"I think they're lying to you"

(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)


I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.

This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.


Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.

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"Of course you see me . . .there's cameras everywhere"

(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)

For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else


I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.

--

Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.

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"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

(quote: Cormac McCarthy, video: Sasquatch! 2009 [some friends of mine appear])


You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.


The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.



I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.

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"There is no dream"

(quote: Neutral Milk Hotel, video: Krishnamurti Discipline)

I've begun to take action towards moving to Turkey. The plan being to live and teach in Istanbul from roughly August of this year until July of the next. Following that, I will make another attempt to gain entry into MFA programs. The overall failure of the graduate school try stunned me for a a few weeks. It's easy to think that this lack of validation is the best measure thus far of my own abilities. But this is art. It doesn't work that way. It can only be done with no fear of consequences or failure, with an irrational belief that your work is good and that it will only improve. And to write with the discipline and stimulus I need, new surroundings and daily demands are a must.

But the decision to go to Turkey is motivated by many things. I am dissatisfied in my job and all the possible jobs related to it. I have purposely stumbled onto a time in my life with virtually no responsibilities. I have always wanted to spend enough time in a foreign land to be a citizen of it, to meet its people as an equal, to learn the language, to not merely observe but participate in its culture, to break the narrow views placed on me at birth. I am in love with the world. It's so tremendously big and so much different than you'll come to understand it through television. So beautiful that you can only look at it in small pieces. For all my nihilism and misanthropy and doomsaying, I love this place and hope to soak up as much of it as I can. And do my best to interpret this experience in words as I go. I've dedicated myself to narrative. And this isn't simply reading and writing, narratives are the things we live too. The story of people on this place and at this time, the story of your life starting at the moment you saw first light to the moment you see last. And just thinking of these billions of stories as they interweave and conflict and gyrate and come together and split apart, thinking of that hulking place just outside my window, a great human novel in constant motion that can never and should never be written . . .it's enough to keep me awake at night.


Also. The mookfish is coming out, for the foreseeable future. We will have a time.

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'The Writer is a Spiritual Anarchist'

(quote: Saroyan, video: Bukowski Dinosauria, We

The question comes to me now that it's real . . .what relation does the artist have to their parents? Some of us have bohemian 'rents that once tried their own hand in some art or at the very least hold up creativity as something with which to measure other things by. And some parents likely view it as an empty pursuit by which no access to the good life or happiness is granted. My parents are nowhere in this continuum. They barely listen to music, my mother reading glorified romance novels, my father reading nothing at all. They do not watch films, but popcorn movies with whatever actors they prefer. The production of even these instances of art are so mysterious to them that the thing they watch may as well have been dropped from the sky. And yet, I'm trying to include them as much as I can in my circumstances re: graduate school. And somewhere in these last few months it occurred to them that I am writing. A lot. And they wanted to see something.
So . . .after they bugged me over the course of several of our weekly phone calls, I relented and decided to send them something. I thought over a half-dozen short stories that may be suitable. This one discarded for all the drugs done in it, that one put aside because the protagonist is too close to my father, a third overlooked because it would simply be too damn weird for them to ever look at me the same. And I settled on this one as it seemed the most neutral. And even it has vomit, and alcoholism, and swearing, and a man's pubic hair catching fire. They called me today after having read it, and said: "thanks', 'it looks good', 'are all those countries real countries? or did you come up with some of them?'. Now, I don't expect them to provide incisive critique. But I don't know how to talk to them about writing, it is so far removed from their world that I might as well discuss my love for some forgotten tribal rite. And yet I came from them. Somehow.


