Even though I clearly have some sort of minor headcold (no voice, but a funny cough), I am in a ridiculously good mood. Look at my life: I’m a working writer, I’m at a top university, I am nearly done with my graduate degree, I have awesome, loyal friends and an amazing girlfriend, I have some of the best gear around with which to indulge my only hobby, I have a nuclear family that can’t get enough of me, I just got back from one of those “college events” that most people only get to imagine participating in, and I have likely found a project for the summer already. To top it all off, I have remembered that I own the best Ziggy Marley song ever to grace the stones of Sesame Street.

Could things possibly get any better for me? Only if there was free orange juice in the I-House study area. I think I’ll go and look. The way things are going, I might just score there as well. The fortune cookies said that I would be happy. Fortune cookies obviously do not lie.

Maybe I am just manic, or maybe I am having one of those rare seeing-clearly moments. Either way, I’d like to offer this pat-on-the-ass to the entire world.

Our neocon overlords are asking for another US$25bn now, and plan to ask for US$50bn again in February, to “support” the war in Iraq? That’s US$200bn total to trash Baghdad for decades to come, lose priceless chunks of ancient history forever, discover there are no WMDs after all, blow 30,000 (and counting) Iraqi civilians to bits, “sacrifice” another 800 (and counting) American personnel, fill terrorist recruitment bungalows around the world for the forseeable future, topple a government in Spain (purely by accident, of course), turn all our allies against us, and make Dick Cheney rich.

And will Bush ask for more after February? Just how long is the United States going to “stay the course” in Iraq, mini-Vietnam that it has become?

Do the math, kids. There are just over 120 million regularly filing taxpayers in the United States. If you are a taxpayer, your equal individual share of this Iraq war, as an American taxpayer, would be nearly US$1,700.00. Good value for the money? Heh… You tell me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your tax dollars at work:

As you can see, we have collected a small pile of naked “evildoers” and have arranged them in such a way as to prevent them from doing further harm or ever starting any eastern-tinged restaurants in our McDonald’s neighborhoods — thereby protecting the world from ghastly terror and helping to spread American ideals like group hooded nudity far and wide.

This is why I do not mind paying taxes.

Having listened to it continuously from beginning to end some fifty times now, I am prepared to declare Perpetuum Mobile to be a rare Perfect Album. I decided to read some other peoples” reviews to see what they thought, and as a result, I have also found the rare Perfect Review.

—

Ariel Sharon thought he could fsck the people in the camps and the right-wing zionokes that used to love him in one clean, quick shot. Guess he learned his lesson. Ha! King George II thought he could fsck the oil-hogging bearded darkies and the wussy-ass pot-smoking wannabe-french leftists in one clean, quick shot. Guess he learned his lesson. Ha!

Okay, who else can I laugh at?

—

I typed this up yesterday for somebody & now it”s going here:

I don”t have exact quantities of anything measured out, it”s all more or less “to taste” anyway, so I”ve tried to estimate quantities for a “normal” quantity of soup (maybe half of what we made Sunday) but take it all with a large grain of salt.

Finally, slice 1/2 cake of firm tofu into long, thin-ish strips & add them as well. Then, thicken with cornstarch+water until it”s the desired consistency.

—

I dream of a career in which I can spend the entirety of my days trying to understand for everyone the essence of the sound of a fly moving from left to right and left again in a small, dark room lit by a single bulb. The joy of the fly is incredible and fleeting; it is unclear what the nature of the communication is, but I am convinced it exists.

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Debtor Nation | Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago | Translations of Tu Fu | Fruit Fucker 2000 | Wüßte | Father Ted | Canticle I: Inferno

—

As when the Sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams,or from behind the Moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.

—

“We spoke at some length.”

