Archive of things to do with 'thinking'

• 01.19.07 Low:

  I haven’t been blogging, because I haven’t been writing posts, partly because I’ve been feeling low, and strung out. That shouldn’t keep up for too long.

  By wieght, blogs are 75% and upwards apology, like zines and communications with thesis advisors and editors.

  
  Tags: self, blog, shame, change, writing, draft, composition, thinking, drained, failure, unfinished, mood.
• 01.04.07 Admonitory premonitory:

  There’s a guy I see around town from time to time, and I never like seeing him. Oh, he’s harmless, pretty nice guy, we’ve talked a few times. He always says hello when he sees me. But there’s always a sense I get, whenever we meet, that there’s something shameful between us, and we both know it.

  
  Tags: reading, psychology, work, shame, writing, dialogue, boredom, thinking, fear, research, temp, library, george gissing, failure, future, ghost.
• 01.04.07 Similes:

  Composition: you suddenly, after looking out idly over a dark water, see a plastic milk jug bobbing on the surface, not far away. You row up to it, you tug on it, try to pull it into the boat. You notice motion out of the corner of your eye: another jug, floating nearby.

  
  Tags: shame, writing, philosophy, draft, art, composition, thinking, water, drained, sink, simile.
• 06.01.04 Tuesday, 1 June 2004:

  I think the solution I’ve happened on is a happy one: this way I won’t feel like I’m pestering you when you have to finish your papers, and I won’t feel I’m neglecting the three or four people who look forward to reading something here.

  I haven’t told you much about work recently. The Lawn & Garden section of Walmart is its own little walled-off kingdom, with bare, untiled cement floors, without the views down half the store that the other areas have. That makes it attractive to shoplifters - I usually find at least one empty package of something a night, and often it’s soda bottles or cookies - they bring them from grocery, hide out in my zone, and eat them. One guy I won’t forget for a long time, he came in around three a.m., walked past me without seeing me, wearing a black jean vest, a black safari hat, black jeans and silver belt and boots, and with tatoos on his arms and a well-trimmed silver beard and long white hair, looking fit, and when I gave my usual Hi there how are you tonight anything in particular you’re looking for? he stopped short and looked at me in astonishment and said No, I don’t know what I want yet, turning his shopping cart halfway around as he said it. I said my usual, Well okay, just give me a holler if you need anything, but he was already headed out, saying, I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, I don’t know, in a real defensive tone.

  
  Tags: thinking, feeling.
• 10.22.02 Sunday, 22 October 2002:

  Before last week, I had never seen an animal being butchered. I somehow didn’t expect it to be so conveniently built. If you keep its legs perpendicular up while you’re working, nothing falls out, but if you want to get something out you only have to cut a couple tubes. The skin slips right off, whole, and makes a rug, so the floor doesn’t get bloody and the meat doesn’t get dirty. The blood also won’t shoot out, if only you wait long enough after you kill it before cutting, but collects conveniently, so you can spoon it right out. The appendix is easy to find, and easier than anything else to cut out and throw away, since it’s only attached on one end, and the intestines make very useful sacks for boiling meat and blood in. I expected myself to be disturbed, watching it, since the last time I saw anything nearly as grisly was my freshman year of college, when I couldn’t watch a set of heart and lungs getting cut up; but I showed disappointingly insensitive, this time. I wasn’t quite capable of touching it, and didn’t join the others (including a five-year old) in a piece of raw liver. But I only felt a little discomfort watching it getting cut up, and that was probably only because it was a sheep. If it had been something less sympathetic, it wouldn’t've bothered me at all, I’m sure.

  For example cows, I don’t like, and I like them less the more I see of them. They are willfully stupid and small-minded, suspicous creatures. They are completely unaware of how awkward they carry themselves, they are even proud of what they consider is their grace, although they’re always inadvertently blocking roads or stepping on dogs. They love to act superior and snort at me. But you can see they’re really terrified, they’re incapable of hiding the fear in their eyes.

  
  Tags: thinking, feeling.
• 08.06.02 Tuesday, 6 Aug 2002 (2):

  Now the question is, Where am I going to fly to, on my new ticket, in the next two weeks? - since I can’t use it to go abroad, and I can’t fly while I’m abroad, and it expires in a year. I suppose I could give it away. That’s not likely.

  While I’m asking questions, the other question is, What do people blog about? I had thought, before I started this blog, that it was an ideal solution to the problems of I’d come across while keeping journals. Keeping a journal, when I’ve managed to stick to it for any length of time, has always proved to be an extremely valuable activity.

  
  Tags: thinking.
• 08.05.02 Monday, 5 Aug 2002 (3):

  Samuel Johnson (quibble=pun, obselete):
  A quibble is to Shakespeare, what luminous vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the […]

  
  Tags: thinking.
• 08.01.02 Thursday, 1 Aug 2002:

  Welcome to my Blog. I’m writing my master’s thesis on Claude Levi-Strauss’s book Tristes Tropiques, a kind of memoir, travelogue of his ethnographic journeys in Brazil, and meditation on world history and the present age. Here’s a sample passage (the most often quoted, far as I can tell, and surely one of the most melodramatic, but hardly the only good one):

  
  Tags: thinking.