you wonder what it is exactly about hangovers caused by whatever solid or liquid you had too much of this weekend that make you ask yourself, sometimes, "what the fuck are you doing with your life!". you wonder if it is from the pure shittiness of having everything churn around in you for unforeseeable hours ahead. or, you wonder if the world really is actually out to get you, in every possible way. but mostly you realize that it is the contrast that kills you. you felt invincible, out of your body, flying. and then suddenly you felt like scum of the earth. Being able to juxtapose those two days side by side (ie the thrill and then the hangover) it's almost scary that you can measure the contrast between the two...brain stimulation, brain death. loving the world, hating the world. vertical and moving, horizontal and inanimate. jumpy, slumpy. etc etc

Breton said a LOT of stuff in Le Manifeste du Surrélisme (read it sometime) BUT you think one of the most articulate things Breton conceptualized was what he called "convulsive beauty": you feel extraordinary happiness AND crushing anxiety. You feel a mixture of panic, joy, and terror. The difference in these kinds of contrasts and then the party-hangover thing is that Breton meant that you feel those contrasts simultaneously. You've been thinking about this a lot in the past month or so, the extremeness (for lack of better term) of feeling two or sometimes more emotions warring and colliding inside you. Mostly for you lately, for the past two months, it's been pain and hope. The most difficult thing about convulsive beauty to explain in words like this is that it almost romanticizes reality sometimes a little too much. You don't mean the kind of universal pain that makes you cry...no, you mean the kind of pain which at first is amorphous and numb, and then whose force pushes out so hard that it makes your mind and body feel like they can't sustain themselves. It's not pitiful, it's not artistic melancholy. But then simultaneously feeling a newfound hope bubble up out of nowhere-"We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illuminated and everlasting road." Stride not into chaos...

It's bizarre that you haven't felt these things one after another or in rises and dips but literally, at the same time. Perhaps you've just never actually sat down and thought about simultaneity because it is so human to organize and to demarcate. But simultaneity; that's existence, isn't it?

One last thing, you thought 30 seconds ago about this piece you haven't thought about in a really long time. It's this big, red, semi-cylindrical wax object made by Anish Kapoor in Museum de Nantes in 2007. He called it "Svayambh", which is Sanskrit for that which is formed with one's own energy, self-created. Basically this thing was on a long rail that spanned a good chunk of the museum's width and would move back and forth on the rail, eroding slowly from the process. You don't exactly know what he means by it...it could be anything, really, institutional critique, some bloody history reference, etc. But really you think it's a damn good example that ties humanity and convulsive beauty together. Which is simply that life is that gigantic, red block: emotive, brutal, ever-progressing.

Listening to Flying Lotus..have you ever noticed how a lot of his stuff sounds like there's a slight, membrane film or something like that between your ears and the music?