:.
in high school, i acted like it. and the college social scene was a big disappointment because i tried to move on, but everyone still acted like it. and today, glimpses into other people's socialnet dramas leads me to fearfully suspect that i'm not encountering isolated instances of high-school-isis, but that instead, high school was a crystallized timelapse preview of adulthood; the 30 second trailer to the 30 yr movie: introduction of characters, conflicts, plots, etc.
do people's methods for dealing with their relationships with themselves and with others develop, or do the trivialities of adult life merely force a prolonging of the same dramas and plot devices to a point where it just looks like they're thinking?
i suspect that the divide is between those of us that are trying to relive our glorious youth by locking ourselves into that emotionally retarded world of dramas and conflict and consequence, and those of us that can't but try to get as far the fuck as possible from any semblance of high school obnoxia.
Sunday, April 28
:.
hey look. now i, too, can be a member of a labeled demographic: quirkyalone.
For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally incapable of casual relationships.
:.
tonight i saw the scorpion king, and for being such an awful movie, it's actually pretty good. and in it the antagonist relies upon his sorceress to win his wars. and i was reminded of poor old king saul. the people wanted a king to rule them and god did not, but god capitulated and gave them saul. which meant he was kinda fucked before he even took the job. and it's pretty obvious that god was just waiting for an excuse to get rid of him, because saul was a thorn in his ego; a constant reminder of a moment of weakness. and god's moment came when saul slipped up with the amalekites, for even as he slaughtered all of the men, women, and children, as god dictated, he spared the good livestock, and that was the kind of technicality that god was looking for. saul's fate was sealed then and there.
and then came david, the good natured harpist, who slayed goliath with blind belief and who succeeded saul despite being saul's most loyal subject. and he was pure and honest and wise. and i imagine that god must have been impressed by the ruthless efficiency with which david, the pure and honest and wise, massacred all those that stood between the israelites and their lebensraum. and the israelites had never before, nor ever would again, enjoy such expansive territories as under the rule of david. and he was forbidden from building the temple in jerusalem because of all the blood he had shed, for even god must have been disgusted by the monster he had created.
and these are our heroes. and this is our legacy. and to these stories we bind ourselves and with these stories we define ourselves and to these stories we hold onto because a man with no roots is not a man at all, and who cares whether these roots are rotten or poisoned or holding onto infertile ground. because what history will teach us is that man is small and petty and will cling to any group of any pretext and any platform, as long as he can belong to something greater than himself and shed the burden of creating his own purpose.
Friday, April 26
:.
and when her summer barbs are embedded in you to the hilt, then what? her clothes are strewn across your bedroom floor like orange blossom seeds across the desert, and one of her red and yellow striped socks is hanging on the chair -- an anchor for your thoughts. does it hold you near, or at bay? for someone else's fiction this would be a happy ending, but for you it's just a happy middle lodged somewhere between deep mahogany bookends.
Wednesday, April 24
:.
among the sordid feelings that wash over me and take ahold of my psyche for a day or two at a time, my most definite favorite is 'island.'
'rock' follows as a close second.
Tuesday, April 23
:.
i awoke feeling hairs on my nose and eyes. opening my eyes revealed cobweb strands leading from my face to the wall and on these strands stood a quarter-sized brown spider. as i stirred, he scurried up the line towards the wall, gradually fading out of existence as my waking mind took a hold of reality. 99% of the time it's critters, and as of late it's often spiders. i don't mind hallucinating anymore. i just wonder why it can't ever be naked women.
Monday, April 22
:.
i started an ad campaign for this site, after reading about this guy's ad art. this is what my first ad looked like (i ran it for 2 days):
:. 1997:
simultaneously, they spoke, like wildfire.
and so he ran up a spiral staircase,
getting dizzy,
anxious.
language confused him,
but he didn't stop.
he had a perspective
that was quite like all the others',
only his contained an unraveling spiral staircase.
he paused, sighed,
then ran some more.
Sunday, April 21
:.
i can't remember why, when i was in grade school, i wanted to grow up to be an astronomer. i remember the excitement of thinking about quasars and black holes and massive stars, red giants and white dwarfs; big swirls of color in my books about stars and faded xeroxes of solar flares pasted into school reports; the exhileration of flipping through any remotely related section in the encyclopedia.
but why? what was it about the celestials that made them more than a speckled sheet of distant black. what did those tiny pinholes of stars promise me that was so much more alluring than the tangible world around me? is it a poetic explanation of escapist youth? the notion of majestic masses of gasses and liquids and plasmas and solids that gracefully trace epic orbits in a frictionless existence, sans arguments or homework or insecurities or finances or a slap on the face. or was it simply the logical playground of my sci-fantastic obsessions: buck rogers and science fiction analog and transformers and star wars; aliens and phasers and heroes and robots? and still, perhaps it was an extension of my predilection for the night, all quiet and tranquil and composed, black and white movies on the television and everyone asleep.
i can conjure up rational psycho-analytical explanations until my fingers bleed. but the truth is i simply don't remember.
