A friendship only on one of the participants terms isn’t a friendship at all, actually, but more like a business contract. Anyone familiar with my blog entries will know that I am not the biggest fan of business contracts. They reek of artificiality. They are the stagnant film on the surface of relationship’s pond. Fuck um.

As I grow ancient, I notice more and more friendships that edge closer and closer to said contracts. My initial impressions of reasons edge towards knowing people becoming more conservative as time goes by. Playing it more safe. There can no longer be as much fucking around with time. Perhaps it is a symptom of middle age crises. I only know that I have not yet fallen victim to viewing friendships as a type of contract. As a type of stench coating a ostensibly deeper pond.

I type yet because I may fall into that morass, converting myself to a two dimensional film. I write this in hopes of rereading and remembering not to.

One obvious evidence is when someone places so-called friends into roles. In the mind of the person who sees people as contracts, he / she / it becomes a sort of Master of Ceremonies, a director or even playwright. During the course of a meeting, his friends are characters, each having specific roles, and each walking a narrow path - that bath being his / her / its part. Deviating even slightly from that path perturbs the Master of Ceremonies. He / she / it feels a loss of control. He / she / it feels a breach of contract.

I’m illustrating an extreme of the phenomenon, of course. But, think. We’ve all seen it.

Another point of view is that of balance. Every relationship has a tipping point where the grey becomes more obscure - where transparency finally fails. I try seeing from this viewpoint, as well. Basically, one or both parties have traversed differing roads and become less and less capabale of tolerating what they see as the other’s hovno. The easiest is to part ways. More fulfilling, however, could be to try cease from judgment and love the other for who he / she / it is, frustrating as it might be. Maybe the balance is not a one dimensional measure, after all. Re-clarifying greys are multidimensional tasks.

I’ve been trying to escape judgmental people since my childhood. My deathly pueblo Fort Stockton was filled with them. I succeeded for a years, basking in friendships that, as Christián would say, were puro. Some of the old despair is eking its way back into my life, however. I touch on it because ignoring the phenomenon would be disaster in the end.

I am on a plane that spans the vector spaces of Bilbao and Brussels. I’m listening to Nektar. The latter is far more important. I spoke to Christián earlier (and I use the word speak in a very idiomic sense) about art. Or it is always a possibility that I interpreted our convetsation as one about art. He could have interpreted it as a mini epic about the default settings of the multiverse. I cannot know.

The quote I wish to reference is thus:

i always end up back to the idea that art is the nexus of nature and technique.

So perhaps it is a neferious balance. I mentioned Hawkwind. They were always shitty players, technique-wise, but bold, even brave on the idea and execution side. I’d say the same about Nektar, though the execution was arguably better.

I am listening to Recycled now, and it pings between my ears with glee. Cybernetic Consumption? Well, the album is about the waste of resources. The music mirrors it, in a sense, beginning brashly and creating a fastastic world of mechanised society. It only dies off at the very end, as perhaps realization comes for our species.

Fuck um.

Not Nektar, though the main songwriter is dead, anyhow. He’ll rest in peace because his music will be forgotten, much like my music, and the music of Christián. It’s time we realize that we are products of a different age. Time has raced away from us. Shaming of the True by Kevin Gilbert is no longer relevant. That was a mere 20 years ago.

How does create something timeless? Though I think that individuals can make blows that splash the lake of humanity, roiling waves, but, in the end, only the species itself is remembered, well, at least to imagined future archeologists. After a few thousand years, and especially because of diminishing attention spans in our species, I doubt if even Bach will be remembered. BUT - In our technological morass, are we able to create a product that is remembered? Besides plastic, that is?

Fuck um.

Holy shit, this album is good, and we all know that when the choir comes in during the last five minutes of the first LP side, we all stop and stare, astounded. Yeah - I was one of thoso who thought that people were idiots were they not to enjoy this fastastic music that I blasted from a car in a pueblo in Hispanoamerica. Oh, was that racist? Perhaps. Also, it was true. Nothing remotely artsy was accepted in Fort Stockton. In fact, it was held up to scorn by my peers as they compared it to the contemporary Metallica. I personally have no problems with Metallica (of the age of 80s), but the two musics really have little in common excepting having a basic harmonic base in rock / blues.

