I'm All Out Of Faith

In the spring of 1999, 10 years ago, it began the student work stoppage at UNAM. Even though Psychology School -and UNAM, in general- was closed due to political reasons, I went to school almost twice per week and I saw many students really involved in several activities to inform people about the situation. There was a kitchen in the school and everyone was helping out students. Students were organized and they seemed to have a purpose. 

  
By the end of autumn, the student work stoppage looked endless. Ciudad Universitaria was a disaster. Tons of garbage surrounded the campus. Students and some other unidentified guys, lived in there. Laboratories and classrooms were small apartments. Entire basic research projects were dead. Experimental animals were starved and dirty, or dead. Sophisticated computers and Skinner boxes available for basic research experiments had disappeared, had been stolen, or simply didn't work. People taking drugs everywhere was common. 

I started to feel sick. I was bored, desperate, tired and sleepy all the time. The physician told me I needed to get involved in some academic or physical activity. I had been for months just reading and writing at home, and visiting Ciudad Universitaria once in a while.  

Didn't have real friends nor a girlfriend, so I was kind of lonely and depressed, too.
I went to a literary workshop, to get rid off my nerves, and there I met some guys interested in writing. After a while, we started to hang out. We drank alcohol and read our poems. It was nice, even though I didn't like their attitude. They behave like if they were a living poem. 

Suddenly, a tiny little girl arrived to the workshop. Her name was Natalia, and looked pretty shy. She knew some guys at the workshop and she greeted them with a kiss in the mouth. It was a very hippie thing, to me. Hated it. I thought she maybe had sex with them regularly, too. It was disgusting.   

Her poems were incredibly sordid and sad, but awesome. 

One of the guys at the workshop, studied at TEC de Monterrey. He liked Xavier Villaurrutia and he wrote poems, too. When it was his birthday, he invited us to his house. We drank all night long. He studied physics and talked about Einstein. The other guys talked about Piedra De Sol and Muerte Sin Fin. I was more into suspense than poetry, so they kinda bored me. 

At some point, Natalia started to kiss me. We were completely drunk. Her brackets drove me wild. I started to feel her hair in my lips and mouth, and I complained about it. She smiled and said that her hair was a part of her, too. 

It was funny, but when we were sober, back at the workshop another day, Natalia started to behave as if she wanted to be my girlfriend. I was so prejudiced. Didn't like hippies, nor poets. Later, she started to write me letters and poems, and I always told her I didn't want to have a relationship with her. 

She got my telephone number and called me up once. She was drunk and crying. Asked me why I didn't want to be her boyfriend. I told her that she was a very sad person, even to me, and that I didn't want to get involved with a sad person. 

She told me that she didn't want to be a sad person, and tried to blackmail me. Natalia wanted me to know that she was able to kill herself, and finished rephrasing Dostoievski: 

"I believed in God, but he doesn't believe in me".            

Someone told me she's married to a junkie and that they lived in a small hippie village close to the sea. They make a living off of arts and crafts. I'm sure I'll never see Natalia again. 

I still have her letters, at my mom's house. I'm curious about what they exactly say. 

[Torn-Ednaswap]

Slip of the pen

Torn

Music Is Like A Volatile Tiny Little Girl

This blog will be a writing experiment.

It will be inspired by music, literature, some pieces of science and women.

All these interests will somehow appear together on the posts.

They won't necessarily be coherent nor have rhythm. 

They will mainly be a confusing mix of reality and dreaming. 

They would mainly appear in the form of an unsatisfied desire.

Women are so important to me. 

My life would be hellish if they did not exist.  

At some point of my life, I fell in love with several women.

Most of the time, I wasn't what they were looking for. 

I hope none of the women I'm going to write about, feel offended in any way. (Obviously, I'm not going to reveal their real names. But if you know me a little bit, you easily will find who they really are.) 

Music is so important to me. 

I would be some sort of mentally ill guy if music did not exist. 

Music has been my most loyal companion. 

It's like a volatile tiny little girl.  

All the songs I'm going to write about are electrical transmitters of deep emotions. 

Dunno exactly why, but surely they will have been stored in my brain and they will come to the outside in some strange way. Some of them will eventually cut my throat. 

These songs I will write about, surely have made me (or will make me) feel extremely happy, angst, mad or sad. These songs will be my greatest hope at some apparently hopeless periods. 

I'll write about the way they provoke me and what kind of memories they remind me of. 

All the posts I'm going to publish will be based on dreaming. 

Reality sucks most of the time. 

Everything seems to be an appearance. 

Money seems to be the ultimate product of evolution. 

