First Aid

I once happened upon a word in the dictionary that was the proper term for the period of exhaustion you experience after crying. That was some amount of years ago and I've never been able to find the word since. It has since became one of my favorites.

Making that post was therapeutic. Writing it reduced me to an absolute mess but what followed was a weird kind of serenity that has lasted since. I make myself miserable with overthinking, with overpoeticizing, with distraction. Ultimately, there's not a whole lot more to analyze than "I'm overwhelmed." If I knew that word, it would be the title of this post, because I feel calm.

The past couple of years have been my two worst. Vicious insecurity has coalesced with a number of unresolved, undiagnosed physical pains and discomforts, a series of minor and major emotional traumas (crushingly bleak night followed by vitriolic confrontation with neighbors, dry ice bombs, moving to college, death of cat, Bryan's suicide) and a variety of domestic/academic frustrations to pound me into the most compromised state of my life. But it's OK, because I'm putting everything above board now.

If I was writing in the same cycle that I've used forever, what would now follow would be some kind of fabricated sense of grand perspective, a makeshift resolve to change. But I don't know what's going to happen, how I'm going to make it better or how long it's going to take. What I do know is that writing about this makes me feel like I'm unwrapping rotten bandages, cleaning the wound, drying it, exposing it to light and air.

I'm not going to say "this is the true nadir, the low point at which I begin to climb my way back up the ladder," because I don't know if it is. I hope so. I hope that I am ready to get better. I'm optimistic, though. This feels right.

Tomorrow morning I'm getting on a train to visit my Civil War re-enactor aunt and uncle in Vermont. They have a beautiful house on a beautiful lake and a beautiful garage full of canons. They're planning on taking me to shoot their MR-15, which is some kind of gnarly-ass assault rifle used for exploding Kuwaitis. Should also be therapeutic.

I will say that I am guilty of being too consumed by my own worries about myself to pay attention to the things that are happening around me. I've been cycling through old photos, which is a habit of mine, and almost every series makes me smile or laugh out loud, because my life is full of wonderful, hilarious people. Sorry if I haven't done my part to return the joy you all seem so ready to share with me.

I think things are going to change. Here's a wish in the well.

The Truth

I have a confession to make, and I don't want to. Definitely not. It's awkward for everyone - sorry to dump an icky thing in your lap. But right now it's something I have to do.

Everything I have written is one thing. Everything I have felt is one thing. Six years of blog is preface to one thing.

PAIN.

I have so much pain.

Here arises the gatekeeper to assurance, sneering, mocking,

"What do you know about pain? You with your middle-class everything, moaning about trifles, you whiny shit, you whiny whiny whiny whiny shit. Waaaaaaaaaah. Waaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah."

I have so much pain.

I have so much pain in my body and I don't know why. I have seen so many doctors and none of them seem to be able to heal me.

I have so much pain in my heart and I don't know why. There is no poetry here. There is no esotericism, which is anaesthetic. There is so much pain. There just is.

These are the same pains. It's one thing and it rules me.

Everyone has pain in their heart. Everyone has rejection, insecurity. Everyone has a friend who killed himself, or worse. Everyone has a childhood with darkness in it, is saddled with doubt, loneliness, longing for transformation. But some people have a valve. Some people are very strong and I am not. It does not evacuate. I don't know why. Maybe because I don't evacuate it. I don't know why.

I am not content trying to pass the wound off as some kind of intellectual leverage anymore. That's a lie. I am exhausted from trying to hide it with flippancy, gestures of superiority, with pretend nihilism. I am exhausted by running from, obscuring the pain out of a sense of social obligation. I am so very, very tired of channeling it into judgmentalism, vindictiveness.

I know that this is not everything. I have been filled with beauty and love, but not for a long time. Not for a long, long time. Right now, every day is such a challenge. I don't know what I'm doing, what I believe, why I am filled with so much sorrow, how to change, how to heal. I have simply run out.

No, I am not suicidal, am not even Depressed really, just so god damned lost. So god damned lost and bewildered.

Sometimes I feel like there's an overpowering force at work in the world that seeks to destroy that within us that allows for happiness. And right now I feel overpowered.

So to know it, I am naming it.

I am naming it Enemy.

Phantasmagoria

I should not be allowed to listen to Vangelis late at night. I am given to mental cinematics. Memory, viscous, drools through every crack.

I am feeling a recurring moment. Lying on someone's floor, at the beginning of a new period. Coming back to college. Coming to New York. Feeling the vastness of potential, like some passenger in a caravan across a desert, awake all night, listening to the silence. Falling asleep swaddled in promises, of new beginnings. Waking smothered in familiarity. But it's still there, twinkling obscurely.

I am making myself re-learn imagination, having consistently missed the point every day of the past years, years, years. I am making myself re-learn everything. I have not acquired the skill of living well, not being able to feed myself (today Fruit Loops, more Fruit Loops, a croissant, a vendor pretzel plus Gatorade, two slices of pizza, more Fruit Loops), not being able to do anything with my time but waste it (learning to turn off the computer, BREAK hypnosis cycle, the pornography of memory that is Facebook), finding nothing to put my eyes on but reminders of banality.

So I take my landlady's advice and start reading Interview With the Vampire, being swept away by the fiction, remembering what it's like to lose oneself in story.

I think about Endgame, our culture's obsession with its own death, memory ejaculated backwards, against the flow, rupturing the vessels, the ligaments stretched to snapping point from too much reaching behind us for answers, visions of huts, wooden boats, dances around fires by which to damn ourselves. Dreaming impossible now, like laying down track leading to a brick wall WE'RE ALL FUCKED NOW KID, and if you want to talk about hope the only option is the Great Big Handhold. We'll all sing We Are the World and buy spirally lightbulbs and after we've vindicated ourselves of any possible connection to anything bad or scary or uncomfortable then kid you go ahead and think your little thoughts about unicorns or whatever the fuck, but watch out for walls - be quiet in the presence of bricks, SHH...

Severed limbs are placed carefully around the sandbox so the children are sure to know their luck in being able to play. Let's all feel AS BAD AS POSSIBLE now, give ourselves guilt enemas, eradicate all signs of ease, and maybe then our insides will be clean for God.


Then I write something about getting stoned and going to see Harold and Kumar, then don't post it because it invites well-deserved mockery and I have said so many mean things about the hippies, but it involves the first bits of my new learner's permit of the soul. These are the guttural consonants that become words about nice things (just a piece, the whole thing is too stonery even for me):


I am beginning to understand why dogma unsettles me, even belief. Especially that of socialist tooth-grinding, globe-worry, the great, throbbing NPR headache. Because it does not allow for the hilarious beauty of encountering the divine on the way to see Harold and Kumar after getting stoned in your friend's dorm room.

That I could, in the bathroom at the theater, be caught breathless by a vision of my own mind, absolutely true: I am perched at the edge of a vast and dark wilderness, filled with illusion and undiscovered wonders, the trees and grass blowing in a slow wind, waiting in quiet expectation for the explorer to take his plunge. And I see the rewards. I see what I feel accomplished mystics must feel: the vibrancy, the urgent, indescribable worth of the experiences and the understandings to be culled; like unfolding toys made of holy jewels, the most splendid machines ever invented, more spectacularly important than anything material and mundane, though the wilderness spills out over waking life. I am filled with a sense of transcendent pleasure, privilege in having the opportunity to adventure into it.

Remembering that what is constructed of invisible fruit is real, because we are all at wander over those umbral fields and forests. That I realize this is all more important than notions of cheesiness, worries of smoke damage.


And oh God, what is more unpardonable to the grinders of axes than the rejection of axes? What is more unpardonable than the escaping trick, the Grand Neener, saying no? "You can come up with as many fantasies as you'd like to justify your passivity but ultimately you live in THIS world, Matt," seeing only reminders of banality, forgetting that SHIT IS NOT SO SIMPLE AS JUST LABELING THINGS 'OPPRESSION' AND 'RESISTANCE,' forgetting that cell phones would not be cell phones if it wasn't for the communicator on Star Trek, forgetting that we would have nothing if someone did not divorce themselves from the mundane.

So I am requesting you do not come near my playpen with your dripping meat things. Keep the hoses to yourselves and stop getting so mad when I don't feel like finding more space in my heart for sadness.

Right now, I have to re-learn. I have to take the food, heat it and put it on a plate in front of me.

I have to unfold the toys.

Beef

Maybe I shouldn't be so excited about having a nemesis. Perhaps I should take not so much delight in finally knowing someone I can despise without ambivalence.

Fool drafts an anti-Matt manifesto in response to the below piece, calls me a "closeted anti-intellectual bigot" and such things, posts it where everyone can see it. I try not to let it turn into a flame war. It turns into a flame war. I come to class with the intention of resolving things as peacefully as possible. I come to class willing to admit that I am perhaps too vocally contentious and invite confrontation. Professor obliquely raises topic of the flame war, which apparently everyone had been watching, before I have a chance to talk to Fool privately. I remain silent because I don't want to fight with people in class. Professor pushes issue, eventually declares in front of everybody that my piece offended him so profoundly that he only finished reading it out of professional obligation. Fool starts in with his infuriating, smug, fatuous drawl about how his screed was all a grand satire and really quite funny but he wouldn't expect me to understand. This is when I go off the deep end. What came out of my mouth was something between the frequencies of loud talking and unbridled, epileptic fury. I don't even remember what I said; basically that he was a bully and was incapable of being forthcoming/brave enough to just insult me without couching it in "this bullshit aesthetic, like you're providing a service by revealing my ignorance."

Then,

"If you're going to look at me and say 'fuck you,' I want you to look at me and say 'fuck you!'"