Nektar’s lyrics poetically exceed Metallica’s, however. Perhaps that is where I stood at the time. I am not as much of a lyric man lately - lately meaning the last ten years - though I have begun writing poetry again, much to the chagrin of my compatriot. Suggestions within Nektar’s lyrics are quite universal, whilst Metallica come off as whining and / or pretentious (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Thing thaht Should Not Be) despite their intentions.

There is the fact that I enjoy the lyrics - or agree with the lyrics of Recycled because they are aligned to my point of view - or, specifically, to one of my points of view. I’m a complex dude, baby. And, we are all drawn to what appeals to our own views, self actualized or not. Branching out and realizing there are other points of views is not a bad thing, but fuck um, Nektar rocks. I type this because it is the attitude we all have.

Gotta listen to the part where the choir comes in again.

Amazing.

I do my best to esconse myself in other peoples’ attitudes, especially about philosophy, but I can’t bear politics. It doesn’t work for me and I shall not apologize. I want nothing to do with it. Go have a picnic in the pines. Burn them down if you like with your rhetoric. I shall hit the local hospoda and chat with the hot waitress who just failed her english exam. She needs a grammar injection.

So, as Herr Christián said, Is art the nexus of nature and technique? I misquoted on purpose because I am VILE. Yeah. It is. He has an excellent point, though rather mundane because I’ve thought about it all before. In fact, I’ve thought about everything before. My immortality has its negative attributes. So Christián’s thoughts, your thoughts, and the thoughts of the tapeworm festering in your innards are irrelevent.

Fuck um.

All sentient creatures have an ability to create art. The environment they are raised in has quite a bit to do concerning how quiescent it is initially, or even eventually. We spoke the other day about a sort of genetic alignment. I am sure one’s tonal alignment may come somewhat from genetics, but I believe (and if I am proved incorrect, though I’ll never read a single word from those torpid scientists about it, anyway, I’ll write otherwise). Most, obivously, have no means to hone a technique. Our GUITAR is not something that is ubiquitous in homes ’round the globe, nor is it on Europa for the microbes.

But, fuck um.

We’re on Marvellous Moses now.

And I think they should. The only way I could understand rhythm when I was evolving in the fetid trench of Fort Stockton was to listen to the ticks and releases of the turn signal of my parents’ various vehicles when we were stopped either at intersections or for routine castigations. That was my technique. No fucking wonder I play triplets with the third note a bit askew.

Fuck um.

I hate to give advice because most people despise it - and well they should. However - do create something, be you a prokaryote with an advanced internal life, or a cretin hiding your poems beneath the boulders of slumber.

I should mention, since the subject may not be very clear, that yo soy un pesado, or at least that’s what people tell me. Roughly translated, this means that I am a type of small, tropical fish that lives off one of those so-called beautiful islets west of Galicia, the playground of stunted men. I woke up as this pesado, or small, tropical fish, one morting after an unrelenting dream about an old, fat ex-friend named Hana.

Hanička had lost her corporeal being. I’ll mention once again that she was weighty, so the act of dissolving her body surely did the universe no harm. Was she just a floating entity afterwards? Maybe she became the preta that waits to haunt Christián Newman’s pleasure room for eternity. What happened in the quantum universe of my dream was much more just for Hanička. Obviously, as her name is Hanička, she was a cotilla of enormous proportions. I suppose the enormity paralleled her corporeal proportions. From the moment I met her until the moment I deleted her from Facebook friends, she was the delta of a raging river of gossip. That river was fed by innumerable tributaries. She sat the goddess on a plinth, watching every current scurry around her, and indeed examining every one in detail as it did, rushing to the sea. The overtly salty Mediterranean is surely fed by riachuelos of dense cotilla vomit. I just know it.

