Wow! I'm sorry it's been so long? Does anyone still read this? Am I arrogant to assume anyone ever did? There are nine of you 'followers' so I'm assuming (statistically) one of you has to have been reading; at least the follower that is secretly me to make me look like I've actually have followers.

I've been giving all of my writing energy to my zine and my project with my pal Bryan - I'm sorry. I'm just trying to release this forty page zine every three months. Anyhow, this issue seems to be about my life as a rhizome. It sounds a lot more cryptic than it is (but it sounds as pretentious as it really is. I'm trying to impress you.)

I was reading some stuff this guy Gilles Deleuze wrote about Kafka. I've read a lot about Kafka (more has been written about him than I think he'd be able to take without puking). This stuff was all over the place, though, jumping from one concept to the other. Did you ever feel like something was utterly mad and ultimately enlighting all at once? This is the feel I got from it.

Upon more research, this seems to be the point of the way Deleuze writes about things. Most literary criticism reminds me of regular rock music - verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, chorus. Pretty straightforward. Deleuze analyzed Kafka's life more like dixieland jazz - three intruments playing a solo simeltaneously. Whereas most critics (and authors, and directors, and so on) seem to list events or concepts in a logical order, one leading to the next, Deleuze showed how many are interconnected to each other, and how many things really make no sense. This way of describing and looking at things seemed to make no sense to me, and also make too much sense to me.

Replacing the good ol' timeline - point A to point B - was a web. There is no beginning and no end. The artist picks where to start, where to go, and where to end, all arbitrarily. Is this just a pointless way of looking at the way I look at things? Maybe.

It's like the brain. There are a limited number of cells. But the connections between the cells can be infinite. All the importance lies there. There are a limited number of things and people in my life. But the connections between them stretch on forever.

The Sartre of the Sea

Perhaps if a jellyfish were to clearly be up to shaping some kind of legacy, we'd more readily recognize it as existential. Moreover, jellyfish can't lift up a stringy tentacle and announce "I am doomed to be free!".

However, who is to say that jellyfish don't think of the world existing for an eternity after they have passed on from their watery world? Much is to be said about how condusive to existential thought idle ocean-floating can be.

Give the Sartre of jellyfish a talk bubble and what would he do with it? I'm no jelly fish, but I reckon she'd be too deep in thought to use it. Had I been born a jelly fish I wouldn't waste my time chatting it up, not with all the jelly fish thoughts to think.

Anyhow, regardless of all these theoriticals on the life of jelly fish, I'm sure we can agree that jelly fish are typically the pensive type. Not the cuttlefish, though. The jock of the invertebrates of the sea.