Four in one day. I think that’s a new record. Should I just take the Prozac already? SSRIs seem to be more socially acceptable in our western world than honesty or actual coping. Methinks a lot of people been drinkin’ the Kool-Aid. Or perhaps I really am a maniac who doesn’t belong in urban settings. Blah. Four in one day.

—

For everyone who ever doubts… Things that make me happy:

• Water.
• The open road.
• Seagulls, especially the flock on and around Egg Island.
• A really high quality first beer of the night.
• Poetry and readers of poetry.
• From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.
• Classic films.
• My old friends.
• My girlfriend.

That oughtta keep ’em busy for a while.

When you hear some people speak, it puts you on the verge of tears and thinking of your mother or your grandchildren or something. I wish I could do that, but I can’t. Most of the time I can’t even write poems, much less speak in them.

I spent the morning trying to find my past, but I didn’t find it. There were some old discs with photo scans that once existed; I looked for those, but I didn’t find them. There were a couple of notebooks around that I used to scribble in. I looked for those, but I didn’t find them either. I read some old email from a few years ago and some reasons I’ve jotted down for hating ex girlfriends (usually written just after they’ve dumped me). I keep those files on hand in case I should ever be tempted to forgive any of them someday.

For a few minutes, I was making a mental list of hats I’ve owned. My memory of my own hat buys goes back to the baseball field in the summertime on the west side. I wasn’t a fan of baseball or anything, but once, for a week, I had a red batter’s hat. I think it was a batter’s hat, anyway. It was hard and covered one ear.

—

November 26th, 1999 — “I’m sure that the dreams will go on for a very long time. But it’s too late now. It’s all over. My mind just doesn’t know how to approach it, so it comes in brief flashes of consciousness. It’s going to be a long road back to Salt Lake City. It’s going to be a long road back.”

July 24th, 2002 — “Above all, I need to remember: you can’t cling to things. Just let them be what they are, remember them as they were, live in the moment, and try to be happy that way. I am somewhere in New Mexico right now. The journey has gone on forever already.”

February 10th, 2004 — “I don’t know what the future will bring. It seems oddly open… Reality is a strange place. I don’t know if this is the end to this diary or not. If this is an end, let me assure whoever is reading: I lived a reasonably interesting and full life with some deliriously happy moments and some horrible ones that seemed as though they’d swallow me up. In the end, I died like everyone else — leaving only a few little things behind me.”

—

It’s that sad sense of inevitability, of the winding down of the things you love… it gets you in the stomach and you have a hard time breathing, after. I’ve hated being alive as long as I can remember.

To the self:

These are the days of your life. You’ve had a few thousand; you may have a few thousand more.

Then you’ll die & it’ll be forgotten. Whatever you did will be trivia; whatever you didn’t will be lost. That’s all.

** time is passing

I have spent All Day watching it pass once again.
I have counted the seconds.

they have been blue i wanna

live

—

i am not manifest how do i get manifest i am not visible how do i get visible i have been working too long too long too long without result without impetus i am dreaming dreaming on my way toward the east on my way toward the next one on my way toward the great lake where the deformed seagulls sleep i wanna i wanna live but i wanna i wanna breathe no alienation none can take the ticket none can take the place i am sleeping on my way i am screaming on my way toward love’s labor spent toward lost labor spent toward indenture under the fist toward unite unite unite but in the meantime it’s lenses and they tell me what to see like i told her what to see and none of them were ever honest just none none of them were ever honest either glass to flesh flesh to fantasy fantasy to decay no moral mess any longer post-darwin atheist amoral love fest flat world of unknown and unwanted

but nevermind

_ am on _ way and in the _ are going to the _ and to see the _ like fresh coffee in seattle on a _ day where the milling vermin and the pike are the _ that run the gamut on the road between the _ and the bc highway where everything works and everything is clean and the hotel rooms are for us

for us

—

what . happened . in . europe

—

On January 8th, 2004, Dawn Golby’s worst fears and premontions were confirmed when she found out that her son was indeed dead in Iraq, just as her premonition had suggested.

—

—

aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I hate it when you’re all happy and protogasmic and then suddenly you remember something that you didn’t know you wanted to forget and it all comes crashing down around your ass and might be public like when you knock over a store display and fall on the products.

So I have this class at 9:30 and I have to be there on time and with an essay in hand about why I need to take the class. Why? Because the professor wants to “pare down” the enrollment — he says he listed the class as a twenty-five student maximum, but the university allowed forty-five students to register anyway.

