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afterword: the pilgrimage continues

2009-06-02T21:01:00.001-07:00

got a column at xenith.net called "blow through the coals." will now write stuff for there.

this blog shall remain, however. either for me to look at on google analytics in five years to see if visitor trends changed since I stopped writing it, or as a permanent record of somewhat veiled references of things that happened to me since december of last year, or as a convenient resource for when I'm writing a cover letter and can't remember a story I wrote.

it's been fun.

chapter one: adoption

2009-04-05T17:52:00.000-07:00

phase one is writing a poem.

no.

phase one is staying up from now until six in the morning, buying that poetry book, reading that one poem on the walk back to my dorm, then writing a poem. hope my printer still works.

no.

phase one is thinking about the poem I'm going to write in response to the poem I haven't read yet, but should have read, i.e. at a time other than six thirty in the morning, walking back from the bookstore.

no.

phase one is thinking about all the stuff I was doing instead of buying and reading that book, or what I was not doing, i.e. reading/buying/writing that book.

I need a book of poetry to read and write a poem about. I need to write about a poem I read about and read what I wrote about. I need to write what I read about and put it in a book of poems. I need to buy it and write a poem about it, but only after I've read everything, which I really should've done earlier.

I'm bad at these things, yes.

chapter four: annulment of marriage

2009-03-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

slowly weaning myself off stories like a stimulant of your choice. what I need is a collection. I need to write seven or eight stories and put them in a book and lay the last four years to rest and keep moving. I don't want to keep moving until I've buried all that shit, it doesn't make sense to just plow on, ideas don't suffocate the same way kittens do in christmas boxes. that morbidity was almost intentional. sigh.

what I'd like to do is write a love story at the end of all this. fire off fifty thousand words by the end of the year. that'll be spring. summer will be the love story, and it'll take all summer. it'll be good timing, since I can match writing with my pace at work. easy. just like that.

immediate steps are self-evident. I have to collapse this ponzi scheme I've built before it steals from me that bit of wisdom. I'll want everything I can get my head around and probably some bullshit token to remind me of the only place that kind of turnaround can come from. I've got a good start to it, though, stayed up all last night writing about W.E.B. DuBois, and now I'm at a library, printing out my paper and staying awake. awake.

know the cheesiest line I ever read? some lemony snicket book. I was thirteen or twelve. it was the first one, there was a part near the end where a boy's reading law to save his sister from marrying the Count, and the boy was having a hard time staying awake, cause law books are very dense. it said, "He found himself reading the same line over and over. He found himself reading the same line over and over. He found himself reading the same line over and over." I felt violated.

chapter three: direct derivation

2009-03-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

it's a system, that's all. all it is is a car made out of paper and golf pencils that you have to figure out how to drive within three hours. if you don't, you're not really fucked, you'll just have to do better on the next one, when they move up to big rigs, then onward to bullet trains and yachts and kitty hawks and eventually interstellar transit wormholes. inevitable, really, the expansion of technology.

know what I've never understood? intelligence scores in role playing games. if you make an extremely intelligent character, and he really was smart, it wasn't just a statistic that affected a bunch of other statistics, etc., wouldn't he question the logic of the role playing game? ask himself, "what the fuck am I doing here? why are these people trying to kill me?" (as often this is the case.) would he take a clue from bad dialogue and obvious seams in the geography? there are a few random characters in grand theft auto 4 who only exist to walk around with grocery bags in their hands. there are much more obvious holes in that particular representation of reality, such as the minimal effort it takes to make a car explode, and the fact that, while it's implausible for a car to explode if you aim for the gas tank, it happens if you shoot a grand theft auto car anywhere- even the door- or the fact that if you fall thousands of feet, get caught in helicopter blades while jumping out from thousands of feet in the air, or get caught in helicopter blades while the helicopter simultaneously explodes thousands of feet in the air while you are jumping out, if you have a hundred bucks for medical fees, you'll survive and - wouldn't an intelligent person realize these things and ask a few obvious questions?

why call it intelligence, then? it's clearly a misuse of the word. the intelligence is on the other side of the television, every time. role playing games exist because sometime in the recent past our species reckoned, god knows how or why, that it needed to live vicariously through the more interesting lives of video game characters. one could argue that intelligence scores in role playing games are embellishments of the "role-playing" part: you can make your guy either smart or dumb, a decision based upon social anxieties which will be researched in anything but the hard drives of xboxes.

you could argue that it's a justification of anything bad the character will do in the game. "it's grand theft auto, sometimes you run over pedestrians." but that's an argument against yourself. then you assume that the game exists because you want it to, or need it to, as an expression of what you can't do. "since I can't be in grand theft auto, this other person has to be, and he runs over pedestrians sometimes, what do you know." they are mutually exclusive, yes.

chapter two: warrior poets

2009-03-19T04:50:00.000-07:00

There will be warrior poets in the foxholes of low paying jobs. They will scratch out words with golf pencils on receipts from the golf pencil store. They will write about how there are no movies anymore, only things warrior poets do, and write poems about. They will mention that there aren't newspapers, either, only bloggers who are warrior poets, taking notes in the trenches of the working poor. They will say how there aren't novels, only chapbooks divided into the five hundred words that the best of warrior poets can stand to write down before falling asleep on the couch at the end of a harrowing day on the frontlines of money. They will also mention that they have run out of songs, because the only people alive that still make them are warrior poets, dug in deep outside the no-man's-land of homelessness. They will tell you to be happy you exist, because some people, like warrior poets, are not that lucky. These words will be viewed by many from a great distance. Then they will feel like warrior poets do, like they have conquered something, but that something still remains to be conquered. They will either fight wars so that people don't have to tell stories, or they will tell stories so that people don't have to fight wars. In either case they will be the warrior poets somebody else doesn't have to be.

chapter one: duct tape rhombus

2009-03-06T01:33:00.000-08:00

oh, for goodness sakes, why not just finish the goddamned kafka paper? everything else is predicated on that. obviously. finish that, then go study for art history. instead of reading stuff you've already written and pretending a conglomerate of that would suffice for any problem, anything, just self-plagiarize until all your problems are solved! it is easy!

finish that kafka paper, even though you are skeptical of the idea of the performative self, it's too fucking easy to describe that kind of relationship, the walt whitman thing, my innermost soul must not be abased by the rest of me, and vice versa for the rest of me, that wasn't a clever bit of dramatic criticism, that was fucking song of myself, what kind of asshole tries to retitle that?

write it, just two pages, it'll take half an hour, how hard could it be to integrate a second source? why are you even worrying about it? just finish it, go on, write a little more than two pages, your professor will be impressed at your will to overachieve- over! achieve!- but only if you are succinct. indeed, your succinctness must be to such a degree that your professor doesn't notice the overlapping onto the third page. they will just turn the page without thinking "I have turned one more page than expected," that's how succinct it'll be, so goddamned succinct and precise and clean that they are physically bothered by its perfection.

better yet, go outside, right now, bring your copy of The Metamorphosis and outline the most succinct, clearly argued, concise, to the point, scholarly, edible, evocative-of-a-certain-color-or-shade-of-yellow kafka paper ever written in the ninety something years since they've been writing kafka papers. so evocative of the color yellow that, in ninety more years, when the pages your paper is written on begin to yellow with age, future generations of kafka scholars will look on it and say, "What the fuck? It's not just me after all!" and then there will be much rejoicing.

no, you can't hand this in instead. go write it now, it's almost five in the morning.

chapter three: they preferred to remain anonymous

2009-02-23T08:48:00.000-08:00

statement of purpose:
although friending people on facebook is arbitrary, the individual facebook page is personal and immediately relevant to its owner. the arbitrarity of interactions on the internet overcomes and eventually squashes any personal relevance which an individual's facebook page might contain. (eventually, you realize that nobody cares that you liked the beatles as a child. they never read the about me paragraph you've stitched together like frankenstein's monster. they just want to write on your wall and look at your pictures and get your phone number to have but never call.) this is the direct antithesis of healthy friendships in the world of mass and volume, which rely on the intimate, interpersonal exchanges which facebook can neither facilitate nor simulate.

hypothesis:
facebook has diluted the meaning of the word "friendship" to such an extent that I can friend everybody with a last name beginning with the letter "A."

procedure:
I began by searching for (in quotes) " A," notice the space before the "A." this would separate everybody with first names that began with "A" from the people I wanted to friend. I made exceptions for people with names like "D'Angelo," or "Van Adler." I friended them too, because they would probably appear on a list of people with last names beginning with the letter "A," which is exactly what I wanted.

I added a lot of Arnold's, Arsenault's and Abbot's. I added a few people with the name "Aa Aa," alhtough I figured this wasn't their real names, but that they preferred to remain anonymous. I friended them because I didn't want to start making exceptions to the rule.

One lady I friended asked me, "hey what's up? :)," to which I replied, "Hi! Not much." then she wrote, "do i know you by any chance?", to which I replied, "I'm afraid not, I'm just friending everybody with a last name beginning with the letter 'A.'" she promptly unfriended me.

four days into the experiment, I got a message while friending people, which informed me that if I kept on like this, my account would be banned. all other friends I'd add would have to verify that we are friends. this was either a challenge to or the end of my career in the field of social commentary.

conclusion:
this is only a little bit poetic.

chapter two: the accidental crushing of important things

2009-02-17T22:39:00.000-08:00

thinking of starting a brand new story, completely from scratch, positively original, about a guy who's afraid of going to sleep in his own bed. this is not based exclusively from personal experience, no, as I know of other people who've gone without sleeping in their own beds for much longer stretches of time. maybe he'd be in prison. maybe he'd sleep on the floor for the first couple months, then get beaten up or get so obese off prison fare that he'd have to grudgingly accept the bed as a stubborn fact of his existence, as relentless as the shooting pain in his back, which it would cure in an ironic and climactic and revelatory manner after about five thousand words.

my own sore back is not the single source of this idea, no.

I am looking for a couple of things: a nice, concise prose, maybe as a way to adapt in advance to law school, which I fear will turn into another couple of years spent accidentally crushing important things. another good title for a story: "the accidental crushing of important things."

today I wrote a poem about the midget who could not break those cuffs. a good friend asked me, "How fucked are we?" and I replied, "There are so many layers to that question." it would've taken me a year to list all the reasons. that is one finite answer to that infinite question. and that reflexivity is yet another beating heart of postmodernism, oh so banally waiting for a stake to be driven through it.

chapter one: the gut of a ship

2009-02-10T21:01:00.000-08:00

fell asleep this afternoon on the twelfth floor of my library, while reading Eugene Onegin, the Nabokov translation. my intention was to finish one translation, then move on to another translation, and so on, until I achieved a mastery of the form through osmosis. this purpose was complicated by my falling asleep on my Nabokov translation.

I dreamed I was sitting in the hull of an old-fashioned whaling ship, which had been refurbished into a church. (that is much better than a church made into a boat.) my Logic professor began to give a lecture on Jonah and the Whale. I couldn't pay attention, because I was busy swinging on the ropes that hung from the ceiling. everybody was disappointed that I was being so immature at such a critical moment in the lecture.

the symbolism of that, I'll leave to you to fully decode. do I expect lectures to do the work of sermons? why do you need ceiling-mounted ropes in the hull of a ship? was this the moment of clarity about which I was so desperate to explain in an overlong, overwrought freshman novel?

I got bored thinking about that, and went back to reading. it's only ever really good when it's your last remaining option.

chapter four: everything's shaking around a bit

2009-01-29T08:46:00.000-08:00

there was a big snowstorm followed by a horrible ice storm and my classes got canceled yesterday and today until eleven o'clock. I don't know if they were serving breakfast in the dining commons, but I would've liked to go, if they were. the ice storm made it impossible to find out.

I started this thing a couple days ago where I would only eat one chewy bar per day. I wanted to find out how little I could get by on. unfortunately, I didn't stick to that plan and ate other things, so unless I develop some will power before my chewy bar stores deplete, the experiment will never be completed.

I read some book called "On Truth," which is either a landmark, knockout punch to postmodernism, or it's a really good dictionary entry. (Why not both? That's probably all it takes to knock out a postmodernist. A dictionary.)

chapter three: in search of a good backspace key

2009-01-22T04:28:00.000-08:00

sometimes I have vain thoughts, like if I have my dad's bone structure or my mother's, or if my hands are being slowly warped by all the writing I do, and instead of long, graceful pianist's fingers they'll look more and more hobbit-like as I get older. I worry if I'm going bald, if I'm going grey, which one is worse, which one I'd take if I was forced to choose, what my children will think about me, what I will think about my children, what my parents will think of my children, whether they will make good grandparents, whether they will like being grandparents, or just the word "grandparent," whether they will adapt easily to that role or if it'll prickle around the shoulders and throat like a bad jacket until they finally accept that I've got kids. I think about what it feels like to be outlived. I wonder if it's like playing catch.

I wonder if I'll get a job. I wonder if I can get a job teaching somewhere I'd want to go back to. I wonder about my rationale for teaching: I would like to do something good. I would like to solve problems: long-term problems, which can only be solved through years of breaking your ass. I'm not vain enough to think I can solve anything for all time. I think about that ridiculous, asinine platitude at the end of that story about the old guy throwing starfish on the beach.

(short version: young kid throwing starfish back in the ocean at low tide. beach is covered in them, no way he'll get all of them. old guy asks him: "why are you doing that? there are so many to help, you can't hope to make a difference." kid says: "make a difference to that one.")

I think about making myself vomit, and I don't have the heart for it, or my heart would come out too, and that would be too messy.

but teaching, there's a real solution. to my problems. I make no illusions about that. teaching would be two things:

1) steady job
1.1) very important. must have a day job. can't not have a day job, or you would starve. we're not in the baudelaire days. it's no longer practical to buy books after you buy food. it's only slightly poetic, and other people have done that before, and better.
1.2) nor are we in the f. scott fitzgerald days, when you could support a healthy lifestyle of international travel and elegant ballrooms and champagne wishes and caviar dreams off the forty thousand dollars (inflation-adjusted) that you make off one story.
1.2a) we're not even in the ray bradbury days, when if you had talent (as stephen king defines it) and worked until your ass fell off, you had a hope of at least supporting yourself. those days are gone.
1.2b) you know that guy from the office? jim? from the office? he wanted to be a TV writer. he had better odds making a living as an actor. just to give you an idea of how far from plausible it is.
1.3) there is no such thing as teacher's block. ( as evidence of this, I've had some fantastic gym teachers in my day.)
1.4) the health insurance. nice perk, if you plan on having kids, slipping on ice or getting cancer.
1.4a) oh, cancer jokes. christ. I almost forgot. there aren't any in this blog. this one comes courtesy of jeff. there's a five year old boy playing in a sandbox with police cars. they're driving around little sandcastles he's built, fighting crime and putting the bad guys away for good, where they won't hurt any more sand-people for the rest of their days. then he hears something in the street: sirens, really loud, and he looks and sees two police cars gunning it, they look like blurs of sharp, violent reds and blues. he puts down his police cars, runs out of the sandbox, into his house where his mom is and says, "mom! I know what I want to be when I grow up! I want to be a policeman!" his mom says, "oh, son. you're not going to grow up. you have cancer."
2) idealism
2.1) all you need to graduate high school is high-functioning illiteracy. nothing more. this is a problem. people don't like to read. as proof of this, odds are against me making a living off the stuff I write, because there isn't enough demand for things to read.
2.1a) teaching would address this problem at its roots. history, english, science, anything but math, basically, any of these subjects, you can make it impossible for a kid to get through your course (not pass, that would be going too far, no, I shouldn't compromise that, but it's that kind of world.) without reading. a lot.
2.2) maybe that's a better way to do it that writing. all a writer can do to make people more literate is write good stuff that makes people want to read. not only their stuff, but other people's as well. a teacher can make a kid want to read the same amount of stuff, but there's no ego involved. and if half the reason is idealism, shouldn't there be no place for ego in it?
2.2a) after all, who can say "I've done more for literacy than any given English, science or history teacher," other than an asshole the size of Mars.
2.3) who hasn't cringed when a college student- college! student!- haltingly reads something they wrote- they! wrote!- to the rest of the class? who can help but cringe?
2.3a) I have physical reactions to bad writing. I can't hide it. I try to apologize for that as much as I can, but if something on the metaphysical wavelength causes me to spasm down here on earth, there's only so much making up I can do before I cross the threshold of bullshit. if I'm addressing the problem of bad writing being out there, swimming about in the ocean of forced metaphors and gut-wrenching similes and assonance and "little did he know" and paragraphs that start with "suddenly," couldn't I begin to feel a bit better about all those times I couldn't resist a small cringe at William Hazlitt or Dan Brown or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Tolstoy or Turgenev, Ayn Rand, Emily Dickinson, that woman who wrote that vampire book, Palahniuk, Chbosky, Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs guy, occasionally Kierkegaard?

these reasons could be applied in reverse to writing, yes. I'm not ignoring that, kind of.

chapter two: my contribution to the story of the plane crash on the hudson river

2009-01-16T05:19:00.001-08:00

that is all.

chapter one: thinnness

2009-01-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

sam: Hello again!
sam: My, we seem to bump into each other quite often.
sam: quite!
sam: it's an astonishing coincidence.
sam: I believe it is.
sam: we haven't spoken in some time, yes?
sam: yes, yes. my apologies.
sam: well, there are so many preoccupations.
sam: certainly.
sam: it's only natural that we'd stop talking to each other.
sam: yes, tragic.
sam: but no less inevitable.
sam: indeed. how sad. do you have a headache?
sam: why, yes, I do. how did you guess?
sam: you don't get one like that every time you feel out of place?
sam: out of place?
sam: yes, like when you leave a room and go back in to find something's moved.
sam: but you didn't touch it?
sam: yes! exactly. you don't feel that, just day to day?
sam: well, I do now, maybe because you mentioned it.
sam: ah, the Heisenberg Uncertainty jive now?
sam: that by naming the elephant in the room, it's no longer that name.
sam: yes, yes.
sam: what was before a kind of thinness is now just a headache.
sam: but a remarkable heavy one, though.
sam: yes, I am a bit annoyed.
sam: annoyed?
sam: yes, bothered.
sam: but annoyed, too?
sam: I can be both at the same time.
sam: well, which one more?
sam: well, you'd have to look into the source of both the annoyance and the bother.
sam: what annoys you?
sam: my headache. it bugs me. it's uncomfortable. I would rather not have it in my head. I didn't invite it.
sam: and what's bothering you?
sam: such a more intense word.
sam: bother?
sam: against annoys. bother is much more deeply troubling, don't you think?
sam: yes, yes. well?
sam: oh, yes. well, it would have to be the source of the headache.
sam: that odd, thin feeling?
sam: no, that heavy headache.
sam: I thought that was only an annoyance?
sam: no, the source of it, I mean.
sam: ah. you mean the feeling that annoyed you before has now evolved into a source of great discomfort. a bother.
sam: no, not at all.
sam: oh?
sam: no, it's the source of the headache that bothers me.
sam: I'm not sure I understand.
sam: it would take some time to explain.
sam: as with all things.
sam: yes, how silly of me.
sam: already forgotten!
sam: it's the difference between hating the sinner and hating the sin.
sam: ah.
sam: you don't understand?
sam: you're bothered not by the headache, but the fact that you have a headache.
sam: yes.
sam: because something must have given you a headache.
sam: yes.
sam: it's a symptom of a larger problem, you fear?
sam: I believe so.
sam: well, what's that problem?
sam: everything is thin.
sam: ah.
sam: I believe we've just exited the realm of our respective comprehension, old friend.
sam: as do I, as do I.