"Drawldrawldrawl something something I enjoyed every moment of writing that review and I think I could do a lot better than 'fuck you.'"

I'm not communicating this well enough. Imagine you are hopelessly, transcendently in love with someone. You have spent months and months together. You have plans to marry and have devoted everything to each other.

Then, one day you come home to discover the love of your life splayed out, naked, in some unspeakably compromising position. Standing next to them, with a lit candle and a cat-o-nine-tails, is your worst nightmare of a snide, patronizing yuppie/carnie who is also your boss. He puts down his implements, calmly walks over to you and starts explaining that "s/he just wasn't satisfied, sexually, emotionally, spiritually. Maybe some day you'll be mature enough not to be so attached. Anyway, you're a grownup and I'm sure you can put this behind you. Someday we might even be friends."

That is roughly how I felt having to endure this goon's condescension in front of everybody. Luckily, a lot of people in the class went out of their way to defend me. One even called the guy a dick.

The conclusion was, basically, "OK, we hate each other."

As soon as the dust settled, I rushed over to the professor and made it very clear just how badly he had fucked up fomenting the fight, that I did not appreciate it, that he had forced me into an adversarial position that precluded the possibility of reconciliation, that the pieces could no longer be picked up, class-wide battle lines had been drawn and it was his fault. All in calm, lucid tones, because I am a fucking professional. We came to an understanding.

Now I've got distance from it and one thing sticks out. Usually, when people attack me, especially on the Blog-a-Log, it really affects me. Some big part of me is drawn to consider myself on their terms. This did not happen. Because I AM A FUCKING PROFESSIONAL and I feel more like an adult than I ever have.

The woman from whom I'm subletting my room in Brooklyn took me aside, detecting some crossroads in my life and prescribing about an hour of spit-and-nails New York wisdom as the remedy. After telling me to read Anne Rice novels about a hundred times and giving me a book about astrology, lecturing about the trials of parenthood, the travails of modern life, cigarette in hand, she told me, "Ya gotta figure out what it is you wanna do to make yerself happy. That's all life's about. Makin' yerself happy. You're how old, twenty? You don't know shit about how life works yet. Just be yerself. Ya gotta just be yerself and do what you do to make yerself happy."

I wish everyone had such a landlady in their lives.

I'm being myself. I am twenty feet tall.

Under Glass

Everyone in my class is supposed to publish two reviews a week on a forum the professor set up. We're supposed to review either poetry books or poetry readings, but the lines are blurry. This is my first contribution.


My Day in Art: Of Curators and Light Bulbs, Violins in the Subway


Where is Jasper Johns?

Not here, nor there. Not behind the samurai swords; not between the Gustave Courbet self-portraits, regarding each other with onanistic awe; nowhere near the Roman busts or New Guinean death masks. Somewhere on the floor above. Somewhere that takes twenty minutes to reach.

I am in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I am irritated, all elbows and glares. I have written two poems in my little diary so far: one about pants (Most of them just cover the meat / Some of them are glazed, pointing to this month’s shoes) and one about feeling overwhelmed by history, which I am finding a jolting reminder of transience and this museum something inappropriate in a way, unwilling to let the thing DIE. Scrawled: I am surrounded by dead people. / We have been over this. / These are my limbs, I use them to move. / This is my heart, I use it to fear death.

Which is easy to do, having the cumulative progress of the millennia laid out before you. Here we sprayed some berry juice on the backs of our hands. Here we drew a pretty picture of a horse. Here the horse stands forever in polished marble. And here Picasso examines a woman from twenty angles simultaneously. These are all gone moments, now, and suggested price for appreciation is twenty dollars ten with student ID.

So I commence the Goodwill litmus, favorite tool for dispelling snootery and illusions of immortality. It goes like this: the best way to gauge the merits of a particular piece of art is to imagine that you happened upon it in a thrift store and it is selling for five dollars. If you would buy it, it is worthy. If you would not, it is just a very expensive smear.

Monierre Dawson: Statement, Meditation
Drab messes of dark lines, pastels on small canvasses.

Helen Torr: Crimson and Green Leaves
Looks like Ikea overstock.

Fernand Léger: The Bargeman
Someone’s Montessori eighth-grader flipped through a book on Cubism and broke out their My First Paint Set.

Henry Matisse: The Young Sailor II
Looks like Walt Disney was painting a male nude by flashlight under the covers, his mom discovered him and made him superimpose baggy clothes as punishment.

But there is still something askew. A thought persists: We have been over this. Why are we dwelling? And then counter-memories, of the agony of all street theater, the inanity of Bansky and all others attempting to extend the museum beyond its walls. Still, I am mostly unmoved by visions of the past, somehow redundant; even the Pollock seems very still.

But where is Jasper Johns?

Whether from too much time on my feet or not enough street vendor pretzels, I am weak, headachy and nauseous. The feeling is one of entombment – trapped with the squinting, nodding, sweater-shouldered, bored-child-dragging effluvia of the Looking On world, forever treading in circuits through the relics. I want to leave but am going to find this exhibit, god damn it.

I ask five different security guards. Second floor, down the hall, turn right, all the way at the back.

When I find it, a sweat breaks and a new poem enters the diary in under a minute:

Saying No to Jasper Johns

I spent twenty minutes
walking through this
labyrinth of a museum
to find this?
Cool, texture.
Awesome, art devoid of color or life,
just sap the fucking life out of the clay.
This whole building is vulgar, somehow.
This building is a series of fine graves.
Gray.
Fucking gray.

The pieces are soupy with pretense. We are asked to examine the nature of art, or something. There is only the monochrome, meant to reveal the brush strokes, the creative structures underlying the spectacle of painting. But how joyless. Like eating a cake made of flint and cardboard. Somewhere, a superior baker is fattening a jubilant many. Somewhere, Those Who Do Not Squint are awash in sweets; somewhere that takes more than twenty minutes to find.

In the subway, a man is playing the violin for change. At first, it is only novel. The underground is usually the territory of bucket-drummers, gospel quartets bellowing golden oldies for tourists, homeless men wishing you a “PROSPEROUS DAY” at the top of their lungs. He plays two pleasant songs and I give him some quarters, not expecting to have my life changed.

After applause from the sizable crowd he has gathered on the platform, he plays the opening notes to a piece that is so profoundly remorseful and beautiful that I am frozen where I stand. Tears begin to well. I am having that experience. Oh Christ, it’s so trite. But the notes. They wrench.

I walk away in under thirty seconds, winding through a dozen people, so I don’t begin to openly weep.

This has never happened. I don’t even like classical music.

But something becomes so clear, riding jumpy-throated back to Brooklyn, held together through force of will alone. This is the only litmus necessary. This is the meaning of great art, the true immortality that has nothing to do with polished floors, expensive cafés that smell like your grandma, with gray or samurai swords, with the embalmment of academia, the obscenity of squinting. Simply,


Do you have to turn away?

Boy On the Block

I still don't have an apartment. I'm sleeping on my brother's floor and may be moving into a room in Harlem temporarily, starting tomorrow. I went to the neighborhood today. It's just grim enough to make me feel like I can be all like, "Yeah, I lived in Harlem. It was kinda sketch but whatever, y'know?" Without actually fearing for my life.

I can only stay there two weeks at the most, so I've been a slave to Craigslist. As in, I just sent out over thirty emails at one in the morning to various people across the city.

I went to look at a room today in Brooklyn. Being unfamiliar with the area except for the ultra-gentrified island of Park Slope, where I am staying, I believed the guy when he said that his area was "one of the safest in Brooklyn."

Wish I had a picture of my expression when I walked out of the subway tunnel. Imagine every Wu-Tang video ever made, then subtract the music so the setting is just muted, decrepit and ominous. I walked down the street. Oh, a playground. That's nice. Wait. Marcy Playground. That's a song or a band or something. And that's a project. Holy shit. Marcy Projects. Ashy Larry. Jay-Z. Holy shit holy shit holy shit.

My first impulse was to flee back to the subway without even calling the guy I was supposed to meet. Instead, I called my brother to make sure I wasn't just being all white-flighty.

"What streets are you by?"

"Uh, Marcy Ave."

"Aaaaaahahahaha."

I met with the guy. The apartment was nice. The view from the windows was literally the urban erosion of what looked like five decades. The buildings were literally melting or something. Piles of trash everywhere.

It's the only place I've been that rivals rural Hungary in terms of decrepitness. But Hungary was funny, because it was like being in a country full of shirtless Marios. Living in Grand Theft Auto is not acceptable, though; even if the rent is good.

Nevermind

New York is going to rule.

Redeye

Going to try to write away the nausea. My gut is churning from lack of sleep, a house full of someone else's party, sitting in a room containing furniture, an empty bookcase, this computer, full of uneasiness, one part dread, many parts uncomfortable reminiscence. I'm going to have to go to the airport tonight and sit in the terminal for many hours. Maybe I'll Spill it all onto a page to be unburdened for my six weeks (this is the advantage of writing). Maybe I'll just play Pokémon until the sun rises.

There are no such things as clean breaks. Change rolls in on cogs of rejection, fear. Huge departures have never made me excited in the way they should. Just removed, itchy, amoebic. Everything is pulled in every direction. I am a blob. I don't see the linear construction of life events; I see a ship listing in curly-cues. And as such, I'm fairly seasick.

I could assert some navigatory conviction, falsify an inspiration to star plotting, release some rhetorical homing pigeon. But the truth is that I am not at all sure what is going to happen or how I'm going to react to it.

Swirly, swirly, swirly.