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A fellow student that I've had workshop classes with has been published in a contest wherein this work also competed. She has not been published before and in almost all cases I would be happy for her success despite my slim envy. But the nature of her work, and the small success it has been granted, disturbs me. See, in my inability to get things published or gain acceptance into most of the schools to which I've applied, I've suggested as one of my disadvantages the content of my stories. I've identified a continuity in the themes and characters and plot and perspective and aesthetic of the work that gains traction. And it is not what I do. I've told people that what is looked at as good in 2009 is work that is memoirish, sentimental, banal, depicting love as it has existed on television lo these many years. Work that when it strays from reality, wanders into magical realism and thus calms the chaos and confusion of living in the modern world. Magical realism is a cop-out, a boiling down, a superstitious response to those things not understood. And my fellow student's work is all of these things. I won't go further into detail about the work itself, but when I read it in class I recall thinking and noting that "this, this in front of me, is the opposite of what I want to write". Further, it is done badly. Sloppily, with cliched details, mortified progresion, warmed-over nostalgia.

And, as counterpoint, what I try to write is what I think needs to be done, in this moment, in narrative. A sort of NeoNaturalism in that the characters, like us, are bound to lives they cannot control by forces of nature. And that the predominate element of that nature, in a postsurvivalist world, is the environment created by our own culture. And further, that the environment does not have absolute control over our fate, but that for our constraints to be surpassed we must be willing to accept the greatest risks. Death and its metaphors are the gamble one must tolerate to become something other than circuitry exposed to the weather. And I try to document this alienating environment we occupy, present characters with circumstances at the furthest edge of confusion and possibility and reconciliation. It is not science fiction, but the leveraging of the unusual to suggest how very little sense we can make of this nature that shapes us, and that we fight against, and that we try, riddled with anxiety and doubt, to understand. In this milieu there is no room for hokey magic to resolve complications, there is only the paucity of explanation and the unsettling discomfort of feeling alone and perturbed when everyone else seems calm and aligned. It may not be the materials that everyone chooses, but they are honest ones and they come from a life I have led that has been fraught with uncertainty and nervousness and frustration and ceaseless inquiry to little avail but temporary contentment. I do not traffic in memoirs, because no person can truly understand another and to fictionalize such an account is as if to say that the writer has feared to live the life they depict, and wishes for some other reality that is not true. So. Fuck your memoirs, unless they be your real life. And fuck sentimentality unless you've loved and lost it and accepted it and your scars will not heal. I have some that still raise pink and shiny from my skin. And fuck magic, go to religion if you wish the world to make sense.

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"Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee"

(quote: The Judge, video: Black Moth Super Rainbow)

I'm submitting a proposal to the Modern Language Association for their annual conference in Philadelphia. The topic is the "Evolutionary Origins of Narrative". This subject represents the confluence of much of the extracurricular study I have done over the last two years, and upon suggestion by a professor multiple thesii immediately jumped to mind. Basically, evolutionary psychologists, philosophers of art, and kids with nothing better to do, are trying to understand what function art serves from an evolutionary perspective. If it is in fact a functional adaptation, in what way does it aid reproduction? There are generally about 5 theories that I am familiar with. Steven Pinker suggests that art has no evolutionary function, that it is a mere byproduct of complex brains. Others suggest that art is simply the effort of individuals to become appealing in the eyes of the opposite sex. Others proclaim that art is a survival strategy that benefits either social cohesion or mental organization. A fifth theory suggests that art began as a means by which to share attention. None of these is quite complex and holistic enough for me. None of them answer the fundamental four questions required to identify an adaptive mechanism (or in Pinker's case, show how art does not meet some of these requirements). The four questions for adaptation, as formulated by Niko Tinbergen are: 'What benefit does the adaptation provide for reproduction?', 'What is the mechanism by which this adaptation occurs?', 'What is the origin of the adaptation in human evolutionary history?', 'When does the adaptation develop in the individual human?'.
Any theory for the evolutionary origins of narrative or art will be forced to handle these four questions. My proposal is to synthesize a new theory focusing on narrative specifically. Essentially, a sort-of anthropology or genealogy of the "Narrative Mechanism" in human behavior. In evolutionary psychology, every definable behavioral phenomenon comes from a 'mechanism', a system of actions, feedback, requirements, problematization strategies, perspective, and subconscious analysis. My paper would, more or less, begin to define the Narrative behavioral Mechanism. Essentially, I believe that narrative as a meme in cultural evolution have worked so well because they are aligned with the way that we sort information already. All of our myths are in narrative form, and the most efficient way to convey some idea is generally to have an accompanying narrative (anecdotes work better than statistics, even when they are misleading). It is a result of our biological understanding of time: we think everything begins, develops, climaxes, and dies. The world around us does this through the seasons, our bodies do this, most phenomenon that we observe seem to behave along the archetypal pattern of narrative. This way of thinking met up with the burgeoning survival value of symbolic language. As we became more complex philosophically, eventually narrative was used as a means of approaching existential anguish (an affliction that may be the true separation of man from beasts). And now in the bourgeois world we occupy, where survival is a given, the role of narrative has been displaced. The art and it's artist have been alienated from their homeland, the Pleistocene. Anyway, much more on this later . . ..

