http://lookungringo.wordpress.com

I've moved on from blogger.com - come peep my words over here: http://lookungringo.wordpress.com

11.29.06

Today I was conducting oral exams with students, and I found out that a student didn’t have much patience when reading. like myself. Maybe it wasn’t a lack of patience, but she said that it took her a long time to get through books. That might not be the lack of patience at all, but longsuffering. I wish I could hear someone say long suffering sometime in a conversation. This phenomenon seems to be only a written thing. But I probably heard someone say longsuffering in Christian high school, quoting the Bible and referencing God’s path. I was also thinking about the word mighty the other day, it’s been too long since I’ve been able to appropriately use that word in discourse. I think that one also showed up in some Hymns or Worship songs.

Five days a week I wake up around 6 or 6:30 so I can get to work on time. The fact that both of my bosses lack personality and humanity has a direct relation to my neuroses and nervous approach to making sure I dot all my j’s and such at work. Making it on time, turning in my folder with attendance, not wearing sunglasses during class, don’t letting students out early, being professional, not using white out, not mixing business and pleasure. When you work there often isn’t enough time to reflect about what the hell you’re doing and what the hell is what the hell you’re doing and what the hell everything is, which can also be a good thing.

That’s alright. But who’s here when I’m not here? Who’s here when there’s still presence but not I? some one is here who’s still present, some consciousself, Right now someone’s outside the window honking the horn, it’s 9:08 p.m. There almost always seems to be some sort of nocturnal activity going on across the street from my apartment. Outside my neighbor’s apartment. Dizque my neighbor’s an alcoholic, I’ve seen him a couple of times in the street. He’s around my age, a young man. He always tries to flag me down and speak to me in English, how’s it going dude, I guess he lived in California or something for awhile. I usually see him in the early afternoon, sloshed under a low sun. my girlfriend says that his mom doesn’t let him in the house and doesn’t let him out of the house, either. He has some pusher friends who drive Hummers and bring him drugs at night. I never want to talk to him, but, you know, he’s totally free to do whatever he wants because it’s right if he likes it and he’s not hurting anybody.

I like my neighborhood, though, it’s what is called “popular” in Spanish. It’s very traditional and there aren’t a lot of white people, there are a lot of stray dogs and some cats who are very noisy when they copulate, there aren’t hardly any people from the United States or Europe, sometimes with this feeling I feel free, or clandestine. Like I’m conducting a secret operation of a private nature. A project with (personal) reality. There is always someone selling cds or barbecued meat or fruit out of a truck or belts or brooms in the street. Maybe it’s quaint. It’s still novel.

I get out of class every day around 4:00 and often stroll around my house in the living room in the afternoon. Today outside my window in the apartment below mine there were children celebrating a birthday party. Some young barely along in years, the world is still a novelty to be breathed, creating a fragile curved drop of water dropping that you won’t remember accurately. They were hitting piñatas on clotheslines surrounded by concrete on all sides; I watched on nostalgically, surrounded by contentment and reserved joy.

Everything is usually satisfactory and all right and I’m drinking black tea and smoking a Marlboro Blue cigarette right now. Do they have blue marlboro cigarettes in my country? I don’t ever remember seeing them. It’s a real Nice Mild Blend. So, anyways, I try to keep a calm nature and when a problem arises I try to be the problem and not think about it, about separation between me and something else, you know, and all that other zen shit I’ve been into lately. A lot of times I forget to do it but when I remember it usually works and brings me some piece of Mind. It’s very pragmatically based, if you’re into that kind of applicable shit. I’m also down with its metaphysics.

The connection between “being somewhere else” and “being where you are” has a funny nature that continually uncovers itself, often revealing circularity. In any case it’s good to be where I am, it always should be good to be where I am. I have a fucking sty in my eye, though, it’s the second time I’ve gotten one since I’ve been in South America. What the hell is a sty, anyway? I think it’s a small mound of white infected puss that forms close to the orb of your eyeball, actually. They’re extremely annoying, I guess they can be cured with tea bags and prevented with sunglasses. That’s true.

Right now my girlfriend is out spraypainting advertisements for a release party for a magazine/journal of which she’s involved in the production. It’s called La Pepa. She’s riding my bicycle and is wearing a yellow and white fluorescent vest, she looked really cute when she left. I hope she doesn’t get stopped by the police and thrown in jail. Though she knows how to maneuver a bike well, my girl. and I would imagine she could make her way out of a pickle.

any day now

it's at once entertaining and terrific to sketch my present profile in 75 hour work weeks, dominant interests include forms of feminine flesh and french structuralist bullshit, or an economic reality dominated by the logic of late capitalism, or by cycles of materialistic leitmotifs of sore testicles, odd sorenesses just at the edge of the lower ribs. jesus may be coming back any day now, and i really don't think i can finish off all the extra gravy that came with this countrie-fried steak.

it's all at once you've been told that convinces you that there could be something more, i Mean beauty manifesting itself in an ideological-physical whole sort of way. in fact the other night i was lamenting that i couldn't leave my own body, relegated to our collective realm of SEPERATENESS; perhaps the dawn of frontiers is indistinguishable from the dawn of sorrow. maybe it's all this fucking anglo-saxonic Distance, or we are sorry that we drew a part.