Thursday, April 18
:.
i am fragmenting. small bits of unhatched blog entries are stuck in my mind's teeth. these unformed texts scurry in my mind, coming and going, punctuating at the most unbloggable moments. are they the remaining entrails of inner thoughts stripped and splayed in days past, or are these unexplored avenues of exposition i've been neglecting? i find i have to search my past entries for texts to make sure i haven't laid these thoughts out before; to make sure that i'm not repeating myself (yet again). past and future, reality and dream, blend with barely a distinction of tense. did this or that happen or did i imagine it so direly that its hazy remnant is as vivid as any other blurry memory?
and you... did i ever see the real you or were you just a projection screen for my heart's art house flicks? how would you tell the story of 'us'? or was it all in my head? are any of you ever real when my heart beats fast? or are you all just mannequins awaiting next summer's line of my rehashed childhood desires?
:. schweet. got dnord's and girlhero's mix cds. thanks people. here's my summer mix:
Silkworm - Couldn't You Wait (Acoustic)
The Moldy Peaches - Steak For Chicken
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - My Pal The Tortoise
Guided By Voices - My Valuable Hunting Knife
The Folk Implosion - Pole Position
Frank Pahl - Emotional Thumbs
The 6ths - All Dressed Up In Dreams
Her Space Holiday - Hassle Free Harmony
Red House Painters - Summer Dress
Elliott Smith - Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands
Juno - We Slept In Rented Rooms [The Old School Bush]
Unwound - Summer Freeze
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Greyhound part 1
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Greyhound part 2
They Might Be Giants - Stomp Box
Violent Femmes - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me
Voodoo Glow Skulls - Here Comes the Sun
Tom Waits - Ice Cream Man
Wednesday, April 17
:.
they should have rodeo clowns for the cowboys, because the poor sap must be thinking what the hell? the bull gets to beat the shit out of me and he gets cirque de soleil to boot? why don't you make him a poodle, or a sword, while you're at it? i bet he even gets a dinner salad with that. ow, my chopped liver!
Tuesday, April 16
:. pen and paper journal entry, 1996:
if life is what i think it is,
then i'd rather be a cage:
containing, constraining, frightening,
engaging.
to hold.
to maintain.
to be home; comforting and debilitating.
something to run away from,
only to feel incomplete without.
Monday, April 15
:.
nobody knows anybody. not that well. - tom reagan, miller's crossing.
and maybe one day you realize that you've been living in a make believe world, with make believe dreams and make believe friends. and nothing is what you thought it was and everybody is who you feared they might have been. and so, very quietly, very delicately, very suddenly, your world shatters. but after the glass stops bouncing, you'll open your eyes. and the air will smell a lot fresher and the sky will be much bluer, and you'll be standing upright amid the shards of your discarded naivete.
Sunday, April 14
:. i recieved my first cd from the burn, baby burn mix cd swap. thanks cheryll. tomorrow i elbow late tax mailers for room at the post office. here are my fellow five:
http://www.freeq.org/cheryll
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnslade
http://girlhero.org
http://www.dnord.com
http://www.knitwitology.net/knitlog/
Saturday, April 13
:.
small nuggets of narcissism attached to this page like fistfulls of mud on an equally brown wall. the frustration of being an amateur writer stems from the banal fact that all of my verbage is so, well, amateurish. i don't think i'm improving. i'm just walking on this vertical treadmill of a webpage. and now i will use an anecdote about a discussion on women to draw a parallel between them and journal writing:
a friend once said that it's all about zero maintenance women. and i asked, but are they worth it? and he said, well, that's exactly the point.
Friday, April 12
:.
i miss the silence. that's what you asked, isn't it? what do i miss most about romantic involvement, now that it's been 10 months of singledom? well, i miss the silence. ironic? perhaps. don't get me wrong. the noise is lots of fun: talking, laughing, fucking. but the silence is bestest. there's the weekday morning silence; slowly waking, intertwined, with eyes closed, savoring the precious seconds before the snooze hits. and there's the lethargic weekend morning silence: plentiful, bordering on gluttony, which can last well into the late afternoon if properly maintained. there's the silence on long walks on the waterfront with a breeze and the wooshing of the surf lazily pushing back and forth. and then there's the driving silence. motivated driving to the mall or random get-in-the-car-and-drive driving that takes you nowhere but takes all day to get there and your mind goes even further, but in the end it always comes back to her.
Thursday, April 11
:.
i think the world would be a better place if people brushed their teeth in nothing but a pair of black socks.