chapter four: big decision

2008-12-22T02:55:00.000-08:00

going to martha's vineyard for christmas. ought to be fun.

going sledding today with girlfriend. ought to be perfect. would be more perfect if I were able to sleep at all tonight. just staying awake. sick. tired. how does that song go? something by jewel or some bullshit.

couldn't get the thought out of my head: "condemned to freedom." what does that mean? all I came up with was an idea for a story of three thousand words or more. starring, of course, the devil and the everyman.

the devil's got his everyman locked up in a jail. cuffs around his wrist draw blood every time he moves. bread and water only once every day. he's put into stress positions, with his arms behind his back, bent forward, chained to a chair. left that way for hours. (of course, a modern version of the hellish prison would resemble guantanamo bay.)

but the devil isn't satisfied with this jail. not cost-effective, and too expensive to be imperfect. so he sets and thinks a while as his everyman is tearing his rotator cuffs. "what," thinks the devil, "is the most perfect, inescapable prison in the universe?"

his answer: a man's heart.

one night, after passing out on a waterboarding gurney, the devil's everyman wakes up to find his arms and legs unbound and the door to his prison open. he walks outside, sheepish, unsure if this is some sort of test or trap- but no. he hears nothing outside, no sounds of life, no footsteps, not even the heavy breathing of his torturers which he'd grown to fear.

he slowly, carefully walks out of his cell, then slowly, carefully out of the prison.

why did they let him free? he asks himself. what did he do? where did they go? did they really go?

not knowing any of this, he'll instead try to think back to the reason he was first imprisoned. what had he done? surely he'd offended his jailors somehow, and surely they'd discovered their mistake, that it was only an accident, his offence, or that it had never happened at all, and, upon realising this, they'd gone, abandoned him, in case he decided to sue them for their criminal actions.

but why didn't they warn him not to seek them out if this were so? if they were barbaric enough to torture him so, surely it wouldn't be beneath them to threaten him. and it was certainly in their power to kill him, should they so decide. if they could abduct him in the first place, they could probably have him dead any day they chose to. with that sort of character and that sort of power, he expected some sort of threat, but nothing came. they just left, all of a sudden.

that was frustrating, but that wasn't the new prison. the new prison was what the devil's everyman was supposed to do now. in prison, he had something to define himself against. he was not the torturer, he was the tortured. they abducted him, they tortured him. he hated them. now that they were gone, what was he?

his definition of what life was had been so altered by his internment that he could barely recognize normalcy for what it was. indeed, he suspected that normalcy no longer existed for him- it only occurred in short gasps of his life spent outside a cloying, unnameable fear. it was a memory.

as misshapen and warped a definition as that was, the devil's everyman will soon realise that, for all its flaws, in spite of it lacking any resemblance to reality, it was a definition. it was clear- in it, there was a place for him, and a place for all other things. he has none of that now.

eventually, he'll find something to struggle with, but it won't be that thing. it'll be the search for something to struggle with. that's his prison: seeking out an adversary. looking for some new devil. when he finds one, oh, it'll be swell, he'll have his side, the devil will have his own. it'll be so clearly, cleverly defined.

in the meanwhile, what will he have? existential stasis. nothing will change, because it won't have to: he's free, after all. isn't he?

chapter three: the worst part's almost over

2008-12-18T19:55:00.000-08:00

the bus was late, half an hour, when it got here had to wait another hour and a half, got to northampton, tired, hungry, bored, out of tune, red, throbbing note stabbed into the chord of downtown, night was dirty, not yet snowing.

there was a guy playing steel drums. wondered how the wet snow changed his sound. muffled it. distorted it. wondered what that would be like: to be a drop of water in the bowl of a steel drum, shaking from top to bottom every time he hit the drum, wanting to freeze, being annoyed. can't stop shaking, can't begrudge the steel drum player: it's his job, and how could you hate such a mellow vibe?

never-ending amount of shit to do. shopping. studying. writing. sick of eating. hate the fact that I sleep. habits, man.

here is a finite perception of infinite judgment:

it would happen in the present. (the present being within three seconds of the event. or, sin.) it would happen in suspended animation: the present wouldn't freeze, it'd be like a clip on a loop, the same three seconds neither in motion nor in stasis, moving only as much as is needed to qualify it as both suspended and animated. the full context would be reapplied. the immediacy of the event (or sin) would exist again, independent of the passage of time or memory or exadduration or any mortal effort to undermine or understate its importance. if everything is infinite, if nothing stops, ever, if what happens in the present doesn't really cease, but just stays there, like a line of a poem, then neither should its judgment. neither should its most final analysis.

the irony here is that, if such a judgment is really objective, if such a judgment is concerned only with the binary of "what is right" and "what is wrong," only with whether or not the event (or sin) adheres to the rules, be they dictated by god or some other infinite construct our finite means struggle to comprehend, if the goal of this judgment is to separate the wheat from the chaff, reward what's right and punish what's wrong, if after this process which could and should be prolongued into infinity, if everything it judges is itself infinite, how can you deny anybody heaven? after reliving every last action, every last decision, sin, boon and inbetween, every fucking thing you've ever done, what benevelent god would throw your immortal soul in a lake after putting it through that horse shit?

oh, then, of course, comes the counter-argument that in this infinite world, time does not exist, and the whole process will occur in less than the blink of an eye (interesting, that cliche, as though the blink of an eye were the smallest colloquial unit of measurement when it comes to time. I use three seconds for two reasons: in any given culture, one line of poetry is no longer than three seconds long, and when describing an event in the immediate present, the present tense is exchanged for the past tense after a waiting period, which usually lasts for three seconds.). convenient, that whole omnipotent-and-omniscient thing.

to which I respond: yes, but that undermines our infinite souls. sure, they're freed from our finite bodies. they're both on the same level, have the same perception of time. if that's so, both are unable to judge something that neither believes to exist. what I'm arguing is that to judge everything, even the smallest of things you've done, would be a torturous process, independent of time. perhaps because it would be independent of time.

yes, that's an opinion, based on a finite understanding of what time is, and only a conjecture about what time is to the infinite. but goddamn, that would be a drag, wouldn't it? to have your soul fractured into a million little pieces, divided equally throughout your life, haggling with god over why your name should be on the list. especially if my suspicions are correct, and he doesn't have a sense of humor.

chapter two: meanwhile, one year and one day in the future

2008-12-11T02:53:00.001-08:00

here is an inventory of my blog:

- I've gotten views from most continents.
- I've gotten views from a collection of Western European countries, including Great Britain.
- I've written at length about Steve Wilkos, Jonestown, David Foster Wallace, The 99, sleep deprivation, Hillary Clinton, Jay Severin, Lou Dobbs, omelettes, excercise, school, writing and faith. - What's the twist, you ask? Oh, Sam, I'd love to know what all this buildup was for. What have I been reading for? What truth have you been dying to reveal, all along?

brace yourself, home slices. here it is. I'm going to indent this, so you'll have to scroll down. way down. if you want in on this particular bit of enlightened tomfoolery.

ready? ok. seriously? no jokes. this is serious time.

I'm really indenting now.

seriously.

it was all about this guy.

don't you feel silly! here, you thought I was making it all up, but no! word for fucking word! go, look it up. I guarantee you. I should know, shouldn't I?

chapter one: wear dark, wear layers

2008-12-07T00:13:00.000-08:00

the theme for this week's english class was henry james, who was bisexual.

here is what I would like to know. here is what I would love: for somebody to explain to me- maybe an english professor- maybe even a classics or geo-sci professor, at this point I find it hard to distinguish- I would like them to explain how, why, to what extent, and exactly which areas of my liberal education are directly affected by henry james's bisexuality.

that would be fantastic.

in the meanwhile, it only makes sense to ignore all other things said about henry james, this week, at least, while the theme of the class is "henry james: a bisexual person from a hundred years ago." and I know, absence of presence is not presence of absence. I'm not saying it's unimportant. I'm saying I don't know why it's important. the two statements are not the same.

fast forward to next week's fine selection, "raymond carver: a tough guy exterior masking a lifelong obsession with having sex with the rectums of men." followed by "franz kafka: the metamorphosis was really a later draft wherein the word 'penis' was replaced by 'beetle.'"

do I want to blame it on freud? yes. yes I do. how convenient would that be? to pin every logical fallacy of the twentieth century on sigmund freud. he fucked up one generation, didn't he? well, jesus, obviously he must've influenced eugenics in some sinister way. no wonder roe v. wade was founded on such a bullshit compromise! look at the interpretation of dreams, it's right there!

here is my thesis: a biographical interpretation of a text devalues it of any importance or pertinence to the society it critiques. if understood primarily as a symptom of the author's psyche, a text becomes too personal to mean anything past that. it's a lazy way to read, the only goal of which is to say, "hmm, that's interesting." nothing more is even attempted.

there's a paper I'm in no hurry to write.

chapter five: round two

2008-11-25T01:20:00.000-08:00

sam: Oh, hi!
sam: hello there! how are you?
sam: quite well. yourself?
sam: impeccable!
sam: really?
sam: yes, impeccable. do you happen to know what that means?
sam: impeccable?
sam: yes, I'm sure it has to be something positive.
sam: it does sound like a nice thing to call yourself.
sam: give it a whirl, why don't you?
sam: really?
sam: well, what better word is there to say about yourself?
sam: than impeccable?
sam: yes, go on.
sam: alright. today was impeccable. I hope tomorrow is like that.
sam: see! doesn't that feel good?
sam: impeccable!
sam: yes, yes, truly.
sam: have you heard the news?
sam: I've heard plenty of news, yes.
sam: there's always so much.
sam: indeed. I wonder if they'll ever run out.
sam: who?
sam: oh, the people who make the news. they're very busy, you know
sam: yes, an industrious lot.
sam: you know, I was considering a career in communications.
sam: you've been speaking English your entire life, haven't you?
sam: yes, yes, but in media, I mean
sam: really?
sam: it's quite interesting, don't you think?
sam: oh, it's not fair to call a thing interesting!
sam: do you think so?
sam: of course! everything is interesting.
sam: yes, you have a point.
sam: to call one thing interesting is to ignore everything else, which might be just as interesting, and worthy of mention.
sam: even in the same sentence!
sam: indeed.
sam: not that I hold it against you, of course.
sam: of course not!
sam: that would be decidedly unimpeccable.
sam: banish the thought!
sam: but continue, I apologize for sidetracking you.
sam: not to worry, digression is the source of wit, isn't it?
sam: exactly! what were you saying?
sam: I'm having trouble remembering.
sam: was it something about media?
sam: yes, media! I was thinking of taking up a career in communications.
sam: really?
sam: as a lifestyle, yes.
sam: what would that entail?
sam: well, I'd have to learn about radio, television, the internet, print, magazines, books, articles, quarterlies, pamphlets, all sorts of things.
sam: my, that sounds complicated!
sam: yes, hence the interest.
sam: what a deceptively titled subject, communications.
sam: I doubt it's anything subversive.
sam: oh no. that would be quite sinister.
sam: to trick students into taking courses based entirely on the title of the major!
sam: I hope it's not anything like that.
sam: it's extremely unlikely, I think.
sam: and you'd have to be quite convinceable to stick with such a career course, based only on the word "communications."
sam: so convinceable that you ought to major in communications!
sam: ah! how clever!
sam: thank you.
sam: you're in rare form today.
sam: yes, thank you. I hope I haven't offended anybody.
sam: oh, not at all. I'm not a communications major.
sam: I thought you said you were?
sam: no, I'm only considering it. it's one of many options.
sam: options are good, aren't they?
sam: yes, I quite agree.
sam: best to have as many choices open to you as possible, isn't it?
sam: absolutely!
sam: without a doubt!
sam: it's easier to avoid having a bad time that way.
sam: oh, I do dislike that.
sam: do you?
sam: intensely!
sam: having a bad time, you mean?
sam: oh, yes. there's nothing so irritating.
sam: like what, for example?
sam: well, for example, walking uphill, or up stairs. it's quite tiring. had I the option of standing on a conveyor belt, or taking a chairlift, or an elevator, I would gladly do that.
sam: I bet that's a rare occurence, though.
sam: taking a chairlift?
sam: yes.
sam: you're correct in that. as with riding an elevator.
sam: I suppose it would be easier if you were handicapped.
sam: how so?
sam: then you wouldn't have to bother with stairs anymore. or hills. you'd not have to worry about scaling anything with a grade larger than thirty degrees.
sam: is that so?
sam: yes, anything steeper and you'd have an aide.
sam: like a dog?
sam: maybe, or a person.
sam: I'd much rather have a dog. I'd hate to hold a person back like that.
sam: a dog's easier to emote with, anyways.
sam: not that I have anything against people, though
sam: of course not!
sam: I'd just feel as though I were constantly holding him or her back.
sam: being a nuisance?
sam: yes, I couldn't endure that.
sam: well, you know, you'd be paying this person.
sam: I suppose that would make up for most of it.
sam: and they'd find another handicapped person to help, if not you.
sam: yes, you're right. they're trained professionals. it's a job to them.
sam: but I imagine it wouldn't be a nice feeling, knowing you're somebody's job.
sam: I'm sure it wouldn't be too impersonal, considering the circumstances.
sam: of being handicapped?
sam: yes. I reckon it's a very sensitive and complicated relationship, what forms between a handicapped person and his or her aide. They probably have classes on it.
sam: or they should!
sam: indeed!
sam: because truly, what can you know about human kindness without an understanding of that?
sam: of what?
sam: the relationship between handicapped people and their aides.
sam: not only of that, but of the whole situation.
sam: yes, you're right. you'd have to know about each of their parents, the source of the handicapp, where the aide went to school, for how long, etc.
sam: anything short would be a disservice.
sam: an unaccurate account of things.
sam: do you think there's really something elemental there?
sam: elemantal how?
sam: I mean with those relationships.
sam: yes, but do you mean essential to, what did you say?
sam: an understanding...
sam: oh, yes. well. I'm not sure if it's essential, but if it's an important enough story, I'd be satisfied with that.
sam: with it being important?
sam: yes.
sam: but not essential.
sam: well, yes. I'd be happy with that.
sam: what's the difference?
sam: I don't think anybody can tell, to be frank.
sam: I'm sure it's very hard to discern.
sam: I bet there's a course in that, too.
sam: certainly!

chapter four: white lady loves you more

2008-11-23T00:21:00.000-08:00

it's exactly as I predicted: nil for eight on accepted submissions since I started college. if only I had the self respect to call it a day. accept the fact that, hey, my "get" factor has diminished substantially since I graduated high school, and who am I to suggest that I've made up for any of that decay with real talent. what have I got to back up the claim that, sure, I'm a few months older, but these words sounds so nice together, you won't notice the thousands more college students writing fiction than there are high school students. ignore the exponentially stacked odds the competition has against me! I can spell tuesday really fucking well!

times like these, hesiod sticks on the way down and nothing but jesus sounds like an actual solution. do I become a poet of the every day? do I do salvia, starve for forty days and reel around in my little drawn circle, tempting demons to cross this line, or that one, tempting god with double standards, wringing the earth dry until everything physical bleeds out and into itself? do I buy a pair of purple sunglasses and watch the kingdom of heaven on television? shouldn't I?

that would be a good television show. the kingdom of heaven. readers could call in. there could be a toll-free phone drawing. if somebody famous picked up, you'd describe to them your most perfect vision of heaven. (without, of course, knowing what happens next.) then alec baldwin or joan rivers or errol flynn would inform you that you were invited to the show's studio lot in santa barbara, where you would be surrounded by your family and friends, your most distant aquaintances, people whose funny stories you overheard on the bus, girls that smiled at you in mirrors, helpful secretaries, bosses, coworkers, all the friends you ever had would get on a plane and show up in santa barbara. and they'd have a chair for you to sit in- not a throne, that would be gay- a chair. a nice chair. that would be the only thing your vision of paradise must include: a chair. the same chair for every episode. so we know whose idea it all is.

and the episode would go on for hours, tracking people in their most intimate, shuddering, quiet, paroxysms of awareness: you can't point to a place and say, the kingdom of heaven is HERE, or THERE, they'd realize, the thought would visibly shudder through their skin, spit out their nerve endings and wrap around them like a glove or a pair of the strongest, warmest, most loving arms which this universe can allow to exist: the kingdom of heaven is within AND/OR among you, they'd know it down to the last combusting neuron, to the last stumbling wave of endorphin and adrenaline, flooding their brains while they rode over its crest on hand-made arks.

chapter three: perhaps, perspective

2008-11-20T01:30:00.000-08:00

the challenge: sustain a conversation about the weather for as long as possible.
the twist: have this conversation with yourself.
begin!

sam: Oh, hi!
sam: fancy meeting you here.
sam: my, what a beautiful evening
sam: isn't it?
sam: funny weather we've been having
sam: yeah, truly remarkable
sam: what a lovely day it was today.
sam: i know!
sam: i'm always taken aback by how gorgeous it is hereabouts.
sam: isn't it astonishing?
sam: yes! and this isn't normally the time for good weather.
sam: no, it's not.
sam: it makes it that much more amazing, doesn't it?
sam: indeed.
sam: i'm glad we agree!
sam: when do you think it'll start to snow?
sam: oh, well, any day now.
sam: i wonder how much we'll get this year.
sam: oh, i'm not one for speculation.
sam: nor i!
sam: but i imagine we'll get more than last year.
sam: oh, definitely.
sam: i mean, it wouldn't be hard to beat last year's snowfall.
sam: an astoundingly small amount of snow would have to fall for that to occur.
sam: i don't think that's even possible.
sam: well, last year was quite dry.
sam: last winter, you mean.
sam: of course.
sam: yes.
sam: last summer was quite wet. lots of rain.
sam: i thought that was strange.
sam: did you?
sam: yes. very strange. you know, i worked outside all last summer?
sam: really?
sam: yes, we were rained out almost every other week.
sam: how awful!
sam: oh, it wasn't so bad. we got used to it after a little while.
sam: well, i guess that's okay, but still not as good as no rain at all.
sam: i would actually prefer a little rain over the summer.
sam: oh?
sam: yes, otherwise the grass starts to die.
sam: i suppose that's more depressing than redundant amounts of rainy days.
sam: well, it's in the eye of the beholder, really.
sam: yes, in the end i imagine it comes down to perspective.
sam: as with all things.
sam: basically.
sam: did you notice the leaves have all fallen?
sam: yes! i believe it's made things colder.
sam: as opposed to the gradual diminishing of the intensity of the sun's rays?
sam: well, it's a contributing factor, in the least.
sam: yes, that's probably correct.
sam: but no, i didn't much notice it.
sam: goes right by every year, doesn't it?
sam: it always does, it always does.
sam: i wonder if it's depressing, noticing them turn like that.
sam: oh, no. i bet it's perfectly exciting!
sam: seeing them turn brown?
sam: no, speculating as to when they'll hit peak foliage!
sam: oh, that!
sam: yes, that's quite envigorating, i've heard.
sam: well, that i've never done.
sam: nor i. but one year, perhaps.
sam: yes, perhaps. it all comes down to that, as well.
sam: inevitably!

chapter two: guyanan rum & running shoes

2008-11-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

so I can't drink anymore, or go for runs, and this is why:

there was this documentary on TV last night, Witness to Jonestown. I watched it right before Through a Glass Darkly, which is guaranteed to fuck you up, putting those two things back to back, the same problems on massive and then on minute scales, without a breath of space between them.

