Skull

Couldn't Find a Pen

I was stupid for most of my life. Every morning I wake, and, if I'm lucky, realize how stupid I was the day before. And then I go to bed and wake before morning and write something clever. And then I wake up the next morning and it's the stupidity again. A maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Movies and Meditation

The High's playing a samurai version of Cyrano De Bergerac. I'll probably be there, then running, then sleeping.

I'm fooling around with meditation. Results are abysmal so far, but other people seem to find the whole thing useful. I've heard meditation described as one of the hardest skills to learn, and I have a feeling that my peculiar need to be moving won't make it any easier.

Aggragate.

Check this out.

It's a program that searches various blogs and forums for the phrase "i feel", then displays the results in realtime.

A sample from watching for a few seconds:

I feel like such a highschool teenybopper pussy when i do that
I feel like running around and shouting it all
I feel like im in loove
I feel so isolated
I feel that many other bands groove together a pushing and pulling between bandmembers
I feel kind of bad for not talking to her that much
I feel very strongly that having the parade could increase the possibility of arab attacks against Israel
I feel like all my organs have been boiled and dissolved

I feel like I can here the internets!

Just sent out my first Metroblog entry!

Summer

From Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolfe:

There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or , if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

Sun and Violence

I wrote something, and I liked it. I'll post it in The Future.

I don't know if I'm learning more in school or out of it. See, in school, you realize when you've learned something new. In The World, knowing kind of sneaks up on you. Much less flashy out here.

So I miss school. Much easier to deal with little bits of concrete knowledge than these big fucking whales bumping into my brain and fighting each other.

I also miss shooting stuff. Summer makes me miss archery, and before that wandering Yoyogi Koen carrying little pellet guns gangster style. We used to fire arrows at each other, which is less serious than it sounds, especially using 20 pound bows. And the pellets were just for those goddamn crows.

Eh.

This whole thing must tie together somehow, right? We'll start with two points, build some sort of meaning behind them, create conflict as they coincide, and end up with a story. It will be an experiment.

James often suspected he was a fictional character. He looked at his job, and the people he always seemed to meet in that certain type of bar, and couldn't help but glimpse a happy grandiosity in it all. And if this was fiction, would the author ever get bored? When the time came, would he feel the paper crumple or the file empty? James kept his life interesting, just in case his suspicions were true.
Of course, without knowing his genre, certain actions became quite risky.

And She didn't really think about other people so much. She sometimes realized the fundamental error, and tried very hard to correct it, but ended up at the same point. She didn't think about other people because they didn't matter. If they mattered, wouldn't they make themselves known?

These two are destined to intersect.

What's this obsession with balance? Would we be worrying about this shit if we were born asymetrical?

Anarchist Crap

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Hakim Bey
William Godwin

Murray Bookchin
Mikhail Bakunin

Dear Journal,

I'm sitting crosslegged on the floor of this girl's apartment. She just came back from Japan. The laptop I'm borrowing from her is still set on Japan time (13 hours ahead), and I spent the last half hour trying to figure out how to switch the keyboard to English mode. We put some of the special characters in different places, they hide the comma key somewhere around the tilde on American keyboards.

The whole place is covered in long spider web strands of blonde and brown hair. The brown belongs to her roommate, who just turned in a few minutes ago. I'm borrowing various sleeping things from both of them, and will be sprawled on this floor in the next few minutes.

I just switched from normal crosslegged to meditation style sitting. I don't know what it's really called. When I was younger, I used the two interchangeably. Now my body seems to get in the way of any quick switches between the two.

We mainly caught up by drinking.

Our different trips to Japan don't really compare. She was in school, spending her free time drinking and stalking intricately put together Japanese boys. I slept in parks, and spent my free time walking. I assume we got everything we needed from the trip. In another year, when a mutual friend comes back from a research project on one of the big Northern islands, the blonde will listen and be jealous.

'Night.

Sunday Music

I'm listening to:

Sunset Rubdown
Prototypes
Young and the Restless

(Click names for audio)

Choose Liff

Myclonic Jerk aka hypnagogic myoclonic twitch

...The general consensus among researchers is that, as your muscles begin to slack and go into a restful state just as you are falling asleep; your brain senses these relaxation signals and misinterprets them, thinking you are falling down. The brain then sends signals to the muscles in your arms and legs in an attempt to jerk you back upright. This misinterpretation that takes place in your brain may also be responsible for the “falling” dreams that accompany the falling sensation. These “dreams” are not really normal dreams, as they are not produced from R.E.M sleep, but rather more like a daydream or hallucination in response to the body’s sensations.

-

Shamelessly stolen from the article on FailedSuccess.com.

Crush!

Operation: LiveForever is in full effect.

Books, Cigars, War

I finished up the Barth, Nickel and Dimed, Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Cigar Chic.

