I wear what I think I should. Fashion is skewed largely towards form in a world of environments so regulated as to have less need for clothes for their original purpose.

In a new time and place and still how quickly things become old and routine so that your mind need only travel familiar pathways.

You become an adult and things get edges and contracts are binding and your identity gets tighter as your history cannibalizes your future and there’s less room to stretch out and breathe deep, but of course that is only looking at it one way, for in another way there are depths in the tightness and passion in the exactitude, and an adult can still be a child whenever he wishes, the only difference is that now he has become his own parent, and his adult self cares for the safety and hunger of his child self, he is grown up and powerful to play his role in society, but also young and curious to step into a forest on the weekend and hug a tree as if it were all for the first time. Child is not only for youth and adult is not only for grown up, they are both within me always.

I am more and more comfortable in each of many places, more a dweller of the earth rather than just of my hometown, more restful to sleep in a new place, less anxious to travel far away, more understanding of people different from myself and places different from where I was raised, there is a feeling of comfort and safety in one’s own home, the lack of which is what we call home sickness.

I am less homesick nowadays for my home is bigger. I imagine I might be homesick to leave earth, to travel in space or visit another planet, but now I have learned to stretch myself and learn and adapt and even far away from earth I would only be homesick for a little while until I made friends with aliens and learned to walk in less gravity, just like I learned to make friends with different cultures on earth and be healthy in different climates.

And my primal self is more relaxed, less anxious for my safety and food security. In large part this is due to the modern economy and ease of transportation and scale of food supply in America. I am thankful for the opportunity to see and live in so much of such a beautiful world.

God please don’t let me lose this newness of vision, please let me see the world like the first time, like I’m traveling to a place I’ve never been before, when my world fills up with possibilities and I see more paths than the routine one. God please don’t let me lose this newness of vision.

When you learn something new and then incorporate it into your beliefs/change your opinion instead of just ignoring it or keeping it separate.

I work up my temporal strength to hold on to a moment; I revel in the feeling of pain or meditate in the heights or even just listen to silence that slows the clock hands.

But as soon as I get hold of one moment the next few pass quickly. And they always pass eventually, even the ones that pass slow. And so inevitably it seems time has gone by all at once.

My father always told me I’d understand things when I’m older. I’m old enough now to understand that even though I hold onto my youth as much as I can, I’ll look back when I’m older and breathe deeply for no matter how slowly I tried to pass the moments, I could not stop them from passing altogether.

We champion only capitalist, and thus monetary, success in post-industrial America. When there are so many amazing humans who have excelled in disciplines that are not so fashionable and appreciated at this time. I wonder if there is an artistic or spiritual revolution coming, when we realize how far we’ve come in the physical world and see that we’ve had enough for centuries now.

Two ways to think about hunger: it’s annoying that I have to eat; or, it’s great that I have the desire to taste again. Two ways to think about sleep: I’m wasting all this time; or, I get to rest

The energy is not in you; it passes through you: from out there, in and back out. You swell as a temporary vessel, not a permanent container.

On a macro scale, human knowledge of the general populace is passed down via conditioning and natural selection as it becomes instinct, but how many generations are required for common knowledge to become instinct? And how much do we learn individually in just one lifetime on the micro scale?

We advance as individual humans from year to year based on what we learn, just as our species has advanced from generation to generation based on what it has learned collectively.

But great knowledge is not necessarily common and doesn’t get passed down via instinct or even necessarily recorded in the most popular books and other forms of media, so mustn’t an individual who is to advance be ravenous to find all that has been recorded in the past that was not passed on evolutionarily by instinct because it was never common but is only passed on in books, some of which only ever had a few thousand copies printed?

It’s the same way that a newborn sees the world for the first time: without all the experience of the world as it is; without so many memories to assure you that this is the way things are.

Green is not just green but it is this phenomenon that my eyes perceive which occupies the exact space of these things that I have since called leaves but which I am now trying to see new as if I have never seen them before. And the whole world seems marvelous and sublime all of a sudden.

The same idea can be applied to emotions and thought and all other parts of our experience. This is one means to creativity: to remove all your assumptions about the world as it is while maintaining your mature artistic powers to recreate it.

Others say they know me and I want to say to them how is that possible? I don’t even know myself. But maybe you know my outside, and even my inside if the out reflects the in. So what parts of me do I know, and what parts do they know?

I dreamed a million dreams and grew much bigger than my bed. I wrote in my dream. I wrote a whole book, a thousand pages. Then I woke up and it was lost. I couldn’t remember when I woke up. I don’t even know if the languages would be the same.

In the nighttime I dream so many dreams that I don’t remember, and think in the morning: how many lifetimes have I lived before this one?

God died, then ego was supposed to replace him, but instead it followed suit, or rather just stayed dead, or was never born. Ego hasn’t really figured out how to live yet.

It visited me all at once and I did not have enough time to learn another art form; I thought it was well suited to be expressed in music but feared it might leave me sooner than I could become musical.

I had not yet mastered English but again for fear it might leave me I began writing, and became a writer, though I just as easily could have become a musician, painter, sculptor, architect, even any of the marketable professions, for what has visited me is universal and above languages, which can only have a different subsection of it above shine down through. For now, I let it shine down through my English.

Any modern middle class American life is a fantastic display of wealth, relative to the rest of human history. Even some in poverty have more than previous kings.

