“ We are Tomte. The Scandinavian region of northern Europe is the fabled home of gnomes called Tomte. Tomte love children. At night. When everyone is sound asleep. Tomte go about casting magical spells to ensure the next morning’s freshly baked bread will be especially delicious for the children. Cherishing the spirit of Tomte, we at “Hokuo” take a highly skilled and gentle-natured approach to bread making.
— I frequent a bakery in Shinjuku station. This slogan is written on their shopping bags.
I’ve been strangely unreasonable to myself lately. I have neglected my passions to the point that that they are no longer my passions. I seldom write. Never poetry. I don’t take photos. I no longer work on digital media. I was never any good at these things but I did them anyway. Now I just work at an unfulfilling [this is not a word—it should be] job. My personal relationships are lying dormant. I no longer keep in contact with old friends. I seldom speak with current ones. I interact the most with work friends. I don’t dislike them. They are good people. A few of them are great people. But when I am with them I am at work. We talk about work. I teach at a conversational English school in Tokyo—an ‘
Eikaiwa’. You could scoff at my using the word ‘teach’ if you like. My life has begun to revolve more and more around this one dismal aspect. The star that is my mind more and more rapidly circles this vapid black hole.
Would I feel this way about some other line of work? Or is that one’s job has a tendency to eclipse everything else. I don’t know how to break out of this. I don’t actually work that much. Some of my students work ten or twelve hours a day and I cringe at the thought of their lives. But they don’t seem like broken ghosts—though maybe they hide it well. Maybe I employ this facade as well, though I am unaware of it myself. I finished reading
Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow. It left me with a nice feeling of intellectual stimulation. A tiny lasting high that churns the gray matter. It was the most
morally perfectionistic kind of information exchange—one of enlightened agreement. It’s that moment when you have some thought that you’ve cultivated carefully and obsessively over years—over a lifetime—and you find it somewhere else long predating your own moment of understanding.
Masamune wrote about the need for diversity in order to survive catastrophe. But he wrote it on the order of universes, not species or individuals. He spoke of memes and genes existing because it is the universe is a harbinger of diversity. The data aggregates from the chaos. It crystallizes in the void. These systems grow in complexity as the result of an inherent quality of our reality. The complexity is infinitely increasing. Or as Masamune put it, “intelligence increases to infiniti,” or something like that. Of course I didn’t think these things verbatim, but I have come to conclusions around those lines. (Though ‘conclusions’ is a misnomer—no thought is a conclusion but rather a process leading to another thought.) I’m not trying to brag or show off my brains. I didn’t come up with these ideas spontaneously. They emerged from the primeval information soup that is our civilization. As I read the last pages, and I closed in on the final ideas, I felt a blissful oneness as a result of this connection. The information has come full circle and it continues onward.
That felt really really good. Cerebral vomit. Gotta sleep so I could work. Peace.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Human Resource - Dominator Herve Remix
