do not threaten me . i have delusions of grandeur
do not threaten me . i think i am god
do not threaten me . i believe i am invincible
do not threaten me . i dream insatiably of death

1 wo ist der schluessel 2 wo ist der schluessel 3 wo ist der schluessel 4 wo ist der schluessel 5 wo ist der schluessel 6 wo ist der schluessel 7 wo ist der schluessel 8 wo ist der schluessel 9 wo ist der schluessel 10 wo ist der schluessel 11 wo ist der schluessel 12 wo ist der schluessel 13 wo ist der schluessel 14 wo ist der schluessel 15 wo ist der schluessel 16 wo ist der schluessel 17 wo ist der schluessel 18 wo ist der schluessel 19 wo ist der schluessel 20 wo ist der schluessel 21 wo ist der schluessel 22 wo ist der schluessel 23 wo ist der schluessel 24 wo ist der schluessel 25 wo ist der schluessel 26 wo ist der schluessel 27 wo ist der schluessel 28 wo ist der schluessel 29 wo ist der schluessel 30 wo ist der schluessel 31 wo ist der schluessel 32 wo ist der schluessel 33 wo ist der schluessel 34 wo ist der schluessel 35 wo ist der schluessel 36 wo ist der schluessel 37 wo ist der schluessel 38 wo ist der schluessel 39 wo ist der schluessel 40 wo ist der schluessel 41 wo ist der schluessel

—

hate kills
death liberates
i manufacture distance
i manfuacture parts
i hurt

Posting in the afternoon. Strange. The mechanism of the atmosphere is ticking and I am listening to it; I am receptive. I am increasingly angry at all of the things that I have purchased to help me; I react to my professors and my papers and my thesis with boredom, distaste and disgust. I asked for these things. I have been given these things. I would like to kill these things. Obviously they exist merely to upset me.

Me.

My head still doesn’t feel right. I am a hostage to myself and my ancestors.

—

I have seen this moment before.
Not willing to concede it and
not willing to countenance it,
I am a child of unimaginable power
and resolve;
No. In this, I am not alone,
the rumble of my consciousness
another note in the endless hum,
another wide-eyed moment in the —
.
But I am mine, pleased
to have had a stepping-stone,
and the scale of deliberation
is waiting on me.
I am mine.
Take the first risk?
No. Do you wonder if —
Ich gehe jetzt?
In the evening child,
it is a lonely,
lonely world.
Ich gehe jetzt.

—

I just don’t know. I really don’t.

Two sets of photos from spring break, take your pick.

One Two

Unfortunately, spring break is over and, at this point, long gone. I wish I could go back.

Wanna: more road, more shoot.

Some are not designed for it.

No matter, gonna walk like I won. Sun is out, dunno how I feel about that, but I got more winters to come. I wanna hit the road again. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter, I’m cooler than that, I’m cooler than Jesus and I can get what I want.

—

I’m fine and fit, I’m wasted, and I’m free
And everybody loves me lets me be

And I was born a long time ago today

—

I saw a woman collapse in front of me near Citi. She was dressed all in grey except for a crazy pink hat and pointy pink boots like the pied piper of Hamelin. If I hadn’t seen her standing a second earlier, I’d have sworn she was wax, laying there on the ground not breathing. When the paramedics came, I hated her for being there in the first place. I guess I’m going to hell.

If she had worn different shoes today, maybe everything would have been different.

—

Sunshine out to all my friends and fuck the rest of it, I only got a few more years anyway.

I wouldn’t call it liminality, but it’s something somehow akin… these spring/summer months that are always putting me at the tail end of the last thing and without a solid grip on the next thing. I’m bewildered in advance, lonely in advance, broke in advance, tense in advance, drunk in advance, just waiting for late summer and fall to come and tell me who I will be tomorrow.

You never want promises becuase they tie everyone up in knots, but without promises, all you have is the past and yourself, and you often fuck it up because you lacked the patience and faith to follow what you thought you knew… all the way through.

Cryptic, man, tres cryptic.

—

So I could have really turned myself into a scholar here. There’s a conference or a speaker or a panel or a referendum or a symposium ad infinitum nearly continously, three before breakfast, twelve brown-baggin’ it at lunch, and thirty-six with free catered dinner every night. There’s umpteen libraries and Marshall Sahlins is like my preceptor’s best friend or something, I hear he goes and hangs out over there and pets the dog and watches basketball all the time.

What did I do with it?

