9:52AM
Here I am on the Sign-in Gatehouse manning the Arrival Time-in/Time-out sheet. There I was about an hour ago having a deja vu. It felt like a premonition of being here and being asked to stay on this job. I was awoken at 4:40 by my alarm playing the Allegro from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 6, a light and fluffy rise to the morning, less brutally cold than other mornings, and time enough with 40 minutes of travelling to arrive at this destination before 6 o’clock. I cannot pull out my laptop on the civil construction site like I can now. Even if it has taken four hours to catch up on all the names that need to be ticked off after the vans, utes and cars coming up and stopping for my window to slide open, me trying to scribble down their names with their time of arrival, and then to find on the Time-in sheet afterwards, it is still a welcome change from labouring around concrete and machinery. I brought books with me also. I have done one set of 21 press-ups, 9 pull-ups with my boots on (leg-ups combined). I cannot do these on the site, unless we are in a waiting mode (press-ups, yes, but chin-ups I’d have to find a scaffold area). I have put on bulk. Weight is questionable, as I always seem to weigh around 65-68kg, but my stomach has definitely pushed out into a more rounded look opposed to the toned almost-abs I had last year. I keep buying shit food after work, ice creams while filling up with petrol (two in one night! (but to be fair on the ice creams - they were bloody nice!)), or takeaway hamburgers, fish and chips, and am not doing any exercise (of any consequence beyond some hard work on the site). For today, tomorrow and Monday’s stint here at the Gatehouse, I bought chocolate milk to have with my coffee, wine gums, a block of chocolate, gluten free bread with plum jam and "Everything Butter"; and I’m thinking WHY WHY WHY??? - this shouldn’t be any different from any other day. But it’s the old “eat to kill the time and boredom trap”. I won’t be bored. I have a laptop, I have books, I have vehicles consistently coming in and out needing to be registered. Truth is, I saw a toaster, a small oven, and a sandwich toaster in here when spending time with Ian on Tuesday and Wednesday to see how he did things and get a hang of the process, and my mind went crazy with thinking about the things I could eat and cook for myself while here. Yet all those things are not what I usually eat. And it would be okay to make an exception across these next few days IF I was exercising and eating better during the week. But after every dinner meal this week, I have continued eating: cheese and honey, salami, yoghurt, whatever I have that fills me beyond the point of satisfaction. Its been crazy. And I’ve had no self-control. I started bringing food to work, more to stop feeling left out while everyone around me ate than to try to curb the after-dinner eating by making me fuller through the day, but it hasn’t made much difference. It’s cold, and I want to eat to keep myself warm. If the premonition was never realised as such, was the premonition just a deja vu of the feeling of a premonition? If time is static with no past or future and only exists as a present state within the three dimensions of space, what made my brain create a feeling of deja vu in the first place? But we know that time is a fundamental property of space by the distortions created on it from gravity and speed, so how can deja vu not be a real interaction with the future? In what way has time been distorted by gravity to create this sense within myself? Because gravity is already exerting its influence on me? Would that not mean then, that I entered a time-frame that itself had remained static? Had gravity in some way stopped, or slowed time from this future state and I walked into it? What happens after that interaction to that future state? Does it remain in a temporal stasis? Does it spring forward like a rubber band? Does it fade like it was the remnants of a quantum potentiality, an alternative path that I will never know because I either took it and it came to fruition, or I didn’t take it and it didn’t come to fruition? Is that what deja vu is – a rubber band of potential futures stretching backwards and forwards as these biological brains of ours suddenly come into contact with them? It affects us because we recognise a memory, but that memory is of us living in the now. And we ask ourselves ‘how can that be?’ We do not memorise the now, we experience it, and what we remember is translated into the concept of a past.
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Prior to the spread of the internet, ideas and concepts were not available to sway with as much force, or at least, wide spread dominance and with such speed. Gangs happen because individual identity is lost, and then used as a call for groups who want members - "find your identity (with us!)"
