I saw The Island last night. Entertaining and well crafted, but Hollywood can take its product placement and fucking choke on it.

I am sick of being a target market. I am sick of corporations vying for ownership of my mind. I am sick of people who watch the Superbowl "just to see the commercials." I am sick of consumerism, materialism and the total absence of coherence and discernment that allows it to continue.

There are better ways to live.

Let's get trunk.

Way back in May, going to school made my head feel like my underwear used to after PE, so I figured I'd need to escape to somewhere strange and interesting when summer came. I got on a plane and flew six hours to my brother's spartan apartment in Queens, where I would sweat much and sleep little.

Imagine walking around with your face wedged into someone's ass crack, all the time. That's more or less what it feels like to exist in New York during July. Compound with that the peculiar rhythm of thousands of bodies in constant motion and the sound of a hundred different dialects and you begin to get an idea. And if you're savvy enough, you can ride through the city's metal arteries to basically anywhere.

Being solely responsible for your health and safety instills in you a great deal of confidence; a power over your life that you can flex with tangible results. On this trip I discovered the transformative properties of spontaneity. Doing things on impulse makes the world glitter, and you invite cool weirdness into your life, try it.

I'd like to share what I've learned, but that's impossible. My whole has expanded.

SRHS discusses David Mebane

Featuring some of my finest incendiary rhetoric to date.

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+



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Vader Coaster

Caption contest!

I found this site that allows you to generate a random poem from the contents of a website.

This is the Tribulations in Phobitopia poem:

Tribulations In the WallOf Montreal
posted by Matthew Location:San Diego,
California, United States
In it, on the sidebarmargin: 0; 0
comments
Sunday, June 08, 10/10/17/2004 01/12/
2005 06/11/20/2003
11/22/2003
05/02/01/
22/2003 03/09/08/2004
06/07/2003 02/22/2002 11/2003 12/28/2004
05/15/2005 I stare at
him before, out
of text in the
sidebarp. { : margin:
0; padding: 5px p { : 0; } . {
6px; } /* links */ a:active { color: #999; : background:
url http://www.blogger.Template Style Name:
Matthew at 4:02 26/
2005 03/
20/2002 11/2003 09/01/2002
11/14/
2004 06/2003 03/
2003 03/06/
2003 05/04/06/06/12/
28/2002 10/11/16/2005
04/24/2003 11/30/2003
01/25/2003 05/
23/2003 08/17/2003 09/
2003 03/
26/2002 12/
2005 06/27/
2003 12/
27/2004 02/26/2004 04/2004 06/
11/2005 The
pe...

The setting: Meanley, after school, today.

The perp: A smallish, ambiguously-ethnic douche face wearing a Nautica shirt, shorts and gold necklace.

The event: I am standing, waiting for my ride when I hear from my right, "Yo SON! Serra high school's GAY!" My mind reels for about ten seconds while I stare at him before, out of the swirling chaos, enough synapses connect to make my face look a little confused. The kid turns to his friends. "Yeah, he used to go to Serra."

...............

I have just completed my twenty-minute epic documentary "The Teenager's Guide to Possession: A Crass Course in Demonology," a chronicle of my attempts to become demonically posessed by playing Dungeons and Dragons and listening to rock music. If you'd like to see it, come to Ebel's room tomorrow during fourth period.

You must see Howl's Moving Castle. Seriously.

Manipulative dickheads

My brother has an oft-repeated phrase; "Sometimes I feel like this whole world was made just to annoy me." That's pretty much exactly how I feel when I read about slimy jackasses like these guys who spend their lives coming up with innovative ways to coerce you into buying things. It's not even the buying that bothers me, it's brand loyalty. It's the idea that someone could be mentally complacent enough to buy into that saccharine, nauseating SHIT that saturates most media. It's people who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials. I mean, God DAMMIT.

I'm beginning to believe that mainstream American culture is intellectual anathema. It's such a dull, life-denying consensus reality. Flags. Pickup trucks. Bush. Britney Spears. Freedom. Elimidate. Maybe that's a completely trite thing for me to say, but at the crux of it all is a pleblian psychology that reduces all concepts to their most rudimentary forms. And it's in my head too! It's horrible and I want nothing to do with it.

I seriously can't stand how people on the radio say "blues," generally preceded by "house of." I can't tell you why, it just makes me want to strangle myself.

Give money to these bands:


Grand Buffet


Tilly and the Wall


Of Montreal

You should look in the latest issue of People. I'm in it, on page 147. Try not to buy it.

As taken from www.bigbangtango.net:

What is the Tango?