there's just way too much pressure to organize and inform procedures, phenomena and information according to the dominant paradigms and hierarchies. wait, i take it back, i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about:) i've really made a mess of this cottage cheese and country fried steak.

it's kind of too bad i never feel impending doom, anymore. in a way. it could really put things into perspective. instead all this shit blends together, i've started accidentally dumping loaves of bread out of plates onto customers' tables and filling out mundane paper work in dreams. it would be nice to end up in a book with pleasantly blank pages again soon, where i'd have to navigate a world of the semiotically unknown again for the first time. it's too bad there has to be a beginning and an ending. do yourself a favor and pierce me with Calvino's Paper Knife, whose textual puncture will at once signify, through a symbolically violent act, the creation of this bridge between You and I, an instantaneous beginning and end.

the midwest begins again from a ( ) point of entry. they are putting the snow barricades up and there is space. and lack but not that kind of material lack, if you permit me or if i permit myself to dichotomize between the spiritual/ethereal and the material. but i don't want to wander around in those tunnels right now....

i've been on campus since around monday morning, 9:00. now it's tuesday, almost 9. papers and movement and things. hi, my name is zach campbell and i go to calvin college. various points of entry.

i had a good thanksgiving weekend. w/family and friends. now the trip back blurs it all, the memory of travel organizes itself into a singular fiction, condensed. condensed movement and condensed space with seat-back table trays and drifting in and out of consciousness in the seat on the plane and wandering through airports heeding the signs that lead me "HOME".

about the only thing that stands out in fact is the bar and smoking lounge in cincinnatti, a congenial asshole from minnesota, a middle-aged kansas citian with a broad hat and a bible, taking chances, an indian IT techie who is movement: from california to D.C. to milwaukee....

wait, funny that memory thing. i was never fucking in cincinnatti. i haven't been to cincinnati in a long time. (it's near kentucky). i went to milwaukee. chris filipini did go to cincinnati and i talked to him in grand rapids before he left. bored and is?lated midwest cities exchanging names amongst my synapses.

at some point late last week or last week-end my friend andy hill told me that for buddhists, the separation of the all into parts, or rather, distinctions, categories, the grid, or whatever you want to call it, only serves to separate us from the whole, or God, and it is the source of man's sorrow. later that night we drove around downtown and tried to find the projects, we came close like every thing; we really shouldn't have been driving anyway.

[you know i couldn't remember if that whole thing with the guys in the cincinnati/milwaukee smoking lounge happened on the way there or on the way back. if you let yourself think a certain way you can skim over those sort of more factual types of details.]*

i like the image of a door half open. we can see inside, but we're still restricted. our position is in between. neither in nor out, really - or a foot in the door. just one leg and a shoe around a sock around a mass of bones and blood and tissue and muscle and fat around dna and cytoplasm, just firm on the ground. always putting another foot in the fucking door.

i'm leaving grand rapids in 3 weeks. i'll be in ecuador for a bit less than two. then to kansas city to work? i hope i won't get stuck there. i'm firmly pleased by it all, but still don't want to be the one w/o a home. don't think of it as a conclusion. or maybe not even an ending or beginning in fact. this is not a beginning.

enough obscure posting. today i slept off and on until about 3:00. i had dreams, maybe a bit more like daydreams or fantasies given the autonomy i had over them, myself (perhaps only myself metonymically) hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. i could try to explain to you what they were about but i doubt it would make any sense. i think it may have had something to do with divisions and sub-divisions of singular things and perhaps categories, and royalty as well, but that's as close as i can get. i got up and rode my bike around and saw some people i know, and had a mexican pizza. last night i hung out with my colleague Metal, and i mentioned that I liked when he said in his paper, althought this paraphrase won't do it justice, that metaphors are useful because they allow us to understand truth in varying degrees, rather than in terms of binary oppositions (Perspectivism as Anti-Realism, Kevin Cook, 2004). and then last night he said that metaphors are our strike back at language and it's inflation and proliferation of signifieds. i added a bit to what he said paraphrastically. and i agreed wholeheartedly and drank some more beer.

i think it's about it. i just wanted you to see this site, you might even like it. kneedeep in cliches.

http://alecsoth.com/bogota_web/pages/01.html

37 distracted images, limited by math. sequences nearly mimicked, with room left for infinity. there is no bastardized moment, but creation, and repetition: humans weaved in through cyclical time, filling up language's empty spaces in a labyrinth of meaning and identity.

dreams and metaphors. dreams, dim mirrors, and plastic bags.

entrance into language, does the linear date matter.

quote:why is there something, instead of nothing.




“WHY IS THERE SOMETHING, INSTEAD OF NOTHING?” why is it always now, now, now, not always, forever, neverending. how far are we from the real? is sailing a ship a good metaphor for this sort of a thing? where the fuck did i put my biology test score? why do i want to hurt you? do i have to hurt you? do i want to hurt you? why don’t we practice alchemy?

i am not an author. i am only an intersection. i am only an intersection.

Now is not the time for such questions. There are ghosts whom come only at night. They carry otherly-shaped things in their pockets, strange matter that won’t fit into language. Any sort of analogy that might be gasping it’s last breath ends here. ?

(walking cliches).