Earth, you are a stupid fucking excuse for a world.

World, you are a stupid fucking excuse for an existence.

Existence, you are a stupid fucking excuse for a God.

God, you are a stupid fucking excuse.

—

Flashback to 1992:

Indignation Trilogy

I.

i am hate / i eat power
help me cleanse / give me colors

TO SEE MY GOD

give me brush

TO PAINT THE FEARFUL FACE

to put the innocent in jail
to writhe

i need you / my cross

II.

Take me / I need
I need
What your revolution gave you

What I need
Is what you got

Revolutionary
Revolutionary / You

You got the politics
You got the blood

Take me / Your worship / My love

More to the government
More to the cause

Feed me / my pistol
Political blood

Superdog

III.

Give your politician’s young blood to the cause
Dog
You eat your own
to gain your fat
I would shoot
Dog
If I wasn’t starving
Give you mind to gain solution
You value his riches

Give your politican’s young bood to the cause
How I love you
Dead on the corner
Dead to the world

—

Skill-wise, I’ve gained a lot since I was sixteen. But I’ve lost something, too.

I just wrote the thesis proposal that I will actually use. It’s everything Kevin wants — it’s theoretically grounded, it sets out to resolve an interesting and detailed social problem, and most of all, it’s impressive. More importantly, it’s everything I want — I’m really familiar with the topic (so it will be very easy to write) and I’m also very engaged with it (so I will be motivated to actually do it, and to do it well). It’s also something that’s relatively under-discussed thus far. There’s one dissertation out there on it, according to WorldCat, and it’s from a significantly different perspective.

Now when I write my thesis, I will feel like I earned a real graduate degree, rather than just a few classes here and there, kiss-ass, kiss-ass, kiss-ass.

Also, I just had a Duchesse De Bourgogne.

All of the best work I’ve done on this campus, I’ve done either at The Pub or in my disaster-area womb-like I-House room. And all of the best work I’ve done while drinking. This probably says something about me.

—

Tee hee, I have a hematoma. 😉

No, you can’t rub it, it’s mine. (And anyway, it’s still a little tender.)

Two flavors: good and bad. And somewhere after your mid-twenties they start to bore the living fuck out of you, but that’s all you get in life. That’s when you get tired and sigh a lot and hear all the pedants you ever wanted to kill explaining preciously and with peach flavoring that “you gotta take the bad with the good.”

Of course you fucking do, that’s all there fucking is, Romeo.

Some nights it’s so fucking mundane you can’t stand to see it, it makes you want to tear your hair out. Excitement is mundane. Hell, death is mundane. James fucking Bond is mundane. Everything’s been done and done again. I alone have made this insufferably trite entry about a hundred times already, and anyone who reads it is groaning already, but if I don’t do it yet a-fucking-gain right now, I’ll have room to continue thinking about whether there’s any point to anything. I am gazing at my navel. Look at me. I am fucking gazing at my navel. GAZE, GAZE, GAZE.

Malraux: “All art is a revolt against man’s fate.”

Frankl: “For too long we have been dreaming a dream from which we are now waking up: the dream that if we just improve the socioeconomic situation of people, everything will be okay, people will become happy. The truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what?”

Some sort of existential social upheaval that puts us all on the streets for the people of CNN-Europe to fixate on while they munch their significant others would not go amiss right now, it’d keep us all chattering like Artaud’s beggars’ teeth. Like a whiny, samey little asshole, I’m sitting here dropping the names of abused masturbators and waiting yet again, desperately, for nothing in particular.

Camus: “What is a rebel? A man who says no!”

Dostoevsky: “It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”

Kafka: “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”

Kierkegaard: “I stick my finger into existence. It smells of nothing.”

—

Setlist.

Rule.

—

I don’t know. Perhaps I am overplaying my hand? Now that I think about it, I’m sure of it. I take it all back. I am going to bed.

Secret U.S. Jails Hold 10,000
What Country Is This Again?
Unchecked and Limitless Powers
US Detention Facilities in Iraq

“…voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
 — Hermann G

There are indeed turtles in the lily pond.

Today I am certain that I have learned everything useful that can be learned at this school, with the exception of one thing. That thing will be learned in the leaving. It’s all legwork and menial labor from here.

Who are you, once you have decided not to be who you are?