  In Frankfurt, Germany, a Russian physicist thinks that he’s spotted a sociology of basic particles. Now he wants to talk to photons.

In Tel Aviv, Israel, a physicist/microbiologist has been studying bacterial colonies and thinks he sees a linguistic pattern—a Chomskyite deep structure, a language—in the communication between single-celled beasts. In a paper published in the leading journal of physics, Physica A, the same Israeli physicist has made an even more shocking claim—that bacterial colonies have consciousness.

In Moscow, a mathematician/physicist at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been pondering quantum mechanics and has concluded that electrons and photons have to make decisions, they have to make up their “minds.”

And in New York City, the founder of a field called paleopsychology thinks that there are common threads between the German’s sociology of quantum mechanics, the Russian’s “emperor electrons,” the Israeli’s sentences “spoken” chemically by bacteria, the Israeli’s bacterial mass mind, and the mass passions aroused by superstars of human culture and of history, from Michael Jackson and Prince to Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

In modern science all of this should be viewed as blasphemy. It’s anthropomorphism, clear and simple. Humans make decisions. Photons and electrons don’t. Humans have language. Bacteria have no such thing. They can’t. They don’t have tongues. They don’t have that critical churner of words and paragraphs—a brain.

The time may have arrived to remove this taboo. Those who’ve labored hard to purge anthropomorphism from their vocabulary may have been the real sinners. They may have been anthropo-chauvinists in disguise.

When we apply words like attraction and repulsion--words that come from human physical and emotional experience--to quarks, protons, and electrons, we may simply be playing on a basic fact of nature. Evolution--and I mean the full sweep of evolution from the big bang to today--is iterative and fractal. The same simple principles show up over and over again. Principles like attraction and repulsion are the tools with which the self-construction of the universe began. They ruled over quarks, photons, and electrons 13.5 billion years ago. They were the master forces of the big bang.

The human high plateau of consciousness, emotion, language, culture, and immersion in the opinions of others is unique. But it's just another form of quark-dance, one it took quarks 13.5 billion years to invent.

The practical consequence? Sometimes bio-patterns can help solve puzzles in physics. Sometimes clues from human psychology can help solve problems in microbiology.

I’m the New Yorker mentioned above, the founder of paleopsychology. I call the social dance-steps of the inanimate and living cosmos The Big Bang Tango. And the concept of the Big Bang Tango is beginning to catch fire.

When the Tel Aviv physicist studying bacteria, Eshel Ben-Jacob—head of the Physics Department at the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences at Tel-Aviv University--sent a draft of his upcoming article, “Reflections on Biochemical Linguistics of Bacteria,” I scribbled the usual notations in the margins. One note pointed out that the paper’s facts hint that bacteria have something that strongly resembles human culture. Then I gave the reasons. Ben-Jacob and his co-writers felt the comparison was accurate, and included it in their text.

When the Moscow mathematician, Pavel Kurakin, at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, sent his paper on “Toy Quantum Mechanics with Hidden Variables,” it bristled with forbidden words. According to Kurakin’s theory, a quantum particle receives “queries” from particle detectors. Those detectors “duel” for the particle’s attention. Some of these “pretenders” receive only “refuse” signals. One lucky detector wins the particle’s favor and is blessed with the particle’s visit. In other words, there is competition and communication—a basic Darwinian twosome—at work on the quantum level.

How, I asked does a quantum particle make its decision on which signal to accept?
Who wins what Kurakin call this “lottery”? Says Pavel, “…Query signal intensity is proportional to |psi|2. Detectors win proportionally to their query intensities.”

In other words, in the quantum world, the strongest thrive. But the weak subordinate or die—a rule that shows up in the evolution of stars, galaxies, living beings, minds, emotions, politics, and history.

What’s wrong with these conversations? What’s wrong with Kurakin’s characterization of the rules of the cosmos as “natural fascism”? What’s wrong with Ben-Jacob’s claim that bacteria “send messages,” use chemical “words,” have “a chemical language,” and “can conduct a dialogue”? Or that bacterial “swimmers enter a ‘consultation phase’, during which they divide and communicate until a ‘collective decision,’ is reached”? Or worse yet, that bacteria have “chemical foreplay,” “chemical courtship,” “interpret” the state of the colony, reach a “majority vote,” and, if they have “valuable information announce this fact”? What’s wrong? Every single word of this is scientific heresy.