Not much. I don’t know that I ever bought into it. I always told everybody that the things in the world that I really wanted to do were, in no particular order:

• Travel a lot.
• Write a lot, preferably something helpful for humanity, though what exactly that means isn’t quite clear and the premise itself is deeply flawed.
• Take pictures a lot, preferably something beautiful to humanity, though what exactly etc. etc. etc.
• Learn to surf and learn to play the guitar.
• Open up a little bar somewhere, thereby cheating socially and help fifteen or twenty people get drunk or at least have a place to come when they’re down for the rest of their lives.

Damn fucking grand, ain’t it?

I don’t know that plans have changed that much. I’m just a little older. It’s like I have to do all this other shit first, though, to prove to the world (and to myself) that I’m theorizing it all properly and that I really have tried some of the other alternatives and found them as wanting as I’d predicted them to be.

Whatever, I don’t know if I even really mean what I’m typing right now.

I am a really, really good liar. Which is a shame because in general, it’s a talent I’m wasting.

Anyway… Yes, buildings around here really do look like that. Yes, that is the building in which The Pub lives.

—

Ghosts of people I have been
Come around and shout “obscene”
Ghosts of things I’ve said and done
Come to haunt me, watch me run

Everybody I know is falling apart
Everybody I know wants to die
Wants to find

—

I’m gonna go to The Pub now. It’s after six in the evening, but it’s light as day outside. Does that make the universe or our cultural-linguistic heritage the bigger liar? Or maybe I just don’t understand the nature of truth.

D’oh. You wander around for half an hour in shit, then you trip and stumble onto the profound.

Beer time.

I am a bad student.

This is because I do not give a damn ’bout academi-ah. I am ready for the next thing. I am ready for the next thing. I am ready for the next thing.

I try to decide what to write a travel feature on in the great city of Chicago, Chicago, Chicago, with which I am not familiar and in which I do not enjoy an infinite amount of time to, as it were, travel. By trian, by train, by train goes me and thus goes my writing, assuming for the moment that it gets done, done, done.

From a multiplicity of ideas comes nadaboys and so I have a bit of this and a bit of that and Ora calls me a rock star, a moniker for which I am grateful, but to which I am not entirely faithful.

Kill, kill, kill-oh! I smile!

For everyone who’s asked me about why the left believes that the U.S. dollar is currently being held up by currency speculation and debt assumption by other countries with whom we trade, largely in the interest of simply keeping trade going and enriching a concentrated body of capital holders that transcend national borders… there’s finally a reasonably good write-up in a semi-mainstream press article called Debtor Nation.

Wow! First topic post in months. I can remember when my blogs were 75% topical. Oh well.

Off to The Pub.

It’s one thing to try to explain, but it’s another to have lived it; to understand. Harmir: I know you understand, my friend. Jesus, it’s all gone on forever already. People on the outside always think they understand, but you can see that they don’t; it’s a conceit and little more.

—

The world is full of so many beautiful people, yet only a few of them will ever find their way into your life, and once they do, it won’t be long before you lose track of one another again. Then later, you’ll remember them and wonder what’s happened to them, but you won’t be able to track them down… and if you do, they won’t be the person you were looking for.

—

Things on the near West Side I remember fondly:

• Chapman
• O.P. and the Glendale Plaza
• Independence Day Festival
• Knowing you were in TCG territory
• Basketball at the Police Athletic League
• The Hook
• The International Peace Garden
• The alley that ran between the circle and the Glendale/Montgomery neighborhood
• The tracks

Things on the near West Side I don’t think fondly of:

• Fighting
• Josh Boyd getting killed in a drive-by
• The shitty Italian restaurant on 9th
• When O.P. got shut down
• The Mormons
• Run-down UTA Routes 13 (9th West St.) and 17 (Poplar Grove)

—

Nearly done with Project 51. May finish up tonight. Best beers at The Pub so far: Aventinus Eisbock, Duchesse De Bourgogne, Three Floyds Behemoth, Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, Ommegang.

—

The thing that I didn’t expect about graduate school was the sense that I am less connected to the rest of the world, rather than moreso. It takes a lot more effort to maintain some level of awareness here; if you’re not vigilant for a couple of weeks, the “real world” leaves you behind. I shudder to think how odd and isolated I’d become if I were to live here for a decade or two, working as hard as the Ph.D. candidates do.

Sometime, years from now, I’ll remember what it was like to be me today, this morning… and I’ll want, desperately, more than anything in the world, to be here again. But there will be no way for me to come back.

Out the window, they’re walking in the grey. They’re talking and they’re smiling and they have somewhere to go. Inside, we’re sitting in yellow. Some of us are talking and some of us are smiling. Some of us are somewhere we went, and some of us don’t know where we’ve been.

