Empiricism is Transcendence, or Look! The Universe is Thrown

I took this from my bedroom window while writing this. 
Look at the universe — look at invisible space — bend.
Space is not the background. It's all inflected.

The west coast sky of the United States — at least between upper Oregon and Half Moon Bay — has been outrageous as of late. Yes, that's kind of an absurd thing to say as the sky is always exactly as it should be — outrageous. But, holy moly, it's been really and truly incredible recently.

I've been lucky to enjoy the sky for extended stretches, with no distractions — no emails or phone calls, no conversations or traffic. Just sitting there, safe and sound, beneath, below, and within the sky, watching. How's that for an excellent day — I spent several hours looking at the sky! That's a good god damn day.

Anyway, I'm sitting there watching the sky and this particular distribution of clouds and I see something amazing: I see the curvature of not just the earth — but also the earth — but the curvature of the space around us. I see space bending!

Now, it's tempting at times to imagine the earth as this body that's in space. We're on solid ground, suspended in even and continuous, if interrupted, space. But what is space? Is space the background or canvas on which we hang our planets and stars and solar systems, the empty place we fill with our structures of knowledge? Space is the blank spots, the playing field. So we imagine.

But I'm looking at the sky and, well, it doesn't seem even at all. It doesn't stretch out evenly in all directions. The thing we're suspended in — if we're to continue with that figure, which has all kinds of problems — is not uniform. Space is not blank at all. The damn thing is bent! All that yawning sky, that space, is not a great openness. It's filled with planes — planes I can't see but whose effects I can see (that is, the clouds and trails don't just drift any old way; they drift along what the great poet and sophist, Lohren Green, might call a seam). 

Just look at the freakin' clouds! They don't fill space evenly or randomly. No, they drift along one level plane, like the cool kids on the mezzanine at the party. 

And it's a plane that bends! The vanishing point of this plane is not the same as the vanishing point of the earth — the horizon. But both sure move along what are obviously planes. And obviously along planes that are related to each other in some complex, mutually inflecting way.

Space is not geometric; it's, at the very least, calculaic. It is bent, everywhere, all the time, in infinite curves. Space is thoroughly internally differentiated. How do I know? Look at the fucking sky!

If you literally look up from daily demands and anxieties — jobs, rent, traffic, girlfriends, boyfriends, parents, children, tv shows — you see the cosmos bending with the force of enormous, twirling, spinning bodies. The universe is thrown. It's big banging all over the place, at different speeds, at different angles, along infinite and intersecting planes, creases in the cosmos, pleats in the universe — all these crevices and niches, canals and alleyways, hills and valleys of the goddamn universe. The universe is San Francisco (geographically).

To see the world is to be outside yourself. To see is to take in the world and, at the same time, to let the world take you in. To see is not to just be the seer; to see is to be seen. A condition of seeing, of taking in the world, is that you make yourself something that can be seen and taken in. This is the mechanism of life — sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. You only see because you can can be seen; smell, because you are something that is smelled; touch, taste, and hear only because you're tasty, smooth, and loud.  

When I'm looking at the sky, I move along with the big banging planetary bodies moving along this infinitely variegated and inflected universe. I'm seeing that which means I'm experiencing that. As that space bends with forces and bodies so vast and swift, I tilt with it, even if ever so slightly. 

Empiricism is not a dead end road of numbers and knowledge, a means to an end, a resting place. Empiricism is participation. Empiricism is keeping your fucking eyes open for whatever and however it all comes, or not. Empiricism means moving along the planes of the cosmos with the speeds and pulls of bodies vast and swift. Empiricism is the way to transcend the ego and become with the world.

The Dupe of Looking Inward, or Wisdom Lies in Empiricism

So I'm standing in front my bathroom sink the other evening, the night getting deeper and darker, and as the water ran, I felt a bit discombobulated. My first instinct, at least at this point in my life, was to try to ground myself. And, for some insane reason, this translated into me closing my eyes, or it felt like I closed my eyes, and launching into some insane inner monologue — or would that be a dialogue? — in which I tried to convince myself to be present. What a demented thing to do! How the fuck am I supposed to be present when I'm interrogating myself, talking to myself, judging myself for feeling discombobulated.