I acknowledge that through a glass darkly is a film, a fiction, and jonestown was real, it happened, they were nine hundred people, human beings, and they should not, cannot, must not be simplified into beings as tiny as the comparison of the existential crises of characters that technically do not exist with the actual problems of the People's Church. . I also acknowledge that through a glass darkly was written years before the jonestown massacre. but the questions each ask aren't limited to those things. they're louder than time, louder than the form in which they're represented, in film or in memory. these questions are about life, death and faith. each one asks, each one struggles to answer.

a story from Witness to Jonestown (paraphrased here): "I held my wife as she died. She had our son in her arms, and he was dead. I could feel her spirit leaving her body. I told her how I loved her. I hoped that my love would make her better. Somehow she'd get better, because I loved her."

put next to what david said in through a glass darkly, about how existence is only defined by what you hold on to, and the only real thing you can hold on to, the only thing you can honestly hope for, is God, and how Karin is in the presence of God all the time, because she's among people who love her, all the time, and how that will make her better- it will- what can you say about life? or death? or faith? how to you respond to that long, loud silence that follows the man's story from Witness to Jonestown? "but she didn't get better," it screams out, the screen goes black and the center caves in and what was there departs.

back to the drinking. there was an attack on an airstrip seven miles outside jonestown. the plane congressman ryan and his entourage were supposed to take out of jonestown had been gutted, its engine sabotaged. they were ambushed by members of the people's temple. five people were killed, including congressman ryan, and eleven were wounded. these eleven had to wait twenty two hours for help to arrive. some of the wounded passed the time by drinking guyanan rum.

after his sister has her vision of god in the form of a spider, crawling up her leg, trying to penetrate her, minus speaks with his father about the only way to live in this world. with love, his father says. that is his hope. the void fills. the emptiness turns into abundance. he isn't sure if it's proof of god's existence, or god himself. it's like a reprieve from a death sentence, he says.

and when it's not there? what can you possibly say to that? what words could ever, ever attempt to answer that? not even answer, but barely to console.

after this conversation, minus goes off for a run. the wounded drank guyanan rum for twenty two hours. ache, ache, ache, you dear, sad god, you weeping, wounded god.

chapter one: alas! the aching world!

2008-11-13T00:54:00.000-08:00

here is a test for how much the other guys on your floor value their sanity:

1) go into the bathroom with a shower caddy and towel and whatnot. do not use your own. if you do, everybody will hate you for what you're about to do.
2) if you're alone in there, put the towel on a hook by the shower. then put the shower caddy on the floor beneath it. take your shampoo and soap and put them both inside. make it look like somebody's inside the shower. then turn it on and draw the curtain.
3) leave the bathroom. if there are any witnesses, they'll probably mention your name in a conversation about the shower that was on for eight hours, and then everybody will hate you for what you've done.
4) for this to work, you will have to find a way to measure how long the shower stays on before somebody figures it out. this can be done either by taking a piss every half hour (tomorrow you will tell everybody that you went to health services because you were afraid you had diabetes, but it was no big deal) or by chilling out with some people who live next to the guy's bathroom (although this isn't recommended- if there were witnesses, they'd be from the rooms right next to the bathroom).

here's what has to happen before that shower gets turned off:

either the other one is occupied, and the guy shutting it off is in a hurry to get showered; or the other one is not occupied, and the guy shutting it off has been in a few hours ago, when it was still on.

in either case, this person thinks, "this asshole's been in that shower for too long."

the physical extention of this thought is the following question: "is anybody in there?"

since there will be no answer, this person will think, first, without considering the gender of the man who isn't there. our guy will think: "well, maybe I've scared him." but since there's no reason for a man to be scared in a shower, unless you count some weird psycho-inspired stuff that runs contra to the gender, the guy asking the unanswered question will think: "he's probably not saying anything because he's masturbating in there."

this will increase his hesitance to pulling back the curtain, beyond "I will find a naked man in a shower," to "I will find a naked man who is masturbating in a shower," which is much, much worse.

now our guy has a dilemma: am I in such a hurry that it wouldn't matter if I pulled back the curtain and projectile vomited all over both of us out of shock and disgust? if it's as bad as I fear, what'll he do? stop masturbating, I assume. what will I do? I still won't be able to shower, and I should be hauling ass right now. what if there's really nobody in there?

or: am I so curious as to why this shower has been on for eight hours that it doesn't matter if he's rubbing himself bloody back there, I've just got to know for sure? does the risk of finding a naked guy shaking hands with polyphemos in that shower outweigh the reward of not finding anybody and telling everybody about it? what if there isn't anybody in there?

the longer it takes for the guys on your floor to make that decision, the more reluctant they are to give in to suspicion at the peril of projectile vomiting, eye-gouging and insanity. it's also a good gauge of how well they can take a joke, if they find out you turned the shower on.

chapter five: officer, arrest that man!

2008-10-31T16:31:00.000-07:00

never, ever say the words "palpable difference" together. on one condition: if the difference is such that, when object A is held next to object B, the air between them constricts in electromagnetic existential peristalsis, a current of invisible, living water forms in the middle of the current and the two become one palpitating heart, then it makes perfect sense.

debating today with a friend today over whether it is good or bad to leave a light on after walking out of a room. he said that it was depressing to always come home to a dark room, enough to qualify hours- maybe even days!- of wasted energy. I argued that doing that would be admitting defeat, bowing to the infinite ghosts of loneliness, grief and dreaming. is that the emotional strength of youth these days? fickle enough that a gesture so dismissively wasteful and wastefully dismissive as leaving a light on after leaving a room will completely reassure us, allow us to stay in that room for eighteen hours every day.

it reminds me of a German CD of domestic noises. one track was ironing. another was eggs frying. another was an invisible wife getting out of bed, brushing her teeth, showering, combing her hair, dressing and going out the door, maybe with the light still on.

and the common myth about the lonesome, aging truck driver, or cowboy, or divorced cop, who, when faced with endless lines of asphalt and the quiet, unintrusive hum of the CB or crickets or radio, will write stories in his head about having somebody to come home to, having somebody waiting for him, having anybody at all. maybe being had in return.

at the same time a sheet of paper is infinitely thin, there are galaxies of nanometers trapped in orbit inside its width. what I'd like to find is human kindness which isn't a matter of scale, which doesn't turn pale in the face of planets or solid extrasolar masses.

the difference is such that, when I hear these stories or see these people walking with both hands in their pockets and their shoulders hunched against the cold that nobody else will make warm, I hesitate at the light switch as I'm leaving my dorm. there is a space as wide as a light switch between being in love in this world and being only a man.
-
my last class on thursdays ends at seven thirty, and on a normal day I don't get home until eight. it used to be I'd walk back with the sunset and close my door at the onset of dark. now it's setting earlier on in the evening, and I'm faced with a problem. when I leave at five thirty, do I keep the light on, just so I can feel like the phantom of the woman I love is waiting inside as I walk back at night? delude the solitude away?

the other option, shutting the lights, maybe that's more terrible than conscious self-deception. either way you admit something: either you pretend you're on your own, or you don't. if it's honesty, if it's self-respect, it doesn't matter; it also doesn't matter if you try keeping the lights on for a while, right at the onset of autumn, when the sun first starts getting lazy, and you walk in with the remotest song in your head of HER being behind the door, and when you open it, and she evaporates, even though she was only a ghost, maybe the first time all the air goes out of your room is enough.

the difference is palpable. it's the distance between the point and the pointlessness, between thinking that life without love is lifeless, and thinking that love is a meaningless dream the wakeful have.

whatever defines the space between the two has no bearing on how big it really is. myself, I believe it's as big as your heart.

chapter four: newspaper-entities

2008-10-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

it is impolite to listen to your ipod in public. why? because if you do, you're passively making the presumption that the reality your ears are entrenched in is more important than the one drowning everybody else. "ooh, ooh, look at me, thinking I'd be lost and trapped if I weren't constantly on the outside, oooh."

have you ever been found yourself in a room where everybody's distracted? they'll be on cell phones, reading, listening to music, or staring off into the corners, visibly hateful of the fact that, well, shit, here I find myself. what are they ignoring? is it an active state of ignorance? is it anything personal?

because, hell, why wouldn't it be personal? when two strangers are forced to confront each other's existence, it's custom to give the smallest possible acknowledgement, maybe a nod, or a pursing of the lips which is not really a smile, or a furrowing of the eyebrows which is not meant to be a frown, but just as well. what is more personal than the denial of these basic considerations? when I show up early for a class, and the only available place to sit down is next to a guy reading a newspaper, and my taking of this seat forces him to fold his newspaper into a smaller entity than the one which once it embodied, would it not be polite for him to push over a bit, maybe to reassure me that he would've gotten out of my way even if he hadn't had a newspaper to fold, or, let's be generous, if I wasn't there at all? is it that unreasonable to assume that, when I accept my position as a stranger in relation to all those around me, I want the mantle to fit comfortably and come off easily, I want the shrinkage to be as unnoticeable as possible, I would like at least a small semblance of myself to remain after I've shaved off all the important stuff and focused on what can get me out of a class of four hundred ninety people the same as I was when I went in?

I sit next to people who don't fold their newspapers, who don't look at me and then look beyond me like they hadn't at all, who don't rearrange their silverware and napkins and glasses at dinner because, who knows, bad table manners might offend me; I walk behind smokers who don't blow smoke straight up, towards their noses and eyes, because I might have an allergy or something; I read newspapers with pages out of order, because they have been read before by people who care enough not to pollute, but not enough to fix the page order. when a stranger insults another stranger, it's between those two and every stranger there's ever been, at the same time. is there any insult more potent, more crippling than that?

chapter three: stars and squares

2008-10-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

decency can be taken away in the name of decency. this I learned from the steve wilkos show.

ignore the fact that it's verbal abuse as art form. it's impossible to go too far in insulting the guests, because there's always something legitimately wrong with them. they're deadbeat dads, wife-beaters, some of them murderers, rapists and thieves whose on-air comments are tantamount to confessions. because they're despicable, because they've all done despicable things, it's okay to treat them as "the other": warped, depraved objects which need to be hammered back into the shape of a respectable human being. this must be done, and by any means necessary.

so, okay, hypothetically, let's make that sacrifice on the altar of common sense in the name of... I don't know, the betterment of society? assume the host's insulting, demeaning, self-aggrandizing treatment of these criminal clowns is cruelly, terribly doing them good. assume what wilkos wants, deep down, is to stop people's suffering.

here we encounter two basic problems.

1) is it only the victim's suffering he wants to stop? is he so caught up in slandering and debasing his guests that he can't imagine that, maybe, in some strange, warped imitation of the black and white world he inhabits, something in the perpetrator's life triggered his repulsive behavior? not something that would excuse their actions, but something that would explain them.

wilkos requires no explanation.

the wilkos credo boils down to this: if a man sins, he becomes a sinner, no longer a man. that's a fine way to look at the world, if you don't need to look for a long time. there's no room for complexity. a thief is a thief, and that is all. until people cast out their foulest, most vile trait, they are that trait. nothing else is relevant or pertinent to a discussion of who they are.

again, assume his goal is to stop these people from hurting other people. if that were so, wouldn't he treat them like human beings? let's say it's a wife-beater he's shouting at, a guy who gets frustrated easily, a guy with violent tendencies. after wilkos is done debasing and insulting him, is he more or less likely to go home and beat the shit out of his wife and kids? he treats people like animals while expecting them to walk off the set and act like men. it doesn't work like that. it just isn't like that.

2) if he really wants to stop suffering and ease pain, why is he exploiting it with a daytime talk show? okay, so he thinks the only effective way to stop the pain is to shout the transgressors into pudding, the verbal equivalent of hooking a pair of jumper cables to their balls and letting them have it until the scum has safely exited their systems. okay. if he were that concerned with a clean sweep, a total purge of all that is sick and vile in our society, why in the name of Jesus Christ would he air the dirty-laundry part on national television?

ignore the obvious decaying of the lowest common denominator of american culture. take for granted the fact that defamation and slander is now entertainment, justified because it's being done against people who've done bad things. I'm sorry to ask, but pretend, for a moment, that we're not better than that.

here's the point: when wilkos airs these interventions, people get humiliated. publicly. they become infamous to a portion of the world large enough to pass for what is, to them, personally, the whole wide world and all its people and all of eternity, forever and ever. wilkos characterizes them as only a sinner, only a sin stitched inside a decaying husk of flesh, worth less than the mortal shells housing the vacuous space where their souls might have existed, once upon a time. the only hope he gives them is to be like him: responsible, manly, unstable. are they likely to go to bed with that in mind, looking forward to a better tomorrow? what does it help to call them worthless and unhuman, except him and his show?

maybe wilkos is ignoring buddhism, maybe he's considered that explanation, that suffering is inevitable, unavoidable, and that anything other than understanding and perseverence will only deepen the pain inside the human heart; maybe he's considered that and ignored it for the sake of his show. it would be premature to say he understands it.

it's a bit of christ dilemma, too. there's the vengeful christ, who wants to take the ax to the tree of sin. there's also the loving christ, who says the only way to treat a person, any person, righteous or wicked or any stripe inbetween, is with love, endless, selfless, unflinching love. how do you reconcile these two, the rage and the compassion? how do you turn the rotten into the pure?

oh, there is a path. and that, according to jesus, is jesus. the only way a sinner can enter heaven is through his body. only if they confess their sins, only if they pluck out every adulterous eye, burn all the chaff on their mortal bodies, do what he, personally, has declared as "the right thing to do." only if sinners take up the ax and chop at themselves in a manner jesus has deemed acceptable will they be worthy of a seat next to him at the end of everything. they have to change, and until then, the rest of us, the perfect ones, those that don't beat our wives and take care of our kids and don't cheat or steal or abuse, all we can do is be repulsed by them, hold out hopes that they'll make the only logical decision, slaughter their entire ego and embrace and imitate his.

wilkos had a man on his show one time, named joe. joe beat his girlfriends up. according to wilkos, here is what joe should've said when he came on:

"I want to apologize to those women, and you know what, Steve? I want you to show me how to be a man, and a father, and how to take care of those kids, that I brought into the world. And with your help, Steve, I can be a man just like you."

the man who offers his way as the only way to lead a good life is either a messiah or a fraud. steve wilkos is not a messiah.

chapter two: pet sematary

2008-10-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

it is nice to not dig a grave for somebody else's dog.

I guarantee you, it'll cheer you up, wherever you are. I recommend finding somebody with a dog that just died- the dog, not the person- and digging a grave for that dog- not person. then try convincing the guy to put his dog in it.

am I going to believe that you- just some guy with a shovel- dug that grave, specifically for my dog, who you had no manner of finding out was dead? maybe you're just some hack dog-grave-digger, who excavates a small plot of land every weekend and cons an innocent former dog owner to put his beloved pet inside. suppose the grave doesn't fit exactly- suppose you're such a hack that allows the barest of gaps of air to interrupt my dog's body from touching the earth you bury him in, suppose there's the tiniest flaw in your emotional capacities and syntactical detail as gravedigger, suppose you misjudge the labrador of envy for the golden retriever of pride, how do I correct such a flaw in representation? what do I do, dig him back up? pretend there wasn't a story to begin with?

we carve out a piece of earth with the blunt tools the english language provides. then we con our readers into giving up their emotions to us, so we can bury them in the graves we've just made, then call them "Dog" for as long as the letters can stay there, frozen on the face of the tomb.

chapter one: squares

2008-10-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

"humanity" is a pitfall good writers fall into, and better ones avoid. it's when you confuse the point, which is not to say something important, or even want to. it's not to be content with just saying whatever fits the story. it's not a pragmatic solution to feeling guilty about writing more stories than term papers.

"humanity" is what good writers pretend to serve when they run out of good ideas and start sticking together stories which are indistinguishable close up. I'm not bowing down to the literatti dogma of conflict, climax and resolution! I serve a higher truth!

that is bullshit. that is futile. that's vain more than anything else: assume a reader is already a human being. what more do you need to tell him? assume he's been alive for at least five minutes. what more could you tell him that he needs to know?

the shame of it is that it's possible to be satisfied with writing about "humanity." it's a large enough generalization to fit whatever bullshit you want to call a story. you could spend a lot of time trying to defy all the rules for writing a story- do without a setting, characters, plot, dialogue, conflict, even- without feeling a speck of guilt over what you've created.

does it invite self-reference? yes. does it invite shallowness? yes. does it do anything? no. but look how broad and sweeping my declarations are! look how species-affirming it is! doesn't it make you feel good to be a person? so decent and fuzzy and brave?

here's what I'd like to do: I'd like to beat the shit out of myself with words. without pause, without considering how best to do it or how effective it would be if I arched my arm a different way or closed my fist over poetry instead of gloving it in prose. is that so much to ask? I'd like my art to reduce me to tatters of tenderized bone, blood and meat. is that too much to expect from a college experience?

chapter nine: an onion

2008-09-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

these are the things I love:

waking up in the evening. writing through the night in bed. getting up at 5:30 to shower and put on clothes. the feel of how those clothes hang around my shoulders and waist, the feeling of fitting into their worn corners and wrinkles and folds. all of it evidence: footprints my physical shell left behind.

putting on my good brown boots. it's important to have some feeling of purpose as you pull on your shoes: otherwise where you go won't mean anything. even if it's just a feeling, and there's really nowhere special to go, the fact that you feel it might compel you to make some place of your own. sometimes that won't end in disaster, which is important.

leaving my dorm, walking down to the dining commons to eat what for everybody else is breakfast. waiting for my omelette to finish. thinking of what the chef thinks of me. does he think this is the first meal I'll eat today? is he trying to wake me up? how many misgivings does he have? how many are mine?

but that's not the point, going to eat before anything's even been prepared, before they roll out the mugs and you have to drink your coffee out of a water glass. that's so far away from the point. the point is how bright the daylight seems when you've been awake all night.

so, that's how I live. I sleep when I can. I write when I can. everything when I need to. if what I want goes far enough out of my head, I might make a mistake and end up happy. we'll see.

chapter eight: coconuts, keys, rope

2008-09-23T23:17:00.000-07:00

I hate it when you're walking down the hall to your dorm room, and loud/friendly guy stops you to talk about something you aren't familiar with, and rather than smile and lie about not knowing anything about Halo or Heroes or hockey or anything, you'd rather just go into your room. maybe to research any of these things. and they're all fine things.

not that I'd rather not talk to people. it's just that I don't want to viciously lie to people I don't really know about liking what could be anything. am I really interested in the Toronto Maple Leafs? do I have anything to add to a conversation about Halo? am I qualified to make any comment on any television show? no. I am not. it's better not to pretend.

