If I were forced to select a ‘greatest song of all time,’ I would have to give serious consideration to Led Zeppelin’s Rain Song as the ultimate and essential victor… Seldom has such a beautiful and poignant piece of music been written, either by the classical composers or the modern ones.

I turned on the window fan and pressed my face against the screen and looked out the window into the darkness and I felt… the cold air, the blanket that surrounds the Earth… and I wanted to badly to join, to be a part of it… to reach out and touch that which is elemental, pure… But I can’t do it any longer. I don’t know where my creative self has gone. Sometimes lately I feel as though I’ve found it, but sometimes I feel as though my voice is still buried somewhere deep inside me, lost after years of ‘adulthood’…

All I know is that the autumn nights, already upon us, are too beautiful for words… I can’t help but cry silently, not knowing what to wish for…

Relief. I have been paid. This increases my ability to get work done significantly, since I no longer have to worry about juggling other things.

It has been raining today. It smells like September. I need better camera equipment to capture it. Maybe there is no equipment that can capture it, I don’t know. Probably that’s the case…

I know I’m going to be arrested sooner or later during this War on Terror, because this is exactly the sort of thing I’d say. I’m part eastern. I know exactly how much Americans hate people like me, I grew up dealing with it, getting into fights because of it. And now it’s so much worse! Since 9/11, I’ve been told on three separate occasions, point-blank, that I look like a terrorist. I take that at face value. Obviously, to a lot of white people, I look like a terrorist. I can’t imagine how much worse it must be to actually be from the middle east or to have an Arabic name.

I can just see myself in a situation where some jackass is harassing me and I shoot back with, “Yeah, and it’s a good thing you’re harassing me like this because naturally I’ve got a bomb and if you don’t stop me, I’m going to blow you up in the name of Allah.”

And then of course I’d be in cuffs, getting dragged down the street by the FBI asshole squad while I said under my breath:

“Shit… I guess I shouldn’t have said that.”

I have pulled three all-nighters this week, working all day as well. My total sleep, in hours, for the entire week is probably around nine hours so far. Nine hours since Saturday. On the upside, I have managed to submit quite a lot of material in a reasonably short period of time, at least by my standards. But it has been very tiring.

University was much easier.

This Iraq issue is about as banal as you can get… America wants its own way, America fails to acknowledge the sovereignty of other nations or of the UN, supposedly in order to protect its own soveriegnty, the American public clamors for war because the politburo’s full of oil men and the public’s full of jingoists, America wins initial war easily creating hundred-day-war number two, America experiences a thousand percent increase in terrorist activity from an ever-increasing range of nations and peoples over the ensuing decade.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Stupid, culturally-insensitive, disrespectful, violence-happy, pig-headed, cowboy-lookin’ Americans. Duh. Duh, duh, duh! Somebody give me a big, fat clue bat so that I can smash this GW-lookin’ crowd in the head.

The winds of September are a benediction, the caresses of three thousand souls wanting peace between brothers and peace among men, dreaming and breathing in the swirls of early leaves — a sad but noble essence forever ready to rise again. If we who are left behind forget — if we twist their final transcendence into a longing for war, we’ll have lost them utterly and ourselves as well, yet once more.

Peace to everyone. Peace. It’s a small planet. In spite of our greatest mistakes and offenses, we are and will remain — one.

And then there are those moments when you know that you feel different, but you can’t begin to determine whether it is actually better or worse that you feel. Confusing, confusing, I am not accustomed to moderation in feeling! I don’t quite know what to do with it. Have a cigar, I suppose, and wait for the sensation to go away!

No, no, I take it back… I do know what I feel. It isn’t better or worse, it is that same old feeling, just a little too transcendent for a moment or two. There is no better feeling than vulnerability. There is no worse feeling than vulnerability. There is no more ecstatic feeling than vulnerability. I love the world. The world does not love me. The world will never love me or anyone; the world is blind and driven, innocent and guilty at the same time, poignant but unfeeling. But no matter; the world is lovely anyway.

What did I write once, a long time ago, when I felt like this?