In the quantum universe of my dream, as lucid and brief as it was, Hanička’s retribution was to have her personality imprisoned in an espresso machine in a cabaña in the woods. I smile thinking of it! I laugh out loud! My eyes stream tears of joy! Her disembodied voice filled the kitchenette. Her job was to create tasty beverages. In fact, I could use one now. I repeat - her job was to create tasty beverages. But, like all cotillas, her self-assigned role was to enrich her personal database of information about the outside world. Well - outside world. I’m using the term outside world much too broadly. Better to say that her self-assigned role was to enrich her personal database of information about individuals with whom she had relations and their particular networks of interaction with other individuals.

One might imagine that Hanička’s fate was not so desperate as to warrent self-immolation. The cabaña was frequented less and less as weeks, months and years went by. The disembodied mind of Hanička lived on, unsleeping, forever making coffee for the mice and spiders. I was one of the last visitors before the incident. Before the fire. I was there with a companion. Who that companion was, I can say only that it was not a goat, as I would have liked. Therefore, my spirits were not as high as they could have been.

The preta of the espresso machine accosted me time and again as she prepared my morning beverage. I shared my stories, but to her dismay, they were not stories about webs of intrigue between individuals. I had no morbid tales of cheating spouses at hand. I could not speak of ruined professional lives or once brillant poets lying naked and homeless under the bridge at Táborská in Nusle.

Day after day, her anima weakened. I could not feed her restless soul. On my final evening, before I crawled under the covers with the rats and mites, she requested a favour. Were I to unscrew a stained panel on the back of the machine, insects would nest. The buildup over days, weeks, months and perhaps years would short the system. She would be released. As I lay with the critters of the night, I thought about her request. I decided I could rationalize this sort of passive murder and not let in weigh on my soul. Come the morning, I did as she asked.

I heard about the fire months later. It had taken out over twenty hectares.

Where is Hanička now? She is awaiting the pleasure room that Christián will construct. I will have to find a new way to murder her, possibly one less subtle.

I would imagine that the evolution of your ancestors involved some sort of microbe that feasted on fermented material, extracting sugar from it that other microbes could not, such as a high alcohol tolerant yeast. I could see your great great grandparents being single celled organisms that evolved around petroleum geysers at the bottom of the sea. It would also account for your hatred of sunlight, and your sexual preference for albino brine shrimp.

According to my Promethease report, my living corpse is not in possession of the gene that spawned Christián’s comments. However, I am overly fond of drinking. A paradox flops in the background. Consuming alcohol makes me feel awful. I’d suggest overindulgence during many years has led to the point where the high lasts for only a few drinks. This apex begins more or less after my third drink and begins a logarhythmic decline at around the sixth. By the time my sixth plummets like a rivulet of melancholy through my rotted, oesophogal passage, I am psychologically lost. Two paths stretch forward from that point. The first is the more difficult, and since more difficult challenges are more worthy, and make one more of a man or beast or erotic monstrosity, I’ll play along with the massive popular fetish and detail it before its weaker, less attractive and meeker partner, of which I shall elaborate afterwards. The more difficult route, and again I’ll mention that because of its difficulty, it is the course any TRUE, BROAD CHESTED, MUSCULAR, ALPHA MALE would choose, is that of cessation. Reread the previous sentence, you SCUM. I didn’t type cesspool, but cessation. I am primly aware that TRUE, BROAD CHESTED, MUSCULAR, ALPHA MALES are wont to dip themselves into the local slime lodge / cesspool / septic pond in order to portray the impression of wonton virility and although I did not type the word cesspool two sentences prior, because of this fact, TRUE, BROAD CHESTED, MUSCULAR, ALPHA MALES will, as studies have proven, interpret any string of characters that resemble the word cesspool as the actual word cesspool. For example, any given writer could be going about his / her / its daily business, hammering away on a prestine, shiny, new laptop in the corner coffee barracks, or even scribbling contently on sheaves of former trees whilst sitting ironically on a park bench in Donostia, and eruct the word cessation, cerebellum or cenotaph. Hypothetically, the aspiring or even already established artist would publish the brilliant poem, short story, novella or technical manual detailing the schematics of the Boss CE 1, allowing even a peasant from the outskirts of aforementioned Donostia or of any and all other Spanish semi-cities to construct the apparatus using items found around a hovel and crushed to powder in the ubiquitous mortar and pestle found in Spanish hovels on the outskirts of semi-cities. I use the term semi-cities to describe places similar to the one in which I currently live. I currently rest my weary ankles in Logroño, for all readers of diminished intellectual stature, or those who claim their badge of TRUE, BROAD CHESTED, MUSCULAR, ALPHA MALE, or either, since they can be practically identical, and do use all three of the aformentioned words often enough. I cannot say how often TRUE, BROAD CHESTED, MUSCULAR, ALPHA MALES mistake cessation, cerebellum and / or cenotaph for cesspool. Some statisticians, such as my excellent friend Michal claim the correlation is between 78.4% and 92.1%. Most people who trust Michal have been fed to various rodents over the ages, so I suggest my readers of slightly greater intellectual stature go with the figure of 97.7%.

