Four bottles. Three for later.

One

for

now.

Maribel? Where are you, Maribel? And where are the dandelions and where is the powder? I grow tired of this game, Maribel…

All classes for winter quarter 2004 are over. You would think I’d be as emotionally invested as ever in my continuing to edge ever closer to a life in post-acadamia. But I’m not. I don’t feel all misty and I didn’t go and have myself a celebratory cigar or anything of the sort. In fact, I wandered straight home and hit the sack because I’d got up too early after spending all night analyzing films that I own and love.

—

Things I did today that probably weren’t as nice as they could have been:

1. Didn’t return a magazine I borrowed from a classmate, even though this was the last day of class and they don’t come to campus often. I was too bored to put it in my bag.
2. Acted incredibly disinterested toward a friend’s visiting parent who was trying to tell me they were leaving. I didn’t even look at them or say goodbye, I just said, “Have fun.”
3. Didn’t hold the door for someone who obviously expected me to. Instead, I turned my head right back around and let the door slam behind me.
4. Told the guy at the DMV that their system was fucking stupid, even though he helped to look up my driver’s license record and tell me that the renewal had gone through.
5. Scared the shit out of two squrrels who were fighting over a piece of food-covered styrofoam.
6. Didn’t return an urgent phone call from a family member.

That’s not too bad, actually, for an entire day. I feel a lot better now.

—

I don’t feel all that healthy today. In fact, I feel distinctly unhealthy. I need to get back to living the way I have been the last few weeks, instead of living the way I have been this week.

I also need to clean up my space and get my papers done so that they don’t weigh on me.

And with your patience wearing thin, those Royals in the blue box cook you gently like they have so many times before on windy evenings when the lights shimmer and gloat, when the wind blows and your hair is all over the damn place so that you want to shave your head.

How many times have you been here? How many times, sitting in this seat, singing this very song, watching the wipers on the glass and the refuse on the pavement as you careen along, running from your memory, running from your pause. You are the forgotten boy, forgotten by your todays, forgotten by your tomorrows, forgotten by yourself.

All that you remember — all that you know is the taste of those Royals in your mouth and the chill of Minerva’s white touch on your cheek, pushing you along to God knows where. To Gods know where. You of the road, you of the battlements, you of the whining, whimpering many, you of the first floor club.

Alone in your box, you’re biding your time, counting the days until only your fallen mother and the friends you left behind once so long ago, on the playground, in the neighborhood, in the little red building of candy and songs know what. Twenty years after the wandering, twenty years after the bicycles and the graffiti and the laughter you are still here in the wind, you are still in love with your solutide, in lust with your solitude, grimacing and longing with the sound walls and the barriers and nobody

nobody

will save you.

You don’t want to be saved anyway. Those Royals are calling you. They’re calling you. And everybody else will be left behind to fade into the deconstructed cocaine black.

And for the first time
I’m telling you how much I need and bleed for
Your every move and waking sound
In my time
I’ll wrap my wire around your heart and your mind

—

I don’t care anymore. I don’t care. Take me! Take me, my comrades!

Joe Pine: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.
Frank Zappa: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.

—

Oldie-but-goodie
S(t)imulacrum(b)
Sartre
Homophobia

—

“Borderline individuals are so completely in each mood, they have great difficulty conceptualizing, remembering what it’s like to be in another mood.”

“People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.”

“Chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom. Someone with BPD said, ‘I remember describing the feeling of having a deep hole in my stomach. An emptiness that I didn’t know how to fill. My therapist told me that was from almost a ‘lack of a life.'”

“People with BPD are often bright, witty, funny… They may have problems with object constancy. When a person leaves (even temporarily), they may have a problem recreating or remembering feelings of love that were present between themselves and the other… Their lives may be a chaotic landscape of job losses, interrupted educational pursuits, broken engagements, hospitalizations…”

—

Fuck life, fuck liberty, and fuck the pursuit of happiness. Somebody lock me up, remove any blankets or artificies of clothing, and take away all of my hope.

Nothing in reality is so painful or destructive as hope.

