I’m sitting in the Regenstein, working on all of the various and sundry projects that need to be worked on at the moment. On the fifth floor, you can see all the way to downtown on a clear day. Today it’s really hazy and gray, though, so instead the world seems to end at the edge of Hyde Park. Everything here is unfamiliar, foreign, and temporary — not a part of me and not belonging to me in any way. I feel the same way I felt the first time I visited this campus in March of 2003, early in the morning, the cab driver having dropped me off in front of this very building. It’s like I just got here all over again.

It seems like everything on this campus is unfamiliar today. It’s like I’ve been visiting for a short while, and now in a moment it’ll be time to go back to my “real” life — my real, confusing, meandering life — the one I don’t know what to do with. The University of Chicago and anything that happened here will be a kind of mystery to me forever, something I’ll dream about every now and then as I’m out there watching the years go by.

It’s all really brief and bewildering. I feel like I wanna yell “Wait for me!” at the top of my lungs, but I don’t know what that would accomplish.

My head is killing me, and I’m pretty damn heavy-hearted.

Now I’m going to shower, and then I’m going to go to the Regenstein to work.

If I’m not there in twenty minutes, you can assume I’ve had a change of heart and abandoned the cause.

I just want outta here. I don’t care about anything.

I am so full of chemicals that Pfizer would be proud of me… but I still can’t stop being sad. 🙁

Right now I feel lonely and old. There’s nothing I want that I can actually have and nothing I can think of that I really want anyway.

Life is

I had all this shit here but I don’t know what I wanna say.

There’s this blank space at the core of me, and then a bunch of conflicted moods that someone has constructed around it. Trying to fill the space up with something is pointless; it’s like a black hole or the Bermuda Triangle — anything that goes in simply disappears.

But of course I don’t have to worry because I know that emptiness and fullness, even embodiment as a manifest phenomenological state, are all just neurochemistry. Everything is real only because we have elucidated our ontology ourselves and declared them to be so. Existence and all discussion that occurs within it = tautology. There is too much university in me, and not enough beach.

I am lonely, but right now I should probably be alone.

Ennui.

I think I have added another tattoo to the list. That’s something. I have good friends and am in contact with my family. That’s something, too. My girlfriend rubs me on the head and smiles. That’s also something. My preceptor likes my thesis proposal. That’s definitely something.

If I work hard, maybe I can turn this train around. I’ll cross my fingers. Bottoms up.

U.S. troops fail to grasp the common practice of shooting firearms off in celebration and fire on an Iraqi wedding, yet another example of the degree to which our troops (and their leaders) are “fighting” phantoms and killing civilians.

There is much work to be done tonight, and I don’t feel like doing any of it. But it doesn’t matter what I feel like. As I get older, I realize that you don’t ever actually have to mentally “do” anything; so long as you were reasonably determined at the outset, you can simply watch time pass and things will somehow get done in the background, stealing your labor as they progress.

I no longer have a coffee pot in my life. I hate trudging around just to buy myself coffee, it ruins the flow of whatever I’m working on if when I think, “Ah, another sip just now!” I then have to disappear for half an hour. When I return, there is no trace of what it was I was thinking before the sip-need molested me.

I am a time whore, come to lick the boots of your moments. My tongue is as the tongues of many.

—
Erstes Geschoss:
Hier leben die Blinden
Die glauben was sie sehen
Und die Tauben
Die glauben was sie h

Jesus, I feel like shite. I gotta start taking better care of myself. Not gonna be easy with the schedule I got coming up, it’s insane.

Last night at like 4.00 AM I woke up and was going to make an entry about Harris, Klebold, Hezbollah and the SLA, but in my early morning stupor I thought better of it and didn’t click the submit button. Now I can’t remember what I was gonna say. I bet it was brilliant and now it’s lost forever. That’s why life sucks.

I don’t have the patience or the awareness for class. I tried to do the reading, honest I did. I was totally at the library doing it and everything. But I was too haunted by G.W. to concentrate. Hey kids, all you need is a parent’s permission to join the Behead American Presidents club. It’s a tendon-tearin’ good time!

I am the most melancholy person I know, so right now I want a swanky lounge martini and a beatles suit. Go! And cue the talking heads’ beret-and-strings cartel. Pretentious fuckers.

I have far too much to do and no time to do it.

And my girlfriend is going far away.

This sucks.

I have to leave on June 10th, 11th or 12th. I think my housing contract ends on the 12th.

My underpants have nothing to say today. That makes me sad. I was hoping they might stand up and shout a manifesto. Perhaps, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life!” or something along the lines of, “Time is never wasted when you’re wasted all the time,” or maybe just the plain, simple, classic, “Wash me.”

Crrrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooottttttttcccccchhhhh!

—

The fossil fuels burned in 1997 were created from organic matter containing 44—

I feel r e a l l y s t r a n g e .

Like nothing is real. I came back to I-House earlier from being out and I started working on setting up a VM or two so that I can do my summer work, but then by accident I got caught up reading old entries and then the lights went dim and the air got fresh or something.

Did it rain?

I don’t know who to call. I think I’m just gonna go to bed, things are off-color and I don’t want to try to figure it all out or wade through it, working.

There is too much hate in me, even after all these years.

It’s raining outside.

Who will be canonized next?

When it rains, it pours.

Maybe it’s going to be an interesting summer after all… or at the very least, a busy one.

My Newton has just about had it. I can’t decide whether to give up on this stuff altogether, snag another one even though they’re relics now, or get ahold of a Tripad or a Clio (more relics) again.

I’m starting to feel like I’m from another age. I must be almost 30.

