| I've been consumed... |
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| 06:40pm 09/03/2011 |
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This year for lent, I decided to give up all television, movies, video games, and internet activity (besides checking and answering e-mail and facebook messages). In short, I gave up a lot of things that I really enjoy... in fact, they're almost all of the things that I do for entertainment. Not things I do to be happy, mind you. But things I do to entertain myself.
When I told my girlfriend what I was doing, she said to me, "Wow.... So, what are you going to DO?"
And I said, "Exactly."
It's not that any of these things are bad in and of themselves, nor am I trying to elaborate on the point that I or indeed all of us do them too much (though we probably do). What I am saying is that for me, entertainment - most potently in the forms of movies, television, games, and internet surfing - is something that I consume. The problem that I've been finding is that, mentally, what I consume does a poor job of defining or expressing who I really am. And given the amount of time I spend consuming, this is a problem.
For example, I've watched every single episode of the television show House. At 40-60 minutes an episode that's 90-140 hours I've spent watching it. But really, the fact that I watch House is an extremely small, inconsequential part of who I am or what I think of myself. If you told me I could never watch House again, I'd be mildly disappointed, but I'd move on pretty quickly.
The problem is, I don't just watch House. I watch House and CSI and Criminal Minds and South Park and The Daily Show and and Fringe and Family Guy and the Dog Whisperer and Bleach and the list goes on.
But if you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd probably never even mention what kind of television shows I liked. In fact, I'd probably never even bring up the fact that I watched TV. But total up all of the hours I've spent watching those shows (and most of them watched in my room, alone) and you have a truly massive chunk of my life.
Video games? Another massive chunk. And I don't even really consider myself a "gamer." I don't even own a next-gen system (360, PS3, or Wii). And yes, I am counting solitaire and digital sudoku, and minesweeper and bejeweled and whatever casual games I might pick up from time to time. Are you kidding me? My weekly high score on Bejeweled Blitz averages to around 500,000. It's embarrassing to admit how much time I've spent building up that particular skill. And is it a skill? Of course not. Then why am I treating it like one?
Movies? Not quite such a massive chunk and mitigated by the fact that once I watch a movie or two, I'm basically set for at least a couple days. Plus I can't afford to go to the movies all that often. I've also stopped pirating them off the internet, and I don't have a netflix account.
But browsing the internet? That time sink is the hardest one to calculate and probably the heaviest chunk of them all. Reading blogs and message boards, watching youtube videos, browsing wikipedia and running through hundreds of facebook and twitter updates is just the tip of a massive iceberg.
And again, I picture someone asking me, "Who are you? What really makes you tick? What do you do for fun?" You know what doesn't come to mind? "Browse the internet." And if it does, the thought is a humiliating one.
As it's been said before, it is always our actions, not our words or ideas, that define us. And what I've found in the past months, even years of my life, is that the way I defined myself and the way my actions defined me were not the same. At best, I was to myself, a hypocrite. At worst, my identity was being subverted.
Sometimes the things we consume, end up consuming us.
For all these hours I'd spent being entertained, I had not a shred of self-actualization. Not an ounce of productivity. Nothing to show for it. I had let my consumption spin out of control until it became who I was. Not that it changed my image of myself. Rather, in a more insidious way, it had actually changed who I was in spite of my image of myself.
This lent, I would like to speak as my actions dictate I must:
My name is David.
I spend most of my free time in front of television and computer screens.
I consume a large amount of internet-based frivolity.
I am very entertained and largely unfulfilled.
And I'm going to change that. |
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| 02:42am 23/02/2011 |
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Hie. Flay stem
s. My faith ele
mis flat.
Eye h
ails my feet. H
aste my life. H
alt him. Eyes f
eel this, my fa
talism.
Fey he;
feel him stay,
emit a fleshy,
a flimsy thee.
I, the self, may
my life sate h
im.
False, they
stay, feel him,
eyes him flat.
Measly thief.