That last one's pretty fucking weird. The book is written as a women's guide to cigar smoking culture, from the point of view of a female cigar afficianado. It is written badly and unselfconsciously - points which combine to make it better (or at least more interesting) than much of what we read in Creative Writing.

As far as I can tell, every book is written with the author as the main character. Any protagonist within the novel is secondary.

I've started Middlesex, and I'm liking it so far. To make a big generalization, it reminds me of many recently written popular "great books". Keep in mind that my recent "great books" category only includes The Corrections, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and Middlesex. [Don't you hate it when you're writing a series, and your second to last item in the series, right before the ", and z." part has an "and" in it? I always wonder if changing the series order would be cheating.] So, commonalities - wacky families, foreigners, growing up. Wide net, eh?

But I like Middlesex, even though most of my liking is based on the author talking about the old Ottoman empire, which was badass.

Listen to this.

Too Much Barth

James often suspected he was a fictional character. He looked at his job, and the people he always seemed to meet in that certain type of bar, and couldn't help but glimpse a happy grandiosity in it all. And if this was fiction, would the author ever get bored? When the time came, would he feel the paper crumple or the file empty? James kept his life interesting, just in case his suspicions were true.

Rum Rum Rum

So, my eyes are divided between three things.

1) A thing about Greek food, which leads me towards thinking of that divine combination of yogurt and anything else. A sort of Mediterranean version of sweet and sour.

2) A description of trailblazing. I want to wander through the city, writing urls on random buildings and stuff. Okay. It may be my vices talking, but that's my goal for Friday. I'll go to Five Points station, then walk back home, "tagging" something on every block.

3) The third is more of an inner eye, thinking of things which make my brain go wonky. Booze is probably the biggest thing now. Though I've always assumed that brain sideways-e-ness is achievable through effort, not specifically through the right mix of chemicals.

Something else: There are two big sorts of relationships. Relationships based on a sort of like-to-like reaction, and relationships where some random thing triggers some random other thing in some incomprehensible fashion. If you were more logical than I pretend to be, you might say that these two relationships are the same, any difference is perceived, not actual.

Anyway, I talked to strippers and (not technically) dwarves last night, and I'm still rummaging around my brain pan. I could use a long walk with someone who only says stuff when absolutely necessary.

This break from actual physical relations may be for the best. My mind is beginning to shift from "sex is awesome" mode to "everything is awesome" version. I expect this to change Wednesday (?).

So, what's the deal? Why are tall blonde girls attracted to me? You people are like the opposite of my type. I try to avoid talking to you, but you hound me!

Is this something about tall blonds in general, or just me? The basic theory is that tall girls feel sort of left out from girl society. Girls in general don't like tall girls because they fall outside of the norm, while highschool boys don't like tall girls because the girls tend to be taller, earlier than the boys. So that means the tall girls end up with strangled low self esteem. Which I guess leads them to hit on geeky guys like myself.

And even now, this geekiness thing is in question. I'm geeky as in I do some geeky things. I fuck around with computer guts, I [heart] internet, I like words, and I've probably got some weird crazy problems left over from school. But, I mean really, what's a geek. A more accurate description may be ocd motherfucker, or um oh shit I forget the name of that other societal craziness, the one where you don't really connect with people. That must be what all these goddamn geeks have.

[Yeesh. I just finished writing this, and it doesn't make much sense. Blame someone else. And my brother, and circumstances. How do I get stuck in these things? A: being stuck is hella fun]

Nose Knows

I smell like strippers and fat people.

I spent last night recovering with spicy chicken sammiches and white wine. Two great tastes that don't go great together.

I'm not sure what I was recoving from. I worked mornings Monday through Thursday, and sometimes my manager said something, and I did my best to smile and be affabile. That was probably it. I don't smile, I grin. Smiling is a lot of work.

Did I mention that a few years ago I used to spend a few minutes each day practicing smiling in a mirror? You know, real smiles, wif teef and stuff. It never really caught on. My "teeth smile" is remarkably similar to my war face.

So, when the manager said something, it was really getting to be a lot of effort. I'm trying to make a good impression, you know. Eventually, I figured out a good routine.

Manager says something, I go to the back room to pick up more ice or wash dishes or peel bananas. On the way back, I punch the fridge a few times. Makes me feel ver' aggressive and edgy. Let's start a fight club.

I miss working at camp, spending my days playing around with bows and shooting at coworkers. It's not even a proper sort of hot in Atlanta, and the cockroaches are way too big.

So that's why I was recovering.

I've turned on all the indirect lights in my apartment, but things still feel sinister. If the rain lets up a bit, I might go run in circles.

You may be interested in this and this. They fit my mood.

I think I'm reading at least 6 books right now.