I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
June 27, 2011 - 1:03 p.m.
I'm almost done procrastinating. I have to get up from writing for a minute but I don't think that counts as procrastinating. I'll tell you why when I get back. I got the little notebook I carried with me the last few days. I have an actual note on what to write about today. Don't worry I'll come up with another excuse on why this entry sucks. It will probably involve an invasion by space aliens.
I actually left the house yesterday. I went to the CD release party for Aaron Nathans's Alchemy of Memory. Good title for me. I make memories disappear. What was I writing about? Good thing it's right in front of me. I don't have to remember things. What don't I have to remember? Just make believe that goes on ad infinitum. Three years from now it will hit you and you'll realize how funny that is.
He played at Caffe Vivaldi deep in the heart of Greenwich Village. I know the place well because Carolann Solebello and Meg Braun play there bimonthly (or is that semimonthly).
It is usually a very easy place for me to get to by subway. Yesterday the train part was easy, getting out of the station wasn't. The crowd was backed up down the stairs and into the station. I had to wait on line to leave. Why? Yesterday was the Pride Parade and it goes right by there. I'm been writing quite a bit about gay rights recently so you'd think I'd be happy about that. Nope, because before I'm a liberal and ceaseless fighter for equal rights I'm a New Yorker. My reaction was, "Stupid tourists! Somebody teach them how to use a sidewalk." There was no good reason I had trouble getting out of the subway and to then walk down the street. It was just filled with people who find the concept that other people want to walk on a street and that they can't walk through them incomprehensible. Have a group of 5 people you want to talk to? What better place than right in the middle of the sidewalk, especially if there is some obstacle there that makes it narrower. Before they let you in the City you should have to pass a test on sidewalk etiquette.
When I got to the Caffe, Dave was outside it talking to his friends and family. I was introduced as "The Famous Gordon Nash." Of course after that everyone else was described as famous too.
I had one of those moments I always enjoy, how a musician struggles to describes what exactly my place in the music world is. He called me a connoisseur. I'll take that. The word I use is stalker.
When I went in Phil and Gary were sitting in the back and I joined them. I didn't know it but they were playing with Aaron.
Aaron was one of my pleasant musical surprises. He's a friend of Phil Henry and I met him socially. I didn't know he was a professional musician. We were sitting around and as musicians will they started playing and I found that not only was he a singer/songwriter, but a really good one.
I had my brilliant insight on what to write about him and now I'm afraid I already wrote it. Well sometimes a nonworking memory can be a blessing and I'm going to write it as if it were the first time.
So you know how I say some songwriters' songs aren't as interesting as they are? Aaron's are exactly as interesting as he is, and that's high praise because he's pretty damn interesting. He never leads me asking, "Why is he a songwriter?" Or "Why did he write that song?" You write a song about grapefruit because you know if you don't nobody else will. He dedicated a song to me, it was about not wanting to be in someone's "harem of men." That really should have been dedicated to Carey, she's the one with a harem. As he dedicated the song to me does he think that I have a harem of men? Does he think I'm in a harem of men? Actually it's neither. It was just that he played it for me when I first met him and I told him that I loved it.
Aaron songs are to him what Wise Madness is to me. They get other people to see how his mind works. That's a songwriter I want to hear.
On the subway I read The Order of the Oddfish and came across this line (this is what I jotted down in my notebook);
"As an Oddfish it is not my job to be right," said Sir Oort. "It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways."
This brought some things into focus. You might have noticed that I do that all the time. I live to be wrong in new and exciting ways. I've been doing that here quite a bit recently but it's something I've always done. For instance my theory of the Zero Milestone.
But the fact that I do it is not what struck me. It's that many people, maybe most of the world, do exactly the same thing but without the self-awareness. Just turn on the TV and listen to the pundits. Read a book, a magazine, a blog, and you're likely to find people pontificating on things with no evidence whatsoever. People just don't seem to see the importance of empirical evidence and judge things by how they sound. That's part of why I make up my nonsense that I know is nonsense, its satirizing what I see go on all around me.
So why does this entry suck? Aliens saw that I was getting too close to the secret of what's wrong with the world, of why people have so much trouble solving problems. They want to keep us weak and ripe for the invasion so they used their incoherency ray on me. Now I can't convince anyone of anything and this is coming out at total nonsense.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
creative commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile June 27, 2011
| site search by freefind | advanced |
Follow on Feedly
