On: the words that will haunt me.

"And so they smashed all they could smash, creating wars without opponents. Their rage became their art. They no longer wondered if they were good enough to deserve their bodies-their life. Instead, they challenged their bodies to deserve them.

This was not the end of the world, but it was the beginning of sorrows" (Coupland, Generation A, 204)

On: Zhuangzi.

"Thus-unlike his Confucian contemporaries Mencius and Xunzi, who sought to offer 'sagely' advice to the princes of the Warring States period-Zhuangzi stepped back and asked whether the various conflicting solutions offered by the thinkers of the day might actually be adding to the chaos. Instead of proposing solutions he offered stories conveying profound insights in lighthearted yet direct and forceful terms."

On: Unintentional resemblance. Uncanny.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"


Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already under way, and we had to get there by 4 to claim our soundproof suite…The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.


All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County -- from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”

-Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Woven by Hand

The creative energy of the average person is being sapped by an abstract, conformist system of education, and by the extension of industrial techniques to every field. But while the machine threatens to reduce human beings to passivity, it also frees them to develop a potential that will wither away if it does not find real fields for action.

-Ramses Wissa Wassef, Woven by hand.

On: The Theory of Decorative Art (and the dangers of the comma splice)

There are two reasons, both weighty, against this practice: one, that all cast and machine work is bad, as work; the other, that it is dishonest. [...] Its dishonesty, however, which, to my mind, is the grossest kind, is, I think, a sufficient reason to determine absolute and unconditional rejection of it.

-John Ruskin, "the Lamp of Truth"