August Musings

2014–08–13

I don’t know if I should feel sad or not. Certainly it would be ridiculous and callous to be happy about the suicide, but is it wrong also to be sad? Is a suicide necessarily a mournful activity because within it there is death? Death needn’t always be a sad experience. If it is the autonomous, sound-of-mind decision, the rejection of a gift not able to be rejected beforehand.

(Interesting question: a lot of back story depends on the answer)

2014–08–14

I don’t believe anything which has been invented is necessarily something which should be de-invented; as an example, a harpoon. Shoot, snap, pull. Shock, blast, death. It captures in its claw the life of a large aquatic mammal, killing it painfully. It suffers. Is that a bad thing? How about the production of oil, which has been predicted to in the future cause deleterious effects to the environment and thus to us. Should we have started out producing solar power? At the time, the only renewable resource able to harnessed was water; hydroelectric power is simple to create in essence, but to truly harness the power of the flow of the river requires in and of itself massive amounts of energy — thus, one needs in order to properly and efficiently use renewable energy resources, one needs a resource which easily gives off much energy. Nuclear energy? Not possible without the use of fossil fuels. I cannot imagine how it would’ve been feasible to act any other way — maybe not wantonly pollute as much — than in the path humanity has taken. Maybe that’s just a personal failing.

2014–08–18

I’ve always been amazed at the changes my body has over-gone as my age increases, as I have superannuated: my hands are frail and weak, with wrinkles jutting upwards from the otherwise smooth flow of the skin of the hand over the bones, following the light-blue veins: that color which is but an illusion, an artifact of the light being absorbed by your skin, a façade, much like my own life. I have these large black dots to the base of my hand — hair follicles, I guess. The skin around my forearm, my abdomen, my thighs, my forehead, my neck — it droops, sags, falls. I feel as if I’m in an oven at a low temperature, simmering, melting slowly and slowly, till I break apart and form a soup.

2014–08–20

The traffic trudged along in Jakarta, all the lanes packed under the sun, with cars honking and pushing ever forward by infinitesimals — they looked to be sweating underneath the bright light. In the cars, it was no different: one had a sense of deep urgency and anxiety in blocked traffic but yet a profound, sad boredom. The people in Jakarta are obsessed with these mechanical machines, yet that insistence on their use undermine the fundamental purpose of transportation. Jakarta is a developing metropolis, with naught of adequate public transportation.

NB: written w/o very much research — I don’t really believe it, if it’s wrong.

2014–08–21

The rain fell down in torrents, in these waves of water that flowed in the wind, as it gusted from one side of the town to the other. The rain seeped into the ground, combining with the dirt, making mud, and the house slipped on this fluid, down the hill. Landslides. 200 millimeters of rain and these aren’t somehow equipped to deal with all of it, yet they’re in the region of Asia that should be able to withstand large outpourings of rain. These areas experience typhoons annually, yet in this year of 2014, they don’t have the ability to withstand it.

My shoes are on the dirt, and I lay my hands out, letting the cool rain hit my arms, and then the droplets flow off. It’s a liberating feeling, as if I possess some sort of power for being able to stand here in this storm. The same feeling I get when I swim in the river, the water flowing all about me, carrying me downstream. Experience the power of nature: I stand in the center of its sound and fury.

(Love this!)

2014–08–25

The blue-gray morning sky lay behind the moss green of the forest trees, and my body shivered as the slight breeze flowed past in bursts. I stood there on the edge, full of indecision: moments earlier I had but placed my feet in the spring’s water; thus I knew its temperature. It was cold, a sort of cold that traps your skin, that makes you shrivel and squirm, a cold so vile you react so violently as you do to a flame. And yet he jumped in. I jumped in, my feet flitting against the soft moss at the spring’s bed.

2014–08–27

When passing by pedestrians, you never really notice the faces of the passing people: there’s a brife moment when you recognize the face as human face, where you identify its main features, but those minutaie you missed sometimes makes all the difference.

Sometimes when I study those who sit and talk of their lives — I can’t imagine how boring their lives are, but statistically most can only be acceptable, yet everyone talks as if all are interesting. Their mouths, necks, jaws; how these muscles and bones ever so subtly shift to evoke noise, to evoke communication, to transmit thought by the vibrations of the air.

I want to notice the details of people’s lives: the freckles on their nose, the piercing through their eyebrow, the small patch of their wrist where one day seven years ago they fell to the asphalt and ripped off their skin and flesh, the pure ivory of the bone exposed with a rough ring of dark red.

2014–08–28

I often only was with people I knew that I should hate, but yet they were my friends anyway. Like, there was this one from the prison near Alcoborte Springs — this large, gray bricked structure, perfectly rectangular with barbed fence, but there were, if you looked real closely, stains on the lower portion of the wall and on the grass that met that gray wall. The stains were red brown, dark brown, a dried blood. He was a murderer and I was a friend of his. He was an affable person, though, and could make conversation. I enjoyed listening to his thoughts, his ideas on the larger modes of life. A murderer’s perspective on the conflict in the Middle East: would it be repugnant? Would he demand violence? Would he be concerned at all with the Other? Is it that those directly around him feel no sympathy from him, yet those so far removed, he could apply somewhat of a moral calculus to its reasoning?

All those were answered in the negative. It was disappointing.

But still: friends with a murderer?

(A murderer is a subjective term. Is a soldier a murderer? A police officer?)

[Notes added by their first reader: I don’t think highly of them.]