And then I opened my eyes and saw the water running. I reached into it, cupped it, immersed my face in it. And then I was present. And then any disorientation, anxiety, discombobulation vanished in one great, silent woosh!

The image of the searcher, of the seeker, plagues us. We imagine that the person who looks for answers, who asks the so-called deep questions — Who am I? Why am I here? — is on some road to discovery, to greater truths, perhaps even to ultimate truths. We believe the answers lie within. So we burrow, we interrogate, we judge ourselves: You weren't present, you fickle moron! Be present!

Alas, there are no answers hidden within in. There is no depth. There are no questions. To ask questions, to mine oneself, is nihilistic and only perpetuates the very sensation that initiated the query to begin with: anxiety, feeling lost, out of place, discombobulated.

O, I could say and write that word over and over: discombobulated. It performs itself so well, so elegantly, despite its unwieldiness or, rather, precisely because of its unwieldiness. The word pops and mutters and reels, like the experience it names.

Here, then, is where the world is to be found. Not in exploring yourself or being true to yourself; not in asking big questions; not in antagonizing the inner voice to speak more, question more, judge more. No, the answer always is: there never was a question and everything you need and everything you need to know is right here (am I quoting Sinead? So be it).

Standing in front of my sink, going deep within only perpetuated my personal mayhem. Well, mayhem is hyperbolic — my discomfort. But leaning into the water, hearing its sound, feeling its temperature, its weight brought me right to where I already was: right there.

The myth of depth is dangerous. As Foucault argues, it is what inaugurates the very conception of the pervert, the criminal mind, the endless interrogation that will out your truth through relentless, endless, infinite discourse. Turning inward is not the answer. That's what they — you know who they are — want us to believe. It is a disconcerting collusion of philosophy, epistemology, religion, "self-help," and the police state (or what Foucault called, at one point, an episteme).

There is no depth. And turning inward isn't wise; it's idiotic. Asking deep, philosophical questions about life and your place in it is even stupider. There are no questions as there are no answers other than: this is this. This is it (pace Alan Watts). All there is is all this.

The world happens at the surface. And I don't mean surface as opposed to the depth; I am not privileging the transient pleasure over and against the long lasting truths of the world. I'm throwing out the whole damn schema.

The surface of the world is run through with physical sensations of sound, smell, touch; it enjoys speed and intensity. And it's also run through, at the same time and along similar pathways, with ideas, concepts, affects, moods. The visible and invisible world are intertwined (thanks Merleau-Ponty!). When I left my "inner" monologue telling myself to be cool and leaned into the running water, I was leaning into life itself as it was happening — which always, necessarily, includes moods, ideas, notions, concepts, affects.

You can't brush away the water to find the truth. Turning inwards is a dead end, literally. The world is neither in here nor over there: it's right here, right now — this. The so-called wise man doesn't seek answers or look deep inside himself; he doesn't ask why he's here or why there's something, not nothing. No, he just leans into the water, washes his face, and quietly — or even exuberantly —smiles.

What is Radical? On Burning Man, Sub-Culture, and Living Vitally

When I was in high school, I fancied myself a radical of a sort, a subversive. I had a Karl Marx poster in my room (it replaced the St. Pauli Girl poster, I have to admit) as well as a Grateful Dead poster. I was in personal contact with the head of the Communist Party at the time, Gus Hall. When I told my grandfather this — my grandfather who'd helped found the National Lawyers Guild and who'd defended communists who faced deportation — he was angry. I was surprised; I thought he'd be proud. But he wasn't proud. Be invisible, he told me, more or less. There's no need to declare myself a communist to the world; believe and do what I believe and do and leave it at that.

