eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...
                    --Aphex Twin, "Ventolin."

Each page of the mashi maro notebook is a different happy colour: orange, pink, bright purple, neon green.  Each page has a helpful little slogan:  Some examples:
        MASHIMARO is good at finding fun things to do
        For good times and / bad times / I'll be on your side / forever more That's / what friends are for
        Wondesful (sic) cherish past friendship
 

In this mall, surrounded by people, each person singular and complete, each person an identity to him or herself.  It's kind of creepy, actually.  That everyone in this place is a self, an identity, a collection of memories and stories that I can never have access to.  Each person around me forever locked away from me.  And I can never know what he or she is really thinking, even if I ask him or her, and she or he tells me: I can never verify it.
        (And on a deeper level, can I even really know what I'm really thinking even if I interrogate myself?)
 

-- rolling rolling rolling
-- all day and all night I spend all my time fused to the television screen, rolling
-- katamari damacy:
        It's the latest insidious plot by the Playstation people to suck up my time and prevent me from ever doing anything meaningful with my time and life.
        It seems that the King of Space went on a bender and destroyed all the stars in the sky (would that I could), and now it's up to you, the lowly Prince, the King's beleaguered son, to gather up things from Earth and convert them to stars.
        In order to do this, you have to roll all the things on the Earth into a big ball and then send the ball into space.  The balls starts small, but by the time you're done it's many times your size.  In early levels you just roll up small things, erasers, food, birds, cats, whatever.  But by the end of the game you have to roll up everything in the planet: all the little things plus: buildings, people, giant squids, even clouds, and so on.
        The game is very Japanese: it has a whimsical dadaesque feel to it, and on the surface it seems incredibly simple, but more and more complexity-- both in design and gameplay-- begins to show itself with repeated playing.
        Beautiful, utterly beautiful.
        Oh, and addictive as hell.
 

COMM AHAHAHA t mean writnd by texts I don't just mean writinAHAun icates -- etc.   A digital glitch, a cut and paste error made during the composition of PART THREE, mangling and fragmenting a paragraph I was writing on the impossibility of communication, mixing this paragraph with something else (I've forgotten what).  And so I kept it in, stet, because now it says so much more than I could have possibly intended, it has become more than itself, a pure thing, teaching through illustration, the futility of communication, the impossibility of meaning, illustrating the breakdown of communication between you and me, and you and you and you, between the self and all others, each locked in his or her own world forever, impenetrable, impassable, aporiatic, everything that comes out of of your mouth, my mouth, is just gibberish that somehow still, through filtering, manages to communicate, even though it doesn't.
 

-- rolling, rolling
 

-- it seems that after an initial apoplexy, the media has calmed down about George W. Bush's re-election.
        -- They still don't like him very much (except of course for Fox News), but they've resigned themselves to his presence.
        -- Unlike the first term, where there was a hope of swaying the public away from Bush in order to prevent a re-election, now that he's back it doesn't really matter what the public thinks regarding the next election because Bush won't be coming back
                -- all there's to do is wait a few years and he'll be gone and hopefully someone can pick up the pieces.  If, of course, there are any pieces left to pick up.  Which I'm sure there will be.
-- and don't give me any crap about how Bush is gonna revise the constitution so he can be re-elected a second time and become a tyrant, or an evil God-king, or whatever.
        -- That's the thinking of the uneducated, reactionary masses who don't really have a grasp of reality or human nature.
        -- That's the thinking of people who read comic books by drugged-up hippy mystics and Noam Chomsky diatribes and uncritically, nerdishly absorb the information they're spoonfed because they want their world to be more mysterious and magical and melodramatic than it already is because they're bored and they never grew up
                -- so all the only thing they can to do is plot out paranoid trajectories with (naturally) their own insignificant mass in the centre.
        -- Because nobody wants to be insignificant-- I understand that
        -- especially if you do nothing with your time but feel that the universe owes you adventure and a living.
 

Rolling.  Rolling.
 