I, fleshy mate.
I hate myself. |
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| 11:57pm 19/01/2011 |
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i dont think i like myself anymore |
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| 20 Things I'd Like From From You JRPG Game-Dev's |
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| 09:46am 02/11/2010 |
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Dear Japanese RPG makers,
Ok. I like your genre. I really do. I'm just getting tired. Really. Really tired. So please... if you could... please address
1) Your pathetic attempts at humor. An awkward pause is not a punchline. I'm not 5 years old. If you're going to wrap your huge breasted and demure or huge-breasted and dominatrix heroines in scraps of fabric that can be only laughingly called clothing, then I demand you not treat me like an elementary school student. And for that matter
2) Please oh please give us one realistically attractive female lead character who is not a supercilious bad-ass, a demure pushover, and most importantly does NOT end up falling in love with the male lead. She should also not be relegated instantly to being the party's healer. How about a female tank? That would be fun.
3) Stop making us grind for levels, money and rare drops.
4) Nobody likes that skinny loudmouth "trying way too hard to be cute and ends up being extremely annoying" side character. At least let us be able to permanently kill her/him.
5) Stop hiding the really good items and the start of sub-quests inside dialogue with random townspeople. We hate talking to these legions of dopes that have nothing better to do but drone in our ears about what the weather is like and how their wives nag them or how much they love their dogs. None of us care. And for that matter
6) Stop making us have to double-check each idiot we talk to as we make sure that a secret clue or item isn't hiding behind a changing dialogue tree. If we have to talk to these idiots, we should have to only listen to their maddeningly boring life story once.
7) If you want to hide an item, put it somewhere we might actually look, like behind a tree or under a rock. No more invisible swords and armor laying about on open floors or against the walls where we can't see them. Mashing the action button as we cling to boarders and zig zag across the walking field is not treasure hunting. It's annoying.
8) Stop putting mundane items inside treasure chests. Nothing's worse than congratulating yourself on spotting a stray chest, only to open it and discover something you could have bought in the shop next to the potions and phoenix feathers.
9) Stop making your sub-quests impossible to solve without a walk-through or guide. Real gamers hate having to ask for help. Puzzle solving is fun and hints are good. So if we're supposed to find something, give us an idea where the hell it is. Don't turn 10 minute fetch quests into 10 hour "find the one NPC who has this random item stashed in their closet" monotony binges. Also see #s 5 and 6.
10) Stop making us grind for levels, money and rare drops.
11) No, taking the same monster model, re-coloring it, and changing its name does not mean you can present it to me as a new monster. Stop recycling your character models. If I'm in a new area, I want new enemies.
12) Stop making us grind for levels, money and rare drops.
13) Random encounters are annoying. If we need to have them, perhaps build in an exponentially diminishing encounter rate with an exponentially rising exp drop. If I have to kill 50 of one monster, that's about 30 too many.
14) Stop over-pricing your shops. We hate grinding for money.
15) Okay, if we have to grind, build in an option to let us and enemies quick cast spells and summons. Those couple seconds of animation are really cool the first 20 times. Then they get real old real fast. I made the mistake of quad-casting Knights of the Round in FFVII once. Not fun.
16) Stop making over-powered items that break your game. This goes hand in hand with
17) Stop making alternate bosses so grossly overpowered you need game-breaking items to defeat them.
18) Stop making optional parts of your game more challenging, rewarding, and time-consuming than the game's actual plot. With that in mind, stop making important plot points optional (and thus missable) content.