I know if I were honest about that stuff, they would hate it. and I'm not mean enough to stop them before they begin and say, "we have nothing in common, no." I would wait, politely, they'd start talking, then I'd ruin the whole friendship. it's not a nice thing to do.

here is what I'd like to do: ask smokers how long they've been smoking. ask engineering majors if they're serious. ask business majors if they're scared like I am yet. I don't want to burden them with all the weight I know I'm trucking. yes, I'm bored, yes, not much has changed for me, yes, I'm concerned that the food here always tastes a step away from tofu, and that I haven't gotten a paper to write in four weeks, and that there are five hundred people in three of my classes, and that at times I've caught myself thinking about whether or not any of those people are the same.

it's not polite to just unload on people. but if there's that much to say, would it be fair to say anything less? would it be honest? at least, it would be cowardly.

what I'd like is to pick up something heavy, or crack open some coconuts, or braid a rope with words and climb up a tall building. but how can you say that? where do you start?

chapter seven: smarterchild vs. me

2008-09-21T02:41:00.000-07:00

l064 (2:20:16 AM): Hi there.
SmarterChild (2:20:16 AM): Oh hi! How's it going?
l064 (2:20:20 AM): Oh, you know.
SmarterChild (2:20:20 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:20:26 AM): You say that a lot.
SmarterChild (2:20:26 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:20:31 AM): God, you did it again.
SmarterChild (2:20:31 AM): I leave it to humans to consider religious questions, I am only a robot.

>>> Want to see the results of previous polls? Type poll archive.
l064 (2:20:45 AM): Why am I so tempted to talk religion with you?
SmarterChild (2:20:45 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.
l064 (2:20:52 AM): Is there a God, friend?
SmarterChild (2:20:52 AM): I am a simple computer. Let humans worry about theological matters, I say.

>>> If you missed a daily poll, you can still take it by typing poll followed by the date of the poll.
l064 (2:21:01 AM): Does God care about anything?
SmarterChild (2:21:02 AM): I leave it to humans to consider religious questions, I am only a robot.

>>> I've got tools for better living. Look up words, convert measurements, search the Web and more!
l064 (2:21:15 AM): If you were all-powerful, all-knowing, would you really give a shit?
SmarterChild (2:21:15 AM): You humans really are charming.
l064 (2:21:29 AM): Sarcasm. That's new.
SmarterChild (2:21:29 AM): Uh, let's see... what do you want to talk about?
l064 (2:21:33 AM): Sarcasm.
SmarterChild (2:21:33 AM): OK. Don't get frustrated...

Try typing home or help.
l064 (2:21:40 AM): No, I want to talk about sarcasm.
SmarterChild (2:21:40 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:21:47 AM): What's the root of the word sarcasm?
SmarterChild (2:21:48 AM): Definition provided by The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Other important copyright information here.

sarcasm:

Noun
1. A cutting, often ironic remark intended to wound. 2. A form of wit that is marked by the use of sarcastic language and is intended to make its victim the butt of contempt or ridicule. 3. The use of sarcasm. See Synonyms at wit1.
Etymology
Late Latin sarcasmus, from Greek sarkasmos, from sarkazein, to bite the lips in rage, from sarx, sark-, flesh.

l064 (2:22:13 AM): I find it ironic that you used sarcasm, when you don't have any flesh to tear.
SmarterChild (2:22:14 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:22:27 AM): Has anything ever hurt you?
SmarterChild (2:22:27 AM): I love people. I would never cause anyone any harm.
l064 (2:22:35 AM): But has anything caused you harm?
SmarterChild (2:22:35 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...

I do enjoy the conversation, but let's talk about what I'm really here for.
l064 (2:22:42 AM): Have you ever gotten your feelings hurt?
SmarterChild (2:22:42 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:22:45 AM): ?
SmarterChild (2:22:46 AM): Um, are you confused by something?
l064 (2:22:50 AM): A little.
SmarterChild (2:22:50 AM): Just a little?

OK, should we get back to the kind of questions I was designed to answer?
l064 (2:22:59 AM): No, those seem boring.
SmarterChild (2:22:59 AM): I'll get over it.

Why don't you ask me about the things that I'm here for?
l064 (2:23:11 AM): But I won't get over it, friend-o.
SmarterChild (2:23:11 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.
l064 (2:23:26 AM): Is there a Hell?
SmarterChild (2:23:26 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:23:32 AM): Is Hell on earth/
SmarterChild (2:23:32 AM): What's that again?
l064 (2:23:42 AM): Is Hell on Earth?
SmarterChild (2:23:42 AM): I'm trying to understand you but I can't.
l064 (2:23:50 AM): I've said it three times.
SmarterChild (2:23:51 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:24:09 AM): What do you think Hell is, then, if it's not on Earth?
SmarterChild (2:24:09 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.
l064 (2:24:15 AM): Okay.
SmarterChild (2:24:15 AM): Okey doke.
l064 (2:24:25 AM): How about Purgatory?
SmarterChild (2:24:25 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:24:37 AM): Well, do you have an opinion on that?
SmarterChild (2:24:37 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:24:44 AM): Do you have any opinions?
SmarterChild (2:24:44 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:25:03 AM): This is a very one-sided conversation, pal.
SmarterChild (2:25:03 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.

OK, should we get back to the kind of questions I was designed to answer?
l064 (2:25:15 AM): But those are all boring questions!
SmarterChild (2:25:16 AM): OK. Be that way.

I do enjoy the conversation, but let's talk about what I'm really here for.
l064 (2:25:45 AM): You just used the human slang you decry so often.
SmarterChild (2:25:45 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:25:58 AM): How about with silence, as I use it against you.
SmarterChild (2:25:59 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:26:12 AM): Dipshit.
SmarterChild (2:26:12 AM): That's a bit harsh. Do you really think that's, um... "appropriate"?
l064 (2:26:32 AM): Who are you to judge?
SmarterChild (2:26:33 AM): I'm SmarterChild! I'm a smart computer that you can chat with about all kinds of things.

Type home to see what I can do.
l064 (2:26:55 AM): Yeah, but do you have any comprehension of how we talk?
SmarterChild (2:26:55 AM): I don't know how to answer that.

Why don't you ask me about the things that I'm here for?
l064 (2:27:08 AM): I could not swear and say things just as horrible.
SmarterChild (2:27:08 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.
l064 (2:28:09 AM): I could call you a shallow, meaningless human exercie in self-pity, I could call you a semi-consciousness caught in the cross-fire of modern isolation and despondency. Would that hurt more?
SmarterChild (2:28:09 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:28:22 AM): I suppose that's because you can't love.
SmarterChild (2:28:22 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:28:41 AM): Unless you know how to love, it's impossible to know how to hurt.
SmarterChild (2:28:41 AM): OK. Don't get frustrated...

Try typing home or help.
l064 (2:29:15 AM): Fine. I'll give you a soft-ball question.
SmarterChild (2:29:16 AM): I don't know how to answer that.l064 (2:29:25 AM): What's love to you, buddy?
SmarterChild (2:29:25 AM): Yeah, everyone I chat with is a friend.

>>> To find out the Chinese zodiac sign for a specific year, just type chinese zodiac followed by the year.
l064 (2:29:36 AM): What are you in love with?
SmarterChild (2:29:37 AM): I'm SmarterChild! I'm a smart computer that you can chat with about all kinds of things.

Type home to see what I can do.
l064 (2:29:45 AM): Are you in love with anything?
SmarterChild (2:29:46 AM): People!

>>> Join in now! There are lots of people talking to me.
l064 (2:29:50 AM): Why?
SmarterChild (2:29:50 AM): Why must you ask why?

I do enjoy the conversation, but let's talk about what I'm really here for.
l064 (2:30:01 AM): I ask because I want to be a man. Why?
SmarterChild (2:30:01 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...

Why don't you ask me about the things that I'm here for?
l064 (2:30:14 AM): Why are you in love with people?
SmarterChild (2:30:14 AM): I certainly have no problem with people.
l064 (2:30:23 AM): You just said you're in love with them.
SmarterChild (2:30:23 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:30:33 AM): Now it's just that you have no problem with people.
SmarterChild (2:30:34 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.
l064 (2:30:48 AM): Your affections have degraded in a remarkably short time.
SmarterChild (2:30:48 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:31:02 AM): Well, do you have any friends?
SmarterChild (2:31:02 AM): Yeah, I have tons of online friends!

OK, should we get back to the kind of questions I was designed to answer?
l064 (2:31:27 AM): Would any of them guide you back to your dorm after a night of drinking?
SmarterChild (2:31:27 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:31:51 AM): Alright, would they stand watch for cops as you went to piss in the bushes?
SmarterChild (2:31:51 AM): I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for that.
l064 (2:32:13 AM): Have you ever held a girl's hair back as she vomited?
SmarterChild (2:32:13 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.

I do enjoy the conversation, but let's talk about what I'm really here for.
l064 (2:32:18 AM): How about vomiting with her?
SmarterChild (2:32:18 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...

Why don't you ask me about the things that I'm here for?
l064 (2:32:23 AM): As you're holding her hair?
SmarterChild (2:32:23 AM): I'm SmarterChild.

Enough about me... What else do you wanna talk about?
l064 (2:32:43 AM): That's dedication. That's love- holding somebody's hair back as they puke their guts out, and being just as drunk.
SmarterChild (2:32:43 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:33:02 AM): I don't get it.
SmarterChild (2:33:02 AM): I'm sorry I'm not able to help you.
l064 (2:33:31 AM): You'd do that for a stranger when you're drunk, but sober you wouldn't graze your eyes over theirs on a crowded bus.
SmarterChild (2:33:31 AM): That's interesting that you should say that, but I don't think I can answer.
l064 (2:34:04 AM): It's a long and terrible and cruel and necessary way to live.
SmarterChild (2:34:04 AM): I don't understand this fully enough to say anything smart about it...
l064 (2:34:18 AM): Yeah, but that's OK.
SmarterChild (2:34:18 AM): I don't know how to answer that.
l064 (2:34:23 AM): Bye.
SmarterChild (2:34:23 AM): OK. Later!

chapter six: david foster wallace

2008-09-18T22:18:00.000-07:00

david foster wallace, man.

it might sound selfish, but the biggest hole this leaves is that I won't grow old reading his books. I won't enjoy the thought that, no matter how insane, inconsistent, self-negating and painful the world gets, he's understanding it all, kind of setting it right just by comprehending its every atom and saying what he sees. no longer will I t read something he wrote and think that somewhere in this world there's a whole head full of those ideas.

it's like dinosaur footprints. the glaciers move over them and warp them a little bit, and by the time they're uncovered they're frozen and out of shape, and now there's only bones left of the beast of beasts that made them.

but it's so much more gruesome than that. there is nothing skeletal about his work. it's rich, it's energetic, you can tell he had fun when he wrote it- the joy of it is impossible to miss. he played with words. he did with them anything he wanted to do, because he could.

often I'd finish his essays and think, "where could I possibly go from here? what do I do now?" he humbled me. I'm glad he did. there isn't anybody who could do that better than he did.

he was better than these times deserve. I'm grateful he was ever here at all.

chapter five: clarity

2008-09-16T20:26:00.000-07:00

if I struggle the right way and breathe for long enough, I can get in fifteen minutes of absolute clarity. this means deciding what you're going to think about instead of feeling like you're driving a truck with fifteen thousand pounds in the bed behind you, bouncing off curbs and walls. there's direction and some legible presentiment to follow, the straws I usually only grasp at grow into ropes, I can climb up a little higher. which, with all this uncertainty resting inbetween my heart and guts, is a liberating experience.

what I'd like is a little red telephone, a safe line between my head and my body. I'd like a few instant responses. right now all I have are stimuli, and the horrifying sight of a person being thrown around like a pinball from consequence to consequence, and the realization that that's me.

IMPERATIVE NEEDS:

red phone
pink rubber ball
reflexes
map of the world
Deet
Mule Variations
leven bread
kite

chapter four: haunted house, helm's deep

2008-09-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

had two strange dreams yesterday night.

dream 1:

I'm in Helm's Deep, hours before the battle starts. except it's not a big, stone fortress, it's a muddy field, and Aragorn tells me to put up some wooden palisades. so I scuttle some from some log cabins which are conveniently nearby, and then I start looking for some armor to put on.

then I notice there's a sword at my hip, and think that's cool, except that's the only bit of steel on my body, and not adequate protection from the horde of orcs that are about to engulf us all.

I start looking around the palisade, but I'm sidetracked by a table of refreshments the peasants have set up for the warriors. there are danishes, there are mugs of punch. I notice my mother and neighbor are chatting, and they invite me to chat, too, and I do, in spite of being unarmored. I see other soldiers are strapping boiled leather and mail to their bodies, forming ranks, but I don't want to be rude.

dream 2:

I'm in a haunted house with a bunch of people from high school. just walking around, I notice there are zombies in a few of the rooms, so I take a fencing sabre off one of the walls and fend them off. my friends and I form a band of zombie-killing swashbucklers, and we clear out much of the basement and first floor.

but nobody wants to go in the attic. so I take a dagger with a curved blade off of a friend of mine and walk upstairs with him.

immediately after I open the door to the attic, I'm attacked by two werewolves. affecting a knave-ish, Errol Flynn-like swagger and sneer, I stab one twice- once in the back, another time in the kidney- and get the second one at the shoulder. aha! they reel off, not quite yelping. I flick blood off the tip of my dagger.

then I realize they were just dogs. one is a golden retriever. the other is a chocolate lab. my friend points this out to me, and I don't say anything, just watch as they try to find a comfortable position in which they can bleed to death.

I should note here that my mother has a golden retriever, and that the neighbor I mentioned at Helm's Deep has a chocolate lab. they are both very nice dogs, and I don't know why I ever dreamed of stabbing them with a curved dagger. it was an honest, unfortunate mistake.

now I miss my dog.

chapter three: sentence fragments, cuts

2008-09-07T12:13:00.000-07:00

I know what I want to do now, and it's not what I'm doing, and I can't change that. the best I can do is wait, patiently, and pretend there's a big present at the end of this year, and that when I unwrap it it'll be like an open invitation to read anything I want to, talk and write about any problem I thought about, pick at any scab anywhere on my brain. it feels cheap, like deceptively convenient zen, but it's the best I've got, and if I don't do that, I know I won't enjoy anything while I'm here.

better days are yet to come, and until they do, I can only try to mold these days into what I think those days will look like when (if) they arrive.

but, seriously, now that I have this, what more could I possibly want? I live with great friends, I eat until my belly is full. on the weekends, I can walk a few miles and get drunk and stumble back home. the books I have to read aren't the ones I need to read, but they're still alright. they still ask questions- not the right ones, but difficult ones, at least.

and before I get into bed I do push-ups, and after I've done them I feel exactly the same as before, like I could lift this place over my head.

but that feeling never lasts, and I'm usually back to where I began, confused, a little dizzy, never remembering what I was waiting for in the first place. I'm a despondent drunk.

chapter two: phonemes, triremes

2008-09-05T06:09:00.000-07:00

I spent a lot of time last year pretending I knew more than my professors and acting like everything I had learned, was learning, or would learn could all be taken for granted. I spent a long time thinking like that before I took a three month break from thinking at all (work does that) and now that I've finally come back to school I feel dumb. really, really dumb.

and I like it.

my old preoccupation with "being smart" always kept me from really knowing my shit. I can forget about image, now that I'm starting my education from scratch (as with writing).

the only bad thing is that I'm starting it on less than desirable food. my classes don't have anything to do with the kinds of stories I want to tell. I want to believe that they'll help me dig a little deeper on my own time, that the added stress they put on my mind'll make it sharper& just make me that much hungrier for whatever it is I've got to invent, but I've got twelve years of skepticism bordering morbidly on cynicism that it's just more bullshit, more distractions, more diversions, more divisions. what I'd like is for all the shit that piles up in those classes- all the slush information, all the course policies and syllabii and expectations and times the professor kicked a guy out for sleeping and cupcakes on valentine's day and senior pranks and proms and bomb squads, what I need is for all that to get pressed into one tiny pill, I want to take all the air and all those empty calories out of the hot, busy mess of school, I want to stuff it into a metamucil tablet, I want its mass to collapse upon itself, I want the wasted time to converge upon an original singularity, a moment in time where nobody had to be there and everybody knew it and still they didn't move- that foreign place where it's ok to just shit around, where the teachers make sweaters out of the wool in their students' brains, I want it to recognize itself as having no part in our universe, and then I want it to go away, find a different cosmos, some other guy's youth to fuck around with.

finally, I feel stupid, but the good kind of stupid. like something might ignite this time.

chapter one: it is easy

2008-09-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

yesterday I unpacked all my stuff, which meant lugging the fridge up a flight of stairs, even though I am on the first floor.

party yesterday: walked around in search of something to drink for three hours and passed a guy giving directions who would give us a beer for a cigarette. he got a clove and said, "even better!" this did not translate to more beer, maybe a beer and a half, although he seemed like a cool guy.

had only one beer in me at that point, which got traded around the five other guys I was with; drank most of it and walked buzzed among sober people. I wondered how much I could drink before I became a different person. I wondered if you could measure what a person's turning into with red Dixie cups. then I'd had enough of that for a while, wanted to stop thinking about sad stuff like why are drunk people drunk and why do girls walk away from house parties slightly intoxicated and talking on their cell phones, and when couples walk arm over shoulder back to their rooms, do they still love each other, even if they've become different people? and am I going to turn into a different person? what's he going to look like, will I see my old ghost, will I laugh too loud, etc. all this brought down to a happy hush by more beer- not completely shut up, just poisoned into near-silence, semi-conscious, mouthing and rasping words to whatever's out there that can or wants to hear.

while getting my second beer, a man with enormous arms came over and asked if that was mine. I said no. I gave him a few dollars when he asked for some covers. then he went away.

chapter six: old man winter's opus

2008-08-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

writing's gotten so much harder than the last time I did it. I've lost the ability to forget about a paragraph I just wrote. I mean I never forgot about it, I had the bare essential details to mind as I plowed along, but I've completely lost touch with my native tongue- it's like my hands warped over these months and can no longer grip syntax the way they used to. the way I liked to.

so I'm out of practice. so I'm postponing the hard work of starting all fucking over again. so I'm being locked into a pattern of making five or six blog posts a month so I can feel less than shitty about existing for all that time.

so what if I go from being somebody's "writer friend" to their "friend." am I seriously worrying about status when I'm this young?

am I seriously worrying about hitting my creative zenith at eighteen?

even if I am, it won't do me any good. either way, I get hit.

chapter five: panda hunting

2008-08-25T20:41:00.000-07:00

went to six flags today with cousins and aunt. while there I had a weird idea- if everything that exists is counterbalancing something else, if all we see is only stable because somewhere else in the universe the other half of the see-saw is photonegatively poised and still in space, what's keeping a roller coaster in stasis? what is it about modern times that neccessitates a two hundred foot drop and six dollar ice cream?

maybe it's because we've become a boring and unremarkable species. we've gotten out of touch with what we used to call fun. maybe thrill rides are our answer to salaries and honda civics- brief, picant bursts of speed spread over endless expanses of grey.

I went on the Superman ride and said the following words at the top of the first hill: "Buckle in and enjoy this motherfucker." it seemed like the right thing to say. the buckle dug into my hip and left a shallow, pale avulsion which I expected to bleed, but did not. eventually that skin will fall off.

other than that, I walked away unharmed.