Kneel

At three in the afternoon I am in my bed, face-down, deciding just to fall asleep with the lights on, savoring the texture of Here. I can feel little hooks catching in the fabric, pulling it east. Everything will move - nothing comes with me but clothes and books containing poems. No bed. No posters.

This bed, at which I crouched and prayed, hands on head, on which I prayed again, unable to sleep, on my knees, arced into the mattress, prayed for stillness, retrieval. This bed, containing strangers. My bed, too small, possessor of one hundred, one hundred more waking hours, of more than two prayers.

I say "Excuse me God who is no bearded man with bearded sons who is formless and unknowable excuse me God that is the understander of narratives, who, what is greater than words good and evil who, what makes us hunger for something we've never possessed, grace, Grace, please help me with it, please God let me have Grace, let my body heal, excuse me please Open the Fucking Valve Please."

How small shall I make the instruments of my autopsy? She walks towards me down the hallway, pretending not to see, eyes a thousand miles away. Gleam. Sneaking into an abandoned house to see my first Playboy, age seven. Seven. SEVEN. Gleam. Watching my family drive away for the first time, finding myself alone, staying that way. Seeing the rain begin to fall, fall, fall. Gleam. The pain in the legs, absolutely relentless. Gleam. They gleam on the tray. They gleam tinily next to my bed.

But there is really only one tool. There is only How.

Waking, laying for half an hour, feeling How? How?

Why is too easy. Why has an appropriate answer, which is "nevermind." How has six and a half billion answers, none of them correct.

Walking to the bus, knees aching, How? Riding the bus, seeing the cragged, weathered faces, How? Seeing them walking by the lake, clutching each other, How? How?

This is everything, I am one word.

Knowing always the standard reply, which is to turn the ? into a . Albion Moonlight seeing his own face staring down at him from the house of the divine.

But the question stands:

How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How?

I pray for periods.

Sisters of Mercy

Come over, rub your toothy skin all over my sensitive life. Come over and help me wrap things in barbed wire.

Come over and drink, having never seen me before, rubbing my head, grabbing me, pinning me on walls. Give me enough rope for noose-making, asking for walks out to your cars and then just getting into the cars and driving away, hands under arms, me like a rock hurled at so many pigeons.

"Matt, girls don't like your posters. What the hell do you have on your walls? Commando? Funny pictures? The Kiss. That's alright. That shows you're sensitive. We want you to change your posters, please. Why didn't you make out with that girl? Give me your phone, I'm going to call her."

Then

"Matt, untuck your shirt. You look like a boyscout,"

swarming, untucking my shirt, goofy mannequin,

someone grabbing it, ripping all the buttons off in one movement, shrieking,

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrupture, tipping, inhaling acrid bullshit in the garage,

stranger hugging me, all grabbing at each other's elbows,

saturated with the frustration of it, the obscenity of desiring,

waiting for the sharp grain to rub in the right direction,

watching her truck disappear down the street,

needing a thing,

needing a new shirt,

needing a new life,

waking with aching head, reading Bukowski in bed for an hour,

remembering tests,

"What's my name?"

"Uh, L?"

"No."

"Well, I don't even remember my own parents' birthdays. I don't even remember my own name. What's my name?"

"Matt."

"Oh, really? Ha ha."

never seeing them again,

having failed their test, having shown them my silly boy's wrong objects,

now summoning the truck back, reversed, the door opening, passing it, heat moving to wooden limbs,

sick,

of the crucible,

the variables,

finding nothing in my kitchen but buttons and empty bottles,

finding in my heart reasons for tears,

hoping that somewhere

she is filling my room with honey,

keeping my wings still,

wrapped in amber.

Gummo

Watched a movie that is one of those that I don't doubt has changed my life in some way. Usually hate these types, go out of my way to despise them. This one sticks to the ribs; I may lose sleep thinking about it.



Ive never seen a more honest piece of art.

Cue Ball

Shaved my head. The kind where every strand of hair is a centimeter-long cliché standing at attention. New Beginning whatever.

A nice little analogy pooped into my head while I was trying to take a nap at 8 p.m. My life is like a cruise ship. Plenty of opportunities for merrymaking, but completely intolerable if not moving forward.

Now my head sheds water. I'm feeling all hydrodynamic. I'm going to sleep at four in the morning not because I can't bring myself to close the book on a day in which nothing was discernibly accomplished but because my cerebral cortex is itchy with visions of the future.

I love and hate the night before travel. Ever feel like a pellet in a slingshot, stretched taut?

The Greatest Told

Pushing the exhaustion margin again, riding the crest into a weary tomorrow (today). Have lately been feeling like I need to write something but the waters are murky and I am having trouble connecting the dots. I'll just see how this goes.

The night before I flew to San Diego, I did not sleep. I was too excited by the discovery of Inferno, a book by my favorite sci-fi/fantasy artist. Not since early adolescence had I experienced as inflamed an imagination - fleeing into alien worlds. When I was tween, I would read Aliens vs. Predator novels and become viscerally involved. That place was real to me. I had the ability to transplant myself into it. Then, there I was, for hours, until my alarm woke up, the sun was on the floor and I was still treading in solemn caravans across the ashen expanses of Hell.

It makes me wonder about lots of things. Like why my mind can be wholly elsewhere, why I'm not involved with excitement, at what point between dropping to my knees, six years old, and tearfully praying that a vivid dream of love (I remember her name, for some reason I don't want to tell you what it is - she kissed me in absolute understanding; among the most beautiful moments of my life) be real to reading the Chronicles of Narnia a few months ago and being deeply moved I stopped believing in awesome powers. At what point I lost track of my holy narrative, which I maybe believe everyone has. At what point the fiery bazaars of Dis became so very interesting.

I try to retrieve things from myself and it results in confusion. I try to retrieve things from others and it results in rejection. I have not tried to retrieve things from God since I was a child, since retrieval started connecting dots with chemical vacations, dumbass haircuts, dumbass books with clouds on the covers, dumbass cults with their dumbass leaders, dumbass esotericism, symbols, heiroglyphs, ciphers, costumes, all the trappings of dumbass, tryhard, dimestore enlightenment. But this idea of God is bigger than the New Age section of Barnes and Noble, bigger than C. S. Lewis, bigger than churches, beyond good, beyond evil, part and parcel of both, stirring its fingers, shifting its weight massively between the atoms.

Trying to escape back into my own story, because I have definitely lost the page.

Exxon-Valdez

The lens is focusing in. We are passing the skin, the muscles and ligaments, the bones, the various squirting masses, down through the brain with its confusion of heat lightning, through the stomach, behind the heart, beyond the body whole, to the swamp, the icky bullshit, which is where music comes from but also poison. Little hippie kids on furry dragons fly around battling Nothingness. The view reveals a mess, That Which Spills.

I know you didn't ask for this uncomfortably intimate vacation. But this blog represents what is important to me, and I can't believe I am the only person reading this who has a hard time dealing with the invisible organ's painful emissions.

At another party, after another rejection (it was impossible, was completely expected, was still kind of heartbreaking), she insists everyone Spill, a gameshow for the intoxicated. She points at me.

"Spill!"

And I spill, about needing too much, projecting too much, various too muches (you don't get to hear if you don't Spill yourself). Everyone pours it out. I walk to the bathroom punching the walls so my Lil' Bow Wow picture falls to the ground.

But my gut still sloshes. The noise kept me awake all night.

I must now organize part of the mess, or I'll be staring at sunlight through my eyelids again.

Let's pull at the biggest thread, which is that I am not happy with my life and have no idea how to rearrange its elements to make it work. I don't care anymore, about sounding whiny, about seeming morose, about the impulse to self-censor in the presence of more painful lives. I grin ear-to-ear, sing to myself and clean my house. I watch caddisflies crawl along the silt at the bottom of the river, little gems of life, watch a pair of mergansers waddle awkwardly up a rapids. But sometimes a hand reaches up out of the swamp and grabs my head and pulls it down so I can do nothing but breathe foul water.

I am not depressed. I am not the Sad Kid. I knocked down a Lil' Bow Wow picture for God's sake. I'm also having a hard time finishing this post and not listening to R. Kelly and going to bed smiling. I am also not a victim. I'm just allergic to enzymes, overly sensitive to certain squirtings, like, "Why is it so hard to fall in love with someone at the same time?" and "Why is it so hard to dance with the hipster people?" and "Why is it such a challenge to be by myself in my room in the middle of the day?"

Next quarter I will probably be in New York for six weeks, writing and performing poetry in Manhattan. This is a thing I have to do and want to do, very much. It'll be nice to be doing something I know I can become very good at. The reason I write is to focus my own lens, past the clay and into the invisibleness, to retrieve some sort of order. To hell with esoteric ramblings in books; the mouths live.

I am going to sleep now.

Spill it out.

Us

I spent most my time in the backs of cars,
inhaling the dark behind the stars.

We wandered while our parents slept,
tallying slow the hours kept

charting maps before the dawn
of holy places between the lawns.

Was it only I who saw it there,
gleaming faintly everywhere,

one ragged strand of angel's hair
wound through the mornings that we shared?

A ghost of memory not yet whole,
perching briefly in my soul,

of a new day our hearts extolled,
for both to keep but which you stole.

Somewhere out there you lost your way,
burned the map and kept astray.

Now your mother is awake,
watching moonlight bend and break.

Factotum

Charles Bukowski used to talk about how most poets are incapable of writing "true things," that they are "fiddling assholes waiting for immortality that never comes because the poor fucker just can't write." They are incapable of producing simple lines like "the dog walked down the street."

