some sort of animal madness is eating me up from within, but i'm not unhappy. invigorated, to tell the truth.

from Walter F. Otto's Dionysus: Myth and Cult:
(trans. Robert B. Palmer. Indiana University Press. 1965. ch 11, The Mad God pp 133 - 142. yada yada.)

    Madness is a cult form which belongs to the religion of Dionysus. The god who sends the mind reeling, the god who appears to mankind in the most urgent immediacy is welcomed and feted by the women in an absolute ecstasy and excess of rapture. They respond to his coming with the behavior of the insane. The myth tells again and again how his fury ripped them loose from their peaceful domesticity, from the humdrum orderly activities of their daily lives for the purpose of making them into dancers in the wilderness and the loneliness of the mountains, where they find him and rage through the night as members of his revel rout....
    A god who is mad! A god, part of whose nature it is to be insane! What did they experience or see - these men on whom the horror of this concept must have forced itself?
    The visage of every true god is the visage of a world. There can be a god who is mad only if there is a mad world which reveals itself through him. Where is this world? Can we still find it? Can we appreciate its nature? For this no one can help us but the god himself.
    We know him as the wild spirit of antithesis and paradox, of immediate presence and complete remoteness, of bliss and horror, of infinite vitality and the cruelest destruction. The element of bliss in his nature, the creative, enraptured, and blessed elements all share, too, in his wildness and his madness. Are they not, then, mad just because they, too, already carry within themselves a duality, because they stand on the threshold where one step beyond leads to dismemberment and darkness? Here we have hit upon a cosmic enigma - the mystery of life which is self-generating, self-creating. The love which races toward the miracle of procreation is touched by madness. So is the mind when it is staggered by the impulse to create....He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life. The primal mystery is itself mad - the matrix of duality and the unity of disunity.
    ...The mad god who appeared with a host of raving female attendants summoned mortal women to share his madness with him. He brought the primeval world along with him. This is the reason why his onslaught stripped mortals of all their conventions, of everything that made them "civilized," and hurled them into life which is intoxicated by death at those moments when it glows with its greatest vitality, when it loves, procreates, gives birth, and celebrates the rites of spring. There the most remote is near, the past is present, all ages are mirrored in the moment of the now.

I tried the Alyosha Karamazov path. It rings hollow. Love is supreme, but it's not all there is. Life is bloody, violent, vicious, absurd. To shut one's eyes to this is to value comfort over truth. There is no transcending it. It is. Has been. Will always be. Life feeds on death. Can't have one without the other. It's natural.  It's horrific, but still natural. And that is why Dionysus is more real than Christ. Dionysus's reality isn't arcane and mystical, it's self-evident. Just turn on Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, National Geographic. Right there, written in blood.

No, I don't believe Dionysus exists. I don't worship or pray to him. But I acknowledge him and his truth. It's the sanest truth I've ever encountered.

okay, i have to rant about this. i get along with all my coworkers except ONE. being in this girl's company is so mind-numbingly dull that my poor defenseless brain is forced to survive by shutting down into a perpetual and never-ending feedback loop of the word INANE. (see, i'm in such shock that i'm being redundant - 'perpetual and never-ending'? where's the fucking defibrilator?) INANE INANE INANE INANE INANE, like the voice of a particularly devastated self-destruct sequence attempting to alert the surrounding inhabitants (i.e. the other quivering parts of my brain) that total system meltdown is imminent due to sudden asphyxiating personality-impotence. seriously. it's like talking to a blow-up sex doll with pre-programmed responses. "that is like so cute!" "i want one of those!" "what is the frickin' deal, it's like, not going in!" gah. i swear that girl has never had an original thought in her entire life. and Bimbo Barbie thinks that because she got there two weeks before i did she knows more than me and she can tell me what to do while she sits and peruses children's books because god knows she can't handle anything above a third grade reading level. and then the boss comes in and she adopts this pathetically obvious, syrupy sweet voice just dripping with eau de insincere bitch and then he goes away and she turns around and starts talking about how creepy he is and when i tell her he's not creepy, he's an introvert, she thinks i'm talking about his belly button. she has never in my presence made anything even remotely resembling an intelligent comment, and i firmly believe she is the most useless, wasted, contrived, vacuous chunk of carbon this side of the pleiades. the only words that spew out of her mouth are unqualified superlatives of the most asinine degree. oh my god i am running out of adjectives. there is no substance to her. i have never known anyone so astoundingly inane.

anyway. ANYWAY. now that i look like a pompous jerk i have two pictures to post. the first is a marvelous creature i discovered (invented) in the far east (my bedroom) on a mythical tour of the fertile crescent, whom i have dubbed the Lamasphinx. he's half lamassu, half sphinx.  you can't see the whole picture because my lettering sucks.

then thanks to national geographic i discovered the beautiful quetzal bird and, rather smitten, i googled him then i chalked him then i taped him to the back of a frame that doesn't match that i stole from my grandmother's garage.

Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This Flow'ry Plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone; her Heav'nly form
Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine,
Her graceful Innocence, her every Air
Of gesture or least action overaw'd
His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav'd
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remain'd
Stupidly good, of enmity disarm'd,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge;
But the hot Hell that always in him burns,
Though in mid Heav'n, soon ended his delight,
And tortures him now more, the more he sees
Of pleasure not for him ordain'd: then soon
Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts
Of mischeif, gratulating, thus excites.

Paradise Lost, Book IX, lines 455-472

[my favorite passage in all of Paradise Lost. prior to this moment, adam and eve have separated to tend the garden in separate places. satan has entered the serpent and is about to tempt eve. he has just seen her.]

"Of pleasure not for him ordain'd..."
satan's anger here has nothing to do with the fact that he is in rebellion. it is another reason for him to rebel. compare to Genesis 6:1-4, and the origin of the nephilim or grigori. he is angry not as a fallen angel, but as an ANGEL.

this seems important to me.