19) Stop making bossfights that confuse difficulty with attrition. Once the hit points reach a certain value, all tactics eventually will become "rinse and repeat." That's grind in disguise. And for that matter
20) STOP MAKING US GRIND FOR LEVELS, MONEY AND RARE DROPS. |
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| Kick Ass Review |
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| 03:24am 08/10/2010 |
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Kick Ass stands in the wake of a recent slew of Comic-Book-based movies that have been released in recent years: X-Men, Spiderman, 300, the recent Batman reboot, V for Vendetta, Watchmen, DareDevil, Elektra, Catwoman, the Fantastic Four movies, the many Hulk films, Ghost Rider, Hellboy, the Iron Man series, Jonah-Hex, The Losers, The Punisher, Sin City, The Surrogates, and the soon to be seen Captain America, Avengers and Green Lantern movies. Putting Watchmen aside, one would think there was bound to be a film made at some point deconstructing the whole super hero concept. I think this is what Kick Ass started out wanting to be. In the end though, I believe it became exactly what it was established to critique or re-image and in that sense, is a failure.
We love superheroes because we want to BE superheroes. We want the super powers, the ability to set things right and dole out our own justice where we see fit, etc. And while comic writers do much to make super heroes identifiable with us, there is always the disconnect, and understandably so. It's the fine line that must be walked down, dividing a character between being enough like us for us to identify with him/her, but enough NOT like us that we can vicariously live out the hero fantasy we're incapable of doing in our own lives.
But there is always that question, why are we so incapable? Kick Ass aka Dave Lizewski has a point: if someone really wanted to be a masked hero, what is really stopping them? His friends answer him pretty squarely, voicing the collective audience's opinion: "Dude, if anyone ever did it in real life, they'd get their ass kicked. They'd be dead in, like, a day." Dave then proceeds to don a mask and outfit, takes it out for a day, tries to stop some criminals, flails about and fights awkwardly, gets beaten, stabbed, and left for dead.
At that moment, the movie is effectively over as it's made its point. This is what happens to ordinary people who try to live out the hero fantasy; They're idiots and they die, quickly. "This is why we have superheroes," the film seems to say. Case closed.
But wait... Wasn't that the point established in the very first shot of the movie? The crazy guy jumping off a building wearing a super suit. "That's not me," says Dave. "That's some Armenian guy with a history of mental health problems. Who am I? I'm Kick Ass!"
The very same Kick Ass we see not a half hour later in a silly blue diver suit collapsing in a pool of blood, having just been stabbed by two thugs. This demonstrates a quiet denial on the part of the narrator (which I'll address later).
But things here take a dramatic shift. Up until this point, Dave really is the everyman. As he says, he's completely average: Not stupid or smart. Not ugly not sexy. Not rich, not poor. His mom's dead but he's okay with that. He's not popular, but not really a nerd. He has no powers at all.
But after getting out of the hospital, nerve damage gives him a heightened pain threshold and the metal plates lining his skeleton a la Wolverine give him extra internal support (though he lacks the Wolvie healing factor, a fact the film conveniently seems to forget). At this very moment, he has become a super hero. Never mind that nerve damage and metal bone plating are very real and could really happen to any of us; Now he has super powers. And look how the movie changes:
Big Daddy and Hit Girl are introduced. Big Daddy is a clear Batman clone right down to the horned appearance, dead-loved-one revenge motivation and impressive financial backing. Hit Girl is a highly skilled fighter and gunman trained from birth in the ways of death a la any number of elite ninja hero tropes you've seen before.
Immediately following the accident, love-interest Katie shows an interest in Dave (though for skewed, indirect reasons) and eventually he ends up with her, the girl du jour: a beautiful, philanthropic, comic reading and sexually uninhibited babezilla.
This is getting boring even to write. We've been down this path a hundred times before. From the moment they walked in wearing their masks, I knew that either Big Daddy or Hit Girl were either going to get captured or killed (for the revenge motivation) and Kick Ass, reluctantly, would be roped into storming the HQ with the survivor in a big impossible mission with guns blazing and knives glinting as blood and bullets fly.
