Love and courage, I feel, are the two highest virtues

and another extended hiatus

thus far resisting all temptations to hit 'delete'

should be back soon enough, here and elsewhere in the aquarium as well

And I could have been a particle physicist

A Large Ion Collider Experiment switched back on after repairs

"The collisions could provide the first experimental evidence for the Higgs boson, which many scientists believe explains the origin of mass. Other researchers are looking for evidence of Supersymmetry, the idea that every particle in the Universe has a “companion” particle.

Last week, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya, of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, suggested that the breakdowns at the collider could be caused by the Higgs boson itself.

They said that the boson could theoretically ripple backwards through time to destroy whatever had created it in the first place. This could also cause the accelerator to malfunction, they said."

Yes, I imagine it could

Men do not know the natural diseases of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work; Mus in pice.

-Michel de Montaigne Que sais-je?

or something

"I don't think humans have figured out a functional form of sexual relationships. Traditional gender roles seem useless and non-productive, and these are generally mirrored in sexual roles and representation. Of course, that is true in prostitution as well, but to me it seems fairly rational and straightforward, which is more respectful of the participants than the unconscious charade psychodrama that usually constitutes regular romantic sex."

-in Letters from Johns (and there is also Letters from Working Girls)

Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra
It flips over, pinning you underneath
At night, the ice weasels come

(Gwendolyn's mother's poetry - Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, Tom Robbins)

Sometimes naked
Sometimes mad
Now the scholar
Now the fool
Thus they appear on earth:
The free men

(found in old notebook, unknown origin)

People run hither and thither.

And then hither again.

alcohol is a good social drug because it reduces your ability to understand what other people are saying

(from here)

my back teeth are more filling than tooth. i had a tooth finally pulled the other day, it was glorious. my quality of life immediately improved 25 per cent or so.

shit proliferates. bad shit drives out good shit. it's the inexorable march of entropy.

i'm gonna get an electric typewriter so i can write without goddamn emails and blogs and facebooks.

i was digging in the garden today, hardpacked soil in a long-abandoned flowerbed.

at about a foot depth i dug through the central egg chamber of a huge ant colony. there was a tiny little plastic kid's toy in there, first i thought it was a little dinosaur figure.

no, it was an anteater.

strange.

i save earthworms from the biting ants to bring to the flowerbed and herb patch. i love earthworms and hate ants.

i am sure we will reach the stars from this planet someday. but it may well be the descendants of the ants and not us who reach other worlds.

bastard things.

it's that fucker i hate. what fucker? the one that lives down the street, a couple houses down. what number? i don't know what number. 7. or 8. i don't care what fucking number. but i don't like him. i'm gonna punch his lights out the first pretext he gives me. what fucker? you know the one i mean, the one that really enrages me. that wannabe rockstar wanker. no, he doesn't have blond hair, he's got dark hair. i think. if it's not dark it might be light though. i don't know. his name? fuck knows. i don't fucking know. you know the one i mean. that mean-spirited fucking twat that i want to punch. i don't know anything else about him.

Running under a big sky

London is so very pretty in the summer. A long absence does much to re-inspire an appreciation for the cultural wealth of this city - the libraries, the galleries, the opportunities for study and learning, the people gathered here from every corner of the earth.

Lazy lurches from one extreme to another, as is his wont. After a thousand broken vows, he returns once again to the caravan of seekers and lovers of knowledge. After the years lost to heroin, and then a year-long drunken bender across four countries and two continents, he runs, he hammers the punch bag until he collapses, he does sit-ups and push-ups and yoga stretches, he seeks a squash partner and a sparring partner and joins a boxing gym; he reads widely, he applies himself fanatically to his passion, the study of languages.

We have re-instituted VFEC, the "Valid Fucking Experiment in Consciousness" of our driven and Nietzschean years (there is even a VFEC blog, although most entries have been redacted. The first post may be useful as background and as a statement of intent).

Lazy takes up chi kung and meditation and pranayama once again. He borrows and reads Paulette's books on Taoist sexual alchemy and maintains himself in a state of heightened sexual excitement without allowing himself to come, attempting to channel the ching into strengthening the chi and shen and forcing his consciousness wider open. He reads Radigan's Solipsist novel The Steppe and contemplates the nature of external reality and knowledge. He resolves to conduct many experiments on himself, the only subject you may ethically experiment on; and on others. He cultivates a sacred detachment, the paradoxical state of non-attachment / non-disinterest.

And it is so effortless. If you must force yourself into any type of "self-improvement", so-called, you are harming yourself, as you do not really want it, or perhaps you want it too much.

"Act without doing; work without effort. The way is not difficult, only there must be no wanting or not wanting."

When you come back after a year, and there are the same people, sitting in the same places, beer cans held at the same angles, having the same conversation.

It fills me with a chilling existential dread.

"My God, you were hard work," the black girl said, wiping my come from her lips after I had struggled through a numbing alcohol, weed and cocaine haze to orgasm in her mouth.

Brazil. Onde a puta goza, o traficante cheira, e o abogado vira amigo. There is something so strangely gentle about her. "I like you, you're nice," she says. "What, most of the people who come here aren't?" She shakes her head emphatically. She soaps me down in the shower and we talk about where I'm from and why we came to Sao Paulo and why she ended up in a brothel in Santana. "My mother has brain cancer. The treatment is so expensive," she says. "Huh. Life is brutal," I agree, and she gives a small sad smile.

