My life as a visiting journalist

I dig into new theories like butter into a knife. I'm a creamy mess tonight. Bear with me if I'm all over the place.

Your mind is the strongest thing you will encounter. Your mind conjured up evils and virtues. Your mind is to blame for logic, reason and meth.

Your mind can be focused, though. If you want to find something bad, something malicious or wrong with your day, you will find it. If you expect the worst, the worst will come knocking.

This is true in that you can control your mind.

I'll move the bulb on a different setting. I Spy. One of your schoolmates (chummy) says he spies something green.

Is it grass? (Obvious choice)

No.

Is it the tree?

No.

Is it... my shirt?

No.

It gets deeper quickly.

Is it Wendy's eyes?

No.

Is it the praying mantis painted on that mailbox on my binder?

No.

Is it the tip of a green highlighter poking out of Mr. Anderson's pocket?

Yes.

Yes it was. You picked the smallest thing little bit of green because you focused on it.

Green exists everywhere, but you can see all of the other colors, or ignore them completely.

With that, I mean to say that looking for the best, most awesome things in your life will allow you to find them.

And on a different, less didactic (Annoying!) note:

I keep imagining myself existing in every moment that has existed in a set space.

I did it when I was driving.

Like how some video games slow and stop working because it is trying to load a world in one place. Lags out.

If I was in a different moment, a car would have crashed into me millions of times and I would have been safe millions more, but all at once. I've lived and died infinite times in every moment.

It makes me thankful for living in the one where I'm not dead right now. Get it?

The Best writers were Depressed

but they were also in World War 2.

The best writers are dead.

School is a nagging sensation enveloping my whole body. I am seizing and ceasing. I can hardly write, or I don't.
I just don't. That's more true.

A month ago:
"College may not be for me."
Well that's wrong. It's of course for you. You could be more successful elsewhere.
You will be, Heck!

Today:
"College may not be right for me, Joel."
You're damn right. Research papers are horrid enemies of my state of mind. School is a wad of dough, with the flavor of your life, it may become nothing. Sometimes a bad school or a poor program is like a broken oven. You get your degree and your life is a ball of warm flavorless dough.

I want to make bread out of my life.
And you are challenging me New School. You are breaking my dough.
(You are actually stealing my dough at an exorbitant rate).

I don't want to be burnt when I leave.

Details couldn't explain my woe!

In two months, though, I won't remember writing this. I won't remember days when I was unhappy.
Two months sounds arbitrary.
Two months is arbitrary.

L'chaim!

For hours, I have chafed the world of television with my backlit laptop screen, with wikipedia droning On and ON about Frasier and a beleaguered A. V. Club insisting that I buy a tv.
I have been running an Oregonian sleeping schedule and I have started living televisionally.

This fresh-faced, duly "Caroline in the City"-esque spin-off of my former life. Big things are in store for the next season!
A quick review:
*An old favorite has been doing voice-over work. A possible relighting of a known defeated flame? Who knows what will happen if the Network allows the series to continue...
*A new character impresses the protagonists but fizzles out into obscurity. Where is she hiding?
*Shenanigans are afoot in 5F! Who knows what the burly bear, the Jedi or the effeminate mass will say next! They're so crazy! If anything, this show will coerce the viewer into believing that people are people and they are so darn funny with their accents and life choices!
*Welcome Back, Joel to Portland for a couple of episodes. The original cast makes light of the little change, and seems happy, but isn't it odd that Life has Gone on for everyone else?

...and....

***Celebrities!!!

And it's all an artifice, a gimmick to pretend that I don't live in New York City.
One of the rooms in my sweet suite is still open. Alex 2 moved out and his space has gone unfilled. I finally wandered out of my room to look through the window to see Oregon weather, gray, sullen skies, surrounding the Empire.

I would rather pretend ((and when I haven't eaten or moved for hours I often do)) that I can jump out of my window, nay, pass the window and sprout wings before I fall. I will hold levity and nerve as I graze scrapers with my angelic stature. I am bird.
Who wouldn't hire a bird? Birds don't need degrees.

Man, I need to do stuff. I'm a lazy, holed-up, seething, hermit crab. I'll come out when someone sets me up a new floral home.
And only then.

I welcome this New Semester.

Also, Transference is good stuff.

Li'l Jon, he always tells the truth.

I'm almost off break. I'm almost done appreciating the weather. It's clean. Or I think it is.
Assumed reality, and all that.

Oregon is nice and clean, but I don't want it. It's gloomy, Especially in January, it's grey, it's quiet. I can't get a handle on it.
There are great people here that I can't appreciate. Or won't.
I walked to my personal (hardly, I just pretend I'm the only person that frequents my steps) lookout to the Columbia and sang a song by Weezer that was on the radio.

In that moment, I wanted to be baptized in the river, alone. A hooded figure wading in the water. I could have swam with an otter. I started yelling about the clouds and the microbrews and the environmentalism and The Darkness
Charlie Murphy!

I figured out then that I didn't want Oregon because Oregon is real. Real people live here. I don't want that. I still want to be surprised at the end of the movie.
Give me fiction!