With all of the other super hero movies before it, I expected at least a critique of the genre with this film or an exploration of any number of different topics this movie brought up and did nothing with. Like, say they let Dave bleed out and die after getting stabbed the first time, and let his friends and the world at large deal with the complex issues surrounding our deepening culture of hero worship and the blurred line between fantasy and reality. Or why not explore (or even address at all) the guilt Dave must have felt knowing that someone was killed while pretending to be a fictional character that he created? Why not explore the relationship between Hit Girl and Big Daddy; How Hit Girl's childhood has been filled with violence, combat training, weapon specifications, conditioning, and kill tactics. Why not address how Big Daddy's need for revenge has fundamentally warped and overshadowed the relationship he now has with his daughter? Why not address Red Mist's relationship with his father and his place in the world or the struggle between wanting to follow in his father's shoes, knowing the family business is a terrible, hurtful organization of drugs, violence and pain, or living surrounded by body guards all one's life, left without real friendship or conversation, ultimately misunderstood while being ironically envied.
Or, why not keep it simple? Kick Ass is ultimately about a young naive boy embracing and living out his impossibly naive dream and getting destroyed by it. Why not have Dave wake up in the hospital bed, forced to deal with the repercussions of the decisions he made instead of being falsely empowered by them? Why not address what his foolishness says about the American dream or the values of today's American youth? Perhaps a statement could have been made for the desensitization of our society to violence and the real immediacy of pain and danger most of us are sheltered from?
In the end, Dave hangs up the Kick-Ass costume not because he's learned any particular lesson or reached a pivotal realization or character shift developmentally. He's just getting laid now and caring about the girl who's laying him so now he has something better to live for. At least, that's my take. While sitting on his mother's grave, he admits that he cannot handle the mounting problems that come with being a hero and he's ready to give it up. Not because it's a stupid idea, mind you. But because he got in over his feet.
Why did he put the mask on in the first place, other than to glorify a silly whim left unchecked? In the end, if we see his choice as naive and his final gun slinging battle alongside Hit Girl as an extremely lucky escape from an assuredly fatal situation, then their agreement to hang up their super hero costumes must represent some kind of maturity gained: an understanding that real people cannot be superheroes because they have lives to live and the process is far too dangerous and silly for any normal human to attempt. But he seems relatively un-phased, even approving of the new wave of heroes now inspired by his potentially life-ending mistake. Has his character learned anything?
Kick Ass isn't an incompetent film, and for originality, I will give it points for giving us a super-hero tale that at least begins with a novel, non-spectacular premise before it descends into familiar hero-film patterns. I only score it low because I expected this film, based on its setup, to deconstruct, critique, and comment on the superhero genre that it eventually falls so squarely into.
It is perhaps only the very end of the movie that at least leaves us with something worthwhile to think about. The last couple seconds are Red Mist, donning a new mask and quoting Jack Nicholson's Joker from the 1989 Batman film, then leveling a gun at the audience and firing a round between our eyes.
Dave's transformation into Kick Ass is emblematic of a problematic and foolish flight into fantasy, a blatant disregard and irreverence for the real immediate danger of violence, and the inherent difficulties of blind vigilantism: In short, everything that defines most of our superhero lore. Kick Ass mirrors America itself with our growing escapism into fictitious worlds, our desensitization to violence, and the repercussions this has on our future. Though both Kick Ass and Hit Girl learn from their dangerous experience and decide to retire their alter egos, their legacy lives on. As their hero work has inspired new heroes in their wake, so too has it created Red Mist as the first real super villain. After 1.5 hours of violence and gore glorified before our eyes where everyone has had a great time, right as the credits begin to roll and the sound of the gunshot Red Mist fired straight into our face echoes away, perhaps something has been said about how it is not the characters in these films, but we the audience who are ultimately destroyed by hero worship. |
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| 03:46am 25/08/2010 |
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cogs and quartz
stripped and fractured
rusted through their sway
this tower of clock bones
missing no moment
becomes per se
a sundial |
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| 02:18am 27/07/2010 |
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There is no strength gained along with this solid realization;
That it is the shortcomings of your own will that have left your potential squandered and unrealized.
The only thing worse than wasting away is the inevitable knowledge of being responsible for the duration of every dragging numbing desperate second of it.