“It all seems very sad. Very, very sad. No wonder it sometimes rains. No wonder the ocean is beautiful…
No wonder people look for God.”

Thank you everyone, for everything. I will try to do my part.

I have been reading yet another bit of preaching about how there is no room for the postmodern thinker within the socialist or communist camps. But I have been recently reminded that the ever-so-discredited Sartre himself became a Marxist in the end, just as Marcel had predicted. And I am willing to become at least as discredited as Sartre.

There are too many talking heads. There are too many people. There is too much love directed at absolutely nothing. It is time to save the world, if only we knew how — if only we could be bothered!

It is raining. It is beautiful. I think this is the first rain I have seen in months, since sometime in the spring… the wind is blowing and the sound of the leaves and the smell of the changing seasons is truly intoxicating. I’d better finish this entry, I’m likely to lose power any moment!

It’s official. The greatest three albums in my collection are indeed:

The Jesus & Mary Chain, Stoned & Dethroned
Beck, Mutations
Mazzy Star, Among My Swan

Somebody needs to send me back to 1967.

All my life has been nothing but pain, from the months as an infant when my mother couldn’t hold me to the beatings and race hate to the “genius” label which kept me away from the other people and made me a curiosity unto myself, full of promise and nothing more.

All I’ve ever wanted is a place where I didn’t have to be afraid any longer… where I could be myself and nothing more or less… but there isn’t one, is there? There isn’t anywhere or anything other than this… this life.

I am so exhaused… so tired of everything. When do I finally get my ticket home, to where the snow is falling in November and the hugs are warm and I don’t have to ‘be strong and survive’ any longer?

How much longer can I be bothered to care…

Sometimes you have a way of making yourself hear what you want to hear… of making believe and then finding evidence to support your dreaming even though there really isn’t any. I am the king of this behavior. Right now I feel guilty about it… and two hours from now I won’t understand any longer what I’m writing about right now.

I sometimes think it isn’t possible for me to learn my lessons.

Don’t know how I feel right now. Relieved, in a way. But also sad. Still, it’s best to have things out and now eventually they can be well again.

On a separate note, it’s always fun to see all of the red ink that editors have left for you. Growl. Don’t ever do this, but I will now because just today it feels like a photo is in order. Aron the writer/artist, after weeks of grunge music and cheap booze:

So anyway, that’s how it is, on both counts. Add a little hollow to your day.

The song of the year once again is… Interstate Love Song. Can’t think of a single set of chords I’ve played more over the years. Everybody sing along now.

leavin on a southern train
only yesterday you you lied
promises of what i seemed to be
only watched the time go by
all of these things you said to me
breathing is the hardest thing to do
with all i’ve said and all that’s dead for you…

Where are you, ah gong? I am once again unsure of myself, alone and not understanding how it is all supposed to work… surely you know… what I am looking for now?

I’m too broke to medicate me. I suppose that’s a good thing…

Well, I’ve finally taken action and now I’m so unhappy it’s almost crippling. Life hurts.

So the Bush administration’s plan is to occupy Baghdad militarily for an indefinite period of time. The stupidity is breathtaking. Obviously, Americans hunger for a thousandfold increase in terrorist activity.

Or is it simply a backhanded genocide plan? Occupy Baghdad, anger the entire Arab world to the boiling point, then as terrorist attacks increase, use them as an excuse to ethnically cleanse the entire east of all those God damn heathen bearded darkies… Maybe we happen to “accidentally” nuke China and the communogooks while we’re at it? After all, they’re sort of close to Afghanistan and all that lot. They’re probably terrorists, too. Boom, boom, boom, and suddenly it’s brand new free land for white folks over half the globe.

I wouldn’t put it past ’em.

At some point, you begin to tire… You’ve been on this treadmill for decades and you don’t know what the aim is, where it’s going — you’ve never known, it’s always just been there to wear you out and tear you down.

You’re just waiting, trying to hang on for someday, which inevitably comes, when you’ll have… peace. When you’ll no longer spend your time looking in vain for something to look forward to or something to destroy.

What did I not learn?