So I drag my ass out of bed early in order to make it to campus in time to email the essay to myself and print it out using library computers, for which I have to pay. I walk fast to be sure to give myself ample time. When I get to the library and walk in, I notice that people are looking at me funny and I smell. Instinctively, I look down at my boots.

Yes, kids, either some idiot lets their dog out loose all the time in the city or some idiot takes their dog for shit walks but without cleaning up the shit. Either way, it’s now on my boot. I rush back outside and start scraping at it with random sticks and depositing little mini-shits all over the pavement and sidewalk. Then I do the “boot cleaning dance” all over the library’s front lawn. It’s all eating precious time.

Finally, I have a reasonably clean boot and I’m gambling that the stench has been minimized. I go inside and email the paper from my laptop to my university account, in Acrobat (PDF) format — an international de-facto standard. The university itself uses the format for innumerable types of documents, and as students we are more or less expected to have it on hand.

When I try to open the file on the print-capable library PC from within my university email account, I find that the university doesn’t support Acrobat format files on the print stations. Whaaaaaat? So I have to go back to my PC, open up the file again, re-save it in a less portable format, and repeat the process. Whatever. Five minutes later, I finally have the job submitted. Now I just have to insert my little red payment card in order to get the print.

So I insert my card and try to print the job… but the printer is out of paper. Shit, folks, it’s 9.00 AM on a busy weekday in the research library of one of the “top twenty research universities in the world,” and the printer is out of paper. No problem. I open up a nearby printer, take half the ream of paper out of its tray, and start loading it into the printer I’m trying to use.

“Hey!” comes a voice, yelling all the way across the main floor of the research library. “Leave that alone! You shouldn’t be in there. I’m gonna load the paper up if y’all can just wait a moment. You haveta be trained on this stuff before y’all go opening it up like that.” An obviously incredibly educated African-American woman in what can only be described as an I wish I was a professional suit that doesn’t actually fit and looks like a sitcom joke is chastising me for loading a ream of paper into a fucking laser printer. “Leave it be for a minute and I’ll get some paper in it.” By this time, she has made her way across the room, removed the paper I’d just inserted, and put it back in the other printer. I look at her for a moment and take a seat next to my notebook PC.

It takes her five minutes to read her little instruction card, open a new damn ream of paper, and stick half of it into the printer. Jesus.

Finally, at length, at great length, she’s double-checked her little card again and she shuts the tray. My print job comes out. I take it, bow at her, and go back to where my PC is sitting. It’s nearly time to walk to class, anyway — the class that I had to write the admission essay for — the one with forty-five students that was supposed to be limited to twenty-five, that the professor is going to “pare down” — starts at 9.30.

I think about checking my email before I pack my PC back up and head for class. At first, I decide not to do it — even though it will only take a second, it might make me late — but then for some reason, almost on a whim, I decide to check it anyway, since I haven’t checked it since about midnight or 1.00 AM last night. Good thing I did, because the professor of the class I’m going to attend in just a minute or two has sent me an email:

“We are meeting this week in Wilder House at 1:10…

1.0 oz Alandia Boheme
1.0 oz Chartreuse (Green)
0.5 oz Jaegermeister

Add 1 ice cube and Kava power to taste; stir gently.

—

momma, I’m not too young to try
we kissed, we hugged, we were close
very, very close
we danced in the sand
and the water rose – higher and higher
until I found myself floating – in the sky
I’m sorry mother, I’d rather fight
than have to lie
if you want me to
I will be the one
that is always good
and you’ll love me too
but you’ll never know
what I feel inside
that I’m really bad
cross my heart and hope to die,
I can not tell a lie

Folklore
Let’s Make Enemies
Linux Kernel Swear Counts
Never Forget
Habaneros of Texas

—

Most frustrating thing about I-House: the damn mail system. FedEx delivers something in two days to the front door of the place. Now it’s lost somewhere in the I-House mail system. I go downstairs: “I received a package today from FedEx.” The lady seems unimpressed, so I suggest: “It’s here, I know, I checked the Web site.” She looks reluctant, so I start to walk toward the mail room and she finally gets up and follows. When she opens the door, it becomes clear that there are several mountains of packages inside. “We have someone coming at six to handle the mail,” she says, “maybe they can find your package. But don’t come at six; they’ll just have started then.” So I ask when I can count on my ‘You have a package’ slip turning up in my mailbox. She tells me in a couple of days, give or take.

Not to mention that once I got someone else’s package in my box.

Damn I-House mail system.

They’ve been grinding all day, too. Bitch, bitch.