Defeat has a perpetual motion to it - an immense inertia.
If the Existentialist must remind himself to tug on his bootstraps, it's probably because he tripped over them.
And the gods he prays to, Hope and Denial, are probably twins, having very much the same face, point of origin, roads, and destination.
Indeed, he seldom sees them without fingers interlocked.
But I think they keep very different bedfellows: One Courage, and the other Fear.
Even gods are defined by the company they keep.
We should all heed well to whom we pray. |
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| Breaking Dawn review |
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| 08:47pm 03/07/2010 |
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Eclipse was one of the most grueling things I've ever had the displeasure of reading; I hated every angst-soaked melodramatic moment of it. I braced myself when faced with the prospect of finally cracking open Breaking Dawn and putting to sleep forever this failed expedition into American pop-culture. I looked forward to it like a looming root canal. A week or so later, I let the last page of my borrowed copy flutter down and I caught sight of the "Breaking Dawn left me Breathless..." and "Bella & Edward 4ever" stickers someone had stuck on the inside back cover. Even then, reminded of the massive tide of teenage girls I could see swooning over the completed story, jamming stickers all over their cars' bumpers so they could proudly display, "My <3 belongs to Edward" ... even then I had to admit out loud:
Well, that last one wasn't too bad.
This isn't to say that it was really that good, or it in any way vindicated all the rest of a lackluster series. But Breaking Dawn did a number of things right which the other books did very wrong, namely, having some sense of pacing, tension and climax, balancing relationship issues with real physical conflicts and interesting underlying mythology and mystery to keep things interesting. This was all largely accomplished in the first half of the book. *Spoiler alert* After Bella has her child, things start getting boring and stale again, despite her transformation to a vampire which by all means should have captured my attention.
I spoiled the book a bit for myself I suppose. I predicted that Jacob would imprint on Bella's child way back on page 143 (I marked it because I knew I would be right) and while the climax surrounding her birth was well done, the book's final climax was... well, anti-climactic to say the least: I was severely let down. It was all rising up to a fevered pitch. All of the Volturi were there, all of the Cullens, all of the other nearby (and far away) covens, all of the vampires with special abilities for combat, the heavy hitters, the strong and the crafty, not to mention the entire population of wolves, many of which were newly transformed children. It was to be an epic battle royal much like the heart-quickening final battle in the Harry Potter series. Lives were going to be lost, real sacrifice was finally going to be made. I was actually excited, and surprised that Meyer had managed to do even that.
But then (true to her form I suppose) she has all of the characters talk, talk, talk, and then talk some more, literally for some 60 odd pages, everyone standing tense in a field growling and pretending to be civil and hovering on a hairline trigger to send the entire scene into a bloody chaos... but in the end everyone goes home, they're all friends again, nobody is harmed, nobody killed, not a scrap of action, not a single limb ripped off. Bella and Edward don't have to shed one drop of blood to get to the sugary sweet happily ever forever after ending. How disappointing. This has been my problem with Meyer from day one: not doing justice to her magical subject material and diffusing proper tension before it can work to her benefit.
My problem with the entire series can be all boiled down to Bella herself. Besides my firm belief that she's a poorly drawn character (and at that, a completely boring one) that aside, I still can't sympathize with her because 1) I'm not a woman 2) I'm not attracted to her as a man, and 3) I don't want to be Edward (partly because he's a neutered vampire but mostly because, again, I'm completely repulsed by Bella. Because I didn't care what happened to her and because I didn't see anything worth desiring about Edward, I didn't care about them getting together in the first book. Because of that, I didn't feel like their "love" relationship was properly developed, and without the proper emotional foundation, I couldn't get that upset by the destruction of it in New Moon. Where I think I was supposed to be filled with pity for Bella, I felt nothing but derision for her melodrama. In the same way, I almost found a worthy companion in Jacob: his strength, speed, animal spirit, and affinity for the wild all appealed to me immensely. But his perpetual fawning for Bella was the same that I hated Edward for, and the way he pursued a woman who was clearly leading him on, the way he kept setting himself up for humiliation and failure, they way he wouldn't just move on, but, like a puppy dog, kept lapping at Bella's touch, it put me off even more. By the time Edward was back and a good three way triangle of angst, hormones, and teeth were really up and running in Eclipse, I was so thoroughly turned off to all three of them that all of the tension there came off as bland an uninteresting. And throughout, there wasn't enough real conflict, real danger, to keep me interested. It's all emotional danger, tension inside of relationships, and to me, it's all very unappealing.