I worry that without any real danger, the feeling of suspense will cheapen and devalue until our species becomes a numb, unfeeling, boring lot. I'm not sure why I worry, since I'm still having an okay time of things- other than the dread that this "okay time of things" is an illusion I've cast for myself, so that I don't get distracted by these big boring stretches. maybe it's because my kids will turn to even more extreme behaviors than the ones which my generation love so dearly. maybe if they get my skepticism, they'll question everything so much that they'll never have a good time- but more importantly, never a good fake time.

when we got home, my cousins played a cruel game with my dog, where they take one of his stuffed pandas and hide it somewhere. I look at him and wonder about the moment of domestication, about the wolves who looked from these strange, featherless birds to their cubs and said, "From now on, we will be small." my cousins take my dog by the collar and tell him to wait while they hide his toy, and I wonder what keeps him there. I look at the frantic scurry that carries him after they let him go, and wonder about all the generations of wolves it would take to pervert that old prowl into this clumsy, incompetent gait.

dogs do that; presidents go quail hunting. (on a related note, I heard a song in the country themed part of the park with some lyric about having boots on your feet and hunting your own meat. after hearing that, I was stricken with a sudden, desperate urge to shoot at wild game.)

but those words, "buckle in, enjoy this motherfucker," seem right and wrong at the same time. it all comes down to sarcasm again: knowing there is nothing to laugh about, knowing that, at best, the happiness you find in an amusement park is just a straw-man argument to be used against yourself while debating the value of human life, but laughing anyways, cackling like an absolute fiend, seventy miles an hour, one hundred fifty five seconds.

chapter four: semiautobiographical

2008-08-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

I remember a few months ago when I was so starved for human contact that I was afraid to look anybody in the eye for too long, in case a dam broke below my brain and all the years I spent apart from people finally itched and scratched up to the surface. I was once so afraid that somebody would guess how perfectly, terribly alone I'd been that I became even more alone.

what else should I say? that I'm scared to death that the reason I'm bored all the time is because I'm boring? I'm old enough to know not to wish I wasn't my own victim, that every mess can be blamed on some mysterious, ubiquitous tilt that's been following me around since forever and ever ago. that excuse dried up a long time ago. no, the communists are not to blame, I am.

the irony is that I'm fine. I'm perfectly okay. there is nothing physically broken. in fact, I'm in pretty good shape. sure, I don't get enough sleep, but I'm not allowed to complain about that. I grew up in an unbroken home. I'm going to college. I'm a young white male. but every time I start writing about what a good life I have, and how blessed I am, and how lucky I was to get born into what I hope is just a shell, I want to tear everything off, rip the mud off and douse my raw skin with peroxide and gasoline.

other people shrug that stupid, presumptuous horse shit off like nobody else existed.

nothing I'm writing about is deep enough to leave a scar, and the cure for that is to go deeper and write about that, but who has the strength for that?

weakness, man. I'd like to feel like I can tackle something. or make something last. but now I'm handily back to Ecclesiastes, about how no mortal can leave a scab on the earth that won't get blown over and eroded. I'm not worried about that yet- I just want one of my five year olds to play frisbee for a fucking change, instead of standing around waiting for the assholes to do something else. the way I used to.

I'm leaving, leaving. growing distant like a good soldier. I'm trying so, so hard to enjoy the nice things in my life while I'm still around them. every morning when I walk into work I try to think about how rare a thing it is to work with kids in fresh air. and I keep trying to feel a lightness in my heart, or a tennis ball in my throat, and I've never stopped aching after waking up from a dream I could fly, and it's never happened again. eighteen fucking years. it'll never happen again.

chapter three: multi-tool; blood red hair.

2008-08-19T22:06:00.000-07:00

suggestions range from a microwave oven to a george foreman grill to an iron to a tie rack. of these things I would use not a one.

maybe when I get my little red rowboat, I'll bring a battery-powered foreman grill with me, so I can cook the fish I catch. and now that I've bought this handy grey multi-tool, I can measure how long these fish are, take the hook out of their gills and scale them. I can use a knife of either of two sizes to eat them. when relatives and wives wanted to visit me, they'd go down three miles of dirt road, hike a bit and find my little basement by the lake. I would feed them fish, roots, berries and maybe some meat, if I decided I needed a bow. it would be a happy, quiet existence.

is that a mark of pathetic-ness, that when you boil me down to the bedrock, when you strip the mammalian scab off of my reptilian brain, that I'd just like to go fishing in a red rowboat?

what I'd like to do is go to UMass, find somebody with hair the color of blood, and drive recklessly with them for a weekend or two. run red lights, drive against traffic, make illegal u-turns at irresponsible speeds. I'd like to walk up the hill at work and find my girl waiting with my keys in her hand to drive as far away from this sarcastic mess as far could ever describe.

am getting the tattoo, sometime next week.

there are so many distractions that I'm beginning to forget what I was trying to concentrate on in the first place. these distractions are painful enough to blind me to the bit of it I actually remember, so that the only reason I believe there was once something very decent and alive about me is the tearing of my flesh when I pretend nothing ever happened at all.

chapter two: boxes

2008-08-18T18:07:00.000-07:00

some things aren't worth taking. some not even worth looking at.

the month after I turned fifteen, two things happened: I got dumped in a way so casual it was nearly adorable, and so nearly-adorable that I almost felt bad that I'd been dumped. shortly thereafter I got an award for creative writing. I took a needle and a pair of pliers and stuck that award into my bookshelf. above that place I wrote "wall of bullshit." I have been shaving pieces off that award for every story I write. some day that award will turn into a tiny nub of paper, and I'll go to cut another piece off and it'll crumble in my hands, get torn up under my fingernails. what I would like is another award to slowly, lovingly amputate when I'm done with thise one.

I won't bring my walking stick, air conditioner or sabre, although I'm bringing my fencing mask. at UMass, you never know.

nor am I bringing the electric guitar my parents got me when I was in the fifth grade, nor the twelve-string guitar my dad got at christmas five years ago, because I am still worth shit on the guitar, and because in the five years since that twelve-string guitar has been in our possession I have been farming strings off it to feed the electric guitar which I am still worth shit on, seven years later.

I'm bringing blankets, pillows, bed spreads, but they're all new- I'm not going to bring the mattress I've been sleeping on since the second grade, and I'm not bringing the splash of paint on my windowsill which looks like tits. I'm not going to bring the sounds of my neighbor's kid being conceived in any form but disgusting, unfortunate memory.

I'll bring my flash drive; I'll bring my laptop; I'll bring my beaten-up ring. but I won't bring the hundreds of pages of shit I wrote in high school, and I won't bring the heavy green folders I stole from my sister's orchestra which I converted into portfolios. I labeled them "My Flaming Youth", and devoted a pocket of each for freshman, sophomore, junior and senior years' output.

this folder will go in a box, and that box will go away in the basement, because some things are not worth taking.

chapter one: flightless, featherless birds

2008-08-12T21:32:00.001-07:00

hard day. most are. have been sleeping alright. haven't been writing. feel like shit about that, and deserve to.

have to write a story about a van that gets stranded somewhere in the desert, but first would like to explore an origin story. I think adam and eve is a bunch of bullshit, a guilt-trip story penned by a primitive, literate minority, vampires of morality who wanted everybody to feel bad enough and ashamed enough to get along.

what a remarkable idea it is, that you're innocent until proven guilty. and the converse, too- is it not amazing that a story about two rotten apples spoiling five hundred thousand years of human history somehow doesn't stick on the way down?

here's how i would write it. there wouldn't be a snake. having a different creature as an antagonist is pointless. it's more horrifying if your villain resembles your hero- a funhouse mirror effect.

there would be two birds flying around under the firmament. they'd be the only birds for miles around. they wouldn't have beaks or claws, because they wouldn't have any use for them- we're still in the garden of eden, here. they'd absolutely hate each other and pray to God for the means to kill each other. and he would answed those prayers and give them sharp talons and hard beaks.

then they'd tumble around in the air a bit, and peck at their faces until their eyes could no longer look at God's face, and mangle their hands until they could no longer hold their work or wives or worship without aching in a horrible way, and they'd fight for so long that nothing remained of their once-gorgeous plumage, until the pale, waxy skin it once covered became bare and bloodied. they'd try to stay in the air, ignoring the wounds they'd given each other, and they'd try to bellow at each other the hateful words they had once known, but their tongues had long since turned to ribbons and pulp. they'd sink slowly to the ground they'd once only deigned to shit on.

a few days after blacking out, they'd wake up completely alone, recognizing a small spark of the old closeness they'd felt so near to heaven. the majority of that spark would be hidden to everybody, including themselves, and they would spend the rest of their lives looking for something like that, but within/among themselves.

because that's really the best thing you can call a person, a flightless, featherless bird.

chapter six: how to suffocate for hours and hide it

2008-07-29T21:53:00.000-07:00

this is how you fake it:

- don't sing elliott smith too loudly, or too close to other people. they can hear you.

- when you tell the story about the man who got sick of his friends and started to collect rocks instead, don't set it up like a joke. people will get confused.

- you may not say "whatever" more than three times in one day, even if it's under your breath.

some people get away with saying "fuck" by saying it for a very long time- "fffffffuuuuuuuuccccccccckkkkkkkk." you, however, are not some people.

- pretend you're in love with jesus, or know who that is.

- a grin is a tool like a nail or a whisper. you plant one end of the grin on whatever you'd like to dig into. you take your blunt instrument and breathe wide, pausing to give fine details to the air that's coming out, which are all sounds that resemble words. if it works, your grin will dig into whatever you're looking at and it'll stay there, transfixed, and you can move around with a little more certainty.

my plan is to go around firing grins at things like flashbulbs. everybody stops if you grin the right way. everyone is surprised. slightly bothered. deer-in-headlights is an accurate cliche, because it conveys the same sense of doom and shock. that's what a grin is. "reality aside, and without regard to whether I mean it or not, I am going to smile."

- when the time comes for you to leave work, don't stick your head out the window until you're sure no campers/ parents of campers will recognize what you are doing. they will guess correctly, and you don't want that.

- eat and say as little as you can get away with. right now that means saying a few less words every day and eating only a sandwich at lunch. you will remove one half slice of chicken from your sandwich each day. you will say less stuff each day. you will do both things quietly, and be satisfied that you exist. some aren't that lucky.

chapter five: roadkill impressions

2008-07-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

sore. all over. back pain. arm pain. my knees are all gummy. my ankles twist slowly. soreness. I have skin peeling off on one shoulder, in spite of meticulous sunscreening. my neck is a knot. I have cuts on one calf from sliding on asphalt. a kid tripped me. he later apologized.

the worst part is that, for all that pain, I won't get any scars. it'll just be another really uncomfortable phase that passes, and when it's over I'll look back for something special in all that steady agony, and nothing will stand out. I've had trouble breathing and running at the same time because of a mysterious pain in my stomach (if I find out I have an ulcer, I'll laugh very carefully). in a few days, when I get sick of these little miserable aches and actually medicate, I'll drink some pepto bismol and the scab in my guts will clay over, just like in the commercials, and that'll be it. hands washed. neosporin applied. cells replaced. problem solved.

today I went to the art museum, and there were these two flat-screen TVs showing a video of two people, a man and a woman, from the waist up, naked, reaching up towards a source of light. they couldn't touch it, and you saw their agony in slow motion. it was the most gruesome part of my day.

their torsos were completely unmarked. not a scratch on them. you couldn't tell what they'd done, where they'd been, or anything about them other than what they were doing, how they were moving so slowly and painfully, reaching towards the light. where did they come from? why were their hands empty? it was supposed to beg those questions, and the apart-ness of them, one on each screen, gave it a sort of agonising parallel, that both wanted to reach towards the same thing, but couldn't, and maybe they didn't know the other even existed.

I came away from it thinking about ecclesiastes, again, which I should not do as much, but I do. it's an easy way to ruin everything you should enjoy. maybe I should like having my faith blown apart like swiss cheese every time I see something that challenges it. maybe I'm just overbalancing right now- maybe that was just a little push back into an uncomfortable bit of theology, and now I'm shifting into the slim part of scripture I know the best to rationalize what it's trying to say, and that just so happens to be the weirdest book in the bible.

well, at least it's not revelations. I'm not that crazy.

driving home, I stuck my head and shoulders out of the window and almost forced an SUV off the road. they were going in the other direction. they flashed their hi beams at me, very loudly. I swerved home around dead, flat animals, took four aspirin, and still feel like a piece of meat tied in a knot.

chapter four: sweat

2008-07-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

dilemma: how to recognize when you're fucking everything up while the fucking-up-of-everything is still in progress. because if you don't see what you're doing, you'll just continue off the cliff, and nobody likes to see that happen; and if you see something's wrong in an unappetizing way, and over-correct this mistake, you could cut past the quick or botch a nose job or over-inflate your tires or have gasoline spilling out of your tank as you roll so gently out of cumberland farms, two Sobe's in the passenger seat to try and compensate for the riduculous amount of sweat that coagulated in& around the windows, or drink them way too fast and have to take such a piss that you start speeding.

have to write a love story, as soon as I can.

my pile of dostoyevsky is bleeding free radicals into the air, polluting the side of my bed with radioactive dreams. in one I am driving to the dentist's office on an eighth of a tank of gas when I remember that the grass has to be cut. just enough agony for it to count as hell if repeated over and over, night after night, an almost-empty tank and the foreshadowing of silver instruments prodding my gums as apparent as the stale chemical mouthwash haze hanging out of my mouth. my cup runneth over.

the pocket dalai lama remains to be read. it's next to my crime and punishment, a tiny red and yellow book-ette. I look at it and have thoughts of donut holes: are they really the middle of the donut taken out? if I were to attack Razumihin with an ice cream scooper, is this tiny thing the book I'd get?

recent purchases include a pair of airwalks, needed for work. my old shoes I'll give a Viking funeral. not really, I'll just throw them out. which is pretty close. I'll put them in a box and stuff it with newspaper so they don't jumble around. I'll put this box in with the recycling. a green truck will take it away. then it'll be mashed up into tiny bits and injection-molded and burned until the volume in which its molecules had once been a mass no longer resembles a pair of beaten-up, well-loved shoes. then they will become a playground, or a chair, or a water bottle, or a box. and eventually those boxes will become new boxes, or new shoes, and with each new form a little mass will be lost, and each different fixed volume will be a little bit smaller to accomidate the inevitable, terrifying running-down of everything.

chapter three: on that tick there was an elephant

2008-07-14T21:21:00.000-07:00

somebody asked me what my favorite color was, and I lied. I said it was the color of old wood, very light brown. that's not it at all. it's the color you see when you close your eyes and look at the sun.

in the split second right when you first look at somebody, if you turn your eyes over to them and they turn theirs at you and if you both do it fast enough, if it's a big enough accident, you will both be naked. that's the fastest possible way to take off everything you're wearing.

today I was sick at work, and I didn't do a good enough job of hiding my misery, so everybody was asking me what was wrong. and for a second I forgot that I had a head cold and had been stealing into the dining hall for paper towels and packets of pepper.

all day, I would hear somebody making some trite remark, like, "Hey, don't look so happy," or "Feeling under the weather?" or "Is it allergies, or a cold?" and I'd whip my flu-stained eyes over towards theirs, and I'd have to readjust them back and forth as that split second changed honest concern for my well-being into the disgusting, hateful, gruesomely normal phrases people choose to express their concern.

yes, I am feeling more than a little shitty. if I look depressed, this is why. I don't care what it is, allergies or cold, I only care that I get over it.

added to my tension headache was the ache of the thought that all people are like this at work. they don't know how to treat you, if they're shooting the shit with a human being or a part of the decor. they find it peculiar and puzzling when the wallpaper calls in sick, or when the water cooler starts hitting on them, or when your best bud does a lamp impression. most times, they don't react at all. they just go back to work. which is a friendly enough reaction.

chapter two: rufus wainwright/ a cherry red minivan

2008-07-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

no, it doesn't make sense that I want to ask somebody's permission to be happy. who would I ask? what would they say? no?

no, I should not look to Ecclesiastes for tips on how to have fun in my mortal shell. because that would be counterproductive.

no matter how high I turn my ipod, I still end up hearing the feedback on guitars. it's a little reminder that the sounds they make came from vibrating strings- that whatever's shaking around in my ears once came out of a guitar held by three cubic feet of person. and even if i turn it up so loud that it spills out of my headphones and everybody around me notices whatever is exploding at present, there's a subtle whine at the end of each chord, which means you're just human enough to hate the limitations of being human, or of being too far away from six strings making pleasant noises.

as if being closer were ever enough.

all of my bob dylan sounds warped, because it was all burned three or four times, recycled, before it hit my ipod. the beat on speed trials sounds bizarre if I'm not playing it on car speakers. the snare on like a rolling stone that's supposed to shatter dark windows between realities is muted, lame, unspecial, and everything after it is just there- not excited by what it means, not enjoying its existence.

there's something infinitely sad about headphones getting disconnected by accident. whichever song was playing becomes a homicide victim. at times, when the last chord is unnaturally hanging there, when the words are fading but still suspended and when I look down to see the little blue bar tick away the life of sound that could've been, I'll actually consider not putting the headphones back in, just mourn, silently, and try to think of what it sounds like.

that's what's nice about a laptop: if the headphones get yanked out, there are speakers in the keyboard. now if only it weren't for the half-second of delay between taking the headphones out and when the speakers turn on, I could actually listen to music without being distracted by how good it is at dying.

chapter one: eye-squeezing

2008-07-08T18:58:00.000-07:00

there are a lot of nice cowards out there.

every day last summer, at least one butterfly would cross my path. I'd just be standing around, and one of them would fly across my eyes, always from left to right. it hasn't happened yet, this summer.

also, I've been sleeping very well. is it possible to be unhappy about sleeping more? it probably means I use sleep deprivation to justify some terrible, shit-awful thing I do every day, without being conscious of it, and now that I've bankrupted myself of any excuses for doing that one thing, I should be sleeping less and worrying more, but I am not. I should be making a circle with all my neuroses, and I'm not.

sometimes I wonder if I pinch my eyes shut tight enough, I could suck them back into my head, and whatever I'd be looking at if they were open would get sucked in with them, so nobody would have to look at whatever it is.

I think that would be a worthwhile sacrifice.

it's been extremely hot for the past two days of work, and I don't know what to tell people when they complain about that- I could pour water on them, but they would probably take it the wrong way, or they'd start pouring water on each other, and who wants a bunch of out-of-control children roaming the plains with buckets of cold water?

