A Heart of Arkenstone

Buttered popcorn

2011-12-31T20:39:00.000-08:00

It's New year's in New York, out with the old and the Amsterdam. The streets are as lit as any other Saturday night, except they smell abnormally like ganja. I'm back in the city to work this holiday. I've never put much effort into this holiday. Maybe I'll join a party, or light some fireworks in the rain, watch them roll down my hill. This isn't my favorite cultural tradition. Dick Clark and Carson Daly are not my favorite Easter Bunnies, but I'll through the holiday gods a bone.

This year has been rough, but definitely not the roughest. I didn't write much, but that means I also didn't write much crap. I didn't emote on paper, I didn't serve in Occupied France. Hell, I didn't occupy. I decided I was part of the working strata that was being represented, rather than representing. Fine. I had to work. Reasonable excuse. I barely worked, though. I mostly sat and ran errands. What a year! Errands galore!

It's been a good year, but certainly not the best. Some death, some disease, some letting go. The last few months have been surreal, if anything. No mandated ways of dealing anything. I live in post-modernity where all advice is relative! So I'm told I'm doing fine. Fine is shutting down a little, playing video games, wishing to stay sleeping most mornings, general doubting of life, not going to Brooklyn, not going to Staten Island (but why would I?)...

It's been a fine year. I'm dating Hania, still. I haven't thrown that away. That's nice. It's a nice feeling not wasting something good. But really, I've put a lot of effort into keeping it floating, as has she, and it's going well. I keep cruelly joking about marriage to everyone. Maybe 2012 is the year I fully loosen my grip on social expectations and decide every big life decision. This year was sure a primer, if that's what I'm up against. I have set on some paths that require certain actions in the future. I will have to work, for instance. I can't ruin my parents' credit with vagrancy, much to my dismay.

Maybe I'll go to grad school. Options are still open. I'm not at a dead-end plywood desk, just yet. Plenty of time. Too much time, actually.

I've been getting debris off some blocked paths, too. I've been thinking about serving in the military (Is that what it's called? Am I pronouncing it right, military? It's so foreign to me). I'm really throwing my arms in the air, Who Knows rising from me like a chant.

Chantix. I quit smoking, by the way.

For 2012, I want to cut nicotine out of my diet, altogether. That's a goal.

I really want to stop judging people, too. That's a goal. That's an every day goal, you know? Writing it now only solidifies it. I need to let people be people and not the categorized and compartmentalized boxes I can push them into. I've been watching a lot of The Wire and I'm pretty okay with drug dealers, now. That's positive change, ya feel me?

I really need to see some more of the world. I started off a good streak with moving to Poland this year (where I'm writing from now), but I'd like to at least double my ambitions. At least.

I really do need to get out more, even if a friend dies, I can't let that stop me. Just keep pushing, falling, rambling. Get a hard time, let it wash over me. I'll be a low island for 2012. I will be pushed skyward by volcanoes. Palm trees will grow from my sides. This metaphor doesn't make any sense.

I really want to learn Arabic, and leave the United States with a salary. That's a goal. That's the goal.

I really need to be okay with the silence.

There are so many testimonies

2011-08-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

I have been notorious for not responding well to tragedy. Not crisis, not emergency. I do well there. I create a sense of levity and try to calm people. No, not that, when tragedy strikes though, I go blank and feel nothing and then it slowly hits me for a week, two weeks, months, months.

I've had a lot of people die around me. I've watched old friends and acquaintances die. Flip over, fall down, whatever. Whatever. I don't know why Reynolds High School was a place of so many deaths. I don't know. I'm not processing anything.

Another of my friends died last night. This is the strangest it's been. When Victor passed last summer, I knew how to deal with it: blasting "Only the Good Die Young" and crying. For days. When Nick Vining killed himself my freshman year, I demonized him and then cried under his desk, and then demonized him.

Those aren't the best strategies for dealing with tragedy, but they were how I was going to deal, regardless. Plan set. Those were the two deaths that hit me the hardest. I was reeling from both of those, but this one,

One of my best friends died last night and I'm just not dealing with it. "That's the right way, Joel, because there is no right way." Pat on the back. "Feel better."

I appreciate it, all, but I don't feel bad. I haven't processed it. Nobody knows how to respond to death and nobody, except trained professionals, know how to respond to those who are responding to death.

I just want to go away for a while. I just want to walk for a couple miles and stare at the water. I don't want to be hassled.

One of my other friends, a mutual friend with my dead friend, she told me that we should try to publish his music. Hendrix-style posthumous. Or maybe Van Gogh-style. Beethoven. In death, he will become a legend. Maybe, is my response. Yeah, sure. Is that honoring his legacy? Would he want his legacy honored?

No, I think he would want to get paid to play music while he was alive. Right?

And there's no solace in hell.

I am disappointed I didn't get to hear his last album, the one he recorded this summer. I'm disappointed he only had recently came to terms with who he was and was able to admit it. He lived with this knowledge only a month, two at the most. I'm disappointed that he didn't get to sell his music for a livable wage. He will only live in stories and caricatures and pictures and digital graveyards, he won't be able to give his testimony. That's what's hitting me now. He's silent.

I'll let it rain on me.

2011-07-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

Two things: I'm sort of worried about the rest of my life. I'm going to owe a lot of money and I'm going to have to pay it back for years to come. Fretting.

I'm also in Poland, in a hotel listening at the rain and reading about modernity.

I need to let go of one to accept the other.

I am more aware of the former because of my age. Everyone else in this program thinks I'm a baby, even, I think, the 22-year-olds (oh, pardon me, 23). I find it incredibly patronising especially coming from academics who deconstruct everything (except age, it seems). Our professors, some aged 60 and over, see us all as children, or young adults which is a euphemism for children.

"You want to work?" they ask me, incredulously. Yeah, I have a lot of fucking loans, I respond with exasperation. This heightens my panic about money, and makes me forget that I'm in Poland with REAL Polish people.

Like,

I signed off facebook with two of my friends yesterday because I had to listen to my Russian, blind violinist friend play some jazz next door. I was sitting back thinking how ridiculous it would be to explain that when I got back home, but in the moment it seemed normal and acceptable as a thing that happens in life.

But earlier,

I made some offhand comment about my disappointment with people that join cults to postpone accepting adulthood, a comment I was very proud of, and my deconstructionist academic peers said I was being ignorant. What is adulthood? Why accept such norms. Pish posh.

I was talking to the program coordinator for the Wrocław a couple days ago at lunch. I asked about her doctorate, which she was given a month ago, and she told me to stay away from the doctorate. It is NOT worth it, she said. Once you finish your Master's program, you feel unaccomplished and the doctoral program helps you feed your academic addiction, but you're stuck in it for years, head to the paper. Everyone is working around you and now you are a doctor of your subject. Where did your life go?

Another guy, a composer (one of two I've met on the trip), went to the New England Conservatory and then a conservatory in Wrocław for two Master's and told me he regretted his New England experience because of the expense. Really?

I'm going to finish reading and sit back all of tomorrow. I'll let it rain on me, real Polish rain.

Stupid Stupid, stupid (Dobranoc.)

2011-07-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

My concentration requires either an internship while enrolled or studying abroad. I didn't know how much time I would have in the next year, so I decided to go abroad. I am a student of the globe, so why not see the globe, rather than just theorize it?

I'm alone in the hotel lobby right now. It's next to a forested park with a big fountain that does water displays that move to music. I thought I was going mad in my room when Also Sprach Zarathustra danced outside our windows. Vitaly thought that the Poles were reenacting the war when the fireworks came.

Turns out it's just a normal Friday night in Southeastern Wrocław.

I'm one of the only students in this program without a Bachelor's. Most of them are working on their dissertation and are including their coursework in their projects. How many Polish intellectuals does it take to upset your vision of stupid Poland?

Just one, just one intellectual. There are none here with toothless, happy grins, old world charm, there are none. These people are wearing better shoes than I am and many speak English. Honestly, whatever stupid image I had of the Slavic countries East of Germany... I will tell you, there are more scags on public transportation in Portland than there are here. I'm not even in the largest city in Poland. I'm in the fourth largest. People aren't rich here.

I managed to upset one of the Polish students who are also part of the program. I said I disliked the mass-mediated discourse surrounding the failure of the socialist experiment that was the USSR. He was aghast. "You actually think that we should have another try at Marxist socialism?"

Well, I guess not, when you say it that way. I believed in the decency of humanity and that the bourgeois were replaced with totalitarians that enacted and reinforced boundaries that already existed, but now I don't believe that. I can't believe that.

I didn't live under socialism. I know nothing. Americans know nothing. Why does The New School discuss Marxism in so many contexts if it is not worth discussing? Maybe because it's great sociological critique, my UN table was able to agree on that, but Joel, the time for socialism is dead.

I had to remind them that my name is Joel. You can't remember both names and polemics.

That's a joke. I've only been here two days.

I got into an argument with one of my closest friends before I left. I presented a radical leftist perspective unabashedly (and unprovoked). I was not received well. To fight complacency, I was reactionary and that did little in the way of conversation.

I find this shit terribly interesting and righteous, but I don't have even reason to bring it up in social situations. I don't want to be a zealot. I don't want to not speak and go on like I have in the past, or like I am here, too embarrassed to mutter in Polish to go anywhere, but I don't need to be so virulent or violent.

And hell, even these international academics are less radical than I think I am. Maybe I should keep reading and absorb more everything. A crisis is like a sponge, and so will I be. I don't want to be wrong anymore.

Prolix

2011-07-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

All young whites are juggalos and juggalettes and I'm tired of it. I'm tired of kicking past Faygo bottles at MAX stations and I'm tired of black and white makeup kits catching in gutters. I don't understand this whole fascination with the Detroit Mecca. Detriot.

I don't understand the white people of today. White culture is so loud and obscene. I heard about the bullshit evangelizing of Violent J, but his name underscores a larger obbjective violence done to the faiths of his listeners. He is, they are ignorance and misappropriation. I read about a group of wild and rangy juggalos that attacked a group of journalists and teachers. Evangelism, Violent J? Your evangelism brought this.

I can piece together the puzzle and the politically correct media won't say it, but all of these kids were juggalos. The music is their destruction. Blither and bluster and stupid, stupid stupid. No time for it. Who to blame but ICP for this and similar assaults? I want these men to be punished for inciting these crimes, but I can't expect the parents to make a move. They were as easily incited as their children by the Black Flags and the Nirvanas and whatever. And their grandparents with the riot-induction of Gene Krupa, David Brubeck, Stan Getz.

Every generation faces a moment of clarity where we can see the culprits and it is up to the strength and intelligence (not verbosity and wayward desires) of the society to pare down the overgrown culprit trees.

We must not let this stand.

Summer Mode

2011-06-20T11:38:00.000-07:00

I'm in summer mode. I will do nothing unless someone urges or yells at me and No one is urging me to apply to grad school or jobs, eat, read or blog. I'm withering away and I'm not even documenting it.
I think I could make FaceSmash.

About a quarter of my summer so far has been in the two most happening cities in the Northwest: Corvallis and East Wenatchee. I jest (please see the municipal websites for both cities), but I enjoyed my time there more than here. Or maybe the same. I'm with old friends and only a handful have gotten old and stale. The ones that haven't seen my in years and mispronounce my name were someone else's friend to begin with.

I finished On The Road recently. It was killer. I stopped after the ridiculous and benign first ten pages, but then I realized that was the whole book and dug it fully. That was the first for-pleasure book in months, maybe a year.

I leave for Poland in two weeks. I'll have research papers due in Winter after I get back. I'm excited to be in a foreign country that isn't Canada, not that I don't love Canada or Canada isn't foreign (It very much is). I'm thinking of this trip as a test. If I fail, I have to work for the post office for the rest of my life. I won't be cut out for international relations. I'll be cut out for what I've done best so far: apologize for late packages.

"I know you have the tracking number, but the number doesn't necessarily signify anything at all.
"I'm sorry."

Polyamory and whatever

2011-06-04T09:18:00.001-07:00

I had a conversation with one of my friends about monogamy a month ago. It's easy to forget that there are other sorts or relationships than the one I'm in. Hell, it's a challenge to be aware of anything that I'm not. Friendship is like the perpetual defeat of my accidental solipsism.

Nonmonogamy is interesting. I think I dig it. I think it's something to be dug, but I've never dabbled. I've never seen anyone that had an interest in other people, as well as me. They wouldn't! I couldn't possibly be with someone that had eyes for another, just couldn't do it, it's wrong and painful ugly, but most people are attracted to everyone around them, right?

What kept me out of long-term relationships for the last four, five years, other than fear, is the feeling that I'd be missing out on all these great trysts that are always satisfactory.

I've heard that these relationships fail in previously heterosexual, monogamous relationships. I think Dr. Drew told me that. I hear that, sure, but there are many people that survive (and succeed) in alternative relationship forms. April Ludgate, of course is an example. My friend in my boat-building class was reading a book about how to better her polyamory. I asked her about it and she told me that the water's fine.

And I have a family friend that's been in a ménage à trois for some five years, longer even, but she doesn't like the company of her husband, the third wheel is a deadbeat skeez, and she's fallen off the deep end in other aspects of her life since then.

It works for some people and other people pretend it works for them. Sounds like every other part of relationships.

Sickness, as in Health

2011-04-12T13:33:00.000-07:00

UGH!

In Space(time) and Einstein today, we saw a patronizing National Geographic video in which black holes and quasars were sensationalized with a John Williams soundtrack. There was one section where in a matter of thirty seconds, Andromeda and the Milky Way collided, the black holes at the centers of the galaxies becoming one, or as they said in the video, "gobbled each other."

The short animation presented a process in the making, one that will happen eventually, some 20 billion years from now. Watching the destruction of much of the life in our solar system brings an odd sense of closure and finality, even though it is yet to happen. No matter what we do in our life, there will be a day when, if somehow the human race has managed to live that long, our galaxy collides with another and we're destroyed.

No matter what.

It's pretty far away, though, isn't it? I probably won't be alive for it. My legitimate children probably won't either, but still, there is a finite end to everything we've ever known, we as in the next thousand generations.

I'm not trying to say that our actions are useless when facing a grander destruction. I'm really trying to illustrate the same thing I always am: If you aren't enjoying your life, relishing the minutiae, then you are really only counting the days until not only your own death but the death and decay of everything you know. Nostalgia be damned!

Life is not suffering, it is a brief state of mutual acknowledgment. Enjoy it or die.

Also I don't know how Brittany is doing it, but every time I hear the French language, I can't help but to imagine there is a montage behind me and what's being said is comical narration.

I was a bully

2011-04-05T17:37:00.000-07:00

I want to be fair, and honest. For some time during the time I was bullied, I was totally also bullying some kids. I have two clear examples that put me in a bad light, but if I'm trying to play the victim card, I should show my whole hand.

I made fun of one of my friends in 4th and 5th grade. She was overweight and I called her a rhino and she would chase me furiously. It was one of those incidents that could go either way between flirtation and bullying. I hope I apologized.

But my other behavior doesn't tread any lines. There was another guy in one of the joint classes downstairs in Glenfair. He was in Talented and Gifted with Keith and I, but he was a weirdo. He couldn't sit down properly and would make noises throughout class. Keith and I harassed and harangued him, not to the point of suicide or anything, but definitely to the point of crying.

We were confronted about this by not only the two teachers of the joint class downstairs, but both classes of thirty. We hung our heads and had to explain ourselves and apologize. It turned out that he was autistic. It wasn't explained to us what autism what, but what bullies were and that was us.

I didn't learn about autism until years later, it must have been.

Louis C.K. has some line about waking up and feeling great and then remembering all the things you've done and having to live with yourself.

So we didn't understand that he was autistic, fine, can't blame us for that, but making a kid cry weekly is heinous.

And this isn't the worst thing I've done. We all have our dirty laundry.

Hopefully all the great things I'll do with my life will reconcile the terrible things I've done.

A friend asked if I was a writer

2011-03-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

and I told her that I was a blogger. I almost spat in frustration. How are those things different? Why would I ever call myself a blogger? What is a blogger? What is a blog but a public diary? "Are you a writer?" "I'm a diarist." Get out. I almost spat.

I planned to graduate next year and I planned to apply for grad school for the year after. I planned to go abroad this summer and then write a thesis. I planned to be 20, but here I am. I must have forgotten to ask myself in February if I was ready for March. I'm not panicking, exactly, but I do not feel prepared for this fast track that I set myself on. I did do this to myself. I absolutely said, "Okay, team, I'm going to sprint through life for as long as I can." And I'm in the last lap of the first mile and I can't believe I've been running this fast. I've barely managed to stay in my own lane.

To curb the metaphor-building and head stress, last night I went for a run. I know it doesn't make sense for late-March weather, but I was running in snow last night. I did not sign up for tundra college. I did not move to Canada, or Siberia or Hoth. Regardless, I was pleased to pass pedestrians sporting winter coats. I was wearing shorts and maybe a shirt. Barely a shirt. I wish somebody asked so I could tell them I was from Oregon.

I did mutter a couple times as I was passing, "It's cold, right?"
I thought that was funny.

Oh, and I got that job that I had been striving to get for a year and a half. I'll be an RA next academic year.

Does anyone want to live with me?

I was bullied

2011-03-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

There is a fever on the internet about four things, Japan, Libya, Rebecca Black's "Friday" and Casey Heynes. The above video showcases the story of Casey who, after being bullied for apparently years, lost it. He grabbed the bully and threw him to the ground. There have been varied responses to this violent response. The school suspended both students, youtube keeps banning the video for violence and some respondents argue that it should have never gotten to that point, but mostly the response has been outright support.

I am in the latter group.

Some of my friends have noticed that "faggot" rolls off my tongue with relative ease which seems to go against my generally politically correct nature. They don't know that "faggot" was my name for several years to the bullies in my neighborhood.