It took me many years to understand this. I think I'm still trying to understand it. After he told me this, I still declared myself a radical at every turn. I wore my hair crazy Jewfro hippy; I wore a Lenin t-shirt on move-in day at college. I started an anti-nuke group my freshman year — STAND: students against nuclear destruction. An idiotic name, I know. And an idiotic group, no doubt.

To this day, I feel an urge to let people know that I don't think like them, that I'm different — smarter but also more, well, radical. Besides the idiotic vanity of this, it also belies my very claim: to be radical, one doesn't need to declare oneself as such. One lives as one lives. (And what's more stupid than trying to prove you're smart?)

Long hair, mohawks, safety pin in noses and cheeks, tattoos: these are signs that presumably declare to others I am radical! And, no doubt, there is something socially radical about sticking a pin through your nose and wearing it around. It probably freaks out the squares in their Gap and yoga pants. But is that radical in and of itself?

Back in those Jewfro, commie, Dead days, I imagined there was a counter-culture, a sub-culture that resisted the Man. But later I'd come to see that all there are are networks of people who share a language, a dialect of words and signs and gestures. There is no master group: all there are are sub-cultures.

This meant that being a commie and going to Dead shows did not make me radical. It just meant I followed the rules of a different group, used different words and wore different clothes. It's all language games, as Wittgenstein might say, without a master rule set (old school grammarians included).

What, then, is radical?

I have a good friend who explores the intellectual, sensual, and existential world with a certain vim. He parties, as they say, and when he was younger, liked to go to arty punkish alterna-rock shows. The thing is, he's always been a dapper dresser — nice pants, nice shoes, a blazer over a  sweater, perhaps, hair neatly groomed. And, at these shows, he'd catch shit from people there. And the funny thing is, in that crowd, he was far and away the most different — the most radical.

In my world, it's shocking to hear someone say I believe in God. We're all supposed to be these liberal, scientific rationalists. And maybe "spiritual," too. But to say those words — I believe in God — makes people cringe and shrink away. So I like to say precisely those words, when asked, because it's true: I do believe in God. I could qualify that in many ways, describe what I mean by I, believe, and God. But that would just help my world be more comfortable with the fact that I wasn't playing their language game. So I just leave it at that.

Of course, in other worlds, to say I don't believe in God is to disrupt the language game, to make people shrink away. So perhaps to be radical means breaking the rules of one's language game.

A good friend of mine was just here recently, making his way home after his billionth Burning Man. He showed me many pictures of pretty women and men scantily clad with that beautiful sky making them gleam all the more. Then he showed me pictures of his trips to Thailand and Bali and, at first, I couldn't tell the difference form the Burning Man pictures. Everyone looked the same; they all were partaking of the same language game, the same fashion code, the same vocabulary of what's to be said and not said.

There is certainly something radical in there, in this creation of a new language game amid the tired language games of work, marriage, kids. This is what Deleuze and Guattari might call a minor language, a dialect that borrows from the major language but makes its own sense, invents a new language game (to mix Wittgenstien and Deleuze and Guattari).

On the other hand, it's all just another language game — meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Of course, this language game may not be interested in being radical; it just wants its pleasures and delights. And that, to me, sounds radically fantastic.

Burning Man seems to me like the Carnival of the Middle Ages, a chaotic, indulgent release from the strictures of the everyday. So people go to their idiotic jobs and pay their mortgage and fancy car lease and fight with their spouses and such and then, for 10 days, they get to cut loose and be nutty — and then go back to their insane lives. In this case, the minor language of Burning Man becomes a sub-set of the major language of contemporary, urban, liberal American capitalism. Without this release, the whole charade of work-marry-die might come crashing down.

(Please,  I am not criticizing Burning Man at all. As an agoraphobic misanthrope, I have no desire to go at all. And everyone I know and love who goes, loves it. So I love it, too. I am just trying to understand the idea of radicality and subversion and poking at Burning Man a bit to see if it helps me understand.)

I know that I lead a very odd life compared to those around me. I have never really worked for anyone else, had a job that I had to go to every day (at least since college; I did work then — but even then, the jobs I had were odd and left me a lot of freedom to roam). I spend a tremendous amount of time alone. I've lived in San Francisco 25 years and I have no one who expects to see me or cares where I am or wonders what I'm doing (except for my son, who only cares when he's here with me).

