Happy 16th Birthday!

The ASB wishes you a happy birthday and hopes that you'll take a few minutes to consider this... Did you know that most accidents occur when the driver is between the ages of 16 and 19 years old? Motor Vehicle Crashes are the number one cause of death among people between the ages of 15 and 20, and in California alone, 18,000 teen passengers are injured or killed annually in teen-driven cars. So, we ask you to be a careful and considerate driver, and remember NEVER DRINK AND DRIVE! So, Happy Birthday, and please be safe.

Sincerely,
The ASB

So a guy walks into a bar, says to the bartender, "gimme a beer." The bartender gives the guy a beer and the guy sits at the bar for a while, just drinking his beer and minding his own. Then he watches a football game on a little TV bolted to the ceiling for a while before putting his jacket on, walking out to his car and going home.

I...am...creative-esque.

I work hard on english project.

I mold something beautiful.

Still working.

Matt craft tale of love, death, sex, cookies.

You wait. You watch. Matt pleased.

"What is this human emotion you call...love?"

A half an hour ago my dad brought home two air-filtering units he bought from Sharper Image for quite a bit of money. While he was setting them up I read the instruction manual and noticed that you're not supposed to stand within a foot of it, and staring at it can blind you. Hmm. "That clean, fresh scent you smell is Ozone. The US government has set safe standards for ozone, and the Ionic Breeze complies with those standards." Something occured to me. If Ozone were safe, why would the government need to set limits on how much of it we can consume? I voiced this while my throat and nose started to close with a mucus-ey sensation. The units also glow with a blue germicidal light. Staring at this light can cause eye damage or even blindness. Hmm...but Sharper Image says it's safe.

My dad left, and it took about thirty seconds for my mom and I to find supported evidence online that not only does Ozone do very little to clean air, it actually agitates respiratory conditions and even promotes the growth of harmful contaminants. !!!!!.

"Well if the government lets us buy it, it must be safe." Cigarettes are still legal.

I'll stick with the cynicism, oh ye of little faith.


Beautiful, beautiful blue light...

Shadows with no morning sun. Dark, dark room, darker every day. Snooze button. Snooze button again. Again.

Cold, cold water. Feed the drooping eyelid. Nothing can prepare mentally for something as formless and horrible as the rest of the day.

Everyone looks the same until you open your eyes. Landscapes of grey, fleshtone shifting mirages of little blizzards growing up to be snowflakes. Everyone's snowblind.

Always pulled against the tide. Nothing's pushing nothing forward. Never, ever, feel safe. Everyone trusts the wrong people. There is no love.

But look under the covers, and you'll find stars pooling into galaxies. You all look like ants...

A how-to guide to self-reinvention and absolute grooviness:

Jeff Filice invited me to the Radiohead concert on Sunday, bless him bless him. For a long time I've been very intimidated by this band. As to why, I'll have to start from ground up. Lyrics as cryptic as theirs demand scrutinization. Whenever I would try to decode their songs I would way, way overshoot, trip myself up and drown in confusion. This shortcoming was hard for me to cope with, I felt like I had failed in a way, like I was stupid for not being able to pick them apart. I decided to drop the whole thing, bury it away and come up with convenient excuses about them being "so pretentious" which I myself believed half-heartedly.

With Jeff's invitation I decided to heal the wound. I've been throwing around a few new ideas I've had and they held particular bearing on this situation. They are as follows: every person alive is capable of experiencing the full spectrum of human experience and therefore is not obligated to hold themselves to one particular standard, i.e. a personality. Personality is limiting and counter-intuitive if you wish to live as full a life as possible. One can become whatever they wish at any given moment without notice or justification. I'm just starting to get a hang on actually implementing this theory.

So, I implemented the theory. This sounds rather bizarre, but if you do stuff like this always with a sense of humor, all is forgiven. Listening to Kid A, standing in front of a mirror wearing a featureless white mask, I concentrated on the issue until I started to pinpoint exactly what made me so agitated. Using the mask simply as a visual metaphor for building from as blank a slate as possible, I slowly knocked down every barrier that was holding me back. When I was done, I had finished most of the album and it was like the Berlin Wall being destroyed, I was able to tread in the realm of Yorke without the least bit of fear, lyrics included. Ironically, once I allowed myself to see, their message made perfect sense to me. It fits me well. I can now live comfortably with whatever reactions their music may elicit from me, and I no longer feel the need to attack them to justify my own insecurities.

So just goes to show, what one cannot find without, one can find within.


The world's most important man enjoys some icthe cweem.

This is what my poetry has become, and it is a welcome, welcome change from the trite, sentimental crap I usually spew. Be this good or no, I'm just glad it's here:

Breakfast of Champions

Making first crack so egg yolk flows out, like soul, milky yellow soul, pouring out, I’ve never seen, heard, smelled, tasted, shat the soul. Writing is like cracking an egg, omelet, eat, shit, sell so you can find girls who will love you because any girl worth loving knows how to read a good poem from a bad, knows how to read the poetry of every line, crease and stain on your body from every day of work you’ve done, every time you’ve cried rainy tears for other girls, your mother, the world. Every good girl can look into your eyes and see not milky white yolk but her own interiors and let you flail and sweat on her even though your colors don’t match.

I feel like making love to a girl in her own overcast rainy new york day apartment under dusty rafters over old scratched wood paneling floors under a creaky but soft and inviting brass-posted bed that cradles in the best of ways. I feel like looking out a window and seeing nothing but water-drenched brick exterior and the multitudinous forms of aspiration, degradation and memory mulling through themselves, sorting, multiplying. This thing just gets bigger and bigger.

