Get out on the job in the morning, time is draggin' by real slow. Sick of feeling sorry about it, boss is keeping me on the go. Sick of that routine work now, sorting's driving me insane. When I'm done doin' one thing, boss says do it again and I say I, don't like you, I don't like you, I don't like you anymore.
I hate working so much. The retirement home I work at is severely understaffed so I've been working six days a week. Because of that, I haven't been finishing books nearly as quickly. I can count on my hand the amount I've finished since I started working. First I reread Difference and Repetition for the first time in English. I still don't know the difference between differentiation and differenciation or why I'm supposed to care, or what vicediction is or how it could be more subtle than the concept of contradiction. I never learned calculus in high school and I flunked my college algebra class so when he talks about differential calculus and its supposed importance I'm completely lost. So, after that I reread A Scanner Darkly both in English and in French (while reading along with the audiobook).
Occasionally I get to go out but I always regret it in the morning. When I went out into town with a friend and came back to write Otherworld I didn't get back to our friend's house until three in the morning and I had to wake up at six to be there at work. As a result, I've been trying to drink less at least when I go out. My drinking's been a problem again lately, and my smoking. Sometimes I get home and my day might've been so bad that the only thing I want to do is go home and drink. Reading is out of the question. My roommate and I have been planning to move to a different state, it'll require me to work long hours and spend very little. I told them that I'm convinced that this will be the most miserable year of my life.
Thus, to be as miserable as I can be, I've taken to reading Libidinal Economy by Jean-François Lyotard. I don't know what it is that I was necessarily looking for in that book, I think I just wanted to read another one of the pillars of Freudo-Marxism (if one could even call it that) alongside Eros and Civilization, Anti-Oedipus and Symbolic Exchange and Death. I haven't read those last two yet. I think I'm attracted to the amorality of Libidinal Economy because sometimes I struggle to take personal responsibility for things I've fucked up. I tell myself that I feel like a crystal and all I do is refract and amplify people's already present desires. A human lament configuration. I'm just a freak who wants to see where intensity will take me.
This month I've been trying to finish two different books at the same time. The other day I finally cleared off space on a shelf on my TV stand so I have a place to put all of the books I want to briefly put down and pick up later. Right now the only thing sitting on it is my copy of Visions of Excess that I want to reread since the other two books I'm currently reading are sitting around on my mattress. The first I started is Early Greek Philosophy, a collection of the extant writings of the various Pre-Socratic philosophers from Anaxagoras to Xenophanes. The second that I'm reading is Born with a Tail: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, a biography of Anton LaVey, a figure I strangely admire. It's interesting to see another mostly sceptical guy developing an interest for the Western esoteric tradition, in some ways I see him as a fellow traveler. I don't remember who it was but there was a voice in the book that said that the Church of Satan wasn't so much a religion as it was a way for LaVey to keep interesting people around him to stave off boredom while indulging in his obsessive interests. I want to spend some time figuring out how to do the same thing.
As far as my esoteric studies, I haven't been making as much progress. The two books that I both want to read that I'm struggling to get started with are my physical collection of Order of Nine Angles writings called The Sinister Tradition, with its infamous black and white cover that for a time could've been bought on Amazon, and The Lesser Key of Solomon. I want to try to go for the more scholarly translation edited by Joseph Peterson since I don't trust Crowley or Mathers and the translation recommended to me by a member of the Satanic Front called the Goetia Daemonium turned out to be complete crap. My plan for finding more recommendations for my esoteric studies is reading a biography of Aleister Crowley and seeing what he read and what influenced his own practice and theorizations the most. I highly doubt I'll come out of it a Thelemite since I'm more attracted to the extreme ambiguity of the Order of Nine Angles, but it'll be interesting to see the life and practice of one of the world's most foremost modern occultists. Another fellow traveler. The other books I want to try to read are my collection of writings from the Christian mystical tradition, the Grimorium Verum, and a collection of Qabbalistic writings from Penguin that I hope to buy on of these days. It's hard to justify buying books to myself lately.
I watched a couple movies this month. I was finally able to find the French dub of Grandma's Boy, one of my favorite shitty movies. I'll write more about it later when I think I'm ready. I also watched Richard Linklater's "spiritual successor" to Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! which I thought was a good movie but definitely a step down from Dazed and Confused since all of the women in it were barely even people. On a whim I stopped to watch The Remarkable Life of Ibelin and I consider it a testament to not only the life of one remarkable man but also of Norway's healthcare system, where a man can be diagnosed with a terminal illness and have his healthcare costs covered by the government well enough that his family can afford to let him play World of Warcraft for the overwhelming majority of the day, where he can have a life rich enough that when he's dead his other European friends are able to stop what they're doing to go to his funeral. I hate where I live and I hate the people around me who refuse to see anything that could make their lives better, maybe they deserve to die. I am the pessimist and misanthrope I thought I was.