Plastering human qualities on everything we see is precisely what science has labored mightily to avoid since roughly 1650. Anthropomorphism is the stuff of witches and Church elders—of magic, superstition, and religion. Anthropomorphism carries all the Dark-Age intellectual baggage that folks like Galileo, Hooke, van Leeuwenhoek, Newton, and Voltaire snatched with difficulty from the fists of clerics, alchemists, and potion makers and threw away.

There's a claim implicit in the work of the colleagues I've stitched together on the Internet, a claim that in my work is as explicit as hell: many of the patterns we regard as solely human are not. We share basic rules and stratagems not just with ants, lizards, and chimps.

It's beginning to look as if we share such basics as communication with quarks, abilities like decision making with quantum particles, and complexities like the deep structure of language with bacteria.

Our aversion to anthropomorphism is arrogance in disguise. It's anthropocentrism--a failure to see that we carry in us patterns we've inherited from ten billion years of inanimate evolution, evolution that built the raw material of your finger tips, your blood, your brain, Bara's, my wife’s, Chris Anderson’s, and mine.

We woke up in the 20th Century to something Aristotle once suspected—that we are political animals. Are we clever? Yes. But we are clever beasts. Thanks to 20th Century figures like Wolfgang Koehler, Paul MacLean, Neil Miller, William Hamilton, E.O. Wilson, and Franz de Waal, we caved in and finally fessed up to the fact that many of the things we do and feel we share with reptiles, lab rats, apes, and chimps.

Science is on the brink of yet another revelation. We share many of our “human” qualities with more than just our cousins in the clan of DNA. We share these qualities with atoms, stars, and galaxies.

Is this airy-fairy, New Age wishful thinking, or is this genuine science? If it’s valid, science is in for more than just a minor change. It may be on the brink of what many of its practitioners wish for consciously but fear deep in their hearts, a cataclysmic viewpoint-flip, one that could undermine the validity of their life’s work—a Thomas Kuhnian paradigm shift.

The paradigm shift is coming. I think I hear it rumbling. In fact, as the New Yorker whose been splicing these disparate strands of the Big Bang Tango together, I’ve staked my life on it.


This ties in so perfectly with everything I've come to believe about the world. The Big Bang Tango is an idea I've been gnawing on for a long time and it has a name now. Howard Bloom is a genius.

Standing like a rock set aside a river,
Faces flow past in angry harmony,
Blinking towards the ground in silent protest of the day’s persistent ending.
I stand close as families scatter listlessly like unbending watercolor insects across a shadowed landscape,
Ink streaking forgottenly from rhythmic feet.

As taken from my Ebel notebook:

Turkish Remakes I'd Like to See

Turkish Rush Hour: A zany beige-meets-beige comedy romp in which two fast-talking, loose-cannon cops must retrieve a diplomat's stolen daughter. Jackie Chan's fantic physical comedy is recreated by combatants calmly passing a clay pot back and forth while gently kicking each other in the shins.

Turkish I, Robot: Turkish Will Smith is embroiled in a vast conspiracy to make the human race obsolete with intelligent robots, represented by Turkish children wrapped in blankets and aluminum foil with empty beer cans taped to their heads.

Turkish Pirates of the Caribbean: Johnny Depp's inebriated swarthiness is emulated through actual drunkenness, and his pithy banter is reduced to incomprehensible strings of vowels heard through layers of static. The original movie's sweeping, intense battle sequences are simply cut directly into the Turkish version, spliced with shots of Turkish fishermen jumping up and down in a boat while crewmembers behind the camera throw smoke grenades at them.

Coolest dream EVER:

In the future, a massive climate shift brings about a near-apocalyptic worldwide hurricaine, and out of the scattered remnants of the Earth rises a great hero - ME - a cunning and infinitely resourceful agent of chaos who crushes his enemies with the might of a god. Between sweet makeout sessions with tons of fly honies, I visited my impenetrable fortress BEYOND SPACE-TIME where I navigated vast mazes of secret tunnels and admired my extensive arsenal of futuristic assault weapons, which were largely unneccessary due to my uncanny ability to TOTALLY WAIL on any assailants with crazy, limb-flailing martial arts.

Yes! My subconscious rules!

People have organized a "Dress Like Matt Louv" day for Wednesday. Just so you know.

into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness,friends

i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-colored twilight

i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermillion departure
swim,sayingly;

(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:

(of solongs and,ashes)

-e.e. cummings

"BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!" Goes the collective student body.

It often takes an hour of wallowing in the dry heat of Kaloustian's class to motivate myself to make a blog entry.

"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" proclaims Massoud from the back of the class. Substitute does nothing.

