncing on the earth’s surface, bleeding rainbow into a topograph.

For the first time I could not tell dream from reality, but I was aware both were equally possible. Then I took the elevator to a floor that I had entirely created with my mind, and I created a vase of flowers. And I thought then surely this is a dream, but then I thought maybe it is reality. But no, because I remembered I was not an architect or a vase-maker or a flower-grower. Then I created another. And I thought again, surely this is a dream, because I’m not God. Though now thinner is the veil.

Oatmeal is bang on after a long vacation. Like separation makes the heart grow fonder. Travel makes for new worlds, and brings a freshness to the old one. Travel makes new worlds; it makes the old one new too.

I discover myself in others: find my heart in love, my mind in conversation. I discover myself in nature: my eyes in rainbows, my fingers on tree branches, my ears in morning birds. I discover myself in myself: my thinking mind and my observing mind.

Surely I could, hurdle myself headlong in the direction of fact and exactitude. And for what? To stand on the shoulders of giants, and not stand my full height on my own. And what’s more, at the cost of the time I might spent with the humanities. Leave the understanding to the gods.

Sometimes ideas don’t fit clean together. Order preceded by order just is. White preceded by white just is. Order preceded by chaos is peace. White preceded by black is light. When even opposites have meaning together, what doesn’t?

She says, “I want to feel permanently how jazz sounds.” She understands jazz more than me; I understand her more than anyone else. But of course ‘more’ is a funny word to say about these things.

I am keen to be going somewhere, spatially—traveling. Even when I sit, I travel, temporally—this going forward, I enjoy less, but am glad for the motivation it affords me.

We are born animal, live as humans, and die godlike. If another species rises to the top of the food chain and learns to think, I wish their kind all the humanity we enjoyed ourselves, before they too ascend to the gods with us.

Thinking in those terms endemic to my own experience. When I explain, it is best to use the descriptors of the world where I live and the language through which I experience reality.

To contemplate solitude amid company, and death amid life, for how quickly after satiation does all the hunger go?

In the depths of exercise, music, readings, mediation, nature—this is where I found my joy. When you are alone, do not be so quick to fly to the shallow sociality, drugs, food, sleep and the easy pleasures; instead, hold out for the greater pleasures. Sweeter sun is just beyond the visible horizon.

Obsession as rebirth from a lifeless life. What does it mean that a ‘beauty’ is qualified by the adjective ‘American.’ At once it was a free beauty, now it is a commercial beauty. Like a beautiful restaurant dinner. Knife and fork parallel on either side of a perfect circle underneath a perfect meal paid for with papers that have killed some and reborn others, let alone the pant leg groping that goes on underneath the table cloth. The greatest chaos under the tablecloth of structure, the greatest pleasure under asceticism.

The history of histories: in each macro segment of history there are micro segments vying for power, each with models and weights for each other.

In the world of exactitude and borders and corners, my energy flows less but more swells, welling up as if my power came from inside.

It is when I explain, and my conversater replies, “That is exactly how I feel,” that I feel betrayed. That word ‘exactly’ should not be used to describe feeling, and especially not in comparing the feelings of two different people. Even logically, when I explain my maths, that is not ‘exactly’ why you understand it.

I tried to be one way, and the universe pushed me to be a different way. I wanted to sleep; the universe filled my head with dreams.

Humans created God. He was fiction, but now He is real. Fiction becomes non-fiction once it is written; it and its effects on its readers become real history. God has caused war and peace, love and suffering. God, as an idea, is even more real to man than His omni-form.

When you step into my body.

There are those things that you wish to know and experience, only that in doing so you can never be the same. It’s the paradox of learning in reverse: it might be bad or good for you, but how can you know until you’ve done it, and once you’ve found out, it’s already happened, and you can’t go back to the way things were.

There are two kinds … The dichotomy is rarely exhaustive, but the paradigm is helpful.

Love as a prisoner’s dilemma: each caught by the other, each asking the other to confess the feeling crime. Held in the same interrogation room. Promiscuity is the Nash equilibrium.

The hungry man wants on.

A bigger masculine and a smaller feminine—must that be it? But, of course, that is not the right question. Unless your only paradigm is physical, spatial, real—which it is not.

Optimal social behavior learned from socialite peers, leftover predatory teeth-showing.

It’s a backwards thing, but why? Is there no feeling of missing what is still to happen? Like there is for what already has. But maybe that’s why. Because it will.

It’s yours but it’s not. Like a thought you can’t remember. It’s there, but not really—memory isn’t the real thing.

It’s so far close. Like an apple in a glass box. To see, not taste; remember not live.

Like her hair and his smile, the wet smell of cider and sound of warmth—and all else that made that day what it was. All else, except of course, that it was, and therefore will not again be.

He claims to be one but really there are many in him. His is the small one, part of a whole. To be One is to be all, the One. The order goes like this: lower one, many, higher One.

For every argument there is a counterargument; an antagonist for every protagonist. We often assign good and bad to each side, but really they are two sides of a coin, and there is no way of telling whether it is heads or tails. The flipped coin lays locked in a closed fist.

I don’t like the idea of a period as punctuation. Is a sentence not a small paragraph, and a paragraph a small section, and a small section a book, so is not a sentence a book?

Solemn, sulking, looking down, frowning, feeling, oops, now sleeping, but still feeling, dreaming, flying, feeling, falling, falling: you wake with a start and grasp the chair arms.

Oopsy toolip, whoopsy flour, pocket full of poses. Ashes, smashes, we all stand straight.

This isn’t poetry, sounds or meaning, but it certainly is, all of that, or none of it. So what, if not, by the normal means. The original Socratic thought wisdom the means of purifying our virtue. But whose wisdom? Surely not his which says there is none. Nor hers which said art.

Then whose? While God is away. You there! Yes, your wisdom. Be my arbiter brother. Surely you think these words, even feel them. By wisdom? What say you? No surely not. Then how is it that this nonsense work. Random seems a more noble life, than by our conditioning. Art then, at least us. But is this random nonsense not also from my conditioning?

Merry is the go around.

Isn’t the best nighttime avant-garde artist a capitalist salesman by day? Who first follows the rules in order to later break them. Like an enemy is killed on the battlefield, but a traitor is guillotined in the public circle.

My fridge is bulimic.