I was studying the history of Morocco this morning, and I foresaw this quest to learn about and discover every facet of the planet nearing completion one day soon. and then what? I got kind of scared for a minute. A panic set in for a minute. I thought to myself, ‘once I'm done learning about everything there is, then what? Do I just go sit in a cave somewhere and wait to die?’ It reminded me of when we were younger and we first discovered the great writers and poets and philosophers. You know, the ‘great thinkers’ phase. The college years. A few years spent ravagely studying them all, soaking it in, looking for clues... and then one day the novelty of it, the newness, the mystery of it, wears off. You start focusing more on real world stuff and less on the cerebral. You realize that you could go on like that forever and still never read them all. But that you don't really need to read them all. You get the basic ‘best one thousand books ever written’ down and then, for me at least, you just kind of lose interest and move on. it was great fun but now its done, to turn a phrase. Anyway, I noticed the same thing with music too. you know when you first discover a new style of music, like classical, or Brasilian pop, or drum and bass, and you ravage it for a while, learn everything there is to learn about it, collect them all, and then one day you reach this endpoint so to speak. Its not necessarily burnout as much as been there done that. its not as if you don't enjoy it anymore, because you do. I mean, I do. but it just isn't new anymore. It doesn’t have the same ability to mysteriously transfix our attention as it once did. I notice this with everything. I get kind of super absorbed in things that are new and then once I get through them, to the other side, then I move on to something else to discover or explore. [remember that football phase? For years I never even knew football existed, and then for a year straight I must have watched over a hundred DVDs about football. I could name every NFL player in the hall of fame in order. Crazy. but then one day I noticed the obsession wearing thin.]

[in a moment’s thought so many other things tie together from this dialogue... I had been thinking about how when people that you know ask you ‘what are you doing tonight?’ and you know they may be going to a movie, or going to dinner, or going to a bar with friends, or going to a club to pick up girls, or to a party or whatever... and since I was very young I have always been kind of isolated from a lot of that, not as much as some mad scientists types we hear of, but probably pretty damn close to that. an extremely social anti-social kind of person I think is a good way to describe it. I have always had a real hard time with things like that, because I get really nervous and anxious at social things because I am always thinking about all the work I could be doing. I have always found more pleasure in “working,” and a lot of times working is just creating or reading or studying something. Even though my heart always longs for close solid friendships as well. you know, you don't lose that. its not as if you don't have that. because you do. you still want to have the security and warm fuzzy feeling of having good friends and family around you. but rather than spend any time going to hang out, I've always found it more rewarding to just keep on working all the time. what I really like is when I can just have friends hanging around while I work. That's cool. like they can be in another room watching a movie or drinking and talking and I can kind of still be there, but I can be writing or songwriting or studying or whatever. look and make the occasional comment. Best of both worlds...

still, you don't often get that. most of the time your friends want to go out and do stuff. Like say Friday night hits and all your friends go to a party, but I want to stay home in order to watch three or four classic French films, because at the time I am ‘researching classic French film.’ “Of course you are,” as the Poet would joke. and that's what I'm saying, back to the original point. I'm not sure what it is. its this never-ending hunger to know everything. so its like one day you realize you’ve seen every classic or ‘considered great’ American movie ever made. I mean, you just wake up one day and you are at the end of the road with it. its sad in a way. Because that's over for you now. you're done with it. so the only thing you can do is move on to all the great Italian directors, then the French, or the Iranian, or Russian, or Japanese, etc, and after a few years, you realize that you and film have finished courting. Your relationship is over. You can watch movies over and over again, but for the most part you are done with that. you’ve reached the wall.

Now I’ve noticed that in my brief time here I have done that with so many things already; literature and poetry, theology and religion and philosophy of course. The sciences are always good to go back to you, dig deeper. But you know, how do you get beyond expert at something? I guess that from there you can start looking for the undiscovered...

[I take that back. experts are different. They keep on studying something beyond the endpoint. They get to the end and they decide to turn back and look around more. they get involved in actually memorizing aspects of a certain subject or field. That's never been my thing. I've noticed that I m more interested in just researching to the endpoint. Getting through it, to that deepest most basic understanding of it, so you see the ‘who what why how when and where’ of something and that's enough. There are always going to be people who are more interested in studying every minute detail of something and just spending their whole life in that, and we should leave that to them. Those are the experts.]