—

I was gonna move from place to place on this campus, accidentally getting some work done here and there, but it doesn”t seem to be working. (“There”s a place around the corner where your dead friends live…”)

Having lost all of the potential for a meaningful life when Nietzsche shot Jesus in front of the Dakota, and having now heard the eulogy performed live, I”m going to take the train downtown and do my best to look like a sad-story street kid with nowhere to go.

Happiness is sadness. I am in love with the concrete.

—

Is there anything for me on the planet, or am I like it”s smiling old father, waiting for it to visit me while I stain my fingernails and teeth?

Umpteenth blog entry of the weekend … Early A.M. … I’ve realized that every time I sleep I lose like eight hours and that’s a whole workday so I’m never going to sleep again … Up and down, terse and verbose, I’m all over the place this week, I swing like a pendulum, I’m losing it … If you’re gonna be this pretentious, you’d better have pink hair … Everybody is somebody else, nobody is you … If I think about anything I’ll just be sad again so I can’t think at all …

There is nothing in my life that is private from anyone. The entire world knows everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever thought, everything I do on a day-to-day basis (which isn’t, coincidentally, all that much).

Is this a bad thing?

Everyone else thinks it’s a good idea to keep a few things to themself. Actually, most people seem to think it’s a good idea to keep most things to themselves. I’ve learned enough not to volunteer sticky details in the middle of conversation over cocktails, but I’ll certainly go on at length about anything at all to anyone who asks, and of course there are things like the blog… and email…

Is my openness a cheat — a way of making everybody my friend, rather than having to maintain actual friendships?

Maybe I am just a narcissus who is rotten at secret-keeping.

—

The future: You’ll see it early in the morning, when you gaze far out over the ocean horizon. Unshakable, it insists that you can have everything you always wanted, if only you are good enough — if only you are deserving.

The past: You’ll see it late in the evening, when you gaze far out over the ocean horizon. Insatiable, it reminds you of every mistake you think you might have made, every possibility you failed to see in time, every face you know you won’t let go of.

The present: Look down at the sand; sit on your haunches and collect a handful. Let it run through your fingers, back onto the damp surface of the beach. Laugh a little at its wetness and stickiness. Dust your hands off and stand back up.

—

For twenty-eight years, a story has been happening just where I stand, and I have become very interested in it. Today in the story, there was army soup and sunlight, plus some happiness and some familiar resignation. There was an eight-by-eight area of city blocks where everything in this chapter seems to happen. I am told that the next chapter dispenses with this locale. Nearing the end of this chapter, on the sidewalk somewhere in these blocks, Stevie Nicks was singing and wind was blowing, almost like it was all taking place in the Windy City. The faint remnants of soup were in the air. People were going about their business. The thread of the story wound in and around all of them without saying a word.

As is always the case, somewhere someone or something was hurting. The story can’t always do so much to alleviate this, or even to find these characters and describe them in any depth at all. The story is long, but it is fairly narrow; it isn’t, after all, a history or an essay. That’s literature for you; it has its limits.

—

Adopted a stray beer; I’ll save it for later when a toast will be in order. All that’s left is to come up with a good one. Probably all that I’ll come up with is babbling nonsense. But probably, a long time from now, it’ll recollect as though it were a good one.

Or maybe, trite and pretentious but also sincere, it’ll simply be: “…to dreams.”

Sometimes you pace back and forth, desperately trying to find a way to stop time, or to return to yesterday, to relive what you know were some of the best moments in your life — moments that you’re losing with every tick of the clock — moments that will someday seem hazy and surreal at best.

But you always fail. You can’t go back. 🙁

—

So I’m done here… I’ll hang around and see what happens for the end of the quarter and mebbe finish my thesis eventually, over the summer or something, but I’m out in the second week of June. Tonight: packing and thinking. I’m going back to SLC; I’ll check on the car, see a couple of people, and hit the road to recover a little, hopefully with a book deal in tow, or if not, to work on one.