I stopped walking home at some point in elementary school because there was an older boy that rode around on his bike and told me "go fuck myself" and "die faggot" with regularity. I successfully stopped walking on my street and avoided him completely, but when I started riding the school bus home, I was met with more bullies. One was younger and one was older than me. The called me gay and pulled my hair hard enough to go home with some in their hands. I had anger issues and I'd turn red in the face when I was provoked or embarrassed. I was red in the face every ride home.

One day, when I was in fourth grade and it was early Spring, the older bus bully tripped me on my way to the back of the bus, where I wouldn't be abused. I briefly fell and dropped my books. I don't know what I said, but it got him standing and I punched him in the face. I used to tell people that I broke his nose (I made myself believe it) but I really just gave him a bloody nose and a complex.

I was ordered off the bus and sat smugly in the Principal's office. I had brought up the issue before and it still happened. It always still happens, doesn't it? I'm sure some policies work, but they didn't work for me. I'm not pro-violence, in general, but I would have killed Hitler and I would still have punched that guy in the face.

I'm not pleased that I broke, and I'm not smug anymore, but context and time has helped me forgive everything.

I was in counseling before and a couple times after this happened for many reasons, but one counselor I had, Terry, a wise older man, told me once that "kids are stupid." He's right and it stuck. It isn't just kids who are stupid, though. It's a lot of people. Kids, especially, but definitely not only. People can be insensitive and worthless. It's a fact. I can say that because I watch from my ivory tower and I have never been either of those things to anyone, I'm sure!

We're all infallible and we have to make sure that we aren't bullying anyone every step in the road because some Casey will righteously throw us to the ground.

I support Casey Heynes for being an incredible survivor and giving only one comeuppance when necessary.

"The Long Rain" by Ray Bradbury, is probably my favorite story

2011-03-17T01:51:00.000-07:00

I'm developing a nasty habit of making decisions not on practicality or interest, but on adventurism. In about ten minutes, I'll leave my building and walk to a bus stop to board the six-thirty to Philadelphia. I'll hang out with my girlfriend for 48 hours, 24 of them ostensibly sleeping and then I'll go back to New York and sleep.

That's stupid. That's a stupid decision. It's stupid that I haven't slept. It's stupid that my first St. Patrick's Day that I've been willing and able to drink, not legal, but (described below), I won't be hanging with my friends and vomiting. Stupid.

I missed a train to Montreal yesterday at around this time. Scott, Chris and I (these are just names) were planning on having a French-Canadian adventure and it fell slowly to pieces. It was a slow burn, a roast. Chris couldn't find his passport. I found mine but nearly didn't wake up in time. Scott couldn't print his tickets at the station and when he did, we both stood waiting for the other one at different entrances, not willing to travel to Canada alone for four days.

It was pretty silly, but I only really was going to go to Canada because it was an adventure, I was with my friends and I could get drunk legally.

But I don't really want to get drunk. I only want to experience it because I'd be with my friends and it's an adventure.
Reductionism.

It's so late right now that I walked over to my mirror and watched my face change color. I don't know how people accept insomnia. They probably don't accept it, Joel. Fine.

I found out my Dad didn't have cancer yesterday. It was a looming, harsh fear despite the likely ease of removal and low risk, comedy is a based on a rule of threes. We were all pretty sure that he had cancer again, just the mention of the possibility and my family nodded their heads, resigned.
But he doesn't! He's okay for now!

That's exciting isn't it?

Also, Brother Joel (Thanks for reading) responded to my first email after months of postponing the inevitable. Great humor, this guy. I hope we can be brothers and friends.

Good morning.

Post Blog: Have you checked out my second blog? It's called Critique: By Critics. It's at criticlasm.wordpress.com.

I think it's funny. I hope more people write for it, although it's perfect now.

This year is different

2011-02-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

This year, my suit will be my clean face.

I'm trying to be something I'm not again this year: successful.
No, I'm really in one of the middle stages of applying to be an RA for my university. It's tiringly exciting, I know.

Last year, though, this was big. I made this whole plan where I would have no technical debt and I would work for the UN gratis and I would, I'm unsure of this detail exactly, but play bass in U2. It's fuzzy.
All of that hinged on getting the RA job and getting free housing. I don't know how it worked, but it did,

or in my case, it didn't.

I went into the first interview (of six) on my birthday in a full suit and really missed my mark. I was sweating. They, two of them, asked me my name and I stuttered out one of their names. My eyes were bloodshot and I said I'd never been to an interview. It was a bad scene.

I'm a lot less stressed this year. I have more on my plate. Bigger things afoot. I'm confident that I'll do well. I've thought of the answers to common questions and I'm prepared, but that does in no way mean that I won't screw it up.

I was trying to shave off my Grizzly Adams beard for the interview, but my electric razor doesn't have a half-stop mode. It's all or nothing. And it's all, for me. I started shaving and realized I couldn't stop.

I would find it hard to hire me. I look like a child with long hair and a distinct musk. I should probably wear over-sized dress pants and look like I'm playing dress-up. I'll walk in and introduce myself as a prodigy or something.

"I'm sorry, that was a joke."
"Mmmhmm," and they'll scribble an x next to self-deprecation.

Maybe I should tell them that I only had clothes that matched my ambitions.
How many bad jokes can I tell? Too many. I should swear while I walk to the building, to get it out of my system, like Edward R. Murrow did.

Something.

I'm confident, though. I'll get through this. I need to master these professional techniques before I'm harassed by more looming opportunities. Yeah, That's the attitude!

Boston was beautiful. I went last weekend. The sealine was overwhelming. It was a real harbor with real harbor folk. That's all it was. I really like harbor folk, though. They love great indie music and have suits that match their ambitions.

Sometimes I blog when I'm doing other things like leaving messages on the phone or writing journals about immigration for class. Sometimes I blog when I eat. I take note of the food, metareference it and laugh.

Life is draining, isn't it?

I wouldn't like me if I met me

2011-02-09T22:04:00.000-08:00

I'm so many things that I've sworn against.

If I saw me I would let myself have it. The long hair, the fitting funny-colored pants, the thick glasses, obscure music, studying obscure languages.

I can't even pretend to be disheveled and pretend I don't care anymore. This simulation is reality.
I might as well apply to work at Stumptown and practice frowning.

I'm in a new place. I have never looked in the mirror and really understood the person on the other end (to be me). I look now and slouch and laugh at what I've become. I'd love to judge the mirror for its faults and ignorance but I am the person on the other side. I can't give up being myself.

A strange amount of people think I'm better off looking like a college student / resident Christ impersonator. I don't know how to deal with that. Mostly, I ignore it. I look how I look right now out of compassion, arrogance and laziness. That concoction has led me thus far.

Speaking of Christ, I've decided that I have no interest in holding the mantle of a prophet. I was told by several reputable sources (those that tapped into the God-divine [read tarot]) that I am a prophet.

Maybe I'll become more of a prophet if I humble myself now and say that I don't want to be. It worked for Paul Atreides, I'm sure.

I think I might just make this a soapbox and complain about the ills of society, the thetanic ills.
Thetan...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/14/110214fa_fact_wright?currentPage=1

I love a good romance novel, or I imagine I would if I was in to that sort of thing.

Can we all move past the inane, for one second?

2011-01-23T00:35:00.000-08:00

In boot camp with Joker and Gomer Pyle, my nickname was Complainy. I never figured out why, but I sure didn't like boot camp. I could tell you about it...

I have this tremendous bad habit of being indiscriminate with how I pee. It's usually in the bathrooms of people I respect and those people are usually women. When I write indiscriminate, I mean accidentally missing, like maybe hitting a wall, but usually dribbling near the toilet. I did this once recently in Philadelphia. I had no idea how far I was from the toilet.
Fellas? Can you support me on this? I'm not the only one in the world with horrendous aim only sometimes, right?

I can't be. I won't be. I won't have it.

And it's just women I respect.

I hope that wasn't too personal. I'm apparently all about oversharing, of late. I didn't realize I did this. I met a friend of a friend and chewed the fat for hours and I decided that a reference to Taxi Cab Confessions was enough to explain some of my sexual history. No, Joel, that is not how we interact.

"I shouldn't have said that, right?"
"No," my friend accepted. "You probably shouldn't have."
I wrote it off as both of them being ignorant. That's the attitude!

I just finished Dune (can we underline on Blogspot?). It was a heckuva read, but I finished it, with all its 'philosophical vistas' and put it down and immediately stopped caring. I didn't want to read the other books; I didn't have time, I decided. It was a great read, though.

I just started Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. I'm loving it, so far. It's super ironic that there are only three stories in the book. How silly, right?!

Relatedly, I recommend all of the films that have come out in the last two months as they are all fantastic. I've seen them all.

Classes start tomorrow at noon.

How are you?

This is banal.

2011-01-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

I haven't been writing. Creeping doubts fill my mind like...
like... See? I don't even have a handle on basic hyperbolic similes. I don't know how your mind works, but I get flashes of prescient vision all the time. I hear myself in twenty years saying, "I remember when I was a writer," talking, I guess, about those scant years in high school. Who knows? It's embarrassing to stall in a sentence and wonder what the next word was.

"You know, like the opposite of sad, sort of."
"Do you mean 'happy'?"
"Yeah, I guess."

I went back to Oregon this winter and was accosted by a strange set of emotions. My asshole friends are still assholes. My critical, my hypocritical, my ugly, my broken
(I feel like I started writing "New Collosus" right there)
friends are still those people, the same, or something pretty much the same.

And there's comfort there. You don't befriend the people I do hoping they'll drastically change in two years. I do, however, sense a deep, drastic change in myself, like how girls become women and vice versa. Or I pretend I feel something, but I pretend hard enough that it's psychosomatic and when my friends don't notice the deep, dark changes, then they must not be real.
I can't be validated.

I fear, though, that the changes are actually an increase in pomp and condescension. I wanted to post a piece a month ago that sounded like,

"Oh, yeah, Joel, he's annoying now. It's like New York, this, New York, that. He pretends like he doesn't judge me, but if there's any character that he can't play, it's himself. But, like, he's to be pitied, not me, obviously."

It was going to be about 20x longer and profanity-heavy, so it could match ANY of my friends.

Self-doubt is something to be fought constantly, but only if you are worth something. If you're worthless, then you might as well give up the fight.

You know what? Most of the time I'm pained to see inaction it's because I fear it in my own life.

Pitiful.

Now that's a downright lie.

2010-12-18T16:53:00.000-08:00

I don't mean to make this blog a happening for anarcho-socialist critiques of capitalism, but
isn't that better than a catch-all of whining and indecision?

Have you guys (as I assume there are two of you, and at this point, it's only men) seen the documentary The Yes Men Fix The World?

I just watched it and I'm inspired to lie to the public. I should be a spy.
Do spies have blogs? Do I need an alias?
If I become a spy, I'll let you know, just please don't tell anyone that I'm a spy.

Some girl on facebook keeps trying to sell me weed. I think that's funny. I don't smoke weed, or I don't really. Or, I would, but... I'm trying to remain cool and respectable and those two ends are at odds. Not just sell me weed, but get a weed hookup from me. I relented and gave her a name of a friend that smokes, rudely.

I don't even know this girl. I'd like to say bros before hos (hoes?), but every time I think about drugs, I feel like I have a gun to my head.
(Funny, to go to sleep, sometimes I imagine someone breaking in to my room and pointing a shotgun at me, as if that hardens me or something. Weird habit, but it puts me to sleep.)

I thought about salvia once and was pulled over. It's the fear of God, man.

On the same note, I almost smoked a cigarette just now. That isn't news, is it? Or it is news, but it's the lamest news in the world. "Oh, Joel, good reading, thanks. Peer pressure is present in college, good one."
But it's more than that (or maybe it isn't; regardless). I have it ingrained that I look at a cigarette and scoff. When my friends started smoking, I laughed, What Fools! As if peer pressure is something that happens to someone else, like death, taxes and mutually beneficial romantic relationships between consenting adults.
That's supposed to be a joke! Laugh at it!

Well, it wasn't funny, so...

The girl offered me a cigarette, jokingly and I rebuffed. Oh, you're funny, I thought. She laughed, but pressed.
She called me a pussy for not smoking. Your joke is TOO funny.
To situate myself back in my created reality, I told her and her cohorts and reminded my cohorts that I ate a cigar once to spit on peer pressure.
I don't think she understood.

"How old are you?" ..."So do you want to smoke weed? You've got to smoke something tonight."

And thanks to Hania, here is a sight (what a site!) where you can download music for free legally, or whatever.

Speaking of music, have you guys heard of this new hip hop thing? We don't have it in Oregon. Ever since, I came to the city, I've heard a lot about it. Is it different than rap? I don't know. I have a lot of questions.

What if these things don't materialize? What if you don't get hired? What if your debt breaks a hundred thousand? What if you work in a padded office?

2010-12-14T15:45:00.000-08:00

It wouldn't be so bad.

In a moment of doubt, I wait for clarity to wash over me, clarity or forgetfulness.

Charity is Great

2010-12-06T06:44:00.001-08:00

But it is not enough.

There's some hubbub about a fad on facebook, that's a social network I frequent, about changing one's profile picture to a cartoon character to fight against child abuse. There was some ideological backlash, of course, because it involves effort. I think most people ignored it.
Though, If it would have been framed as "raising awareness" or "bathing in nostalgia" or not framed at all, it would have results as powerful as when users were asked to change their picture (voluntarily and not by facebook itself) to Pokemon or doppelgangers.

One of my friends even started a reverse trend fighting terrorism with pictures of orange juice.

And then I saw this lecture by Slajov Zizek and after the initial nausea was the grain of truth reflected in the hubbub.

Are you really making a difference, or passing over for status quo?

I'm not throwing away my TOMS shoes or shaving my hair that I was growing for charity. Charity is still necessary, I made my professor and classmates tell me,
but Joel, does shoelessness still prevail?

One less person! It's still useful!
Yes, but the problem, Joel.

The problem.

What EVER

2010-11-30T22:21:00.000-08:00

Too serious, too dramatic, too everything.
Too much.

Isn't that a song?
Yeah, it's a song.

One of the things I read that my college is trying to cultivate is a powerful critical analysis, a somber pragmatic rationale for tackling today's issues, whether that be which flavor of American Spirits to buy or how to cut a hole in a Urban Outfitters jacket but make it look like it was an accident because you were drunk.

I already critically analyzed everything. That's how I got to college, and likely, that's how I'll be sent out. Anyway, I prefer making jokes than contemplating the states of things. Thoreau said "Pay attention not to the Times, but to the eternities."
Isn't that cool? He was so cool.

I really like when old people wink after they crack a joke. It's a highlight of every day.

I am tired to looking at myself in the mirror and saying "I didn't do the required reading." I can barely bring myself to look at my face. I evade my disappointing glare.
No, that's not true. That's ridiculous.

I saw "Fair Game" on Black Friday with my aunt. The movie was about the Valerie Plame fiasco. I was surprised to find that no one had any idea what that was after I told them I saw it.
I was also surprised to find that it was not a Vaudeville-style comedy.

The state of things today...

I heard a story before I went back to school about why my dad was actually born in Chicago. My grandma always told me it was because Detroit was an embarrassment of a birth place, even in 1946, but my aunt clarified that story with facts about the German practitioner that prescribed heart medication to my grandma, despite an absence of a heart condition. It turned out he was anti-Semetic.

Yet Another example of a story without a punchline.

I started Christmas shopping and I kept in mind the buy what you would want to receive mantra. I strictly followed it, actually. I hope everyone likes size 31 jeans and candy.

You know what my biggest problem with studying the political implications of Apartheid is?
It's so Boering.

Have a great night.

For Christmas, I am only going to speak to my nephew in Spanish

2010-11-17T06:42:00.000-08:00

Title unrelated.

Candid:
I started dating a girl about two years ago. Started.
The process of dating is rough when you care about everyone and their feelings,
especially and most importantly yourself.
Started.

It was on and off, up and down, and other terrible things relationships shouldn't be,
but always in my control.
I've said that line at least a hundred times and it has only recently become digestible, understandable.

I am selfish and I am an asshole. I've been working on that for years, and I will continue working on it.

I kept coming back, I keep coming back. I've always come back to the situation and asked for chances, opportunities and she's always given them, the sap.

We started dating again, in June, and after a couple months of not being sure where we are, I have committed myself to the situation in ways that I never have before. Facebook. My status has changed. It was purposeful; it is purposeful. I am trying to right my wrongs, and whatever...

I face the same doubts, probably once a week about whether I should be in a relationship or not, the same doubts that have stymied my every move for the past couple years, the doubts that established my ignorant swinging bachelor life at the end of high school.
We do not act in a vacuum.

I'm sure some of my friends call me Doubting Thomas when I'm not around. I'm sure they've said it and I wasn't listening.

This morning, I thought about the relationship and wondered if I could handle it, should I handle it? What's the point? It can't be that good. Fewer and further between are these doubts, but omnipresent, somewhere, id, superego, loudly I exclaim that I have these doubts,
always have,

but,

I do not act in a vacuum.
and I may or may not be in love with this girl.

Mostly the latter.

Oh and it's a girl, by the way. I figured out I wasn't gay.

They are... difficult issues

2010-11-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

Today was the longest day of the year by my count. It still hasn't ended.

Two dramatic happenings:

I was at work at the theater for something like ten hours today, on and off. I have a calm, often apologetic demeanor with patrons. I want them to know that they are in control, while I tell them what they can and cannot do.
Today, I learned to be assertive
(Not aggressive, Not Aggressive)

The show had started, we held the start for five, ten minutes for late comers and then come rushing up two patrons, a married couple, looking determined.
We scan their tickets and direct them towards the monitor with a moving picture of the happenings on stage. The wife comes to me and complains that the picture is not adequate.
"You can't see anything!"
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
"We'll go into the theater and stand in the back." She said this so many times. ALL BROADWAY HOUSES do this. ALL of them. So why don't you? Where does it say on my ticket that I can't stand in the back?