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I've developed a new hobby. I put a draft of something I've been working on in my jacket and walk the mile downtown and deposit myself on the worst lit chair in all of 10th Street Tavern, and I drink whiskey and make red marks on the paper until something adequate becomes something good. Then after a couple hours, in the dark, I walk back home. I take the most circuitious route possible, with something disjointed and beautiful on the headphones. Look for fences to climb, buildings to surmount, etc. The other night I . . .well, I'll keep that moment to myself. It was wonderful to just be cold in the dark alone. Seeing the life that we avoid with our houses and streetlights and televisions and cars.

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"We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence."

(quote: Darwin, video: Wale-The Artistic Integrity

For my American Realism course I have to write a research paper from no less than 8 sources. The only limitation is that it has to deal with American literature written between the Civil War and World War I. After the paltry class discussion when the professor asked those gathered to define evolution, I decided that I need to examine Darwin's influence on the written word as art form. While he was only partially a philosopher, he presented an idea which fundamentally alters the picture of the world. For those who do not accept his theory, there is still this pausing gap, this rigidly logical refutation of their "meaning" that they must come to terms with. After Darwin, god became obsolete as a philosophical device. And 75 years later, Existentialism questioned whether, in a world without god, does life have any meaning? My research centers around finding 'transitional fossils' that indicate a progression out of Romanticism, via Darwin's findings. Was Realism a rejection of Romanticism at least partially because Darwin changed how we see nature and our place in it? Are the hard truths revealed by Darwin reflected in the grittier aesthetic of Realism? Does the art of the time hint at our collective philosophical evolution, does it indicate the Existential anxiety of casting out mythology and order?

I can't listen to American news anymore. Even NPR has been seized with the Fear. You cannot turn on a television (I'm guessing) or visit a newspaper's website or listen to the radio without dire news about the economy. Thousands being laid-off, millions more underemployed, our collective investments dwindling in value. It is all either a temporary downturn, or the undulating spasms of a false ideology as it crumbles. And the working class can do nothing in reaction but save a little more, leave out a few luxuries, show up to work, try to sleep at night. And I have no lack of sympathy for those who have lost their jobs, or who are going through tough times. But a lot of us made bad decisions, or are stuck in undesirable circumstances, or both. And the lesson to be learned from this, especially for younger people who haven't yet bought a house they can't afford or squirted out one too many lil'uns, is that the whole dream we've been sold is a joke. Buy a house, slave away at a corporate job, distance yourself from reality with television and sports, capitulate to the reproductive urge. All these things and more have been marketed to us as the ideal, as the swift path to happiness. But it isn't. And every second you spend willing yourself to someone else's system, is another inch you drift from the person you are. Not to say that you should never get a job and work for the Man. But never let it fool you that this 9-5 is your life. And never rely on another's enterprise to make you happy. Whatever you do for yourself, can never be taken away.

