"The important thing is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments."

(quote: Abbe Galiani, video: 'Robert McKee' from Adaptation)

Going to not New Orleans now, but the University of Texas where I've been offered a Michener Fellowship . This was unquestionably my favorite program upon application, but its reputation for extreme selectivity kept me from hoping too hard. There are many virtues to the academic program itself, including an opportunity to study screenwriting, but from pragmatism I'm stoked about the stipend. I will not have to work for three years. It's all a kid could ask for, and I can't wait to get working intensively. Full days of writing, like those I could barely wring out of weekends, laid end-to-end.

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I'm waiting for a backlash. And I'm starting to think that Irony has been our generation's sole defense against taking all this technology too seriously. All facebooked out and craving anonymity, a few kids that are already born will have enough. And it won't just be crust-punks and Luddites, but broad swaths of people who just don't care to plug in all their gadgets.

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Don't watch the news. You're not surrounded by crazy people. There are some. Mostly on the television itself. And you're still more likely to die from a flamed-out furnace or a distracted teenager wielding vehicular homicide than shot in the brain by some wild-eyed sniper or blown to bits by post-modern kamikazes. Just laugh for a minute at the hypocrisy and the misunderstanding, the clarity of things when you're disengaged. And then giggle at the thought of utopia. . .People do not want to be free.

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"I wanted the whole world or nothing"

(quote: Bukowski; video: 'lil Wayne-La, La, La)

I've been accepted to attend the MFA program at the University of New Orleans in the Fall. This after several rejections and a wait-list at the University of Texas. There's been a whole set of penciled-in plans waiting for this, coiled up waiting to be sprung. . .so now it's 2.5 more months of work, the new tradition of Sasquatch, a month-long escapade through Turkey, Albania, Croatia, perhaps Italy, the Czech Republic, Spain. I've been out of school a year now, and I can scarcely summarize those months between. Only a montage of beer cans and books and rubbing my forehead in consternation, the glow of the screen, the smell of ink on airplanes, napping off the grindstone week, a few of those times when you're at the bar or on some friendly couch and the light and the collective BAC are perfect and you can genuinely tilt your head back and cackle.

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There's bound to be good times, and those less good. And in the murk it's easy to become distrustful and vacant-eyed and an inch smaller than your skin. Now's the up-time though, and if you don't let yourself feel the ecstasy than you were a fool to feel its opposite.

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What I was thinking about whilst paying to park:

When we were fresh out of the forests, planting the first maize and trading the first beads, all this capitalism made sense. It was an imperfect but simple means of distributing the value to be had by working the natural world. This was before the printing press, before programmatic government, hedge funds, ________-industrial complexes. And then we slipped out of that world, gradually inching into an inorganic technological sphere. The industrialized world is one big city now, one could travel around the globe on commercial flights and never leave the airport--it would be like one horrifying trip to the mall, with bizarre ethnic districts and periodic, uncomfortable naps. The natural world we once inhabited has become a space administered and owned by corporations and government. In the age of post-survivalism, everything is owned. And because everything is property (where government control of land, for example, can stand-in for commercial ownership), the time-tested value of capitalism becomes perverted. Where once food, durable goods, and raw materials were the only items up for exchange--now everything is. Everything has an abstract and quantifiable value that can be traded for other things. Ideas have become commodified, sex, health and disease, kindness (in the service industry, each smile you give has an estimable dollar value). Time itself has been commodified (I certainly didn't decide to work from 8-5). . . .No solutions or grand philosophical statement. . .I just find it interesting.

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