Being and Cigarettes: An Existential Manifesto

My room is in a basement apartment. When I sit at my desk, I can look at my window through my parted curtains; I can see that the snow on the ground is above my head when I’m sitting at my desk.

Not every night, but most, I sit at my desk with a pen and a single subject notebook and I try to make something from confusion. There isn’t anything there to make. Confusion is what hinders creation, not what propels it. I could make something from clarity, of seeing through and mitigating the confusion – clarity, in this circumstance, may create something, and that something may relate to confusion but only as something that alters it’s power, circumventing the influence it has over me. Nothing of worth can be made from confusion.

When I go outside I’m elevated from my desk.

It’s hard to make something from smoking cigarettes, but I find it provides a certain clarity. If I write for clarity, and I smoke for clarity, which is a more worthwhile activity? You say Writing, of course.

Misha, The Russian, is standing at the edge of the frozen tarmac in front of my building’s driveway, wearing a blue wool scarf that must be at least five feet long, completely wrapped around his neck, both ends hanging down either side of his chest like the Tippet of a North-winter Pope, a ear-flapped leather Cossack hat, and his thick rim glasses. We shake hands. “How are you, this evening?” he asks, pulling from his pack of PJs and handing me a smoke.

“I’m good, I’m good. Happy Easter.”

Misha grunts, and takes a long draw. “I never used to mind the winter until I started smoking. “

“Everyone finds fault with the season once they live on a diet of ash and plastic.”

“It’s not just the cold. The winter air with the smoke irritates my lungs, it covers them, I think, and then I feel kind of cancerous. Y’know?”

“No. I only smoke in my blog.” I say, watching the grey cloud of breath dispel in the wind.

“Y’know, fuck you. Just, fuck you!”

We do this every time he’s in town. Discussing personal politics in the flood of neurotic street lights, walking between my den and a 24 hour chain coffee dive with a fake Victorian facade, burning Surgeon General chimney sticks, and shooting butts as three point baskets from the sidewalk to the sewer grate, filling spaces with dick jokes and things I’ve done to his mother. This takes anywhere between 1 and 3 hours; 1 and 3 hours where I’m not being productive, but I’m in the clear. I’m in the clear of confusion and the fear of not being productive. We may be confusing, but we are, and you can’t fuck that up a whole lot when you’re being.

We’re smoking cigarettes and things write themselves.

Wu World Order?

Sycophantic shit gnome

I’m standing up in front of my desk and I’m holding up my autographed copy of “How To Blog” for my writer’s craft peers. Simple start-the-term assignment: do a presentation on your favourite writer, fill at least three minutes with material or discussion on something they’ve done and why you like them.

“Tony Pierce,” I start “penned the word ‘Blook’” – there are approximately sixty eyes casting judgment of varying shades of red, from blogging isn‘t writing to I bet he can’t top my presentation on Dan Brown/Chuck Palahniuk – “which I think it pretty awesome.” I say some shit about how distinctive his voice is, how fresh his metaphors are, stream-of-consciousness something’rother, 15 minute government mandated work breaks, how fly a post How to Blog is, then I challenge the audience that I have likely read more than them in my lifetime which by their fickle and entirely arbitrary standards should give blogging more credibility since I’m very clearly a literary god (from beyond the moon) and I endorse the fuck out of it. I proceed to recite the entirety one of his August 7th, 2003 entries that begins with me and britanny murphy were sitting in a tree., with a delivery I have rehearsed to kill. “Any questions?” then walking slow-cool over to the blackboard I pick up a piece of chalk, I break it midway through jotting his url down for all to see, wipe the white dust on my pant legs, and sit down feeling good that the next person that claims Fight Club changed their life will choke by a sudden hyper-critical self-consciousness by comparison.

