Showing posts with label Chuang Tzu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chuang Tzu. Show all posts

Thursday, October 6, 2011

The Clinically Depressed Trickster Figure


You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later...
Mitch Hedberg

...turning leaves, blankets and warmer clothing, and lotsa tasty stuff made from various forms of squash...shifting from that edgy, anxious spring-and-summertime depression to the more cozy, lethargic fall-and-winter variety...

We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

a mystic looks at the universe and sees mystery...an existentialist looks at the universe and sees absurdity...I look at the universe and see absurd mystery...or mysterious absurdity...

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.
Chuang Tzu

...would like to start a non-religion based around a clinically depressed trickster figure...offering annual, year-long retreats at the long-awaited Yoga for Cynics ashram...where the mountains kiss the sea and floppy-eared dogs wander among recycled building materials inscribed with inspiring words from Chuang Tzu, William Blake, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Mitch Hedberg....all specific commandments, sutras, and holy dogma written on any available outdoor surface in colored chalk, to be seen, or changed, or ignored, by anyone at any time, or simply washed away by the rain...

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
William Blake



*was looking for an image for this post and googled “trickster figure”...and what did I see but the cover of this obscure book of literary criticism called Trickster Lives, published a full decade ago, now, and happening to feature a chapter on a poet named Thylias Moss, written—in semi-fluent academic jargon—by none other than your humble author in PhD-student mode...never woulda imagined that was still in print...*

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

My Astrological Sign: Charlie the Three Toed Sloth


Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the internet
unknown (but found, of course, somewhere on the internet)

Would it be hypocritical, or at least disadvantageous, to discuss what an incredible time-waster the internet is in a blog? I met somebody once who started an anti-technology, nominally Luddite organization. She gave me the URL for their website in case I wanted to get involved.

I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass
Walt Whitman

They say savasana is the most important yoga pose, or at least some of they do. That’s “corpse pose” for the uninitiated...so easy a dead person could do it. I actually find it nearly impossible without a yoga teacher present. I can fuck off endlessly but, somehow, am not so good at actually doing nothing.

God knows, it’s sacrilege to waste the talent for idleness which I possess
William Faulkner

There’s a stupid bumper sticker that says “I was going to procrastinate but decided to put it off till later,” or something like that—I’m too lazy to google it. There’s actually something to it: procrastination is much better if done on purpose—go off and do something you actually feel like doing with the knowledge that you’re not gonna do what you’re supposed to be doing anyway, as opposed to pacing around or endlessly web surfing all afternoon under the false pretense that you’re actually gonna be productive.

No one seems to know
How useful it is to be useless.
Chuang Tzu