If people were taught pure individualism, not selfishness based on desires as Ayn Rand's philosophy promoted, but a welfare of self-first mentality, then all else would follow. Because in order to take care of the self, one must look after the self, prioritise the welfare of self, and in this one is able to recognise dangers to the self more readily. “Is this going to be beneficial to me?" Most times this will exclude mob mentality because mobs and groups ask for a sacrifice of the self; at some point the individual will be told or persuaded to drop the self-preservation in order to achieve the higher goal: "do it for your brothers," "are you a real man? Do this so you can be a real man as well!" The higher goal, therefore, must always be self. When it’s not, stronger willed individuals who manipulate are able to take control. Personal self-hood is replaced with someone else's concept of self-hood. Self-preservation is a key instinct, but is eroded as individual identity is lost. One feels ‘other’ rather than ‘self’. Or, they identify self as ‘other’ rather than ‘I’. ‘I’ is an inward looking state determined to find what is best for self, not subject to outside influences. While outside influences do exist, they are instead a smorgasbord of what enhances the self, not what satiates emotional, physical or intellectual desires. Satisfying these desires for the sake of satisfying them makes one a slave to desires, rather than an owner to their pleasures. In terms of male violence, specifically, domestic violence, there is much to be said for jealousy and the (in)ability for males to express their feelings without anger turning to hatred and destruction. Much has been said by others, little of which I disagree with (if any). I am very much a proponent of Egoism as set out by Max Stirner in his 1844 publication The Ego and Its Own. Instead of focusing on individuals outside of himself and how they should act to create a "better" society, Stirner advocated a form of anarchist philosophy that was purely about what he wanted. The point was always to remove 'spooks' from the mind - anything that reduced the individual to a subject to be manipulated by others. Many human beings, if not all, allow ideologies to rule their concepts of the world, they then become subject to these belief systems. What 'communism' has been turned into - a tyrannical 'evil' - is the perfect example - misunderstanding the theory with the application of an idea through fascists and tyrants. Max Stirner sought to destroy all institutions, ideologies, and belief systems that took away his own individual self. The logical outcome for each Egoist via this route is quite simple: I am what I make of myself, not what others make of me; I am the Unique self according to my own will not to others. There is no doubt in my mind that society benefits everyone when everyone is accounted for and supported. I'm okay with this, because society provides me with things I need. But history has shown how belief systems when promoted as the higher goal for whatever reason, is what kills humans, is what oppresses people, is what reduces the individual to the subject of someone else's will; is what sends men off to war to be murdered, is what drowns women to decide if they are witches or not; is what kills over and over because, because, because... Male violence (any violence, but specifically male) seems to be centred very squarely on what another human being does to affect them: another person's actions have reduced this self to a subject - subject to how this other person acts. They are no longer what they make of themselves, but what another has made of them. Jealous, angry, possessive, etc. Many New Age spiritualists seek to help people remove negativity, to learn to live in peace, in the now and not in the future. We as human beings must decide how we pursue life on our own terms. It is raining in Auckland and I have no desire to leave my hotel room other than to find something to eat. Last night I drove for a (very) short period to see how far away the Vector Arena was, but didn’t find it and came back screwing up the right of way at the bottom of Gladstone Rd. meeting with The Strand. I decided that I wasn’t going to do any further driving in Auckland. But it is raining. And I’m not keen on catching a bus. The hotel does have meals, but I would be concerned about the cost, though at least I could say it would be a healthy alternative.
It’s 12:13 p.m. I’m getting hungry. I’m going to risk it. At least, I can say, it’ll be an adventure. But probably not a very happy one. Just a few more words first: My room is a lie. Advertised with “a garden view,” it merely looks across the meagre shrubbery beside the footpath alongside Gladstone Rd. Cars consistently pass by leaving no room for any kind of tranquillity that “a garden view” could infer or conjure in a person’s mind. The window view gives no sense of place, only presenting a thinly wood panelled fence that shows a blue car parked on the road beyond it and the tail or front end of cars surrounding it; everything else is blocked by a couple of trees to my right. It rains in Auckland like you are meant to feel it. After looking at my meal list on the hotel room menus, I decided on the $18 Steak and Chips. ‘That sounds like a decent price’ for a meaty meal, I thought to myself. But when I got up to the restaurant, I ordered an orange juice and room service at an extra $3 because I couldn’t eat it up there due to a private event and wasn’t prepared to carry it back to my room after having to wait for it. So the total cost came to $25, and my regret kicked in with thoughts of ‘fuck, I really should have braved the weather and searched foe something with a less brutal cost attached to it’ (or something similar). Not that I think $25 is brutal, but compared to what I could have paid, it’s definitely more than what I wanted to pay. When I thought about it at the Copthorne Hotel last month, I was just happy to be paying for a meal that was ultimately healthier, and that’s something I’m now willing to pay for. Maybe at the end of the day I will be far more thankful that I didn’t bother trying to rape my soul by competing with car traffic, people traffic and the all consuming rain. Yay! My meal arrived. See, and in no way can I say that that meal wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t huge, true; and it wasn’t the most beautiful taste I had tasted either, but then I didn’t expect it to be; there’s no doubt I could have paid for the same meal slightly cheaper, but at what outside cost? And therein lies the rub. By not venturing out into the wet downpours (opposed, my semantically inclined critic, to the dry downpours of sunshine) I avoided battling with multitudes of bodies plagued by fashion and trends, muggy indoor temperatures, car parking costs, car driving costs, and all other temperament upsetting inducements that only Auckland can curse me with. In those moments I feel like an RPG character who has been cursed and has to wait a period of time for the curse to wear off, or, alternatively, seek help from a mage or harvest some weird plant that grows in an out-of-the-way territory and is surrounded by trolls or giants who protect the area because it is sacred to them and supplies them with special life enhancing properties but they need to be fought and battled against in order to even reach the area with the special curse-curing plants. I’d rather just let it wear off as I cross the Bombay Hills tomorrow. At least I have some tasty orange juice to see me through until that time. Tool Setlist:
I’m not sure which was last – Stinkfist or Forty Six & 2. And I’m also not sure where Schism comes in in the whole setlist after Pushit. I know the first three are correct, and Lateralus was last before the intermission, and then the drum solo. |
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