:.
i had a dream once, and then i woke up. and some people can manage to sleep and dream and believe it and then wake up knowing it was just a dream, only eager to dream again. i can't avoid it, but i'm not proud of falling for the same trick every night. after night. before tomorrow.
Wednesday, April 10
:.
if we had time machines, and people could go back to their past, i think people would understand why they moved to the future in the first place. i mean, nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.
Tuesday, April 9
:.
when i'm feeling up then it's cool to think that this is the best i've ever had it. but when i'm down then it's sad to think that that's still true.
Monday, April 8
:.
and men break upon her like waves against the rocks. and it'll take no less than hundreds to affect her stature. but no less than thousands will try. and all will try despite the foreshadowing fate of the previous wave's receding surf.
Sunday, April 7
:.
i'm in sunny socal, at a friend's birthday celebration. and while i'm making the rounds catching up with friends and acquaintances and ex-coworkers, i'm grateful that cynischism.com is a domain name that's as easily forgotten as it is told. because, sometimes, this very personal emo-exhibitionism becomes a rude awakening to that dream of going to school in your underwear, or more contemporarily, exposing your breasts for beads in one context, and then seeing them on tv in another.
even traditional private paper journals usually pretend there's an audience (i do know of a singular case where the writer invented a pictographic emoticonography to ensure privacy of said writer's journal) but even (especially) in extreme cases, the author is writing for the audience of future-tense author. but now the barrier to entry with the web is so low, and the voyeuristic kick so high... is public journaling significant to the dialogue of modern culture? is it just a freak symptom of the information age? what's the signal-to-noise ratio of this live cacophony of hundreds of thousands inner monologues? is this a fad, or a movement?
i discovered blogs while i was trying to break out of the megalithic corporate meta-web-ring that overtook the webspace when e-commerce became viable. the web used to be a technophilic schtick of random hypertext sideshows. and then came the vendors with dollars in their eyes. and then came the populace, with nothing to say, and the perfect medium to say it in. and i fell in love with the shear honesty of the populist blogging phenomenon. this is my reality tv, pointed inwards and out.
Friday, April 5
:.
in the future, professional lives will be private, and private lives will be public.
:.
today's weather was perfect: clear skies and cold winds. i walked to the farthest restaurant possible and en route i utilized the 'knowing smile'. the 'knowing smile' is called as such because it tends to make people think you know something they don't. this is true, as they don't know about the 'knowing smile'. to enact the knowing smile, one relaxes the shoulders, eyes, and arms, and smiles. one maintains the smile continuously while walking to one's destination, making as much eye contact with grumpy people as possible. note: this is a bona-fide smile, not a stretched mouth. the knowing smile is self-actualizing: it's hard not to burst out laughing when employing the knowing smile.
Thursday, April 4
:.
while they are most definitely harder to acquire and doubly so to maintain, i dare say i have developed an affinity for friends of the female persuation. once i overcame the male aggro-territorial notion that the only meaningful relationship i can have with a female is a romantic one, i've begun to cultivate some very rewarding friendships.
i'm not fooling myself into thinking that i'm anything but an observer inside this biological machine that is 'me,' thinking that i can force it to act beyond its short sighted emo-habitual nature. but i do think that if i observe hard enough and long enough on very specific issues, then like a flashlight chasing a rabbit, or a magnifying glass focused on an ant, i can force this here primate into new behavioral territories. not by 'acting,' but by 'staring inwards,' i can change my behaviour. and i will turn myself inside out until the crank brakes.
Wednesday, April 3
:.
meatspace journal, '96:
death, like a series of tulips,
gathers its remaining days
and puts them in a jar.
this jar is placed upon a
high (ly unlikely) shelf and
left there, continuously,
for one and one half eons,
afterwhich
it is removed,
opened,
and consumed quickly with
a glass of water.
Tuesday, April 2
:.
jordan (the anne frank of emo) is back to blogging. i cant... stop... laughing. go there... now.
:.
is the eliptical at a resistance of 4 harder, or easier, than actual running? i wonder if there are any cute women behind me right now. if 167 beats per minute is 80% of my theoretical maximum heart rate, as this colorful chart clearly indicates, is running at 180 beats per minute bad for me? leather or leatherette? i mean, are they honestly telling me that in the year 2002 they can't figure out anything better to make a car interior out of other than dead cows? is that chick cute? i cant tell from here. never mind. they're together. do i want to spend money on a bmw 330i if i have to park it a block away on the street because i don't have a garage or street parking on my street? why is my eyelid twitching these days? i like this song. do the guys running around on the second floor track think their exercise is more 'real'? well, they're not getting any further than i am. i like this song too. is 4.6 miles in 30 minutes a good pace?
-- the mind is in stasis while the body is in motion.
Monday, April 1
:.
not an april fool's: i've got a date on wednesday thursday. brought to you by match.com.