going rogue

"It wasn't that Rachel condoned his callousness, nor did she wish that she could emulate it (not much anyway). It was just strangely refreshing to be talking to a person who had conquered the guilt that oppresses us all. Perhaps this is why rogues are such popular figures of fiction; they have the ability to be bastards and not worry about it - they give us a chance to escape the ever oppressive conscience."


- Ben Elton, Stark

nice cd cover #31

Roly Porter - Third Law

oh well

"'The only thing is, we're, I think it's quite possible that we're in Hell.'
'Oh?'
Eric's lack of reaction made Rincewind curious.
'You know,' he added. 'The place with all the demons in it?'
'Oh?'
'Not a good place to be, it's generally felt,' said Rincewind.
'You think we might be able to explain?'
Rincewind thought about this. He wasn't, when you got right down to it, quite sure what it was that demons did to you. But he did know what humans did to you, and after a lifetime in Ankh-Morpork this place could turn out to be an improvement. Warmer, at any rate."


- Terry Pratchett, Eric

nice cd cover # 30

Emancipator - Dusk to Dawn

learning to fly (lesson nine)

you are not learning to fly while on the ground.

nice cd cover # 29

Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest

the residue

"I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best as I could and I found human beings inside. The writing would be forgotten. The writing would become much less than the episode itself until the episode ended. The writing was only the residue. A man didn't have to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong he'd feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came.

I was sentimental about many things: a woman's shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, 'I'm going to pee...'; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she's now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends, your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same; sleeping together..."


- Charles Bukowski, Women

nice cd cover # 28

Incubus - Morning View

learning to fly (lesson eight)

"But what I loved most from the first training flight was the neatness, the sense of everything in its place. The farms in their squared sections, the quartering county roads oriented to the cardinal compass points, windbreaks casting long shadows westward in the morning, the round bales and scattered cattle and horses as perfect in their patterns as sprays of stars and holding the same ruddy sun on their flanks, the pickups in the yards, the trailer parks in diagonal rows, the tract homes repeating the sidelit angles of roofs, baseball diamond and kart track ovals, even the junkyards just so, ragged lines of rusted cars and heaps of scrap metal as inevitable and lovely as the cottonwoods limning the rivers, casting their own long shadows. The white plume from the stack of a power plant tended eastward on the morning wind as pure as washed cotton. This was then. from up here there was no misery, no suffering, no strife, just pattern and perfection. The immortal stillness of a landscape painting. Nor ever can those trees be bare... Even the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle progressing along the track of a highway pulsed with the reassuring rhythm of a cricket."


- Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

nice words # 21/22

vacillate / oscillate

unfathomable

"Most people realize the sea covers two thirds of the planet, but few take the time to understand even a gallon of it. Watch what happens when you try to explain something as basic as the tides, that the suction of the moon and the sun creates a bulge across the ocean that turns into a slow and sneaky yet massive wave that covers our salty beaches twice a day. People look at you as if you're making it up as you go. Plus, tides aren't news. They don't crash like floods or exit like rivers. They operate beyond the fringe of most attention spans. Anyone can tell you where the sun is, but ask where the tides are, and only fishermen, oystermen, and deep-keeled sailors will know without looking."


- Jim Lynch, The Highest Tide

splintered

"And on the drive back to the house on Elsinore Lane, above the dashboard and out the windshield, visible in the wide horizon of darkness, I was seeing newly planted citrus trees that were appearing along the interstate, and the citrus trees kept flashing by, along with the occasional wild palm, their fronds barely visible in the blue mist, and the scent of the Pacific Ocean had somehow entered the Range Rover along with Elton John singing 'Someone Saved My Life Tonight' even though the radio wasn't on, and then there was an exit ramp and the sign above it read SHERMAN OAKS in shimmering letters, and I thought about the city I had abandoned on the West Coast and realized there was no need to point this out to my wife, who was driving, because the windshield suddenly was splintered by rain, obscuring the palm trees now lining the highway everywhere and, above them, the geometry of a constellation from a distant time zone, and I also realized that there was no need to point this out to Jayne because, in the end, I was only the passenger."


- Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park

poem of today

nice words # 20

eclipse

nice words # 19

sylph

nice cd cover # 26/27

I Am Robot and Proud - Uphill City / Uphill City Remixes & Collaborations

sentences flowing like wine

"Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever."


- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

the water reflects the water

 

Shelter

From sound to echo
—we sleep. Among
silent mountains, locked
between sides. We crave

only to remain. On
random days we could reflect
angry sunlight away, and
be still. Like words in thoughts,

We could find that we lie,
heaving bodies into mute
ground. For here your head
lies on my chest. Your gaze

will harvest many swallows.
When they fly low, as if
to touch my belly, and they
predict summer in a way I

could never promise.

nice cd cover # 25

The Verve - Forth

The albatross sailing on wind

 

The albatross sailing on wind

does it think to feel

the weight below, the endless space

it hides under the span of

its wings?

Or does it embrace

the empty only because

it looks ahead, sailing

on wind, open-armed,

untiring?

Gliding canopy of feather

ruffling starless ocean eyes,

hanging on, turning

Into the silence deafened

by wind, by wind, by wind.