Every time I think of the future right now I get melancholy, because I don’t know what it will look like, even though I have a definite idea of what I want it to look like. It’s a drag, because thinking about the future is all I’m doing this morning. I have to go to class in a moment… I don’t know whether it will be nice or whether it will really suck to get out of my little I-House room today. Sometimes this place has been like a womb.

Last night at like 3.00 in the morning I was realizing that I have to be out of here (papers done, shit shipped to storage, everything packed, on the train for a plane for my final exit from Chicago) in four weeks. The girlfriend basically leaves in three. I have to have my thesis paperwork finalized in two.

Of all the feelings in the world, bittersweet is the one I am least well able to survive. Individually, they are no problem; bitter I excel at, and sweet I can do reasonably well, albeit with a few cracks here and there. But bittersweet, I think, is the reason for every drop I’ve ever drank.

I take it back, at least partially. I just found a place on campus where I am pulling the latest Fedora beta down at more than 500k/sec. I almost have the first two discs already. Where is this place?

The Pub. Where else? And they say beer is bad for productivity… at this speed, I’ll have 1.5GB of FC2 ISOs in no time. Once again I discover that there is no better place to get work done.

—

Meanwhile, I am struggling with one of the papers I’m working on. It’s a chronological analysis of the transformation in social praxis resulting from the changes in the physical space of Salt Lake City’s Main Street plaza. Problem: I am not in Salt Lake City and do not remember the area between North Temple and 1st on Main well enough to write from memory. There is precious little information or data out there, apart from press releases and one dissertation on the relationship between religion and the transformation in the plaza.

Ideally, I could just wait until June, when I will be there. I worry, though, that Sewell, having already discussed this with me more than once, may be running out of humor. I also worry that this might be a humanities paper at its core, rather than a Marxist paper on power relationships and contested space. Bah.

—

I am running low on cash. It’s a good thing I got this project going, though it would have been nicer if the rush weren’t on until June. But oh well, I can’t fight Red Hat or their minions. Plus, I will soon be selling off some I-House shit (i.e. fridge, laser printer, DVD player, blah, blah), so that will help.

I think I’m gonna see if I can get a second project going as well, once June rolls around. No sense in doing things in a half-assed manner!

—

I can’t wait to be on the beach. I wanna smell the Pacific again. It’s been too long (a year already!) since I was there.

Here’s to the University of fucking Chicago, one of the hardest places in academia to communicate. Places on campus with wireless connections capable of downloading a full megabyte before losing signal: zero. Places on campus with wireless phone coverage capable of holding a call for more than a full minute: zero. Number of working mail servers, for when you do manage to get a connection: zero.

“Where are you right now?”
Sent to me: 2:14pm Received by me: 2:45pm.

“Drop it by my office, I’ll be here until 3:00.”
Sent to me: 10:18am Received by me: 3:24pm.

I’m paying for this shit. Where the fuck is all the tuition money going?

Most beautiful thing I ever saw: Golden Gate Park in the early morning fog on December 1st, 1999. Sadly, I couldn’t appreciate it then, and wouldn’t be able to until months later. Now I can appreciate it, though my memory of the experience is hazy.

Will I be there again soon?

Surreal and alone are the word(s) of the evening. (morning?)

Jesus, who pushed the self-destruct button?

Life is sad. 🙁

I’m too old for all this shit, or at least I should be. “Almost thirty,” but it’s hard for me to grok what that amounts to, I can’t even keep the emptiness out. I feel like I’m twelve.

Blah.

I need my conscience to keep watch over me
To protect me from myself
So I can wear honesty like a crown on my head
When I walk into the promised land…

The neocons think that we left-wingers a) hate America, b) think that terrorism might be justified, c) don’t believe that American deaths are worse than non-American deaths. Well… speaking as a left-winger… true, true, true. So what’s the point?

All kinds of sun, but I haven’t done my laundry, I don’t wanna do my work either, I’m thinking about the last time I was at a McMenamin’s having a beer-O and about the last time I was in downtown SLC buying veggie sushi-O and wondering about the freedom of automotive life-O and about the pollution that I always felt guilty for creating-O.