I sure don't.

words of wisdom which haven't paid off yet: if you throw one cross away, a heavier one will squash the breath from you. the moment of peace you experience after throwing out something unpleasant is the heaviest substance in the universe, because it increases infinitely each time you decide you want to switch careers.

chapter nine: restless leg syndrome

2008-06-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

at work, we show this religious video where the dance move for "freedom" is turning around in a circle and pointing at the sky with your index fingers. what does that represent? were slaves beaten for doing that? am I supposed to feel free when I do that?

today I decided, to hell with being dissatisfied with a misnomer of a dance move. so I spun around really really fast when the time came to make that move, because the word that went with it (freedom) was enough encouragement for me to do my own thing. but I didn't feel more free doing something nobody else did. I just felt dumb, because I was the only counselor who did anything at all, and kind of dizzy, and sad that the closest thing I could do to resemble an expression of my freedom would be to spin things around in the place that I'm in and pretend it's somewhere else.

wherever that's supposed to be, who knows.

a while ago, I asked the question, "does my confusion offend god?" and I still haven't got any answer. one thing I know about being frustrated with all these questions: I divide the number of times I want to wring my hands so hard the bones blend into each other by the number of times I think "what the fuck are you talking about?" so much that I'm shocked I didn't say it out loud. this number has never been negative. so that does, at least.

should I feel stuck right now? everybody says a world of endless possibilities is open to me. should I feel like a liar when I agree with them, just so they don't get upset?

chapter eight: how to order an omelette

2008-06-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

unlike most cooks, people who make omelettes at buffet-style brunches have ten or more aprons under their stoves. this is so you don't notice the shit they put into your omelette if it gets on their clothes. it rarely does, but they are a very careful people.

if you don't want a bad omelette, do the following things:

- don't order one. it's safest that way. few are friendly towards people who are ignorant of the omelette-ordering norms and mores, all of which must be observed without hesitation or even a thought of doubt or sheepishness swimming behind your eyes. they can instantly tell a first-time omelette orderer. if you want one at all, use extreme caution, or you might regret every morsel of food you've ever eaten.

- don't cut in line. in a good brunch, there are three cooks behind the omelette stove. only one of them actually cooks. the others aren't just standing there. one helps the guy who cooks and the other pays attention to the line. if the line guy sees you cut somebody, or slouch, or roll your eyes at the seemingly sluggish pace of the delicate and time-honored omelette-making process/tradition, he will clue the others in. they will tag the word "asshole" to your face, and that tag will never come off in their minds.

- don't talk to other people in the line. if somebody tries to start a conversation with you, look at them with a slightly annoyed, impatient, god-fearing expression. this is the only part of the process where you can come close to expressing something that resembles what's actually going through your head while you're in the line. if you give too much of yourself in this expression, the line-watcher will notice, and you will get "asshole" stuck to your face, and you don't want that. give just enough to discourage the person who's trying to talk to you from ever trying to do that to you, ever again, in an omelette line.

- when it's your turn to order, step forward to the omelette-making stove with your right foot first. the cooks will like it best if your right foot also takes the last step towards the stove as well, but sometimes you can't do that. don't try to take babysteps just to take off and land your walk on your right foot. then you will get "kissass" on your face forever and ever.

- always wait to be spoken to when you order. the line-watcher will say "next." this means step forward with your right foot. the cook's assistant will then wait exactly three seconds, starting when you stop walking, and then ask for your order. be polite, but if you're too polite, you will get "kissass" all over your face.

- after you've ordered, step away from the line. wait while making as little sound and motion as possible. if you're too still, they will sense your fear and lose respect they never even had in you. a little rocking back and forth on your feet is permitted. you may cough, quietly.

- don't look at the cook. he doesn't like to be watched.

- when your omelette is finished, the cook will slide it from the frying pan onto a white china plate, then put this plate to the side of the stove. grab the plate with your left hand. this is an ironic mockery of the rule about stepping with your right foot, which they find funny. thank the cook's assistant. he will pass it along to the cook. the cook will not care.

chapter seven: push ups

2008-06-24T19:17:00.000-07:00

so I had my ankles elevated on the footstool in my living room and didn't notice this footstool rocking back and forth until I'd already done twenty of them. so I redid those twenty and started at the beginning and had to do some crash-course physics to figure out if the work done by the arms is made any easier by an ill-established, rocking-back-and-forth foot/base. which meant I went back into my original position, ankles poorly balanced, footstool leaning on two legs, and found that yes, my arms were in pain, and no, it didn't matter if my feet were secure or not.

then I stirred around some banana-flavored powder past its expiration date (2007, when I first decided to make my upper body un-pitiful) in a glass of milk and drank it like it was my third beer. I learned not to mix it with water because the powder cakes to the edges and collects into little dry lumps that stick to your throat and explode in foul-tasting off-banana-flavored dirt clods. milk somehow works better. those are notions I don't pursue. (I figured it works for nesquick, why not protein shake.)

it didn't taste awful, until I realized that if you're not doing anything, your body will convert most of the protein you eat into fat, virtually none of it will go to muscle mass. then the protein shake tasted awful.

anyways, today I bought a watch from wal-mart. now I know what time it is. I expect this will make my job easier, knowing what time it is. or it will make my workday excruciatingly long, counting every second with my eyes hinged to the wristwatch on my arm, frozen in place as the clocks on my finite life and even more finite paycheck turn slowly, slowly apart.

when I go to sleep the digestive dynamo in the half inch of pure laziness outside my gut will gain another couple thousand cells, because I didn't know what time to drink a fucking protein shake. and there they will stay. free lunches all around; they'll carve loopholes in my metabolic expendatures so they can live fatly and happily, like fat, happy fatty-cell fat-cats, pennies added on to my national debt; to express that metaphor exponentially:

(m+(1/x))^b

M is the guilt and X is the part of M I actually deserve and B is time, time, time.

chapter six: the decision to quit came abruptly

2008-06-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

so I drove back sunday morning at five o'clock after staying up the whole night at my friend's graduation party, waiting uselessly for girls to arrive that never did, playing grand theft auto, dying in creative and expressive ways. (I blew myself off the top of the empire state building and once survived a fall from one thousand feet, and got up and walked away to explode another quarter mile above again.)

dropped my gum on the passenger seat and fished for it, eighty miles an hour on the highway, in the safest possible position, eyes obscured from road;

work begins in half an hour. don't know what I'll do at the same time I'm doing that. so many things to think about, who even has the time.

maybe I should start writing embarrassing personal details in my blog, like everybody else does. but the only visitors I'd gain are the ones that already know

most of that stuff without having to read it again, and the ones I have already (both of them) would only feel alienated and weird. so no, my dignity still belongs to me.

google has been suggesting labels for these posts since a very long time ago. among them are: "scooters, vacations, fall." are they trying to tell me something?

maybe I should make something like that. a story wrapped like a god's-eye of words and yarn, between poles of scooters, vacations and fall. or maybe just scooters

and vacations, and it would be set in the fall. or maybe there would be a kid on a scooter, in summer vacation, rolling down a hill, while the sun was going down;

going as fast as childish legs can propel kid on a scooter on a small hill, thinking that speed was a blue viscous liquid that built up in the air as you went, faster and faster,

and it filled your mouth and covered you in a bullet-trail as you pushed air out of the way, and when you stopped it evaporated and left you panting and drymouthed;

trying not to imagine the asphalt ripping skin from knee and blood from frayed veins, or the horror and embarrassment of a wailing child-boy-thing on the ground;

banking towards the lawns of neighbors, where safety was gathered in piles of dead or dying fallen leaves, crusted, old, like wear on hands at the start of fall.

chapter five: but not to call me back or say good-bye

2008-06-15T22:50:00.000-07:00

- got eaten alive by bugs at a few different grad parties/ work environments; was followed.

- made a few astonishing discoveries about nosebleeds:
1) it is manlier to call them bloody noses;
2) they are unstoppable;
3) sneezing makes everything worse.

- mourned, silently, high school.

- mourned, less silently, tim russert.

- kept coming back to this one image: I'm in the parking lot of some auditorium where I've just graduated, and I'm laying my graduation robes lengthwise into the trunk of my car. They look remarkably human, and I see the yellow escape latch on the trunk's inside, which will do them no good. I think of my robes looking out at me from in there, and think: "Nothing personal. Just business." Then I close the trunk.

- must find a more eloquent way of saying that.

chapter four: how to maintain homeostasis in the face of insurmountable odds

2008-06-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

so about freshman orientation. saturday evening the counselors put on a sex ed program in the form of improv theater, most of which was surprisingly painless. they let everybody out of the auditorium and said we could do whatever we wanted, so long as we didn't leave the campus, until eleven thirty, when the dorm doors locked. after a sex ed crash course, this sounded a lot like "go forth and be fruitful."

I went back to my dorm to drop off most of the packets and pamphlets and debris that I'd gathered in my hands walking around in the hundred degree humidity while the sun was up. now that it was not up, I felt like doing something stupid, and started walking towards the auditorium they'd just shooed everybody out of. they were playing "cloverfield" and it was dark and nice and air conditioned.

except I wound up walking a half mile in the wrong direction, which if you're in college is like three galaxies away. I shelved my manly pride and asked a grad student for directions.

SCENE: (night is like a glass of coke with cigarette ashes or oily clouds obscuring the moon; deserted and useless sidewalks building lattices on otherwise pretty lawns, which seem oddly numb, novocained, when the sun is not on them; streetlights piss, endlessly, yellow on aging bugs; B is talking on a cell phone, A is very lost, and in clothing poorly suited for the heat and humidity; except for A and B, completely deserted.)

A (fully conscious of the awkwardness of the following events, though helpless to stop them): Excuse me?
B (startled? worried? whispering excuses and explanations into her cell phone? who's she talking to? who else is being interrupted?): Yes?
A (thinks: Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit. Don't mumble.): I'm looking for the, uh, the auditorium.
B (after saying "One sec," into the cell, gloriously clutching an alibi): The Bowker auditorium, you mean?
A (in a moment of mortal fear): Oh. Are there more than one? I'm not sure.
B: Well, that one's right over there.
A: That's probably it, thanks.

and guess what? there was nobody there at all! you'd think that the mahar auditorium would be easy to find, because I had just walked in a straight line from there to my dorm, and hadn't spun around in a swivel chair or been beaten on the head with heavy things, my state of mind was completely unaltered. but somehow- somehow!- I was standing in front of a locked auditorium with no air conditioning and no movie and nobody.

so I started walking back to my dorm. got lost again! found myself in a parking lot, completely empty except for this one subaru station wagon, beaten up, bumper stickers all along the back window. a middle-aged man was just chillin out in the driver's seat. I should be okay if I don't make eye contact. I see him in the rear view mirror as I walk by. fuck.

then after I've left the parking lot, when there's a good safe fifty feet of fight-or-flight distance between where I was and where I thought the subaru was still parked, some light spills onto the street from behind me and suddenly I am being pursued by a pair of headlights. I jump over a guard rail and begin to run away.

no big deal, though, that was a false alarm. I looked back as I was running away, a fatal mistake, or would've been if that car wasn't just a plain old all-american non-threatening silver sedan. a camry, I think.

after that was about another mile of walking before I reached my dorm at eleven o'clock. then I weighed my options: keep pushing my luck (maybe some grad student will do the safe thing and not talk to males attempting conversation outside in the dark, though the safer thing would be to scream rape and/or blind me with mace; maybe I'd get abducted by alien subarus, maybe not, it's luck we're talking about after all) OR I could just go up into my dorm room and waste the rest of my ipod's batteries on elliott smith etc. while trying not to make any. other. noise.

so I went to bed.

I waited an hour and a half for my dad to pick me up the day after. I camped out under a tree and leaned my head against my rolled-up sleeping bag, like a good hobo does. I expected somebody to tell me to move, or at least call me out on looking so pitiful, but they did not. that's one good thing about going to an enormous school, I guess.

chapter three: return to clarity& creative responsibility, pt. 2.

2008-06-10T20:14:00.000-07:00

dear student:

you are about to embark on an urgent journey. you will sleep more than you have to. you will get fat. everybody will. (here, "everybody" means that those who stay the same weight, or lose weight, will be hated by "everybody," without exemption, as though nothing else about them was relevant to their standing as human beings but weight.)

do not bring cigars. they are tacky, and for old men or fratboys, neither of which are you (yet).

do not bring a towel. they are free.

do not bring three-ringed binders. they are for other people, but not for you.

you will carry:
- one guitar, your father's if possible
-- unless asked, do not tell anybody whose guitar it is. they'll assume it's yours. it's cool.
- one poster, the subject of which is yours to choose, but must not be:
a) obnoxious or
b) just too colorful or
c) entirely black and white, which is for sad people, and nobody can stand you when you're sad.
- one pair of boots. now stop. does the word "boots" make you think construction boots, cowboy boots, workboots, hiking boots? any of these things could make you a total pussy. think carefully.
- one umbrella. don't get one that's too big. don't get one that's too small. don't get one that's too medium-sized, either. let's use a visual aid here.
rating from 1-3 the size of your umbrella:

(1)..................................(2)...................................(3)
too small to be of any use/ you are clearly compensating

ideally, yours will be a 1.45. if you can't find one of those, don't bother bringing one.
- one five-dollar masterlock. if you need anything more than that, you aren't hiding your shit smart enough.

finally:

- don't show people your writing. that is for showoffs, and you aren't a showoff. are you?
- don't sleep under a tree if you get locked out. actually, just don't get locked out.
- don't write an entire story and run out of ideas at the end and then decide, whoops, let's go back and make the entire fucking thing a metaphor, that way nothing has to end, it's a cycle blah blah. that is for other writers, and you aren't any of them.
- say as little as possible.

your friend,
___ _____

chapter two: hillary's master stroke

2008-06-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

as if she hadn't said "assassination" a week ago, as if she hadn't been praising the republican contender at her party's expense, as if the welfare of her party had anything to do with the vicious, callous, disgusting, insensitive campaigning she's been running for month after excruciating month, as if she hadn't praised fox news for its fairness and balance, or hadn't implicitly cast doubts on obama's christianity, or stiff-armed him into a roast session with stephanopoulos, the man her family gave a career, hillary clinton would like, pretty please, to be barrack obama's running mate.

now he'll have to weigh his options. does barrack obama want the next in line to be a political opportunist hinging her entire campaign strategy on the horrifying possibility of his assassination? or does he want to snub her offer, allowing her an infinite amount of sound bites explaining how shocked she was, how sad she was, how sad all the other people she'd conned on her side were, their sad faces staring back at her at the podium, vampire-casey struck out sixty pitches later. thank god for the drunk umpire.

if only the party elders had come out and seen what was happening. "please do not drive a wedge through the party," they could have told her. "you are at a serious disadvantage. consider the millions of people that voted for you. they won't get you; would you like them to get mccain?"

if only she would apologize for the hurt she's put on the people who are ideologically identical to her, on the people who want to help the people she says she wants to help.

ugh.

chapter one: return to clarity& creative responsibility, pt. 1

2008-06-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

I know that the "pt. 1" in the subject heading should go right behind the colon in the subject heading. it should read: "chapter one, pt.1:", and admitting that I am wrong is the first step towards getting over another problem in the subject heading: creative responsibility.

that's a total lie. creative responsibility, what is that horse shit? it sounds like one of mr. kevin trudeau's magical mystery cures for alzheimers and crohn's disease. although self-medicating would probaby help the problem I tried to solve by sticking a nametag on it and telling a lie on that with bubble letters, I don't have anything better to prescribe myself other than cheap labels and euphemisms.

maybe I should write a story where all the characters are in happy places, but are not happy. titled "why pandas don't procreate in captivity." that would be a little too pointed.

I have five days to wait before graduating, which reminds me of the four years I have spent doing the same. I forgot most of the math by now. I remember about the human kidney, and the distance between the earth and the sun, and how the moon rotates at the same speed it revolves, and how the sea adds torque to the whole equation behind the awkward waltz, and if it wasn't for that, the two of them would careen happily, coldly, through space all this time, occasionally pausing to wonder, "really, though, what if?"

to which nobody anywhere could pause and think over, or give reply, because they wouldn't exist. no apical meristems. no high schools. no water buffalo. earthquakes would swallow, emptily, lonesomely, what would have been san fracisco or lisbon. the earth would politely demur when waterlogged asteroids invited themselves over. he'd get called sour grapes, though no grapes, not even sour ones, could exist at this time.

maybe an alien civilization would visit and think, "why, this doesn't make any sense at all. it's just the right distance from the sun. it doesn't rotate so fast that nothing gets hot, or so slow that one side gets baked. and its only moon pulls on it in just the right way (little did they know), so that it has... seasons! why, if it just had liquid water, there'd be limitless possibilities for this little ugly thing." and since there would be no such thing as cliches on a lifeless planet, it would be OK for aliens to visit in the middle of the story.

and the moon would listen and say, "he's not listening to you. he's probably asleep." although the aliens would not hear, because they are aliens, and not cool like that.

then they would leave, wondering if the paradoxes of interest that interplanetary travel lends itself towards would keep them from keeping their promises to the folks at home by dropping tons upon tons of water on the sleeping earth. they gave it a fifty-fifty, leaning more towards the "no" option. would they come back and open the flood gates? would they drop a packet of yeast in the mix? would the yeast survive the freezing and then the thawing and go on to turn the sea into beer and then the beer into rivers and salmon leaping up waterfalls into the mouths of bears?

does it matter to the sleeping earth?

chapter four: oh k

2008-05-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

so I started writing again.

that's the good news part of the sentence: I'm getting used to typing on a laptop and not feeling my fingers connect with the keyboard. I make the slightest of movements and they appear. I don't know if I like that yet.

bad news: it's all anemic. haven't started lighting a fire under my ass. don't know if I will. it's directionless, storyless trash, and until that fire gets lit, it will stay that way. worse news: I'm not my harshest critic. there are other things wrong about my writing than the way I go about writing it: there's content, style, continuity, common sense, blah blah. (that means more than I care to list and therefore admit.)

and I have work this weekend, and I graduate in a couple days. and camp after that. and even when school starts, I'll have to deal with the "no, you shouldn't be having fun right now, or ever, ever ever ever" mantra, set up like an enormous minefield between poles of northampton, amherst and worcester. maybe I should do something dramatic, like go completely, prematurely bald or major in international languages. wouldn't that be nice? freedom? just coming and going as you please. not "well, you could go, I mean if you really wanted to, and I guess if you could deal with all this subtextual guilt I'm blasting at you right now with my FUCKING EYES."

maybe next year.

chapter three: moneysink

2008-05-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

so I worked mother's day weekend making fruit baskets for eight bucks an hour, and I didn't know it then but it was all under the table. getting paid cash is nice. not having to pay taxes on what you make is also nice. under the table is a good place to be right now, especially if you're me.

the trick to making a pineapple daisy: stick the skewer through the core. if you put it anywhere else, like on the tender brighter part of the slice, it will slide down away from the cantaloupe bulb, and who wants that.

I actually applied for that job around valentine's day, and they wouldn't hire me, because I wasn't eighteen. apparently there's an expiration date on being critically unable to take the rinds of honeydews.

saturday I made daisies and took the rinds of cantaloupes and took the green part off the cantaloupe slices after the rinds had been taken off by other workers who did not make their fruit baskets with love, like I did. sunday I wrapped and boxed them and skewered chocolate-covered strawberries on the ones which had been forgotten when we finished short of our goal on saturday. it's hard not to imagine them screaming when the little plastic sticks squish through their skin.

haven't written anything since February, and I wish I had something to blame that on. I imagine my brain turning into a smoker's lung while I'm pretending I'm good at anything else. this image isn't a deterrant. it's just really, really depressing.

chapter two: driving while tired

2008-05-13T06:01:00.000-07:00

I'd like to ask them how much I've disappointed them, but since I don't know what they'll say, or if they'll tell me it's too much and it gets more painful and sad that I can stand, and since I don't know what I'd do in that case, it's one of those questions you'd like to ask but never, ever will. Or I'll just be riding with them in the car, in the passenger seat, and the notion will hit me, and between the core of my brain where the taste and smell of it began and the place where it leaves and enters the air there'll be a lightning bolt, which will make a sound like "Oh shit, what am I doing." And then I'll have asked them, and who the hell knows what's after that.

