“I want to be anonymous. I don’t know how you get involved with uninvolvment,
but I don’t want to be involved. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

~Bob Kaufman

The great beer swiggin' poet, Charles Bukowski, was born on this day in 1920:

"amazing how death wins hands down
amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of
life

amazing how laughter has been drowned out
amazing how viciousness is such a constant

I must soon declare my own war on their war
I must hold to my last piece of ground
I must protect the small space I have made that has
allowed me life

my life not their death
my death not their death

this place, this time, now
I vow to the sun
that I will laugh the good laugh once again
in the perfect place of me
forever.

their death not my life.”

― Charles Bukowski

“The present period is one of those when everything that seems normally to
constitute a reason for living dwindles away, when one must, on pain of sinking
into confusion or apathy, call everything in question again.

The triumph of authoritarian and nationalist movements should blast almost
everywhere the hopes that well-meaning people had placed in democracy…

We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to
come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.”

— Simone Weil

"Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from
ourselves."

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"There is only one choice at the end of this century: Eastern barracks or
Western brothel."

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“All literature is contemporary to the reader who knows how to read.”

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it,
without this equally delicious and admonishing search, I deem myself lost, and I
am lost."

-- Robert Walser

"Tattoos aren't meant for everybody
and they're too goddamn good
for some people."

—Lyle Tuttle

“Religion has failed us because long ago it separated us from Nature, which we
now call Our Mother, and made us worship things. History has failed us because
long ago it convinced us that by reason we could absent ourselves from the pain
of life and reach harmony, peace, and plenty.

Science has failed us because it bedded down with wealth, became technocracy,
and made so many things that clutter up our lives. We have nothing left but this
Ecology…

We can imagine nothing, not a single thing. We reach instead for memories,
memories of our future. Instead of going west, we will escape to the moon, the
planets, safety beyond the farthest star.

Instead of liberal social legislation we will have liberal environmental
legislation, a little tinkering with landfills, a ban on disposable everything,
car pools, passive solar design in housing, abundant devices for contraception,
mass tree plantings.

We will not question our world, but polish its edges. We will use our memories.
And crawl toward our future. And ...

“It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing
too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result.”

— John Fowles

"You must go in quest of yourself, and you will find yourself again only in the
simple and forgotten things. Why not go into the forest for a time, literally?
Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books… "
—Carl Jung

"We have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism... attention
to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone
very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be
sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the
condition of dis-ease.

And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse
as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz,
experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless.

What do all these things have in common?

They represent various styles of rejection of linear values. The society is
trying to cure itself by an archaic revival, by a reversion to archaic values.

So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity, or scarifying themselves, or
showing a lot of flesh, or dancing to syncopated music, or getting loaded, or
violating ordinary canons of sexual behaviour, I applaud all of this; because
it's an impulse to re...

I gave up drinking once --it was the worst afternoon of my entire life.

- Humphrey Bogart

"You can't be as old as I am without waking up with a surprised look on your
face every morning: 'Holy Christ, whaddya know - I'm still around!' It's
absolutely amazing that I survived all the booze and smoking and the cars and
the career."

~Paul Newman

"A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.
Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally
shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and
mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than
enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman."

~Carl Jung

"To be spared from the dangers of technology, its users would have to be both
wise and just. But this is fantasy. Technology can never be anything other than
a means of facilitating the very worst of human qualities."

--Ramon Elani

“What more profound illustration of the soullessness of technology than a world
where people rot away while staring at their phones?

A world where all meaning is created by human interpretation will necessarily
become a world of incoherence and despair. We sowed a diseased seed and now we
reap a poisoned harvest.”

—Ramon Elani

"If you ask me, something sinister lurks in men who avoid wine, games, the
company of lovely women, and dinnertime conversation. Such people are either
gravely ill or secretly detest everyone around them.”

― Mikhail Bulgakov

“When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are
miserable. Thinking of happiness as a project, they look for fulfilment at some
future time. The present slips by, and anxiety creeps in. They dread their
progress to this future state being disrupted by events. So they turn to
philosophy, and nowadays therapy…”
— John Gray