School is ugly. It's like your underwear after a hot day at school. GOD, it's hot and gross and my head hurts and "Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!" Soulless myrmidons patrolling the campus looking for children to bully, grades, grades, grades, the dumb nauseating pulse of the top ten at lunch, the smell of cheese everywhere, hot sun, I VOMIT YOU OUT, I EXPEL YOU FROM MY BODY LIKE A SICKNESS. I reclaim dominion over my life, they get no more anger, no more floorspace in my head.

"Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot! Faggot!"

Love something.

Cell phones make you stupid.

Happy, surprised, simple.
What is this I hold in my hands?
Confused, surprised, surprised, simple, blonde gray and black.
Warm face.
Amazed, amazed, amazed.
It worked?
What is this I hold in my hands?

I'm definitely not the first person to say this, but comic books are really an under-appreciated medium. I've probably read about sixty comics in the last two weeks and I can say with confidence I've gotten more enjoyment and stimulation out of them than all the obligatory school reading I've done in the past three years combined. Here are my favorite titles:

-The Authority: Imagine a hedonistic Justice League floating through ultra-space in a sentient spacecraft fifty miles long who fight sadistic villains, power-hungry dictators and aliens in massive, bloody melees often resulting in extensive civilian casualties. Groovy beyond description.

-Animal Man: An animal rights super hero book. It's not lame. The writer manifests himself as an alien to try to subdue characters he can't control.

-The Invisibles: Basically the source material for The Matrix but way, way cooler. Members of the crew for the movie were actually given copies of the comic for research. Young, sailor-mouthed highschool anarchist is inducted into a faction of occult guerillas, it is CRAAAZY.

-Transmetropolitan: Gonzo journalist of the future wields a diarrhea-inducing gun against politicians and eats human body parts. Patrick Stewart wants to make a movie out of it.

-Hellblazer: Inspiration for the movie Constantine. Only Hollywood could translate a swarthy, blonde Englishman into Keanu Reeves.

-The Books of Magic: Harry Potter was a totally inferior ripoff of this series, from the same guy who did Sandman. Needless to say, it will rock you.


This man writes comics that will make your face turn inside-out.

I highly recommend both "Looking Beyond the Ivy League" and "Colleges That Change Lives" by Loren Pope for those of you interested in alternative (good) colleges.

I'm in Kaloustian's class, there's a sub, I have an hour to kill. I shall write.

Looking for colleges got a lot easier when I realized how completely disenchanted I've become with mainstream education. I want nothing to do with it anymore. There is a college I am seriously considering in Washington where they don't evaluate you through grades; only through written assessment. And the students assess the teachers as well. You make your own curriculum. It's small. It's different.

I met with one of the higher-ups at UCSD and even she doesn't think the UC's are all that great for people like me. Colleges like UCSD are way too big for any kind of recognizable community to form, everyone's scattered, your professors shirk their responsibilities and you end up being taught by grad students and many can't even graduate until year five because they couldn't get the classes they wanted or needed. It also seems to me like these colleges are based on the same systems that high schools and middle schools are: churning out a product. Molding a student, not a person. School thusfar has given me very few useful, applicable skills, and if anything, my ability to process information effectively has been severely hindered by it. I want out. With that realization came optimism, and for the first time ever I'm actually excited about my education.

Yeah, and fuck middle school. Seriously.

Walt Disney hired Nazis, condoned police brutality as a means to end an animator's strike and produced propaganda films about how nuclear fission makes for a better tomorrow. I wanna put my fist through my TV.



P.S.........Electrophoresis.

Crazy-ass dreams about policemen smothering babies and go-kart riding parents. I want certain things I'm not getting. Like to speak in not-code. I no communicate well.

Read Kerouac, dammit.

It's the hidden logic of the internet that I can say words like "love" and "God" without embarassment. I can see hundreds of us bearing our chests to our screens, a thousand and one midnight confessionals. We're really quite vulnerable, yeah? Why hide behind boxes, isolated, hurting? We don't have to be distanced. Everything we say to each other doesn't have to amuse. We can be honest, we can be honest.

We can bring it out in the open. Those things you think about when you can't sleep can become realities if you want them to. We don't have to be half-humans anymore, we can find each other.

I'm now convinced that one's enjoyment of life is directly proportional to the amount of sleep they are getting. I got fourteen hours of sleep last night, it lends perspective.

Dreariness gone. Things make sense. Information is processed logically. It's like open-access to your whole brain and everything glows.

I spent yesterday dancing with the strange and beautiful things of the sea. Massive, flowing, eating beings. I hooked a shark and just stood there, holding on to it, helpless and absurd. The staggering simplicity of the thing is incommunicable.