2003-2004:

• Said goodbye to the dot-com world forever, leaving my last job in “the industry” in the middle of the night on May 4th. It was hard, like saying goodbye to an old friend that you may never see again. I felt tight with a few people there.
• Spent an academic year studying at the University of Chicago.
• Finished my fifth book while there — the most successful one yet.
• Stood up for Allen at his wedding. Leal and I are the only two bachelors left in our generation.
• Helped to preserve and translate what would be the last words my grandfather left for the world.
• Fell in love, more in love than I think I’ve ever been.
• Drank my first $1,000.00 worth of Absinthe.
• Saw New Orleans, Nashville, Birmingham, and a pile of other places.
• Finally made the career decision I’ve been trying my entire life to make.
• Did some of my best creative writing ever.
• Made peace with an old friend.
• Made enough new friends to keep me busy for a while.
• Made relative peace with a lot of things from my past.
• Said goodbye to the person I fell in love with, maybe for a very, very long time.

That’s enough, isn’t it? It feels like enough. I don’t want any more, I can’t cope with any more. I need a few nights by the ocean with a beer and a couple of friends. I need to talk about old times and skip rocks and burn shit. Maybe I need a few dozen such nights.

2nd week in June. Goodbye, Chicago.

Another well-crafted ‘blog entry, the performance art of the lonely and antisocial, last refuge for interminable denial. I’m in denial.

5.00 saturday, the only customer in a small basement college bar. I listen to Blixa & co. tell me about the historicity of Deja Vu. I’m too tired to be visibly or audibly hurt. I’m quietly embracing an old, familiar pain that I both hate and love. If I were simply heartbroken, that would make things easier… but nothing’s ever simple. I’m not heartbroken. I’m in love, and I may see her for the last time ever sometime soon.

I’ll give up on swearing that I won’t do this again; I know myself too well. Sometime next year, once I’ve admitted to myself that I’m a lone traveller once more, I’ll do it again. Sometimes they pretend that it pains them to hear me say it; it doesn’t, not really. It pains me more to say it, and to realize it. But I’ll do it over and over, a collector of my own insecurities, a specialist in loved ones’ understandable and always “perhaps” temporary departures, each time more broken and less able to believe than the last, until finally, someday…

And rightly so — the object of my belief is nothing more than a myth. The object of my belief is a phantom from another era and another life.

Always they tell me they’re afraid of how I might hurt them; always, in the end, it’s me in the bar alone instead.

But believe or no, I’ll do it again.

A thousand lives I lived, beneath the hand of the slaughterer.

I’m fundamentally a lonely person, impatient to hear what my own last words will be, desperate for comic books and plastic toys to come to life and prove that it doesn’t have to be so. But they won’t. I’m old enough to know it. They won’t.

I came to the bar because I knew it would be empty. I don’t want to call a friend. I don’t want to talk to family. I don’t want to see a familiar face. I just want to be alone, to smell and taste what is my nature — I’m a young, hopeful apprentice in an age of proletarian metrokids. I’m the skinny girl in the closet with the strangely large knees, raised without language and without culture and suddenly thrust into a world of monsters that I fear and love.

Everyone I’ve ever loved is still inside me, tearing me apart. Few of them know it, and few of them care. None of them are within reach. Just as well; I’d only hate them if they were, as much as I’d try not to — and it would devastate both of us to realize that that was how I felt. Then, once I’d driven them away again, I’d cry bitterly at having lost — once again — someone I love.

I want nothing other than to be faithful to the world… but in this world, there’s no place for faith.

—

I love her and I will miss her.

Three hour set. Haus Der Luege und Neun Arme. Blixa said that he disbelieved the number of people claiming to own Drawings Of Patient O.T.. To Blixa: es tut mir leid, vis-a-vis SomeBizarre… but I do indeed own Drawings Of Patient O.T., und I listen to it often.

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p a s s i v e a g g r e s s i v e w i r s i n d

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Today: Chinatown. Alcho-hol. Arbeit. Angst. AAA.

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All.