From: horsestorideon@hotmail.com
Subject: wood shop [art class: we’ll teach you how to be creative… you did pay for it] [0005]
Date: November 5, 1998 2:35:13 AM PST
To: exit2k@hotmail.com, afw10@columbia.edu, mrvisible@worldnet.att.net, sowinski@inetdirect.net, sejohnst@midway.uchicago.edu, and 26 more…
i’m leaving kansas now… you may not hear from me for a few days
but
buck up
i probably won’t die on the motor-way
and it’ll resume soon enough.
sleep-tight,
mwa.
here’s a fundamental problem
[look, it comes from my joints]
:
in the wonderings given
most are concerned with the tragedies
and questioning or forgetting the joys.
Yes.
maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about that, though.
yes, this is a fundamental problem, comming from all of the earliest pivots made.
in what i’d like to say to you and what i’d like to do for you
i guess i have different aims…
when i’d like to make you [take you, force you]
free.
is joy a way to express that motivation?
i’ve never been taught that
nor have i ever seen it..
i come across joy’s uses in nasty persuasive ways
like rotting out your teeth
or making you bow-down
it’s anger and spite and the dirt of life that makes you grit your teeth and shout and stone, take up arms; run.
it’s this hell we’re trapped in that make you want to change it
make you want to embrace it so close you crush it and make it yours
it’s this anger and possesion and defense and exclusion that makes you sweat in exhaustion at the end of a war.
in war.
we’re in war again…
alright, this is a tried tactic…
get a party of people pissed off about the same thing
[oh, it doesn’t matter if it’s really the same thing… as long as they think they’re pissed about the same thing as the guy next to them]
and you’ve got yourself a pack of snarling wolves ready to rip apart the prey, the enemy, the offender… whatever it may be.
this works well for crowd control
this gets implimented quite well for crowd control
i can use desperation and depression
agression and fear…
i was raised in the mid-west in america as a catholic
i know the nature of the trade…
i’ve learned my own tricks
and some of theirs…
but what about the past?
he said to me “happily ever after”
and i wondered about
before.
:
can you become happy After if before is still there..?
it’s not there…
it’s before, yeah? it’s gone, yeah?
how do we shake it?
what if we react against before?
what if we ignore before
and make all the same mistakes…
what if we react against everyone’s Now and make ours a bit different
on principle.
some guy i once was said “anything that i see that many people doing has to have something wrong with it”
and, forgetting about the duality that “wrong” exists in, we might use that as a lever to propell us into thinking about what we’re doing on a contrasting level….
oh, there are So many people in the world
we can’t watch out for all of them
[fortunately they’ve condensed themselves so we don’t have to]
but what about joy?
right, that’s what i’m aiming at here…
can we try and persuade eachother with stories of joy instead of death?
can we be in love with the night without having to be stabbed to know it?
can we sing some song of joy and not sound like an ignorant fool?
some sort of moron spousing off about how happy they are when we’ve got our…
problems…
.
i’d like to think i’m not dying or losing or pissing you all off
but i know i’m not talking about joy all that often
and when i see the pleasures that some have felt
that i have felt
that i know are there
i always wonder why it has to come back to this bickering and confusion
and professions of death and destruction.
;&;
it might not have anything at all to do with joy..
any of those nouns…
it could all be about our vessels…
ok, let’s look at it like this:
we’re trapped in our bodies
and no matter what we’re thinking or doing
we can’t escape our border-lines
…
we learn to EXUDE
like giving off a sent
or a sound…
these things can be practiced and proffesionalized and mimic’d…
so, as they can be done well
they can be done very poorly.
take one of the men i love:
[he’s not here right now, not on this list: he’s dead. they do that.]
his early readings were emotional… he’d just written these texts and he read them like they were his desperation
his thoughts and words shared no distance…
and he got older. this presents no intricit problem.. but the further we get from thing the easier it is to forget them… what happend was: he had a stroke. i figure it’s as effective as any electro-shock he’d ever gotten [and he had] at knocking out those sections of the brain that were slowing him down or damaging him or making it difficult to get up everyday and keep moving. [some of you may have these sections of brains… or be familiar with the concept]
the difference in the readings were noticable right away:
his intonation was all fuct
like an actor who’d never read the script and didn’t care to get in charecter…
he’d read the lines and be so fucking chuffed that he’d written them or delighted in what they said
that each word kinda BURST! into being and slobbered over to the next one…
yeah, maybe he had a great time reading it
but all the emotional data from the origional writing was lost…
i guess things can change and all
but it’s a bit too much like embalming to me…
anyway,
i don’t think i like listening to people having a good time if they aren’t expressing WHY.
[“why”]
[this is important: watch]
not that it has to be clear
but i think it should be present…
[if you were to look up and catch their eye… you could see it was there even if they turned their heads quickly enough to let you know what it was]
[which leads to]
so many people have separated the thought from the act
and it’s NOT the thought that counts
and it’s NOT the act that counts
it’s this communion of them
the way they spin with eachother
the way they call their names when they’re smiling or fighting
or resting on the floor…
if you’re listening to a joke
and you think you can tell a good joke from a bad joke
do you
laugh
or say
“that’s funny”
?
if you love someone
do you
buy them a ring
or
watch them in your sleep
or say
“i love you”
?
if you say you don’t want it [again and again, to make sure you get it across]
do you really mean it?
or are you trying to trick us into giving it to you?
ahhhhmmmm
i heard so many things . . .
if there’s one thing that i learned when i was still a child
was not to trust Words from a mouth that’s not even paying attention enough to get the intonation right…
liars can be respectable if you can see they respect you enough to try and convince themselves as well
if it’s a game with substancial force
and you have no objection to it
it’s fun to play along
[you just might learn something]
but if you aren’t connecting
if one of you is trying a BIT too hard
maybe it’s time to find another play-mate…
another million.
[i’m not pointing any fingers]