This life gives me plenty of time to relax, which I need after I work and think. It gives me plenty of time to write. It pays the bills (for now, at least!). And it lets me eat and piss and shit when I want, in privacy. There are very few language games I have to master, no fashion codes to follow (I write this in my pajama pants and stained sweatshirt that I wear all day every day). This is my radicality; this is how I burrow, parry, duck, and avoid the monstrosity of life today.

This, then, might be what defines radical. It's not just disrupting language games or inventing new ones. It's forging a course of daily life that fuels your vitality.

Knowing is a Process

For many years, I taught a course on joy. Joy, I'd argue, is the affirmation of life as it is, as it happens, as it becomes. Joy doesn't kvetch or whine; it doesn't hope things will get better. It declares Yes to everything, even pain and suffering. Joy doesn't seek an elsewhere. It regrets nothing; it wishes for nothing other than what is. I'd teach Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and his great dictum, amor fati: don't just accept fate, love your fate! I'd teach Whitman's unabashed voraciousness for life. And, eventually, I'd come to teach the story of Job, who really got the shit end of the stick but still affirmed his faith without wishing things to be otherwise. That Job!

But, while understanding the concept and mechanics of joy, I actually knew nothing. For when I was confronted with my own pain and suffering, my own dark hour, I didn't say Yes. I flailed and whined; I turned sour, dour, and blue. I imagined the great relief a bullet to the head would bring. I still often pine and whine, fear and dread. I don't just take things as they come; I fear what might come and hope things go a certain way.

What, then, was I teaching of joy?  My knowledge? My understanding? What is it to know something?

There was a long, beautiful period of my life where I was making all sorts of connections, seeing the world anew constantly. I loved spinning things, seeing how they could and would meld and reconfigure according to this or that theory, this or that view of the world. It was a constant high. I'd see lines of flight here, knights of faith there, the will to power abounding; I'd see différance playing itself out, the post-modern condition in action, the society of the spectacle folding me in. I killed authors, found meaning in the slightest gestures, saw montage create movement where there'd been none.

Then a conspiracy of sort occurred as time and circumstance (is that redundant?) had its way with me. I aged. I spawned. I became tired, admittedly sad, often distracted by the newfound burdens of work (grad school was all play) and parenting. Ghosts of my childhood came to roost, unearthed by the presence of my own progeny. I stopped seeing things anew; I crashed from that high.

But a funny thing happened. I began to know things I already knew. That may sound silly but that's precisely what happened. I knew what a line of flight was, in some sense. But it wasn't until confronted by the traps of parental discourse that I really learned what a line of flight was — and only after many, many failed flights that ended in crashes of the most unseemly sort. I may have known what exploitation and alienation from the means of production meant but it wasn't until prices skyrocketed and my expenses along with them that I knew, and saw, how things work and how deeply fucked we all are.

There are different kinds of knowing, different modes of understanding. I don't want to say that my early reckonings of ideas were false. I did see something, know something, understand something. However, my knowledge was limited, tempered by the mechanics of my own body and experience. Sure, joy found me, found the part of me that could grapple with it, even articulate it. But it didn't find other parts of me, the folds of my being, the whispers of my becoming. The resonance of that doppler wave was limited.

For the past few years, my mode of knowing has changed. I rarely see the world radically realigned; I rarely find newfound connections between aspects of the cosmos. But I continue to know, to learn, to understand those ideas and possibilities I nibbled on in my youth. I was about to say that every day, I understand Deleuze, Nietzsche, Whitman, Eistenstein a little more thoroughly, from a different angle, in a different way. But I'm not sure it's every day.

Which makes me thing about the time of learning, the time of understanding. I used to tell my students that, for the most part, they wouldn't understand a word I was saying at the time. But, years and even decades later, fragments might strike and resonate. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was talking to myself, telling myself that these ideas that were bouncing all around my body and mind would take root at different speeds, in different rhythms, with different reactions, affects, and effects.

