spiritual ponderings, tattoos, and intoxicated viewings of futurama...yeah, it's a normal post

currently, i'm sitting at my desk (i made it off the futon! who woulda thunk it??) and i'm pretty damn bored. some season 2 futurama episode is playing on my dvd player, i'm enjoying one of my hopefully-soon-to-be-award-winning christmas beers, and i'm not tired in the least. well, let's just say, i'm not sure if i'm tired, but i know i don't feel like sleeping. in fact, i wish sleeping could be made obsolete. for me, sleep is almost always accompanied with a mild-to-strong sense of defeat. i think i'm in the minority here...i'm good friends with some people who would spend all their time sleeping if they didn't need to work.

it's so frustrating when there is so much to do, and so many things you could do, and yet you end up doing nothing. i could read...i've got about 30 books on my shelf that i'd really like to get into. i could research...my thesis is upon me, and it's not really gonna be easy. i could work on music...but, after being at mcgill for this long, most of my creative, artistic tendencies have been snuffed out "like a stale pall mall" (yeah, i've seen a lot of seinfeld recently). i could mull over the scattered thoughts in my head.....yeah, that sounds about right. and, at least with blogging, i can pretty much get some of them out there to my relatively non-existent audience.

i came across a notebook that i used for my reflections in my freshman year mysticism class today while scouring my apartment for a very expensive set of needle EEG electrodes that i'm probably going to have to replace, and, as usually happens when i come upon this thought repository in recent years, i get a little shocked at how far removed i am now from that time in my life. while i have learned so much since that time of naivete, about maturity, women, goals, friendship, etc., it seems that the promising avenue of spiritual exploration and consciousness expansion on which i was travelling has somehow been almost completely lost. the worst part is that i don't know where i went astray. was it the four straight years of booze? was it every badly-timed pseudo-relationship? was it the stifling experience of professors trying to shape me into a corporate mechanism? it's really difficult to say...probably a combination of many of these experiences. no matter what it was, i'm frighteningly different then i was. i haven't become completely cynical about this field of mysticism, as i am still open to it, but i just have little drive to go down that path recently. come to think of it, it's very possible that i don't want to walk that road again simply because of the pain that immediately followed the opening of my head to these pursuits. i had been almost experience-less in life and dove head first into a realm of contemplation and exploration that is as murky and hazy as the darkest of oceans. i did not end up in the shallow water and bump my head...i dove into the deepest of deep ends, and kept swimming further and further down, to the point when there was no clear way to come back for air. and it was in this confounding abyss that i was barraged with the heaviest and most profound experiences of my life so far. i guess now i'm trying selfishly to protect myself from getting into that position again. the keeping of spiritual rumination and life lessons in separate and distinct moments is very difficult to do. my only hope is that i can get to a place in my life sometime when i will feel comfortable enough with daily life to do another half-gainer into the deep end. damn, i need to quit it with the water metaphors.

one thing to look forward to is that i'm probably going to get my next tattoo soon. i was hoping for jesus (who did my first) to come back to montreal to do mine, but i'm not sure whether he will be anytime soon, so i'm going to get one of the other artists at Imago Tattoo to draw up a rendition of my design, and i'll decide whether he's got the right stuff or whether i'm gonna hold off for jesus. if you live in montreal and want a tattoo, you gotta check out imago. though, when i say tattoo, i'm not talking about just any cookie-cutter, "i wanna get a tattoo just to get one", "i'm hammered, so why not?", found-on-a-colorful-board-with-300-others tattoo. these guys are professionals. it's all custom work done in the most clean, sophisticated tattoo place i've ever experienced. so, i'm just crossing my fingers that jesus is gonna be back, or that safwan (the owner) has an opening, even though last time i checked, he was booked for over a year.

there are other things to look forward to as well...friday will be a blast with dave, jenny, and jen all coming here to watch futurama and taste beer. if anyone wants to join in the absurdity (oh, there will be some absurdity!), let me know. as most of you know, nick's apartment, aka NightTrain's Palace of Procrastination and Inebriation, is always stocked full o' beer and tv shows on dvd, so there's enough to go around.

anyway, i should probably call it a night. i'm gonna go lay on my comfy bed and unsuccessfully try to fall asleep. peace.