Public Journal:

Oil and water don’t mix, but make a good salad dressing (that is when I liked salad dressing).

or

In a discussion on aphorisms, it is best to use aphorisms.

As for jumping in, I hardly had the focus for specifics lately, but I’ll consider it. Nihilism, anti-morality morality, why my damn past haunts me, getting rid of it; emotionally and physically by throwing out all my old shit, my new job as a janitor, cleaning shit… I hardly need to explain that metaphor. But, I’ll stop by and hopefully I’ll even wipe my feet first, and I’ll try to make my pithy maxims used with the help of the dictionary glued to my hand (don’t worry, there’s nothing that a toillette can get on it that it doesn’t already have inside) be of relevance.

I know it’s hard to find people to discuss books with here and I know you don’t like the stict as hell forums.philosophyforums.com, but it’s (in part thanks to my pioneering work with the early Heidegger reading group) the philosophical reading group center of the internet. So if you ever wish to put on a suit and tie and try it and start a reading group thread there I’ll be happy to help you jump start it (red to black, black to red?) Who knows, maybe I will be interested, I’ll look the book up and see.

Its not that I don’t like philosophyforums. In fact, I kind of like the board’s emphasis on composition.That seems to me an interesting and effective way to keep the discourse civil.

My primary discomfort with it lays in my tendency to flake out as I often do here. It’s the vertigo of the possible of not knowing how I’ll behave at the end of a drinking session that underlies my reluctance to go on the board.

I hate it when I flake out here. You can only imagine the anxiety I would feel about doing so on a more restrictive board.

I have my own problems with that. I started a Sartre thread and while slow, I of all people couldn’t even do my own part to keep it going. I really do miss having the motivation to read and discuss dense philosophical works, maybe in 6 months to year such motivation will come back.

Stuart: I hope Your job is not too hard on You, I could, too write a book about all the jobs I ever had, but I always kept the fact n mind, that as long as I can think about my situation, and situations in general which I can relate to, I needn’t come to any derivative conclusions as to notions such as for example: how unfair life is, or why me? The jobs that I did have (there were about 40 of them) I always had the impression that I did them well, and held myself in esteem, for being productive.

 I do hope you don't find this digression un compelling, as far as being an incursion into non philosophical areas.  

 I, D63, had it not been for my being to literally apply the phenominalogical reduction to the raw meat of my life, I probably would have been unable to hold  a grip unto my life.

I know exactly what you mean, Stuart. I’m still grinding away at. But I do get burnt out. I’ve been experiencing that a lot lately. And even as I do this, I still face such large books (for instance Delueze’s Difference and Repitition at 300+ pages) that will require me to read through them the first time without the slightest idea of what’s being said. I’ve had some of them for some time now and still manage to find some other book to keep me from having to attempt them.

Philosophy can be hard work.

That’s just it, isn’t it, Obe? You make a lot of compromises for this as far as creature comforts go. But you keep on doing it. I have a reasonably good job. But there are still a lot of important but mundane I should be attending to but can’t because I have to put as much energy into this as I can.It’s the source of a lot of discomfort.

And while I often wonder if it’s worth it, I’ll probably continue living like this to my death bed.Having hit my 50’s, it’s a little hard to stop now as I have, since my teens, been either engaged or completely immersed in culture and the creative act.

And as burnt out as I get, and despite my lack of success or recognition, one thing I have never questioned is if something like this can justify a life. It certainly sucks sometimes. But you can never think of it as a waste.

 I totally agree. It seems like a dead end sometimes, but we have got to keep it going. I am personally in a situation, rather, have been, for ever since I can remember reminiscent of Sartre's No Exist.  Incidentally, it was that play, in addition to the novel Nausea,which finally made up my mind to become an existentialist.  It is through the saving grace of Sartre, that I am probably still alive.  That's what I love about philosophy, it became essential to me, and it so remains.

 This is why I can feel like shit monday, and save my dough and fly to europe in the summer, which I plan to.

 This is why I could at once barely tolerate certain situations, while at the same time relishing the thought of being immersed in it.  And that is why I can write in Hebrephrenic expressions, while knowing it may not sound so as a free form of expression in the new writing.

I used to be very lonely, especially when it came to philosophy. I would have liked to talk to more people about it, but I wasn’t very familiar with the internet and so forth. To take comfort in my isolation I assumed that isolation led to originality. I would imagine myself, writing a thousand page ‘masterpeice’ throughout my life (a life that may or may not have been social, but definetly not in terms of philosophy/art/intellectual conversations).

So there I’d be with my book, and let’s assume it is actually one that many would appreciate, and I knew I was about to die. A gene came and asked me if I wanted him to put the book in the hands of a good publisher or burn it and give me a week long vacation in the tropics before I died. The latter! Such an obvious choice.

It’s very easy and only three days a week. In other words; a nightmare. What fun it was when I used to be a manager working 60 hours a week. Damn it that was years ago. I’m grown restless enough to vollunteer 10 hours a week, but a new career, if even feasable would only be run under again from my… well you put it better last February:

First of all, thanks again guys for showing up.