This was sometime in 2005, maybe. I’m bringing it up now because I blog less than I used to – if I hadn’t deleted the archives of Far From Relevant several times I’d have up over 1000 posts, and maybe if I’d been consistent I’d have a similar number of readers – and I’m far less active in the general blogosphere having reduced what I read to a handful of blogs. So when I was reading the Bug Blog last night I was delighted to find a new post he’d written out there at SXSW, a post of such quality, of such raw and exuberant life that I remembered my writer’s craft presentation and thought “I’d do it again”.

Maybe this time though I’d design a presentation around blogging as a tool of elevating global consciousness, because that’s what it is. A former co-worker of mine said something to the effect of “blogging is pitiful self-indulgence which nobody reads; it’s the peak of narcissism”. I disagree entirely. Blogging is your opportunity to watch me direct a monologue to my mirror, my opportunity to be able to carry on that internal dialogue out loud without trying to fit into the ever narrowing borders of self-consciousness while still being able to show an audience what I’m thinking and feeling, and the multi-faceted second-person audience that I address’ opportunity to get involved and underneath what’s been said.

-Thanks to blogging I can discuss anxiety with one of my all time favourite musicians.

-Thanks to blogging I can write about a very smart, lively, down to earth, brilliant writer who likely would not have his job at the LA Times without his blog.

-Thanks to blogging I can misinterpret and carry on a discussion about feminism and misogyny with one of my best friend who lives hundreds of miles away, a discussion that we likely wouldn’t have had should he have expressed himself in another format.

-Thanks to blogging I can occasionally read up on and sympathize with a guy I don’t know but find interesting anyway.

I could go on but I’d rather replay Suikoden II.

***

So, my friend DeeJay has being doing a project he calls 365. The idea is that he takes a photo of himself every day for a year. I’ve been following it on and off for the 200something days he’s been doing it. I’m going to rip him off by drawing a picture of myself every day for the next year.

My advantage?

I can go back in time.

I’m sorry Owen Pallett. You were right.

I want to be addicted to video games, but my attention span isn’t long enough to develop interest and subsequent dependency. There was a time in my life that getting me to move for dinner was a task; there was a time in my life where my primary ego was named Azreal and I resented being referred to otherwise. In the last two days I have juggled between maybe ten video games trying to find one compelling.

I used to roll with Final Fantasy, but fuck!: those games are so goddamn contrived! Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy, Arcade Fire) once said something like “I don’t play them… the games are overwrought and convoluted emotionally”, and when I read that I was like “No man; fuck you! Those games are good.” Then I played them again. The series was pretty wicked for a decade between ages 7 and 17, but now I feel like slapping the dialogue right out of the mouth of the funny looking, generically anti-social protagonist every time he speaks, gleefully watching I can’t give up! drip down his clothes in a spittle/blood hybrid, collecting into alphabet soup on the floor.

30 Days of FLEXIBILITY (Daylight Saving Time)

Inspired by my idols, I’ve decided that for the next thirty days I will blog at least once a day.

I have a calendar up on my bedroom wall “MOTIVATIONS: Year 2008 Inspired Visions Calendar” – I didn’t buy it – and this month says Flexibility, “With flexibility comes a greater choice of options”; there’s a picture of a meandering waterfall or some bullshit. Wynd has always emphasized the morbidity of my habits, like how I have to suck the ash down to the plastic before I can toss a butt on the curb or someone’s lawn, or how I stroke the days off of the calendar as they finish, almost in relief, as if today were I burden I couldn’t wait to drop (only 22 more days of being Flexible and I can be Innovative).

I cross off the days to convince myself that I am moving in time; that I’m on a graph that determines my quality of life, and every day I move over on the x-axis, or Time (in days), and by completing my daily goals I’m forced up on the y-axis, or Happiness (in goals achieved). Since I have a linear conception of Time provided by my calendar, and my goals are kept to a base-level like waking up sometime, crossing the days off of my calendar, etc, I am comfortably pitted into the position of a constant incline. My life, if graphed on a Cartesian plane in this manner, looks something like this: “/”, indicating steady growth. Suddenly my habit doesn’t seem so morbid, does it?