This blog works a lot better when you're listening to music.

People say that high school is like a game. If so, the pieces have really shifted around the board. Everyone is now interconnected in completely new ways; social geography is changing and people keep re-emerging as fresh and different than when I last saw them. I don't know if it's just my attitudes changing, but I'm seeing some people in a much different light than at the end of the school year.

Everyone's got someone new. New combinations of the same friends make for very fun and interesting results. I'm sure I'll be pulled into it soon, but for now it's just good to sit back and observe.

Maybe I'm getting more accpeting? Kinder? More generous? I can talk to Bryan for a long, long time now and not have any conflict with him, even internally. Maybe that'll change, but it seems that just not being around everyone I know seven hours a day, five days a week has made me much calmer.

It's all good and well to speculate about these things like this, but when the shit storm begins September, we'll all just regress to our passive-aggressive, selfish other selves. See what this system does to us?

Panic until the last stop before the subway derails into a pack of erudite pelt-wearing strippers scraping gum off the walls and making statuettes of ex presidents. Cherry flavored and dripping through the cracks in the ground to the under, under, underground where homeless and prophets sleep. Friendly rats scuttle through my toes and someone holds a pillow to my mouth. Three shots and they're dead. All of them. All nonsense, of course.

I can sense it on your breath: you need a cryptic one-liner.

"Trying to find new ways to tether myself to the ground."

I believe the correct term would be "bored."

As many of you know, Gangs of New York is the coolest thing to come out of hollywood in years. This is why:

The movie is about a boy (dearest Leonardo DiCaprio, swoon and whatnot) who rises out of the past to extract bloody revenge upon the gang lord who killed his father in a massive gang war unlike anything I have ever seen. This all takes place in the dirty streets of mid eighteen-hundreds New York, so most of the killing is done with knives.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays a character named William Cutting, or Bill the Butcher, the man who killed Amsterdam's (Leo, our hero) father (Liam Neeson, playing Liam Neeson). Never have I experienced such a completely fleshed-out character; it's as if Lewis created an entirely new person out of nothing. He is enigmatic, violent as hell, funny as hell, and I remember the first time I saw it, my hairs would stand on end whenever he was on screen.

It's interesting. While Gangs is one of the most violent movies I've ever seen, there is no graphic violence actually demonstrated onscreen, it's all implied. True, it's implied by showing blood, but rarely, if ever, do you actually see the act. I didn't even notice this the first time around. After the first battle scene you're always on your toes because you never know when Bill's going to kill someone.

Overall, the main reason I love this movie and bought it (it's out on DVD now) is that after seeing it for the first time, it literally became a part of my waking existence for a few weeks. I assimilated Bill's mannerisms into my own, and for a while I actually walked the same stilty, spindly way he does. It was actually hard to stop thinking about the movie for a long, long time. I've watched it a couple times in the past few days, and let's say it's highly recommended.

It seems like every movie I ever see about school has at least one lovable, charismatic misfit character. I figure, I'm only going to be in my summer school class for another three weeks, why not become that guy?

I'll come to school in ripped jeans, boots, and a plaid overshirt with cut-off sleeves. Sitting in the back with my feet up on the chair in front of me, I can spout pithy catch-o lines at "teach" and sneer at the rest of the class. In the middle of a lecture I'll lean back, spit into the air, catch it in my mouth and belch. And then I'll confront a spoiled white girl about the superficiality of her problems compared to my tumultuous home life.

Hey, I've got the hair for it.

I've been neglecting you because I've been shrinking, growing, exploding and rattling inside for the last few weeks.

And now the bomb...I have summer school. I'm already halfway through it; the teacher acts like she was thawed from some dormant Martian glacier. My classmates look like members of a police lineup, but they're some of the nicest people I've met.

Happy God Bless America day. Two countries down, the rest of the world to go. Celebrate!

Trying to get creative, but everything I write turns into a coming-of-age thing. Inevitable I suppose.

HBO is nothing but crap and freakish porn.


Squeeze.

So then I looks up, and I sees every one of our timelines intertwining and bumping into the sun like we was the greatest fuckin' thing in the world, and then I sits down and cries into myself because after peeling myself away from my life I realize we are.

I'd like to elect Oasis as the most obnoxious band in the world.

All this world's humanity.
We're strutting around with chests puffed out
Sticking each other with thorns,
Watching blood flow
And cradling our babies.
In the end,
When all actions are memory and
We're looking things over with God and a cup of tea,

We just have to laugh at ourselves,
Take all of it, all of it, embrace it in our arms with all the love in both worlds,
And maybe cry a little.

My animal instincts are surfacing.

Because the snow is deep
Without spot that white falling through white air

Because she limps a little--bleeds
Where they shot her

Because hunters have guns
And dogs have hangmen's legs

Because I'd like to take her in my arms
And tend her wound

Because she can't afford to die
Killing the young in her belly

I don't know what to say of a soldier's dying
Because there are no proportions in death.

-Kenneth Patchen

Take a moment, lock yourself in a dark room and think about all the people who have died for 'nation.' Then you look into the eyes of an Iraqi mother whose children were killed by shrapnel, and you tell her 'God bless America.' You say it. Because that's exactly what we're doing. We tell them it's for their own good.

I'm going to have to get a TV for my room or something, because I'm tired of my parents walking by whenever someone's getting their head bitten off by a giant wolf, or when the movie's only shot of a naked breast flashes on the screen.

I wrote this in Spanish, I really like it.

Coffee and Salmon

And I feel like swimming upstream
With all the wet and slippery things
Which accompany the Jesuses and the girls.
They are born of struggle,
But are better off dead.

To find new ways to put colofrul clothes on them,
Spin them around and say
"Sadness and glory, buy my crying
and black-turtleneck-stupendousness."

Everyone's born wet and slippery;
Everyone swims upstream.

I have never laughed so hard at anything on the internet. Honestly. Internet Mammogram

I've taken the forum by the reins, and it's more or less fully operational. We really need a big readership for it to work, otherwise people will lose interest because no interesting content is being produced. So please try to get people you know involved, and the more participation there is, the better it will be.

I have created a forum. I figure it can be a main focal point for the blogs and the cliques, and it will be fun. The Node Make it cool. Get your friends to join.

I'm pretty sure fly tying is something foreign to most of you, but it's something I've done since around sixth grade, and I've gotten rather good at it. Take a look. Fly Tying -I have no personal connection to this site, but it gives you a general idea. Click on either the tier index or the fly index.