(Promethease report)
(Donostia)
(Boss CE 1)
(Logroño)

Fuck um.

I told Miki earlier via Facebook Chat (a bane, itself, to existence). And we have just now decided to instead use either Whatsapp or Viber or, confusingly, both simultaneously since Facebook Chat is a bane to anyone’s existence. In fact, the existence of one who uses Facebook Chat is mottled with decay. These fraught souls wither before others. I, too, am afflicted, obviously, but am stronger in hara and spirit than social wallowing ilk.

Anyone reading even slightly closely has noticed that I used told intransitively in the previous paragraph. The shitstain pedants of the English tongue’d like to spike me to the wall of my grammatic insensitivity. Fuck um. I envision all pedants together as a family, twisted together in a pit, entwined. Their wails rise in unison. It is a perfect fourth between the sexes. My compatriots and I begin to pour the petrol. Michal is laughing as he sparks up a reefer.

Anyone reading even slightly closely has noticed that I used told untransitively in the previous paragraph. The lowly pedants are a shimmering conflagration now, and can no longer murmur hateful stupidities. I told Miki earlier via Facebook Chat (a tool used by the stricken of spirit) of his destiny as a goat farmer. It was a metaphor, actually, as I have been caught up lately in complexities of modern life and once again wish to walk away from them. How possible is it to lead a simple life, in contrast? What is a simple life? I’ve had numerous conversations with Mr Christián M Newman concerning this subject. Idealism usually pervades these conversations. I’m not sure if that is unfortunate, not, or somewhere suffering in the curl of the eleventh dimension.

A hovel in Andalucia? What complications come along with such a simple life?

• Integration into the village
• Property taxes
• Property maintenence
• Land owning bureaucracy in general
• Goats consuming one’s infant spawn
• Infant spawn in general
• The tendency to become attached to local women when hanging out in one location too long
• I’m sure Shambal (the proud non-pedant) can think of others

Climate predictions do not fancy Andalucia doing well. The location is just an example. Such complications would have to be taken care of in any.

One conclusion that patters about my consciousness is just renting for the remainder of my days. Everything is, after all, transient. I don’t have any reason to leave a cottage / hovel / mansion / cave / milk carton to any progeny. In fact, hasn’t one of the primary philosophies of my life been to be rootless?

Live rootless

Die rootless

Fade (or decompose) away

In contrast to more or less everyone else who is not either homeless, an urchin, a coddled child or dead, my ways are already unpunctured by stabbing societal complexity. What I really need is a finer filter to rid my daily motion of particulate matter - material fecal heaps that do not facilitate creativity. Sentiment has no place in the simple life. Remember that time and again.

A bookmark function for Martenblog is a future fruitful idea. As the point of Martenblog is to be reread in intervals to remind my brain dappled with decay of lessons I have learned and ideas I have spawned. I’ll get on it.

You pick up threads and clues, searching for a pattern that explains the whole, forgetting that a great deal of life (and art) depends on chance events.