She said all of that so many times.

She rushed while the show is in progress to an unmarked exit door, "We'll just go in here" she says, declaring I can't control her actions, she's an adult and she will be treated accordingly.

It's actually building policy that we only late seat at specific times agreed upon by our staff and the production staff. Only. It is my job to make this clear and make it happen. I'm rather calm in times like these.
She was not having it.

"I'm sorry, but that door is locked."
"What do you mean it's locked?"

She gave me devil eyes.
"It's company policy that...

And that's when my manager stepped into the situation, seeing that the woman was going to give me a mouthful. My manager had had a long, tiring day and she was not willing to concede anything to anyone so when the patron exclaimed that the monitor was not adequate, my manager smiled. "It's company policy..."

And that's when the battle of wills began.

More and more and more and
Yelling and WHO do you think you are and JUST LOOK AT YOU and You're being patronizing and all of it escalated.

You'll have to wait for the break.
Where does it say that? That's not how Broadway works.

And then the police were called and there were tears shed by all parties.

The patron yelled at my manager and accused her of not being properly educated all the way through the late seating break.How blind she was.

It was overreaction and ego. There is no winner in a battles of wills. There are only the unsatisfied and the foolish.

I feel guilty for not quelling this.

Things not need escalate

Stories My Grandma Tells Me Part One

2010-10-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

I've had to be flexible for a couple weeks. The point of a blog isn't to keep the audience updated on all of the ham sandwiches I've eaten or women at whom I've swooned, is it? I'm struggling if it is.

I went to DC today to be a part of The Rally to Restore Freedom and/or Fear. I failed, if my idea of participating was to be listen and watch the rally. I succeeded if my idea of participation was being slammed into a crowed of ten thousands with funny signs and silly costumes.

I'm going to lean towards the latter. There were too many people there. Jon Stewart joked that there were 10 million. All of Gresham showed up, that's for sure. I think all of the East Portland suburbs showed up. That's about how many people were there. 300,000, give or take 100,000.

The entrances were closed, but what can you do? I read in a magazine (whichever, they're all the same) that it's better to spend one's money on experiences, rather than goods. Higher emotional capital.

It was AARP magazine.

I'm flexible.

I really enjoy my grandma. She's crude and old. I used to ask how old she was and my parents would estimate and then tell me "Old." That's an answer, thank you. She has the same birthday as me and in March, she'll be 97. She needs to slow down. Too many years. Somebody should tell her.

Sometimes she traps me in her room (I'd gladly be trapped, with the sugar-free Werther's and yarn) and tells me stories, most of them I've heard before, but they resonate differently each time I hear them. She tones them differently, different context, shifting point. The same ten stories.

I really like the one where her brother accidentally drinks breast milk that he found in the refrigerator. That one is hilarious, but sits the same every time, on my shoulders, like lightning.

She told me this one today, involving her last late husband,

"He was going, you know, but I didn't know it. It makes me angry that he didn't tell me he had Alzheimer's. I didn't know what it was. He didn't either...

"One night he told me he felt great. 'I'm taking you out,' he said. I said, 'okay, I'll go get dressed upstairs and I'll come down and you'll get dressed.' I used to lay his clothes out for him, you know.

"So I got dressed and I called him and he said he was in the shower. I went into the bathroom and he was showering with all his clothes on. 'I feel great,' he said. 'We'll get you out of those wet clothes and into dry ones and right into bed.' That was the frosting on the cake. That was it."

Fleeting, like an escaped balloon

2010-10-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

So I'm listening to Vitamin C's Good Riddance or First Day of My Life, or whatever.
Graduation.
Vitamin C's Graduation.

It's been a strange day. It's been a set of days that fall into each other.

Today was marked by the balloons in the sky, or UFO,
Technically UFOs, but they looked like balloons. A policeman friend of Cansino, the best the security guard I know, said it was forty balloons. Fear not citizen!

What's the deal with covert ops while I'm in school? Seriously, nine months out of three years and they have to happen while I'm at work (in reference to the bomb in Times Square; I'd link my previous post, but whatever) and this one! This diabolical weatherman scheme! This was happening in Chelsea!
MY NEIGHBORHOOD!

I thought Chelsea was a secret.

I went to a vigil today. I'm an Ally. I announced it, proud of it.

Have you ever wronged someone badly once and continued to wrong them, without trying? Even while trying to do the right thing?
Ever wonder if sometimes you are the perpetual antagonist to someone's perpetual victimization?

I do. I think about it every day.
Melodrama...

There's a girl that looks like Aurora at Lang. I don't know what to say, or if I should say anything at all, but I have a keen urge to tell her not to apply for a job at Office Max because
"They'll fire when you get pregnant with Natalie,"

but she probably wouldn't understand.

Writing on the Wall

2010-10-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite parts of the New School, I'm talking top two, is the graffiti.
There are some real idealists at my college and they mostly want to be read, not heard. They want to leave their print in an ever-expanding city where they feel like only the wall will be willing to be marked, impressed with their very personal opinion.

"Fuck you, you bunch of faggots"
and so forth.

That's really most of the graffiti, that and rebuttals.
"You homophobic piece of shit... Why are you at The New School?"

It's called Trolling. It's baiting and it is common. That you fight back means you've lost. Don't take scribbles seriously, man.

But that's not the focus of this post. The focus is the aficionados and absurd, the non sequitur humor sometimes in response to the rest of the hate-baiting mess.

I like,
"UNIVERSITY ASSASSINATES YOUTH"
and in response,

"ODB was the best rapper of the Wu Tang Clan"

In fact, if we are measuring popularity just by graffiti, Ol' Dirty Bastard, the deceased rapper, has a significant New School following. Some people are willing to fight to the death in his honor.

I have two other favorites. I go out of my way to read the writing on the walls of these bathrooms.

1.) To the conversation referenced at the beginning of the post, there is one separate thought, hanging over the rest of the nonsense:
"There's always money in the banana stand."

And that's it.

I'm glad someone thought that a Arrested Development reference was applicable. So glad.

2 and new.) The original quote was
"Life is Dead" to which someone with a large scrawl responded, "Cultivate DICKS".

I believe the response was a reference to Voltaire's Candide, as in Cultivate your Garden, but the person omitted the necessary comma between the two words of his counter so naturally someone else drew a large phallus being watered to the side.

The best part is that someone else in blue crayola marker decided to fix the first statement to say, "Life is BRead", rendering the comeback and the illustration meaningless.

I think I'm going to go to work now and see how many of the anonymous will fight me.
"ODB can't be the best MC, he's not even alive."

Digging too deep, we are all obscene.

2010-09-27T09:05:00.000-07:00

There are far too many wonderous things on the internet. I would rather stare blankly at a series of windows flashing and coalescing than write, alas, it must be done.

Because I have a huge ego.

Probably two things:

I successfully killed who I was. I made decisions antithetical to my previous nature. It was awesome. I drunkenly exploited a third world country for its resources. I spat on a police officer and veteran, then stole a painting from a sad hawker with two kids. I think I didn't flush and then fought a group of schoolchildren and defended my actions with "Everyone is allowed to have emotions!"

I expected some perspective building out of these deaths of previous self, but what I've found is that I have experiences, but my person hasn't changed. I feel pretty much the same way about life. Maybe I should do it again. Maybe I should do it every weekend waiting for the mirror and the words to shift and aggregate.

Thing two: I've been having some trouble while I'm having sex with A LOT of women (I don't know why people don't take me seriously). While I'm rocking the motions the only way I know how, I keep having to stop the action and tell her not to move her body, but make faces at me while I pan around her and close in on her face, and then back up again, only to pan around.
It's a challenge to do this spectatorship and participate at the same time, leading me to have virtually no sex my entire life.

Some of my friends inform me that this behavior is actually a representation of a need to be stimulated by what I've seen, which is apparently odd camera angles in cheap pornography.

Well! How-dy! I'd like to counter by depicting realistic, inspiring sexual experiences that could also be made into pornography:

Passing each other every day for about six, seven month Going out for coffee and talking about displeasure with the intellectual regime about a month later and awkwardly making an advance that pits me back further, over and over again until

A final culmination of unsaid and (often) unwanted evanescent emotions leads us to an encounter for five, ten minutes until I fall asleep because of exhaustion.
All of this would take place in real time.

But that would be like making a map that so accurately depicts the terrain that it exactly covers it like a fitted blanket.

It sucks to have to pick and choose. You miss out on so much.

2010-09-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

That quote doesn't mean anything. I typed in a text message about food. I like to be enigmatic, but not too enigmatic.

So time flies when
anything.
Cliche, right?

But it has flown. My hair is eight inches on top. Most people on the street don't respond to my smiles anymore; they assume I use drugs, which is true, but is unfair of them to assume.
Classes are better, I'm smarter. I'm less patient. I think I'm a better person, but I'm struggling with that. Who knows?

I mostly struggle with my predisposition for predestination. I inactively focus on what I'm supposed to be experiencing, while fighting against that impulse with solipsist nihilism.

For instance:

"It's a beautiful night, the people are wonderful. I think I want a hot dog. I would like to make something of my life. Good thought, I wonder what lesson I can take from leaving Scott's apartment early. Probably one to do with temperance.

WAIT.
No, Joel. Stop it. You're doing that Calvinist thing again when you think there is a lesson in every moment. It's not that life might not be important, it's that life is not important right now.
Stop it. Stop it. I do want a hot dog."

Plenty of silly things have happened that I should have chronicled, but I have neglected my ego. One time, I was moving stuff from a storage apartment, but it was too carry to heavy, so I put all of the clothes on and walked the rest of the mile with ease, asking pedestrians if they knew about the storm.

I do a lot of stuff like that. I'm unappreciated and that's probably for the best.

You know what the best part of being Youth is? I can purposefully make decisions I know are poor and chalk it up to my age. Immediate acceptance of terrible actions.
"We were all kids once," I'll nudge my ashamed children, "right?"

I went to see the Blue Scholars at the Bowery Ballroom and it was a great show. The highlight was when the MC, Geo, and security shoved his way into the front before he started. I was in the front next to him. I knew it was him so I said, "I can tell you're in the band because of how you look, but who the fuck is the guy on stage?"

"He's low-key and shit." Then he laughed.

I liked Blue Scholars more than I liked Public Enemy.
I hope both parties read this post.
A boy can dream.

Father Figures (Or Why I Learned to Love Artificial Insemination)

2010-09-03T16:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, not really.

I would hate to have a blog, or any series of written pieces where members of my regular, dedicated audience says, "It's all kind of the same, Joel. You didn't grow, you hack."

You know?
If I was an old, bitter drunk and I wrote about being an old bitter drunk, maybe a wouldn't care, but I'm not Bukowski or Burroughs or
Hell,
I'm not even Hemingway.

So,
I'm really digging into the possibility of finding my biological father. I think the state of science is awesome and frightening, all the same. I shouldn't be able to find him, you know.

There are some exact matches on the DNA Family Tree website and I sent an email to my mom saying, "I know this guy isn't alive anymore, but he could have been my biological father."

She said, "No. This is why:." She then listed facts about my biological father of which I had never been aware. WAY TO KEEP ME IN THE DARK ABOUT EVERYTHING MOM.
I'm not angry, but if I find out about another sibling this year, I'll go crazy. I'll snap.

I put here a list of the things I knew about my biological father a month ago:

-Brown hair
-Brown eyes
-Master's program when he donated
-Lived in Oregon
-I can only assume male.

Here is what I was informed:

-25 in 1990, so born in or around 1965
-Many siblings, roughly 5 brothers and one sister
-Medium complexion
-Married with no children in 1990.
-5'11"
-Hobbies included biking, reading, writing, history and backpacking
-O+

The more you know!

It's like I'm discovering myself. Answers to questions I've always had, like my family's surprise at my academic success.
"You did really well in school this year, Joel!"
"Right."
"Well done!"
"It really wasn't an issue. Didn't you and Dad do well in school?"

"Well, no."

I don't know. I don't want to overthink it. Overwrought in Overthought. It'd be cool is all.
Right?

You made your bed, now Lie in it.

2010-08-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

It seems silly, doesn't it?, to take everything so seriously
and to expect that you are the exception to every rule
and to dismiss advice only to form an opinion identical to the original advice and
and
and
and

So many things! This is the mark of overanalysis.

I am back in New York today.
I'm not freaking out, but I'm not doing well.

"Summer went by so fast."
"I wish I could have done more."
"I know the facts but I'm ignoring them."

Give yourself, time, right? Let the world settle before you change it.
Or something.

I'm trying to think about life as an escalator. There's a big one in Universal Studios and another one in the 42nd street Regal Theater. The marvel is not in the breadth of the escalator you're on, but the sights and sites around it. You can't see the end of the line. It's been so long that you can't remember the beginning. You can run up or down, but it still goes onward and upward. You can jump off, but you'll just land on another escalator, ascending, ascending.

And there is also this zen thing where I try to find peace with whatever I'm doing. It'll get challenging when my family enters into an ethnic war with my friends and neither side wins.

Find your zen there!

I'm pining for the Oregon Fjords when I plug my radio in and I hear the Nine Inch Nail's cover of "Hurt". I turn it on and it plays 94.7 KNRK wherever I am.
There's solace somewhere in this.

Hidden History

2010-08-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

Summer is ending in a flurry, but I'm preoccupied with genealogy. See, my mom and I entered in on a DNA database to see if there are any half-biological siblings or maybe a biological father available on the internet.

Oh, right. My dad isn't my biological father. That fact is pesky.

I was informed of this reality when I was 15. That may have been RELATIVELY late, but who cares? Not me. Bigger fish.
So I'm looking for biological ties just for fun! Who knows what I'll find?

But that's only my preoccupation. My dad woke me up, a strange occurrence for I lack responsibility, and tells me we should talk.
"Wake up, drink some water."

I mean, okay, but we're walking a dangerous line. I've never experienced a positive surprise in this position. I glance outside the window. Good. Good. The truck is still there. Is my mother pregnant? No, that's impossible. Why would he tell me this now? Is he mad about my sleeping friend in the basement? No. I wrote a note. There's silence outside. No, there are birds. I'm waiting.
I drink some water.

"When I got out of the Navy, I was sleeping with a girl named Diedre in LA. She said she was pregnant..."

Dad, we had this conversation five years ago. Not this one, but one involving this topic. I've lived this life.

He surprised me and proceeded to tell me about his ex trying to get him to be a father for her son back in '68, but her family was not receptive and he was escorted out of Ohio. He told me about he forgot the hypothetical son until 1989 when he called but they never met. He told me about the call he received on Friday from his other son. He told me about the lunch they had planned at Edgefield Winery later on Saturday.

He told me his son's name was Hoye. Joel Hoye.
He lives in Las Vegas, but had lived in New York and LA earlier in his life. Everywhere my parents had been. Strange coincidences. Laughable ones.

My father has two sons named Joel. The biological son doesn't share his last name. The one that does share his name is not his biological son.

Anything I find on the DNA database will be shadowed in comparison.

Quiet Majesty

2010-08-13T16:23:00.000-07:00

I forget how jittery I get when I drink coffee. I don't drink coffee. It's excess. I don't need to have so much uncomfortable focus. I could stare at a tree for hours and feel like I've done myself a favor.
Well now I understand nature, I'd think.

I'm back from vacation and what do I do? Wake up at noon, even if I set alarms, I'll disable them. I know myself. I have no self control if I don't have a reason to have self control.
With my time, my limitless hours, I have done naught. I know that. I am nothing. I'm not working. I'm not reading. I'm not painting murals of Chicano history on Brooklyn walls.
I'm doing nothing and I am nothing.

I mean, there's that, but there's also this whole living in the moment thing that I'm doing. There are friendly faces and mistakes and meteor showers and the internet and gifts and gab.
Repercussions, sure, but eventually! Right now this is what I'm doing and it's fine and it will build me.
I'm back to running. I'm back to writing. Some, but some is some not none.
I'm back to forgetting what words mean and kicking myself.
Knowing that I'll do fine, but worrying about all of the possibilities.
Being too egotistical to be nervous around attractive women.

Everything.
Is this a recharge?
I guess.

I just need to make sure that I've grown.

Taylor and I were talking (He's not real, by the way; He's just a name) about what's wrong with what I think.
The issue is that I think heavily, but speak lightly. Simplified dialectic. One sentence is backed by a thousand sentences that I haven't spoken.
And also, "You're not as open-minded as you think."

"I'm Opinionated."

I'm liberal and not religious and that means I'm open-minded.
But not really. I'm notoriously, loudly set.

And I know that.

The point is, if you have a problem with anything ever,
I'm Sure that I can tell you which way is right.

Enough about Me

2010-08-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

So I just watched "Julie and Julia" (sp?), a film by Nora Ephron (the famed fictionist who concocted the romance novels with the faces cut out, probably).

It was a touching film. It seemed to strike pretty close to my conscience with this whole blogging thing. That was an important part of the movie. Also, Stanley Tucci plays a diplomat. On top of that, Amy Adams and Chris Messina's characters live in New York.

If I had any interest or talent with food, I would do something with it. The sad truth is, I prefer frozen dreck to culinary artistry.

I guess that means a deeper meaning cannot be had.

I kept thinking loudly to myself, "Girl, you ARE a writer. Just because you aren't published doesn't mean that you aren't a writer!" I thought this many times.
If there's anything Writer's Workshop 1 and 2 Professor McCarl taught me, it's to think of yourself as a writer if you write.

(*Think of Oneself as a writer if one writes)

(**Correct Grammar is a waste of time.)