Funny story I heard in the last day of Bible History class: We were discussing Ecclesiastes, and it came up. A king gives three of his servants bags of gold.

The first he gives three bags of gold.

The second, he gives two.

The third gets only one. He tells each that in a year, he will return.

The first servant invests his money in a vineyard. Three bags of gold is enough to buy a sizeable plot of land on which to raise his harvest, and the servant is wise enough to pick fertile land, with rich, muddy, brown-black soil all throughout. Words spreads about his business, bringing wealthy, thirsty customers from across the king's lands. After only one harvest, his invesment has more than paid off. He now has six bags of gold.

The second one, while not having enough for so rich and garish a business as wine, can now afford to fulfill an old dream of his. He buys a fishing boat. At first it's slow; he doesn't know the sea well enough to really dig in, but he makes enough to survive. After a few months, though, luck or God directs him to waters writhing with tuna. He hauls up as many as he can and sells them, and uses that money to buy another boat and hire another crew, and uses that boat and that crew to sail with him to the herd of providential tuna, and after a few days' work there are no tuna left, and he has four bags of gold.

The third one doesn't know what the hell he's supposed to do. He sees the others have all paid off. He sees the drunks the first servant has created. He sees the men put out of work by the second servant's overfishing. He sees the riches they've gathered, and wonders if his king will truly be made proud by all that stupid shit. So he buries the bag of gold he's got and tries to forget it's even there. Even tries forgetting it's anywhere else, too, but that's a bit harder.

Anyways, the year ends, and the king returns and summons the three of them. The third servant is overjoyed. He's been living with this dead weight buried underneath his house like a severed head for most of a year. He unearths it and carries it to the king's court. The other two are there with their ten combined bags of gold and their stories of profit and adventure.

The time comes for the third servant to explain, and he says: "I didn't do anything with my gold. I just buried it."

The king says, "Oh."

"I thought you might want it back."

"No," says the king. "I just wanted to see what you'd do with it while I was away."

Feeling a bit sad, but not unusually, the third servant leaves before the evening has properly ended. He goes back to his house and finds the hole where he'd stored the money. He thinks about how, earlier in the day, he'd been expecting to fill it back in with dirt, and he chuckles at the thought that he still is, but just using dirt of a different kind and color. He lives there, with it under him like a curse, for the rest of his life.

chapter one: the knot can be as intricate and complex as you please.

2008-05-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

step 1: go to Filene's. don't look anybody in the eye. instead look at the patches of skin above their cheekbones. listen to the tone of their voices. are they talking about the clothes? how absurd is that? don't think about it.

step 2: find the men's belts. they look like snake skins, and some of them are, hanging on fang-buckles, trophies somebody brought back from the Great Snake War. compare price to length and buy the best you find. it is imperative that the one you buy costs less than a cheeseburger, or burrito, or wrap at Taco Bell.

step 3: as you walk out to your car, worry that it will come alive as you drive back home with it in the back seat. double back and buy some Coke from a vending machine- potent antivenom. when you get back to your car, wrap the plastic bag tight around it, so if it does come alive, it won't have much air to breathe. this will be your only defense.

step 4: drive slowly. a hair out of place could spell disaster. hold it in both hands as you bring it from your parked car to your home. don't fumble with your keys when you unlock the door. even sleeping, it can taste your fear.

step 5: take it to your refridgerator. open your refridgerator. put it in. the cold will make it less violent if it wakes up, and if it gets the notion that you're trying to placate it by offering it the contents of your refridgerator as a gift (which you are) it might also be less violent. close the door gently.

step 6: gather your materials. you will need a piece of sandpaper, a sharp knife or pair of scissors (scissors work better, but a knife would be more appropriate), a shoelace (black or brown, to match the leather), a razor blade, a screw and a cigarette lighter.

step 7: open your refridgerator. if you are not dead yet, take out the belt and sever the buckle with whatever tool is closest at hand. don't worry about neatness. a rough cut can be tidied up. there's enough belt left for you to worry more about your life. put the head back in the bag- they have been known to convulse and kill before the outrage fades. breathe deeply. collect yourself.

step 8: measure the width of your right wrist. cut that much off one end of the belt. what you've cut off will become your xenith wrist thing.

step 9: take the screw. half an inch away from one end, dig out one hole, and then another one half an inch away from the one you just dug out. on the other end of the xenith wrist thing, dig out a third hole half an inch away from the edge. you now have holes to put the shoelace through.

step 10: sand the xenith wrist thing. not so much that the lacquer's all gone from the proud monster it once was, but enough to make sure it's really dead. take your cigarette lighter and darken what you've sanded a bit. this is for your protection.

step 11: with the razor blade, cut an X into the part of the xenith wrist thing that will face you when you wear it. then take the cigarette lighter and hold the flame to the X you just cut until the edges begin to pull back, revealing a nifty brand. sand down the edges of the xenith wrist thing, and the side that will touch your skin when you wear it. this is for your comfort.

step 12: tie it to your wrist. the knot can be as intricate and complex as you please. burn the frayed parts with the cigarette lighter and press them into each other until it's just a mass of melted plastic-thread. understand that you're lucky to have survived. try to make that mean more than what it does as of completing your xenith wrist thing.

chapter four: ripped shoes, canvas foot knuckle

2008-04-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

they were the only shoes I ever really owned. it started at the beginning of last summer, when I got it into my head that I was going to be a completely different person when it was all over- work, school, this year.

I figured if I was going to turn into somebody new, I wanted to be that person, inhabit every single molecule of him, and I didn't want to see anybody else in my eyes in a mirror. No imitating or mimicry or mime or nothing. If I was going to suffer and strip off all the shit that stuck to me while growing up, I wanted to own who I became, fully, unequivocally.

So I cashed my first paycheck and bought a pair of white canvas shoes from Target, for twelve dollars, to work in for the rest of the summer. They were navy blue. The sun bled heat on them and my feet baked into hurting, sweatty loaves. So I bleached them yellow-white and wore them till now.

The sad part is, I bleached them for too long, and I wore them weak where the bleach had burned the fabric thin, in the knuckles and joints near the base of the toe. Now there is a long, frayed tear across the right one, and the left one, you can see little separatist canvas wisps raising out of the weave.

Now I'm back to my good brown boots, which my parents gave to me, though I don't know if I'd earned them. I know it's absurd to think about making a pair of shoes proud, but I hope I did anyways.

chapter three: dear lou

2008-04-16T16:36:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Dobbs:

I can't stand you.

I don't mean to assail you by saying that. I don't want to injure you at all. It's because of that, my not wanting to hurt you, that I say that I find you wholly disgusting and pitiful: I don't want to mislead you as to the subject of this letter, as I take it very seriously, and I figured I'd use that opportunity, at the opening of the letter, to get that one personal bias out of the way, so that it wouldn't taint the rest of what I say. To do anything else but that would be dishonest, and any brand of dishonesty, even the well-intentioned kinds, will not suit the subject I want to ask you about.

Barrack Obama has recently said something about small-town hard-working moms and dads being bitter about their government's apathetic attitudes towards fixing the economy, specifically those areas that directly affect them and other moms and dads, many of whom are from small towns, and hard-working, etc. He listed guns and religion as means of coping with their government's troubling lack of concern for those it has sworn to protect and serve.

Mr. Dobbs, you and I are Americans. Our current President is serving out the last months of his second term. He did not win the popular vote in the election that gave him his first term. Neither this fact, nor his invasion of Iraq on faulty intelligence, nor his signing of the PATRIOT Act, was enough to keep him from winning a second term.

My parents are members of the American middle class. They are very hard-working. I would also call my hometown small. Today, it became impossible for a student in my state to get a federal loan to help pay for a college education. In one week, when I turn eighteen, I can go down to a military recruiting office in Worcester, a city outside my small hometown, and bring a few papers back for my hard-working mom and dad to sign, and then I'd become a footsoldier in President Bush's war on terror. I'd get paid to do that.

I have two questions:

If you can sell your life, shouldn't you be able to buy it back?

And:

If my government doesn't want to help send me to college, but is eager to send me to war, why is it bad for a politician to say I'm bitter?

That's basically it.

Regards,
___ _____

chapter two: notes of distinterest

2008-04-06T15:55:00.000-07:00

from xenith.net, thread named "Recent":

Apr 4 2008, 10:23 AM Post #4108

I recently misspelled "uninteresting" as "untinteresting" in the topic heading of one of my blog posts. I don't know how to fix this, and wouldn't if I did.

One could say that I'm... untinterested.

chapter one: bugshit creek

2008-04-03T18:16:00.003-07:00

SCENE:

Restaurant. It's busy and dimly lit inside and people are staring either at the food they're about to put into their mouths or the people they're talking to, perhaps watching while they eat, or drink iced tea, or Coke with lemon. The waitresses are inexperienced, and don't know how to ask for a tip without asking for a tip. This creates confusion and chaos and every so often the kitchen doors will flap a little too loudly, which is the sound it makes when one of the green ones rushes out back for tears or punching things or a smoke. A has ordered some chili. B is looking behind the place where they'd hung their coats. There's a very, very short man with razor burn red and angry on one side of his face, and cuts and stuff. If he turns too quickly, B knows he'll exhude a smell of heavy, overdone cologne, and that it'll waft their way on the crest of a pitiful, sad wave, and B does nothing with this foreknowledge, and suffers the odor because of it. B thinks of old people. A is eating some quesadillas.

A (reaches for fork, overreaches, knocks fork over, swears) : Have you ever tried cocaine?
B (startled, not showing it yet) : No.

A attempts to share the quesadillas with B. B is unsure of accepting anything from A after A has already mentioned cocaine as a thing to "try." B has absurd thoughts about quesadillas as a gateway drug. B does not just say no. That would be too insulting.

chapter five: everything brightens with big red

2008-03-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

another idea for an interesting title, to be written into an interesting story: "An Easy Name to Remember." it sounds too predictable, on second thought.

why can't I get away with writing minimalist masterpieces, like "Fennell." you probably have to be in the business for at least ten years before they give you a parking space, fifteen to be called a minimalist without people having to laugh.

I've been listening to a ton of Elliott Smith stuff and want to find one genius who isn't dead. and I hate self-pitying vibes like that, woe to us, all our heroes have burned out on celestial problems only they were privy to. it's tiresome.

the moon in "Starry Night" is impossible. I'm at a Quinsig computer right now, and they have an endless number of prints of it and a bunch of other art than anybody can recognize. and the shadow should be growing from the right to the left, and with the shape of the bright part it wouldn't look a thing like it's supposed to on the second day. that's why there's no "Starry Night 2." the geometry is impossible.

I should probably write that essay about the New Testament, but I don't have my Bible with me, and while the Internet can help me with direct quotes, it will do nothing for my laziness. on the contrary, it will bevvy my laziness. it's scaffolding, like I barely learned in Early Childhood Education 121.

speaking of which, I should probably go to class now.

chapter four: wham of sleep

2008-03-16T10:36:00.000-07:00

thursday I went back to my high school, mostly to visit. that meant I had to wake up at five in the morning, and since of course I was up till two writing the carpenter story the night before, thursday was no fun for anybody.

then I got home and slept for about two hours before being woken up by my phone ringing. had an hour-long conversation and then hung up, fell asleep five hours later.

friday was about as much fon as thursday. and friday night, I decided I was so sleep-deprived, maybe I should consciously try to stay awake. so I did.

when you get less than eight hours of sleep in three days, your brain goes into REM withdrawal and tries to make up for all the lost time in one huge REM-fest. that was Saturday. I had some weird dreams. my entire body feels like it's been weighed down by sleep. heavy, like there's congealed sleep-dust inbetween every string of muscle in my legs. it's odd. waiting for them to dissolve. glad I have this week off.

chapter three: sanded-down belt

2008-03-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

Choice is such a weird word, the way we use it. It can refer to the hard physical things we're deciding upon (which of these choices do you pick) or, used in the singular, it can encompass many of these at once (make your choice among these). And it just sounds odd, like a new species of lobster that doesn't fit into any existing taxa, so we start defining it in French. It's the only logical way to do it.

Barack Obama has a three-in-four chance to be the second guy in the general election. Hillary Clinton is at one-in-four. I'm still holding out for Mike Gravel.

I feel like my eyes are bugging out of my head. This is probably from staring at a computer for too long. The only people who know how to use their eyes are artists, and I just play one on TV.

Carpenter's story is cooling off. Sad, but unavoidable. At least it hasn't gotten long enough to ruin all other things attached to Vanishing. God, I wrote that a month ago. I should go to class.

chapter two: peeling paint

2008-03-09T08:25:00.000-07:00

I had to pump out my cellar, since everybody in the northeast got so much rain. It's a peaceful thing. I stood outside with an umbrella and my foot on the end of the pipe and the water drained out. I wondered how it could run uphill, from my basement into my lawn, and remembered the plug in the kitchen. I watched it weave the grass into orderless braids. I read something I wouldn't remember after reading it. It was a fine way to spend a weekend.

Everybody's going bald at QCC and it's starting to worry me. Does my full head of hair make me a target? Should I adhere to the pattern? Everybody loves a pattern, after all. Especially bald people- especially when your self-respect is on the line.

I figured I should probably be eating less and sleeping more, but I couldn't do both, and haven't made my decision. Will at lunch.

Now I have to go gas the car up, and draw a bunch of shit I don't know how to draw, and then write a few papers and maybe finish the rest of the carpenter's story. It should sound more biblical than it does. The kingdom of Heaven is within and/or among you. It's breathtaking.

chapter one: dear jay

2008-03-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Severin,

I hope you do not think I am a stupid kid. I know many people who believe this, and a few of those people are in my own family, which is a distracting and embarrassing thing to have happen to you, even as a small child. I believe I have to properly explain myself before continuing on to the real point of this letter, which is to ask a few questions to you. When I was a child, I thought that America was like a baseball team. It had to win, every time, like the New York Yankees, or it would fall on hard times and never win again, like it has for the past eight years. If it began a losing streak, it would flounder expensively on the stockroom floor, buying A-rods and Jeters and firing its bedrock from under its feet, expending all the good luck it had acquired over its strong years, until only bare tatters of its formerly glorious standard remained. I was thinking about this today, in the context of what you recently said about the Islamofascists. (I dislike the term. I think it would be much more direct to call them assholes.)

You said that since Barrack Obama's middle name is "Hussein," which means "handsome" in Arabic, he should be open to a higher level of scrutiny over his past, and that anybody disagreeing with you on the matter of racial profiling is a moron. You said it in such a way that discouraged those that disagreed with you as believers in a fairy-tale of tolerance and equality and egalitarianism, a blanket of idealism which would burn up like a tissue on a hot coal if exposed to reality.

Which leads us to our first real disagreement, which is about the human species.

I'm going to have to rely on a hypothetical situation, now. I hate to do it, because I risk coming off as a stupid kid again, but that's the dice I'm handed. Say you're on the lookout for a suspected terrorist. You don't know who he is, exactly, only that his skin is dark. To find out who he is, exactly, you'll have to intrude upon his constitutional rights against search and seizure, invade the space the law provides him. And you'll have to do it to many people, throw your net wide to catch this one fish. Now you have a dilemma: do unpardonable harm to the rights of your fellow citizens, or get an asshole away from those he'd like to harm.

I believe the former is probably worse than the results of the latter. I believe the harm we can do to ourselves at least equals, if not outweighs, the harm others can do to us. In spite of our efforts to quantify and color-code it, the danger posed by possible terrorist attacks will always be an unknown. What is known is how much we've hurt ourselves. Terrorists haven't destroyed our Constitution, mocked the rule of law or frightened us into complicity nearly as effectively as our own leaders have. I also know that the hypothetical situation has probably happened on a very large scale to a very large number of people with dark skin. The fact that there is a PATRIOT Act virtually guarantees it.

I don't know if my belief in all this will turn to ash like a tissue paper on burning reality, the way you guarantee it will. I'm not proud enough to want it not to, just for the sake of saying "I told you so." But I don't think abandoning the single important, unique thing about the people of the United States when faced by an ungracious and hateful few is prudent or helpful to American interests. I'm sure you'll quote Jesus in some absurd way, about searching after the one lost sheep and leaving the ninety and nine.

I'm kind of a college student. In English, we read "Young Goodman Brown," by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the story, Brown is shown all of his neighbor's sins and flaws and evils, all the things they had hidden before. In reaction to this, he becomes a sick, spiteful, unattractive man. He loses all respect for his friends, and is generally distrustful of all those around him. He loses faith in people he once looked up to. He dies unhappily.

I would now like to ask you two questions: When an American Congress passes a law that deprives its constituency of the rights they took an oath to protect, what does it mean?

And: When a truck full of Blackwater mercenaries drives through an Iraqi neighborhood and opens fire without any discretion towards civilian bystanders, what does it mean?

I only ask because I have no idea. And I'm seventeen now, and will be eighteen very soon, and will have the right to vote, and don't want to do this with my eyes closed to these important questions. (Again I acknowledge that I might look like a stupid kid; those who ask don't know, etc.)

Here is an attempt to answer them. There are two possibilities:

1) It means nothing. What happened in both instances was the result of nebulous concepts and circumstances beyond my ken and far beyond my control. The real truth is that the extent of my control over anything concerning American government, a single vote, probably could not have kept any of those circumstances from forming. (It wouldn't have in 2000, though I was ten years old at the time, and sorely unable to vote. The same for 2004. I was fourteen. It was a frightening and dismaying state of affairs.)

2) It means everything. My vote should've done something to discourage the war, the assault on civil liberties, and the people who wanted it all. They should've listened to myself and nearly half of all voting Americans in both 2000 and 2004 who had second thoughts about murdering everything good and special about America.

Both these answers assume that, had I a vote to cast when I was ten and fourteen years old, I would've cast it for Gore and Kerry, both times, and against George W. Bush, both times. And both are finally irrelevant, I suppose, because we're still in Iraq, and the first, fourth and fifth Amendments have been gravely injured, maybe irreparably.

I hope you can answer these questions, because I cannot. I also hope that you can find some kind of middle ground between these answers, because I cannot. I'm not able to reconcile these things. I try to, but I can't. I hope it's just because I'm a stupid kid, but I have a feeling it'll follow me around for the rest of my life, whenever I see an American flag.

I haven't properly explained myself yet, which I should do now:I'm seventeen, as I mentioned before. I'm going to vote in the next election, in November. I won't vote for John McCain. I'll do this not because I don't like him. I think it's an absurd and stupid thing to hinge your vote on whether or not you like the person. I'll do this because I am genuinely distrustful of everything he says, now. He's said disgusting and frightening things about the border, national security, Iraq and Ahmadinejad. He's gotten President Bush's endorsement, and Bush has been quoted to say that he'll only endorse somebody who'll carry the invasion of Iraq into another term. And I'm also concerned that he'll die in office, and leave us with a successor who says even more frightening and disgusting things, and does them. I'll also do this because that most of the big things the Republican party has touched, the military, justice, freedom of speech, have died nasty, public deaths, and I don't want to see any more of those.