Confusing shit, and I can’t work it out, I’ll leave that to ppl more beautiful than I, like, everyone is more beautiful than I, like, I wish I was more beautiful than I, like, admiration is so everywhere in me. “As for me, myself, personally…” (i.e. a Cheshire moment), I don’t know, I just don’t know, I’m gonna freak, I’m gonna run and not stop running and tear my clothes off and run and not stop running and leave my feetprints on the beach and keep running and burn shit and keep running and drive and run and drive and run and I won’t stop I just won’t stop there’s too much in the balance for me to stop I don’t wanna see any of it I don’t wanna face the MBH boys I don’t wanna see the ST office ever again I don’t I don’t I don’t brown sand beach Danville Hercules reach I am the visitor and I want to stay in your bed please I haven’t got the courage to face the crossings in the central business district ever again just lemme feed the meter once more I’ll be back and I’ll never leave again never ever I promise I promise I promise I promise…

—

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

So today my IQ is higher than it has been. I opened up sr.c in 2.6.5 and hacked up kludge R/W for USB2 DVD-RAMs just like that in about twenty seconds, no idea why I couldn’t grok it before. So I was able to archive all the recent photos, finally.

Then I recoded my old leapdragon.net blog scripts into a new incarnation that uses a simple, book-like (i.e. plain text) entry storage format instead of a DB, is about 1000% faster, more fault-tolerant, and uses fewer than 100 lines of bash code — about a seventh the size of the previous incarnation — all while remaining completely automated.

If I had Tourette’s Syndrome like my cousin, I would have screamed out something obscene and broken somebody instead of inserting this sentence here. I wonder if he’s out of jail yet…

I have to download Core 2 and begin to analyze it for changes. I also have to get my shit written up for workshop… I was supposed to supply most of it last week (Wednesday, Friday), but I was preparing for the Scav Hunt stuff and just postponed it. Gonna fuck me grades overrr.

Looking at the prints I had made yesterday, I realize that the Sigma 28mm f/1.8 that I have used so much really has horrible chromatic aberration and needs to be replaced, mebbe with a Canon 28mm f/2.8. Why did I never notice this before? Oh well, live and learn and shit.

I don’t know if I’ll use the new code and put leapdragon.net back to work or not. I began to think about recreating the older shit when I was reading the 2000 stuff last night and realizing that it was significantly more interesting (and less long-winded) than anything I’ve posted recently. Maybe I’ll rebuild the templates for this blog using the CSS stuff I cooked up this morning when I should have been working.

Ramble ramble, grunt, grunt.

So now when people ask where I’m from, I won’t have an answer. In July I won’t live in SLC, I won’t live in Chicago, I won’t live in San Fran, I won’t live anywhere. There will be no answer. When they ask whether I have a job, I’ll avoid explaining by simply telling them that I did once but I went on a rampage and killed all of my underlings with a stolen AK-47 and I was on death row for a while but then I went to the halfway house because they were running out of space for the kids who got caught up for carrying. Then they won’t ask anything stupid of me anymore because they’ll know I’m confused and dangerous.

I have to get to fscking work, I suppose. A couple of friends called last night, but I didn’t wanna see ’em. It was a good thing because I ended up hanging with my GF instead. Not much time left.

Two weekends.

🙁

I’m fscking lonely already.

Went shopping for probably the last time in Hyde Park today. Every time I realize just how little time is left before I leave this bit of my life behind, I feel this undescribable mix of gratitude and sadness. One more chapter nearly written, one less chapter to live through before I reach the end… A place and a time that won’t exist again, for me or anyone. I can feel the look on my grandfather’s face before he died, and every now and then I begin to catch glimpses of what it meant — of everything that he knew he had seen.

Now I’m cleaning up the place… I’ve got to start packing, hardcore, this week. There won’t be time while I’m finishing up my final papers, looking for an advisor, trying to say goodbye to people, tying up loose ends, and launching a new writing project. I didn’t realize it, but Scav Hunt probably marks the end of ‘living in Chicago’ and the beginning of ‘moving out of Chicago.’

Last night, I could see my life like it was a film and I was watching it. I so love all of the places and the characters… but it can’t go on forever…

Every life is beautiful; every story is true.

Did Scav Hunt.

Item number 280: Turn Wine into Water in Bethlehem.

Four more states to the “visited” list: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York.

Even though I have slept a lot already today, I am going to bed.