So I'm writing a novel, right? I'm REALLY writing it. It's real. It's in my hands. I roughly remember all of the characters...

But I'm holding off for at least five years, or so.

I know a girl, a college friend, who has written over two books. I don't know how she's sure enough about anything to write about anything.

Maybe that's just me. I want to know about life before I write about life.

There's something so Pretentious about a suburban teenager directing a school play version of "Serpico", you know?

That's a reference to the movie Rushmore, by the way.

Also, by the way, Condescending means talking down to people.

I'm in the San Fernando Valley right now, taking the scenic routes with my dad's side of the family. There is a real reason I wear a Star of David around my neck and it's not because I chose to be chosen. There's something Deeply rejuvenating about family, even if they are loud or ugly or talentless or unfunny or downright schmucks. It's an identity.

The second blog is churning. One more ingredient and it will be systems go. Taylor, that's you. Sign up. Let's get some criticism on the road. I want to decry Meryl Streep.

It's getting crowded in my head. I need to leave it for a while.

A dream died today

2010-07-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

Summer living is SO HARD.
Ughh!

I've been writing so much. At least three novels last week. I'll sort them and it might be more. I only write paragraphs at a time. That's the easiest way to write books by the way: tie together unrelated paragraphs.

I'm telling you, that's art.

In the reality, I haven't done anything at all. I've wasted my time.
"Should I buy a new journal?" I ask myself every day.
Yeah, Weeeeeeellllllllllll, I guess I coullllllllld, but I just situated in this chaaaaaaaaaaiiiiirrrrr, so I probably shouldn't.

Every day.
Summer living will be the death of me.

I have spent most of the last week not sitting, though. I've been out in the West Hills deforesting. It's a pretty good living. Definitely one of the most masculine things I've done in a long time, possibly ever. There was a day I spent on a saw mill, but I wasn't wearing plaid, I was wearing stripes by Kohls. Department stores are not masculine.
If you want clothes and you are male, you must kill an animal and wear it. Horse, river fowl, whatever.

I'm working on a second blog. I know I haven't perfected this one, but the second one will be better. There will be more information soon. It'll be something critical and regular with multiple contributors. It'll be Really negative, too. That's all I'm sure about.

Mostly these days, I'm trying to become the person that I see in the mirror.
(I taped a picture of Liam Neeson on my mirror.)

My old technique of bettering myself as a person was rejecting all criticism.
For instance, my sister Aurora said that I was being clingy once. Haven't spoken to her in a while.

But now, I regularly figure out who I am, what I stand for and what I see myself being and destroy it all.

This has been a summer of going to the basics. Of ego death and fervent spiritual dreams.
It's been a summer of growth.

Obviously, I want it to end.

LORD, Do I have Stories!

2010-06-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

Mmm!

I got back last night from two weeks in some podunk, all-White town in North Alabama, unaffected by natural disasters and poor race relations.
That's not true. I was in New Orleans.

Hania, a girl who I've been slyly referencing for about two years (especially when the story is about self-pity), hooked me up with a trip to The Big Easy.

Service Work.

It's a beautiful, muggy mess, man. Hurricane Katrina killed some serious employment foundations and continues to wink at the residents with abandoned homes and empty lots, five years down the road. The oil spill has brought some would-be rig workers to the Easy, too.
On top of those environmental catastrophes, alcohol there is like meth here: Plentiful. Half of the French Quarter is washouts with great stories and hungry hearts.
Bruce Springsteen lives in New Orleans.

Education in the city is horrid, also. I met too many people with illiterate leanings. Adults, middle-class. Too many. This is the West, isn't it?

No, Joel. This is where the "Global South" got its name.

The whole time, or at least the time when I wasn't reveling REALLY loathing my neighbor or looking lustfully at everything downtown or in a(as of yet) unspoiled gulf of Mexico,
I wondered, I refuted what the difference was.
Had I done anything of substance? Had I contributed to the rise of a once cosmopolity?

I packed boxes of books in Capdau Elementary, I painted baseboard in a church office, I handed and shook the homeless looking for a good camping spot, I dug a ditch, killed weeds, smiled, witnessed, Strove to make a difference,
but this city is shattered.

Not ruins, but perpetual shatter. There is much room for improvement.
And of the thousand, maybe tens of thousands of volunteers that come down, is my time drop in the water?

Am I faceless many? I must be, right? I have to be. I can't have an ego in this place, staring out the soul-crushing shattered windows of a charter school.
I can't.

I just can't.

That was until I was standing next to a VCR and Hania, talking with Miss Luvenia about faith and race. Our host, whose house we were painting "Winter Hedge," said, as if in a dream,
"You have no idea how much difference you're making.
"This means the world."

Or something.
I paraphrase because the moment passed like all others, and her sincerity struck me.

I hope I didn't get preachy.
I have cooler stories about getting stuck groggy in a what could have been a tropical storm at six in the morning, swimming with fish, falling in and out of perspective,

But what struck me about the trip, past the breast-beating and the evangelism, was the thing Miss Luvenia said to me. An old, black widow, hardly walking, telling me she'd rather be me.
And I told her that I'd rather be her.

That was the crux of it. I think. The crux of the whole trip, of my life so far. Or something.
Or nothing.

For those of us who lack faith, who struggle with the idea, or feel outside the club that already has meaning pre-attached because of the One Truth of their faith,

We have to find our own meaning. Miss Luvenia smiled and told me I'd be a good father.

Go Big or

2010-06-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

So I went home.

I failed at college. I did nothing but study and curse the season for changing.
I seethed like an old man.
That attitude gets you a one-way ticket home. Shape up for next time.

I'm enjoying being home, sort of.
I mean, I'm doing less than I did in college.
I'd peak outside my window, "Is the sun shining?
Better go back to sleep."

I don't even see the sun anymore, now that I've been home.
Portland has been ugly and drizzly, too. More than usual. I thought I lived in England, for a while. I wanted to colonize so bad!

I wanted to write about my experience at the Sasquatch Music Festival, with apparent rants about the pervasive white youth culture,
contrast and compare it to my recent visit with my Other grandmother (not the foul-mouthed, but the foul-spirited) on the topic of drug use and abuse both to numb the pain and open the eyes as well as the ironic conformity of the eternally nonconformist youth and the seeming conformity of the elderly who have lived completely different lives,
but
Not only was my commentary going to be cruel, but
It's really not that interesting.
You could read that anywhere on the internet, I bet.

Summer is about unwinding, not analyzing (and refuting) the lives of others, Joel.

I think you should focus on something lighter while you float between unemployment, hunger and philanthropy:

I don't care what anyone says. I'm glad I'm growing out my hair.

Proof of success!

Train of Thought 5, 6 and the Rest

2010-06-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

This is why I don't post series.
And this is why we don't have nice things.

I have long since ended my trek, but I will still recant the end as it was so powerfully inspiring.

The last two days drove by slowly with Illinois, Ohio, Montana, Indiana and eastern Washington rolling on by my window, by every window. I don't have these states in an accurate order because they don't need to be.
What wasn't dilapidated houses and shut-down steel mills still coughing smoke from the years past of poor health and union busts
was fields, open fields underneath the worst of overcast heavens.

Big Sky Country was wide, rambling country.
I sang "Wide Open Spaces" by The Dixie Chicks to my Dad for two days.

He told me about a History Channel special about ruins before I graduated. The show glossed over the ruins of previous civilizations and stated that the modernity's lust for progress and rebuilding has arrested our ruins.
Well Dad, I beg to differ.
These are our ruins: The empty factories and the abandoned homes next to the train tracks. They are our ruins. The Iron Age is over for America.

On a lighter note, some two-seated woman totally hit on my dad as he was stumbling back from the bathroom. Thank you Gods of Contrast.

As we came up on the Rockies, he told me a couple stories about his childhood and why he loves trains. For the first time in my life, I could imagine him as a child, not as an addled young man in the Village or a fisherman off the Oregon Coast, but as innocent and ignorant.
There were a lot of people in the 50s that didn't know any better. That's as much as I can say before I'm stealing stories.

Indirectly, I learned that one thing that can't be taught or explained is nostalgia. We were cooped in a box slightly smaller than the 50 square feet of my dorm room and forced to stare at each other or the dull and dying outside world partly because he was attached to the grandeur of the railroad in his memory.
I'll tell you what, I was born with jetfighters and space ships. We don't need trains like the baby boomers.

It was still a journey and I've seen middle, run-down America.
Amtrak won't go out of business, at least, for the next five years, so if you want to get nauseous and glue yourself to window across the States, I'll tell you, it's an experience.

Train of Thought: Day 4

2010-05-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

It is important to bond with family. It is said that when you die, the entire family, all creatures before you, greet you in the Purgatorial state of the unknown.
I would to like to see all of my ancestors reincarnated, on the other hand. I would like to cherish my familial history as pets. A little caravan of dog-aunts and parrot-uncles, good-for-nothings, marching behind me, a smiling menagerie. I would like that.

I write this because I have time to think on 17 hour train-rides from the District of Colombia to Chicago. I have much time.

Leaving Philly was easier done that said. Grandma would have been angry if I didn’t make eye contact with her and yell my goodbyes and Aunt could not Stand (right?) my contentions, but she waved me off lovingly, just the same.

We had seats this time. We have many seats. We have a whole train to ourselves when we get to Chicago, Alas, that is tomorrow.
It’s odd that through years of mutual verbal abuse, my dad and I have hardly quarreled during our trip. I can’t call it maturity or growth, though it most definitely is, because I have a pride and a narcissism that doesn’t trust silence more than I can throw it.
Who is this imposter that can have civil conversation? My friends will be surprised and saddened, lest I fall into old habits.

And of course, I will.

In the dining booth we ate with a Boston-grown, tough-as-nails truck driver with silly, flippant mannerisms and his geeky French traveler that was severely misinformed about American landmarks (“You’re from Oregon? He’s going that way to see Mount Rushmore.”). The two just met.
My dad somehow mustered over an hour of truck-driving knowledge with the Bostonian. It was impressive. I was stuck out of the conversation because "the young folk" don't know much. My dad patted me on the back and used my ignorance as an example. I stamped my feet, cried about how much of an adult I was, and realized my place.

I tried to make conversation with the tall Frenchman but I relapsed into Spanish several times. He laughed, Frenchie, but our exchange suffered. And I want to be a diplomat with these chops?
Better line up for fast food work, Joel.

The lights went out in the Midwest. I’m passing major attractions, but I can’t tell.
Oh, right. I’m writing in the present tense now. I forgot to clarify that. No mistake. I’m in the present right now.

Instead of wandering amazed in Sandusky Ohio’s amusement parks, I can see metal rods from afar between pages of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

It’s getting late, wherever I am. I wasn’t sure if time flew in the Midwest.

Train of Thought: The Evening of Day 3

2010-05-23T18:15:00.000-07:00

When you become an adult, no one, or most often no one, stops you from waking up at noon. You’re just lazy. You’re a slob if you do, but you are free to do it.

I woke up at noon and sat back until four in the backseat of a used car with a broken seat-belt running errands in South Philadelphia. My dad and his sister bought me an acupressure wristband because I ran out of Dramamine. I can’t handle Philadelphia driving. Speed bumps are dismissed and stop signs are ignored completely. It’s like riding shotgun in a go-kart with poor brakes.

Lucky for me, I’m a fool and believe that acupressure works. The placebo effect is sufficient.

We dined with cousins and first cousins at a fine Italian restaurant, Stanniccio’s (what a name!) where we spent so much that we were gifted free orange cello, a liquor.

I don’t know if it’s clear to you that I am afraid of alcohol and, actually, all things mature and adult, but I am. That’s an exaggeration, but I don’t drink. I’m still holding onto some semblance of innocence that was completely spent around the time my first long-term girlfriend lied about her pregnancy,

But I don’t drink.

I was served the alcohol and most of my relatives pushed me to man up, with the exception of my aunt,

“Joel, it’s fine if you don’t to drink it as long as you know that we won’t love you if you don’t”

Or something.

I moved the shot glass around the table, grimacing and weeping, but I succumbed to the pressure (acupressure) and knocked it down.

From there, I cut my hands on the broken glass of the bottles I smashed to suckle every drop of alcohol I could find. I flipped the table when it went dry. I had to be knocked unconscious by the maître’D and THEN the police were called.

The worst thing was,

I didn’t even like the taste.

In the evening, my dad and I sat on my aunt’s porch and I listened to him wax nostalgic. We tried to sing harmonies to “Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful and cackled as attractive women strode past. I was sober, too.

My dad stopped me as I was explaining my views on alternative fuel or the fall of the nation-state or whatever and said,

“Joel, this is a song. This moment is a song.”

It took him five minutes, but he found it.

We listened to it as I welcomed adulthood.

Train of Thought: Early Day 2

2010-05-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

As I had already overstayed my welcome at student housing and Ronny’s apartment, I woke up in some hotel on 33^rd and wandered, groggy, to Penn Station with suitcases ripping open with t-shirts.

Here’s a note for the uninformed: Don’t pack all of your t-shirts. You won’t wear them, or, you shouldn’t wear them.

Also, second note, if you don’t know locations or directions in New York, likely every major city, you shouldn’t necessarily expect assistance from train, plane or mass transit staff. They have better things to do and enjoy misleading the general public.

We followed poor directions so we almost didn’t make it onto our first train to Philadelphia. My dad and I somehow lacked intuition and were far enough back in the line for the conductor to personally bark at us to “Get on the Train! We’re Leaving Now, You damned Fools!”

He looks more and more like a whip-wielding Egyptian in my memory.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe He’s unfair.

We loaded half of our luggage into someone else’s compartment and wandered the train for seats.

“Is this seat taken?”

“Yes. He’s coming right back,” they all said.

Ladies, you liars, we’ve already seen the rest of the train. You are alone and you should be, you fraud.

We were left with one seat in the lounge car. Because I am not ageist, I stood next to the garbage can and smirked at the lounge attendant (she prefers Snack Specialist). She didn’t say much to me, I assume because I look like a 19-year-old in a band that’s not very good.

With this much excitement early on, when I arrived in Philly, I was overpowered and napped for the rest of the day.

Train of Thought: In and Around Day 1

2010-05-23T18:08:00.000-07:00

I haven’t written a series of blogs successfully since Spring Break 2007, and then barely, at that.

I was proud of myself for having some sort of journalistic integrity describing the lucidity of Las Vegas as a teenager, but like most of my early writing, it turned to mush quickly.

I get ahead of myself, see.

My first year of college is over. I am officially not as ignorant as before.

My dad and I decided that the best way to travel back home this spring would be by train. It’s an experience. I’ve told this to people (not friends, just strangers) and I’ve received mixed reactions.

“Trains are stupid. They’re for illiterate pansies.”

That was harsh and irrational.

“I like trains. Good for you, Joel.”

Thank you, stranger.

We saw Hair on the night before we left for Oregon, with Philadelphia, D.C. and Chicago stops in between. My dad laughed louder than the rest of the crowd. That was embarrassing, but only at first. I forget how loud I am. I cried at the majesty of ‘60s culture while my dad assumed the role of unseen Hair characters from memory.

We danced onstage at the end and I was almost ashamed of my dad’s interpretation of the Rain Dance, but I accepted his lineage when I noticed I was the only dancer on the off-beat.

Thus is life.

And I don't even drink coffee

2010-05-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, not much younger than today, I had some friends that were desperately uncool. To put a face to a name, sweat pants and roosting chickens as pets.
I was in 7th grade and kids were cruel.

I wasn't cruel, or I was, but only to those assholes that watched wrestling and smelled poor.
That's hardly cruel, right?

But really, I had innocuous friends that sometimes hampered on how many drinks I was offered at parties
or how many parties I was invited to

or whether or not I was ever going to be invited to parties
(I wasn't).

I was socially awkward, then. Or I was too smart for my own good.
I love to hear that latter phrase. It was something that my teachers told me when they doubled as life coaches. It meant that I told jokes I didn't fully understand, liked music that wasn't in my generation,
and that I was socially awkward,

but I could write one hell of a worksheet.

I wasn't exactly an outcast with my braces and developing taste for girls with low self-esteem, back in seventh grade. I wasn't a pariah. I was geeky, sometimes bullied, sometimes violent.
I was sorting myself out,
but I had friends that in low places that didn't need me, but wanted to socialize with me.

And, of course, who am I to say no to friends?

It's a thought now: maybe I missed out on something then. Maybe I could've been a different person because of my choices. Probably, I wonder and sigh.
Then again,
It was middle school. There was nothing else going on. It's a joke to regret childhood.
Seriously.

But now,
I sit in a cafe, asking myself how shallow I've become.
How many of my friends are cool wastes of time and how many are those innocuous mouth-breathers and latchers-on?
Have I gone shallow?
At what point do I stop myself from embodying pretense?

I can't brush this off as I sip at my latte.

Invest Well.

2010-05-06T18:49:00.000-07:00

My professor told me a classical research paper was a case study.
"This is a compendium. The intro is great. The conclusion is great. You might want to fix the middle, though."

So I'll give some case studies.

I was walking onto the subway today to get to work. I usually walk, but I planned my day ahead of the time and I planned to struggle to eat a chicken gyro on the street while carrying my folders in my hands and check my email ten times (Just in case!).
I planned these things ahead of time. You can't go back on plans, you know?

I stumbled down the stairs and there was a woman at the bottom of the first step, waiting for eye contact to capitalize.

(When I was researching the independence movement of Oregon, Washington, and California ((Cascadia)), I came across a story by the founder of a thinktank in Seattle called the Sightline Institute. He bought a bunch of oranges, too many, at Pike Place and handed them out to the homeless he passed. There was no dilemma about the ethical, Christian ((He is a minister)) need to help by giving change. Problem solved. No more homelessness. I have since made this my mantra.)

