its new years eve. i am enjoying a rare night off; the nye show is tommy tune, broadway song and dance man, and he brought his own piano player. im gonna go to the show at ten, then after that i have to play with the big band- some hot funk, watermelon man and shake everything youve got, at the hot deck 10 party, but til then i am sitting in my room drinking irish whiskey and scotch and watching the powerpuff girls. ive never seen this show before, but theres a marathon on and im fucking love it. (right now- the villains have formed a supergroup and they call themselves the "beat alls" and pretty much every single line of dialogue is a beatles lyric. fucking great!)

anyway, watching the wild cultural collisions in this show has confirmed a recent line of reasoning out here on the high seas- one of total integration. a lot of people i know just wont settle down- they dont pick any one thing, they fly from this to that and never settle and thus never excel in the usual sense of the word. i count myself as one of these people- never really committed to anything, thus my lack of real "success" in anything- music or career or spirituality or cooking or intellect, im just too all over the place, it seems, too excited by too many things to give any one thing a serious dedication of time.

theres so much! so much!

anyway, the other night i was really wanting to fall asleep, it wasnt working, and i was thinking of how much i wanted to sleep, so i could dream, because i love a dream, for the surrealness, the unexpected juxtapositions. so i decided to try and force it- i was tired enough and my mind was astral enough that rational thought was pretty much out the window, so i was in a real fluid and accepting state. i was listening to beethoven piano sonatas, the late ones (no. 31 in Ab, op. 110, i think, a grad student at college used to play this to me in her practice room while i lay under her grand piano. she died in a car accident a few years later. oh i miss you tara!); these are pieces that really transcend any labels; classical or romantic, they are just music, a seemingly seamless integration of all musical possibilities available to human consciousness at the time. so i thought to my self, well, all i need to do to create a dream is just take all of the imaginative possibilities available to me right now, here in 2003 america, and integrate some of them in new ways. so i tried it: the first two things i though of were an orange (i had eaten one at dinner) and boxer shorts (i was wearing a pair). and thus, the image of a orange unpeeled to reveal a balled up pair of boxer shorts arose brand new in my head. i created it. i had never thought it before. maybe no one had thought it before.

the idea of something youve never thought before, something thats never been thought before, thats the essence of creation. the surprise! whoop! man i love creation! and it seems that theres a pretty fun and easy course to divining creation- this random act of integration. simple ideas, surrounding us on the field of science, culture, history, spirituality, at, etc.- from the last piece of pizza to lois lane's earthquake grave to guilt to bee dances to cubism to the word order of languages to christs turn the other cheek- these can be fused together into new ways to create imagination. you can consciously do this! its a new route to lucid dreaming for me, and i have been doing this exercise for the last week or so now, and i feel like my imaginative life has taken a real good turn.

so, for example, take pizza christ and bee dances. what can this do? imagine christ and a hive, both hungry, a single piece between them, hawaiian style. what will happen? how will they communicate? what will they communicate? christ will surely allow the bees the pizza, and will gladly accept their stings, the one cheek swollen as the other cheek is revealed- yet he is a man, and he is hungry. and the bees, will they know christ> do they think? will they take the pizza to their queen? can christ dance as a bee does? how does this scenario alter your understanding of christianity and entomology?

and then: where is this scene taking place? for me, its in the garden of the godfather pt.II, where brando dies. how would christ interact with the hollywood mafia?

this can go on and on. it is a imagination machine! so simple! i am thinking of creating a beautiful leather bound book (the leather scented with coriander) of base ideas which can then be combined through dice rolling, hot nerdy d+d dice, that is. and a velvet ribbon bookmark.

anyway, happy 2004, i hope your new combinations are revelatory.