I recently spent a few days on the Oregon coast, fueled by mental and existential accelerants and catalysts, expecting and wanting to see the world anew. I missed the old days of my old high in which the world would and could realign itself before my eyes and I'd declare, Holy fuck fuck! Yes! That! But that yearning already showed me the limit of my understanding of joy as I was still hoping for an outcome, not affirming whatever.

What I experienced, then, were no new revelations, not of that sort. Rather, I experienced the profound resonance of some things I've been in the act of understanding not just for decades but for scores. I saw the sky, the infinite sky, yawn and fold before me and around me. I felt the sun touch me in all sorts of places: I felt life happening in me, as me, with me. I knew joy again; I knew it anew.

To know is not to conquer, despite anachronistic academic protestations to the contrary. To know is to live through, over and over again, a process of reckoning, of resonating, of becoming.

Of Grammar

Grammar's a great word. Gram is something written or letters or writing itself (this of telegram).  When I think about that, I see grammar as one who forges with words. Forges is funny in that it means to fake as well as to create. Funny, as well, that grammar came to mean the rules of forging as distinct from the act of forging.

Whence rules? Sure, there's something to be said for creating consistency in communication so that we can understand each other and hence do business, mate, forge a society and culture (there's that forge again!). On the other hand, who gets to make up these rules? And, for that matter, are we sure we want and even need to forge such communicative commonality? I mean, if I want you to understand me, I'll communicate in such a way that you can and do. This happens all the time when traveling — we gesture, gesticulate, stick words together like blocks. And, often, it works: we forge sense together. But that's between you and me, not some dusty grammar book and me.

The act of forging is always grammatical. It puts things together according to a logic, a sense that may be internal rather than external, immanent rather than extrinsic, but with sense, nonetheless. Burroughs and Brion Gysin used something called the cutup to write. The name of the method is self-explanatory. Here's an example of a cut up Rimbaud poem:

Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife.
 
The great skies are open. Candor of vapor and tent spitting blood laugh and drunken penance.
 
Promenade of wine perfume opens slow bottle.
 
The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist. 

Fragments of sense and image shards and odd euphonies emerge from putting things together. This doesn't mean that if you put any things together they'll be so conspicuously enticing. But, I have to tell you, most people who follow the so-called rules of grammar don't always create something meaningful and enticing. In fact, I might go so far as to say that most writing, with its staid grammar, is lousy. Which isn't necessarily the fault of the rules.

Which is my point. Sense comes from lots of things, lots of places; it comes from juxtaposition, from the relationship between things. The best sense emerges in surprising ways. And some of the best sense doesn't make sense, not in that sense of the word sense. But it does make sense in the sense that it forges sense, much as a blacksmith forges metal into, I don't know, a horseshoe or some primal, elongated whimsy.

Grammar from a book is akin to a moral code. It stands outside the fray, determining from afar. Thou shalt not diddle thy neighbor's wife! Even if the wife is miserable in her present relationship and the two of you are in mad love! Thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition! Even if it means doing so makes perfect sense and not ending in a preposition is, in fact, confusing and douchey!

The grammar I'm talking about is what Deleuze would call an ethics — the emergent terms of behavior between things, in this case, words and punctuation. Here, grammar becomes a kind of verb, the very act of putting things together in order to forge sense. The risk, of course, is that you create no sense, or nonsense (I have to think about what that is), or boring sense. But that's a risk worth taking.

Reading Amidst the Fray

It's a luxury to read great books, films, works of art. You get to jump in, kick around, then stand back and think while the thing stands still. I say "for the most part" because the thing you're reading — a book, film, painting — does change as you change. But that change is relatively slow. So if you're reading, say, Cassavetes' careening film, Faces, over a few weeks the film won't change all that much. When you read it again years later, it will most likely have changed quite a bit and you'll wonder: Is it me? Or the film? The answer is both.

