How to Fall Asleep

Tell yourself, whatever you do, not to move. There's a little clock in your head, and your problem is, it's still ticking. Like one of those self-winding watches, every time you budge, to turn or rearrange your sheets, it resets. Shuffle, click. Try to keep that in mind. You will find reasons to move. You might feel hungry the minute you lie down, and decide to ignore your appetite, try to get to sleep anyway, only to hear your stomach growling louder, agitating against this tiny famine and refusing to let you sleep till you eat something. Unless this happens very regularly, it's hard to plan for, and will often force you out of bed. Afterwards, you might have left the kitchen sink dripping, and think you'll be kept awake all night by the gentle tapping. God forbid a car alarm should—
       —Go off! Disrupting your whole patterned being, it puts a huge dent in the flow of your night. Those sirens sounding outside put you in a frenzy, even though you keep still: your mind clenches into a red ball of surprise, your body tells itself to react and not to, to be angry and not to. You practically have to move, if only to swat at your pillow till you cool down. But moving will fracture the unity around you. You move, and instead of sitting stock still, everything in your room shifts in relation to everything else, exploding from a flat picture into a bristle of separate shapes and corellated vectors. That isn't what you want. That's day and movement. Ideally, everything blurs together as night mills on. So don't pay attention to any single thing. This can be very hard. Is your furnace noisy? Do your pipes hiss? Does your lover, shamelessly asleep, breathe loudly next to you? Think of these as noises without causes or names, and so not really noises: features of your ears, purely sensory, not sonic, phenomena; artifacts of perception. Extend this. Your window glowers with star light, probably, or street light, or moon light. Again, this is a scene painted on the inner surface of your corneas. Nothing is beyond it, nothing is even in it. It's one thing, in you. There are neither streetlights, nor heavenly bodies, nor anything else that creates that light—certainly not a dim market square, paved in heavy cobbles thinly lined with spiky grass, with hedges of banana crates and chipped empty tables, a bench or two on the sides, and bookstores and butchershops facing in. That doesn't exist. In a reversal of the normal relationship between human beings and the universe, the world is because you see it. You are the god of your own unravelling. And your fallen angel is an itch between your shoulderblades, agitating, threatening to pry apart the harmonious aggregate you're balling together. The traitor, needling you in the trough of your spine, insists on special recognition, on treatment as a unique circumstance, requiring specific action, not caring that your design demands that everything settle into one block with no gaps. If you can think your way around the itch, good. But make sure the cure is not worse than the disease. Kundalini yoga may overcome the physical sensation, but risks focusing your mind when you need it to diffuse and bleed blackly into watery night. Therefore, Kundalini yoga is counterindicated, as are timed breathing, visualization techniques, and any mental game or recitation. Passivity, of mind and body, is crucial. Don't even react when the mattress seem to knurl your back or prod against your joints, or when your nostrils and mouth are dry. Move like a skeleton: only in the feathery moss between your ribs, and the roots knobbing through your pelvis or displacing the occasional vertebra. Some myths say the world grew from the body of a dead giant. Others say it's somebody's dream. Combine these. Combine whatever you can. When you stop sorting everything into different corners, and tune nothing out but hear nothing either, and feel no comfort or discomfort, and neglect the senses of time and place, then, unmoved, these things settle on you, a weight of thought-matter, a hazy solid with no edges or margins, lacking internal division, having only the recognizable quality of weight, multiplying, forcing you down, contributing to your stillness, pressing your mind out of its daily shapes, holding your body in a pose of exhaustion, until the space between your being and this weight is so small that it almost disappears, until your refusal to distinguish, your absorbing the world into yourself, so that all you suffer or do takes place within you, ends finally with you smothered by the undifferentiated mass you have taken in, with you joining that unthing in your unspace, swallowing yourself down till there are no legs or arms or chest or shoulders, nothing but head or mind, or the smallest piece of you that exists, and that held between your own teeth.

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Finally.

Other "Peeps'" Work

You go girl.

I've been wanting to post that picture for a while, but it took me until now to find anyone who'd host a 700kb animated gif. U of T won't touch it. How do I know the stick figure in this animotronic internetpicture to the right is a girl? Simple:

1. She is clearly an anime RPG hero (Japanese words, crazy blasting and martial arts powers, superimposed portraits in polygonal frames, speed lines even when she is standing still). Therefore,

2. She is a girl.

Cases in point, all from actual anime RPGs: 1 2 3 4 5 and 6

See? Girl.

