I don't think this blog attracts many visitors

Hi anyone reading this!

I feel quite embarrassed to be writing in this variety of intimate and intellectual tones. The existence of a potential audience is exciting. Focusing.

Anyway today the computer arrived that I am to write the larger share of the Gaia novel on. I woke, after having been too excited to sleep until three o clock, to hear the delivery man tapping desultorily on the door.

He then did not hear my shouts that I would be a moment, and walked over to my NEIGHBOUR TWO FLATS DOWN, and handed her the several thousand dollar brand new computer for her to take care of on my behalf! I was pissed off for ooh a good half second. Before I realised that it didn't matter a damn if I complained to FEDERAL EXPRESS, the SUCKY delivery people, because all I would do would hurt the drivers reputation and nothing would alter.

Visions of whatsename down the way dragging the new iMac into Cash Converters for a second hand quote.

So I savored the unwrapping, slowly starting with the smallest, the USB disk drive and the carry baggette, then the Main Event. Then I set it up. Then I played around with it. Then I got extremely frustrated.

Then my flatmate came home and tried to reason with me and actually succeeded and left me with no reason to be upset AT ALL, so I had a good cry with him and went back to work.

It was nice. I stuck to nice insignificant things like copying favorite music onto iTunes to listen to while I worked and looking over ancient disks for crusty old stories I'd written six years ago. Nothing too challenging.

Then the call for the extra training course I'm supposedly doing came through and I fucked about a bit longer on the new computer (two more hours only!) before going into town for the arvo for a short short training session, a private interview discussing what they needed from me, and I left exhilerated and on fire. Simply put, these people want to support me in designing a curriculum for my future students, a simple cost-benefit and needs analysis, and a precise description of the market segments that I intend to teach. Basically they are support folk, which I am in dire need of at the moment.

So I was stoked.

En route to my flatmate getting pissed in a nearby pub I met an ex-Hare-Krishna, a man who had given me free Prashadam to eat when I had needed it, and we had a pretty wild chat. He had that steely fine sense of someone who has earnt an iron-solid sense of selfhood, and expresses it witha style which I have honestly only encountered much before in European novels, so I can only call it a Continental (or West Eurasian! haha) style.

We talked about partnership and relationship, so I told him what Krishna had to say in the Uddhava Gita about the who thing, words which are indelibly imprinted on my imagination for their luminous beauty and sheer utility in worldly matters. It's the story of the bangles, which I think I mentioned a few posts back.

That made his eyes open up and made my day. The ISKCON hari krishnas have done us in the West a raw deal I reckon. The first generation of Krishna-influenced humans, under the auspice of International Society For Krishna Consciousness, in the West were dancing cultists getting high on the Hari K chant, doing what Caitanya taught without only a nod to the other aspects of Krishna. Krishna is clearly more influential than the West's ISKCON movement in India, yet the attempts to transplant his teachings have struck difficulties it seems perhaps because the high culture of ancient india was so utterly different from anything we have in the past or future. I read a reductionistic history a few months back that put their deep and metaphysical culture down the relative pastoral isolation of the Asian subcontinent, with the Kashmir passes their only out on one side and the mashy land of Bangladesh on the other. I dunno. I think that is a dreadful excuse for a wonderful thing, though. And Krishna is doubtless a wonderful thing among wonders. He has the sense of aplitude without egotism that only Jesus can be said to have had historically, while the Buddha's 'perspective' is altogether a temporal, ahistorical even.

We talked about renunciation too, which clearly became complicated in his head, so I volunteer that renunciation the Philosophy is all very well but in practice it was the implicit, impersonal, and quite ordinary process of Growing Up; that in fact the only thing we renouce is our ignorance of the way reality works, progressively simplifying and cohering our perceptions into a single unity of vision towards which all wisdom tends in itself.

So I like to talk about that man Krishna. I would have liked to have met him.

I got to the pub, where my flatmate and I swapped days, and then we went on a wild eat and shop for food where he teased and flattered and flirted with, well, everybody in the damn marketplace. It was hilarious.

My best mate Dan rang when we got home to tell me he was visiting in about 12 days time, so I'll be writing a bit more about that. Then I went online to look for some new groups to become member of, and ended up dropping out of most of the ones I already was member off, and spending about an hour pleasurably dialoging out my various interests in various fields.

And I have an ISP to put the new computer into, which I'll be doing as soon as I can disconnect it from my flatmates computer!

That's it for today!