Welcome Back K-J!!!

A big WELCOME BACK, to Kill-Joy! The land of the brave and the home of the beaver has missed him since he left for Australia. I hope that we can hook up sometime over the summer for some skating and transcendendal meditation.

It's cold and rainy in Smogtown today. I packed up my video game system and relegated it to the storage room. Last night I breached 99 999 on Mrs. Pac Man, but instead of rolling the score back to zero, as happens in Space Invaders, the counter kept going into the 100 000's! This means that to roll it one would have to play all night long, propping one's eyelids up with toothpicks and crazy glue into the wee hours of the morn. If I were going to do that I would get sponsers and make a marathon out of it - the "help buy Flatlander a new skate deck foundation" - and since this would take more orginizing than I have ambition for, I decided it was time to hide the video games away and focus my energy on the pile of half-read books at my bedside.

These include: "The Lathe of Heaven" by Ursula LeGuin. This is a sci-fi story in which a man discovers that he has the power to change reality with his dreams. When he wakes up after dreaming about something, the world has changed but only he remembers the way reality was before his dream changed it. The guy ends up going to a psychiatrist who realizes that he's not just some crazy chump, but that he really has the power to change the world through dreaming. So the doctor starts to hypnotize the dreaming guy, getting him to change the world according to the doctor's vision of how to make the world a better place. Of course, each change has unexpected reprecussions, and the reader begins to wonder if maybe the world wouldn't have been better in its original, untampered version. It's a neat book, well written and poetic, but also kind of dry and hard to get through. I want to see how it ends.

I'm also reading "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka, about a guy who wakes up to find he's turned into a cockroach. It's such an amazing story; part fable, part horror tale, somehow encapsulating all the axiety and alienation of modern life in a single, fantastic image of man-turned-cockroach. David Chronenberg eat your twisted little heart out.

Also by my bed: "The Other Bible", a collection of writings from the first few centuries before and after Christ -basically a smattering of all the stuff that didn't make it into the Bible, but touching on the same themes and mythologies. You get your Gnostics, Jewish Mystics, Essenes and other various and sundry religious enthusiasts from the time when time itself seemed like it was about to end. Reading these writings, many of which surfaced only this last century - burried for 1800 years in clay pots to avoid destruction at the hands of zealous Christians who couldn't tolerate the idea that not just Jesus, but everyone on God's green earth has a portion of the indestructible divine nature within them - makes one realize that for most of western history theology has been orchestrated by the "winners" in a battle in which the winners were actually a bunch of uptight creeps.

So that's the reading that I'm catching up on now that Mrs. Pac Man and the ghosts have been banished to the closet. Next week I'm going on a little road trip with my dad, so I won't likely be doing too much blogging. I guess that means that concerning this little Fakiegrind tag-team operation, Kill-Joy, newly installed on the west coast, is "IT".