Something good has happened. This has improved my day considerably. I found out about it via email, wonder of the modern age, food source for a hungry world. I have brandycoffee in front of me and I try a little to write a little about a little excitement.

Cheers to you all.

I’ve got too much work to do and I don’t want to do any of it. I just hope my driver’s license renewal went through and that I get it before 20 March because otherwise I’m gonna fscking go spare.

I was wondering: do other people have all of the same feelings as me, but they just somehow manage to bottle it all up really well so that they seem bored and tranquil all the time? I mean, do they get annoyed with my intensity because it threatens their ability to keep a lid on their own? Or do they just not have the same feelings at the same levels as I do, meaning that they get annoyed because they really think I’m making it all up or that I’m off my nut?

—

All in all, I think I’m in a pretty good mood this morning, although I have a lot of work to do before early afternoon. Right now I’m sitting in the basement doing laundry, because I am completely out of things to wear.

This morning I am thinking fondly about my significant other. I talked to her on the phone last night just after reading Hunger, so I was in that misty, hazy mood that you get into when you’ve just read an intense novel and are open to anything and everything and appreciative of all that you know and love. It’s funny how when you’ve been in a relationship for a while, the sound of the other person’s voice can make your night. At the same time, I’m getting very accustomed once again to working, thinking, walking and talking as a solo act. Graduate school will do that to a couple, I guess.

I have to call the Utah DMV today to see if my renewal will be accepted. I already called the rental agency, and they won’t rent without a current driver’s license.

—

Hunger: A fine little book. A moving little book. And yet somehow, it just doesn’t get to me on the same level as some of the others from the existentialist and proto-existentialist traditions. The trouble is that Hamsun’s books are full of consciously innocent people unable to avoid doing damage to others whom they also know to be innocent people; circumstance and absurdity are the evils that toy with peoples’ lives.

That doesn’t ring entirely true to me. Absurdity on this scale implies some subjective incongruity in the analysis of context. But if we are all innocent, and we all know this, then there is no subjective incongruity. I think rather than “we are all innocent” ala Hamsun, the more true statement is Dostoevsky’s sneering, if unwritten, mantra: we are all guilty, and circumstance and absurdity are really phenomenological manifestations of our own broken natures… Absurdity is not a force a priori, but rather is experienced as the conflicts between different elements of our natures (in the individual) and different natures (in the group). Absurdity is the reflection of our individual and collective guilt, in the mirror of our claims of, and aspirations to, individual and collective innocence.

Where Hamsun somehow fails:

“I talked at length about these burns which my soul had suffered. But the longer I talked, the more anxious she became; finally she said ‘Oh, my God!’ in despair a couple of times, wringing her hands. I could see quite well that I was torturing her, and I didn’t want to torture her but did so anyway. At last I thought I had managed to tell her the broad essentials of what I had to say. I was moved by her despairing look and cried:
    ‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving! Can’t you see I have my hand on the latch already? Goodbye! Goodbye, do you hear? You could at least answer when I say goodbye twice, all ready to leave. I don’t even ask to see you again, because it would cause you pain. But tell me, Why didn’t you leave me alone? What have I ever done to you? I didn’t get in your way, did I? Why do you suddenly turn away from me, as if you don’t know me any longer? You have plucked me thoroughly clean, made me more wretched than I’ve ever been. But, good God, I’m not insane. You know very well if you stop and think that there’s nothing wrong with me now. So come here and give me your hand! Or let me come to you. Will you? I won’t do you any harm, I’ll just kneel before you a moment, kneel on the floor right there, in front of you, for just a moment; may I? No, no, then I won’t do it, I can see you’re scared, I won’t, I won’t do it, do you hear? Good God, why are you getting so frightened?”