I just purchased Music for Silenced Voices and perused the first few pages. Thus, the quote. My first thought regarding it is that resultant art is not necessarily dependent on chance events, but its impetus is. I sit down and deliberately work out a piece of music, or write in this blog, or strangle Chritián’s infant spawn. These acts are just the resolution of ideas sparked in my day-to-day consciousness by exterior forces. Inspiration always comes from the outside. Flotsam from the possibly imaginary world’s ocean around me washes up in a rocky inlet. Most is washed back out. I inspect others. I keep fewer. Sometimes I take those few, sit around with a guitar, keyboard, pen or garrotte and fashion them into tangibilities.

The current music singing in my ears is Dogshit on the Shoulders of Giants by Upsilon Acrux. It’s not first date music. Perhaps it could be second date music. My guess is that it’d be music more suited to a dismembering party. That being ascertained, I remind everyone for the first time that Shambal Brambel actually conducted a dismembering party once upon a time.

Unfortunately, the foci of the entertainment were already deceased. Shambal had grown tired of one peculiar arm of his Spanish family. Peculiarity, in Shambal’s eyes, is strict adherence to any tradition or ritual without any hint of creative variation. From the Book of Shambal’s Quaint but Violently Enforced Laws, I quote:

If one is so bland to slog time and again through traditional forms passed either by writing or orally generation to generation, one must inject a modern and slightly fantastical wedge into each proceeding. Something as simple as a disfigured child in an oratory role or a cohort donning a mask made from one’s aunt’s kidney will do. Just mix and muck it all up a bit. Don’t be a preprogrammed drone without a mental space of one’s own.

Said arm of his Spanish family ignored this and several other of Shambal’s sacred scripts, directly resulting in their demise. The benevolence of Shambal could only be carried so far. I continue to quote:

Continual breaches of this (admittedly vague) rule will be punished. The meters remotely attached to my living corpse clearly indicate the local average of my irritation level. The readings are on display in the dank basement of my illusory yesteryear for all to fetishise over. Thus, caution can be taken when caution is of importance, meaning when my irritation level, easily determined by one of the multitudinous aforementioned meters esconced in the tenebrous oubliette of my opaque history, exceeds a score marked out and elaborated in another of my bestial dialogues.

Culprits will be forced to drink mercury until their stomachs and intestines are filled. Before the actual poison sets in, they will surely perish of exploded inner linings. Furthermore, their bodies will then be disgraced in front of the remainder of the family, if any remain. Otherwise, their now not-so-living corpses will be disgraced in front of the extended family.

All this talk of family makes me want to retch. Excuse me for a moment while the contents of my hara are ejected forcefully into my porcelain compatriot.

The hotel staff kindly provided me with three porcelain compatriots. I chose to soil the bidet. Fuck um.

I’m slightly surprised that my livejournal still exists. Its last entry is from 2008 and it is incredibly generic. I posted a photo of myself by recommendation of Aimee Estes, a person best left to push up the poppies. Furthering a fruition of opium is something beneficial that her useless bag of flesh could do for humanity. Anyhow, I began going through an entry from Christmas Day 2005 entitled 100 Things About Me a month or so ago. This evening, I am on number 13, which reads

In general, I like cooking better than I like socializing.

To be slightly more abstract, I am quite fond of activities that require both creativity and concentration. For this reason, I also enjoy my job, which is insemenating circuit boards with my prehensile forebrain. Also for this reason, I enjoy composing music. The piece Albahaca is coming along nicely, thank you.

To be slighly more specific, I am more fond of activities that require both creativity and concentration more than I am of socializing when the latter is in an unwelcome context. My definition of unwelcome here is quite broad. Any social event that consists of forced niceties is right out. I am certainly fond of socializing with my mates and I take to it with gusto.

A limp wench might tell me that socializing can also be a creative sport. One can find the cracks in conversations, the narrows in which to slip. One can dart around others’ presentations like one eluding slow motion missiles. One can also be a cunt. One can be a creative cunt. Manipulation is not my aim. Perhaps I went through and discarded that phase during my teens and early twenties. I could be a cunt. I was a cunt. I was a creative cunt. I lost some friends.

Effortless socialization is fastastic and it abounds with my mates. Sadly, I my matie time is limited. It sparsely dapples yearly wax and wane. Of course, my mates are completely to blame and I am innocent. Fuck um. They, too, can benefit mankind by pushing up the poppies. I yearn to be adrift in a haze of opium spawned from the nitrogen-rich flesh of my compatriots.