I feel like only recently have I had enough humility to write things that represent anything beyond my own self-involvement. True things, like pieces of the first poem I've written in months and months:


I sometimes think the popularity of coffee is a conspiracy
perpetrated by the same people who pretend that tea
tastes like something other than leaves in hot water
(and carry it around in glass jars like little backstage passes
to Zen heaven where Ginsberg eternally masturbates and
bald men pace flowingly on hemp sandals)


The test is something along the lines of the Goodwill Litmus, a device I came up with wandering through art museums in Europe for judging works I knew nothing about: if you encountered whatever painting is in question on sale for five dollars at a thrift store, would you buy it? The Poetry Litmus is thinking about whether or not you would be embarrassed to speak the lines out loud in front of people.

I saw Kimya Dawson perform at my college. She was all adorable and whatnot, sang songs about farts and butts and people drowning in floods. I love seeing people who have found their genuine thing and are not pretentious about it. I also love seeing them making livings off of it and being able to connect to hundreds of people at once, revealing something that is actually themselves. The best art is neutral, reflecting many places at once. The best art is also simple, contained, true.

I recently encountered a piece of art that has since become my favorite, maybe ever. It's a short book of comic strips about a cat doing adorable things, called Cat Getting Out of a Bag. The following is a MySpace correspondence between the author and I.


I see that you list The Blow under your favorite music. I saw her perform recently. She is, to trot out a tired platitude, a force. After the show, I wrote her a rather gushy MySpace message about how much I appreciate sincerity in art because it is so rare and valuable. Apparently, this is becoming a habit for me.

My gushing will benefit from context:

Tonight, I had dinner out with my parents, who are visiting me at college. I ordered a boca burger. I hate boca burgers, but I've been a vegetarian a number of years and after a while you learn to settle. Halfway through my meal, I realized that I was actually eating beef. It was the first time since Junior year of high school that any meat had made it far enough to be swallowed. I was stunned, and sunk into lasting malaise.

The issue was not just dismay over having compromised, even if by accident, my values. I was upset, deeply, because I didn't know if I really WAS all that troubled; whether the past however many months, even years, of adherence to my diet was just out of force of habit. Was I just too lazy to come up with a tenable enough justification to start eating meat again? Did I care at all?

We went to a bookstore because my parents thought it would cheer me up. I was going to buy the new Onion book, "Our Dumb World," but some guy swiped it while my back was turned in defiance of his ambiguously European wife, who was loudly denouncing it as trashy, distasteful, and gauchely American.

"Cat Getting Out of a Bag" was on display. I opened it and thumbed through half of it.

By the time I came to the sequence of Misty summoning you to turn the light on in the basement so she could use her litter box, I was on the verge of breaking into tears right in the middle of the shop.

I settle for boca burgers because sometimes animals look at you and there is a moment of recognition, maybe even understanding.

I bought the book. Your drawings helped me to renew my conviction when it was most threatened, so thank you.


Matt
Thanks very much for the message, it's truly appreciated, and it makes the art making all worthwhile.
I have yet to see The Blow live... I did mix some song titles and lyrics into a comic I did that comes out later this year, I'll be interested to see if anyone catches it
Best to you,
Jeff

~

I want to learn create things that are exactly what they are, that are of use to people, that are true.

Orientation

I have been in this library staring at words for over ten hours solid. Next to me sits a six-page outline scrawled painstakingly in green ink. It constitutes the rough sketch of what is to be the most fruitful implementation of my analytical energies of my entire college career, perhaps barring a 20-page biopic about metaphysics in The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

It took me over ten minutes to write that paragraph. I am trapped here for another half hour. Girl with the magic purse is asleep on a couch.

Sat down at this computer to start writing the introduction to the essay proper. What came out in giggly delirium is the following:


Dragons dragons dragons poopy poop dragons.


Right now, that's the funniest thing I've ever produced or seen written by anyone ever.

Girl with magic purse is giving me a scalp massage. This is the best thing ever. I am about to pass out. Not fall asleep. Pass out.

Girl with magic purse finds her nickname vaginal. I can't tell if I agree.

She wants to know if she farted in her sleep. I can't tell. She also says she is so sleep deprived that she's going to go home and "fuck a bunch."

Instead of writing this essay, I'm going to gluestick some cookie fortunes to an orange and throw it at my professor's head.

Now I'm filled with glee because GWMP just materialized next to me holding a slice of cold pizza and let me take a bite. I demanded she recognize my status as "the best girlfriend ever." This guy keeps walking past and I flash him the Wu-Tang sign and I can't tell if it's funny.

GWMP is making toy police officers have sex on my keyboard. She also put a felt mouse on my shoulder. I am living in a David Lynch movie.

I swear to god I'm not trying to sound dazed. This was supposed to be a narrative. Art transcends.

Wu Tang.

Prodigy

I was supposed to be continuing my ten-some hours of reading about China things for a constipated 12-page political economy research paper that is scraping its way through my intellectual bowels with all the ceremony of a kidney stone but was instead jittering around my room yelling John Denver at the top of my lungs. Nobody was home.

Then I got way too into "How Soon Is Now," playing it three times in a row, arms, legs, hair akimbo, hoping to Sweet Jesus I would hear the front door open if somebody came home mid-shriek. I got to thinking about all the times I've watched family members start projects they didn't or couldn't finish, how used to mediocrity I had become. I started to think about what if I got good at this, what if I'm almost there, what if I am approaching, have approached, the moment at which the ball is dropped or carried over the wall?

"Adam Smith In Beijing" called from where it sat on my couch. But the throat kept going and I found myself cycling through most of my back-catalog of practice songs until I was crooning an a capella Country Roads and totally hypnotized by how melodic I found my own voice all of a sudden.

"Holy shit, can I sing now?"

Only science can tell.

I retrieved a digital audio recorder I had left over from a previously abandoned venture to become the school paper's only gonzo reporter. It now contains: about two hours of life soundtrack from being accidentally activated in my backpack; some hippies talking about their organic kitchen compound in the woods and how people need to rise up and take back the power; two voice samples that roughly approximate how Denver would sound if he reprised his greatest hits as the plane was crashing, and he had chugged a bottle of Drano minutes before, and there was a raccoon mauling his face.

But what's the alternative? Compiling theory about the dynamism of the Chinese market economy? When Guitar Guy still lurks the city streets and youth hostels of the world, unchallenged, laid? No, friends. I can't let that happen.

Fucking Jack Johnson.

Oral History

My lesson today included "Take Me Home Country Roads," which, in a moment of delightful synchronicity, we discovered was co-authored by the guy who wrote "Afternoon Delight."

There are a few benefits to going to school two thousand miles from where you grew up. One is being able to get sentimental listening to John Denver when the lyrics have absolutely no relevance to your life beyond a general feeling that somewhere there is a dusty road leading up to the old homestead. Your favorite cow idles up to you as your boots kick up dust and snorts a snort of recognition right as the screen door swings open to reveal your whole family, wearing aprons, leaning against the door frame with the exact same cross-armed posture. Why is everyone wearing aprons? Because you're home. Country roads.

You get to picture your city like a fishbowl filled with the smiling faces of everyone you know, unified in mutual consciousness, content in shared presence. He who has funny mustaches and talks big-heartedly about Socialism bobs in quiet revery next to She who pierced her tongue for a day just to prove she could. Wearer of late-night speedos streaks by Carrier of way too many fragrant, earthy things in her magic purse. A parade of the femininely demure floats indignantly past a chorus of the damned shouting gleefully about buttholes. The disembodied heads, still smiling, roll across the floors of places you keep remembering.

And even though most everybody's on different continents and maybe have always been there, it's nice to think about bowls and roads sometimes.

My Education

It's hard to tell, sometimes, whether I stand for very little or very much.

Maundering, quasi-poetic, autobiographical narratives. Certain lines in certain paintings by Klimt. Anticipatory thoughts about the future. Calming down. Not pretending to understand much of anything. Turning your back on prophecies and the apocalypse.

It's hard to buy a t-shirt for Waiting To See. It's hard to write about it so that people will know quite what you're talking about. There's no club to join for There Are Things to be Reconciled Within You that are Ultimately Larger than Men in Helicopters and the Declining Value of the Dollar, Maybe, Maybe.

Secret taboo thoughts I share with myself, like, maybe it's more important to be kind of baselessly in love with her even though she didn't know what the devil-horns hand thing was and you've only said maybe fifty sentences to her and she didn't show up to your party anyway than to read esoteric scribblings in your room about imperialist American wars and the economic fallout of globalized capitalism like tracing the shadows cast on the ground by silhouetted giants boxing millions of miles away, somewhere around the moon or maybe Jupiter, and going to rallies to let the starving people know how sorry you are to have stood in the darkness. Forbidden things like talking about my friend with the startup company being possessed with a good soul and treating his workers like people and keeping some sodas in the fridge for them and having the professor later stand up in class and say "Matthew knows a friendly capitalist, maybe you should get his autograph" and later having the professor laugh in your face chuckling "I mean, how is that relevant to anything?" and all the time wanting to say Fuck you fuck you fuck you with your crude hieroglyphs of men in top hats holding bags with dollar signs on them and pyramids and dire proclamations about all these goddamned gadgets 'WHAT IS AN IPOD ANYWAY, am I right? Am I right? Ha ha ha.' like the world was so simple and the beauty that is inside of people could ever be captured in your stupid algorithms and the only way to make space for your unborn children is to lock arms and resist, resist, grassroots resist with your slogans and sexy, sexy molotov cocktails and bless yourself with the tears of the oppressed and FIGHT, KILL, FIGHT, KILL, BLEED, BLEED, BLEED and your killing will be vindicated by the purifying glory of righteousness.