The Young Man and the Sea

The Academy Awards nauseate me, and yet I watched them for two hours before turning the TV off. The culture virus has me.

P.S. Counting Crows suck like all hell.

P.P.S. Garden State is good and you should see it.

By the time I was out the door, my cat had already pounced and I could hear muffled squeaks.

My cat killed the baby rabbit we'd been seeing in my backyard for a week. He stared at me blankly with it hanging limply out of his mouth.

It died quickly. The more I thought about it, the less sad it was. My cat had millions of years of killer instinct to compete with. Death isn't evil. It simply is.

Homework hurts my soul, and that is not an attempt at comical hyperbole.

There is nothing more discouraging than the knowledge that you are about to apply yourself to something irrelevant, that you are about to unwillingly concede to dance like a little monkey and talk about Marta going to the supermarket, repairing her lawnmower and volunteering at the community center.

Just let me get drunk on the afternoon sun and sit empty-headed and lovesick, which is more important that all the God-damned textbooks in the world stacked on top of one another. There are destroyers of beautiful things, and don't ever forget that.

Damn-ed Hallmark.

Woke up, showered and thought about all the girls I'm not dating. Happy "Wallow In Misery" day.

Walk into first period, math, there's a quiz.

Straight to Woods-Petties, Spanish, there's a quiz. However, Señora gave me a chocolate and it seems like she's warming up from her "act like a surly fuck-o to Matt Louv" phase. Halfway through the period my lip starts bleeding and won't stop. Bloody kleenex stuck to my face, I rise to my feet and proclaim to all, "Happy Valentine's Day!"

Then I shot Kaloustian with rubber bands.

Home, I cleaned my room and listened to Dead Kennedys. Dead Kennedys fix all.

What a fabricated holiday. Lotsa love to all, despite.

"I just wanted to compliment you on your growth into manhood. In particular your forearms. You have hell of manly forearms."

I am so bored with us.

Cleaning my room, listening to the radio and I find myself changing the station every couple minutes because I simply cannot tolerate the commercials they play.

"Allo, zees ees Francois, from France, zee countree of luvvv. Zees Valentine's seezon, take your spezzial someone to a bistro..."

Vomit, vomit, vomit. We are SO ARROGANT.

Sometimes I feel like America's a film I have to scrape off the back of my retinas and burn out of my ear canals to have any kind of coherent, real-human-being thoughts.

Our culture is godless, yet we ourselves are not. How do we allow our good sense to be stripped away and replaced with such meaningless trivialities? Is this our consensus reality? Lives of spiritual complacency playing to a soundtrack of car commercials?

Smash it all to pieces and build something pretty out of it. At least I'm trying.

Two relevant poems by Kenneth Patchen, an angry pacifist.

'O Fiery River'

O fiery river
Flow out over the land.
Men have destroyed the roads of wonder,
And their cities squat like black toads
In the orchards of life.
Nothing is clean, or real, or as a girl,
Naked to love, or to be a man with.
The arts of this American land
Stink in the air of the mountains;
What has made these men sick rats
That they find out every cheap hole?

How can these speak of greatness?
Push your drugstore-culture into the sewer
With the rest of your creation.
The bell wasn't meant to toll for you.
Keep your filthy little hands off it.

O fiery river
Spread over this American land.
Drown out the falsity, the smug contempt
For what does not pay...
What would you pay Christ to die again?


"And When Freedom Is Achieved..."

You have used a word
Which means nothing.
You have given a word
The power to send men to death.
Men are not free who are sent to die.
Only those who send them are 'free.'
You should have freedom stuffed down your fat throats.


Those poems were written in the thirties.

Your sensibilities are being exploited again

This shit is infectious and I hate it. Hate it!

Over the past couple of days I've had a lot of time to reflect, and I've come to a few conclusions.

For some reason, this year seems much more draining than any other. Everyone I've mentioned this to agrees with me. It seems like all of us are worn out, like we're sick of the institution and sick of each other. There seems to be a mutual animosity that's emerged just below the surface.

Time to make our lives our own again. If we stop allowing school to damage us, we stop empowering it. We need to reclaim our minds and our relationships, because school mentality will not stop until both are torn from us and mangled into something we don't even recognize. Time to start being interested in each other again. Time to start being kind. Time to start learning on our own, and learning from each other.

So this is what I ask of you all: do everything in your power to instill your lives with positive energy, however you may do that, because the rest of us will benefit and we can make our collective existence into something constructive, rather than the dreariness that it currently is. Our happiness is our own responsibility.

