By Tom Henry Brooks 3 (THB3)
Life is like picking up broken pieces of glass with bloody fingers and trying to reassemble the mirror of the soul…
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I’m going out of this world the same way I came in; naked, bloody and screaming…
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“I step out into the corridor where two teenagers lean against the wall, staring down at their phones as devoutly as two old priests with prayer books.”
“I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.”
“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here. Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”
“All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.”
Matt Haig
HOW TO STOP TIME
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“We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.”
William Shakespeare
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“Supercomputer status
walking along streets,
Everyone is an addict
stumbling concrete,
What was the motivation?
Constant communication,
Everybody wanna get
chose like Moses,
Came out Mother Earth
smelling like roses,
Summon the new edition made it way too efficient,
Made us the guinea pig
and did it with no permission,
Told it to call a friend,
didn’t tell it to listen,
So very scary, so binary,
zero or one,
Like or dislike,
coal mine canary,
I dream in color,
not black and white,
You sell your daughter
on that data stream,
Dopamine
make it hit now,
Humans don’t understand
Humans gonna sell a lie,
Humans gotta survive
We know we gonna die,
Nothing can live forever
You know we gonna try,
Life, is it really worth it?
The algorithm is perfect…”
Childish Gambino
ALGORHYTHM
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“Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it 20 times already.”
Adrian Hollinshead
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“To thine own self be true.”
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“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
and one man in his time
plays many parts.”
William Shakespeare
AS YOU LIKE IT
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“The past is a mental junkyard, filled with memories no one remembers.”
Chuck Klosterman
THE NINETIES
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“People like, occasionally, to see human life as a generally smooth upwardly sloping line towards enlightenment and knowledge and tolerance, but I have to say that has never been my experience.”
Matt Haig
HOW TO STOP TIME
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I quote others only in order to better express myself.
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CITY HAIKU
(NOT by Basho)
foul steaming dog turd
and my shoe just misses it
really disgusting
THB3
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CITY HAIKU (part 2)
oh my fucking god!
what if it’s human bum shit?
makes it even worse
THB3
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Was just reading Kerouac’s
DHARMA BUMS again after 25 years and he’s always going on and on about haikus and the bliss of nature’s majesty and all that pseudo-Buddhist beatnik bullshit. I realized that I hadn’t written even one haiku in a long time so I wrote two. But I am most definitely NOT in the mountains. I’m in the dirty fucking city.
This was the best I could come up with in my current setting. Actually, I think these are a couple of pretty damn fine haikus considering the circumstances under which they were written.
‘Nuff said…
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“Thus shall you think
of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn
A bubble in a stream
A flash of lightning
in a summer cloud
A flickering lamp
A phantom
and
A dream…”
The Diamond Sutra
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“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
Albert Camus
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Defiance…
what it really does is make you feel ALIVE in a world of ordinary, soul-crushing conformity…
THB3
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“A novel is an axis of innumerable relationships.”
Jorge Luis Borges
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“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
Walt Whitman
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“Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks
Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away
Any fucking time, any fucking day
Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay
Fret for your figure and
Fret for your latte and
Fret for your lawsuit and
Fret for your hairpiece and
Fret for your Prozac and
Fret for your pilot and
Fret for your contract and
Fret for your car
It’s a
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of
Freaks
Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call L.A.
The only way to fix it is to flush it all away
Any fucking time, any fucking day
Learn to swim, see you down in Arizona Bay
Some say a comet will fall from the sky
Followed by meteor showers and tidal waves
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits
And some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this
Stupid shit, silly shit, stupid shit
One great big festering neon distraction,
I’ve a suggestion to keep you all occupied
Learn to swim, learn to swim, learn to swim
Mom’s gonna fix it all soon
Mom’s comin’ ’round to put it back the way it ought to be
Learn to swim
Fuck L Ron Hubbard and
Fuck all his clones
Fuck all those gun-toting
Hip gangster wannabes
Learn to swim
Fuck retro anything
Fuck your tattoos
Fuck all you junkies and
Fuck your short memory
Learn to swim
Fuck smiley glad-hands
With hidden agendas
Fuck these dysfunctional
Insecure actresses
Learn to swim
‘Cause I’m praying for rain
And I’m praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way
I wanna watch it all go down
Mom please flush it all away
I wanna see it go right in and down
I wanna watch it go right in
Watch you flush it all away
Time to bring it down again
Don’t just call me pessimist
Try and read between the lines
I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t
Welcome any change, my friend
I wanna see it come down
Burn it down
Suck it down
Flush it down”
TOOL (from 1995)
Maynard James Keenan (lyrics)
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“It was a confusing time to care about things.”
