hocus pocus

I wanted to keep my job. This was my home. When the time came I wanted to retire here and then be buried here. That was before it was clear glaciers were headed south again, and that anybody buried here, including the gang by the stable, along with Musket Mountain itself, would eventually wind up in Pennsylvania or West Virginia.
--from Hocus Pocus, 2001

i think vonnegut had it about right

not only the idea that humans are simply vehicles designed by trafalmadoran superbeings in order to give germs a supreme breeding ground so as to become immune to the challenges of asteroid-induced space travel

but also in his style of writing a paragraph or two of some basic idea before moving onto another, with their distinction being signified by a line

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it may be that he and i shared a basic tendency toward schizophrenia, in which the boundaries of this and that are not as obvious to us as to conventionally media-induced consciousness, nor the boundaries of now and then

although he died finally in his eighties from a bump on the head, while i just pretend to have lived

he said as much of himself: that without writing he would not have been functional

me, well: i have milk to stock

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the greater likelihood is that i share with him a common anarchistic trajectory

one that follows a great enough and long enough disruption of normality that there becomes no further meaning in any conventional prescription for life

for him clearly the meat locker beneath the ground in dresden in which he was imprisoned and therefore ultimately saved from the carpet bombing of the city by his own troops

for me maybe it was that kindergarten class where i sat frozen without interacting for six months or maybe the kototama or the holocaust or too much pot as a teen

or something else like the immense failure at most everything i've tried to do and everyone i've tried to love

or the mental wards themselves

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but what i mean to express is how grateful i am that there are so few illusions left, and i am all the more capable of happiness as a result

i know pre-fab monogamy is a bland choice amidst those offered by a universe marked by zen and eros, whereas more fitting at least for me might be

an empathy-rich-platonic-polyamory-with-other-options-to-be-consciously-and mutually-determined-on-a-case-by-case-basis

i also know jobs and homes and friends, no matter how seemingly permanent, come and go

and that the glaciers, or some such thing, will soon swallow up the whole of it

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and that is why

at the end of civilization

when it would be sheer stupidity to move from community-centered mountain safety into the dregs of urban petroleum-based living in a coastal state about to go bankrupt

i have decided nevertheless to spend the forseeable future

on the shore of a beach
connecting to something yet alive in this world

learning to surf these waves