Clearly, I am not the target audience for this series. Had I been able to identify with Bella, had I envied some aspect of Edward or Jacob and desired their existence vicariously, had I cared about any of their feelings or their relationships between each other, maybe then I'd be on board with all this Twilight madness. But as it stands, Twilight, to me is a poorly written series with shallow characters and an extremely bad sense of pacing. It makes poor use of both vampires and werewolves, robbing them of their power and potential. And ultimately, and worst of all, it idealizes adolescent angst, melodrama, and extremely immature and ill-defined conventions about what real love is. This is a 12-year old's version of romance. Twilight fails for me on the two levels where it desperately needed to succeed; the relationships desperately lack a realistic depth and the magical element has absolutely no bite (pun intended).
I'm glad to be done with this series. Final book notwithstanding, I'm left knowing that I've only read Twilight so that I would be able to intelligently mock it, so that when I heard it mentioned I could hate it for the right reasons. The hours of ennui and brief moments of interest followed by disappointment, I did it all so that I could honestly say one thing: Yes, I have read Twilight... And yes, I still think it's shit. |
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| just venting |
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| 02:05am 25/06/2010 |
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Feel free to just skip over this. All it is, is an unadulterated tirade, my little man inside my head punching in his hat and hopping up and down. You've been warned.
I physically couldn't bring myself to actually open the cover of the last book in the Twilight series. Such a sudden feeling of revulsion and anger came over me, I had to write this instead. It's probably kept me up later than just reading the fucking thing would have. But I've heard "never go to bed angry" so I'm resolving this for myself now, in the only way I know how.
Twilight is about a girl named Bella Swan, a name implying a beautiful graceful girl, probably very spoiled by her rich father. In fact Bella Swan is anything but: She's clumsy, middle-class, and by her own standards not particularly beautiful. This however doesn't stop every boy she meets in highschool from becoming immediately and inexplicably attracted to her (every single one, if you remember: Mike, Tyler, Eric, Edward and arguably Jacob all within the first book). I say "inexplicably" because, outside of whatever looks Bella may possess, I cannot imagine what if any attractive qualities the girl has. Personality wise (and at this point, for me, Meyer has had 3 entire novels worth of the character to work with) Bella a giant gaping nil. Bella considers herself shy (she had trouble making friends in Phoenix and only makes them in Forks because she's a novelty to the small town) but I'm not quite buying it. Bella repeatedly shows herself to be downright mean and basically, a cold bitch at heart. She doesn't care about any of her so-called "friends" really. Most times, she finds herself deigning to suffer their presence, viewing conversations not as opportunities to get to know people better but as ways to not appear like a jerk as she ignores what they're saying. She finds her guy friends annoying when they become interested in her, she finds her girl friends annoying, petty, and boring (confirming the "birds of a feather" saying, I suppose). She even looks down on her own mother for being flighty and overly-concerned with her well-being. And the father who takes her back in after she refused as a teen to visit him anymore, making him come to his divorces wife's house to see her every summer, she sees him as unable to really take care of himself; well-meaning but ultimately stubborn, bumbling, out-of-touch, and over-protective. In nearly every interaction with them, as with all of her friends, she suffers their attention.