I hate that people be so simple and silly.  

They are the worst enemy of the world. 

Effortlessly, they seem to believe what do you do and what do you care about, only if you keep yourself telling them all the time what do you do and what do you care about. 

Even if you tell them all these things out of nowhere. 

It's exhausting. 

I don't find a reason to tell you every time that I like to write since I was born. 

I don't think you need to know if I play guitar since I was 14 years old. 

I don't believe you want to know if I'm caucasian or a neuroscientist fighting in the Third World, or just a guy with some sort of pathological attraction to loneliness. 

I don't consider important to speak you about the authors I love and what kind of novels I enjoy nor how many books I read each month. 

But it's pretty annoying when someone, that supposedly knows me, starts to assume that I don't even like music just because I don't speak of Mozart or Beethoven... or that I don't really like music 'cause I haven't experienced how it is to play an instrument... or that I'm not a scientist 'cause I never presume my academic achievements.  

Music, literature and science are my interests.

I know that I should be passionate about science in the first place, but sometimes it seems that technology is most important than research questions.  

It is common to read a paper of the top three scientific journals and to forget about the point, due to the exacerbated quantity of control experiments required by these journals and due to the sophisticated explanations that authors have to give on the sophisticated techniques they employ. 

Methodology is pretty important, but it should be a tool to shed some light on physiological phenomena. It shouldn't be the phenomenon.  

Also, it is devastating the way people in general think about science. 

They seem to believe in science exclusively when someone tells them that an apparently serious scientific study showed that laziness, grumpiness and egocentrism are related to intelligent and successful people.  

Or they simply confound science with technology. 

Or they simply employ Albert Einstein's quote ("I believe in God...") to argue that science and religion are not on different paths... even if they haven't read Baruch Spinoza and so they do not know what kind of God was the one Einstein spoke about. 

The worst of everything is that they lie and sin, and that they believe that we all are the same and that we all should be frightened, tempted and punished by the same demons and gods. 

They could quote Charles Bukowski to speak about psychoanalysis or Aristotle to speak about networking coaching. 

They're amazing, in a real bad way.  

In this period of my life I barely have the opportunity to enjoy music (I hope it eventually changes), 'cause I have too many papers to read and to write and too many things to do. 

I always wanted to be in a garage punk band -I suppose I have never tried to do it fiercely- and all the music I listen up its related to this genre.

Currently, I just listen up a few bands like Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Melvins, Dinosaur Jr., Screaming Trees, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Butthole Surfers, Nirvana... 

From a few months until now, I have been listening to some bands I know I will eventually stop listening to.  

The Cure (Pornography and Wish are awesome records), Siouxsie & The Banshees (what kind of dark and beautiful post punk songs they played!), The Doors (despite they were more into the hippie 70's vibe, they have really awesome songs, lyrically and musically), Jimi Hendrix (I'm not sure if he was really the awesome guitarist people talk about, but definitely he was a rock n' roll artist ahead of his time) and The Rolling Stones (they're just as legendary as The Beatles!) 

I'm not gonna lie: I'm not a big fan of The Beatles nor of Bob Dylan; I prefer Neil Young, Mark Lanegan and Kurt Cobain.

(Did I mention that I'm left-handed and that I play guitar? 

Heart-shaped box is by far one of the funniest songs to play I have ever learned. She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand are fun to play, too.

Nirvana is the band I hear almost all the time.

Despite he is one of the musicians I feel more attracted to, my goal it's not to play guitar like Kurt Cobain. 

I think his music was about to turn into blues and folk. He seemed to be bored of the Nirvana formula. I'm pretty sure he would have recorded albums like Mark Lanegan has done since he quit Screaming Trees.) 

I always wanted to have a job in which all I had to do was to read and to write.  

If I found a job like that, I would live in Paradise.

At the time I'm posting this, I'm a meaningless scientist and a meaningless writer. 

I hope it will change in a few years. I'm working on that. 

I would like to have enough guts to make a better life in another country, but I'm afraid I'm scared to make it.

I cannot stop thinking in all the pros and cons, especially in the cons. 

(Is it a disease? Am I too pessimistic?) 

By the way, English is not my native language -you can check it out my EGOTECA-, but I find it pretty fun to write on English... besides, I hate when people lie about their language' skills. 

Thus, METASTASIS OF SOUND is some sort of testimony of my English' language skills.

Maybe someday I will need to test that I'm really able to write on this astonishing rhythmic language.  

I invite you to read my posts while you listen to the song I will write about. 

Dear reader, this is the aim of this blog. 

I'm pretty sure you're gonna read it when I die.