My friend is relaxing downstairs, chatting with the doorman and some of the girls. "Shit, man, you've just been waiting sitting here? Sorry I took so long." "It's nothing, it's nothing!" We walk. I say thank-you to the girl on the way out and he reprimands me for thanking a whore.

I feel indifferent to everything, but my senses are open, soaking in the world, the insane city around us. A change is coming. I can feel it.

Like above the roofs of Katmandu, of Peshawar, of Kabul - the sky out here in the periphery is full of kites. A strange mixture of sadness, longing and joy, a sense of places lost and far away, falls on Lazy as he watches the kids duel in the skies (cruzando pipas, they say here) and run through the streets after the defeated kites fluttering down trailing cut string.

This is where to drink when up in the vila, o chileno's bar. Or really it's more like a trailer wedged between two houses to get R$2.50 beers or glasses of pinga to drink in the street in front and with a covered yard behind where to sit if you like or if it's raining or if there's a game on the tv.

No one knows why he's called chileno, least of all himself. Like he's not chilean for a start. But he's not just a grumpy grizzled half-cracked old guy who's heard too many appeals for credit and waters down the sao francisco either, he's an artist and a songwriter, though you might not think. He is camera shy but my friend managed to get the first known picture of him.

He brought out his big notebook for me and we discussed lyrical writing. He writes lyrics in spanish now, which is eccentric in itself as, as i said, he has nothing to do with chile and he had to ask me how vivo sonhando com ela would be, and he's translating them into english as well, and how would i put tô apaixonado por ela, and like this. He wouldn't bring us beers in return even though we demanded, but i was honoured when he sang us a few of his lines at least. If I ever vanish for days I might be here. Good luck finding it

Happy Bloomsday innit

Turn to face the strange

Hahahahahahahaaa. That Ishmael. "I have come to believe in the total malleability of human nature: anybody can be anybody."

That was when we were young and zealous Nietzscheans and before this lapse into a morbid and impotent fatalism.


It is time, again:

Face the world and walk out into the strange. Find what you fear, and do it.

I am a brain in a bath tub

Life is great

Pour me more bubble bath, please





get your own strange ribbon here

leafing through a book like "the correspondance of henry miller and anaïs nin", it makes me wonder what sort of legacies the writers of my generation will leave behind. "the collected facebook updates of alex nichols"?

it's too cold to write

i have a theory, based in part on observing lazy's narcissism, and in part on seeing on the webstats how many people click through from here onto their own blogs, that most people spend more time admiring their own blogs than they ever have to spare for others'

sometimes lazy hates people. so he stays in bed all weekend with his russian fucking course book, a volume of borges in fucking portuguese, a friend's novel he hasn't finished reading yet, and a bottle of scotch whiskey. 36 hours later his liver hurts alarmingly and he decides to give up drinking. life feels empty...

Fun facts about transport in São Paulo

A law against drunk driving finally came into force a little over half a year ago but hasn't really changed anything. Everyone still drives around completely out of their tree.

If there is such a thing as a São Paulo bus map, I still haven't been able to find it. Asking people helps, although often the drivers don't know where they're going.

Bus stops are always located in the middle of blocks and well away from train and metro stations, rather than at corners of the crossings of main roads and rail routes.

Passengers in Metrô and train stations always stand on the escalators and never stand on one side to allow people who want to walk up to pass. Further, if there is a ludicrously crowded escalator, and a completely empty set of normal stairs, everyone will still try to pack onto the escalator. These people love escalators.

Morning and evening rush hours see traffic on main routes, in ten lanes and three layers (including elevated and underground), going absolutely nowhere.

Futebol!

Best reason ever for supporting a football team (because isn't your team as arbitrary as everything else?) :

About as remote as you can get in São Paulo state, where the paved road ends and a dirt track goes off into the bush, but still only a few hours from the city, you can still find the odd Indian village. A friend of mine is a lawyer, and she has taken up a case for land rights on behalf of some Guaranis.

They all support Palmeiras (="palms") in the village. The old Indian guy explained: the palm tree is sacred to us. The world was born from a palm tree. We eat palmito (palm heart). The birds which are messengers of the spirits perch in the palm tree.

Therefore, we are all faithful to Palmeiras.


Oh and I met Sócrates, Brazilian football legend from the 70s, in the bar a while back. These days he is getting a bit alcoholised and he was completely sloshed. Like Gazza. I asked him what he thought of English football.

"It's a load of shit," he said. "Just like the football in any country."


[From a more-or-less indifferent football fan in England I have become a complete devotee in Brazil. Just like I follow cricket when I'm in India or Pakistan - it is very difficult not to be caught up in the feverish excitement. I used to make money betting on the cricket in India, back when Pakistan was still a team to be reckoned with, because no matter how poor the chances, it seemed to be utterly inconceivable to people that anyone would want to bet on Pakistan (ancestral enemy...) winning. Not only that, but in Brazil it's a different game, a beautiful virtuoso game compared to the tactical workmanlike football of Europe.]