—

“Housekeeping” is going around I-House inspecting rooms for bugs (uhm, or something). They knock. If you’re here, they ask if they can come it and look around you room. If you’re not, they use a key and enter while you’re not there.

I’m not at all comfortable with that. This isn’t supposed to be a hotel, it’s supposed to be a long-term living space. I’m gonna have to look at my tenant’s agreement again.

My advice to anyone coming to the University of Chicago: steer way clear of I-House. They make it sound nice on paper, but it ain’t that great, and you have to put up with a whole hell of a lot of shit because the place is just plain badly run.

What a fucking waste of time all of this is. Hello?! The moments of my life are ticking away and I am sitting here typing up a lot of prognostication about utter shite that nobody in the world really gives a flying fuck about. Papers? Papers?! Theses?!?!! Bah! Fucking waste of time.

All this waking time at work, and virtually none of it spent with friends, family, or anyone else we care about. Fuck the Adam Smith lifestyle and the rationalization of labor. Fuck it hard. Fuck capitalism and fuck state capitalism, too. There is an endless world out there and a limited amount of time. I will die someday soon and will have wasted most of my life as a curator and collector of exchange value.

I would give anything right now to be sitting on the beach with a twenty-four pack of cold stout playing card games or flying a kite or reading Proust. I would kill for the chance. I would kill to be driving up or down Highway 101 again. Life is short and could end at any moment and yet we spend all of our time doing what we know very well we would not be doing if this was our last week to live.

Take a moment and think about it: all of the times in your life, all of the memories that mattered to you… really mattered, really stuck with you as “the best times of my life?” How many are there? Ten? Fifteen? Maybe even less? And how many days have you been at work? How many hours have you spent making fast food or driving a truck or typing shit on a PC keyboard, waiting to go to your home and recover from it all? You can’t even count them.

Industrialized nations: YOU ARE WASTING YOUR LIVES. You have been programmed almost from birth to climb the ladder of consumption/labor-alienation, and you are doing it very well, even though at some point every one of you inevitably realizes that you’ve been had by a few people at the top of the ladder who don’t live at all the way that you’re living, even though they’re happy to encourage you to continue.

I think it is time for me to tune in, turn on, and drop out.

I am a fucking rotten social animal.

Heh…

Oh well.

On a sunny Sunday in Hyde Park, people are everywhere. Gardening, walking their kids+dogs, shopping, delivering, dancing, playing, yeah. I gotta get me some cash and some normalness so that I can join in and express my being, unalienated, all that. Or, to use UofC parlance, “and all the rest.”

Learning to trust people and to trust the situation, that’s what it’s all about. No matter how many times you get got, it’s better to be open to it. “Don’t you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder?”

I’m gonna open up the image shop again, maybe play it a little harder and little more upscale this time. We’ll see if I can’t roll some $$$ to top off my summer project. I wanna switch systems, this Canon stuff doesn’t have the dynamic range I need. Frankly, I suck with it. The Olympus E systems and the Fuji S-Pro systems have about 2-3 times the dynamic range that the Canon gear does. I get better resolution with the gear I’ve got now, but I’m just not getting good with it, I get a whole hell of a lot more rejects.

Scooter+Jinx now.

—

And I pointed to sky:

See the clouds?
See them follow?
All off-white and thick with the rainstorms of spring?
They cover our peaks and green valleys below them
in a mist that hangs heavy on the warm hills between —
on these days when the singing is louder than midsummer
on these days when all birds fly in spite of their wings.

—

Strange when you read things you wrote about old relationships, and you can’t remember who you were writing about, who you were dating anywhere near that time.

Worked all day, yet accomplished very little, and don’t really care. I am utterly joyless. I don’t know what I need or want. I don’t want to call anyone. I don’t want to self-medicate. I don’t want anything. I don’t want to be here. I want to be far, far away from here. I want to be four years old again, chasing my cousin around the grandparents’ house with a toy gun.

I want my dog to be alive again and I want to go sit with him in the back yard and watch the bees on the dandelions and feel the summer wind coming off the lake while I pretend that every kid’s dog lives forever.

I can’t find the right tune. It isn’t any Malaria tune, and it isn’t anything by Neubauten or SY or Alice or DAF, either. I have all this cynical, synthetic, bleak music. But I don’t feel bleak, I just feel… left behind, like when all your friends went out without you on a Saturday night and you only found out by calling around, and so you had to sit at home with your parents and admit that even though you were a crazy fucking teenager, you weren’t yet an adult. Only now I’m an adult.

I used to keep a really beautiful, natural aquarium with just a few small fish and tons and tons of space full of living plants for them to swim and play in. And I would watch them play. But Je—- killed them all or something when she moved. Now I feel responsible for their deaths.

I want to go back to the Britannia warehouse and sit around drinking with Harmir in our Bekins trucking shirts. I want to go back to Brookings and be stuck again with nothing to do, waiting for car repairs and wondering what’s happening in the outside world.

I want to stand at the edge of the Pacific and say an atheist’s prayer.

Old Host, I miss you. You always believed in me. What should I be doing right now?

I fucking hate dreaming and I want it to stop.

I don’t want to be reminded of what I really feel, just when I have been successful at denying and forgetting.

Trust no one.

Life would be better if I wasn’t so bright, if I didn’t ever notice anything. But I do.

—

The moment summer begins, I’m gonna radically reform the colors of this blog.

—

Right now, I am about as miserable as they come. I feel queasy about everything in the world. I didn’t feel any better while I was asleep, but at least I wasn’t so damn self-aware about it. When people have lied to you your entire life, lies are all you see anywhere, and they sting you like used needles.