Dostoevsky succeeds beyond all expectations:

‘Water, give me some water, over there!’ I muttered in a faint voice, realizing full well, however, that I could’ve done both without the water and without the faint voice. But I was putting on an act, as it’s called, in order to maintain decorum, although my nervous attack was genuine.
    She gave me some water while looking at me like a lost soul. At that very moment Apollon brought in the tea. It suddenly seemed that this ordinary and prosaic tea was horribly inappropriate and trivial after everything that had happened, and I blushed. Liza stared at Apollon with considerable alarm. He left without looking at us.
    ‘Liza, do you despise me?’ I asked, looking her straight in the eye, trembling with impatience to find out what she thought.
    She was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say.
    ‘Have some tea,’ I said angrily. I was angry at myself, but she was the one who’d have to pay, naturally. A terrible anger against her suddenly welled up in my heart; I think I could’ve killed her. To take revenge, I swore inwardly not to say one more word to her during the rest of her visit. ‘She’s the cause of it all,’ I thought.
    Our silence continued for about five minutes. The tea stood on the table; we didn’t touch it. It reached the point of my not wanting to drink on purpose, to make it even more difficult for her; it would be awkward for her to begin alone. Several times she glanced at me in sad perplexity. I stubbornly remained silent. I was the main sufferer, of course, because I was fully aware of the despicable meanness of my own spiteful stupidity; yet, at the same time, I couldn’t restrain myself.”

—

I really gotta stop reading these kinds of novels. I like them too much.

I should probably try to gather up some breakfast and/or lunch. Something to keep me alive for a little while longer so that I can write my papers and make progress in the all-important Project 51. But I have no ideas and no determination. It’s another ten minutes or so until my laundry is done. I’ll wait until then; then I’ll gather up my PC, get back to work on the writing that I was supposed to submit yesterday, and try to find some lunch.

With luck, I will be able to submit my writing by 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon… Still early enough that I can’t really be accused of anything. Hopefully.

—

I have run out of things to say.

Yes, it’s a shock to me as well.

The worst thing you can give an exceptional child is a sense of shame. Exceptional people should not have any shame. Exceptional people must not have any shame.

Any parent who thinks at any point that their child should be embarrassed of themselves for anything… ought to be shot.

Hell, shoot everybody!

Remember when the Berlin wall came down and the Scorpions had a hit song about it? Were ‘we’ really as much more innocent then as it seems now, in retrospect? At the time, ‘we’ though we were jaded, post-Reaganite ‘computer-age’ people who had seen and understood all the movies the Brat Pack made. I was in high school. I thought I was very jaded.

It is just me, or is mass culture on some kind of an always-toward-more-cynicism trajectory? Really it is, and I think it’s the nature of capital that takes us there. Capital has no nationality and doesn’t give a damn about status quo. It’s all about the calculations, the maxima and the minima — both the micromaxima and the macromaxima and the microminima and the macrominima — of single columns of numbers. Capital has no culture and no history, no preference and no taste. It seeks to give us exactly what it helps us think we want — which usually roughly coincides with what it is maximally able to match to the limits of functional tastemaking at minimal investment with minimal risk.

And yet somehow, because of human fallibility, it never wins. Instead, we are always running from capital, trying to be ever more anti-consumerist, ever more sincere, more radical, less bought-and-paid-for. We are always trying to make sure that we haven’t yet sold out. I don’t think this is a political calculation, I think it’s human nature. I think it’s what simple people call ‘freedom.’ And yet, because capital is constantly performing the calculations, constantly engaged with the calculus, the base topology of ‘sold out’ continues to expand, to digest heretofore untouched regions of practice on its way.

So we get more extreme.

And because it depends on us for its existence, it gets more extreme.

Deep down, somewhere, we will always know that given the current state of things, for everyone to stop selling out en masse is tantamount to cultural and perhaps even physical genocide. So instead, we just continue to run, to hop half the distance to the boundary, which increases exponentially but is still within sight. But some day it won’t be.

I don’t know which is the correct answer. Is it a false dichotomy? Is there some third direction which renders the topology obsolete without at the same time destroying those of its inhabitants that lie at the margins?

Blah.

We get more and more cynical.

That’s all. Our parents thought they were cynical during Carter. But then they saw Reagan. We thought we were cynical during Bush I. But now look at us. What’s next?

I wanna hear that Scorpions song again.

