In the Café Metro, they're pouring Portishead through the speakers, Beth Gibbons like a dying angel over dervish-spinning drunken Bristol beats. The windows and doors are all open to let in the cold-warm eddies of the outside citynight air, and the smoke thickens the air in the upper gallery. I wish I had some dope, in my lungs, in my blood, to sandblast the edges away from my scrambling monkey-brain ego, to simply be, and to see, this moment of the universe-indwelling-in-itself.
When you do anything enough, devote your full attention to it, it begins to show up in your dreams. Read, write, program, play games, do drugs, have sex, whatever - focus on them enough, let it filter and percolate down to the mid-brain, and your dreams'll begin to arrange themselves around this focus. I think that the way we percieve reality when we're awake is the same way. The objective universe, if there is such an animal, gets thrown against the walls and screens of our senses in great big reality-bloodied chunks, till they get filtered in through the great incomprehensible network of the limbic system, till it comes out processed and patern-recognized into some form we already know how to deal with because we're used to it. Of course, it's equally possible that there is no outside, and when you get to the edges of the senses, all you see is your own eyes, blinking back at yourself. Better not to think about it.
I saw a rich man on the city bus today. At least I assume he was rich - he had all the right caste markers, Rolex, barely tucked in silk shirt, worn just so, country club crags and weathering on his face, relics of genteel excesses. He didn't act rich though, he acted old and tired and confused, twisting around to look at things from awkward angles, coughing into the back of his hand, talking under his breath, for all the world like the best-dressed homeless man in the city. I'm not sure what it means.