As far as cooking goes, tomorrow I am on my own. No compatriot will be in my sight-line, nor will my flared nostrils taste the scent of their putrefacation, nor will my ears lap up their wails, nor will my skin sand away their scabs, nor will my sense of balance bother to hurl my unwilling living corpse at their unguarded thorax. I shall cook quinoa with garbanzos and dine alone.

I’ll toast my future poppies.

I began the specifications of a new piece of music a few days ago and it crept into my dreams during the subsequent nights. Out of these somnambulant encounters came a clear structure. This one will be under four minutes, I promise, dear Demi-God of musical composition who forms a dome over me of inquiet, resonant, conscious chambers.

As I have been wont to do since my distant past, out from my hara sprang a sort of chord progression. Initially, it was simple, but then morphed. I am considering now to let that morph happen during the process of the piece. I don’t want to actually play the chord progression deliberately, but let it be subtly pronounced by a snaking, fractured, mostly continuous guitar figure. It will be a semi-arpeggiated line with plenty of passing tones to confuse the listener. Inspiring the bass, rumbling underneath, will be Sunn o))), lengthy and droning, cut apart by quick, syncopated runs at fashionable intervals. There is nothing fashionable about this music. I correct myself. Bass, rumbling beneath, and inspired by Sunn o))), in lengthy and droning phrases, will be punctuated by syncopated runs at arbitrary intervals.

I’ll ditch the mellotron for this one. In its place, I’ll remind any creature tied to a plinth and forced to listen to the album at an intolerable volume that the synth echoes ideas from The Six, though only distantly. The square wave pulse will beat an insistent 1 - 2 - 3

• 4 over the other instruments’ triplety groove, a magical strategem employed by Christian Vander from time to time (listen to Hhaï when you get a break from your toilet training, ingrade).

As for percussion, I am going to start with its part. Again, this echoes my compositional (I laughingly use the word) methods of old, programming my now deceased drum machine, Marcus, to the structure of an upcoming piece (I laughingly use the word) of musical regurgitation. To note, however, is that Tidal Cycles is not a mere drum machine, but a form of programming patterns in real time. I have to inject aleatoric means in some manner and morphing patterns on the fly is as good a way as lynching your brother’s wife with a length of piano wire, to keep things musical (I laughingly use the word). I plan the patterns to overlap the flat four count and the triplety bounce in certain situations, but primarily concentrate on one or the other.

I STARE back at the second paragraph of the Martenblog entry. Join me on your mandolin, ukulele, autoharp or goat bladder as I cycle a progression twice or thrice.

F F/b5 Cmaj7 Csus2 F# Bm7/11 Asus4 E7/bb

As I played with the sequence the other day, I thought it might be wise to destroy some of the tonality by creating the following:

Fmaj7/b5 Cmaj7/9 F#sus4 Gadd9 Bm/G Aaug/#9

As an INTERJECTION between phrases in the piece, I shall opt for these two chords: [f c f# b] and [a bb f c] chugged on the ukulele, perhaps with reverb enough to send them to the absolute backdrop of the sound stage. An air of obscurity will encroach from the ill-lit depths. The growling bass will paint the heavens.

I decided to re-read the Foundation books by Isaac Asimov. I half jokingly write re-read because I don’t believe I have ever read even the initial trilogy in its entirety. Following a suggestion by Isaac himself somewhere near the aorta of the internet, I begun Prelude to Foundation a few days back. It’s puttering along quite nicely. Psychohistory is it its infancy. Or, rather, psychohistory has been conceived and its gestation will crescend during the curve of the story. Or that is what I predict. Another book bridges this one and the original series.

Many a prophecy, by the mere force of its being believed, is transmuted to fact.

Here is a succinct way to state something that even Shambal, swaying strangely, half erect in his slumber in his sessile spot, could believe. The force of rumour is a hurricane. It leaves scorched earth in its wake. Well, at least it leaves modified earth in its wake. It leaves a swath of humans with changed opinions concerning the purpose of life in its wake.