I want to live literature.

I walked back to my car. My car. It won't be mine tomorrow. Yep, my car, my little car is shipping off to fight the good war in Dresden. I walked back and a wolf kept parallel pace with me. She was young, but more importantly. She was an effing wolf.

I didn't mean to call you that late. I'm sorry.

Let's pray to the Greek Goddess Narcissa

Sometimes...
is an album by Dallas Green.

Sometimes, I google my name. I like to see what comes up. That's not strange. Tell me that's not strange. I mean, it's not daily, nor is it even bi-daily. See? Healthy.

I found a link to a site called 8coupons.com . They have listings of restaurants in and around New York, at least. A Chinese place was the subject of this page. Remember that piece of Fiction that I wrote about burning my tongue? That's a review now.

8coupons googles the restaurant and puts any reference to it as a review.
Wonderful. I don't think I can take that back.
Nor should I.

They have great General Tsao's. I like their orange chicken, but it doesn't seem hearty enough.

Home Team: 1.

There's no such thing as the real world

It's strange. It's all so strange and surreal that John Mayer hadn't been lying. What was he, 22, when he recorded some song that said just that. This is a guessing game. It's all a guessing game. I would love to hang out with all of my friends for a couple more years. I would love to beat all present and future video games and sample every new doritos flavor while I'm at it. Wouldn't that be glorious? I don't yet have a reason to cultivate my garden. Why should I?

I have to live this out. I have to work. You have to work or scam, or whatever, it doesn't matter. The buck stops here. I didn't realize the buck was arbitrary and so was my idea of here, but here it is. This is the end, my friends, maybe that's too personal. This is the end.

I write this only to mean that I have to do something tomorrow.

I have a song by Company of Thieves, The Dead Weather and Broken Bells all running, panting in my head together. Riffs and shouts bang out. I wonder sometimes about when I'll stop searching for new music, when I'll give up on the radio and cling to my discs and digital downloads from when I was eighteen.

Stephen Colbert is figur'd out. I was watching the Report and biking on a stationary. I figured it out. It makes sense why Stephen Colbert has a sizable audience and has received so much praise. Two things: He speaks baby talk. His interviews are hilarious because they are so ignorant, but not everyone thinks he's ignorant. He might be a truth-teller. He's not. He's a satirist. He dumbs down information to a liquid form, real issues, but sometimes lets got of highbrow steam. His liquefactioning of information makes it perfect satire, though. Score one for South Carolina.

Who's Got it Figured Out?

Well, for one, I.

So Scientology. Here's the thing. I know I have the right to make effigies of religious figures from beliefs I don't subscribe, but I shouldn't. I'm not going to raid HQ with hate flags because I couldn't possibly figure that aliens set us up the bomb in volcanoes. That is a ridiculous story. Scientology, granted is a made-up faith, a falsity in the name of absolute known reality. True. That verbose, squirming miscreant fact is null because people still have the right to believe in it.

You know what sounds crazy but isn't regarded as crazy because it is so prevalent?
God. The idea of God. Faith. Black holes. Aliens. Monsters. Celebrity.

Everyone has the right to believe.
Well, they should. Or they do.

I mean, I don't believe in some things because of high subscription fees and overages, but some beliefs have great rollover rates. I'm on a new plan, speaking of which. I only believe in things with unlimited texting.

I'm itching to leave this place. I could do it early. I mean, I practically can't, but I could. Possibility. I've got things to do and I want to do them both quickly and well.

I've been listening to music lately. If you haven't checked music out yet, I recommend starting now!

You can't Trust Them All

This break has been fruitful. I'm on break, by the way.
My V is fixed. Geek Squad said that they may have to run diagnostics.
Some diagnostics, what is it, Mr. Arken, may have a negative effect on your computer.

What negative effect?

Oh, they might wipe your hard drive, are you backed up, Mr. Arken?
Just sign here, Mr. Arken
I'm glad I had an apple that day, or that conversation would have made me mad.

It's a new year. That 100% means something in this country. Resolutions, drunkenness, I swear I'll quit smoking this year, taxes, probably, I don't know, Adult stuff. I can only assume.
I didn't pay enough attention to things in 2009. I was busy graduating and making mistakes that will hopefully turn into alternative fiction and moving to a different state and living there, and learning to clean.
That's 2009. Cleaning house.

You (I mean you, right there) shouldn't be uncomfortable talking about race. I'm not angry if you are, and what difference would it make if I was? The conversation needs to be open. AJ said he liked Chicago more because there were more black people making good of their lives instead of being victims. I forgot how white Portland was. It's white, I tell you. Parts are black, the poor parts. Oregon had a law a couple years ago, a century or so, barring Blacks. Exclusionary Rule. Maybe that's why white people love Portland. It isn't threatening. The unknown is threatening, isn't it?

So why do I blog? Ones that blog keep asking themselves that in my presence. I must ask myself. Simple answer: I am definitely the best writer that has existed.
It's too bad that the best writer ever only can muster a vocabulary of just under 200 words.
Weak, I know. Specificity in words isn't necessary with talent.

That's 2009 talking. Being pompous.