Secret taboo thoughts I keep to myself, like, tying up the demon of blame-casting, scapegoating, adherence to anything but that which fills you with love or oddity or wonder or tolerance or memories of things that mean something to you in a burlap sack and filling it with rocks and tying it closed with a dozen knots and throwing it into the river so it sputters and dies a watery, silent death and stays dead in your heart forever, and ever, and ever.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether I stand for a great deal or nothing at all. But other times, it is not so hard.

Middle Distance

I smell like strangers.

Ended up dancing because I opened myself up for long enough to be swept into it.

I smell like the prettiest girl in the room, who agreed to dance and laughed as we spun, among other strangers. Sometimes something invisible transpires. Then sometimes you get all cocky when she doesn't know what "Padawan" means and you're trying to be funny but just seem like a tool.

Somebody important told me I need to learn how to quiet my mind when it gets carried away with itself. But it's impossible when the heart complains in concert.

After the dance, after an incomplete goodbye, I detached, exasperated. Wandered around staring beyond things. I've been there lots. All fingernails on chalkboards, hunger heaped upon hunger. Treading the perimeter of familiarity and kicking at the walls.

Tonight I realized something, really learned something, not in an artificial poetic device narrative way, really had a minor epiphany.

These moments are rare, but they're among a very few breeds of moment that make banality tolerable, make life livable. I mean that. It's my greatest love.

I do not love drudgery. I do not love the morose. I FUCKING. HATE. THE MOROSE. Know this, please.

Buoyancy comes with new things, new people. The heart quiets.

This is my greatest love.

My singing coach (I have one) called me to ask me if I wanted to learn Space Oddity. I explained to her that I associated the song with a very close friend who died and it would be too emotional for me to handle. So I walked into today's lesson prepared to sing "How Soon is Now." Yes, Padawan, much less emotional.

"Y'know what your trip is? You need to sing happier songs."

We had been singing Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.

So I found "Afternoon Delight" in one of her songbooks, turned it around to show her, grinning, still heart. We belted that shit and it was glorious.

There are so many chances to bring wonderful things into your life. And I am just so poorly equipped to rise to that potential. So the moments are rare.

Authoring memories out of nothingness. Rivers of alien faces. This is my greatest dream.

Shh.

Lost in Space

This beautiful girl is glaring at me witheringly over a 40 of Steel Reserve, her eyes completely empty. She turns away to talk to her friends. "Let's go find the hot guys at this party. It's gonna be hard."

Five minutes later,

"Let's go to Jake's! LET'S GO TO JAAAAKE'S!!!" (a gay bar downtown)

Yes, please go to Jake's.

It's farts in the dark, the little rejections that lump up in the arteries. Repugnant but ephemeral, passing.

Then they are redeemed by moments like Steel Reserve's friends, who are nice, having a minor argument interrupted by a dreadlocked guy wearing a parka doing a magic little pixie dance.

"What the fuck are you doing, hippie? Get the fuck out of here, man."

But he keeps dancing anyway and eventually blisses off somewhere else of his own accord.

My house is full of strangers. Requests for the wandering band of Woody Guthrie junior folk musicians in my living room to put down their tambourines long enough for people to dance to an Outkast song or two are met with more absent, withering glares. A guy from my class, gone, is talking about how much he loves Hitler. A couple is making out in my garage while a girl takes pictures of them.

Then I think about the handful of times in my life I have held the same feeling in my heart as someone else, simultaneously.

It's all farts in the dark. A gaseous nebula lingering in space, dotted every million light years or so with a few bits of dense matter and a whole lot of fire. Marbles jangle loosely in the belly's expanse.

Then you get loose and send them hurtling towards collision. Which often destroys things, but sometimes makes bright new constellations to guide you, out in the salty tumult.

Klink.

Unlikely Elephants

Go to bed. Instead of writing about things that will make you excited and think about dinosaurs and Jericho and resurrected woolly mammoths piloting flying cars around the Eiffel Tower.

That first audacious crazyman to say, "We will carve this unmovable boulder into a wall, that will stand in the desert with other walls, and we will live inside."

And now the audacity is holding up a plastic cup and feeling like a skydiver with a malfunctioning parachute masturbating until he hits the ground. When did we stop being thrilled over the fact that we have the power and the resources do whatever the hell we want? We threw stones, then we threw spears, now we have WALKED ON THE MOON.

The future is taboo. Don't have hope, kid. You're killing everything. The story is ending. Buy some wheat grass at the co-op and tuck your race into bed for a long, long sleep.

One of those things you can't really let anyone stamp out if you don't want to is thoughts like supercharging silver linings, expanding them, setting up a lemonade stand in the fucker. Thoughts like "The human story is beautiful and frightening and unpredictable and is leading somewhere none of us can even imagine so let's pop some popcorn and see what cosmic dramas we get to enact before we die."

Let that rattle around down below. It feels so strange, to have hope. To have confidence? In this enterprise we've been steamrolled into dismissing as the death rattle of a golden order and the dissolution of all things, forever and ever, anon anon? To hold up a piece of plastic and see something that will stand testament to our existence thousands of years after we've all eroded back into the ground?

How absurd. How thrillingly, thrillingly absurd.

Passenger

I got a comic book for free once, an illustrated guide to keeping an art diary. On the first page it references most diaries as being "filled with longing for a transformation." I've repeated that phrase in my head hundreds of times. Longing for transformation. Being dissatisfied with what you have but unable to capture that which you lack.

And it's not grass is greener. It's the blessing that becomes a curse - our birthright as thinking, emotive, self-aware creatures: absolute freedom to create your own life. It's horrifying.

I go to the gym every morning to try to work my way through accumulated injuries and the body-based insecurity I've been fermenting in my gullet since fifth grade (big goddamned surprise, everyone).

Well, who really gives a shit about that, Matt? You're right.

So I go home and look at all the books I haven't read, ostensibly containing some vast revelation that will dump itself into my soul and catapult me into the driver's seat. Then I push a few keys on my music keyboard, peeking timidly from behind the corner into rockstar land. Then I think about maybe I should be writing something profound, or should be doing homework. But I usually end up consulting the oracle for a while, thinking about how things could be.

Could be if I said "I love you" every time I felt it and meant it (I will be bringing up the topic of loving people frequently, so if this makes you uncomfortable, ask why, but I don't apologize), could be if I had been true to my birthright from an early age, could be if I could learn to pick up the reins NOW and get on with it, could be if I weren't so self-aware all the time, a cup pouring endlessly back into itself, which is a line I just found in my journal, which is filled with longing for transformation.

But really, Matt, who gives a shit about that?

You're right. Really, you are. Just keep driving.

Oracle

Or wishing well, whatever few things you thumb through on the internet when you should be going to bed. Pages with pictures of people you miss, people you'd like to sleep with, people you don't know. Flipping out coins, staring, measuring the parameters of yourself against the traced lines of friends and strangers.

Their mouths live. Sometimes they burp and keep on talking obliviously and it's adorable. Sometimes the lines solidify, in scratches, in being awed by how beautiful she is when she cries, in drawing pictures of unspeakable things all over your friend's homework. In graduating. In seeing his head shoved down so it doesn't hit the top of the police car.

But the tracery - of gameface pictures, of names of things, of glib glibness - is the lattice empty? Maybe not. A bookmark of time spent with various presences. This person you miss because the words "I love you" actually came out of them and they meant it and sometimes it helps so much. This person you want to sleep with even though you know better. This person you don't know but think about telegraphing because their names match yours.

You can look at the thing, make wishes, construct the future, see yourself reflected back in dim lines. Because finally, you thumb through your own names, your own pictures, your own carefully assembled nexus in the web. And then you see all the points coalesce into what you made for other people, truth (both the happy whole of the part and the ugly concealments) wriggles somewhere between your diaphragm and your kidney, and you think,

"Really?"

Then you drop another penny in the water.

One fast move or I'm gone.

Made my whiteboy pilgrimage to City Lights in San Francisco this weekend. I told myself I wasn't going to drop money on books, as I never read any of the ones I buy. But it's City Lights and I'm a whiteboy with seriousness in his heart so I picked Big Sur by Kerouac as my memento.

I open it in the motel room later and it's like going home and visiting a teacher that believed in you; like talking with closest friends at night, on a cliff, staring out over the place you grew up in, remembering why you're doing what you're doing. It is remembered, that Kerouac writes things that are true, that I am not the only person ever to spend too much time rubbing their fingers over the texture.

Awakening from a three-day binge, hearing bells in the mist, seeking refuge from himself, he writes, "One fast move or I'm gone."

I put the book down and think about tattoos.

Spend a lot of time with my fingers stirring around in the past, rubbing them over the texture of things. Trying to get my bearings. And there's nothing to bring back. So much to resolve. So little assurance there will ever be a chance.

Yes, here we go, right back to the back. This way, friends. Never left anyway.

You spend so much time wanting one thing, etching out a slot for it, staring into the space, filling your head with want. For years, maybe. Then a few simple words pass, a simple barrier or two overcome by a breeze of momentum - Really? That's all it took? - and it's gone. You're outside of it. Staring at this useless hole you dug for yourself, wondering how many hours you spent shuffling around in the dirt at the bottom. But it's not sad because you never filled it with the Thing. It's sad because the Thing was in your head the whole time.

How much can be devoted to "I love you, oh, I love you, love you, I love you so wholly that it hurts me, physically hurts me in the morning first thing upon waking, is how much I love you." How little we really want the labor of actually loving. How easy, in comparison, is the hole in the ground.

Stirring the fingers, touching the rough spots, pressing, finding them give way into little depressions where a body should have been, but, instead, there is just morning aches.

Imaginary friends don't make good company.

Go kiss someone on their living mouth. This business is so much harder than wanting.

