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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, and fuck middle school. Seriously.

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



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

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

Read Kerouac, dammit.

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

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

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

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

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

The Young Man and the Sea

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

P.S. Counting Crows suck like all hell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn-ed Hallmark.

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

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

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

Then I shot Kaloustian with rubber bands.

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

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

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

I am so bored with us.

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

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

Vomit, vomit, vomit. We are SO ARROGANT.

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

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

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

Two relevant poems by Kenneth Patchen, an angry pacifist.

'O Fiery River'

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

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

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


"And When Freedom Is Achieved..."

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


Those poems were written in the thirties.

Your sensibilities are being exploited again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pictures