I don’t think you can begin with what you should end up with, or how things, in the largest sense of that word, hang together, in the largest sense of that word

Feel the tide shifting back from years of pseudo libertine permissiveness to a slow and patient acceptance of the cloak of the penitent.  The fields lie fallow, restrictions flower with every breath, and so long as there is routine and ascetic primacy the question about how come we aren’t happy and rich and lathered in fecundity need not come up. By choice this barren desert. By necessity this well-worn circular path. What is good in the way of belief is not incorrigible, but subject of revision and discipline.

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Hey mister, if you’re so smart, how come you ain’t rich? What’s the point, spending all that time wallowing in the mud of your own mind, keeping tabs in books to go back to? You do that for what, just in case you need to remind you that they say what you think they say? Your back is crooked and your hands are soft. What gives? How come somebody has to be dead and consecrated to get you to pay them attention? What’s all this purity in unhappiness about? To what end? You don’t like girls? You don’t like to go so fast that everything might tip over and end? You don’t like to strain against your body and find out if it can do more? You don’t want to even try to be inhabited in embodiment, to feel in every pore? You don’t even want to try to be enjoyed and enjoyable, to spread yourself thin in the thickness of things? And empty pocketed and rot-gutted to beat it all. All that time trying to be learned, and not even a medium size pot to piss in. Just a stumblebum playacting at being a mandarin.

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