And Stuart…. You Abstract? Or are you just quoting him. Anyway:

And, Obe, isn’t that the reason to be for a lot of Sartre’s earlier writings –primarily Le Etre le Neant . We have to put in mind here that Sartre wrote a lot of it while he was a prisoner of war as a resistance fighter and knew that anyone, at anytime, could be tortured in order to get information. He had to think in terms of pure free will and later admitted that as an underlying justification for his thought.

But it saved you. And from a pragmatic perspective: that’s all that matters.

However, I would offer an alternative perspective on Sartre’s perspective. I have, throughout my life, gone through a lot shit phases. And throughout it all, I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix them and prevent them from happening again. And the only real answer I have found came from a documentary on people stranded in snowstorms. At the end of it, they pointed out research that defined an MO for those that tend to survive such situations: they’re generally people who accept that it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is that they’re in the situation; they don’t expend energy on assigning blame; they simply recognize that it is their problem and that if they just keep trudging on, it will pass one way or the other.

And you’re right: I really do need to get back to Nausea and No Exit.

Tonight, at the bar, Stuart, I was on the patio of the bar having a cigarette with 2 other guys. One was talking about people’s gambling addictions. I decided to be publically philosophical (something I don’t normally do) by pointing out that there is an underlying psychological aspect to all such self destructive behaviors. I started with the example of a woman who stays in an abusive relationship. I argued that if something is tearing down your self esteem, then there would be only thing that would build it up more than anything: the very thing that tore it down in the first place. This is why abusive men tend to give their victims moments of affection. And the same goes for gambling addictions. The gambling addict doesn’t care if they come out ahead in the long run. All they care about is the “good run”. And the same can be said of the drug addict. What they are always trying to get back to is that feeling of being on top of the world. And, unfortunately, the same principle seems to be at work with people like us. Through our efforts, we achieve that feeling of being on top of world. But when we reach those phases where we seem to have lost our Mojo, we keep on keeping on in hopes of getting it back. This has killed many great minds and artists.

Unfortunately, this was lost on the person I was explaining it to. He focused on the abused woman and distinguished the 2 by pointing out that a gambling addiction was one thing, but if someone abused a woman, he would kick their ass. Hard to disagree with that.

But I think the incident properly illustrates the isolation we feel as the intellectually curious. It’s why I don’t talk a lot about what I have learned with normal people.

While having a cigarette on that patio, I was looking at the Bag and Save and the landscape in general and wondering if Van Gogh’s style of painting could capture it. The architecture of the Bag And Save just seemed too straight-lined for Van Gogh’s more organic style. It just seemed to me that someone like Steeler would be far more equipped to capture it.

I found what you said on gambling/art very interesting. I was addicted to art and I guess I was in denial. Now I’m fully aware of my addiction, though it’s more of a disposition. As I’ve been telling obe and others I would trash ti if I could, but only medicine can relieve such symptoms only to be a replaced addiction with it’s own set of side effects. So I’m one does art and philosophy against my will. The highs come occasionally and the lows are the norm. keep in mind what I was saying about the 1000 page book was an idea I ‘suffered’ from many years ago, I don’t see myself going anywhere with this philosophy and even if vague goals do come up they are against my will. So burning my work for a couple pennies rather than a vactaion is hardly an exageration. I hope I’m not being too graphic but what you see with me here is someone who perpetually vomits, not that you all are enablers, if it wasn’t for forums such as this it would be as if my mouth was closed shut, damnit I’ve been averaging 15 posts a day for the last two months. My words had been repressed for lack of much company from about eight years ago to three years ago, such a back log.

But, I’m getting off topic, I like to watch nfl/nba, I don’t even try to deny myself it anymore, because I heard another good psychological insight a couple years ago. Guys are used to pack hunting, being stuck getting our food at the store, some kind of pitiful replacement such as sports on TV is better than nothing, but I don’t want to really talk sports it’s always very contrived.

It’s interesting what the guy said about beating up abusers. Such ‘moral’ sentiments are common; ‘if I saw a hungry child I would feed him’; right… hungry children are everywhere, people just don’t look. If the guy wants to beat up abusers (as if that would accomplish anything in the long run) then they’re not hard to find.

Stuart:

my friend !!!

?: you abstract…

miss you, abstract…

It’s time to go back to normal…

:chores-mop:

I emphasize with Abstract, being that I when I was 25 I was a writer asking all the difficult questions and near death. I wish I had got to know him better, but he didn’t like to follow up very long with the answers I gave to his questions prefering to discuss those of others. I respected that, the answers I developed to life’s questions are really not the preferable one’s to have, even though I feel I must share them.

:chores-laundry:

](*,)

My last poem sucked. I admit it. But one of things I’ve noticed is this draw to abstraction. And I’m not sure if it is because of middle age, or that I am truly burnt out, or because of my turn to philosophy.