So I glide awkwardly down the stairs and make eye contact. She was asking for change.
Before she pleads, I put my finger to her lips. No, Say no more. I was prepared with a trusty piece of fruit.
I hand her a banana and she looks at it. What is this queer piece of yellow?

"I want change. I'm trying to get out of the city. My apartment, it's really..."

What? You don't want my fruit? How can you not want my fruit? You people LOVE my fruit........
Shit. I did it. I made them the other. I've tried not to do that. Suddenly, it's a You People situation. I can't look her in the eye, now.

But I do, anyway. "I'm sorry, I only have fruit to give."

And then, after work, I met another man. He did the walk-and-talk move. It's amateur, but if you do it well, you get what you want. He even put his hand on my arm.
"Hey, you seem like a nice guy, can you spare me some change?"

He didn't know about my fruit policy, obviously.

I stopped and looked him square in the eye. "I'm sorry. I can't give."
I mean, I have the ability, but I'm on a street corner where you could run and steal my things. It's not a race issue. It's not a class issue. I shouldn't give you money. I don't put too much importance on frugality but theft would greatly inconvenience me.

"Not even a dollar?"

"Look, man, I am sorry, but I can't give today. Have a good day."

Speaking of Thrilling

2010-05-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Saturday, there was a car bomb in Times Square.
I say car bomb lightly because it was propane tanks, tubs of gasoline and fireworks.
Al-Queda has claimed responsibility for the event. I don't know what they're doing, but ground bloom flowers aren't threatening. Bombs are threatening.
I don't know.
I heard that there was a bomb in Pittsburgh today, too. At the end of a marathon. Another failed attempt.

I don't want another 9/11. (This is the age of the understatement.)

I was at work in Times Square, 42nd Street, when we were informed to stay calm, be ready to guide patrons West to safety.

It was an odd day for me. We were ushering a dress rehearsal for our next show and I decided that meant business casual instead of uniform.
To me, business casual means oversized suit jacket, size-too-big dress shirt and brown pants.

All but one other coworker was in blacks on the day that a terrorist plot foiled four blocks away.

Isn't it funny that these are the things we think of when calamity strikes?
I looked different and was uncomfortable.
That's silly.

I seemed to be the only person with his heart racing. I was jittery and shook every time the doorbell on set rang.

I guess New Yorkers are acclimated to disaster.
Business as usual.

Most of the theaters in the area closed. The Square was evacuated.
My theater stayed open without interruption. Nope, business as usual.

It was exhilarating. Oooooo! Terrorism!
Even now, I can barely begin to imagine what would have happened had their been an explosion.
I want to take this seriously. I'm supposed to take this seriously, but there's a part of me that thinks he's going to live forever and he hasn't left yet.

The world isn't bleak, it's thrilling.

2010-04-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

There was a conference at school tonight. It was a screening of excerpts of Rwandan genocide survivors called "Voices of Rwanda" and then a question and answer session with the executive producer.

I joked to a friend that this was one of the two topics about which the New School teaches. This and Walter Benjamin.

The testimonies were somber and quiet, usually. The video was only of the faces of three survivors with subtitles and an explanatory caption between the stark, grave images. It was graphic and sucked the air out of the room.
It was similar to the Fortunoff Archive at Yale, more so than the Shoah Foundation at USC, both archives of recorded Holocaust testimonies.

Fortunoff doesn't have clips online. It only gives out full interviews. Shoah has clips as if to simplify the experience of each survivor into a buzzword, but that isn't in Rwanda.

After studying genocide for a year now, I have made it so that I can picture atrocity and breathe at the same time. It's a feat. Withstanding the truth of the testimony is a juggling act of rationalizing and unfocusing, disassociating.

The footage ended and I asked a question about courts. He gave an answer. Other people asked questions and he answered. The shocked witnesses of witnesses stewed in their chairs. The inquisition was ending and a woman stood from the back.
"I just want to say Thank you, Taylor. Thank you for your work. As a survivor it was hard to watch, but thank you."

It's easy to pretend that the world is split up into different universes and traveling to the African world is as crazy as traveling to the Moon.
But she was in the room with me.

I couldn't pretend anymore and cried for the first time in a while.

I wanted to tell her that I was glad she was alive, but I thought that didn't make a difference.

I talked to her afterward, anyway. There was a reception with food and drink.. A woman in the elevator spoke truly: "There needs to be lubrication after something like that."

I may have a career in this.

There's a character

2010-04-20T22:30:00.000-07:00

in Slaughterhouse Five, and probably some other crap written by a one-off Hack like Vonnegut or Salinger,
that writes fiction.
He writes unsuccessful, bitter science fiction, but at least he's writing.
I want to be him.

That's a dream for the weak, or the broken idealists.

"Here's another one," he said aloud, his hands raised, lifting his tie out of his cup of coffee.

"Here's another what, Dan?" his wife asked, smoking a cigarette at the breakfast table.

"A guy I knew in high school died. He was third string Debate team or something. He had a mustache his sophomore year. Another guy in the Metro, he was arrested. Meth, probably. He looked haggard on the news yesterday." He folded the paper in half and looked at his wife, looked her square in the eye. "It's hell to have all of your friends in prison or dead."

She pushed her cigarette in the tray and smeared the glass. "Well, that's why I don't have friends, Dan."

"It's only a matter of time," he said, unfolding his paper and dipping his tie in coffee.

Well now we're respected in society

2010-04-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

(We don't worry about the things we used to be)

I read to the end of my Macroeconomics textbook expecting heaven to open
and BOY was I surprised to find that the main author (Colander, 7th edition) had thrown his hands in the air and said he didn't know.
"Global development is a complicated issue..."
I appreciate your honesty, I really do, but we had a deal, Colander.
You were going to give me the information I needed and I would blindly memorize said information.
You have cheated me. You printed a book, nine hundred pages of graphs and models that don't accurately illustrate reality.
You are an honest man, but you are a deal breaker.

I wanted to study economics because it is an undiscerning art.
It isn't one of those "pseudo-sciences" like politics or chemistry.
Economics was grounded in reality.
And you have spat on my dug grave.

On a different note entirely,

I have been highly amused to find that it's true. I can be the mayor of one town and the mare of the next.

We don't worry about the things we used to be.

Back home, I'm a ruthless, benevolent braggart that craves attention and can't make up his mind.

And that's me.

At this school, The New School, I'm an off-beat Northwest cynical, displeased smirker that revels in his intelligence as much as his indie music tastes.

Somewhere else, I'm probably a despot, a heathen, a priest or a vagrant.
And those are me, too.
It's more than presentation, it's stepping into a role.
And they were right when they said you could be anything you want to be,
But they forgot to mention that

You're also a whole lot that you don't want.

Something that won't be witty in a couple days

2010-04-07T23:25:00.000-07:00

I made a trip to an advising office with some modest entrance that could have hidden some dank speakeasy or a some jumping point lookout,
but instead hid tired, cramped academics.

My academic adviser is an unapologetic cynic. She worked for World Bank instead of the Peace Corps after getting either her Master's or her Doctorate, or maybe something else. She has degrees like vices, many. I took one of her classes last term and didn't know anything about most things and by the end of the class, I had it all figured out.
At least how to tell my temporal history from my opinions.

She made it clear that my undergraduate degree didn't matter.
"As long as you have a high academic rank, just do what you want, Joel."
Okay.
I need high marks to get into grad school.
I needed high marks to get into college (I couldn't do it on looks alone).

"75% of jobs don't ask to see your transcript."

Good news.
Good news to share!

She's publishing an academic book about cybernetics and memory while writing a second one.
I told her I was writing a book of fiction and she said,
"Great, hopefully someone will read it," sardonically.

I laughed and grew nervous as the day went on.
"I hope, too," I laughed.

I don't want to be forgotten while I'm alive,
mostly by myself.

You're wrong, you're all wrong.

2010-04-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

I have been very tempted to make this blog a political jumping point as I'm accepting that for a while I won't be dreaming of one-off roles and comedy writing.
And that's okay. I still want to do that, but I want to be smart, and the only way to be smart is to have a degree that says so.

So I get my degree.
But I love writing, so I'll write about other things. I'll Muse. I'll throw copper in a fountain and hope someone retrieves it, makes something cool out of it. Pennies aren't worth anything.

Insults are odd. They depend so much upon the person. For instance, jokes about mothers are cruel to orphans. Jokes about Blondes offend the Polish, and vice versa.
One of my roommates I make fun of in my head.
(I know I shouldn't, but I'm documenting truth here; roll with it)

I call him a big, smelly oaf.
That's not particularly insulting. That's childish. I've insulted him calling him a child, too. That's not so bad, unless you're acting like a child, unless regularly you throw temper tantrums and don't clean up after your feasts, you oaf.
See? That's not right. I shouldn't do that.

And Smelly? That's hardly insulting
...
Unless you smell.
Unless partners will not make you their husband because of your POWERFUL scent.
I have another roommate (I have a lot of roommates. I'm not making this up.)
The other smells like a hockey match.

I don't even know how you do that.

I started my book, too. I'm writing a book. I plan to write a bunch of books, but so far, I have only started writing one. It's okay. I've written about a page.
It's about sanity and homelessness.
Not like I know anything about homelessness. Not like I care.
It's not like I'm going to research this.
It's only characters. Lifeless characters.

In truth, it'll be some sort of parable, some launching pad for humanization.
I won't say too much.
(There'll be a surprise twist!)
There probably won't.

After an Easter egg hunt on Sunday, I shopped with my coworker Matt for his wife. Not for his wife. Gifts for his wife. He's an Australian actor and [not because of that] I have wanted to hang out with him. He's sort of what I aspire to be. He has a blog. He's real.

We talked tax codjavascript:void(0)e wandering through Times Square and I'm sure now the country/continent of Australia is a better version of America.
If it was a LITTLE greener, I'd move there right now.
Then it would be San Francisco. 100%.

I recommend hanging out with Australians. And actors.
It's just fun not knowing if they're lying or not.
They can be in character in any moment.

After all, what is natural?

2010-03-28T20:42:00.000-07:00

I was busy writing my Republic of Cascadia research paper and I decided I wanted candy.

When I entered the lobby of 20th street, I also entered a conversation about healthy living. A small girl that I've never heard speak was a well-oiled vegan machine. The security guard on duty, Cansino, must have asked.

"If you want energy, real energy, I wholly recommend cacao. Just pure, natural chocolate. It's rather bitter, so you can mix it with some [something] or brown sugar, whatever you like. I personally like to mix it with gogi berries, a real superfood. The Chinese have it listed in most of their remedies. It has 18 of 22 amino acids, more vitamin A than carrots and more iron than spinach. It has cancer-fighting [words] and you'll never get sick!... Well anyways, I think cacao is too bitter on its own, so I mix it with gogi; it's like a sweet treat. Dave Wolfe eats cacao every day and I see him as one of the best, one of my natural health living idols, but that seems..."

She breathed.

"and Daniel Vitalis has a plan for everything, how to be efficient on a plane, indoors, outdoors, exercise... If you watch his videos on youtube, it will change your life."
(I thought, like New Slang?)

She continued to speak, it was becoming more fluid, less robotic. I thought to myself that I should really know what she's talking about. Health religions are started in Oregon, aren't they? I'm from there. I need to be in on this.

"...And cancer can be cured. What if I told if you take 300 grams of Lyceum and it will stop your cancer dead in its tracks? David Wolfe knows this. It's cutting-edge stuff."

And by that point, I agreed with her. You're right. AIDS was a conspiracy. I can live to be 200. There is nothing in my way. I need to start eating only raw foods and foraging in Central Park. If I do this, then my yin will balance with my yang and I Can't POSSIBLY eat anything that isn't made of pure vegetables and Western medicine is rather suspect and I will understand...
Oh right,
This is the kind of person that's attracted to The New School.
I smiled. She thought it was intrigue, but it was closer to amusement.

"We'll talk again sometime later," she said, now directed at me, as if she wasn't in a conversation in the first place. "I know I talk really fast and it's a lot to remember."

I nodded and, wanting to be standing in the fresh rain with the cement smell, left.

I ended up buying a candy bar.

I give a B- to Reviews

2010-03-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

They are doing more than the minimum, reviews, but still so much more could be done. Without a reasonable replacement, reviews and review systems are our best option for qualifying art, thought, and process But your test grades in eighth grade math still get a higher score than reviews as a whole.
I feel and I am not alone in feeling that when I read a review I am left with opinions that are not mine and guide me only as far as was intended and that length is a B-.
Shape up, reviews.

I read pitchfork.com's reviews of music, sometimes. It just makes me mad.
Here is link that makes me laugh instead. Look how digital the internest is.

I've been dying to write something, anything. My fingers are steadying, hardening and splintering from atrophy. I haven't written anything REAL (FEEL IT!) in too long.
And by real I mean fiction. I haven't written fiction in too long.

I started using sleeping pills.
I also stopped using sleeping pills. I just wanted some regulation. Those hours were out of control, with their big money spending and their ignorance of the common man,
oh, no wait, that's Big Business.
I couldn't sleep.
With every sleeping pill, I felt closer to celebrity, but then I gave up the habit, only to stare at the red marks on my ruddy face in the mirror. Oh Hardship, you bother me so!

Sidney and Joï (roommates) were listening to a poor cover of "Use Somebody" and I made them watch (made is a strong word; I coerced them, I rose my fist, yeah) into watching Jake Shimabukuro play "Dragon" and Andy McKee play "Drifting." Some of those tabs that I've left open in the window of my mind. Joï sang "Telephone" by Lady Gaga over both melodies.

You can lead a horse to water, and he'll eat for a day.
But you can't teach an old horse new tricks, not even when you beat it dead.

I keep reading philosophical material that makes my troubles seem trivial. I want or need or cannot but dedicate my life to something. I want to dream the future, yes. Walter Benjamin said that.

"Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening."

So college is telling me to be a revolutionary and that writing silly satiric pieces can get me only so far.

Positive note: "Right to be Lazy" by Paul LaFargue is HILARIOUS.
That's not really positive.
Duane Reade is open at all hours.
No, not positive.

No, okay. I'm settled.

When I dreamt I was an electron in a bar, I still ordered milk and (is) the bartender (here) asked me if I wanted anything else.

"No, I'm fine."
And as an afterthought,
"Thanks."

Can you name the people that made you cool? (and how sometimes blogs are less cool in retrospect)

2010-03-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

I'm a sensationalist. I pretend that I'm not, visually, mostly, but I can't help but rouse and rabble.
Rabble on, I heard once.
Lead Zeppeling, or something. I'm not big into the "music" community, so I wouldn't know.

But more, Blue Scholars, the best Filipino/Iranian rap group from Seattle (The only Filipino/Iranian rap group from Seattle), recently made a new HIT downloadable on their blog.
Those Northwest rappers, they're definitely funny.
It's one of the bands Ben turned me onto when Ben and I were friends.
That was before he went to Mexico.
Those were the days, downhill since.

I've been wanting, asking for inspiration and reasons to be, lately.
I ran to the East River, the other side of Manhattan where I was told I would likely get stabbed. I didn't get stabbed. A mere graze.

It was beautiful. It was like Portland. I'll send you the picture if you want. I really will. If you have my phone number, I'll send it to you, if you want.

I thought about reading about Cascadia but instead went to Chelsea Market for the first time/ It's on 9th avenue, and that's usually too far for me. That's an avenue that doesn't have my school on it, so I have no reason to be there.
Well I'll tell you, it was like what I imagine Christmas in Disneyland to be. Plastic perfection. It was pure food. It was all stuff grown in the area. It was a breath of fresh air, to say in the least.
I bought SO MUCH produce. I'm on a health kick now after going to Philadelphia. When I'm with family, I just eat. Nothing else, just eat.
"You're too thin!" No, I'm not. Stop hiding candy for me, Grandma.

I'm not as much worried, today. I'm looking for inspiration. And when you want something, prophetic, it's there. Right in front of you.
(When I say prophetic, I don't mean like the time I was at Happy Day Christian Daycare and the employees, or the other daycared, I don't remember, told me that praying was about asking for a sign and it being presented. I waited a full hour on the metal monkey bars watching traffic as mostly trucks passed. I thought that was the sign from God and that was when I started thinking religion was lame. Not like that)

"I'm thinking of transferring mostly because I don't think this school will prepare me for a career," I said entering the elevator.
"Well, it won't. This school will just make you a fucking amazing person."
Thanks Matt.
I guess I'll rethink my next couple years.

Monkey Wrench

2010-03-14T14:47:00.000-07:00

I can do Whatever I what.

I worry and I worry and I worry and I get emotional.

I'm so close to womanhood. If it wasn't for my mane of a beard, I would go beyond empathy.

I massively and royally screwed up the interview. I was emotional during a rational portion of the group process and I sucked the big one. Not really, just counterintuitive world.

And I was nervous in my birthday suit.

(I was in a regular suit. It was my birthday. That's the relation there.)

I was nervous. My age and inexperience showed.

But thanks to El Presidente y su administracíon, I can take out as much money as I want. I can go anywhere and spend all sorts of fake cash and it's Fine!

There's loan forgiveness for people that want to serve the world or nation.

I mean, that's beautiful.

I'll figure something out. I'm going to visit Georgetown. I'm going to do whatever. We'll see.

Sometimes the way is pointed, sometimes Not.

UGH! Look at the above! So informational. Mark it well. All is not blandblandbland,

blandblandblandblandblandblandblandbland.

There's television on, for instance.

As a thinker, I want to not default onto the answers of yesterday.

I have to ignore Zarathushtra and Buddha. Narratives of yesterday!

There was no flying car for the prophets to make decadent.

We have rock music. We need new ideology.

Everything is Black and White! Listen to the forecasts! Panic!