But, anyway, all these people, around me.  Hundreds, and they are all beings, entities with feelings and memories and consciousnesses and-- for lack of a better word-- "souls"-- even though the notion of the "soul" becomes more and more abstract and unfathomable and inhuman the more science begins to pin down the location of consciousness in the brain.  And all these people, here, around me, are thinking feeling beings, and they're all thinking and talking and looking at each other, and looking at me, and I can never really know them, except I can know-- or rather I can tell myself-- that they are all like me.  They are all singular entities, selves, "souls," each feeling and doing and remembering and trapped in its own body.  Each one feeling as infinite and immortal as I do.  Each one with its own perceptions, and also each one relating to the outside world as if it (the individual, not the outside world) is the only real entity, the only real being, the only self with a set of memories, the only thing with a consciousness, objectifying the outside world, objectifying all other people, because that's the only way we can really relate to each other because to imagine the Other as a self-contained self just like you (or me) results in a weird transcendental state of mind which-- although useful in its own way if it comes upon you in little bursts when you're doing nothing (like for example sitting in a mall alone) tends to paralyze you with wonder and "intersubjectivity" if it (the recognition that all other people are entities with their own perceptions and "souls") endures for a long stretch of time.
 

-- I almost always wake up scared and tired.
 

thing about cell phones / hippies
        talking with the guy I know, sort of an "activist" type
        mention I have a cell phone now and he accuses me of something vague, like being a "yuppie" or something because I have finally caught up with that aspect of the culture I live in
        he says "now you'll be one of those people who walk around talking on the phone all the time parading around like a bunch of fucking lawyers"
        I tell him that maybe these people need to stay in communication all the time
        that maybe the world is moving so fast that they have to be connected with other people even when they're out walking
        he says that nothing moves that fast
        -- this is the typical reaction of someone who is a member of a small, backwards subculture
        -- the reaction of someone who is so out of step with the world that they can't actually see how fast the world is indeed moving
        -- someone who is never going to actually progress
        the fact is that the world does move that fast
        his world doesn't move fast because he's not in synch with the larger picture.
        -- and so, the world will advance beyond him and he'll stay behind, wearing hemp shirts, braiding his beard, believing in old socialist clichés
        -- and he won't notice, and he won't care.  and on some level he will be happy because he'll be secure in a society built for him by all the people with cell phones, he'll be indebted to them but he won't even know it.  he'll just spit on them, and they'll ignore him, and he'll be happy begging for change, or busking, or working some shit job in the hemp store
        wonder what he'd've said if I'd told him I was also thinking of investing ten grand in the stock market just for kicks?
 

[[[rolling rolling
 

One of the reasons for the happiness of "The Millennials":
        they have never had to grow up facing something as mind-shattering as the threat of global nuclear war.  Sure, they can all pay lip service to the idea, but they never grew up with the Emergency Broadcast System, they never saw all the tv specials, all the movies, and all the books milking the threat.  The idea that they could be incinerated at any second never dogged them when they were 8 yrs old, 10 yrs old, all through highschool, etc....
 

-- What happens is you (I) spiral away into infinite regress and wonder, trying to hold onto this  experience of recognition.  And then I (you) begin to think about these others and their lives, how they all intersect on some level, that she over there knows someone who knows someone else who knows someone else who possibly knows someone who knows me and that all these people are all selves, just like me, an infinite chain of selves, and each of the people in this chain that I've just constructed also has other acquaintances (as does she) and all these acquaintances also form chains of mutual acquaintance until the entire world is a vast web of individuals, "souls," who all feel infinite and immortal and who all subscribe to their own systems of belief, and who are all singular and yet intertwined in a web, a vast network of six billion plus nodes forming some sort of global ant-brain that doesn't possess a single shred of self-awareness, but somehow moves in patterns, falls into patterns of movement and trend-- trends of belief and technology that shape the face of the globe in a (from the outside) predictable manner, fluctuating with parameters like a tidal pulse or the way snow or sand blows across the pavement in calculable and yet partially unpredictable swirls.
 