—

How can someone not be impressed with blogs? They’re the most creative, most personal, and most democratic form of communication ever invented. Until we all get frontal lobe implants, they are the collective.

Or maybe deep down somewhere, I’m still an anthropologist.

—

So I kept telling everyone that once spring break was over, I’d start fixing and enhancing stuff here. Things I accomplished today with the blog:

• Fixed the comment posting form so that now it’s in two floating divs instead of with a sidebar dragging its ass behind.
• Fixed the search results form so that it’s intelligible instead of a river of shit.
• Fixed the formatting in the character pages. As we (hopefully) add some more folks, this will become more important.
• Added a random archive snippet in the sidebar, just to keep the past interesting.
• Fixed the headers so that they’re not all sever-side includes, since the host won’t SSI CGI-generated files.

Next: figuring out some way to change the black background while keeping it black.

—

I got somewhere to be. I gotta go. I’m gonna down some Jaeger quick, just to be facetious.

—

Gotta love it.

Gotta love it.

Got up early to drag my ass to class, but learned shortly thereafter that I was two days early. What was I thinking? Probably about the fish pond full of AIDS awareness ribbons by the thousands, or maybe about the paltry royalty check that frustrated the hell out of me.

Time to hit the union hotline and find some work, methinks.

—

Fuck. Secrets. I can’t stop obsessing. Fuck.

The half-neon sign is either a metaphor for death or an allusion to deco-retro film fantasies. Moses, not one of these, was on in the laundry and there was a small crowd standing around watching. I hung around for a moment and remembered my exam on the lineage of kings years ago; I was stuydying for it for hours in from of the student services administration and flirted with some freshman girl for a while. I can’t remember if that was before or after they tore out the “freestyle fountain” and replaced it with the ugly new UMFA.

Since I stole the socket flourescent and replaced it with a blue bulb, the room is darker, more like the space I used to have, though not as colorful, and without as many things hanging all about.

I never look like myself in person, and I never look like myself in pictures, either. There’s a reason for that: there is no self. It’s a trick.

Time to self-medicate and write something.

—

Same old, same old. You’d think I would be used to it by now. I suddenly remember Heather and her pride at winning the pissing contest. I also remember walking twenty-two miles to buy oil on the most occult night in living memory. Invisible triple-six pirate dreams on the giant crosses, just past the altar by the Nephi exit. Harmir, do you remember the Cuneiform and Greek characters in the tar that night? Odd shit. Truly odd. God, that was a long time ago. Blah. Twenty-two miles.

Same old, same old. Gotta get my laundry; gotta get a drink.

Secrets.

Nothing in the world triggers my obsessive tendencies or stings me so much as when people can’t or won’t tell me about something that I know exists, that I know they know. It drives me to distraction; it gets me with that sinking feeling that makes me want to drink until I don’t exist anymore. Right now I am nursing two unknown secrets.

I know exactly where this all comes from.

It comes from McFarley and the lead pipe; I’ll never get over it as long as I live. I wish I had managed to bash his brains out all over the pavement. God knows I tried. Maybe then I could live with not knowing things. Or maybe then it would be a hundred times worse, I don’t know. But what chance can a five-year-old have in such a situation, anyway?

Forsyth and Failner, I would like to kill you both. I wish you both nothing but ill and hope you get everything you deserve. If you were to read this, you probably wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about. It probably never affected you at all.

But I know.

I know.

And for twenty-three years, I have remembered everything about it in ridiculous detail.

—

We’re getting older, the world’s getting colder;
for the life of me I don’t know the reason why.
Maybe it’s living making us give in;
hearts rolling in and taken back on the tide.
We’re balanced together, ocean upon the sky.

So I’m in The Pub and it’s packed with prospective students drinking for free. I recognize the excited/confused faces, the plastic cups, and the pitchers of the cheapest beers on tap that are everywhere.

I was just one of these people.

I mean, it was like ten minutes ago that I was visiting this campus and swearing I’d never attend this school, that I was going to S.U.N.Y. to study Turkey instead. Now I’m here, I live here, I know where everything is, I’ve been to The Pub dozens of times, I’ve got the world’s coolest girlfriend and the world’s most ex-marine student advisor and a littered-up and acceptably decked out room at International House, where I was once sure that there was no way to erase the blandness of the place.

Now I’m sitting here with a laptop, a book and a beer, not the lonely visitor but with a dozen friends I could call to join me for a beer but won’t because that’s how bored I am with them all already. Now the visitors look at me and think: “So there’s a University of Chicago student. Jesus, he’s in a bar and he’s got a book and a laptop. What a weird place. I wonder what he studies.”