There is no reason I cannot become them or at least see the world through their eyes other than because I do not share their pasts.

Spring comes after winter, and how quickly after smelling the spring flowers do I begin to fear allergens, because I have a weak mind for gratitude, owed mostly to my inability to remember the bad amid good, and for the lack of bad in my memory—I flee to the good when it does come, but how quickly then amid the good I begin to think of the bad.

Whereas I might show myself at once to be deeply intimate and successfully empathetic with one’s own experience but at once as I remove that mask and put on another, my partner seeing me switch guises so smoothly might ask how many guises there are. He believes not that I still wear the face similar to his own under my secondary mask, but that there are a third, fourth and many more.

Surely there are different parts of our nature, so on what morals, other than fashion, does one overwhelm all the others?

They all live with one or a few certainties, ignorant, consciously or not, I do not know in most cases, of the many other potentialities, which, together with their certainties, comprise the whole. Are not potentialities, certainties with all the same parts except for reality, and is not reality so dubious a thing that we might say potentialities are, in fact, certainties? And so the certain people live sixteenths of lives, or much smaller fractions, without filling up with all the rest other than their history and conditioning.

That I have a style, that I have a sound, genes and history—bothers me a little, bothers me to have a static identity. It has always annoyed me that each man feigns only one identity; and what’s more, of all the beautiful collisions of condition and environment within him, he chooses the one that just so happens to please his time and place.

Winter is Apollonian; summer is Dionysian. But this is the opposite of how these Greek gods are traditionally alluded to. The dark night is the old drunk, but isn’t the cold of the dark so precise in ways other than to the human eye?

And cannot light too make us drunk? A blinding white light like an invisible night—both melt into indiscernible orgiastic until the One is achieved. Do omni dark and omni light cause the same effect in man? Or the opposite?

Freedom requires an ability to choose. But how to choose without morality? Freedom needs a little bit of slavery.

Empathy is selflessly egocentric — yes, this is an oxymoron. Because in reality I think true and genuine empathy is actually a paradox. As much as it is selfless it is also self-centered in the sense that the only faculties you have to understand others are those with which you are endowed yourself.

It has always annoyed me that each man feigns only one identity; and what’s more, of all the beautiful collisions of condition and environment within him, he chooses the one that just so happens to please his time and place.

Because the sound is there, and words were only sounds in the first place, but why let the first words and their derivatives, be ours, why not take back control of the sound?

They asked, why do we need art? The artist said, explain to me your emotions, logically. They consulted then said, we can’t. The artist said, that’s why.

The purpose of fiction is to alleviate the pressure of biography from the author in his own time, place, and personhood; but nonetheless to project himself on other characters and plots other than his own life.

How far removed is our economy from production for our base animal needs of food, water, shelter and safety? Surely we satiated these in the first century after the mid-eighteenth century. Now we have advanced occupations for great and greater improvements in the former, but also for politicking, suing, financing, consulting, counting, keeping track of, news, travel, learning, pleasure, hygiene, and social connection.

Where does art fit in the economy? What does it mean that people are willing to pay for art, but at the same time artists starve more often than bankers, even though the less successful bankers don’t buy art, and the more successful artists don’t starve.

Form becomes tradition and sometimes we fail to see past habit that it no longer serves its function. My mom cuts the ends off the meatloaf; I ask her why. She says, that’s how grandma does it. I ask grandma. That’s how great grandma does it. I ask great grandma. Because my pan ain’t big enough for the whole thing.

Even in the way I write my novels, say I perceive that there are certain rules that make for “good” writing, where “good” writing is writing that people like to read. Am I wrong then to ignore these rules? To write what people don’t like. Such a choice might make for awfully queer novels but would not a fool be the fellow who says they are not “good” and means anything other than people don’t like to read them. For the same reason that my own preferences seem arbitrary and unfounded, so too for the collective preferences of society, and might I choose the former for “my” writing, even if it is not preferred by the latter? For isn’t this the only way to maintain individuality? Yet what is worth more: a homogenous mass one or a heterogenous small many?

The mind is classic and the world is contemporary, the mind reaches along histories to recurring principles, the worldly are subjected to timely fashions.

Think of all the art not appreciated. Is it not the same for all the lives not appreciated? Are not artistic choices very similar to the moral choices we make in our lives? And though there seems not to be a provable universal set of rules, there are surely popular fads. Woe to the artists and lives not in fashion in their time and place. Is this not the reason that classics are discovered only after the death of their creators, as the themes of the time shift but the classic remains. Or because a fashion comes around capable of recognizing its brilliance. But surely we have forgotten, or never recognized some of the classics.

We start from a morality assumption feigning agency for ourselves. What if we started from amorality? So too with economics: we start from a survival assumption and feign a motivation. What if we started from a death assumption? But surely this would result in chaos. And at least the majority are in favor of stability, so we’ve arrived at our current social institutions.

If we are to say our love, is the our not just you and I? Or do we include the rest of them? Surely not, lest I am dishonest to call you mine. I might instead say, they are ours. But still we say you and I: ours. Then why do we use their ideas about it, what do they know?

How sweet is health after sickness, friendship after solitude, satiation after hunger; less sweet is health after health, friendship after friendship, satiation after satiation. To appreciate everything as if I had spent a great deal of time in its absence, or as if it will soon be taken—to live as if I were dead long before my life and will return to sleep again soon.