What “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” reminds me of is “The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon," that compilation of lists and observations, complaints and poetry by a court lady in the Heian Period in Japan. She’s cranky and egotistical and obsessed with aesthetics, wonderfully modern in some way (as everything true always seems no matter what the era):

“There is nothing in the whole world so painful as feeling that one is not liked," she writes. "It always seems to me that people who hate me must be suffering from some kind of lunacy.”

"Things That Don't Have Any Redeeming Qualities: Ugly people with disagreeable personalities."

“I love to slide a silk robe over my face and take a nap, breathing through the filmy scent of sweat."

I’ve always wondered how people can find the courage to write this way, as if their every thought, even the mean ones, mattered. But in some way it’s the most human, or humanistic, of all sorts of writing (an argument could be made here for blogging), because it says that all thoughts do matter… Or do they?

Warhol is more tongue-in-cheek about the whole enterprise, making fun of himself even as he takes himself seriously:

“I believe in low lights and trick mirrors."

"Can I deduct liquor if I have to get high to talk and talking's my business?"

Reading his book I keep having these thoughts about how everything that happens all day every day is like an entry in “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" or "The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon." Like today I was in a cab and the cabbie was talking on the phone, and I thought,

“Things That Displease Me: When cab drivers talk on the phone.”

Not just for the obvious reasons—like we might get in a crash—but because I get very curious about what they're talking about and I think it’s a little rude of them to not let me in on the conversation. Sometimes I fear they are having phone sex. It certainly sounds like it. The driver today, he was Eqyptian I believe, he was talking away, “Walla walla walla walla,” and then every so often he would get very agitated and say, “You brought this on yourself! You brought this on yourself!” What did she bring on herself? I wondered, and I just really wanted to know. (I could somehow tell from his tone that he was talking to a woman.) And why did he phrase the reproach in English rather than his native tongue—did he consider it too blunt a thing to say in anything but rough American? When the taxi finally stopped and I was paying him, I asked him, “What? What did she bring on herself?”, and he just looked at me like I was nuts and he had no idea what I was talking about. “You just said she brought it on herself—what was it?” I demanded. But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer. It was maddening.

See now there is an example of something that happened to me today that is of really no consequence to anyone—even me, really—and yet it is somehow interesting. Isn’t it? Is it more interesting than reading about how psyched I am about Obama, or how worried I am about our attack on innocent civilians in Syria? Probably. But why?

Why blog at all? I started this blog because I was so frustrated with the way no one in the mainstream media would touch any of the weird questions about 9/11. I got really into researching. It seemed to me that the official story of 9/11 was just crazy, too like a Hollywood movie to be believed (i.e.: 19 terrorists hijack four American jumbo jets, wielding nothing but box-cutters, the entire intelligence community and the multiple defense systems of the United States military fail to stop them, the planes crash into the World Trade Center Towers, which collapse into their own footprints, looking very much like controlled demolitions, meanwhile Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is allegedly helping people in a parking lot at the Pentagon...), whereas everyone else seemed to think that if you questioned anything about the official story of 9/11, you were crazy, and this seemed both very interesting and alarming to me at the time.

I wonder if the truth will ever come out.