I won't be no run away, 'cuz I won't run.

- Matt Berninger

THe sensation of freedom that travel brings? I can have it by going from Lisbon to Benfica, and have it more intensely than one who goes from Lisbon to CHina, because if the freedom isn’t in me, then I won’t have it no matter where I go. ‘Any road,’ said Carlyle, ‘this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’ But the Entepfuhl road, if it is followed all the way to the end, returns to Entepfuhl; so that Entepfuhl, where we already were, is the same end of the world we set out to find.

Condillac begins his celebrated book with: ‘No matter how high we climb or how low we descend, we never escape our sensations.’ WE never disembark from ourselves. WE never attain another existence unless we other ourselves by actively, vividly imagining who we are. The true landscapes are those we ourselves create since, being their gods, we see them as they truly are, which is however we created them. None of the four corners of the world is the one that interests me that I can truly see; it’s the fifth corner that I travel in, and it belongs to me.

- Fernando Pessoa, the Book of Disquiet (of course). Though I agree incredibly with what he is saying, its excerpts like these that make me wonder just how terribly miserable he must have been as he wrote such a wisdom to be forever regarded as such.

“I know that running away seems like a good idea now but I promise you, you will take this feeling with you wherever you go.It will not leave you until you deal with it. And it won’t leave you even then, but it will lessen. And believe it or not, eventually you will be able to draw strength from this experience that you never imagined possible.” - Paul from HBO’s In Treatment.

Bukowski and Fugazi

This is a world where everybody's gotta do something. Y'know, somebody laid down this rule that everybody's gotta do something, they gotta be something. You know, a dentist, a glider pilot, a narc, a janitor, a preacher, all that. Sometimes I just get tired of thinking of all the things that I don't wanna do. All the things that I don't wanna be. Places I don't wanna go, like India, like getting my teeth cleaned. Save the whale, all that, I don't understand that. - Henry from Barfly, an semi-autobiographical movie based on Charles Bukowski's time spent in Los Angeles, getting his wino on, like a boss.



Fugazi- Burning too


Anytime but now
Anywhere but here
Anyone but me
I've got to think about my own life
We are consumed by society
We are obsessed with variety
We are all filled with anxiety that this world would not survive
We gotta put it out the sky is burning
We gotta put it out the water's burning
We gotta put it out the earth is burning
Outrage but then they say...
Anytime but now
Anywhere but here
Anyone but me
I've got to think about my own life
The world is not our facility
We have a responsibility
To use our abilities to keep this place alive
Right here right now
Do it. Now. Do it.

Trashcan Lives

the wind blows hard tonight
and it's a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle of
red.

it's when you're on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.

this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.

we just forgot
ours.

in either case
it's a hard
cold
wind

The pride of the content

The many what if?'s that build and we collect over the course of our life are much easier to deal with when our 'what is' is satisfying. Though we could have done better, at least now we can sleep. I'm trying to be fine with that.

Fuck your weak high class.

Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power. What can china give me that my soul hasnt already given me? And if my soul hasn't given it to me, how will china give it to me?
-Fernando Pessoa

'Should you ask me if I'm happy, i'll answer that I am not.'

that is the beauty of prose. The words are as pure as a thought not hindered by presentation.

On being and knowing you're being.

"To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the inanimate monad, the soul's magic word. But the sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves."

Its been a few times I've had this feeling or thought, a moment when you suddenly don't feel human. Instead, I feel I'm watching a human and subjecting myself to a risky punishment for the sake of a pleasure I might obtain sometime in the future. I think thats the only moment of truth anyone can really have. You can enjoy looking at the sunset, or watching some sports or something dissembling in its beauty, but its just a sensory experience. There's nothing in it but familiarity or something fairly not experienced often.

With that feeling I described, you, for a moment, can feel free. YOu're notthinking about who your friends see you as or who your parents want you to be, you're just this thing capturing every glimpse of an idea you've ever had and seeing what it's made 'you'.

I'm only saying this all to help further enlighten people about the frivolity we behold as so magnificent, epic, and worth enduring. We shouldn't have to at times feel like we have somehow escaped figments of threats. We don't have to judge ourselves.

When ever I've tried to free my life from a set of circumstances that continuously oppress it, I've been instantly surrounded by other circumstances of the same order, as if the inscrutable web of creation were irrevocably at odds with me. I yank from my neck a hand that was choking me, and I see that my own hand is tied to a noose that fell around my neck when I freed it from the stranger's hand. When I gingerly remove the noose, it's with my own hand that I nearly strangle myself.

- Fernado Pessoa

Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods

More from The Book of Disquiet

"What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or it isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life."

THAT is what art should be about.


"To heed the present moment isn't a great or lasting concern of mine. I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally."

I agree entirely with both of these quotes but especially the second one. We spend our lives being affected by the moment only to be once more forced to do something else in another moment. And its a tedious process no matter how good your life is. You do one thing then do another. Whatever the cause or effect, its only purpose is to satiate those midgets running around in your nervous system telling you what to do. And in doing this that then that then this, we don't always remain ourselves. We protect and hide part of our personalities so as not to offend some people or so we don't embarrass ourselves. I'm not saying I don't do this, but it should be no a goal of all of ours to become someone who is always who we are. Who isn't ashamed of any part of their psyche.

From The Book of Disquiet

"I envy-but I'm not sure that I envy-those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say. What is there to confess that's worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then its no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations."


Gotta love some good prose.