Joseph Knecht's Search

"What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveler who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering."

From The Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse

Easy Rider

"Try this." - Captain America

Easy Rider isn't a great movie. In fact, the plot has less depth than a teenage comic strip that gets passed around in the cafeteria. Two hippies cross the South and encounter people and prejudices. There's no plot. A few flimsy statements about culture are made but it's all "Tell" and little "Show". The hippies are free to travel...and the locals are free to be leery. How can you complain? When has this not been the case? America is huge and the idea that you're going to travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans, over 2000 miles across several cultural boundaries, without some difficulties is crazy.

Plinio's Wish

"I wished for nothing better than to be as one of them and to have no other life than theirs--that passionate, childish, gruesome, uncontrolled life that vacillates between happiness and fear." -- Plinio Designori
From The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse


"And I, for my part, would always stand outside, alone and uncertain, full of intimations but without certainty."

"Distant as my childhood is, and incomprehensible and fabulous though it seems to me on the whole, I still sharply remember all the suffering and doubts I felt at the time, in the midst of happiness. All those feelings existed in the child's heart, where they have been ever since: doubt of my own worth, vacillation between self-esteem and discouragement, between idealistic contempt for the world and ordinary sensuality. And just as I did then, I later continued to regard these aspects of my nature sometimes as a miserable morbidity, sometimes as a distinction. At times I believed that God wished to lead me on this painful path to a special isolation and deepening of my nature, at other times I took it all as nothing but the signs of shabby weakness of character, of a neurosis such as thousands of people bear wearisomely through their lives."

From A Child's Heart

Long Long Time

I tried and tried for a week to tune my voice to belt like Linda Ronstadt and all I did was hurt my larynx. Her recording of Long Long Time, written by Gary White, is actually my alarm on my phone now so I literally wake up every morning at 5:27 am to the words, "Love will abide, take things in stride, sounds like good advice, but there's no one at my side." And I look ruefully at the queen sized bed, empty mostly except for piles of Hermann Hesse memorabilia and the fleeing ghosts of my dreamtime fantasy lovers. The awful back spasms that greet my morning are doubled in terror by this beautiful song about facing the reality of fear and tears and loves that never were. I hit the snooze button and 5 minutes later the song starts again. This repeats 4 times until I get my boots on and prepare to meet a blazing sun that has roasted my flesh beyond recognition.

This Call is Being Monitored...

Funny how life works...I was typing out a furious essay on the state of the world. Basically, the essay, which I now decided was written in the wrong spirit, argued that a person speaking privately needs to be worried their words are being spied on. But a person blogging about random events or posting on social network sites needs to be even more careful because the internet police may take some random uber-ironic joke about school massacres and lock you up to make a point. It's better to decide if the threat was credible with the mouthy teenager in jail for 4 months, rather than learn too late he was serious. I guess that's the idea and sadly I can't really argue with their reasoning anymore. Fuck it! We live in a police state because we're all assholes who can't police ourselves.