2010-03-08T19:14:00.000-08:00

I do. I panic. I do the panic. It's a dance crazy like the stanky leg or the jitterbug
(it just plumb evaded me).

I jump to conclusions. That's an easy way to figure yerself in a hole. Keep jumping blindly and you're bound to find yerself in a hole, straight on, that's the Truth, I say.

The results came in today.
It turns out I'm 19 and not 37.
I don't have all of the answers or all of the experience.
I get nervous; I get passionate. That's the spirit, I thought. Keep giving the morals!

They LOVE morals!

Some people want reason over morals.
And that's where my age showed.

I'm told that I am an old soul. Astrology tells me that I have been through eleven cycles already, at least. Psychics tell me that I'm meant to be a prophet,

but I can still fail. We can all fail.
Every life (I believe it!) we have to learn another set of lessons.
They all seem the same after a couple cycles.

I may not leave New York. We'll see. The world hasn't ended yet.
Counting down from two years, though.

On a specific note, not some crap rambly note
(as if anyone even reads!;
especially on the useless internet!)

I am tired of reading Terrible names on youtube.
Funnyman4321 has not striking quality. It makes me doubt your humor,
you sad sap. You fake.
That's not that bad, in truth. He might be hysterical.
He's not, though. I know him.

A real bad name is linkrulessonicsux.
That's a horrid, bad name.
I'm watching his rerecording of Dude Where's My Car.
His sunglasses tell me he's thirteen, but his voicelowerthanmine
Just makes me angry.

And I hate him.
I hate him so much.

Oh! It's Ashton Kutcher's voice.
Hmmm.

There's the reason I was looking for.
I just to have to wait. Everything becomes clear

I want to hang out with you, Henry David Thoreau

2010-03-03T21:23:00.000-08:00

I get tired of theory. There is a broken tapedeck in the back of my mind that whines on and on about the state of the world, how dreary are the buildings I choose to see daily

(I could walk a different way),
but man, does HDT get under my skin. Mmmmm.

Those that go through heroin withdrawals feel something under their skin in the same way I love to see my derma bubble and pop with ideas of perfect isolation.

I got rejected from being an Resident Advisor today. I was really banking on that job to stay in New York, but in my interviewing, it was decided I wasn't wanted as much as others. The New School is too expensive for what I'd be learning, what I could use. I could be a liberal, theory junkie that hates the system and Freud.
That's not my dream.

It was never my dream to live in New York City. I don't need the professional contacts I've made here. I can't work for the United Nations until I'm a graduate student.

I had a back-up plan. I have the ability to transfer. I have it and I will use it. I truly hope I write fiction all my life and my experiences in New York are represented. I trueally hope.

So, where to?

I feel like a cokehead

2010-02-26T21:10:00.000-08:00

because I keep wrinkling my nose. Not like a closeted witch or a bunny, but with my lips and my squinted eyes and my knuckles dragging across my nostrils. I look like a mess.
I accidentally snorted some shampoo in the shower. That's why.

I make it a habit to smile while I'm walking. It makes me seem different. I don't need to be substantially different. I don't need to create or anything frivolous like that. Silly. I need to have the pretension of being different and warm and caring.
It's all about the image. I'd resign if it wasn't for that.

I don't understand the iPad, other than a nasty joke. It's an iTouch, right or an iPod, something beautiful that can capture attention. I don't need people. I can interact with my friends, designated by the queue on my iPad. What the hell is it?
It's a trinket, a bauble. It's an indulgement.
But have you played the toilet paper app, Joel? Don't knock it 'til you try it.
I have to invent a new pocket for it. That's when it becomes unnecessary.
The first man to build a house didn't need it, right Adam Smith?

I'm tired of schoolwork, by the way. I love communes and Islam and women and poverty and theory regarding the former sobjects, but I don't feel the drive to be an intellectual anymore. I want to be a man of the people. I don't want to limit my discussion to only those who know a analogous set of facts as I do. I want my words to be as bland as they can be. I want to make up in marketing what I lack in intelligence,
or something.

My rants get so strange. I make both sides seem ridiculous.

I had a great aunt that was one of those figures that you were supposed to love because they were family, but you only loved them, ignorant as you were because they were family. Those people were real characters before you met them. They were round and susceptible to mistakes and failures of reason.
When you meet them they love feeding you and giving gifts, the synagogue and game shows.
Age isn't fair to real characters.

She was loud and opinionated. Sometimes hateful. God spat on her when her daughter came out as Catholic and her eldest son gay. She grew past these prejudices and was loud and opinionated again, but like a tire will lose its air over time, so did she.

By the time I was aware of her as a person she would call me Josh. I've had teachers and professors alike calling me Josh. That's not my name. I don't look like my second cousin named Josh. I'm not Josh, but she was deflating.

It's hard to face that one day you'll be empty,
so I don't, personally.

Perspective, again

2010-02-23T11:44:00.000-08:00

That's a buzz word. I should probably go into writing the news, manning the teleprompter, filling the pundits like cream pies,
but I may not. I may just pretend to know how to write and work in a South American embassy. We'll see.

My suite is getting a little frazzled. There was a pile of garbage with liquor seeping, mopping the floor beneath it. Flies materialized, I swear through black magic. Our pile of dishes started curing staph infections. There was a feeling of rancour because of the singing, the bleating of sheep emitted from the throats of grown and growing men. It was getting bad is the point.

Everyone seemed displeased. Or maybe I was displeased and I imagine the feelings of others to be the same as mine. The passive and the aggressive wrote notes condemning a behavior but they themselves would behave in a way that was condemned by another scratch on the wall.
I'm complaining. I'm a complainer.
Solutions. Solutions.
Okay.

Here's a short story illustrating a point, not necessarily mine:

Susy sauntered into her home, oblivious. She unlocked the door and removed her scarf, placing it loosely on a coat hook. Her mother greeted her. "Hiya Suz! How was school today? Learn anything interesting?"

"Good afternoon, Mother! School was great today, yeah, actually I learned about—"
"Gosh DARN!" Susy's father bellowed from the dining room.
Thinking perhaps her father had stubbed his toe or chipped a tooth, Susy and her mother raced over the earthy Persian rugs and into the dining room. "Gosh, you better Darn EVERYTHING Straight to Heck!" shouted her father.

"What is it Father?"
"The raise I got at work," he continued to shout, slamming his red fists on the table, "pushed us into a new tax bracket!"
Susy thought to herself. She understood that tax brackets were somehow bad and that more is better than less.
"Father, I'm sorry, but what does this mean? I don't understand."

He began breathing again, her father. His breath at first coming in short pants. He skin became the normal polished ivory and he explained: "Susy, I'll put it simply. We will have to give up one of our jetboats. This is like a darn swear on my ears. I'm livid."

Her mother rubbed the back of her husband slowly and apologetically. "Our taxes will be higher, Susy. That's all. We can't afford all of the wonderful Gosh-blessed things we've been given and pay taxes."

"But won't we be making significantly more money?"
"Yes, but the new bracket has a higher ceiling. Honestly, Susan Skylar, do you listen? I just told you."

Susy stood an uffish while in thought while her mother crushed Advil into her father's whiskey and stared at the tax forms.

"Can we get a smaller boat?" Susy asked ignorantly.

"No, stupid Susy, you're so stupid. We want only the best for our family," her mother said, lightly slapping Susy on the face repeatedly.

"I see. Woe is us."

"Woe is us, indeed," said the father grimacing.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Susy, what did you say you learned in school today?"

"Oh, nothing, mother. Ethnic civil war seems so irrelevant now."

Some thing is off

2010-02-18T20:45:00.000-08:00

Seriously.
I felt odd all day. Like when you wake up before an alarm and know that you shouldn't have.

No, body. You are wrong. Go back to sleep.

I was angry in class.
I made negative, critical comments about white culture and the upper class.
Oh, wait, I'm at Lang where upper class and white is the norm.
That makes me want to swear,
but I have family subscribers.

Here's to you, Hayes!
Hannah's and your pictures are up on my wall.

Well, as it turned out, something was afoot. Not everyone is well.
Bomb threats, not here, but not far
an airplane crash in Texas,
a couple falls and Kaiser is ignorant.

Law is blind.
Justice is blind.
Order is blind, or blurred, I guess.

It all came falling today.
I was doing well, but it all came today.
Packaged by Amazon.
I didn't order this book. Did I?

I don't think I honestly ordered The Temper of Our Time by Eric Hoffer. I don't know why it arrived.

I hope you're alright. I hope you're fearless.

But things are not obscured.
Mercury is no longer retrograde,
so shut it Bloc Party.

What can I do right?

2010-02-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

Around once a fortmonth, I travel to Philadelphia to visit my grandmother, my aunt, Abby and new friends. Abby was busy so I spent most of my time listening to my grandmother tell a skewed version of history and arguing with my aunt.

She's great, don't get me wrong. My aunt is like my father in that she is self-righteous, liberal and swears sometimes. She's quiet though. Most of her yelling she does silently with her expressions. She looks at me as if I'd slapped her when I say I want to eat a cheesesteak for breakfast.

We talked about (500) Days of Summer for a while. She argued that Summer acted and spoke respectfully. She did not deceive Tom. It was in his head, he led himself onto fantasy. No pretense, Joel.

I disagreed. I said that she (Summer, not my aunt) did not take into account the feelings of Tom. She should have known.

"'Should' has nothing to do with the equation, Joel.

"I can't believe you think that."

Her and I also discussed a satirical piece of short fiction where a man, about to kills himself, races past the Apocalypse to greet his newborn daughter. The moral of the story that it isn't the end of the world to have a baby. Life goes on.

She said it was disgusting fiction. Ugly.

I mean, she's right. It absolutely is, but that was the point.

But I want to sell it at some point. I don't know. I mentioned an audience and she decried it.

"You have to write for yourself. You can't write for an audience."

Fine. Fine, Aunt. I'll read something pretty and sweet and we'll watch Big Love.

Weekend vacation.

Make It Big, Wham! (The path to success is littered)

2010-02-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

with

Nutria

Fairest pelt!
Cousin Winter curses and glares,
but you, Nutria, have provided
at cost-effective rates!
the finest coat in all of Sellwood.

Sickness and woe
are mere surrealities. You, warm nutria,
did not perish without meaning.
You, itchy nutria, Prince of Mediocrity, have
missed the A-C of bulging teeth,
the 1-2 of white, puffed ears,
the N of Wings!
Burnt sepia mass, searching
wandering in the river.

No one speaks for you, fair Madame
Queen Nutria, guide your vessel;
nay, you lack the vision.
No Roosevelt, you.
It is a doubt you could save yourself.

Cousin Winter, wrinkling in his
agéd speak, he plays with mirrors, but
Scraggly Nutria, you will suffice.
Just enough.
You with wandersome eyes, you filth,
only good when you're dead.
Die for warmth, proletariat.

Become the fairest, most beauteous coat
from fat, ugly beaver.

You want a big word? I'll give you a big word

2010-02-07T22:23:00.000-08:00

Everest.
Evercest, also. Quite a connotation.

Yo, but seriously. It's a mad crazy world out there. You just can't stop.

I started reading D.H. Lawrence a couple of days ago. He has control of language. He's dropping word bombs on my peaceful village. Sometimes, I have no idea what language he's writing. Who is he, Lewis Carroll?
Stop making Lewis Carroll jokes, Joel. Not only are they not funny, but they're tasteless. The man was a Saint.

I don't think James Joyce is God.
That must be why I dropped Intro to Fiction.

I missed the Superbowl for the first time in my conscious life. It's a travesty, I know. Life is full of them, Superbowls. I'll catch the next one.

I want to complain tonight. I want to rabble until my heart turns blue and some jazz musician will ask me "Are you Blue?" and I'll totally say yes, for once, I am blue.

The fear is gone. I can take on any academic obstacle. I can honestly take down most obstacles at this point. I'll top my dreams by making them reality.

At work, there were extra posters of Laurence Fishburne as Thurgood Marshall. I set him up so he stares out my window. I hope someone has noticed.

Ushering today, I couldn't help but write poetry in my mind:

The world is full of ugly men,
each ugly in their own way.

Darn Tootin'!

2010-02-02T09:36:00.000-08:00

Intro to Macroeconomics is the best thing for me, as a sad sap with broken, sad sap dreams.

I was walking away from class trying to shake off the knowledge bestowed upon me, and I was thinking about being sad, so I asked myself,
"Self, what are the costs and benefits of being sad?"

Well, I would have the ability to write great poetry if I was sad.
and I would have a topic for a morose (BORING) blog.
and I would eat more, I know how I love food, right?

But the costs: I would be less productive. I may say something stupid and regret it instants after it is uttered. I'll be less confident therefore impregnating less women.
The list goes on.

Joel, you are living the dream. You are a god (lowercase. I know my audience) among men. What in the heck do you have to be sad about?

I have toothpaste dribbled dots on my jeans.
I am alone surrounded by millions.
I forget basic articles of speech.
I'm balding.

But I decided I would be more efficient if I was not sad. Dang, if I don't waste my time feeling anything, I can do so much!

My life as a visiting journalist

2010-01-29T20:55:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-01-24T11:37:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-01-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-12T23:54:00.000-08:00

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?

2010-01-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

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.

I am Helen of Troy

2009-12-27T12:35:00.000-08:00

My home is somewhere in an airport, I think. It's traveling, my sense of home. It has already packed its things and dropped a dramamine because of nausea, nauesa, naseua. It's uncomfortable with the new idea of self. It wants to hunker down, give up, and fall in love with the first city it sees,
but my sense of home is a wanderer. And she Hates commitment.

So, Portland, there you are. You look more like a ghosttown with the bare branches and shallow pools. Lewis and Clark at night wasn't even frightening. Five in the morning, you are dead.

I locked myself out of my house last night. I stood on the porch for ten minutes figuring it out.
Yep, I did. I slept for an hour and a half in the purple Honda and called my mom.
The government calls me an adult?

I hate being Helen of Troy, in love with two warring factions. I used to privately support the Achaeans, but I am torn. Illusion never changed into something real.
I have the power to pack up and leave, or I had the power. I left. I'll keep leaving if you're lucky.
I can't stand between you.

I've got an agenda.

I'm my Father's Son (Buh Bah, Buh Bah, this is the sound of)

2009-12-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

I decided that a snow storm is without question the best time to go to a movie theater alone. Up in the Air directed by Jason Reitman is a powerhouse. It was So good. I put forward the most extreme aspects of my personality when I am alone. I laughed louder than any other theatergoer. There wasn't a contest; it's something I think I've been trained to do. My Dad does that. I resented in public places and Here I Am laughing up a Storm in a crowded theater.
I was part of a collective review at the urinals, too.
"This movie was really depressing."
"Especially because of the sensitive subject of the recession."
"This is definitely not a holiday film. Last year around this time, my wife and I saw Valkyrie."

I agree with Max about Criticism. There is good in every piece of art. There's a point. I like being critical because it puts me, really without merit, in a position of power and influential subjectivity. It's Stupid, though. There's no reason that my opinion should count for more, or that you can't experience something beautiful beyond my clever critique. And there is my haphazard criticism of criticism.

The movie last night made me want to be different. George Clooney is a terrible person. He's laid brick for walls that surround him. He's close to no one. It's life for him. He's a great talker and he can make friends with most (that charming grin!) but he's got nuffin to lose but darkness and shadows.
I haven't been him. I'm not him. I'm connected to a lot, but I have a habit of getting up and leaving when a threat of emotional pain (or commitment, frankly) comes along. There's a girl or two somewhere in Oregon that laugh when I write that I'm sorry because it's over now and it doesn't matter. I missed the mark.

I'm trying to turn a new leaf. I'm trying to uproot myself. I don't want what I wanted before. Ms. Blum, I don't think I've made that clear. You'll get to know me.

One of my other friends wrote something that reminded me of the Intelligence versus Faith debacle. The smartest have the hardest time believing, just emptying their briefcases or backpacks and walking into something unknown.

Well, it doesn't stop with Faith. I can throw down some statistics (some fictional) and personal experience that will disprove idealism, but there's something beyond this masonry. I've had a hard time putting myself into anything that's stable. Something better might come along, right, but if you (Yes you) spend your whole life searching and correcting, criticizing, you'll miss out on everything.

The Monotonous shouldn't speak Chinese

2009-12-16T13:25:00.000-08:00

Finals that are easier than the quizzes are the best finals.
She must have thought we not only didn't listen, but also are stupid.
Unstoppably stupid.

"¿Cómo se significa de 'agua'?"
Yo creo que agua, en íngles, se significa Water.

This holiday makes me smile. I smile regularly, but this season, I make sure
to make eye contact as I smile.
It comes as really friendly,
or creepy, really creepy.
That makes me wonder to whom I'm smiling.
Just with averages, I've got to be smiling at a crook or a grifter every day.
("Even in Manhattan?" someone in the back asks.
"Especially in Manhattan" I say, fixing my cuffs.)

So what does that Crook do with a smile?
Is he aware that he's batting for the other team?
"Oh, I bet that small unshaven man thinks I'm a good person."
or "I feel regret for living an unfulfilled, dishonest life because of this enthusiastic smile."

Who knows? We're only playing with averages.

You'll meet all sorts of fun people when you come to New York for some months.
I was making sure where Shakespeare and Company was located and I saluted a woman with "Hey Man," followed by an unhelping explanation about how I salute most people similarly.
That's how I met Tatyana from NYU.

There was a street musician at Union Square West and 17th. He was, I think, a rapper selling his cds and I told him I didn't have cash (without an introduction, I was out of the blue), and I would prefer giving him money for his art. He thanked me for the fresh of breath air. He described the earlier assaults he had incurred and then a Public Service Announcement:

"I haven't always been like this. I used to be clear in the mind when the world was brighter and I could think clearly. Remember that commercial, man? It was like," sternly, "'where did you get this from?'" Softer, pleasantly, "'and the kid is like, I got it from you? You did it twenty years ago.' You remember that, yeah?"