I've been writing quite a bit so far this year. Though less and less of it is presentable. I'm so much pickier and careful and thoughtful and (un)conscious. And so now I write the first five pages of a story at least three times before I settle into a groove. Write out not an outline but an ever-evolving aesthetic manifesto each time I want a thing to become a story. When I was maybe 20-years old, sleepless, I developed a crude analogy for what a story needs to be. The Bonfire Theory of Narrative Craft. Basically, it is this: A story, at the broadest conceptual level, must have three elements. The first is the flames. Flames are what are seen from a distance, what dazzles, what draws someone in or scares away an animal. This is the story's "gimmick", what you describe a story as being about in one or two sentences (Choke is about a sex-addict who pretends to choke for money and affection). The second aspect is the "fuel". How the fire is assembled, the structure of the wood aligned such that it burns at the desired intensity. This is the story's plot, the causality, what actually happens, how all of the events are tied together. The final element is the coals. The long-burning furnace of the fire, the part you bake hot-dogs on. The part you could take with you in a clay vessel on your pilgrimage and use to start a fire elsewhere. This is the theme of the story. What the story has to say, why the story is important to tell. What from the story can a person take away and add to their own experience? Anyway. Good stories are built like bonfires. And depending on how you want it to burn, you have to carefully consider all three of these aspects.


I'm occasionally opining for the Boise Arbiter now. Check it out.

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"Signs and wonders all along the road"

(quote: Mighty Mos, video: Bertrand Russell)


My brother leaves Boise in three days. He's packed up his belongings, prepped his dog, cleaned his house and found some young rabble to inhabit it, cast a line for job prospects, and is now counting the hours before he roars off into the mountains to be with the woman he loves. I came here because he was here, or at least that's why I tried to. He's my patron saint, the patience and even hand that laid the groundwork for me to be however rebellious and uncouth I have been. The wise and kind older brother that we should all have, and I cannot say I would have tolerated me as well as he has. He has never failed with an encouraging word, an incisive observation, a veteran bit of experience. And our relationship has grown more complicated in the City of Trees. We shared a dwelling for over two years, and relearned each other's idiosyncracies, talked until late at night in that complex of sentence-finishing and head-nodding that only siblings and spouses can conjure. We went to Africa together, to Amsterdam, to San Francisco. He watched me cry a hundred times for someone a million miles away and said exactly what I needed to hear always. He tried to understand my writing, and even when he didn't ruminated about how important it was that I kept going. And though we carry out our lives differently, and I was often selfish and closed off, I respect him as much as any man I know. He's struggling, like all of us, but he has never been afraid to do the hard thing when it was right. He's the man my father could have been, and one whose respect I will work my entire life to maintain. Thanks, bro. It's been good. I love you kid, and what's mine is yours. For life.

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Plans gradually into fruition. Like there is no action but waiting. And all these kilobytes committed to text have simply served to keep me distracted, to keep the nausea down about what may or may not happen six months hence. Anxiety evolves, and the things that made me tremble even two years ago now get swallowed like daily medicine. Money, loneliness, validation, insomnia, stagnation. . .gulp. The next half-decade sits in smoky still-images in my brain: surrounded by spectres, high as a kite, ox-like and obstinate, laughing in the dim morning in my cold bed. I tried my hand at this conventional thing: worked in my office, and put on brown leather shoes, and made the phone calls I had to, and contributed to my retirement fund, and clinked drinks with mid-life crisis casualties. And I didn't fail out, I wasn't asked to leave, and I have burned no bridges, try as I might. The televised 'merikuhn dream just isn't my gig. Even now I can feel the mercury setting in my bones, like concrete turning me into a statue here; groaning and medicating with the other statues in our still, still garden. But I've found a way out, and not a frantic leap from windows, but an almost sanctioned way to stave off my demons and wake up enthusiastic. Almost counting days now . . .

