I continue. I contain myself. I am myself, nothing more or less. I persist, unending, no matter what. I have myself, I belong to myself, and that is perhaps the only certainty. But that's all I need.

Cruising the cable stations this evening I've stumbled across The Freshman Diaries, a documentary show about college students (presumably freshmen) at University of Texas. The first thing I see is these two kids together, a dopey-looking guy and a cute girl, and the guy is trying to get the girl to kiss him, and he's getting all emotional and dramatic, and eventually he just tramples some boundaries of personal space and not leaving when asked (it turns out they were both drunk, and he is known to be a bad drunk). I felt this kind of revulsion, and realized that they're just kids...but it's really an ugly mirror to look into, because while I had a bit more style than this kid, and I was and am neither a frequent nor unpleasant drunk, the scene they were playing out was a duplicate of several I've played in, and my friends. The girl who's not interested, the guy who keeps thinking, "No, that can't be right", in a sort of hormone-addled confusion and denial. My sexual aggressiveness--which I hadn't really seen in myself until relatively recently--has calmed down, but traces remain especially of the dramatic, emotional communication habits where nothing really gets communicated and the whole point is just a sort of psychodrama playing out according to some script in my head that's not even original, just plagiarizing bad movies. I mean, literally, I recognized the expressions on the kid's face as my own, watched him do the same things I did just a year or two ago. I think we take much longer to grow up than we tend to think we do. It's like humanity is stuck in reruns.

I'm listening to KLF's Chill Out for the second time today. I'm always amazed at what a good album it is...so beautiful, it brings me to tears. So textured, layered, a perfect album, nothing missing and nothing superfluous. Themes carry over in the background from track to track, alluding gently to something you heard ten minutes ago. It's beatless ambient, but it moves and changes and stays interesting in ways that ambient doesn't always (and often enough isn't meant to). It's just...chill.

Perhaps I will buy it and play it at my family over Christmas.

Ah, the chaste purity of our Western heritage. Nothing like those Oriental or African savages, thank God.