They’re on the table: my clipboard, my beers, my phone, my pen, my ashes. It’s my little world, in my little circle of lamplight, apart from the rest of us, just like the rest of us. Behind the bar, they’re getting ready for trivia night, for the crowds that are gonna come and have most of the answers, lose some of their cash, like they’ve done since time began, as far as I’m bothered.

It’s not like I’m gonna join in.

I’m going over to the other side. I’m gonna betray. I’ll be outside the window. I’ll be walking in the grey. My feet’ll be as large as life in the window, passing by, purposeful. My feet’ll be carrying me, fast and loud and twenty-something.

Then I’ll get where I’m going. There won’t be anything for them, or me, to want. We won’t be grey and we won’t be yellow; we’ll just be. We’ll be.

Maybe I’ll do what I’m supposed to do — the work I came to do.

Or maybe I’ll sit on the step all night, lighting cigarettes in hope of seeing friends.

—

I live in the now. I can tell it’s the now because it’s made up of a bunch of things from the past and a bunch of things from the future.

I’m not anti-society, society’s anti-me
I’m not anti-religion, religion is anti-me
I’m not anti-tradition, tradition is anti-me
I’m not anti-anything, I just wanna be free

you’ve been having a lot of problems you’ve been going off for no reason and we’re afraid you’re gonna hurt somebody we’re afraid you’re gonna hurt yourself so we decided that it would be in your interest if we put you somewhere where you could get the help that you need

—

—

god bless renderfux

I am a nonbeliever.
I am a nonbeliever.
I am a nonbeliever.

I am devoid of options; devoid of agency. It is all over for me. I do not believe.

I will not believe. Forever, I accuse.

When you’re younger, you’re more open… always trying to be understood, always feeling justified, a kind of righteous indignation combined with longing. But life has a way of closing you off as the years go by. You begin to realize that openness makes everything worse; people don’t care about you, the internal you, even now — and they’ll care about you less once they know how you feel… what you really look like. They may even get angry at you about it. They may even hate you for it.

So your feelings become more and more your own, less and less connected to anyone or anything, just as you yourself are less and less connected to anyone or anything, knowing that everything you think and everything you feel is inappropriate, selfish, immature, unhelpful, indulgent. You don’t have anything to say to the world; you are consumed by the things that you can’t express and there’s no room in your heart or in your mind for anything other than you and the essence of you, which you know to be inappropriate, selfish, immature, unhelpful, and indulgent by the world’s estimation. It is the essence of you that only needs, to the point of offending everyone… that has learned that to express your need is to ensure that you get less of what you need, and that to continue to express it even then is to eventually get none of what you need.

At length, it is yours and yours alone… all of it. You as you, as you know yourself to be, cease to exist in their world — an impossibility that the rest of humanity is unwilling to try to reconcile, in the efficient nexus of society’s function. They can no longer offer you as you anything, and you as you are really worth nothing to them anyway.

That is when the lights flicker, like aging neon, like a broken tube.

—

Inside America’s Jenin
Iraq As Vietnam
Vietnam Vet Sees What Bush Doesn’t
American Propaganda Revisited

—

I remember
Watching them go round
round and round
Always where I wanted
gone are the days
I remember
running with the breeze
cool overcast
   and the green trees
   and my black heart
   and the road began here
   and I was forced to follow
I remember
Standing in the field
In the dark

—

“Nothing has changed… everyone just has long hair now.”
   — John Lennon

“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something. Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.”
   — Albert Camus

In Tamil and in the Tang… my seagulls are the separation, the seashore. People here don’t like California ‘gulls. They don’t like the sound they make, their wild wailing, flying south. They are never staying, in Chicago, in Salt Lake City, in San Francisco. They’re grey and white, and they live in the air.

I know the way, know the way, know the way, know the way.

The thing that has disillusioned me about academia more than anything else:

Attending high-level “workshop” classes full of what are supposedly some of the very best Ph.D. candidates the world has to offer and watching twenty-five out of thirty make fools of themselves by vocally discussing an argument that they obviously didn’t understand or read closely in the first place. More importantly, repeatedly watching the five people who do follow the thrust and form of the argument, and the professor, who also does, say nothing in the face of a vocal discussion — among excited pedantic twenty-somethings — that is founded on such utter misunderstanding. More importantly still, those rare occasions on which either the prof or one of the clear-headed students actually decides to step into the maelstrom and try to rectify the misunderstanding/misreading, only to be either essentially yelled down by the vocal group, to be lured into descending into irrelevant minutae, or to be unable to effectively master the mechanical aspects of verbal communication necessery to clarify the argument for those who are lost.

—

You can do more good writing books from outside the academy, whether monographs or novels, and you can do more good attending protests, events and party meetings. These “thinkers” are all thinking to themselves; they aren’t really listening to, or understanding, one another at all.