For you edification, a gentleman who helped to define artistic integrity for me. Charles Bukowski. I have to put this one up, because it’s a great definition of Lewd Cognoscenti in many ways… anyway… take it away Charles…

the strongest of the strange

you won’t see them often
for wherever the crowd is
they
are not.

those odd ones, not
many
but from them
come
the few
good paintings
the few
good symphonies
the few
good books
and other
works.

For so many of us today is just another day. Maybe you’re working, some of you are probably out shopping, getting ready for this holiday season thing that we’re all stuck with.

And yet I also know that for at least a few humans out there, today is simply loaded with meaning. This is after all, the day. Kind of a weak post I know, but the person it’s being written for knows exactly who she is, even if she doesn’t read yet.

I write for a blog. This blog as a matter of fact, and I’m pretty damn proud of that. I mean sure, we’re sitting here in this odd corner of the internet, safely obscure, (for now that is, plans for world domination aren’t set to implemented for about another month) and yet there is a hypothetical readership out there.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
-Mark Twain

I’d have to say that one of the great failings that I have seen in American culture is the lack of ongoing education in most peoples’ lives. I am most definitely not talking about going to college here. It’s just that so much of what people talk about comes from television. I work for TV, and I gotta say that if you want to really learn something, I mean truly grok it, you gotta turn off the idiot box.

This is a paper I wrote about my ‘faith’ such as it is, I’m putting it up here simply because out of all the stuff I’ve written recently, I am perhaps most proud of this.

Without Symbol

On a shelf in my apartment, in a small box which depicts a gargoyle perched on a sarcophagus, I have a pendulum in a black velvet pouch. It sits among the other tangible mementos of those things that defined my life, and represents the closest thing I have ever known to faith. It was my mother’s.

Tobacco; so sweetly fragrant and moist. Yielding beneath my fingertips as I pull you from the pouch to be twisted into a cylinder that I can set ablaze. Tobacco, you give my hands something to occupy themselves with so that I can feel productive, so that I can balance out the odd twitches of self-consciousness in a social setting.

The human species is a vast and diverse playground. In these days of pop-culturitis and mediocrity it can be hard to find those things which make us stand out from the crowd.

Enter the one percenters club.

Please leave a comment on what it is that makes you special, that one thing that no one else you know does (or doesn’t do).

Being that it had been a goodly long time there that the ol’ jester didn’t have a computer, that meant that it had been a very long time that I wasn’t really aware of all these new and almost unbelievable advances in the field of internet pornography…

Damn this shit will make you sad.

I really hate to say things like; “This is my favorite book,” but in this case it’s fairly close to true. Anybody who has read this thing should understand at least of few of the references and puns that go into my name.

David Foster Wallace is part of a new breed of writer, doing things with language that make you drool. Every page of this book brings you into a fuller and fuller realization of the kind of brilliant mind that you are dealing with, and that, for me at least is the kind of experience always to be sought.

Are we cool enough as a species to make it? I mean this seriously, because the impression one can get from surfing certain arenas of the internet, or if one is unfortunate enough to own a television set, there is a lot of stuff out there that can lead quickly to the conclusion that well… maybe we deserve to join the dinosaurs and await a new half-life as odd museum peices… our bones put together just slightly wrong enough to make us interesting for the next wave of life to take a shot here.

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

Gandhi

I was having a conversation with an old friend last night and he posed this fascinating question to me…

How do you rebuild a ghetto? And I mean funky ghettos, not government housing projects.

We were talking about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which is how this idea came up, but it set the jester’s mind to thinking. How do you rebuild a ghetto? Because you can’t, a ghetto exists for a thousand reasons; you’ve got the cheap rents in old buildings that have fallen into a state of disrepair, you’ve got shop-keepers who offer that eclectic selection of staples and oddities that the community residents somehow manage to live on.

“That is so weird.”

Ever hear anybody use this phrase? Do you know what it means? I thought I did until recently. Found out that the definition might not be what you expected.

I always am actively searching for these little tidbits, so I’ll post them as I come across them.

This is actually another paper I’d written for school, but it is about the book I stumbled across this year which blew my mind in ways that a book hadn’t blown my mind in a good long time. For anyone interested in new and progressive devolpments in literature.. this is a must read.

Quarks to Quasars, Powers of Ten
This is a visual journey consisting of 42 images — 42 powers of ten. At one end of the journey is the immensity of the known universe, 13.7 billion years old with a radius of at least 12 billion light years (and probably much larger). At the other end of the journey is a depiction of the three quarks within a proton.

In the grid-lock of shopping carts, a man with only a basket is free. I do enjoy a good exercise in cart dodging, especially when you’re wearing a jester hat and have no problem vocalizing the stream of conscious-nonsense that rumbles in a brain totally befogged by last-night’s heroic intake of scotch.

All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.

Gandhi

Did you know that the definition of sophisticated is ‘overly complex’?

What does that say about our culture? What do you mean by that?

words words, where did the words go..
i gathered up all the important ones
in my mind
and put them in a box so i wouldn’t forget them

then i forgot where i put the box

The life-story of a man born from an English father and an Indian (that’s Ghandi’s country not Native American {bless the convolutions of language in the P.C. era}) woman. Originally raised as an Indian, his true identity is discovered and he finds himself cast out into the streets.