This blog has sunk way back into the Id. It kind of goes in cycles but it hasn't been aired out in a while. Reading my friends' blogs has reminded me that events are usually more interesting than feelings.

I have decided to take a break from writing. That doesn't mean I will no longer write. It just means I'm unburdening myself of the self-imposed expectation to achieve brilliance in the form. I haven't written a poem in months. The dating blog kind of sucked the enthusiasm out of me, not that I ever really had that much to begin with when it came to sitting in front of a blank page feeling exasperated.

As a consequence, I'm trying to make music. I'm even taking singing lessons. Right now I'm feeling like I'm just poking my head out from beneath a rock. But screw the rock. I've routinely embarrassed myself in the past over things not one one-thousandth as worthy.

For Christmas, I'm taking my mother to a shooting range. Anyone who has met my mother will understand how bizarre this proposition is. My whole family are pacifists - I have never shot a gun. And that's the point. She quit the nursing job she held for twenty-some years, finally overwhelmed by the lack of self-preservation most of her patients demonstrated.

After I got into San Diego, we went to Balboa Park. As we were walking, I suggested off-handedly, "You should dye your hair purple." For all the times I've mocked this sentiment, it seemed like a good idea. To do it appropriately is a tall order, though.

When I resurrected Dillon, I reaffirmed an idea I've knocked around for a while: the big secret of life is that you set the rules for yourself and you can do anything at any time as long as you are congruous and confident about it. People move aside to accommodate your momentum. The strongest reality wins.

So I told my mom she should do something that threatens her comfort levels. I told her the best thing you can do for yourself is to temporarily become something you resent, or to participate in something that you hitherto felt you could never be a part of. We reached an agreement: she would go shooting if I agreed to take a personality test out of one of her "find your ideal career" books; something I have openly resisted for years.

It makes more of a difference than you might think. A lot sticks. Try it.

And honor just being happy to be twenty.

One hour left. Just a number, just a number, just a number. But the heart says different.

It's my eighth birthday and I'm at school, fourth grade, orange shag carpet, even twelve seeming impossibly distant. All is bathed in holy self-assurance. Pain, yes. Loneliness. Purity, though. Selfness.

Then I'm bored and gradually diluted until the self-assurance is buried, seemingly irrevocably.

Then I'm burying friends and part of me secretly thrills at the thought of my house burning down.

And the only really heartwrenching thing, truly agonizing, is the ineffability. The story is too big. There is too much holiness. It can never be retold. It can never be understood, even by ourselves.

So I honor what I can.

Honor finding my mistreated pet hamster dead and stiff on the living room carpet.

Honor a dream of absolute, searing LOVE and togetherness, ONLY SIX YEARS OLD, waking in tears at the beauty of it and kneeling beside my bed, praying with clenched hands that it not be only a dream.

Honor the impeccable sanctity of the first years of a family.

Honor my first kiss, stolen, then given.

Honor the pain, HONOR THE PAIN, the dilution, body hatred, HONOR IT, loneliness, fear, HONOR.

Honor the joy of looking into friends' eyes and seeing there a home.

Honor the dead poets with black and white faces. Honor my desire to throw their books into the ocean and walk away forever.

Honor death. Honor change, which is death.


Honor Bryan. Honor to you, Bryan. You are here in my heart forever.


Honor my component realities. Honor Skate Town and Superbad. Honor Kerouac's Great Emptiness. Honor the cripple. Honor the hermit. Honor the King. Honor a distrust of the pointedly cool. Honor the pointedly cool. Honor inconsistency and the freedom to travel between these realities without fear of congruity.

Honor the bullies. Honor those I have bullied.

Honor Miramar Ranch Elementary School. Honor Thurgood Marshall Middle School. Honor Scripps Ranch High School. Honor The Evergreen State College. These places are in my blood. I trace their geometry with fondness and tragedy.

Honor moving at the age of five, telling my dad I want to go back and suck all the memories out of the house through a latch in the door.

Honor wanting to suck all my memories out of the world and keeping them in a chamber close to my heart where they will stay warm and I can protect and preserve them.

Honor this weblog, which is a chart of my sincerity.

Honor overwrought tone. Honor the ability to laugh at anything, even staring down the barrell of two decades with damp eyes for the spectacle, the IMMENSE, CRUCIAL, YET UTTERLY UNGRASPABLE IMPORTANCE OF THE THING.

Honor the spectacle.

Honor the past.

Honor the future.

Honor the present, which is both.


Honor to these things.


Honor to these things.


Honor to these things.


Because that's all we can do.

I was on the beach with my parents and we found a duck floundering in the sand. A female Northern Shoveler, probably point-guard of the winter migration.

"It's a duck."

"Well, it's a Shoveler. Look at the long beak."

It tries to move away from us by rolling its belly forward and kicking with its legs. Something is broken.

We stand and stare for many moments before going to look at the water. Blackbirds hop all around us.

Then we walk back, towards the duck. In my mind a man is standing over it, torturing gleefully and staring defiantly into my eyes. I am filled with hatred for this imaginary person, stamping out the bird's vulnerable life, every little kid flushing anthills with a hose, every person who doesn't care. Suddenly I am beating this man, screaming.

The duck rests in the lap of a woman sitting on a log with her boyfriend. We walk up and stare. She lifts a wing and I motion at the underparts with one earpiece of my sunglasses. I don't know what this is meant to signify. Neither of them speak English. We smile at each other, not knowing what we mean by smiling. "Ah, yes, what is to be done?"

She pets it as we walk off down the shore.

I'm almost done reading The Gospel of Food, a book all about how liberal food politics are mostly based on fallacy and anti-science.

I think about the possibility that maybe everything is JUST OK and something shifts on a primal level and releases all kinds of confidence and endorphins. That maybe McDonald's provides edible meals and a welcoming atmosphere to poor families that would have to live on crackers otherwise. That maybe I can swear off the horrible "reduced" whatever food I was raised on, every bite laden with the unspoken fear of diabetes and cholesterol implosion heat death.

That maybe ballasting your soul with doctrines limits its potentials for fulfillment. That maybe limiting your potentials for fulfillment cripples your soul.

That maybe we're not all going to go screaming into an icecap apocalypse, that doomsday has been lurking at the edges of our dreams since we were squirted into the universe for a purpose whose continued obscurity honestly renders all judgment, comparison and prediction inherently faulted, that somebody's going to look back and regard the idea that bicycles and veggie burgers will save the world in the same way we shake our heads at how it was once believed that masturbation causes blindness.

That maybe we can drink in huge, blustering breaths of liberated air, embrace our ignorance, assume nothing and go tromping off into the future with excitement (how alien this concept, once so central to the human mind). That maybe the only gospel of worth is: go with it, dudes.

There is no way to tell someone you love them after they're dead.

Not enough words in the world for this.

Couple days ago had a quarter-conscious dream of retreating into a dark apartment, everything stone and candles, the home of Kenneth Patchen and also the idea of Kenneth Patchen, waypoint for every poor soul who inherits the holy William Blake endless night holy holy bullshit. No name dropping here, according to Patchen there is no name for it, just a vicious Knowledge creeping down the generations, beaming its doubt into the hearts and minds of serious serious serious young men. Sat there, in the stone room, at a wooden table, drinking something and dwelling in the residual company of those who came before, serious, ashen-eyed, dead and electrified by Loneliness.

Augh. Would rather not be one of the victims. I'm repeating myself.

Woke up into unbelievable head-shattering sleep paralysis, my body made of lightning, amplified again and again until it's never been so bad, trying to call out to someone to maybe come slap some life into my arms and legs but being only able to mutter out, "...muh." Then seeing my reading lamp hovering over me, thinking AHA, here is the trickster who renders me paralyzed two or three mornings out of the month! "Fuck you goddamned shit ass motherfucker..." realizing it is a lamp and, indeed, not a malevolent sleep demon from the nether.

Fun morning.

Dwell dwell dwell dwell malaise malaise Happy Self Indulgent Blog cantankerous buttercup. Zummm. Fuck it.

I'm sitting in a hostel in Munich and I have less than five minutes of internet time left.

The obscurity of my situation - opposite side of globe, don't know what time it is back home, an empty checking account - is mighty powerful black magic against my state of mind.

Walking in circles around old cities, seeing the human creature poke its head out of history, feeling the experiment churn on under my feet, part of me, everyone, an equation of old statues, bronze becomes steel, mud becomes concrete, growing on forever.

Homesick fever dreams. Wonderful times, really, amazing, but no place like home.

Happy world. Lonely and OK world.

Out of time. Love you.

SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!

I just received notice that I am being picked up for blog syndication on Nerve.com. I'm going to be paid $100 a month to go on dates and write about it for 1,000,000+ people to read.

Four hours in the computer lab filling out an application has set my life on a completely unexpected, bizarre, potentially wonderful course.

I can't express to you the joy and amazement I feel right now. I've basically started a career for myself and it all came to a head in a matter of two days.

HOLY SHIT!

I'll soon be appearing here: blog-a-log

My head is spinning. I don't even know what I'm going to do. I'm floating.

Yesterday I was on an America West flight from Las Vegas (wonderful playland fantasy city - totally bizarre and horrible but kind of endearing at the same time) to Seattle. Those little flip-down screens that are built into the ceiling consoles of many planes were flipped down when we boarded, playing a montage of placid music and scenes of mountains and fish and whatnot to soothe raging, panicked us. After we taxied, they retracted, then when we were at cruising altitude they extended back down and started showing advertisements for the airline and Cranium trivia. There were also ads for some stupid Cranium offshoot toys and photos of all the wonderful places America West - and only America West - can take you.