Apart from Edward and a couple classic Victorian novels, Bella simply ISN'T anything else. Name one other thing that she either does for fun or is interested in. She doesn't particularly like music, she doesn't have any real friends, she doesn't like any movies, she doesn't sing or write or dance or plant gardens or paint or play sports or play chess or do well in school or fail classes or dream or want to do anything with her life or is interested in anything... She danced as a kid but gave it up quickly as she was too clumsy. She briefly took piano lessons until she complained her way out of them too. She shies away from people but never particularly regrets being alone. And most of all, besides her attraction to Edward, Bella doesn't have a single deep, inspiring, provoking, interesting, creative, or worthwhile thought in her (apparently) pretty head. I understand trying to have a "normal" character for readers to relate to, or even a less-than-average underodg to root for. But Bella is much worse than either could be: She's boring.
And within the context of Edward? In his absence, she's insecure and suicidal; In his presence, clingy, melodramatic, needy, obsessive, compulsive, idiotic, doting, and tiresome. No wonder Ed is so slow to acquiesce to making her immortal. I'd hate to spend eternity with her too.
But Edward himself is similarly flat. He's "perfection" sure, in every Byronic sense of the word: He's tall, dark, beautiful, socially elevated, sexually powerful, rich, mysterious, moody, musically inclined, introspective, intelligent, confident, sophisticated, a bad-boy, fiercely protective, jealous, slightly masochistic, and most importantly of all perpetually fawning, complete with a troubled past, cool family, and the shiny red cherry on top of the chocolate shit sundae, he's got a nice car. But in that perfection, he's perfectly defined and without any flaws, he just isn't interesting and neither is his "romance" with Bella. Any tension between them seems artificially generated. They worry and fret about Bella becoming a vampire and possibly loosing her soul and the fact that Edward naturally wants to bite her empty head off and drink her blood while he touches himself. But this is all disguising the real relationship issues at work here. What about how Edward chronically disregards Bella's feelings and desires, pushing his will onto her and brushing her aside as the idiotic teenage girl that she is? What about the fact that he has the maturity of a man who's been alive for hundreds of years while she's an extremely young girl who's never had a relationship or "romance" before in her entire life?
That's another word that needs quotes here, "romance." In every summary I read of the first book, Twilight, everybody is fond of saying, "over time, they fall in love" and I'm left questioning now, as I did then, "Fucking why?" Outside the predator-prey relationship that makes each other attracted, what honestly do they have in common? What is their supposed "love" based on? What happens in the couple months they're together when they barely even kiss, when Edward is talking about what it's like to be a vampire and Bella is going on about how great his eyes, abs, chest, ad nauseum look like... what happens to make them fall in any kind of real love? It's not fucking love, it's teenage hormones, it's a fucking crush, it's the lust of inexperienced children who haven't become adults yet and don't know what things like compromise are or working through problems. Stupid fucking children that don't realize that love is caring for someone even when you see their flaws clear as day. Not when you know unequivocally that they're the best looking person you'll ever see.
And I could go on about Jacob Black, but he's just as easily summed up as "doting puppy dog / frustrated guard dog" really. And where I can see how a romantic relationship might have formed between them (during the Edward-leaving New Moon fallout) both Bella and the reader at the same time are suddenly informed without warning in Eclipse that she's actually in love with him too. That's right Bella, have your cake and eat it too. It wasn't enough that every guy you met somehow falls for your lack of charm and personality, but you get both a werewolf AND a "vampire" dying to get into your pants too? What the fuck is so great about Bella Swan? She's a waste of space, an empty shell, a boring, stupid, trite, semblance of a real person with real feelings.
And that's right, even "vampire" needs quotes here, doesn't it. Because I've read 1,736 fucking pages and I've seen somebody get bitten fucking ONCE. Most of the vampires we see for most of the saga, are the Cullens who don't even drink human blood. Well fuck me, some vampires they are. No glamour, no sex appeal, and now they have psychic powers instead. No. No Meyer and fuck you for thinking you can cut the nuts off of an iconic monster and think I wouldn't fucking notice. They don't care about garlic, wooden stakes have no effect, no fear of Christian iconography, AND they don't melt or light on fire but FUCKING GLITTER in the sun? These are not vampires. NOT FUCKING VAMPIRES.