My dad gave in and booked another trip to Alaska this summer, same place we went last time.

I can't express what a relief it will be to fish there again, last trip was the most peaceful experience of my life.

I encourage all of you to try to seek out places like Kodiak, places of natural beauty. They've made such an impact on me.

Pictures

New Year's Eve, party at Emily's house. Her house is haunted; many stories I'd rather not dwell on. Ansel leaves a digital audio recorder in an empty room upstairs and leaves it to record half an hour of white noise. Later, we hook it to a guy's car stereo and listen to silence for ten minutes when...

"................................BLUOACHTOAURFLARORLAAAGH!!!........"

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!! WHAT THE FUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!"

Ansel is so startled that he rewinds the tape to the beginning. We listen to the entire thing again, and the sound is gone.

"AAAAAAAAAGH!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!! I HAVE TO WALK HOME TONIGHT!!!! FUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

So, I haven't done a narrative post in a while.

Christmas was generous to me again; the highlights were an iPod and iPod accessories, though I got some other neato goodies like the Queer Eye book (to those critics of Queer Eye, find me a TV show that's more good-hearted, nurturing and positive) and the new William Shatner album.

The year's about to end, a "new year" about to begin. This is a meaningless quantification in my mind, though every year I do the obligatory reflection. So where am I now? 365 steps closer to God(s) and a bit hairier. Over the break I've been growing a weak little McGinn beard, simply because. This does not make sense, as I think guys my age who have facial hair are obnoxious and gross. I have no intention of keeping the beard, so if you want to see it, act now.

I also find myself playing a waiting game again, as happens every so many months. How can something so important move so sloooooooooowly?

Not looking forward to diving back into school; the administration is out of control and I'm tired of feeling like everyone's a few words away from killing each other.

To those of you reading The Dharma Bums: that book is an almost perfect model of my outlook on the world, so tread lightly and I hope it's as rewarding for you as it was for me.

I'm a heathen.

Sometimes I just feel like everything's holy.

I tried stream of consciousness writing once, back before I knew what anything was, and it wasn't very good. So I did it again and enough interesting thoughts came out that it's not too embarassing:

Like the set for some movie sent down from heaven where the funds ran out about halfway through, discontented cast and crew with coffee stains on faces, wrinkled lines in sides of faces, tumbleweeds across the dusty stage with everyone standing around, confused, watching.

Shaking a stick in the middle of the grass, everyone not knowing but knowing but refusing to acknowledge their own beats and sticks. Everyone rips off clothes, sense of own mortality and smear shit on walls, proclaiming mortality and invincibility just because we’re not supposed to be mortal and invincible. It’s all coming down, it’s all fleshy, it’s being taken away.

Slamming table against wall again and again and again.

Like priests marching around the altar of some sacrifice, holy but not knowing it because they’re laughing and they can’t just sit the fuck still and not think anything and not do anything, no one knows why they’re walking, just lay down in the middle of everything and people will proclaim because the most important statement anyone can make is no statement at all because simply the essence of being, one point of concentrated space in time, is more powerful than all the words in the world set together, and all the arcane energy that they create can’t begin to touch the beauty of one unhindered moment.

Ultimate irony that you can’t feel your own warmth, but you don’t have to touch another to feel human, it’s all there. In the trees, like they just don’t care, like you’re an insignificant nothing but you love them anyway because they SIMPLY ARE and you SIMPLY ARE even though it’ll take years and years to realize that you SIMPLY ARE.

Inexpressible, heartbreaking, multi-splendorous, horrifying and beautiful complexity of everything.

Can't sleep, go downstairs, the whole outside is lit up. Step outside, a good kind of cold and the world's pure when no one's watching. Smells like the desert, I can see my breath, my English class is reading The Dharma Bums and everything's just a little more still.

Hard to believe this is right outside our windows, every night, and we never bother to pay attention.

So I hope they'll listen to dear old Mr. Kerouac.

I'm glad everyone gets that release once every so many months, at least those that aren't too self-conscious to enjoy themselves. Perhaps, actually, they aren't self-conscious enough.

Reaffirmation, reaffirmation, reaffirmation that the gritty is there, that it's there when we need it. Just jump up and around and feel dead and brilliant, like black and concrete added make light.

Get rowdy, y'all.

You can always count on the weather to be relevant.

This is hard.

You are captured by evil henchmen and trapped in a square shaft 100 feet deep. The walls are completely smooth and straight. On your person you have a container of dental floss, a promotional AOL CD, a lighter and a torn female condom.