It’s a uniquely Mormon perspective to believe that one has a “right” to live in a world devoid of sensory input that conflicts with one’s own personal value system. I think it comes from the Mormon doctrinal assertion that thought is reality; e.g. that if you think about killing your teacher, even if you don’t do it, then in the afterlife you will be judged as having murdered your teacher. Similarly, if you think about having had had sex with the first lady, then in the afterlife, fornication with the first lady will be counted among your sins.

Hey, people can believe what they want. If these crazy Mormons believe that watching a documentary on Jeffrey Dahmer will create culpability for cannibalistic acts in the afterlife, fine. But it’s that extra step that’s problematic: since Mormons believe that their salvation isn’t just tied up in what they do but in what they think and in what they see and hear as well, they develop the sense that they have a right to a clean, pure field of vision. They do things like argue for the “right to be free from free speech,” explain how a beer can on a billboard is equivalent to drunkenness, or things like this.

And of course to have doubts about your faith, even if you don’t ever voice them out loud or share them with anyone, makes you a heretic. To doubt is to have joined the army of Satan, and that is how you will be judged. But more importantly, to doubt and then spend time with others — even if they don’t know that you doubt — is to damn them as well, since (whether they know it or not) it is also by and as your associations that you will be judged. And so if you doubt, you endanger not only yourself, but everyone around you as well. If you imagine sex, you not only condemn yourself as a fornicator, but everyone around you as well.

Within the context of a group, it’s a particular kind of mind control that I don’t think exists in other “mainstream” religions. And it’s the sort of conditioning that makes dialog about faith impossible.

I always sit here and pound on blogs for two reasons. First, I can’t have someone next to me all day, every day to share my thoughts with (nor could I stand it if I did; but the thoughts are still there and they want out). Second, I’m always hoping that the mindless nonsense I generate will sound all cool and philosophical, like it does on Northern Exposure, and that I’ll learn from myself, solve all my problems by listening to myself, and be able to finally open myself up to life properly.

Unfortunately, neither problem is solved by this blog. And really, there are bigger problems I should be worrying about. Like the fact that I haven’t yet learned how to have patience, or how to appreciate and enjoy things that I know are beautiful.

—

Part of the problem is that somewhere inside, I’m still living on the playground. I’m still fighting all of the battles that I’ve already lost — that I lost as a kid. I need to stop.

I need to let it go.

—

You take me here from far
Up to the highest star
You took a part of me
No one else will ever see
And if I gave away
What I’m dying to say
I couldn’t give you more than this
I was born and it was bliss
I have died for a thousand years
Tasted salt of a thousand tears
And your kiss was almost gold

You took me near you took me far,
Up to the highest brightest star
You’re giving back the exchange,
We got something going on
And if I ever fell from grace
With every living human state
Well I throw the whole thing down
And I take to higher ground
Cast a spell on my surround
Time to think on what I found
This is almost gold

—

Yes, I am still sitting here adding to this entry. I am in the basement. I don’ t want to work. I don’t want to go to the library. I don’t want to go and hang out in my department’s lounge or anywhere where I will know anyone.

Anyone I know will try to talk to me. I’ll smile broadly, make witty and urbane chit-chat, and gradually edge toward the door without realizing it. Then, without warning, I’ll make an excuse about having to make a meeting or being late for a class or needing to do my laundry, and I’ll leave. All of this just in order to be free of a conversation that the other person is generally enjoying.

I know they generally enjoy it because people keep introducing me to other people and asking me to talk and telling me that they’ve told each other about me. So I talk. We all talk. We talk and talk and talk. It’s like a little mutual circus, like a little verbal game of twister. And I dislike all of it. Why don’t I like talking to people? Because most of them never say anything.

I like talking to harmir and aqueous because the conversation is usually real. It’s personal. It’s about feelings and life events and phobias and triumphs. Other people tell me about their advisors and morning traffic. I don’t even know them. How am I supposed to care about their advisors and their morning traffic? You can’t tell someone about your advisors and your morning traffic unless you’re already very good friends. If we’re strangers and they’re not going to bother to tell me about the last time they cried themselves to sleep at night or how their kid is an addict and they’re at the end of their rope, then it doesn’t interest me. They’re going to have to do better than that. This is 2004. We have the Internet and Cable TV that are full of cheap thrills, people crying in bed, and young addicts. And I can get them by just sitting on my ass.