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The other night a friend of my brother's, this guy I've known for about a decade now but have never really connected with, asked me about the whole grad school thing. When I told him I was going so that I could write a novel, he asked: "what do you write? I mean, murder-mysteries, or science fiction, or something?" And I didn't know how to respond. What do I write? So I laid out the plans for my novel, the gist, the theme, the setting, one or two of the characters. The thing is, talking to people that don't read much, I have a hard time explaining what my overall project is. I feel like the follower of some unkempt religion, like some excuse needs to be made. But in the glow of my computer, it all makes absolute sense. Finish two more short-stories that are stewing in my skull and turn everything legible into a self-published collection. Draft the text of my graphic novel about time-traveling drug-dealers and immortality cults. Pound out my novel about loneliness and amnesia and Detroit and identity. Congeal my Antarctic dreams into some kind of bleak narrative. The thing is, I have never felt this in charge of my creative impulse. I know exactly what I'm doing, even if part of the plan requires me to give up all conscious control.

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"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings"

(quote: Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian; video: trailer for Synecdoche, New York)


I'm looking forward to xmas in the mitten. Last night I sat in Boise's smokiest bar and read a poem by a friend of mine. He's a Detroiter too, or close enough to count in the MTZ. The image of a figure standing outside a Woodward bar, watching the fleeting past in oil-stained puddles. Nothing can be retrieved or even properly named. And there are absolutely times for nostalgia, as much as I've evaded it. I want to walk across that scarred parking lot behind Jacoby's and feel bitter winter wind. I want my car to spin across the flooded interstate, soaking my tribe in gasoline and overflow. I want to blow my New Year's kazoo from the roof of the Jewish Park Shelton. I want to walk between the arguing deaf in the sharp-edged morning. I want to breathe in the smoke of structure fires, etched against the emulsive sky like the whole city is in my dreams. I want to steal things in a place where property means nothing. I want to chop firewood in the shadow of anonymous wealth wasted. I want to feel nervous and excited and go rigid in the abdomen walking from my car to the place I buy beer. I want to talk to Kazakhs or Albanians through bullet-proof glass. I want heroin addicts to crash their bikes in my driveway. I want ceilings to leak and basements to reek. I want my bars so fucking dark I forget who I came with. I want to look forward to someone driving long distance this weekend to sleep on my floor with me. I want to sit on my porch all day, getting slow drunk listening to psychopaths and making plans to do it all again tomorrow. I want to see the SWAT tank rolling up Trumbull as I stagger stoned gorgeous to a classroom with no windows. I want to make burritos from canned goods with no labels. I want to philosophize until the sun comes up and I'm asleep in the chair alone. I want to come downstairs vibrating with something, and have 8 other opinions on it within minutes. I want to see OneBeLo rock the mic every goddamn weekend. All these things, as clear now as they were then. Whatever the case, in three weeks I'm home. Hopefully I can still keep up.

Saw the above film yesterday. Like every Charlie Kaufman piece, there seem to be waves of appreciation that come on as the time since viewing grows. He is directing for the first time, and I think in some ways his amateur lens shows; but from a story-standpoint it is very unlike anything I have ever really seen. True Theatre of the Absurd. Strangely, the film feels like a week long. And not due to pace, but as a result of the lifetime the film contains. It takes place over the course of at least 30 years (probably more, it's difficult to tell), and the main character (Cardin) seems to have lost his grip on time. This is The World According to Garp gone surreal, the main character being among the saddest figures I've seen in a film. The many love stories of the film are each unique and true and classically rendered. The infinite self-reflexivity of the film's ultimate project is the best argument for the post-modern aesthetic one could ask for. I already like this movie more after writing the above then I did before.


Today, in applying to the University of Minnesota, I had to write 3 additional personal statements. One on my "career plans", one on "diversity", a final one discussing my "self-motivation". The first was brief, simple. The second was mostly about Detroit. I am a white male from the suburbs, yet I think I've gotten my dose of diversity. I appreciated the opportunity to write the essay on self-motivation, I feel I have qualities and accomplishments that a resume can not depict In my two school careers I have consciously avoided most extra-curricular involvement. I have no interest in padding my resume with anything, or spending time that does not feed the revolution in my head. So I'm a member of no organizations, societies, associations. I sit around very few tables and discuss nothing. There will be no greek letters on my tombstone or yours.

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