Mill

I've been a mad dog working and barking for weeks now. And it doesn't stop. It takes a whole week of concerted effort to ingratiate oneself with a sub-sub-field's specialized discourse, but it has its own rewards. I now picture the heads of these various cognition labs scattered around the Western world, sitting in stuffy little rooms with shelves crammed with useful books, required books, stacks of papers to referee, drafts of to-be-published materials.

It has not been a month of change or creativity. The Leonard Cohen tribute nights courtesy of our sexy friend have not kept up with demand. I would have gone to poetry readings, but they always make you participate, and if I see my writings as contrived, think of how contrived English majors will think them. I missed a soup party right in front of my window. Our upstairs people made huge pots and gave it out to whoever wished to partake. Jack Layton and Olivia Chow stopped by and donated a bottle of wine (they live like 4 houses away). I wish I were making it up. All the days seem the same, the only respite being a brief snowstorm yesterday. I stood there in that mad swirlage and just focused on an exercise I had read in Buddhism Without Beliefs that stressed minfulness. I don't know if I reached any kind of plateau, but I got a little closer: the pain in my cheeks and my body's desire to get out of the cold were just things to be experienced in and of themselves, not drives, not impetuses (impetii?), not motivational or affective states.

I have written way too many sentences that have not been horribly awkward phrase-string monsters. Perhaps I should expunge my instincts to be purposely dense. I wrote an essay defending scientific realism so we can go ahead and start using science to shape our lives so we can get rid of silly old God and gods and my TA for cog. sci. went on the offensive against Dawkis and Dennett and I thought it was overblown but he is an eminetly reasonable individual and the minority is entitled to spew hate speech it's just the majority which is thus restricted in civilized disourse and then I started drawing analogies and thinking of nothing but essay and dreaming essay (reading a little Vonnegut as a change-up every once in a while) and I had myself a moment of insigth this morning and the first thing I did was get dressed because I really need a space heater in this room and then I typed up my idea but I've been considering going back to hadwriting for recording ideas: it's more humanistic and written in my own unique pseudo-illegible all-caps hand: ask anyone who's borrowed my notes and besides I can then sit in my coffee shop eating spinach borekas and cream cheese bagels and various fair-trade coffee and huddle and imagine and be just like that one shaven-head artiste whose pictures maybe adorned the walls--I don't know but I know where to ask: you know who you are--and I have two weeks and then the dream is gone but I'll go on to write other essays and I'll push someone's buttons with a "Darwinian hand-wave" but that's because they just want to feel superior, not realizing that they've rigged the superiority game already with their massive inflation of intelligence; I would go so far as to claim that animals are far more rational than us insofar as they're more consistent with their drives but that's just another big Darwinian hand-wave and we found this book in the library which is a poetic exploration of the history of science and we read one and set a mini-play to the reading of the encounter between Huxley and the Bishop Wilberforce (or something like that), where the bishop asked "tell us, sir, are you descended from apes on your mother's or your father's side?" and then Huxley bitchslapped that asshole back to the Olduvai Gorge and fortified thus I started piecing together my draft-dodger zoology prof's life as he talked about grad school and how things are looking pretty grim and I stopped caring and decided I'd definitely take a fifth year; I haven't stopped being shoe-gazer-esque during these long years but I've found non sequitur to be a wonderful literary device for the lazy author who can't maintain a train of thought to save his life but that's quite all rigth because I've had a few ego boosts in my life and I should hang on to those because nature does not care and I was loved once and one can say I still am and for the first time ever I tried to give a thoughtful gift to my mother which was also a reminder to me: that although I'll end up in science just like her, nobody should forget those peripheral passions: drawing in her case and writing in mine; speaking of which, I'm nearing the end of my manuscript and I got Kurt Vonnegut to leave an ambiguous quote on the back cover (not really) and I also exumed James Joyce and asked him what he thought and the bastard was damn near incomprehensible because the wood mites took his tongue (also a lie; Mr. Joyce is a wonderful speaker but his estate won't return my e-mails) also the most lush moment in the world is the morning where I hit snooze on the alarm, where the slightest move will bring me in contact with non-body-warmed blankets and sheets and I will writhe full-body in peristalsis--and did you know that your occipital lobe has more neurons in it than the rest of your brain?--because it's not intelligence we find valuable, it's vision and synaesthesia which is really a very neat concept, enough to impress the prof and warrant a whoe sectin in Sci Am but we're getting ahead of ourselves--what else did I do?--oh, I tangled briefly with a proponent of intelligent design and found I've slot my debater's edge for self-assurance and I was too accommodating but it was all aprt of my stategy to sucker him in but the discussion dealt with other stuff and my scarf fell off and I am deathly afraid that one of my assumptions is subtly flawed and if that's so not even Dennett can save me, not all the militant atheist assholes and I'll have to hedge my bets with the dying breed of liberal Xians and O shit Annual Gift Day is coming and I have to be extra thoughtful and we'll celebrate Julian Calendar Annual Gift Day (Eastern Orthodox "Christ"mas) in Sweden frozen in a log cabin and I'll tell you all (you both?) how that went.

Words of wisdom from D. T.: "Being in a rut is exactly the same as being in a groove."