What do I want from people? I suppose I want their souls in a little plastic bag up front, so that the intensity of the actual communication can match the intensity of the physical experience of having to chatter. Maybe for most people midnless chatter isn’t such a big deal, but for me chatter is hugely performative. It’s like being on stage, and I usually need a drink or a nap before and afterward.

—

The second book I ever wrote (also didn’t get published) was called “Every Kid Should Have A Car.” It wasn’t particularly well-written and I don’t think it could ever be published. But the point is that it was nearly two hundred pages long and I wrote it in the space of about eighteen hours.

That’s called figuring out how to channel all of your obsessive energy into something creative. I used to be able to do that a lot. Writing projects, coding projects, art projects, Web projects, travel projects… I was once wildly productive. Why can’t I do that now? I think the problem is that in the social sciences, there are only one or two things that I find interesting across the entire field. But as a graduate student at a major university with big loans, I have to spend my time doing social science projects whether I’m inspired to do so or not.

—

This entry is too long. I have to get some writing done today, but not now. I think right now I am going to go and try to kill the sunlight by closing my eyes in the center of my mattress. I have obviously not had enough sleep recently. I need to get out of town. Badly.

—

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell – The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

—

and the green trees
and my black heart
and the road began here
and I was forced to follow

—

Answer: I am a lucky bastard. BUT, I am a lucky bastard who is out of Alandia.

Jesus I can be hard on myself and others.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction — or so the wisdom goes. But sometimes instead, the logic should read that for every action, there is a framing dialectic, and within it, a complementary reaction. Rather than simply conservative, such dialectics are vectored and generative. And thankfully so, because if they weren’t, my life would be a lot less good than it is right now.

The point: Thanks for killing an hour. I’ll be more understanding. Let’s go to New Orleans.

Last post of the day, probably. I’m leaving the Regenstein for Harper. I won’t bother to get the PC out over there, it’s all down to reading now. Day’s tally:

Pages written: 9
Content grade: A-
Organization grade: B+
Theoretical completeness grade: C
Hours in this chair: 5+
Song I’m gonna have in my head next: Rocket
Number of stupid colon-terminated lines: 7 (incl.)

—

I wonder what life would have been like if I had never taken the Caldera job. I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t stopped seeing Lis. I wonder what life would have been like if I had moved to Portland. I wonder what life would have been like if I had gone into the Peace Corps instead of applying to grad schools. I wonder what life would have been like if I had gone to SUNY instead of Chicago.

—

—

I can’t really even get a handle on what life is like now, and I’m in the middle of it. Forest? Trees? Hell, I can’t even tell light from dark, day from night, me from anyone outside of me. I’ll be lucky if I can figure out how to get out of this damn library.

Maybe it’s just time to put some more hours into Project 51.

Did anyone ever doubt?

I know I didn’t.

What would be your future profession? by vyvyan
Name
Age
Sex
Education
Your future profession	The next Jim Morrison
Created with quill18‘s MemeGen 3.0!

—

aqueous: I think they’re coming to chitown, too. I gotta see’em somewheres this time ’round.

I finally made it to the Regenstein library at like two in the afternoon. Not good. I have far too much work to do to be getting here at all kinds of late hours. What’s more, I’m really, really fscking sleepy. Maybe it’s because I dreamed a lot last night. I never dream. I can’t remember what I dreamed, I just know that I did.

—

12 Reasons Same-Sex Marriage will Ruin Society
Smelly Kenyan given public wash
U.S.-backed Coup Spurs Terror in Haiti
Time for a Drink

—

There’s all kinds of whining that I want to do here about my pain and my hate, but it just isn’t kosher. I’m tired of whining. I don’t know what to do with myself. Things that should not hurt my feelings at all… do. For no reason. I hate that.

I apologize to everyone in the world for being such a miserable, cranky fuck.