But there is great pleasure and a certain security in reading things. I, for one, like to spend my time coming at the thing from different angles, in different states of mind, at different times of the day, in different moods with different needs and different energies. A beautiful repartee takes place between the thing and me as I wrestle its moves and mechanics.

Mostly, I'm looking for that instance in which I get it, I see with what Bergson calls intuition: I grasp what is at stake for this thing. I see, in a flash, the terms of its world, the universe it sees and creates. This is especially true of an oeuvre: you suddenly see what they see, the world Descartes imagines, the cosmos in which Cassavetes operates, the terms of Nabokov. But that flash, while immediate, often takes time to come and then, once seen, needs to rest and take root. (For instance, I see Deleuze's world but it continues to take root in odd parts of my body and I am still surprised by it.)

Things get much more complicated when you're reading the social — all those glances, desires, needs, assaults, seductions coming at you all while you try to make your way through the endless nonsense in your own head (I suppose I should shift to the first person here). For much of my life, perhaps the present included, I am thoroughly confounded by when a girl likes me likes me, as the kids say. I can readily see when a boy or girl are interested in each other. It's so damn obvious. Just look at how she's talking to him! Duh!

But when she talks like that to me, well, I assume something's wrong. I rarely assume she likes me. How could she? I'm an idiot, a nose on a stick, an endless mouth. This neurosis prohibits my seeing what's actually happening; I see my self-loathing, not the event of desire that's transpiring directly in front of me.

Which is all to say, reading the social amidst the relentless teem of the social is tricky, to say the least. It all moves so fast! Movies move fast, too. But it's easy to pause, rewind, rewatch. I've watched movies dozens of times before writing about them. You don't have this luxury in the social. Glances and moods move fast and you are responding, always, whether you like it or not. Sitting there with a blank face is a communication with meaning; it is a reading of the situation, perhaps despite yourself.

Of course, in addition to the speed, what makes this so tricky is that your every action inflects the whole. If you smile, it shifts the mood and the play of meaning. If you turn your back, make a stuttering joke, spill your drink the very terms of exchange shift differently.

What's perhaps surprising is that this is true of reading a film, too. Your every move inflects the whole. If you read Cassavetes as dripping human affect the way Pollock drips paint, this sends ripples through Cassavetes' oeuvre and, like any grammatical instance, nudges your reading into a certain configuration — and, by extension, nudges you into a certain configuration.

Reading in the social and reading a film are not categorically different performances. As Bergson might say, they are different in degree — of speed and intensity, not different in kind. When we read books or movies or art, we are implicated. We may try to distance ourselves from this by writing arid academic prose or by deploying someone else's theory. This isn't my reading of Hitchcock! It's Lacan's! As if this got us off the hook. As if writing poorly and quoting someone else somehow spared us the insecurity, the uncertainty, the risk of being this person seeing these things.

When I read a thing, I want to throw myself into the mix. I want to celebrate the fact that I'm of the very stuff I'm reading — like Faces, I am affect and light and word and image. This is the key insight to New Journalism: we can write from the middle of the crowd, not just from the balcony. I want to feel the film all around me; I want my very flesh to shudder, my thinking to vibrate, my every twitch to be implicated. This is why I am not an academic: I want to be enmeshed in my thinking rather than wielding my ideas from afar.

There is no outside the fray, no matter how turgid your prose. This is not a bad thing. In fact, Merleau-Ponty says this is the only way we can know anything — precisely because we are of the same stuff, precisely because we are something that can be touched, seen, read. This reality can be disconcerting, especially when surrounded on all sides by glances, desires, and moods. The thing to do, I believe, is to learn from how we read things — let yourself be inundated, look for that flash of intuition, and then at once read and create that new cosmos.

In Praise of Weird

So I'm standing outside a bar in downtown San Francisco waiting for a friend. A man is standing there, too. He's white, turns out he's 39, dons a Giants baseball cap. He starts talking to me, asking if I live upstairs which, I learn, is a shelter for veterans. (I don't.) We're making very small talk — this shelter is recently renovated, it's very clean, mostly occupied by Vietnam vets who are, in his words, docile. Fair enough.