I must look older than I am because I remembered nonesuch commercial.
I said I did and we laughed together. What a habit it is to lie!

I walked home and spied two painted black fire escapes on opposite sides of a building. Unobstructed. It was stark. The escapes were like two twin black spires, raising up towards the turrets for the Kingdom behind. It was gothic and royal.

"What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity,"

2009-12-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

is a quote from Sans Soleil.
The closing line is also a quote from the Chris Marker film.

A man was walking past as I snapped pictures of the tops of buildings.
"It's beautiful," I said.
"I see it every day and I never get tired of it," he replied.

Or maybe, sir, you don't remember the day before.
If you focused on yesterday, you would see stills of a time that was, right?
The highlights of your day, the memorable moments of your significant other,
of the ketchup on your sleeve,
of the support of your boss to move forward,
of Bette Midler song that blasted out a coffee shop in Chelsea,
and probably six dozen or so nagging images that were caught in your grill.

I think I don't look up enough to make it mean something.
The skyline is just a feature of everyday life, ignorable, ignoble, simple;
you can cast it away.
With that, every time you look up,
a pleasant surprise.

It makes me wonder what I will think of yesterday when today becomes yesterday.
And what will the images of me be tomorrow for that man?
For every man?
It's ridiculous to forget all of yesterday, right?
Right?

“The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.”

Where have the souls gone?

2009-12-10T08:45:00.000-08:00

I can write research papers. I have the ability. I wasn't so sure of myself, say, a week ago, but putting your mind to something, reading until you dream of the topic and not eating dinner for a week out of forgetfulness can do a lot for a person.

In my psych class today, the first of the last three classes,
up sprouted an argument about cultural sensitivity and Hmong versus Western medicine.

This class has been a hayride for group therapy. It's a required course for psychology majors and it inscribes a yearning to make change. It's a good class, but we are indeed prone to arguments.

Today was vicious. Half of the class was red in the face from either shame or anger.
"It's about the placebo effect; if someone believes it will help them, then why try to stop it?"
(This was the focus of the conversation. Western medicine doesn't have all of the answers.)

"Yeah? Well, my brother died diagnosed from leukemia. They used those crystals and they didn't do jack shit."

My hand sprung up. I was grinning. Man, do I have a rebuttal. A smile had appeared on my face. I was going to win this argument.

"My sister also had cancer," I said triumphantly. "And chemotherapy didn't save her."
There was a disquietude. I was proud for a couple moments and then my pondering mind reminded me that

I had lived that. This is my life. It is not some argument point, Joel.
Come back down to Earth.

There's a meeting at 5, so don't show up at all

2009-12-07T16:20:00.001-08:00

I get really antsy when I'm writing papers. Every half page or so, I pour myself a glass of orange juice, scratch my chest like a bear, and strip off a top layer (It's too warm inside for three layers, anyway. MAN, it is cold during the winter season. Why did no one tell me this about New York?).

I'm just afraid of commitment to the point that I want to stop writing papers as I write them and I make jokes instead of statements. Only.

I need to work my ass off. I decided that as I stared at my reflection holding the orange juice.

He told me, "Jole, you need to work your ass off."

I asked him why he spelled my name like that.

He told me that he was testing me and that I should get back to work.

Well, I knew that.

I probably expect too much from my reflection.

I'm interested in becoming reclusively Indie, but I also want to be a weathered dictator of classical music knowledge.

There aren't enough days in the week, right?

Megalomanic Affirmation

2009-12-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

I am Godly.

I am omnipotent.

I rule with molten fists.

Tremors in me run through the world.

I am the reason for existence.

Cheetahs can get surgery, can't they?

2009-12-02T22:22:00.001-08:00

I should be doing all sorts of things.

I have two research papers that need to be written or refined. Oh, big whoop, education; you beckon and you grasp for my attention, but you are catcalling for nothing. I'll come to you if you weren't always looking for me.

Let a man breathe, education. Give a man space.

I should be writing myself silly. That's what I should be doing. I should be working on my first novel, or something. I don't know. Nadie sabe hoy o en el futuro. Nadie sabe.

I saw a video on Tuesday regarding The Conversation we must have. The Conversation against colorblindness and against racism. It was from the early nineties and there were some giggles about the staging and attire, but the message was so pure.

One man erupted at a White man that was a product of the blind society.

"You are holding yourself back. Why can't you just think of yourself as a person?"

"BECAUSE I CAN'T BE JUST A PERSON, THAT'S WHY!"

(Here I am, pleading with the masses to be empathetic, and the problem the whole time is sight, and not sensation. Understanding and not philanthropy. Man, have I been wrong.)

He went on, the exploded (emploded) man. He said that to be American was to be white and to be American was to give up his ethnicity, his color, but that is not allowed because he is treated as a black man. He is inextricably tied to his color.

"Why can't you just think of yourself as a person" meant, "Why can't you be white?"

Because you won't let me, that's why.

Because I can't change myself, that's why.

Because skin color doesn't change.

Because sexuality doesn't change.

Because gender doesn't change.

Because faith doesn't change.

But what of transcendence? What of Becoming something better?

Then what of Racism, Homophobia, Sexism and Faithful Ignorance?

In this country, Straight White Protestant Males who hold the power are Better. They have everything at their fingertips and they don't even realize it.

Well, Straight White Protestant Males who have the power, there's a world about and it wants to be reckoned.

There are some people that you're stepping on. You might want to mind them.

One must consider the final result

2009-11-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

The more I am around New York and the dollarbill mentality, the more I wonder why people think the acquisition of wealth will help anyone more than themselves and (maybe) their families, especially in the long run.

I'm at work right now. I'm securing the building to my full extent. I need money to survive in this society of affluence and wealth by the dollar and not by the experience. So I'm at work. I even like it. Celebrities drop by and my coworkers are on their way to Broadway. It's comforting, working here, for I am stuffed with influence of those that are choking their dreams, putting their dreams into a dominated submission. It just warms my heart to see people, young people, know what they want to do and do it. Probably, I support them even more because they are performers and they want to perform, not to live in the Upper West Side and throw bricks of gold out of their windows.

What's the good in living if one only wishes to catapult himself?
I'll tell you what, a baggie of cocaine and a flashbulb with a paparazzi grip seems sweet, and OH, it is, but there is some conventional wisdom in living a long, fulfilling life instead of one seeping with depression and addiction is the way to go.

Life as you will, and someone will follow.

And with that, CapeCodsGiving was a smashbang success. AJ, Abby, Corey and I feasted on food just short of divine and I am recharged, enjoying their company, breaking from my academic existence, and talking about the musicality of art in front of the Atlantic Ocean as the sun dives further and further into obscurity.
I wish you all the best.
(I'm actually annoyed when I watch videos and read memoir-esque articles in which an audience is referred. "Hey everybody, I hope you checked out my new beatboxing video!" So to fix that:)

I wish you, and only you, the one person that reads this sentence, all the best.

SO!

2009-11-23T16:14:00.000-08:00

We're going to die. It's inevitable. I have a hard time accepting that in a hundred and twenty years the world will have a new cast. Do what you will with your time here. Your faith probably says you should be better than you. Mine sure does, or Mine do, depending on my mood and quality of conjugation.

I don't know how magnanimous I want to be with my life. I think about altruism and money-making in similar light, but I don't just want to be a guy that has a memorial scholarship named after him. That would be great, leading my life in a community, sure, but I would like to build great structures while I'm here. I want to do something that will be studied and will last.

I want to be referenced in pop culture, dig, yeah?

Don't you want to do something that you aren't doing?

"Just do something, Class of '09."

SO!

I was typing and suddenly, and I mean, OUT OF NOWHERE, my c, t, h, and v stopped working completely.

No, I need those, actually. Those are my common letters. My v letter has been nude since early october, and that's fine. I'll fix it some other day.

I think I'm going to teach instead of pay for education next year. I'm putting thought into it. I want to do it. Yes.

There are Many organizations that pay you to teach English around the world. We might as well, right?

Grammatical New York (It's probably just Symbolic)

2009-11-17T21:56:00.000-08:00

Before I came to the city, it was a quote.

The New Yorker would say,

The Times would say,

Bruce Vilanch would say... "New York."

But it was really just a high tilde. I knew it was on the keyboard, but I had no use for it.

When I arrived, the Taxi Driver with his mohawk and song of redemption only gave me an ellipsis...

I was begging for something more.

Was I left with anything more than questions?

I travelled ^Up and was met with FLASHES! and CELEBRITIES!

Exclamations and slurs [in brackets, for context].

I kept moving around the city, in tiny expanding circles. .oO

finding the $money tied to the percent of stock% quotes and digit@l interaction.

But my classes were telling me to be a CAPITAList & have more than one identity/understanding\of the world. I can be more than one thing.

I = so many things, but where am I? Do I need to be here?

Why is there so #much death. and focused melancholy if this place is the end-all, beat-all?

Where do I go from here?

Is this place a period.

No, I can leave.

sometimes it's a comma or a semicolon.

A pause is domestic, so that's LaGuardia,

but a harder pause is international, so that's JFK;

I'm still not excited, though. As if the Giants and Yankees fans were saying with a big colon: New York. That's the answer. That's the example, por ejemplo.

I'm +ing all of this up, I'm taking it in from an m — to an n – to a -

But, I believe now that I understand this place.

this place is an asterisk. (*You do what you want with it.)

I can drag my feet and sing the blues

2009-11-17T21:42:00.001-08:00

There are at least a thousand lives on the street at any given moment in New york City.

This is an addendum to the teeming masses:

I round the corner and there is the saxophonist. He's playing a variation on a jazz standard but who knows where his hands have been? A passerby watches and weeps to himself, letting only his woman by the arm know that he has emotions, to the rest of the world, he's as brittle and as hard as ice. The policeman strolls down. She's aware of the complaints against her kind, the boys in blue, and she doesn't want to lose her badge, but where else is safety? Where else, in this damn city, is security but with the police force.

Two men are smiling. They aren't facing the hate that they faced back home. Now they're just faces.

John Mayer is playing at the Beacon this very moment, Fuse is streaming the feed over its doors and windows. It makes the man standing and staring at the screens feel like he's missed the world. He has a family, but the pictures are in his wallet, and that's far away.

The young woman glides in her heels, she can't smile. She's been trained not to.

And the homeless man in the wheelchair gasping out pleas for his brothers and sisters to lend him a helping hand, almost a croon. It's common to see actors like him on the street. He used to be off-Broadway, he used to sing at all the functions, but like all actors, now he's just playing a caricature of himself.

Vignettes never tasted so Sweet

2009-11-17T20:21:00.000-08:00

I think the funniest thing I have ever written is "Drugs are for stupid potheads that smoke 2 much weed."

It's not funny that Scott and I fully believe Yishia in 5F1 is a Jedi.

There was a floral ceramic bull somewhere on 7th, when I was walking home. The revolving door was not locked, but there was a sign lodged in, securing the security guards shooting the shit inside. I stared at the bull. It can't be from Portland. No. That's silly. It's a bull, too. This is the other side of the world. There is a ceramic bull inside an office building. Masculinity, ignorance, futility. This is the other side of the world.

Chase Bank was in lights on 7th, too, except 'as' was blotted out by broken circuits. Chase Bank was then labeled "CHE." I laughed uncomfortably loudly.

I wonder if people that are used to New York take it for granted. No, know they do, but I wonder how many people do. There are unscalable buildings all around me. We have built buildings taller than mountains, just glass edifices covering metal skeletons like Reese's Cups. We have made a competition of building garbage higher and higher. Our nation is probably in the lead. This city is in the lead.

You are in the lead.

Midnight Running Club

2009-11-14T23:40:00.000-08:00

At one in the morning, Troutdale has put a wet pinch on the wick.

The light is above porches or

streaming out of windows,

the illuminated television turned down low as to not wake up the parents

(or the children).

A stray flashlight is carried with blue batons,

dancing around in the pitch and puddles,

waiting, watching for any disturbance.

"We don' wan' any trughble 'round here"

ol' timeys in charge of the police force would say.

I bet I could read about me in the reports in the Outlook, if I wanted.

And Gresham! Lo Gresham!

She turns off at the drop of a hat. She's a gateway

to the East!

and to A&W

and to the Mormon Temple...

But she shuts her eyes in hope that a bagel store will open open them,

or an office complex on Stark.

All hopes, she says,

but tonight, I was not rambling with Joseph in the center of streets,

no we were not Boogie Eyes

like my mother, in her yore days,

I was alone,

or as alone as possible.

All the Mom and Pop Rite-Aids and coffee shops have a light on in front,

reminding you that you are not alone,

that How could you think you were alone?

that You are confronted with opportunity!

that How could you think such a thing?

No one is sleeping, it seems, the boroughs do not turn off,

the crowds shift from one building,

from one business shirt

top buttoned and belt looped

to unbuttoned and belt loosed.

The night is a dazzle, or would be if I was north twenty-odd blocks.

There is no facing the faceless many,

the hurried bunch,

for it's pleasant to hear "Run Forrest,"

because some languages translate fluidly.

Endorphins have done me a load of good

to not forget things like this.

I miss you, too

2009-11-10T21:55:00.001-08:00

I've tried to miss no one, Fire on the Mountain, but Brittany resounded a high pitch and I felt the need to remind myself that I am human, and you are a restaurant. I miss what you held, when I was there, it was my friends, or my Dad one time. You had Jerry Garcia on the wall and you housed a country folk band once and I enjoyed them.

Taylor told me about you and I thought you were a mediocre idea, I'm sorry to admit, but you were spectacular, your name was true to your taste. You often left me begging for water and more of your goods.

I miss the atmosphere that surrounded you. It was the good, bike-riding idealist indie, and not the indie that looked like the Kings of Leon but worked at a coffee shop. You left me wanting more of you.

You gave us a better goodbye than the Airport did. I was in the middle of you and I knew exactly what I wanted. I hope you know that we were all sharing a drink. I hope that's okay.

And now, Fire on the Mountain, you are one of the places that is stuck in the back of my mind as a warm representation of Portland, Oregon. I thank you, for that FotM, you are eternally bonded with Tom McCall and The Decemberists and weird donuts and my family and most of my friends and a sense of home that I can tell myself exists everywhere, but truly was invented by you.

Thanks.

Here's a New York moment, for you

2009-11-10T21:46:00.001-08:00

There's a Chinese place around the corner to Rite-Aid, above which I live. I dropped in the other night and ordered the spiciest entree, General Tso's chicken. I waited around and read King Leopold's Ghost because Golden Wok is mostly a take-out place so I had time to read. When my food was ready, they asked if I was eating in (at one of the four tables? Are you kidding?) and I said no, but I proceeded to unwrap the bag and sit and to scarf down the food.

The first couple bites were so filling, but right out of the wok, they were, and I pretended to burn my tongue. I started yelling; I started crying and pointing fingers, garbling through hot chicken and broccoli that they meant to burn me. They made me leave and gave me my cash back as I forced tears onto the pork fried rice. I gladly left.

I feel bad, though, because I'm bulimic now. I ate the rest of the food when I rounded the corner back but I didn't keep it down.

I've got to keep my figure somehow.

2009-11-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

Cancer Weekly

Cancer is a threat to everyone. Though heart disease, diabetes, and gout will more likely be diagnosed because of my genetic disposition, I can’t be sure. On the upside of the cancer fight, I am more prepared for an overabundance of cells than most. I have heard stories like Rhio O’Connor’s and they remind me of the tenacity and dedication of my father, Michael, and my late sister, Aurora, who were both diagnosed with cancer.

I gawked, as a child, at Aurora’s fight. She had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and decided that chemotherapy was the best weapon against metastasis, and for years, she pressed on, growing her hair and letting it fall. It was too much, though. The chemotherapy didn’t let her live as a person and she gave up on the chemicals. She died not long after.

My father, on the other hand, had two bouts of treatable, removable cancer when I was nine, and then again when I was sixteen. It was expunged out of his bladder first. The second round, though, was harder with half of a lung removed and chemotherapy on top. He lacked energy and nearly the will to live. Surgical recovery is nothing compared to suddenly not having the ability to taste. He’s still standing, my father.

Rhio O’Connor is a shining example of knowing the facts while ignoring the myths. He outlived his incurable cancer, mesothelioma, by six years and did so with an optimistic fervor, a nose in the books, and an earpiece to the doctors he thought he could trust most. His, Aurora’s, and my father’s fight, I have had to figure my game plan ahead of time. Cancer can strike at any time, as I’ve learned. Preparedness be thy name.

I have health insurance. I am diagnosed with cancer and it’s terminal. Here’s my plan:

First, I’ll find out what kind of cancer it is, how long I’ve had it, what I did to get it, and which are the most common treatments. This information will be most likely found during the initial diagnosis, or a several weeks after.

I will mourn for a week to get it out of my system. All disorders are psychosomatic, in the sense that if one believes that one is sick and helpless, a hormonal imbalance will be created and symptoms could worsen. I will therefore tell myself every day that I will be alive the next day and I will do all I can stay alive, focusing daily on the fact that I exist and how grateful I will be for seeing the sun and smelling the leaves.

I will then find out if there is an easy fix. I will consult my general practitioner for any colleagues he has or had that specialize in the type of oncology that relates to my cancer. I will consult this (or these) doctor(s) about my diagnosis. If I can have it excised, I will, immediately.

My new oncologist will be my center for information until I branch out, elsewhere. The doctor will inform me about the best clinics and hospitals, the medical journals and quarterlies that are most trustworthy, and the names and address of other oncologists. The doctor will also be the first reliable opinion regarding my chances of survival. With names and titles and places, I will begin to make calls to other doctors with a list of my symptoms always at hand. I may travel, but depending on the cancer, the action may be ill-advised.