Chuck Klosterman
THE NINETIES
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“We live invested in an electronic information environment that is quite as imperceptible to us as water is to fish.”
Marshall McLuhan
(Canadian philosopher;
the study of media theory)
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“This world is not
conclusion;
A sequel stands beyond,
Invisible,
as music,
But positive,
as sound.”
Emily Dickinson
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“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.”
William Shakespeare
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
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“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.”
Duke Ellington
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“I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future…
I should do foolishly.
The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm,
the heavy and mobile masses,
the dance of the
Dream-led masses
down the dark mountain.”
Robinson Jeffers
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“Take the only tree that’s left
Stuff it up the hole in your culture.”
Leonard Cohen
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You may have noticed a theme of gloom and doom with hints of environmental apocalypse and human foolishness running throughout this journal. There is a reason for this.
I have literally just now finished reading THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH by David Wallace-Wells. If I were to describe my overall feeling upon finishing this book, it would be a sense of overwhelming sadness. Perhaps even despair or a feeling of hopelessness. Sure, we can shift the blame to our grandfathers and great grandfathers for the state of the world today. It’s so easy to blame our ancestors for what we have in this 21st century, this thing we call global warming. There are many who deny it, foolishly. But it is all around us, we are living in it every day. And the saddest thing is that we are all taking part in this nihilistic, wanton destruction of our planet. We cannot help the fact that we were born into this world. It is what it is, so to speak. We are all consumers. Most of us drive around in our gas guzzling cars, we eat beef, we use electricity, we shop for things that we don’t need, we dump our plastic trash everywhere and it all ends up in the ocean, choking out the life in the seas. They mow down the forests and jungles for wood to frame up new suburban shopping malls. We belch smoke, filth and carbon pollution into our atmosphere as we drive around our endlessly growing cities. We kill everything in our path. We seem to think we have paved over nature. The entire infrastructure, the entire system that we live in is dirty. There is no other way to put it. There are too many of us. We are straining our resources to the limit by constantly destroying every natural ecosystem we have left; one by one the dominoes fall. It’s a monster problem that will have no mercy for any of us when it’s time to pay for our sins. This juggernaut has already started rolling and only a sea change in the thinking of the entire global human race could make any impact on our situation whatsoever. It’s nice to recycle, it’s nice to be a “smart shopper”, it’s a good thing to drive a hybrid or even a totally electric car, but these little things will do nothing unless the entire system is overhauled.
Human ingenuity has contributed to destroying the planet this much already. Who’s to say that human ingenuity might not be able to fix the problem? The timeline grows more desperate by the day. If something is not done, and soon, we are all doomed. I’m complaining and criticizing a lot, but I offer no solutions. That’s because I really don’t have any. It would have to be a complete global shift. It has to be all or nothing and it has to be NOW. Where’s Carl Sagan when we need him?!? We live on this “pale, blue dot” in the vast, cold endless night of space. Earth is our home, the only home we’ve ever known.
For my part, I will continue to recycle, reuse plastic bags again and again, and try to eat less beef. But, I have to admit, I really do love a good hamburger. But see, that is part of the problem, isn’t it? I’m sure there are millions of people thinking this same way. Are we supposed to give up all the comforts and pleasures our easy modern society has provided us with? Perhaps. It may be the only way to save ourselves from complete annihilation. I really will try my best. We may have to make some serious sacrifices to ensure our survival.
I’ve never had that much faith in the human race. We are too lazy, egocentric and self-satisfied. We have been spoiled rotten by the convenience of our modern age. There are simply too many choices. We have way too much faith that technology will somehow save us, like some cyberpunk Messiah. I’m afraid the world will crumble around us and be ravaged by horrific climate change as we all just stare listlessly at our phones, vaguely wondering when and where it all went wrong. But I think, deep down, I already know. And I’m willing to admit my mistakes and own up to them. But what good does that do underwater or starving or dying a thirsty heat-death? Yes, I truly think I realize the root of the problem. Do you? In case you don’t, it’s us, each and every one. I sure hope we can all come together and figure this out before it’s too late. I live with that hope, for now. Time slips away, one step at a time into an uncertain future. We can’t really know what will happen, but as it stands, it doesn’t look pretty. In fact, it looks downright ugly. I hope I’m wrong, I really do…
Tom Henry Brooks 3
Tokyo, Japan
July 14th, 2022
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The Street Journals 