Music of course. I don't think there’s an artist or album that has ever existed or been made that I don't have in my collection. And I don't mean that from a layperson’s point of view, like when your best friend Johnny says that between bites of his cheeseburger, where they may have a few thousand cds in their collection that they're real proud of. But I'm talking about more from a scholar’s or researcher’s viewpoint: ‘have you ever heard this 1933 recording of pygmy mouth harp music from central Africa?’ [there are no pygmies in central Africa of course.] along with all the usual stuff that we all know about. I'll go to a store in a new country and say to a few of the clerks (because its impossible for us as non-natives to know all the good stuff except the really popular stuff) ‘Look, pick out every single classic or cool or cult album ever made in this country and start putting them on the counter. Would you do that for me?’ and of course for them it’s a ball and for me as well. and it’s a great way to dig in deeper than we can if we’re just reading magazines or whatever. but even then you’re still going to miss a lot of stuff. [I did that in Italy and walked away with hundreds of CDs and then one day on the beach I bought a bunch of bootlegs or pirated cds and I pop in this supposed Nelly CD and instead this amazing Italian music comes on and it turns out that its this guy Ivanno fussatti, who is now my favorite Italian singer, and out of all the hundreds of cds that the clerks chose for me at the stores, no one picked out any of his... so you never know. it seems there will always be little treasures out there left for us to discover. Let us hope so.]
You just get to that point where you know and own it all. [again, for the experts, the totally anal guys with the ripped up converse high tops and horn rimmed glasses, there's always going to be ‘that one trumpet player who played with Dizzy back in 56 at Harold’s who made this one obscure album that you can only get by writing his aunt Mildred or through trading on the underground...’ thank God for that shit, because I think that's what keeps a lot of people alive. You meet guys who are that way about their fucking tools or about trucks or fishing or about comics; all sorts of things. some women are that way about china or little dolls. You know, its just that ‘special something’ that gets them off, gives them a little tunnel in their consciousness to burrow into sometimes.

I think of Juliet and her boyfriend and how absorbed they are in something called “trading seeds.” They trade the seeds of trees and flowers and herbs and whatnot with other people all over the world. and then I guess they plant them in the earth and grow them. its fucking an unbelievable idea when you think about it. seed trading. Its like going back in time to primitive human kind of stuff. but yes these are the experts. These are the people who major in one thing and minor in a few other things. these are the people that we hire when we need something done the right way. but this isn't what I'm speaking about necessarily. For me, I've never been into that as much as others. I've always unconsciously strayed away from being an expert at anything to be honest. [although try as I might to stay true to my dilettante ways I find that there are things that I am slowly absorbing so completely that I am sadly becoming at an expert in them.] Feeling that in knowing everything there is to know about that ‘one thing’ that they are in return not seeing so much more about so many other things. knowing the tree so well that they forget about the forest. [I'm writing before I complete the thoughts here so I know I'm rambling a bit, but hang on ... we may get somewhere here.] what I mean is that there are always going to be people out there who know every single thing about English history. As much as these people fascinate me, and as necessary as they are to us, for without them we wouldn’t know anything at all, I have never been able to find within myself the same desire for that kind of obsession with minutia that they seem to possess. But what I do love doing is obtaining a kind of minor-mastery on every and all subjects. And to me its like work, in that I am very dedicated to it and passionate about it, but its fun. it feels like a life mission. Why I don't know. what is it?]

Sometimes I wonder, what is all this insane researching about? What is this quest to soak it all in so fast? what the hell am I looking for? And once I get to that point where there is nothing left to discover on or outside of the earth... I mean, there's only so far we can go, because a lot of stuff out there we just don't know about and cannot know about, then what? I mean a lot of life on earth for us humans still is a waiting game. There is only so far we can go with our limited knowledge of things here still. luckily there is a lot of crap out there as mentioned above that people can get absorbed in to take their mind off the fact that the real core issues, the real meat of the matter, we are still fucking clueless about. Like the ‘who are we, where the hell are we, why are we, and where are we going’ matters.

[one assumes that this is why people jump on one of the religion or philosophy ships so quickly after they are born. They're either indoctrinated by their parents and/or government to do so and they stick with it and then do the same with their own children; or they go out and search for a while and then find one that feels the most comfortable to them and they stick with that one. Its easier for us as humans to just ride on one of those even if you know its not real, than to float out in the middle of this ocean of uncertainty. Now of course, in reality the ocean of uncertainty is all there really is for us now at this stage of our evolution; always has been like this. it’s the only thing that we know for sure is real and honest. Being religious or philosophical, pretending to know or believe something that you cannot be certain about or know for sure is a form of lying to yourself and everyone around you. It’s a way of turning off your thinking or your logic mind in order to keep your sanity so to speak.... but for me, I've always found it a kind of insanity in itself. As comfortable and stable as religious or philosophical ideologies can make us feel, and so I understand the temptation, I still feel a bit uneasy when encountering others among us who attach themselves to any one or other. Its one thing to meet someone who says ‘I was raised catholic, or Muslim...’ But its another thing entirely when you meet someone who proclaims ‘I am a catholic, or I am a Muslim, or I am an atheist.’ All of these people scare the hell out of me to be honest, because you know you're not dealing with a totally rational logical thinking mind. There's something a bit off there, as much as they can’t see it, or you don't want to see it. but its this suspension of disbelief in the person that they somehow are able to pull off even in the real world, in order to avoid having to face the horror of how alone we are out here floating around on this big rock not knowing shit about who we are or why we are here or where we came from or where we’re going. Scary? Hell yeah. Understandable to turn off like that and just hop on a religious bus? Sure. But not for me. [don't get me wrong; I love the social and cultural aspects of it. I love getting together with like minded people to explore and celebrate the power and glory and magic of our collective idea of ‘God/source/the force’ and all of the values that over the years we have attached to being religious. At least some of them. I'm into it. Its just not my thing to sit there and say I'm sold on any of it a hundred percent.]

