Shifty eyes

Went for a swim in a caldera today, not twenty minutes outside of the centre of town.
What kind of a brilliant town has a swimming hole like that?!
A town that has little tolerance and culture, unfortunately.
Because it's a little town!
Had dinner with the parents tonight.
Mum's on my side in the war to win back my father's heart.
The war's already won really. The challenge is to establish some kind of new rapport with the old man and mostly that's up to him because I haven't changed how I operate!
Cryptic.
Coming out, like any other process is simply a matter of Doing and living with the consequences.
It's all productive.
We had a toast for some reason at dinner and nobody looked anyone in the eyes.
Still, it gets easier.
Never forget: it all always gets easier. Even when it's getting harder, the net effect is that its all getting easier.
Never forget!
Keep looking.
With those shifty eyes.

Mustang

I walked a half hour to a great local Launceston pub called 'The Royal Oak' and had a brief but shit experience.
One half of the bar was packed brimful with a bunch of 'metrosexuals' - clearly recent attendees of Launceston's 'finer' private schools.
The other half was taken over by a metal band called Mustang.
A good band who I haven't seen perform in years.
But not that good that I was prepared to pay $7 for the privilege of hearing/seeing them play!
And no concessions!
Do you want my money or not?!
Clearly not.
So now I'm home writing this.
My social life is rather limited it seems...
And I wouldn't have it any other way at the moment!

In the shower

Postructural stuff is not about trying to win the argument.
SOPHISTRICATION.
When I said incite change... Yes, it's ongoing and inevitable.
But we can enhance it and control it to some degree.
Look, my dear Thelonious, if I relate to you as if you are sub-human scum of the earth (as I am, purportedly) then I have entered into a particular kind of relation with you.
And it presupposes a whole range of attitudes and beliefs that I carry around with me in the world.
So change, even seemingly small beer, is a big deal.
We want to knock down the church and state? How about the church and state already in our heads?! That's the first place to start because it's not separate from what's 'out there'. Your head is already out there. There is no 'out there'.
You live in the world and what you think or do is already a part of that.
So, you already incite change with your posters, for example.
Always already on the way.
I was in the shower thinking something this morning but I can't remember what it was.
I wash away the ideas with my bodily secretions every morning, and it all swims out to sea to mix with the other scum.

Saying the same things in different ways

REITERATION.
One of the criticisms often levelled at Post-structuralism is that it does not think through the specifics of politics and therefore is inherently conservative.
The whole point is not to make a specific point but to establish of PROCESS of critical and de-stabilising thought in order to displace stale thinking (which is not separate from life and the material things of the world).
There seem to be two tendencies in human being, two drives: equilibrium and instability - but it's all creative in numerous different ways.
On the one hand we want to be comfortable and stable but things are always changing around us and I think we are not capable of entering into Buddha-like static relations with the world so that we creatively disrupt the balances and derive new relations.
Too vague?
If we need new thought as the famous The Andrew put it, then we need to break out of old paradigms of thought regarding the corruptness of the state and church etc and enter into new arrangements of thought that can creatively encompass and derive new variables from what we already have to make new patterns, thought, modes of being and create change.
But the last thing I want to do is persuade anyone that I'm right.
Makes me wonder why I'm writing this...!
Further, this is stuff that I'm rather ineptly parrotting from Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze.
We are the robots.

There are other words ...

What are we saying when we say something?
What's the meaning of the words?
Well, the words are the meaning and the meaning is the use we put them to.
It just so happens that someone else is always able to put them to a different use.
And there are always other ways of expressing things and therefore other meanings because the use will change a little according to the various impressions different words set off.
Derrida thought therefore that there is more power in the written word.
Why?
Because it is precisely ambiguity that allows for meaning, use and creativity into any and all expression!
And ambiguity is more likey to occur in a decontextualised (textual) locus than in face-to-face dialogue.
Thus, for the post-structuralist movement, ambiguity is at the heart of all human experience and expression.
We might then do well to live ambiguously - to fuck with the variables in surprising ways - if we take post-structuralism at its word.
Sounds a little schizopherenic, doesn't it?
If change becomes the highest value (or perhaps the only ontologically REAL 'value' [whatever that means...]) then it makes sense to perpetuate and live with the ambiguity that change entails.
It's hard to take such a stance seriously, perhaps this is why po-st's have such a developed -and odd- sense of humour.
So what can I do to live ambiguously?
A start might be to live according to process rather than for specific events and things: ie. how do I approach any and every event that I experience? What's my attitude to life?
But more, it might require a certain lack of clarity and a willing to accept that we are never right about anything (as if there were a state known as rightness) but that for the same reason we are never wrong either.
This I find quite liberating and also potentially dangerous.
I think politics is stale. It needs something new to shake it up.
Deleuze thinks it is the task of the 'left wing' ('left' and 'right' were still valid notions in his time - he died in 1995) to energise politics and create change by creating new ideas that the 'right' cannot ignore. It seems as if the right has taken this charge seriously and the left entirely ignored it.
And of course, to change politics is to change everything.
Let's get out there and incite change by how we live and lets change culture.
The greatest change involves changing how and what you think and therefore relate to anything and everything.
It's all up for grabs and other vacant platitudes.

Setting off

A Collection of half thoughts and general weirdnesses from somewhere.
Well, I have nothing to say at this point (in case - my friend Fiona informs me to add).
Absolutely nonsensical!!!!!!!