The context in the novel is a conversation Heri Seldon has with the Emperor, whose name I have forgotten. Hari is required by the elite to predict the future with mathematics by employing a system he calls psychohistory. Being a abstract approach, he finds the request impossible to follow. I suppose that will change as the story progresses, but I hope with reasoned steps.

As an aside, I do appreciate Asimov’s style. He takes science very seriously. He is meticulous and I can imagine he revised his work time and again until anything that could be cross-referenced was consistent. Another author of his ilk is Larry Niven. I suppose the appropriated name for this genre is hard science fiction. I’ll harden you, baby.

The self-fulfilling prophecy, to me is like semantic drift. A equally very clever or very daft human begins using a word or phrase in a manner at an angle to it original meaning. His, her or its use spreads to his, her or its local peer group, then exponentially from there. Mostly these turns of phrases stay localised and confound newcomers. They are shibboleths, in a sense. Spreading further abroad in space and time, a whole segment of a dialect can change, however.

If Hari predicts a fecund future and as he does so, possesses sufficient valuation for his message, half-astrology or not, to be believed, the future will come. Humans will work towards it collectively, even unconsciously. The power of hidden desire is a force to be grated up and fed to your cyborg ocelot on a Tuesday evening after guzzling brandy and rubbing the skin of your buttocks raw on your expensive rug bought specifically to impress loose chicks but now serves as the home for countless microscopic insects and dead portions of the aforementioned buttocks.

To know what the future holds, in even the most general and probabilistic way, would serve as a new and marvelous guide for our actions, one that humanity has never before had.

Isaac sums it up with that sentence again a bit more succinctly that I may have in my previous paragraph.

Black Swans that uncurl their necks and open their fetid beaks to yowl are stumbling blocks. As the rush of humanity striving for a singular, even utopian future bounds downhill at a frightening pace, the possibility of strange crevasses wrecking momentum grows. The blunder towards the singularity is mostly unconscious. Our species is the steed and a dream holds us by reins. Dreams shift unpredictably. Mr Black Swan swallows some of us. Those devoured are shat out to stagnate forever on the slopes. Insular cultures sprout from the dung.

Hari will leave certain worlds behind. I am sure of it. These worlds will be the backwaters. They’ll be the Fort Stocktons and Cold Brooks. The shitholes bereft of expansive culture. Mr Black Swan, why have you kicked humanity in the larynx once more?

Fuck the backwaters. I’m sitting on the multi-dimensional head.

Before Shambal knew with any clarity he’d be sessile for centuries, he was a man of ephemera. He’d still be were it not for the condition keeping him tied to a hovel in a wasted land. His own waste continues to churn beneath him to create power and a superficial luxury. Robotic apparati scuttle, clunking here and there, often even tidying up and bringing him required quantities of comestibles. The quantity is immense. In order to excrete enough to power his small hovel, including the ancient batteries on which his mechanical company feed every late evening, he must consume constantly. His gastrointestinal system has evolved quickly over centuries to create dense, fibrous feces full of nitrates. Tubes routed to engines rattle in mock digestion. Shambal himself is a tube. During waking hours, he is acutely aware, even with myriad intellectual distractions, that he is simply a processing plant.

In one infinity of quantum universes, Shambal is from Tanzania. In the one of which I write now, he is a Spaniard. In every quantum universe, he ends in his hovel, sessile. Thank the rings of Neptune for convergence. Like in the Tanzania branch, he was born into a sordid aristrocracy. The vast family spread its tentacles from the nucleus of Almogía, a white and brown pueblo. Their feelers poisoned Malaga and even as far as Sevilla and Cadiz.

A dynasty is similar to a religion. A dynasty is similar to a fundamentalist religion. Shambal’s family indoctrinated him. Shambal’s family burned their legacy into his brain. Any deviation from it was heresy. Devations were blasphemy against the perpetuation of an idea, no matter how ludicrous. And, after time, after his pampered childhood and his elitist adolescence, Shambal saw the whole pattern of life ludicrous. Ludicrous was painted on every path behind him, on the entrace to every corrador backwards, back into the shell.

