From Up On Frederick's Stone

4.0. That’s what my teammates on the football team called me, for my straight A’s.

There is a colorful, creative aporia in the free play of walking through a Staples store, a Target, an Ikea, a Bed Bath & Beyond (RIP). The aporia of consumerism. Possibilities extend in many directions. Sensory whirls of human habilibility. We feel compelled to purchase, but in the abstraction of the music, the empty halls, the lush shelves of interesting objects, something more spacious is alluring. It is a willingness to participate as an observer, the imaginative wealth of poverty, the romance of illusions, the charm of mere appearance, the emptiness of form, the grace of materialism.

What is the reason to do art? What utility does spirituality have? In the face of materialistic anthropocentrist industry, where does the money mind bridge over to the spirit of life/death, if at all? The answer, I believe, is in the American West, in the spirit of the landscape and the people who have inhabited it. It is the wisdom of eons in the youthful optimism as twin spaciousnesses: infinite extent and infinite potential. They are married here, old and new, in the west, atop the dead body of the Farallon plate. Openness, openness, openness. Gone, gone beyond, gone beyond it all, open-eyed, sobeit

Another brief thought on politics and a thought on how psychosomatic drugs alter one’s perception of reality.

Two totally different topics: how a long work day is leading me to change my relationship to time; El Niño/storm vs sea myth.

The prospect of working eleven hours daily at a decent job is causing me to naturally want to “structure my time more intentionally/efficiently.” The vast majority of advice on time management is but the masturbatory hypocricy of charlatans. I don’t know what words to use for my instinct to rearrange how I act in time when busy, except those that are bastardized by the “success gurus.” It’s not that I’m against “wasting time” or being idle. That has been the dominant position for a long time, even if there are cultures and people who aren’t so callous about their time, who value leisure, the “dominant” cultures/people are heavy on the side of structuring time.

Attempted first line:
For there to be causation between any two objects, there must first be causal affinty between those objects. Objects must be able to interact before they interact. This capacity for physical interaction, this causal affinity can be called interrelativity.

Minds are mountains, mountains are minds—what is common between them? What is enlightenment in the transcendent complex? What shall I call it?
Some great timeless questions:
– How long is the shore of Lake Powell?
– If a raindrop falls exactly on the continental divide, what determines which ocean it will end up in? Are there alpine lakes with two outlet drainages?

A brief thought on the concept of “Eber” before I go into work. It’s a topic that keeps resurging into my mind. It’s the root word for Hebrew and the root concept of Nietzsche’s übermensch. It is perhaps the clearest movement toward pure abstraction the human species has ever made.

One day, to my disgruntlement, I got into an argument with a friend about politics. I think it’s a good idea for me to jot my perspective down, mostly because I’m still upset that he didn’t actually listen to me, partly because it illustrates how mass media affects our ability as citizens to function as part of the US government by/of/for the people, partly because I think that a clear nondualistic political perspective is both uncommon and powerful.

When I felt closeness with the central coast in those later years of grad school and weird phase in-between Cal Poly and Big Sur, my imagination drifted to the bigger mythological/philosophical aspects of the work in my thesis.

In 2022, there is one main thing that I think I discovered, but I don’t know how to describe it—at least it is hard to put into words.