No. for me, I'm going to keep searching and researching. But that leads to my deepest question. I mean, if you already know not even halfway into it, that when you get through to the other side, after you’ve learned and seen and heard and touched and tasted everything there is in the entire fucking world, that you're still not going to have a clue about the real heart of the matter, that you're still going to be left with that hunger and craving to learn more and discover more... what then? Just sitting there in the dark cave? Waiting for Godot? Waiting for lightening to strike? Waiting for some sign from the heavens? As if somehow this time it’ll be different. God or the universe will really talk to me. and I will really get some answers...

[lest we remind ourselves that last time someone went and sat in a cave to get some answers it was Muhamed and he came out with Allah and the Koran. And millions upon millions of us humans died because of that over the centuries...] [and a few centuries before that, they buried old Jesus in a cave and according to some legends he came back to life after a few days and even more millions of people died in his name.] So we have to be careful when someone says ‘hey man, I'm going to sit in a cave and wait for God to talk to me.’ With God, all of them so far, unfortunately has come a lot of war and death close behind him. So I'm not looking for that God. I think we’ve had enough of him. I'm looking for a different God. A new God. A more relaxed, enlightened, intelligent, laid back, transcendent God.

If any God I meet in my cave starts in with any of that ‘us versus them’ talk, I'm just going to look the other way and pretend I don't see him or hear him. ‘Uuummm, pardon me, I know you're saying you're God and all, but would you mind just moving over a bit. You're actually blocking my view and I'm waiting for someone...’ ‘But I am that someone you are waiting for. I am God!’ ‘O.k., well do you have any enemies?’ ‘No, not that I can think of.’ ‘Good answer. So there's no one that you want me to kill or torture for you?’ ‘No. of course not.’ ‘Not even any of those extremist Muslims or Christians or Catholics that have been such bastards over the years? You don't want them stoned to death or anything like that? No secret military missions in the middle of the night, no taking over other countries in the name of you? No suicide bombings or any of that stuff?’ ‘No. But I do have an idea. Why don't we take the lot of them, Osama bin laden and Arafat, and Jerry Falwel and Pat Robertson and all those crazies, and of course Sharon from Israel, he's a real monster, and get George junior and his father in there, and then, what is the name of that American senator that is so against homosexuality that he would consider his own son a sinner if he were gay...’ ‘you mean Rick santorum or something like that..’ ‘Yes, boy is he a loon.’ ‘Hey its all in your name God.’ ‘Well not for long son. Get him in there too. I'll leave the rest up to you. But grab that crazy little black fellow, Farakan, before he gets someone hurt.’ ‘O.k. and then what? Don't tell me to kill them. or else you're outta here. I can’t believe in any of that killing stuff anymore. I don't know about you, but I've had enough.’ ‘Me too. Listen, take the lot of them, line them up for a few days in each major city around the world and let the people come around and throw water balloons at them. just a few days in each city.’ ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Absolutely. Put them on tour and let the people have their way with them. water balloons right in the old kisser. They deserve it. that’ll show them. Then we’ll hear how sinful homosexuality is. But listen.’ ‘Yes God?’ ‘Don't forget to grab any of those folks in America and some of the other uncivilized countries around the world who are still promoting capital punishment.’ ‘you mean the murderers who try to pretend they are not murderers?’ ‘Yes. I like you son.’ ‘Thanks. I like you too.’ ‘But then let them go. o.k.? No prison, no torture, no murder. By then they’ll get the message and maybe start using their charm and charisma and intelligence to do some good in the world.’ I kneel down to my knees. ‘You really are God after all.’ ‘Well actually Dylan was God. But he didn't want the job. A real crotchety old coot. So I stepped in.’ ‘You know I always kind of expected that.... God, can I ask you a question before you leave me all alone in this cave?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘What about meat? Do you eat meat?’ ‘I don't eat. Don't have time for it. But I've heard it’s a lot of fun.’ ‘Well... can I eat meat? Is it o.k.?’ ‘If you have the heart and stomach for it, then go ahead. If you don't, then don't. in the bigger picture, it isn't going to matter.’ ‘Yeah I like that. thanks. And God one more thing... is there any way, after I do all this for you, that maybe I can get like two or three days straight with Minnie Driver? Naked? You know, fooling around and everything? And then maybe we can have kids and stuff?’ ‘Sure why not. Now good luck my boy. Have fun.’ ‘Bye God.’     

Current Spins: Rob Hirst (from midnight oil) Impossible shame. Great music! check it. Jethro Tull, Passion play. This is some long boring English folk music shit. I hate the flute. But with all due respect I normally love jethro tull. The new phoenix, alphabetical. Not as good as the first, but I still believe.

A few days later, in New York, Sam, the writer from the New York Times, falls asleep after a long night in and out of our hotel room. She is naked now, under the covers. Fast asleep. I am sitting on a chair by the table, drinking Champaign and reading her journal which she left on the night table... I scroll through the last few weeks...

Voila le petit mots de mon journal, reads the introduction [Here! The little words of my journal.]