How I stopped biting my fingernails.

When I was seventeen I went to France on this France trip with a bunch of other French-speaking high school kids. It was a school trip for three weeks, and we toured all over the place and ate French food and did French stuff and it was really fun and amazing.

Up until then, from the time I could reach my mouth with my hands, I would chew my fingernails down to my nubs, down to the quick, so they'd bleed. I would nibble furiously, uncontrollably. I tried to stop, but failed.

My mom got this gross stuff when I was a kid and painted it on my nails. It was just stuff that tasted bad and didn't wash off well, so it discouraged kids from biting their nails. I can still taste the stuff if I think about it. It didn't help. I grew to like it, nasty and terrible-tasting as it was.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? In France, after two and a half weeks of whirlwind adventure, back in Paris again, I remember waking up one morning and realizing that I needed to cut my nails. I asked one of the girls in my room if I could borrow her nail trimmers, and then I asked if she had any tips on how to cut them. She was like, why? And I realized, it was the first time I'd ever actually cut my nails, in my whole life.

Why did I stop biting my nails? I don't know really. The dramatic change of scenery and environment and the sense of disorientation. Maybe. I realize there are the things that happen, and there are the things we say to ourselves afterwards about how shit goes down. On some level, even the narrative is a kind of lie. How I quit biting my nails is I went to France. It doesn't sound real when I say it like that, because it's just the truth rubbed raw of all those other details that might muddle or muck it up. It's why I say the key to a good story is omission. But I don't know, and never have known, if this is a good story. I don't really think it is. There's a moral in it somewhere but I'm not sure what it is and I'm not interested in telling it, and maybe that the only human interest it's really got. That and it's true.

a cynical kind of day

If I'd known what kind of day I'd have when I woke up this morning, I might've skipped it altogether. Though I suppose it was an important one, full of new information and enlightening tidbits. I was supposed to run a workshop this afternoon an hour outside of town and it didn't happen because of seized bearings, someone else's busted arm and a rather large photojournalistic editing project. But these are merely the interesting details in what is otherwise a long and boring story.

I did not give any workshops today. I spent the day in doctor's offices and cars and other people's lives, and here I am in the relatively reclusive anonymity of my relatively unread blog, doing that potentially shameful thing akin to scribing a self-referential whiny diatribe on a bathroom wall. Everybody's doing it.

Psychic prediction: in the years to come when the neoliberal capitalist agenda becomes increasingly user-friendly and transparent, the concept of rights will be seamlessly fused with the concept of commodity. Today, if you have enough money, you can travel to Amsterdam from the U.S. and engage in activities there that are otherwise illegal as a U.S. citizen. In the future, perhaps a greener future where the fuel to fly you to and from this place are spared, you will merely purchase the right to enter an amsterdam zone on the end of your block, much like a door charge for a bar with a liquor license. Your id will be checked on the way in, and then you will be permitted to engage in activities which are not legal outside the building. The cost will be costlier, but theoretically the right to buy it will be available to everyone.

Citizenship will be phased out slowly as passe, the recognition that nation-states have been messy and outdated will be commonplace. Zones of appropriate rights will be established but will no longer be dilineated by borders. Fences will do. All people will be theoretically free to circulate, provided they have accumulated the capital to trade for the right. For some rights, the cost will be so exorbitantly high that only the concentrated capital of several lifetimes of labor will purchase it. You may not even know what these rights are, because you have no amassed the capital to imagine them.

Psychic prediction: tomorrow morning I will wake up and eat some toast and coffee. I will google the news. It will be raining. I will go back to bed and revel in holding very, very still for a long time. Sometimes, I will blink.

drinking out of bags

I was out with a friend of mine the other night, talking about sad stuff on a step somewhere, drinking out of a bag. There was this kitty that had followed us for a couple blocks and we pet her and she was hangin around us. She was a needy little kitty, still a kitten really, all black with white socks, very friendly. Prone to meowing. I was watching while we talked, and people would pass by and stop to pet the cat.

What is it like living in a world full of giants who want to scratch your back? They call you over and rub you behind the ears. All kinds of different giants, who don't necessarily talk to eachother or look alike or get along, but they all seem to like you.

I was watching these people and I felt okay about them. I kind of got this warm fuzzy feeling watching all these different people walk by and pet the cat. And I sort of felt like we had this unspoken comaraderie, just us among the conspiratorial cat lovers of the world.

I was reading about Iran, and the protests about their election, and I had this kind of awkward realization, feeling how humbled and awed I am by that many thousands in the streets. I believe those people. The sheer image of that many people makes me believe, instantly, before I even know what they have to say. I know it's potentially fallacious because the whole premise is ad populum, but that's the democratic shtick I guess. It's a potentially fallacious one. I see those pictures and my eyes tear up. I want those people to get whatever they want. I believe it can't be malicious, whatever it is that brings that many people together.

I find it interesting when I stumble across a belief. It often strikes me as a realization more than anything else. I just notice that I believe something. And I guess ultimately, I'm still really optimistic about people en masse, as individuals. I think we're doing something terribly wrong, but I believe we have a really incredible potential for doing things right.

All together now.

I want to do away with the concept of the past life, and the future life. I have a proposition, a supraconcept: the simultaneous lifetime.

I've been reading this book about these kids, and there are thousands of them, who have these distinct and vivid memories of past lives. They remember their houses, their phone numbers, their spouses, their children. And they can call them on the phone.

There are also those people, you've probably heard of them, who get regressed through hypnosis to some past life or other. But some of these cases have been debunked on the basis of such things as people remembering being two different people during the same period of time.

I have these dreams, and in these dreams I am two or three people, or four or five. I am all of them at the same time. And these dreams and I, we say why not? If you are taking as a fundamental possibility that the soul can be transferred between people, and that it maintains memories of distinct people and places and numbers, then why is the concept of linear time the sacred cow? Bring it to the slaughter. You are that cow (and the butcher, and the baker).

This too solves the intellectual quandry of there being more of us alive now than there have been ever before. Because we're just reincarnating here over and over again, for some undefined reason, crowding this place and time in some orgiastic feast of the multiplicitous self.

Think about it next time you're in the corner mart buying beer at two in the morning, right before the legal cut-off time, and you see that guy who's all shaky and sickly in front of you in line. He's buying tv dinners with his Oregon Trail card and you're a little worried about him but in your relative misery you think, almost against your will, at least I'm not that guy. But you are that guy. And he is you.