-- nostalgia for the First Gulf War:
        -- in the early 1990s when the bombs started falling and the reports started coming in, on tv
        -- how we were all nervous, on pins and needles and I was in my early 20s, and it all seemed so fresh and scary
        -- how in class the profs would all talk about vietnam and how they all hoped we'd never have to face the spectre of war
        -- and it all seemed so real, all those broadcasts, Wolf Blitzer, how the war just started suddenly and w/no warning and how it made CNN into the network it is today
        -- then, CNN was nothing, a joke, and then the First Gulf War happened
        -- at home, going out for a walk, wintertime, the cold air and the tension
        -- walking, expecting apocalypse, waiting for the bombs to start raining down.  A glow on the horizon, the night sky above, buying cans of Dr Pepper from, the corner store, walking home, watching tv, the fear, the excitement, the journalists all under a table as the world exploded around them, wondering what'll happen next day after day
        -- the adrenaline rush caused by the horror of all your worst clichés coming true
        -- on pins and needles for days, the world seemed so fresh, so alive, so invigorating
        -- there was A WAR
        (-- or at least that's what it seemed like
                -- after all, it was a new experience.
                -- it was on tv, and everyone seemed so scared it sure seemed like a war
                -- naïveté, maybe, but the naïveté of youth, and the thrill of the end of the world
                -- in other words: innocence)
        -- I want to go back to this
        -- I want my blood to flow hot again
        -- I didn't know it until it'd been over for years, but this was one of the best times of my life
 

there are layers developing in / to society
we have the very super rich at the top, the people in the middle (which is further divided), and then the people at the bottom.
some of the people on the bottom are there by accidents of fate but some of them are actually there by choice-- and this is what scares me
the middle is also beginning to splinter, upper middle getting richer and lower middle getting poorer, and the middle middle turning into a vacuum
        -- these theories are actually quite old
however it's the ones who want to be at the bottom because of lifestyle choice that irritates
        -- they have romanticized poverty, and so have decided that "you don't need money to live" which is complete and utter bullshit
        -- most of these people also have rich friends, of course, people they can live with, sponge off of, form communal dwellings with, and manipulate (sometimes even unintentionally) into giving them free rides
        -- half the time they don't even realize what they're doing
 

Schizophrenic on the bus:  "Popeyes restaurant.  It's not 'Popeyes.'  Cut it in half and see what it really says.  'Pope yes.'  They're Papists.  Watch them.  Bad.  Bad."
 

"Millennial" happiness, again:
        whatever it is, they feel they can protest it, that it's "over there" but can be approached on their terms.  They have never seen a world that doesn't care about them and what they think and do, and will never care about what they think and do, and in fact wants to impassively crush them at any moment simply because they are beneath notice, irrelevant.  They think they can change the world by making it into what they want it to be, but the world doesn't work that way.  They are simply spoiled children, but they're too happy, too wrapped up in their own little worlds to notice how ultimately unimportant they are.  They also pretend to be global, but in reality they filter their supposedly global point of view through their innate sense of local happiness, and thus aren't really global at all.  They believe in universals of right and wrong, and thus are always in the dark, and part of the process of the Westernization of the world, part of what they readily protest-- and they don't even know this because they believe that they believe that everyone is equal, when in reality they have already, through their innocence, placed themselves at the top.
 

-- the 100th episode of South Park: the centennial.
        Where it's revealed that what makes America so great is that America can declare war on anyone it wants to, and yet America can also seem as if it doesn't really want to declare war by letting people futilely protest, and by letting the protesters honestly believe that they really are making a difference.
        So half of America can be seen as sincerely wanting war, and half of America can be seen as sincerely wanting peace.  So when there's war 50% percent can scream for peace and when there's peace 50% can cry out for war.
        And so the country can roam around, doing whatever it wants to, unfettered.  Always opposing itself, but never really opposing anything.
        Having its cake and eating it, too.
        Patting itself on its back, congratulating itself, telling itself that it really does care.
 

-->  rolling  <--
 

-- Each one of these things around me isn't a thing at all, but a human being with a mind and a history.
-- And each one of these beings interacts with countless other beings possessing minds and histories.
-- And they are all as real as me.
-- And this knowledge makes me feel nervous, scared, vaguely sick, and I need to get out of here, out of this pulsating mass of "souls" and infinities, and go somewhere where I can be alone.
-- I need to be alone because I feel like I'm going crazy.
-- They're all alive and real like me.
-- And I feel like I'm going crazy.
 

        I wish I was a gluon
        a meson or a muon
        cuz a subatomic particle
        is really swell to be
 

Next:  A really, really bad day; or, Digging my own grave....
 

Epilogue 73q.
Epilogue 73o.
INDEX.
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