When the stewardess asked me for my drink order, I leaned over and asked, "Is this business going to be going on the entire flight?"

"Yeah."

"Can it not be going on the entire flight?"

"No. The advertisers require that we show it."

I groan and shake my head.

"Well it's not like you have to look at it. ("You fucking caveman idiot.") Does it really bother you that much?"

"Yeah, well, it's so obnoxious and intrusive."

She looks at me incredulously. "You're the first person to ever complain about that." Another stewardess approaches with drinks. The stewardess already berating me turns to her friend, motioning at me: "The first one."

"That's ridiculous."

I order water, and when I put my tray down I laugh, put the tray back up and take a full thirty seconds to process what I had just seen. The whole top of the tray was plastered with an ad for some obscure laptop. I put down the tray for the seat next to me and saw a different ad for the same laptop.

It may seem like I'm being affectedly shocked at all of this, but I was genuinely surprised. It was like some overdone movie parody of American marketing materialized before my eyes.

At the end of the flight, the Alpha-stewardess made this announcement to the cabin: "As we make our final descent, flight attendants will be coming through the cabin to collect any remaining service items."

WHAT! "Service items?" Who is so offended by the word "trash" that they require a euphemism for it? Do the America West managers really believe people could ever possibly be offended by that word if it wasn't suggested that they should be?

Craziness. George Carlin rolls over in the grave he has yet to fill.

I am done with this college that reads The Dharma Bums and sits in a circle sighing and nodding
you all talking about how it is a book for young people with a slow drawl making young people into
words like fuck and shit
(DO YOU HAVE NO PASSION MUST YOU SIT THERE AND BE ASTUTER-THAN-THOU AAALWAAAAYS!)
and I try to tell you No this book has conquered literature because it is Truth Forever and Ever
because it is a piece of a soul it is beautiful things and emptiness and honesty pacing back and
forth at the top of a mountain kicking rocks into the void
but your pencils go scribble-scribble-scribble
and your years calcify in your bowels.

Stuck In the Past Again

We all sit around the
fire on the beach feeling
"Let's have it, bring us
our futures" and
wandering about filled with
nameless knowing, touching
once and then again
at each others' elbows
until it is
time to
go.

I've had about enough of contrived profundity,
of the urgency of poetry,
of the guilt over not being always prodigal.

Of crying over trees
of isms and
the masturbatory nonsense of plots and characters,
symbols,
even blankness.

Snore snore snore.
What is is.

We're all so tangled it's charming.

I say HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA to serious me. To hell with pathos.

Here is the first draft of the heretofore untitled article I am submitting to the Cooper Point Journal, my college's student newspaper. The article will consist of reviews of all the awful merchandise I can find at Goodwill. This is a review of "Cruisin' Ukuleles," an album I found in the two-dollar bargain bin.

I don’t know how the ukulele was invented, but after listening to this album I can only conclude it was the result of some evil warlock’s failed plot to shrink the hands of honest, hard-working Hawaiians everywhere; dooming them to pluck sad little mutant guitars forever. Considering the fact that “Cruisin’ Ukuleles” exists, I also conclude that this black magic is alive and well in the world, corrupting the hearts and souls of Pacific Islanders and annoying people worldwide.

The liner notes begin, “The arrangements on this recording come from an era when cruisin’ the drag and listening to music on the car radio was the hip thing to do. If you didn’t have ‘wheels’ you could always stop at the local hang out and hear those same special tunes on the jukebox. Let us take you back to an era when the music made us feel good. Come join us as we take you cruisin’ ukulele style.” After about ten seconds of play, it becomes clear that “cruisin’ ukulele style” constitutes a harrowing thrill-ride through the twisting mountain roads of pure, existential anguish.

Imagine a fifth-grade recorder festival. Now imagine the fifth-graders are all forty-year-old Canadians wearing fanny packs and tonelessly thrashing 112 ukuleles (literally) while a chorus of young girls chant Beach Boys lyrics in eerie, spiritless harmony. Take the whole scene and place it on stage at a yacht/barbeque/riding lawnmower convention and you begin to appreciate how difficult it is not to pass out while listening. “Cruisin’ Ukuleles” couldn’t be more banal if it was performed by an entire fleet of nine-year-old girls riding ponies.

The Ensemble’s perspective of American history is questionable. As far as I know, no jukebox playlist in this country has ever included the songs “He Ono La,” “Lahaina Luna” or “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Ostensibly, the Langley Ukulele Ensemble is attempting to reinvigorate some vintage favorites with a fresh and quirky sound, but the end result is something akin to renovating a decrepit, classic automobile only to use that automobile to run over a troupe of boy scouts who are also orphans. The highlight of the whole album is “Four Chord Medley: Silhouettes / Blue Moon / Heart and Soul / Diana / Rama Lama Ding Dong,” a baffling ukulele mashup of five golden oldies that surpasses the Ensemble’s own precedent for inanity. I don’t know what “Rama Lama Ding Dong” means, but my best guess is that it’s Asshole for “we will not stop until we have destroyed everything you hold precious and beautiful.”

So if you like ukulele solos, “special tunes that make you feel good” and misery, Cruisin’ Ukuleles is for you. . As for me, I’m throwing my copy into the cold waters of the Puget Sound, where it will languish forever before the tiny, mercifully uncomprehending eyes of crabs.

Fuck you Wulf Zendik with your promises of holy loneliness with your arrogance and beautiful hatred. Fuck you whatever part of me it is that strives to be ever more alone until I am simply a shivering point in space.

Who convinced me that solitude is the divine ultimate truthful thing from God’s mouth? Who convinced me that this born into thing is wrong, so wrong and horrible and soul crushing there is simply light and the illuminated, there is a celebration of present things yes of PRESENT things not apart and lonely things but of things which defy all that is lonely by occupying space it is the revolution of flesh and stone and air, an impossible and holy comedy one joke after another one absurd little molecule of presence pressed up against another all vibrating and joyous in the face of absolute nothingness daring to be here now. HOW CAN YOU EVEN SAY THE WORD LONELY much less fill your life with it, you fool, I am a fool.

I am saying fuck you my past filled with horrible loathing and doubt I am saying fuck you Zendik Bukowski Me who dip my loneliness in gold and smother the face of God with your very very very so very important malaise that is more important than love that is more important than the joke, ha ha ha ha eternal joke, eternal joy and being and togetherness.

I will huddle in the darkness with that first bit of hereness, whatever buzzing little fleck of matter was first to drift with that terrible ecstatic wit that made everything I will bask in the absurdity in the unlikely furnace of creation of life and the forever dance and laugh and laugh and laugh fuck you my dear loneliness.

Maybe you don't want to read about all my loose ends. In which case, sorry. It's just that this year continues in its subtle brutality and makes me think about all the years that came before it. They all unfold into that kind-of-beautiful thing. You know.

I just want very badly to be able to translate some of the geography of my experience onto your computer screens because I feel the collective Poetry of anyone's life is the greatest gift that can ever be given, and I want you all to have mine, because I want you to know me.

I have become terrible at levity. I read too much by serious men with black-and-white pictures. I'm going to learn how to breakdance as soon as my foot and knee heal, if that's any consolation.

If there's one issue that currently defines our identity, it's our treatment of the environment. Our conscience is crippled by it. The guilt touches every one of us, because we've been brought up to hate ourselves for our implicit cooperation. I say to hell with all of that. Whatever is happening may be happening for a reason and it is the height of arrogance to impose an aesthetic (it's little more) on the consciousness of entire generations with all the dogma of an inquisition. It's the lack of ambivalence that offends me.

There is a better way; my father promotes it. There is compromise. The spooky graphs and statistics we summon are not nearly as important as the questions we ask about our purpose; whether we continue to nurse our sense of loss or make something useful out of the experience. I just wish everyone would stop walking around thinking they knew exactly what is right for the world. We will never have that answer.


The Frightened Earth

You are all afraid and guilty,
I can see it in your talking,
endless talking
and alarms in the
night,

as a baby screams because
death is still fresh in its soul.

You are a part of it,
maybe,
smokestacks and dead penguins.
But why feed betrayal to your children,
why this endless lament
when you don’t know,
when no one can ever know
where it ends
or
why?

I say you have invented this evil,
there are no monsters under the bed,
Al Gore is not your messiah,
it is all foolishness,
this terror,
this guilt.

So who are you to scream your
conjecture into the void and
call it law,
to make our spirit cower
and hide its poor head in the
acrid soil?

YOU MADE ME CRY
BECAUSE I THOUGHT I
WAS KILLING MY WORLD
SO FUCK OFF WITH YOUR
PRECIOUS CRUSADE.

No one knows.
No one.


This is the 500th Phobitopia post. 500 is because I wanted you to feel part of what I am, and because that part is the important one.

George W. Bush

I am sorry you had to become
this thing, George,
though secretly I think I
admire you in a way,
how you give America its
true face and make us
think about cleaner things.

I am sorry you were
born into your world
of power and cabals,
secrets and winks
and nods that mean death
for children.

You are not my villain, George.
In the way that no man is a villain
but a
sometimes
victim,
sometimes.

Because you know the hum of
cicadas,
and God sits in your heart,
maybe,
maybe.

So I am sorry that you
have become America,
as no man or woman should be
money and indifference,
as you are not,
I think.

I would sit and listen
to what wisdom you have,
as every man and woman has,
some dark night
in the White House.

It is good to be home.

It is so good to be home.

I've often toyed with the idea of creating another blog, but I was always afraid that it would dilute what little readership I maintain with this one. However, I decided to create an online dream journal because it's interesting and I can generate limitless content with a minimum of conscious effort. I will still post to this blog as frequently as I have things that need saying; I've been writing Phobitopia posts since seventh grade and I'm not about to stop.