According to the advice of the doctors, I will begin to look into which treatment will fit my cancer best. Radiation and chemotherapy are not out of the question, but if I can work with my immune system, or use angiogenesis inhibitors, I will. I will try any trial drug, as long as it is advisable under the consideration of my oncologist crew.

I will look into alternative medicine and dietary guidelines to be used as complementary while Western practices are administered. I will read as many articles as exist on the subject of negative synergy between nontraditional and Western medicines so I will be sure that I will not do more harm than good. I will also start praying more.

At this point, where I have intensely educated myself about my cancer, I will have reflected upon why I have this cancer. If my behavior can change so that I will not get the cancer a second time, if I survive (when I survive), I will do all I can to live better because of it. That’s one of the things I’ve noticed about cancer: it has the ability to change the way in which people live and see life. It is the same for many near death experiences, but I believe cancer is a more potent, more powerful wake up call, I will make sure that I change myself.

I will have chosen my treatments and my diet by this time, two or three months after my diagnosis, and I will have much haste to begin. If the quality of life changes for the better, I will continue my regiment until the cancer is gone or I am bankrupt. If I lack the money to support my medical needs, I will write letters to philanthropists, in hopes that one does not take pity, but instead sees the benefit of human life.

If the diagnosis does not improve, or worsens, I will restart the process with my oncologists. If I die from trial drug or a poor synergy or uncontrollable malignancy, it will be recorded so the next person to be diagnosed will know what not to do. I will not die of a lack of hope though. I have no reason to accept that I will not live forever until I die.

My sister died because of not knowing about her cancer, first, and second, not knowing about the other treatments. Chemotherapy is not a be all and end all medical miracle and neither are any of the other treatments. Rhio O’Connor, in spirit, and my father, in body, live on to the testament that rigorous study and edification about one’s disease or disorder can elongate a life. It’s the more one knows that beats cancer.

Life is like a really dark version of Toy Story

2009-11-05T20:15:00.000-08:00

SO! I'm glad I don't drive in this town.

I saw a car on fire today. The embers were burning beneath it like faulty fireworks but the smoke billowed too wildly. I could barely breathe, or shouldn't have kept breathing, truly.

I walked away, closer to the Post Office (it's the Post Office), and when I turned around, the hood had exploded in flames. I tried and tried to get a picture with my tiny cameraphone, but no luck, I was breathing volcanic ash, like May 18th.

Also, there was this older gentlemen, some would say 'silver fox' walking in my direction, and I him, as I headed to work. He was cocking his eye at me. I cocked back, wondering how strange I must look for him to cock his eye. Pues, the closer I came to the man, the more aware I was of the fact that his cocked eye was a permanent state.

He was slightly disfigured.

On one level, I feel Awful, and on the other, Nope, I still feel awful.

I have a whole set-up for a novel. I just need to write it.

Isn't that always the issue?

If I didn't know and love you, I would resent and hate you.

2009-11-05T20:11:00.000-08:00

The last couple days of Memory, Testimony, Archive have been punctuated by leaves outside flying upward. The class is on the sixth floor and I have absolutely limited knowledge of jetstreams, but in both class periods last week, up they flew. It was beautiful.

When I think things are falling and hopeless, here are these leaves praying for the sun, quiet Icarus, quiet.

I think Bleu Cheese is the worst thing to come out of cows.

It tastes like garbage.

"It's an acquired taste."

Acquired garbage. It's mold to begin with, but then it isn't just mold, it is living, breathing, amoxycillin. Sick, man. Even Dean and Deluca fell short with their cheese selection: they included the banish colored cheese, Bleu.

If you're sad, Bleu Cheese, I know why. You are worthless.

But there's a market for everything.

I was really impressed with Carry that Weight and The End on Abbey Road (definitely the best music by the Beatles, Rolling Stone; there is consensus among me). Those two songs are the last recorded by the Beatles, all four of them. They kicked it off beautifully and fully with Carry and then, "Guys, this is it. This is the final song we will put forth as a group. The tensions are too high. The junk addiction is too powerful, that creep Yoko is too here, and we're done."

And it was a book end to the most successful band of all time.

I like being around drunk people until the drunk people start generalizing and categorizing me with the tiny scope of knowledge and reason they hold at that moment.

Sleep on that, That's all I ask.

Joyous occasion, this day

2009-11-04T23:38:00.000-08:00

I'm so glad I haven't received many comments on my earliest blogs, transfers from myspace days of ignorance and self-pity.

Man, weren't we all wrecks back then?

Well, I'm sure was.

I'm a father now. I'm a father of two beautiful girls, Haley-Rose and Josephine. I'm just proud to be alive. Fatherhood sure has brought the best of life into me. "Everything seems so trivial" since fatherhood hit me like a rock.

At first, I was against the notion. "No, honey, I don't think we're ready," but she sure does have me in her palm!

Sometimes I write papers and hide them from myself, only to find them when they are no longer in context. I wrote a sweet paper about and to Senator John Kerry. Load of good that did him. Bogus.

I love knowing I should be asleep. I make my alarm clock less and less visible when I feel the morning creeping. The wan reflection (of probably the laundry room on the second floor whose unneeded light trails into the windows) dims, but it feels too close.

I don't feel like I should have whole discographies. I don't need the whole thing. I'm struggling with this and I want to delete much music that I shouldn't have in the first place, but The Fruit that Ate Itself is So Good! I can't decide.

I felt like life happened today. I was in a friend's sisters and cousin's loft in Gramercy Park North and I saw the city lights and ate tuna pasta. I feel like everything can fit into place if I wait for it and do my best to be in position.

It's funny to think all I knew about New York before was from the Spiderman 2 video game.

"I want to ingenuous all over her face"

2009-11-01T21:31:00.001-08:00

Scott says things like that. He didn't know what it meant.

He also said, regarding my facial hair, "If God gave you the power to grow a handlebar mustache, who are you to spit in his face?"

I feel like a kid today. I listened to my recorded self and it's awful. I'm so young-sounding, and the words, my choice of words even sounded like Buster trying on Daddy's pants and slippers.

Aw, how cute. Look at Buster try and run.

At what point am I supposed to take myself seriously? At what point do I expect others to?

It's a process, though, it isn't simple. You're right, Orit. You're right.

History isn't simple.

And you know what? Orit is right about something else. To what I am testifying? What memory do I have that's of any use?

I wish I had some perspective that was different, but gee Golly, I can't prove that I do, and if I did, it would be proof of one in six billion other proofs.

Well aren't we all different and special in our own way?

I thought about writing names before I used names in this entry. Because who are you, reader, to know about whom I'm referring? I could just be writing, Alionka (Ah-lee-áhn-ka), right? I could just be writing. Right Hannah? Right Brenda Smalley and Jennifer Crooks?

I could, and you never can tell.

A Tramp is sitting on my Doorstep

2009-11-01T17:01:00.000-08:00

Vitamin Water is pretty cocky, marketing their products as Revitalizers or Focusers or Provocaters. As if Hellman's Mayonnaise couldn't have exactly the same marketing campaign?

Hellman's Synergy

Best Foods Rise and Shine Mayo

Heinz 57 Energy Ketchup

It's a trend in marketing, I think.

Do you know that there is a site just for people named Scott Walker?

The site is called worldwidewalker.com and it's under construction, but it will be.

Coldplay doesn't get enough credit for inventing music.

Just shy of sixteen ounces of brown sugar

2009-11-01T00:58:00.001-07:00

is on top of the first toilet. It shouldn't be explained. Some questions will always lack answers.

Today was Halloween. I was Superman at work (and at play).

No, there was no play, EXCEPT where I walked in Times Square scouting out other superheroes. I gave them an earful, I'll tell you. Batmen knew that they were useless, rich, pompous magnates when I was done with them.

The Pope laughed. He couldn't fly. I can fly. Superman can fly.

I shouldn't have joked with all of the Policemen I did, but it was so worth it.

"Great costumes, gentlemen."

To all of them.

To the Joker, I was just disappointed. "Come on, man. You have your own city. Go back to Gotham. We have enough trouble here, anway."

"I'm just taking a break. Lay off."

Some stranger muttered hate slurs about me in my getup. They were baseless and wrong, and yet I was still offended. I talked to a couple of policewomen about slurs and they asked why I was offended, if it wasn't true.

"You're right. Someone yelling, 'You are an abstinent and ethical straight man without a criminal record' doesn't sound imposing at all."

I love seeing people let loose. This is a holiday of choice for forgetting guidelines and requisites. Tomorrow, that's another day, but today, I'm Superman.

*No, this is all too much

2009-10-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

I am having some cognitive dissonance right now. I can't be the bad person that I'm made out to be. I'm inherently good, but my mouth is so large, and so gaping, that no doubt some dreary, judgmental things will fall out, unbeknownst to me.

(At this point in the writing process, I tried to drink my tea that I had spilled on the ground minutes before, but it was too hot to drink, far too hot. It spilled out of my mouth and onto my designer jeans. At least I bought these on an outrageous sale.)

People still have lapses of sense-making. I've encountered some big egos bulging past some skulls. Last night was a blowout. Also, I can't speak for the life of me to people who are from different cultures. I'm too open. I'm too honest. I'm too forward.

I'm too much*, I've found.

I feel so old.

The city is gorgeous, though. I will go to the High Line and read for awhile, I think.

Or outside.

I'll go outside.

My pants are still wet from the tea, but there is some shine.

I enjoy work, at least. Hell, when I take a step back, I enjoy all of it.

I'll be able to write better standup after this.

That was uncalled for (to be)

2009-10-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

I am walking down the street with a 14" by 28" poster of Laurence Fishburne dressed as Thurgood Marshall because the former is playing the latter in a new off-Broadway show (16 WEEKS ONLY!). It was free at work, so I nabbed it, grabbed it and advertised, nearly a sandwichboard, down 8th avenue. I received many looks and stares of all sorts, but only two verbal recognitions. One was friendly. Thanks Khonsu. The other was:

"What's this?"

"Thurgood Marshall. It's new."

Realizing, "Oh! Clarence Thomas doesn't observe that hideous fucking Communist idiology."

The last sentence was for clarity's sake, apparently. It was like he had planned out a sentence about Marshall for weeks, but didn't know where to place it, or he learned this somewhere and was simply repeating it. He was angry, too.

And then he was gone.

¡Lo encontré! (Suddenly I see)

2009-10-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

I saw some ugly people on the street today. I thought they were both attractive, but I realized I was looking between them. See, one of them had a jagged, squat face and the other had a overly long face, just shy of horse. I thought, maybe if they had children, the problem would be solved,

but no, of course not. The baby would get features of both sides in all the wrong places.

So, I smile at ugly people, I mean I smile at attractive people, too, but I make sure to smile at ugly people, and I usually receive coy grin in return. Perfect!

Or sometimes, probably, they were thinking, "I'm going to smile at this ugly young man walking towards me. He deserves it." I think I'm the originator when the ugly people already had me marked.

We're all ugly, aren't we?

On the related note, I like to pick up on one or two pieces of minutia about someone's personality or features and make a nickname out of it. Peter, Max and I used the Irish setup, most often.

Look at the Mousey McMouserson or Loudy McHairysmith.

We tried to use the German arrangement, but Smellsy Von Bigarmsheim just lacked the rhythm.

The Village used to be cool. It has pockets of truth, of opportunity for any and every dream, but there are just too many people looking for what was, what could've been. I want everyone to smile back when I walk home.

I'll make an effort.

Pero tengo drogas, Señora...

2009-10-20T22:02:00.000-07:00

Es un chiste. Nunca puedo tener drogas, Señora.

There are too many pretty faces in this city. I can't make my mark and sow my seeds with just one! That is like only eating one kind of chocolate, or marrying only one woman, for one's whole life.

Ridiculous, right?

I learned much about the Village this weekend.

The place is full of assumptions, most of them positive.

Por ejemplo:

- If one wears a suit, one must be an adult.

- If one has facial hair, one must be an adult (This is the same in England, I've learned).

- If one is walking, one must enjoy comedy (That's really just a lesson of comedy clubs in general, put forth strongest by Times Square).

- If one doesn't drink, then there must be something wrong.

And you can say anything to pretty much anyone and it doesn't matter whether it's true or not.

There are so many people in this city that it is unlikely that you will see them again unless they frequent your work or home. Facebook and a phone and a pad of paper can only do so much.

I should be researching and taking notes, but here I am, again, old friend.

Shouldn't we always be more productive than we are?

"NO! False assumption! You've spent too much time in the Village, thinking, Joel."

Well, I would say (hablaría), It's already tomorrow and the day is done, so we can just give up on giving up and work for the sun.

Es Pablo,

2009-10-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

I saw Justine again.
I saw her earlier this week, but I didn't have time to say anything. I had forgotten her name, so I just let her pass and it was like watching sand drop in an hourglass. Today I talked to her, she had forgotten my name, and in all honesty, I only remembered because I wrote it down, thinking she was going to be an important figure.

It meant less today. It means less. She is another person.
I have decided that for a couple years it's just handshakes and earnest conversation.
The more the merrier.

Cafe Esperanto had tasty food. I recommend it. I need to be in the Village more.

The longer I stay, the more I know that I can get anything I want here. If I want to smoke, if I want to drink, if I want to snort, to eat, to thrive, to die, to be a face in the crowd, or boost my ego, I can have it all,
except for sense of belonging.

I'll keep looking.

Wallfllowers no pueden ayudar

2009-10-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

Walking down the street, trying to see through the eyes of the passing people, I was distracted. I didn't have time to warm my waffles. It was a day like that, you know.

I round the corner of Rite Aid, strolling back to my apartment complex (simplex), I spot a woman ambling in my direction. I don't feel special, I know whe isn't walking towards me. She is struggling, though. The closer I get, the more obvious this struggle becomes. She is walking slower than a mile an hour, with a cane in one hand, and another hand searching, searching for something to hold.

I should help her, I think. I should lead her somewhere, or at least offer my help, but here I am, again, stuck in a city of judgemental glances and helpless people. What do I do? What can I do? What could I do?
Nothing. I did nothing.

After I passed her, I held the door for one of my friends. He keeps glancing and can't decide either. On the elevator, we agree that we wanted to help the woman, but,

"But," my friend said in the elevator, "you don't know about her." He laughed, lost somewhere.
I agreed.

From Point A to 6 in Two Hours (Why are downloaded songs all lowercase?)

2009-10-04T23:27:00.004-07:00

Joel Arken
Fellow Joseph Plourde
Freshman Seminar
5 October 2009
The New School Reader: The Vices and 1964
Post-Modernism is dead. It started off dead and here we are, 2009. It’s still dead. Erich Fromm’s “Our Way of Life Makes Us Miserable” was a quick, concise accusation of modern man. It echoes Walter Benjamin’s theses of distraction from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation.” We are a diverted, disturbed people. Fromm’s piece was written in the beginning of an overhaul of commodity and consumerism. He weathered the ‘50s, but if he only knew what was to come.
That is to say, Fromm didn’t know how right he was. He wrote that “our present way of life leads to increasing anxiety, helplessness and, eventually, to the disintegration of our culture.” Most negative aspects that plagued “This Modern Era” of the sixties, the overabundance, the use and abuse of toxic intoxicants, and the alienation of man through technology, have all grown to newfound, extraordinary versions of their previous selves.
We have become the fattest and most grotesque nation because of the overabundance of food, and poverty has stricken the poorest of us with the least healthy food, leading to obesity in the ones who can fight it least. We have an abundance of medicine, but only those working, and Not even All of those, have access. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 30,000 suicides occurred in 2006. I myself bore witness to two in my high school, within a year. We have abundance of therapy, self-help books, life coaches, but the amount of those identified with neuroses and disorders is growing.
Physical abuse is still common. Drug abuse is more prevalent than it has ever been. Meth has replaced heroin in the war on drugs. Pharmaceuticals have replaced cocaine as the drug of the affluent. Marijuana and alcohol begin to be abused in middle elementary schools. Culture-bound syndromes of eating disorders, shopping disorders, attention disorders and the like are finding their place in the American lexicon.

Anything can be found online. Books can be sold, bought, downloaded, ripped, stored, stolen, and read all without thinking about stepping near a library. Information is everywhere. Where the internet was a military operation, it is now a poorly-sourced book of all information one could ever need. Advertisements are on every medium, save public broadcasting.
Machines that once were used and implemented by man have made some jobs, careers, futures obsolete. Computers buy, sell, steal, or give. Automation is the new feature in supermarkets, in theatres, in workplaces for security. Everything is faster; everything is more efficient.
Maybe it’s that nothing has changed that bothers us nostalgic types. The symptoms are worse, the diagnosis, more severe, but if I know one thing, it’s that cynicism is dead, too. Hope is the new black. We are the new “I.” Community is coming back in a new way. Thousands want to dedicate themselves to enrichment of life, to art, to ‘super-lienation.’ We are becoming constant and perpetual machines of interest, of power, of influence and interest. Testimony is the invention of this new century. I’m no Buddhist, but there is balance out there, it’s the duty to find it, share it (for free, of course), exploit it, gain it, and become it.

We have inherited death and dying and internalized it, externalizing hate and greed and doubt, but so self-consciously. We are the new dead, but we don’t know otherwise.

Just a comparison, Don't fret, Don't panic

2009-10-03T00:52:00.001-07:00

I was running to work this morning.
I apologized when I was in the way of someone.
Knowing that everyone else's time is worth just as much as mine, I try to not stop anyone from going on with their business.

A car was stuck in the middle of an intersection, many started to cross, and he honked and sped into the street. I gave him a sarcastic thumbs up, thinking that he was taking away from my time and all of the time of these other people, but
I FORGOT,
his time is just as worthy.

It's hard to be self-aware and be right at the same time.