Perpetuating a dynasty constructs the shell. In parts, it is thinner, in others, thicker. Relations outside of the shell are less or more tenuous, but always tenuous. Even the thickest of cords connecting Shambal to the exterior were easily severed from denizens of the interior. Lasting bonds only resulted by bringing others inside, and never letting them escape. Shambal saw this again and again and the horror and despair from both sides. He finally fled through a crack in the shell that would have eventually sealed him from the outside forever. After a certain point, usually a certain age, the denizens only nurtured those of the interior. Their world was small, but coherent to them.

The traditions of Spain struck Shambal as antiquated and stagnant. The world was moving on. That is to say, human culture was moving on. It never could quite regress to a state of olden times, good old days or rural greatness. Those times were the past. They were etched into the past. No matter how humans tried to recapture them, the recreations were fake, as the species’ expansive culture had outgrown them. Shambal knew dynasties were regressive, or at least sessile, ironically enough. They become more and more hefty until their movement both intellectually and creatively could no longer be set adrift.

In his vast lifetime, Shambal never uttered the word adrift with negative connotations.

He mumbled to himself once, during the end of his adolescence in Almogía:

I see the shell of my dynasty like gauze. Time and again, it tightens, or perhaps it is just my perception as my mind grows increasingly curious of the outside. The gauze filters outside stimulation increasingly granular until I catch only smatterings of fragmented scents. The denizens do it unconsciously. I am like the beloved son still connected umbilically to a possessive mother.

He cut the cord.

From the outside, Shambal saw his life before as a stone in an endless ocean. The stone rose magnificently from the waves and was even nearly impervious of them. To the brief lives of most on the outside, it was unchangeable. The ocean’s contrast was stark. As liquid is to solid, the pace on the outside was immense.

Many centuries later, Shambal wrote:

Spain is both alive and dead with dynasties. They pervade and separate, unite and spurn. We were encouraged subliminally, almost hypnotized, certainly brainwashed to create our own. A stone is a cottage or villa or apartment you purchase. A vast ocean of liquid is going from one rent to another, never settling down like in olden times. I wanted to outpace my retrogressive environment. The denizens held me as long as they could, but when I finally broke, I severed the cord for good. My mother shrieked from her grave, as if she’d felt the knife.

As I candidly continue from another curious day:

I try to never order the same thing twice in a row at a restaurant.

I do go to restaurants time and again. I resist mightily the urge to stab contemporary clientele with soiled utensils. Soiled utensils are the best if you go through with murderous intentions since it infuses victims with your silava. This liquid, which flows freely from a crevasse beneath your lolling tongue, is like a tattoo you force upon another person. You can even do without the cutlery, stand erect or slumping slightly on your table, and begin distance spitting. Practising beforehand at home is recommended. The targets you tattoo will be revolted, but, as your spittle soaks into their souls, they come under your control. Soon, after a few weeks of patronizing various cafés, you’ll lead an phalanx of stolen bodies. Victory! The death of this decaying culture is dripping from your moistened lips.

I am not the cunt I used to be, so I don’t insist on ordering radically different plates everytime I frequent a place. The stagnation that is going to Polo every time I attend to my Prague itch wore me down for years and I feel a bit of shame for it. The majority of our evenings there saw us ordering Křidelky. Those severed chicken limbs never seemed to taste better. Tradition it was, time and again. Fuck um. I didn’t even break the ritual last I was in the smoke fouled bar.

Spain is a difficult thorax. Various pintxos scream at you from upon counters. They are naked as your favourite bare-breasted wench you dilly in your dreams. Variations occur, but were I to sit and think of every pintxo place I’d visited in the time stretching out backwards from immediately before I began writing this bit of absurdity to crawling out of the bubbling morass of the ancestral swamp, I’d come up with no more than seven valid genres of the accursed foodstuff. I’m telling you that Spain has been designed to mock freedom of choice. The rulers now die the flame death. I choke on my own vomit gurgling at them.

Whatever comes next in this life, and many things do, some unexpected and some not, I shall remember during my next restaurant visit to order a cream-filled ocelot kidney.