And then he asks if I know what's happening September 23 — the Day of Atonement. You know, when the skies will open and the rivers will run red. He then continues on about how the Navy is microwaving the ocean and keeping rain from California and how the Colorado River is already running red.

What's interesting is that he doesn't ask me as if he knows something I don't; he asks me as if he assumes I already know. Which is exactly how people in San Francisco will speak to me about, say, George Bush or Donald Trump — as if I know what they're talking about. Which I don't. Because I never, ever read a newspaper or watch any news. Everything I "know" about public discourse comes form my Facebook and Twitter feeds.  And I skip the posts about Democrats and Republicans because, well, it's just all the same old nonsense — as Burroughs says, it's the red cape of the matador, making us charge at nothing while the sword is wielded from above.

There is, I realized, no real difference between what this guy is talking about — days of atonement, microwaving oceans — and what all the more gentile, middle class whines on about — Republicans and such. It's all just stories, stories framed and repeated by various media sources. This vet — he'd been in Afghanistan, it seems, delivering mail — simply reads different websites than the well employed Googlers. But both regurgitate the same old nonsense as if it were "news."

Now, I know that most people in my world would consider this guy a nut job. But what bummed me out was that he was not all that nuts (well, he might be but not in what he was saying to me). All the stuff he was telling me about the Navy boiling the ocean is simply not that weird. In fact, I found is disappointingly familiar.

This is the problem with the ready dissemination of "news" and conspiracy theories (which, to me, are the same thing): the weirdness of people is culled. So rather than hearing something truly bizarre, I hear the same old conspiracy nonsense about the Illuminati and the dark secrets of the US government and days of freakin' atonement — which we've been hearing about for millennia!

I want to hear something that I couldn't have imagined someone saying to me. I want to hear the weird and the wonderful and the scary and the hilarious. This is why I can't stand news sources. They're anything but new! They tell me the same old nonsense in the same old banal tone of voice.

When I was in college in Philly in the late 80s — an exceedingly depressed and depressing time for that sad little city — there was this older white dude who roamed West Philadelphia. He was often shirtless and in jean cut offs (not Daisy Dukes, mind you); his hair was grey — he was probably in his mid to late 60s. I don't think he was homeless as he was, despite my description, not totally ill kept. But he was seeing things and thinking things and, lucky for me, saying things that were of an alternate world. The line I remember the most, that still brings me pleasure, is, "I will raise an army of lesbians and take over McDonald's!" Now that's strange! I could not have seen that one coming.

I'm guessing he was schizophrenic or something related and equally delusional. And I by no means want to make light of that. But I do want to suggest what Deleuze and Guattari suggest: that there's a strain of schizophrenic thinking that is refreshing, that finds lines of flights out of the same old discursive hegemony. Again, this is not to make light of those whose lives are crushed by schizophrenia. I've seen what it can do to people firsthand and it is often terrifying and awful.

But there is something to this figure — this concept, this function — of the schizo who is not constrained by the frames of discussion media dictate so vigorously. And it's not about dressing up wacky or piercing your nose or doing a cabaret with your friends. This is what San Francisco often thinks is weird. And while all those things might or might not be fine, fun, and delightful, they're not weird precisely because they're what we already think of as weird. They're already known, accounted for, categorized. The weird is not a what but a mode of forging the new.

Weird is surprising in that it neither goes with nor against the grain. It doesn't try to break the mold; it casts new molds. Or, perhaps, doesn't care about molds at all but rather enjoys meandering — the schizo stroll. Weird slices through discourse, categories, and common sense. It scrambles — not for the sake of scrambling but because it operates and lives in a world you cannot yet imagine.

The regurgitation of the same old nonsense — whether it's wacky conspiracy theories or the all-too-banal politics of presidents — is zombieism. It's people walking around under the insane delusion that they're alive. But to be alive is to forge new flows, to follow new lines of flight — to say things that others don't already know — and couldn't have even imagined. Life flourishes in the weird.