I wonder often. Being another person, what it would smell like. As a full-grown man, submerging. The premier frontier. I imagine girls tasting like a bubblegum lollipop, sweet, sugary, reminiscent of times passed. That’s when weird shit happens.

Cool girls, girls worth knowing, grow on walls like a great big sexy mold that creeps farther and farther away the closer to achieving enlightenment you get, because cool girls don’t wear black, cool girls live with their parents and summon Satan’s thousand forms to hide in their shampoo. I’d like to erect a glowing, flashing, smelling, pheromone-emitting beacon to bring these girls out of their deceptive skins of clothing and human form, because cool girl is something unlike anything else, it’s magic, it’s freedom, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted and will never, ever get. Cool girl tastes like bubblegum and steel.

Cook that omelette, eat full until you die and only you are left.

Despite appearances, vehement opposition to TV is really one of very few things I consistently take seriously and believe in on a daily basis. But even then, the angry tones in which I write about it aren't a very accurate representation of the way I think. No, I'm not really this militant and rabid, only on the blog.

Turn off your televisions. You're living through a false matrix of thought predefined, prepackaged and engineered to make you placid. I may sound like this a lot, I may sound histrionic in what you see as paranoia, but this is one thing which is absolutely true.

There is no "them." The sad irony of the whole fiasco is that we willingly continue the cycle started when TV became a part of the American Dream.

Point 1: When you watch TV, the left side of your brain functionally shuts down, leaving the right lobe to process information in illogical, nonsensical ways. You cannot possibly process information spewed at you by TV in any semblance of reason. Ad agencies know this, use it to the point of exploitiation. The switch in nodes also releases endorphins, a substance chemically almost identical to opium. The endorphins leave you placated and listless, unwilling and almost unable to stop watching. You know how you feel after watching TV for a couple hours? Disoriented and sick? There's a reason! It's unhealthy, and yes, addictive. People removed from television for a few months go into withdrawl, be it mild, in which they are temperamental and unhappy.

Point 2: You have lived with television for so long that you have begun to believe that the world portrayed in television is more real than the world in which you live, and that your life somehow fails to fit television's image, and therefore is unexciting, undesirable and banal. Before you dispute, think about how many times you've turned off a TV, looked around you and morosely walked through the motions of your life for the next half hour, feeling slightly unfulfilled and unhappy with the hand you've been dealt. Where is the logic in this, that we value pure fiction and lies as truth?

Point 3: Television has created a common language which we now share. It's creepy. If someone says "Can you hear me now?" everyone immediately understands and chuckles even though we all know the catch phrase is not at all funny in the slightest way. On top of this, listen to yourself speak during an emotional moment, and just track every single sentence you say back to movies or TV. I've done it many times, and it makes me sick.

TV limits what we can achieve, keeps us from attaining happiness and forces us into grim acceptance of the world we now perceive as violent, unfair and ugly. The average American watches four hours of TV a day. FOUR HOURS! That's 28 hours a week, 112 hours a month. Think of what you could do with that time. Even if you watch TV for half an hour every other day, that's still a chunk of time too precious to sacrifice to an institution designed to keep you emotionless. You will never get that time back. Ever.

Trust me, there is a world surrounding us that is more amazing, more mysterious, more unbelievable than anything I've ever experienced before. I have discovered a universe so unspeakably, complexly beautiful that I feel more alive and in love than I ever have, and I cannot wait to see what's next.

But go watch Friends, it's just so mildly amusing and distracting!

Placid. Serenity. A welcome length of silence in which I can retract and think about breasts and the importance of living like a hand outstretched in open palm. Test done. Agitation, gone. Discomfort, minimal. Not even indifferent, I begin drifting through my brain's back rooms with a flashlight. A subtle rustling and moving of papers, pencils. A faint "shyeet..." can be heard before, while my eyes begin to cast themselves towards nothingness...

"SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!"

"Oh..." say my eardrums. A fire alarm at point-blanc range sends waves of disorientation, shock, panic and terror throughout the class. A duct opens and my bloodstream flows with adrenaline.

"SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!"

Somewhere, an angel loses its wings.

Nobody ever wants to change everything. Change everything a good thing! Yesterday I kicked down every goddamned door that was blocking my path through the world and toppled routine with the help of music and the will to make everything seem like a fingerpainter's canvas. I rearranged color-smears, conquered the devil and made snakes fly. Take the filters off your eyes, once you stop believing in dragons the dragons die, and all you get is a sick feeling in your stomach like the world's forsaken you. Don't believe what they tell you, Imma be the fucking president when I grow up.

-Perfect- You're the perfect girlfriend. Which
means you're rare or that you cheated :P You're
the kind of chick that can hang out with your
boyfriend's friends and be silly. You don't
care about presents or about going to fancy
placed. Hell, just hang out. You're just happy
being around your boyfriend.


What Kind of Girlfriend Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Whoa...awesome.

Why we are not a star-faring race.

You are Homosexual...You like people of your own
gender and there is no reason to be ashamed of
this result...Congradulations on finally
finding your sexuality.


The Sexuality Quiz
brought to you by Quizilla

Wow, what a revelation...I guess those guys were right. I'll be damned.

The First Ever Quiz That Doesn't Suck

YOU are a B-2 Spirit. Its low-observable, or
"stealth," characteristics give it
the unique ability to penetrate an enemy's most
sophisticated defenses and threaten its most
valued, and heavily defended, targets. Its
capability to penetrate air defenses and
threaten effective retaliation provide an
effective deterrent and combat force well into
the 21st century. Your quiet, but when you
speak your words are loud and make their
"impact".


Which miltary aircraft are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

By the way, this test consisted of two questions.