Parasites

The parasite is the hammer and anvil of evolution, or that is my understanding of things.  We have been able to evolve through our adaptation to them.  The stomach digests food by its use of parasitic bacteria - by being home to parasites. 

Is a virus a kind of parasite?  Anyway, what interests me in this instance is the mind parasite.  If there is such a thing and if there is how we would go about finding out.  Of course, the suggestion may seem absurd, in so far as the mind is an imaginary animal - so to speak.  What am I talking about?  An imaginary parasite for an imaginary animal?  

However how else to explain the extremes of human vanity if we are not … polluted? - these extremes that infest every dimension of life, so that like phantom dirt, like imaginary mud no washing can cleanse one?   I think of the sound of laughter; uninflected by any idea of social status, where no aspiration, complex, hang up, or fear - or anything else - lurks, as opposed to say the ‘human’ aliens in They Live!,  whose ruse is revealed by dark glasses.  They don’t laugh at our jokes!

Wild London

I remember when I first visited Cheltenham where my parents were planning on moving, back in 19**.  I had got a summer job there on a building site; Cementation were doing sewage works alterations but me and my mate, the son of a friend of my fathers, had nothing to do at all.  It was a make-work job.  We would tool around inventing what to do, like removing scabs of mud from a newly surfaced road; or we would bunk off and just sit on a deserted pavement somewhere smoking fags and staring off into space or at a tree or something.   It struck me at the time and it still strikes me now that this put me into the world - the having a fag and the doing nothing but being part of a landscape - a place deserted by all but a few machines in their standard yellow paint.   I experienced the same when working for Camden Council Parks and Gardens, in another summer job.  The act of just sitting around or walking about liberated from the routines that usually beset me, of getting from A to B or whatever, by the excuse of ‘working’.  Wild London.  You can see the same with workmen sitting on the steps of buildings, owning the street they are temporarily in by the mere fact that a moment’s time out from their job is sponser to this rarity of ’being at a loose end’ …