Good Nights

I look back, and I see my friends being taken from me, one by one.

There was beauty, is joy still. But I remember my first steps into darkness. I remember the first tokes, walking for hours because I couldn't feel the pain in my legs. I remember the terrifying steps up to the front door, feeling alien to my own home. I wallowed, hid in my room and listened to the insect purr of my own mind.

I woke up in time to see my friends fall over the cliff, one by one. The powder made them hollow. I believed their empty reassurances. I was paralyzed but couldn't bring myself to hate them. I wandered with them, admonishing vaguely but staring, blankly, at the violence. Then Sean was gone from my life and the wound opened. It's still deep enough to hold the child soul of every single one of them.

Then the bad news, weeks and weeks of arguments and pleas and terror, absolute terror before the awesome power of the law. Then seeing Grant lowered into a police car and weeping into a pillow because tyrants were eating my friends alive. And they did; they ground the happiness from our bones. I wandered again, we all did, in a new and lonely world.

Just remember it, is all. Leave the emptiness. We've earned the right to be whole again.


Cars At Night

That was our holiness,
the thrum of engines.

I loved you then,
I was distracted.

I’m sorry,
I didn’t hear you,
the buildings looked
like they were going
to say something.

Is it cold?
What are we buying tonight?

That was our holiness,
caravans in the dark.

It took you then,
and I told the Earth
to shut its ugly mouth.

And I loved you.

That was my holiness,
watching you fall.

Turn down the radio,
the streets are saying
their goodbyes.

Some serious investment in existential crises is recommended. Going back to the beginning and examining your own birth and urgent terror at the thought of death. Yes. A frank evaluation of life's only important riddle. Inviting the puzzle in, railing against the injustice of absolute spiritual ignorance. Colors the world pale and new and entirely lawless, beautiful. Removes the language of entrapment. And "go fuck yourself and your atom bomb," there is too little breathing to waste on killing.

Beauty unto all of you.

In these new days.

Beauty.

Unto all of you.

In movies, adolescent boys are always portrayed as surly, distant, self-posessed. They are dark fools. A shared joke, asinine ingrates drunk on grandiose malaise.

And I see this and I learn that that part of me is a dark fool, a joke, asinine. It is not something I am allowed to be. I am robbed by art.

My favorite poets, too, are drunk on grandiose malaise. Kerouac, Bukowski, Patchen. They turn over the rocks of the soul and examine the squirming, brainless things beneath. Robert Bly talks about draining deep waters, one bucket at a time, to find the long-haired wild creature below.

But this process is made impossible, because I am male and I am young. If I stare into the void; if I say things like "stare into the void," I am a target for ridicule, a landing zone for stereotypes.

This art kills growth. Farce smothers dialogue.

Dark is damned important sometimes; turn over a rock.

Our First Story

It was quiet after entrances
into white light,
hello's and tears.
We will take you all home
now where you will
grow sated and unknowing.

They smothered all the wolves
and closed the doors.
It was warm inside,
we walked barefoot
in the streets.

It came one day after
we forgot how to play emperor
and had begun
to notice all the blood.

He was shoved into the back
of a police car with a hand on the top
of his head,
roll cameras.

They knew, to look at
our pale faces.
They knew the betrayal
and their eyelids held a steady line.
Their mouths could
form no apology.

Welcome again,
we know you are frightened
but so are we.
Gather what you can
from curfews and parades
and then set out.
Do not come back.
The doors
will close
behind you.

I expected to make some sprawling, pseudo-poetic blog opus about the end of high school, moving out, the beginning of college, all of that. But it's too much to try to fit into my inadequate little words.

I think it would all summarize into something like "be nice to each other and be nice to yourselves."

Ultimately, all I feel when I look back is "well shit, it is what it is." Time to make something new.

Bonnie

Her underwear comes from
a communal pile
now.

She is told to face the
wall and her sandals
are aligned perfectly
outside of her cell
now.

She cries when she
reads letters
now.

She was kind
and filled with a
quiet kind of goodness
then.

All she wanted
was to be included
then.

We were too important
to be gentle
then.

And now she is
pleased when she
is allowed to clean
the toilets.

Now she is stripped
when her parents come
to cry.

And I would give her
a piece of my soul,
now,
if it would fill
one empty smile.

Where the hush is,
I am laying down.
I am sleeping
and then not.

Somewhere
under my back
a wheel
turns in
the darkness.

Ants have
found the
bird.

I am feeling
my heart,

it is calm
and alone.

Rabbits do not notice.
They chew warily
in their holes.

The world births itself
again,

a new pair of eyes
blinks against
the wind.

I'm doing research for the Primary tomorrow, weeding through tidal waves of rhetoric and empty promises, and I come across this site, the homepage for a Democratic contender for Insurance Comissioner named John Kraft. This website is totally delightful, it looks like either he himself made the entire thing or hired a high school multimedia class to do it for him. Be sure to find one of the "Go to Hispanic music" buttons, it's inspiring. Also watch the totally confounding video in the "Video" section.

If there is one thing I have learned in my recent life it is the importance of loving the people who surround you, and I want you all to know that you are my friends and you deserve the full spectrum of my affections, beyond end-of-high school sentimentality, beyond late-night confessionals, with the sacred part of my being I love and I wish there was a less awkward word but there is not and I love everyone and I will gladly bear the embarassment of saying so because right now I feel this is the most important thing I have said in years.

Sorry for all the heavy-handed ardor recently, my life has developed this odd habit of disintegrating, perhaps for the better.

I am left with the feeling that something is very wrong about the way people here live. After I've scolded myself for being arrogant, after I've extended the benefit of the doubt fully, seen, begun to understand and forgiven, I am continually disappointed. But the creative responsibility is ours, is mine, and it has been my fault always, dwelling, chewing over the same general malaise that's been swimming in my gut since I forgot I am a child.

I conclude that we are all equally responsible for the souldeath that cripples the human animal (and when has it been different?) if we allow it to set up camp in our own heads.

I can't do it anymore, ruminating always, scowly, whiny bullshit.

I've been watching birds lately, learning more about the world in the past two weeks than I have at any time I can remember. There IS beauty here.

Today I found a tiny hatchling, about two inches long, on the ground, struggling and panting. The nurturing instinct returns, a driving urge to protect vulnerable life. It is powerful. In a rush to identify its parents, I found that Orange-crowned Warblers build their nests on the ground. I watched one of the parents feed spiders and grubs to the infant. I would later discover a second hatchling. The cat stays inside.

There is a cycle, unyielding, a vaguely knowing consciousness in the inquisitive quickness of a bird's eyes. There is a web, and I am part of it. I put out seed and the birds come and more birds come to eat what falls from the feeder and their scratching feet plant the seeds and rabbits come to eat the sprouts. Mourning Doves, pensive and cantankerous, fight with one another. The crows, indifferent, watch.

There are no guns here, no politicians and politician language and politician thinking. There is no feeling awkward, mistrusted or unwanted. There is no dull, thudding heartbeat of a culture forgotten what happiness is. There is only the cycle, the buzz of cicadas, the shuffling of wings.

I think I'll miss it here.

Stillness and quiet
write softer their song
after stillness and quiet
pass on.

The smiles of friends
burn endlessly strong
when the faces of friends
are gone.

My life has struck a vein of coolness. Another of my poems was accepted for publication, this time by poetry.com.

Here's the poem:


Revelation

Soon,
you will be late
for waking.

And in that endless moment,
the song of all your gunshots
will deafen you
in the blackness.


(Click here to see my poem on the site) It's also a semi-finalist in the monthly contest with an $1,000 prize.

A truly wonderful idea.

I found out yesterday that one of my poems was selected for publication by the League of American Poets in their annual anthology. Here is the poem, I've posted it before:


Their Guns Are Not Toys

Sometimes I forget
that it's not silent here all the time,
then at 10:20, an hour after I was supposed to be asleep,
I hear the sound of gunshots from where the soldiers are training.

They must be out on late maneuvers,
roused gritty-throated from their beds.
"When yer in the shit,
Killing Or Being Killed
will not wait for you to drink yer got-dammed morning coffee!"

Soldiers would say things like "In the shit."

I picture them,
ropes and bars
bright in the halogen darkness,
weaving and dodging,
preparing for Killing Or Being Killed.

This is actually not a joke.

I got my Selective Services registration confirmation card in the mail yesterday. All the literature I've read suggests compiling a Conscientious Objector profile early, so I'm starting now. I hope all of you do this too. If anyone wants information, I'd be more than happy to share.

First things first, either send them a letter stating your intention to register as a CO or write it somewhere on the card. Photocopy this, mail it both to them and to yourself, to get the time stamp. Don't open the envelope.

How wonderful that playground bullies have the power to send the rest of us to die for their causes. Too many angry words for blog.

Aaaaaaaaaaah DAMMIT, that lasted, like, a day.

"Boy, I sure do enjoy the lo-tech egalitarianism of the internet, kept alive by sites like YTMND," I thought to myself as I loaded the homepage of aforementioned website. Clicking on the first animation I saw, I was greeted with this garbage: Bilbo wants it.

Good job, soulless, soulless coolfinders, you found the cool. Your prize? The knowledge that you wipe your asses with culture and cheapen everything you touch. The fact that this animation was in the "Top Five Rated YTMNDs" section doesn't make sense, because it's neither funny nor original, benchmarks of most super-popular YTMND's. That is, it doesn't make sense until you realize the admin may have been paid to display the ad prominently on their site.


THERE'S
NOWHERE
LEFT
TO GO.