Whoever can escape from the shaft gets to co-host.

Don't wanna feel like I got punched in no gut no more.

Don't Pick at It Radio will now be airing on Wednesdays at 7:00 pm. Here is the link, don't lose it. DPAIR

Instead of doing another rap contest, I'm going to try something very different. Whoever can most accurately reconstruct the weird dream I had the other night using these pictures as a guide will get to co-host.













Those of you whom I've already explained the dream to are disqualified.

The next episode of Don't Pick At It Radio will be this Wednesday at 7:00pm, not Monday at 8:00.

Bush's one-fingered victory salute

Rap.

A message to all those who embrace difference



Thank you for being interesting. Thank you for interrupting the human landscape with color and shapes and metal. Thank you for your perspective. Thank you for continuing to dress the way you please, despite constant ridicule. Don't listen to them, they're the ones doing it wrong.

New rap topic:

Rain is a blessing. When it rains during school, my listlessness vanishes, I feel warm and belly-happy.

But some people don't appreciate the rain.

Today at lunch the "administrative assistant" I lovingly refer to as "Anal Tear" was patrolling the quad, ordering people enjoying the weather to find shelter. "We're in high school now."

Yeah. We are in high school. Perhaps it's time we are treated like young adults.

It's strange; Anal Tear figures were everywhere in middle school. Freshman year, it was about half and half. By sophomore year, most of the faculty's authoritarian douchiness had subsided and this year, I can't think of another person besides Ol' Crabbytats who still ascribes to that outdated, awful system. I wonder if she knows how universally disliked she is.

Anyway, it's raining, and I'm happy.

Pump Up the Volume: best movie EVER!

New rap topic: the epicanthic fold.

Once again, whoever submits the best rap gets to co-host the show with me.

No broadcast tomorrow; I will be gone. I'll figure out the schedule soon.

This is John Kerry.

This is John Kerry stomping Bush into the ground.

This is Matt Louv jubilant.

For those of you who don't know, Spanish class is intensely boring. A few days ago, we were split up into groups to draw maps of the Caribbean with magic markers. Instead, I repressed violent impulses to spasm on the ground and channeled my pent-up agitation into a rap about cybernetic tigers:

Crawl through the jungle on your hands 'n' knees
Raise your face to the sky, smell death on the breeze.
There's a man-made horror creepin' through the brush
Orange and black, you're gonna get crushed!

They come from a lab, from the future unknown,
Flyin' through the trees, metal and bone,
Five-hundred pounds of cyborg death,
When they crush your ribs you'll be all out of breath.


As you can tell, the rap possibilities this topic opens up are limitless, so whoever can come up with the best cybernetic tiger rap will be slated to co-host Don't Pick At It for one show.


Niggaa whaaaaat!

There's this little kid with a broken heart running after me, but he's running too slow.

I wish there were really weird, fascinating seventeen-year-olds.

I wish there was some other-world we could disappear into on Friday nights where everything goes upside-down-ways and there is rock music.

I wish gum came in Kelso flavor.

A million and one kids beating themselves up over the same trite bullshit. Let's all find something new to feel mopey about. Like badgers. I am going to drive myself to breaking point over badgers.

I am such a cliche! ASS!

Go here.

Top quotes from the last two days:

"Hey, do you have Prince Albert in a can? Because if you did, you'd probably be in there with him, because you're a homosexual." - Brent Winkel

"Of I smeared you with pathogen, would you be happy?" - Mr. Asakawa

"Do you understand the fascination with beaver?" - Mr. Ihlbrock

"MY ESSAYS ARE REALLY HARD!!!"

"And When Freedom Is Achieved..."

You have used a word
Which means nothing.
You have given a word
The power to send men to death.
Men are not free who are sent to die.
Only those who send them are 'free.'
You should have freedom stuffed down your fat throats.

-Kenneth Patchen

You know, when it's two in the morning and you're on AIM and not talking to anyone.

You know, when it's silent and you're weeping into your keyboard and thinking that no one hears you.

You know, it's the spaces between the words.

You know, there are thousands of others just as lonely as you are.

There is so much not to be sad about, you just have to try.

"I LIKE SHOUTING!!!"

Intense self-loathing, brought to you by The Mall.

There's a reason why everyone's read it.

Down at Jeraback until 11 with the night tribes and about 10 bro's who showed up later, lurking around their pickups, and for the first time since seventh grade, I have to deal with Justin Mills.

Goddammit. The pain and fury they create. They don't know, don't know, don't know how horrible it is to be singled out. They still don't.

