Urban Ascetic

I'm pretty sure I picked that phrase up from some magazine. But I'll see if I can live it. Ascetics mortify the flesh: they attempt to transcend its fleeting needs. What am I doing? I'm cutting back my sleep. Five hours ought to be enough for anyone. My body does not like lactic acid to build up in its muscles from overexertion: fuck it. Bitter poison of alcohol every night: not to excess, but enough to bend me and leave its mark before I colllapse on my bed. My nerves shatter and startle at the slightest cue these days, these periods of increased mental exertion. So be it. In fact, it is good. My previously softened, oversleeping, chilling demeanour made me a lot less chill on the inside. Exhausting oneself in as many ways as possible and knowing that tomorrow brings in even worse challenges with ever-diinishing energy to meet them causes som strange psychodynamics: an island of calm. A center. But that's just exhaustion. I don't have air conditioning. The heat waves will not longer elicit complaints from me. No more comfort foods: only the severest greens and carbohydrates and nuts. (That'll have to be phased out.) Down with need. Want less, use less. I'll do these things. Get a smaller room. Less air circulation. More muslce pain. More conflict. More confrontation. More challenging the slightest problems (sharpening the wolf's debating teeth). Ascetics seek truth. They are not relativists. They are intolerant, but powerless to stop other strategies of transcendence. (I'm speaking to you, congregations of well-fed satisfied bankers &c., chanting retreats, self-satisfied Buddhists, slovenly "social mores are bullshit" liberals, straight-laced "I need to lace my laces straighter" conservatives, & especially you, "anything goes" libertarians. You are the nihilists, and not in the good way. In the way that high-school ego-inflated pseudo-intellectuals are into the occult. Badly and shallowly.) I'll construct a kindgom of the mind. Reclaim St. Augustine's City of God, but plop down a nice big town square on The Throne of Heaven. Perfuse my brain to get the creative juices flowing and bugger to eveything else. This is my anti-drug, my brain-stimulation reward (BSR). I've reached break point.

Consider: "The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."