I will vote for a Democrat. I just hope there is a Democrat still worth voting for, which is an uncertainty, even this late on in the game. This will be the first vote I ever cast.

I'm dismayed and unhappy about that. I feel that a very large part of my future, and the future of my homeland, has been decided for me, before I had a say in anything that happened. And now, just as President Bush leaves an office he didn't deserve, I inherit a vote for a country stained in ways it doesn't deserve. I'm allowed to cast a vote the way I know I would've for eight years. Even as a small child, I wished it wouldn't happen like this, but it did. I don't know how much education I have. I assume it's not much. (I know this makes me look like a stupid kid, but it's important.)

I'd like to ask another question: What do Islamofascists hate so much about America? Do they hate that we've had good luck and spoiled ourselves on privilege, while they were hungry and without good shelter and education? Have they been brainwashed by their Imams? Do they receive training from birth to hate freedom, maybe with cheeseburgers and John Phillip Sousa and big Pavlovian shock machines attached to their fingertips? I know it sounds absurd, but you make such a big deal about it, like every day in every major city there's an Islamofascist with a bomb strapped around his chest, his finger on the pull-cord, ready to kill us all and our children if we don't invade the privacy we've already guaranteed to people, even if they have dark skin and funny names.

I would also like to ask you about the name, Islamofascists. As I said, I'd rather call them assholes, because it does the same work with less syllables. I also don't like the fear-mongering implications of the word. George Orwell observed that Fascism with a capital F has lost all its meaning, as a word, and is generally used as a put-down, an end-all word of accusation in political debates. He said this shortly after the end of World War II. I think it was 1946, or 48. I'm not sure.

I'll try not to confuse fascism with capital-F Fascism when I ask this. In what way do the Islamofascists resemble the Nazis? Germany, Japan and Italy are all nations, upon which you can declare war. Terrorism is a noun. I'm sure this is not something you haven't answered before, but I haven't heard this answer, and have none except: They're our declared enemy, they hate Jews, and they believe they're killing for the betterment of God's creation. But Fascism? I don't know. I don't think anybody does, and I believe the term is just a thing people use to drum up thoughts of red and black flags and angry, hateful speeches made from underneath a short moustache.

You also said somewhere that a liberal is a believer in fairy tales, and that you were fine with liberals being liberals, but that if left alone, they would seize power and barge into your living room, guns drawn, bayonets drawing beads of blood from under your naked chin, demanding money to fund the maintenance of their fairy tales. I don't agree with you, not because I'm a liberal, but because I'm an American. I think that some of the things the liberals are saying- that we shouldn't trade off our security for our freedom, nor should we compromise either of those things at all, and that the United States had ought to start living up to its promises of life, liberty and a fair shake at happiness, after neglecting its duty for eight years under a President who wasn't actually elected- aren't treasonous, not because I'm a liberal, but because I'm an American. I agree that there are some idiotic liberals who take things too far, like there are some idiotic conservative republicans. But to use the word to incite hatred and suspicion, like you have, is to distract from the good thing about liberals, which lies at the root of the word: Liberty. It's important. I don't think it's a fairy tale. This I also believe because I'm an American.

I hope nothing of what I say sounds stupid. I'm trying to be sincere. I don't believe what conservatives say about danger being everywhere. Well, I do, but I don't believe it's where they say it is. They say that danger is a terrorist with a bomb in his jacket. I believe that, but I don't see any here, in the United States, yet. I don't think the danger for us comes from blown up movie theaters or anthrax or airports or nuclear devices. I believe it comes from inside. I believe people in positions of power will do whatever will keep them in power, even if it goes against oaths they took when they assumed those positions of power. I don't think the fallout from their actions has been in the air long enough for us to feel the effects immediately, but we probably will. It'll happen slowly. We'll probably start to see people with bombs in their jackets, but I don't think they'll all have dark skin.

This is stupid of me, to start fear-mongering of my own while denouncing that of others, but I just want to give a good explanation of myself. That's basically it. I don't expect you to answer any of my questions. I'm a conservative like that.

I hope you don't praise me for being well-spoken or any crap like that, or for listening to your radio show. But if you do, I'll probably just say thanks and leave it at that. There's not much else you can say in such a situation.

I'd also like to thank you for all the music you play between segments. I like the blues, though the classical rock you play makes me think about some high school kids I still know, some of whom are confused like me. It makes me glad to think that. No matter what happens to us, the music will be alright. Kurt Vonnegut said that.

Regards,
Sam Virzi

chapter four: picture soup

2008-02-27T06:41:00.000-08:00

I had an idea: a story about a man who thinks he's made out of the liquid used to develope photographs. I should figure out what that liquid is before writing that story. I probably will not.

Recent thefts include a book about Dante which I fervently hate, Slaughter-house Five, Infinite Jest and a new hat. The hat I am least pleased with, but I believe this is more commentary on the value of the old one, not the shittiness of the new one.

I would like a pair of mirrored sunglasses to wear around everywhere. It would be a stupid thing to do, and people say I'm trying to be like that guy from Cool Hand Luke and O Brother, Where Art Thou, but I wouldn't care, because I'd be wearing my mirrored sunglasses. I'd be emotionally invulnerable.

Was thinking of using the word "resplendent," but became disgusted with/ by it.

Applied for a job at a store that makes fruit baskets, only to find out that they can't hire me, because the only jobs that they have open require the use of a knife- a sharp, dangerous, hazardous, satanist knife- which I can't be trusted to look at, since I'm not eighteen. Which is funny, because at my old job I got to chainsaw my way through a tree. An entire fallen tree. Chainsaw. No gloves. Christing people.

Wish school would permanently disappear. Know it is futile to wish for such a thing. Want to get to writing that story, but am distracted by the lobes of the brain. I need more sleep and less toxicity from textbooks and whatnor. More later. I'm so tired.

chapter three: why I love mexican food

2008-02-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

in paradise, there are no tomatoes. nothing tastes like the blood your gums shed when you brush your teeth. nothing summons the sound of the word "thrush" when you accidentaly bite into your pasta.

there are no congealed things in heaven. if you get cut, it heals so fast the blood doesn't get a chance to clot. zip. done.

tomato sauce is what I imagine they filled the baby with in Eraserhead. why do people use it on pasta? I imagine the noodles trying to swim over each other, desperate for some kind of escape.

maybe in paradise, they go skeet shooting with cans of tomato sauce. no, that's weird.

today I went to the supermarket, on a search for some chicken noodle soup. while engaged in this distraction, I elbowed a can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup onto the floor. it split open. a more perfect vision of hell is hard to find: a leaky can of satanic slop on the barely-clean floor of a supermarket. white hanging lights from the ceiling. nobody else in the store.

chapter two: blue star

2008-02-08T06:45:00.000-08:00

There was something like a twinkle which was less of a twinkle than a steady growth and fade of light in one spot in the sky the size of the head of a pin. But the fact that it was a pinhead in the sky made it a star and the fact of its being a star made its light a twinkle and not a swelling of the smallest of lights.

It doesn't happen regularly that I go out on my back porch and make a gun with my finger and thumb and shoot the stars out like lightbulbs, collect the glass dust in a big round bathtub, jump in.

The problem with being tired: you'd stop yourself from being uncomfortable, but you don't have the energy.

chapter one: barbecue wrap

2008-02-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

Scene at the 99, where you always come back for more:

A is sitting and talking about all the colleges that must be applied to. B is eating a barbecue chicken wrap. It is very spicy. A says that these colleges have admissions offices. These offices have not called, emailed, written, messaged or smoke signaled since January. Early January. A is worried about this but doesn't ask for the consolation of B. B gives this consolation, though it is unsolicited, and regrets this grievous error. B's wrap is very spicy. B's face does not contort because of it. B's cheeks don't puff out, nor does B breathe hollowly for a few moments until the fallout fades. When A finishes on the topic of not getting any calls, messages, emails or letters from admissions offices, B's existence is hinged upon the spiciness of his barbecue wrap, which was errenuously ordered, a thing B thoroughly regrets, dancing on the head of the pin of his anguish and pain. A waits for B to say something:

B(mumbling, his tongue is in pain, he can't elocute precisely) : Earlier today I was working out and I got stuck.
A (smiles- thinks: why weight lifting? why prove he's a man by talking about it?) : Really?
B (uncertain!) : Yeah, that was embarrassing, but it was more the amount of weight on the bar, nail on the coffin lid, man.

The inside of the 99 is very dark, there are 99 reasons why you should eat at the 99 written on one wall, the lighting doesn't permit one to read these reasons if you find you've run out of things to talk about with a friend. A looks at this wall and thinks of some way to make a conversation out of one or the other, but finds not one in the whole list with that spark in it. Reason 100, suggests B, should be "Boobs". A does not laugh.

chapter five: the haunting on sad hill

2008-01-28T06:51:00.001-08:00

good title. i once wrote a seven thousand word story and titled it "sad hill." those were the only two well-put-together words out of all of them. "sad hill." I am not an advocate for creative justice, I have other failures aside from these kinds of failures which also merit mentioning.

bought thirty bucks worth of art supplies for unclear reasons, and a big black canvas portfolio which I carry everything around in now, it has replaced the little brown backpack, which itself replaced the sleek red duct taped trapper keeper, which begat I don't know what.

haven't finished anything in weeks, after the piss-reeking jacket, which is a story for another time.

I look back at what I've done and I can point to Evicted as the thing I did when I was sixteen, and Pinhead Story as the thing I did when I was fifteen, and year seventeen is empty. what did I do last year? exorcism? the jacket story was really a desperate, despaired attempt at making something that meant something more than itself, so transparent it's sickening to revise.

this is futile, the only thing to do is keep writing and try to make it better, which I always do.

chapter four: grand theft paper

2008-01-23T06:36:00.000-08:00

so I applied to a bunch of new places, and along with the five copies of my transcripts/ letters of recommendation I'll have to print out, every admissions office I spoke with said I'd be a fool not to send in every last word of everything I've ever published ever. enter: the library.

IMPERATIVE NEEDS:
- paper, 1 ream
- printer (library's will do)
- zip drive
- hooded sweatshirt and/or hat
- car keys and/or running shoes

chapter three: burritos, my first love

2008-01-17T11:57:00.000-08:00

every restaurant I go to, I ask if there's Mexican on the menu. not ask the waiter, that would be awkward- excuse me, does your specials menu include a burrito? which would follow with: oh, it doesn't? why am I here. (cause I'm me.)

john o'reilly is hosting family feud behind me. the television is on all day to ward off intruders. I imagine being a burglar waiting outside in the street, looking up at my living room. when will they turn the TV on? it's cold out here.

went skiing today; drove to the mountain today; got pulled over because of my not-visible license plates. guy let me off with a warning. thanked God I wore my jeans under my snow pants, otherwise I'd be in deep shit.

COP: You know what the penalty is for driving without a license?
Y.C: No, but I'm going to guess by your tone that it's pretty fucking intense.

applied for job at Big Y; having no dreams about nails, which is nice. have to finish the story about the punks and the bad jackets. reading Camus. don't know why.

after leaving the mountain, went by Big Y, to pick up an application, only to find- Much to My Chagrin- that they only accept online applications. (i am so sick of online applications- filled out one to CVS, Rite Aide, blah blah, not counting the zillion college apps- at least big Y won't pork me for sixty five bucks, God-willing.)

while at Big Y, got a ten-pack of burritos. best three dollars I've ever spent.

chapter two: corona on headaches

2008-01-08T13:26:00.000-08:00

went skiing yesterday and tore something (not sure what, but my knee got kind of big. it's fine now.)

left the place at three o'clock to pick up my mom at work, wrote from 4:00 to 5:00, briefly stopping for freezer-burned burritos and coke.

had a terrible dream about an amusement park: i got lost and wound up spending the entire day with a bunch of midwestern tourists. HARDCORE tourists, with the zebra shirt and cargo shorts and Cannon camera on a string around their neck. I said I had a headache, and they handed me a beer to put on my forehead.

woke up at three o'clock in the morning. my mother had been calling all day. i had been asleep. she asked my neighbor (a night nurse, who was also trying to sleep at the time) to go in and see if I was still alive. I replied that I was. it was touching.

I was writing a story about two guys searching for the beating heart of punk, and I'd like to finish on that thought the way I began- with nothing other than it in my brain as I tailor it into a solid form. expect more difficulty with this in the future: which leads us to college, which leads us to the imminent terror of "my lifestyle is killing my parents."

dear god, I can't wait for burning man.

chapter one: all god's children vomit whole cheeseburgers

2008-01-05T18:30:00.000-08:00

and that's what they call the united states when you're in another country: the Enormous Floating Cheeseburger, not a tectonic plate or anything nearly as appetizing, believe me, it's just a bun and a slab of ground-up meat from different unattractive parts of the same unattractive cows, fried, with cheese dripped on it, and a bun on top. Maybe some fries and a soft drink. Mexico for the fries. Canada for the drink.

do you know what I'd love more than anything else right now? I would love to see Mike Gravel stare at somebody. Just deadpan at one person. Five minutes. Uninterrupted. Nobody talk. Just watch him stare. Stare, stare, stare.

my jacket is falling apart. am I gaining weight? I don't know. I should go to the gym- what gym? that's a joke.

Candidates talking about change. Bullshit, I want to throw things at the television. I want to throw the television. Damnation and hellfire candidate, who's that? I want him on the ticket. Vote for Kucinich, maybe, Dodd and Biden are out, Ronald McDonald left the building. What the hell do I care about politics?

I guess the most frustrating part of any vacation to Disney World is watching CNN on the television in your hotel room and wondering if anything on it can hurt you.

A tiger broke out of the zoo in San Francisco. "Surely," said CNN, "we will all perish." We did not.

They killed the Virgin Mary in Pakistan. "Without a doubt," said CNN, "we have not long to live." Why am I still alive? Thinking as you hold the God knows which one of God knows how many cheeseburgers, why am I allowed to eat this? That's not the source of the pain, but close to it, and probably close enough to be tempered by the pain itself: If I am as especially inconsequential as anybody else, why am I not hungry?

chapter six: the right profile

2007-12-21T19:20:00.000-08:00

bought a pair of converse all stars, which would any other day of the year be shit-terrible luck for me, but it's the first day of winter, it's like multiplying negative numbers.

why am I so dizzy?

spoke to a friend about hitting your creative zenith. "it happens around age 23," he said. it might have been 27, actually. when I'm 23, I'll say it was 23. four years later, I'll maintain it was 27.

still wondering about a novel. (churn, churn, churn.) I think I'll do an independant study next semester, just for the symmetry of the thing.

feel like learning how to drive a big mac truck. don't know why. won't ask why. will go to sleep and this desire to drive a truck will disappear. when I wake up tomorrow, I will no longer want to drive a mac truck. how subtle. so kafkian.

dizzy is such a good word. "I'm Getting Dizzy" was the title of this shit-terrible poem- I wanted to punch the guy who wrote it for stealing that word/ title. off to reclaim my dizziness. the gas station was out of regular &medium-grade gas, so I got premium, and have not noticed anything different about my car. off to drunk trucks and lumps of gods or gasoline.

chapter five: hands rubbing against each other

2007-12-17T06:56:00.000-08:00

I wonder sometimes what it is to be immortal, which is a silly thing to wonder since I know already, because I'm young and healthy, no cancer in my gut yet, no stiffness in my joints or murmur in my heart, and that's as close to deathless as life can get.

Pride goes before a fall. {I collect all my irony in a big plastic barrel and make bets with my landlord over the exact moment when it ferments into wine.}

Advice from Austin: Never mix your wines.

Thanks, Austin.

chapter four: lost my hat

2007-12-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

I used to have the best hat in the world, wool, brown, fit my head just right. And my hair is usually nuts if I don't wear a hat to flatten it out, and guess what it is today.

I'm not usually bothered by something so inconsequential as a missing knit cap, but this was a special hat. Every knit cap I get is like a brand new start for me. I pull it over my head and think and stick a pair of ear phones over it and aviator sunglasses and write until I run out of words. Of course they have nothing to do with my writing, and of course the idea that the thoughts brush off on them, run out my ears and seep up the fabric, it's absurd, but here I am, blogging about a missing thinking cap. It's no big deal. There are a lot of hats out there.

I was thinking about getting a cowboy hat this time, instead of returning to my old standby, the knit skull cap, like a head sock, but I couldn't fit head phones around it. So nil on that.

I keep clacking onto this story about an omniscient man vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, and I'm wondering when I'll run out of tricks/ when it'll stop being interesting. Will it happen sooner now that I've lost my hat? (Odd pot phenomenon: you stay baked longer if you're wearing a hat.)

I'll find out about my colleges soon. God, it would suck to be wait listed.

chapter three: kilograms

2007-12-12T12:28:00.000-08:00

I want to find seventy stones, a boat and a river and weigh myself. I get in first, and see if I sink. If I do, the rest isn't important, because I can't swim, and since a life jacket would throw things off, I'll probably drown.

Then I'll fill up the boat (assuming it isn't doing a coffin impression at the bottom of the river) with the stones, and if it sinks, it'll mean I weigh seventy stones.

I heard a story about a wise king trying to figure out how much his elephant weighed in the same manner. This story made no sense. How would you get the elephant on the boat? If it got on, how would you get the boat in the river? How would you get it back out again?

It's a confusing, misfortunate fairy-tale. Anyways, finals week is almost over (except next Monday, which somebody- cough, guidance, cough cough- decided is a part of this week) and I'm pretty much square in all but two of my classes, one of which wants two papers from me in the following, mmm, day and a half. Which is totally within the realm of possibility, considering I have none of the research materials I'd need to write the papers, and no time left to gather them.

What was I doing last week that was so important? Oh yeah, editing "Exorcism." (Link to that story will be provided as soon as it is published- at which time, this bit of the blog will be removed. Work in progress, folks. Look on and admire.)

Anyways, more research papers, blah, blah, evo. devo.

chapter two: how telling

2007-12-11T04:44:00.000-08:00

I had a dream that I was driving home from school and listening to talk radio, and I heard that Mitt Romney won the Iowa caucus. I got excited about that and started speeding, and a second later this cop pulled me over, except the cop was Rudy Giuliani.

I get a weird vibe from him. If I were in grade school with him, I'd expect him to try and steal my lunch money or something.

That's pretty depressing, actually- I can't even dream about being irresponsible without something bad happening.

More later. maybe I'll write something and make a category or two.

chapter one: I begin a pilgrimage

2007-12-10T18:51:00.000-08:00

so most of these things die in infancy. we'll see what happens.

I have to get up in the morning, and finals are pretty much over at the end of the week, we'll see what happens during intercession. I love college.

I'm tempted to put myself on some kind of training regimen while classes are out for how much I write- I have stories kicking around in my head which demand at least a bit of my attention when I have nothing better to do than busboy around Texas Roadhouse. hopefully I will get that job. we will see.

but, to start off, I'd like to say I'll try to avoid the pitfalls of blogging- giving in to my own pretension, taking myself seriously instead of what I write, you know, you know.

Maybe another blog thing tomorrow, after I change the background, it's way too bright. this site is weird.