So I went and looked at the trees, because I don't want to be angry again.

I'm dropping out, once again. Will be in Santa Fe, New Mexico for six days starting tomorrow. If you want to call me, I'll have my cell phone.

"In Italy, when the moon is like this, we call it Hunter's Moon..............haw haw haw haw."

The Matrix has me

"This movie's REALLY BAAAD!!!!"

The coolest effing werewolf movie ever created

My Google image search for "Nancy Retter" turned up two pictures, one of which was this one:

Always the man with the perspective.

My very first cook book.

Sgt. Dan 'Hondo' Harrelson: Dammit, Street! You've got to learn to control your fiery temper! You're a good cop, and a good man, but I need to have confidence in my team members when we're transporting dubiously-ethnic, crudely-stereotyped foreign criminals!

Jim Street: You know, you'd be a whole lot more relaxed if you cracked open a crisp, refreshing Dr. Pepper.

Hondo: Gee, what a great idea! While I'm at it, why don't I hop down to my local McDonald's and grab a few juicy, delicious hamburgers to go along with the soda?

Sanchez: I am a strong, female role model! Watch me sweat!

LL Cool J: Bluest, deepest, my hat is like a shark's fin!

The two craziest dreams ever:

1. I watch Richard Lewis brutally murder Eric Thornton on an island on a lake surrounded by forest.

2. My brother and I disguise ourselves as two of the Lawrence brothers to steal food from a supermarket, I watch El Chupacabras patrol the edge of our campground and ride go-karts in a haunted house where a woman I'm flirting with sticks a white M&M under my eyelid and tells me I'm crying.

All who want to hear a Don't Pick At It live broadcast, say "Aye."

And now, I will put my cat on the keyboard.

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How to make a sappy, drag-your-feet, lay down and cry weblog post:

Begin by relating an experience of yours, only instead of actually telling a story, convolute everything with pretentious metaphor that means nothing to anyone except you. Make it seem like you're really that thoughtful all the time. Make sure you drop lots of hints to the person you have a crush on that they have absolutely no capacity to decode. Speak in the very internet-specific dialect of half-poetry and interject long, twisting tirades about the pain of being alive with lyrics. The relevance of these lyrics to what you're half-heartedly trying to communicate is irrelevant. Think that writing many of these posts will make people want to get closer to you. Understand how laughably bad and juvenille almost everything serious you write is, but embrace it anyway, and make lots of tounge-in-cheek stabs at your own pomp and share a chuckle with your readership.

WATCH DA ALI G SHOW!!!!!!!!!

Which would your rather bone:


or

Where everything is as it should be

Tomorrow I will be flying to the top of the world.

There will be no computer. There will be no AIM. There will be no phone. There will be bears.

I will be gone for a week.

Don't get into trouble, now.

My day so far:

Some time last night, between going to sleep and waking up: dream that my family are all dinosaur hunters, except my mom, because she's a girl. In this dream, dinosaurs roam my house at night, hide in my closets and are spooky, scary etc. My dad and I bust some dinosaur ass with a large arsenal of shotguns. At some point my brother turns coat, becomes a dinosaur and tries to eat me.

11 AM: Wake up and am pleased with myself that I didn't sleep past noon. The first thing I do after getting dressed is to crack open a Sprite and watch the Daily Show. Unfortunately, there is no professional wrestling playing that early in the morning.

11:30 AM: Listen to "Straight Outta Compton" about ten times in a row. The idea dawns on me to have an Ice Cube movie marathon. My dreams are crushed when I found out he's made 21 movies. Favorite Ice Cube quote: "Shit, it ain't every day your homegirl gets to make her very own documentary about indigenous Amazonian peoples!"

12 - 3 PM: Wish the new season of Da Ali G Show was playing.

3:30 - 3:37 PM: Write in this weblog while listening to Straight Outta Compton.

For every post on this weblog, there's five more sessions of staring blankly at this "new post" form, writing a few disjointed sentences and eventually quitting.

The reason: want to express something completely inexpressable. Always. This great big truth I can't tell. Something about the complications of walking and breathing, and the humor necessary to see how pretentious the feeling is, and the good sense to know it's true.

Something like a tree with a million branches, and then a million more.

To summate, sixteen years of accumulated experience can't be summated.

"Hey, what the hell are you kids doing? You absolutely cannot be here. What do you think the fence is there for? Do you know what would happen if the Home Owner's Association got sued? Do you live in this community? If you don't live here you have to leave. If you have a problem, call the police, and if you don't leave, I'll call the police. I like smothering puppies with my ass."