Speaking of which, if you've never read Moorish Girl then I decry your Moorish Girl-reading ability. If you have, then I guess you can consider said abilities recried, or if you prefer, retroactively cried so as to negate the original decrying. She also pointed me to failbetter.com for the first time, and has a list of literary magazines as long as the hour hand of the Clock of Szeged, which is to say, 5 cubits (plus 3 centicubits). If her magazine list were the diameter of a bell, that bell would be the Bell of Heroes, and it would weigh 8537 kilos, and I'm sure that makes everything clear.

If you've never read Dawn's blog, then that condition can be easily treated by reading Dawn's blog, plus massive doses of Chloramphenicol.

Scholarly writing makes André hungry for confusion treats. I'm sick of using "this" as an adjective and always ensuring that "it" corresponds to a noun. Times like this, when I'm bogged down with Englishly correctness, I wish I could rap.

Grammar and clarity own my pages so if you were shown my pages you'd be blown away by my prosperity of expression, overcoming your professorly discretion to show you how verbal misdirection is a rarity in my pages, forcing you to atone for condoning your TA's rages doubting the sincerity of my decision to assassinate errors in every stage of revision, so spare yourself my derision by not airing your disrespect 'til you dare to inspect the lines I'm sharing.

Hey, cool, I can rhyme! It just takes me five minutes and the rhymes are all jumbled, so I s'pose I'll never be the next Bunny Rabbit. S'alright.

In Case You Wondered

This is my state of mind, recorded in the margins of my research essay notes.

Gent: Sir, you don't have any legs.

Sir: Ahh! Thank you, gent. (Falls down).

Edifying! Did you ever wonder what I scribble on the sides of my pages when I'm not fully engaged in studious, studiary, studying? Well, I don't care if you didn't, now you know.

This concludes my theatrical interlude, as my essay is headed this way, and it looks both quarrelous and ornery.

I don't hate deadlines, I like deadlines, they just have such a malicious dislike for me that I avoid them whenever possible.

Holy Smokes!

The kitchen just exploded in front of my face. This happened in reality, it did, just a moment ago. Happened with a loud electrical pop, an arching line of fire that lept four whole feet, from the sink to the fridge, and in the arm's length between that fridge and my nose, a white sparking firework went off—bang!—sending crackling streamers to the floor, like what you see on tv shows when a power line comes down. It seemed a hot lightbulb or a small bomb had detonated from out of thin air.

Somewhere in the instants just after the bang, the conflagration seized the entire room, which echoed and reiterated the pop and flash and obliterated itself in a shower of incandescent destruction. All around me, except the outlines of linoleum directly below the soles of my feet, was ashy ruin.

And then the sparks faded and the kitchen was intact and as white as it ever was. Dazzled, my arm still outstretched to reach for the box of tea on top of the fridge, I was left with nothing to show for my fantastic vision except a yoghurt container in the sink bottom slightly warped by heat, and a dent in the sink's steel basin that inexplicably followed the ridge of the yoghurt container's base.

I was relieved to come up with a more scientific explanation (we wired our own ground circuit to surge through the cold water pipe into the earth) than "ball lightning." Cold water pipes are supposed to be safe things to do this with because they go straight into the ground, but I think at some point our pipes must cross or contact, and we therefore should rethink our electrical strategy.

You Lazy Bastards!

As they say in Chicago: Aiya! Did anyone even read this post? Ah, hell, I can't stay mad at you, standing there and being all collective like that. I've been busy too, and it was a long post. So here's the deal:

1. I want to create an evil twin, so we can fight.


2. Being that I am made mostly of animal products, it will be made of starchy vegetables (Dave figured that part out). As I am a non-robot, my evil twin will naturally be robotic.


3. But my evil twin, Not-André, needs a kernel of pure opposition to me blazing at the heart of its AI. Evil twin plant robots don't program themselves, that's where you come in.


4. Go to Not-André's Not Nohari window (though I am as vain as I am fabulous, I don't wanna touch Johari with a pointy stick, and this Nohari gizmo is the devil's work—so it's perfect, just not for me, dammit). From the window of horrible character flaws that appears, choose the 5 or 6 that least describe me. By definition, these will best describe my evil twin.


5. Dance like drunken giraffes, I guess, for soon there will be Twin-kombat!

Make sense? Go, do it now.

Also, why the hell don't y'all sign the guestbook more damn often damn? I know you're reading this without ever having signed anything—is there a thrill to it, you blog pirates? You're messing up the whole system. Is the guestbook link at the top of the page too small? Would it help if I put an armadillo up there? I think I will.