So, let me summarize the first three novels: Bella, somehow without any worthwhile personality, manages to attract every guy she meets in her new town of Forks including Edward who claims to be a vampire, but is really only pretending to be as far as I'm concerned. His dick sparkles and he has no balls, he's not a fucking vampire. They somehow become attracted to each other, probably due to the massive gravity pull of the empty black holes in each of their brains, and over the course of a couple months, maybe half a year, they somehow fall desperately in love to the point where Bella is ready and willing to give up here insignificant trite little human life to be with Edward as a 17-year-old permanently, 17 clearly being the correct mental age to be making decisions about eternity with a guy you've met a couple months ago who literally is always compelled to kill you (don't worry Ed, I am too). Oh, and I almost forgot that there were these other vampires who wanted to kill Bella but they got killed instead. I thought I'd tack that onto the end of things there as an afterthought, kind of the way Meyer did.
In New Moon, Ed leaves Bella, thinking it the best thing for her. Unbelievably, she becomes even more of a blank slate than she already was, eventually being brought out of it by the lovey-dovey puppy slobber of a drooling Jacob who's actually a werewolf, go figure. She decides to lead him on though she secretly doesn't want him and is ready to kill herself because she can't have Ed anymore, but when she does, and Ed thinks he's alone, he tries to kill himself as well (as, despite his extensive knowledge of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, he somehow failed to grasp the obvious message that melodrama and hormones make teenagers act in unbelievably stupid ways when they should really just chill out, take a deep breath, remind themselves that their lives mean fuck all in the grand scheme of things and MOVE ON... but hey, if it means they're out of the gene pool, maybe that's the best thing for all... way to go R&J. Twilight crossed lovers: You almost made it!). But they end up reconciling so fast it made my neck hurt and Jacob is quickly pushed back out of the picture. That's what you get for being the "secretly-in-love best friend... seriously, haven't you ever watched ONE teen movie? Get a fucking clue lover boy.
In Eclipse, literally, nothing happens for a while. Edward and Jacob compete for Bella's affections though she appears particularly vapid this time around, Edward is his usual cardboard-soaked-in-suave self, and Jacob finally is the first character to actually have some sort of development... even if it is down the road of becoming even more legendarily thick than I believed he could be. Bella and Edward get engaged and oh yeah, there's these other vampires that want to kill Bella, but they get killed instead. Almost forgot again. Had to tack it onto the end there. Wait... hasn't this happened before?....
So now we come to the final book. And looking back on things, you know, I almost shake with anger when I look at how many awards this piece of shit series has racked up over the years. Not braindead teenage goth girl panty-wetting awards either. I mean big ones. Twilight won the New York Times Editor's Choice and Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year." Best Book of the fucking Year? Fucking how?!
There are some things in this world that you just cannot explain. They're just so illogical, so lacking in any coherent sense, so mind-bendingly fucked up, you can't get your brain around it. And then, when those things are injustices, you wonder, how can this be possible> You think, if there was a God out there, he wouldn't allow this kind of shit to happen. But even worse than that, if there isn't a god out there, if there isn't some benevolent being with his hand in things or some Loki who's just doing shit like this to laugh his ass off at all of it, if not that, then we, the smartest beings in known existence, 21st century enlightened fucking homosapiens, we are the ones championing this mediocrity, parading it around our streets like it's the next Shakespeare. And yeah, I can compare Meyer to Shakespeare since the half-wit does it herself in book two.
You know, right now some brilliant writer's horror-romance is probably collecting dust as another phone call is made about how to best make Breaking Dawn into a movie so we can squeeze a couple more million dollars down Meyer's blouse while children starve in Africa and artists starve in America.
The worst part of it is, really, this book doesn't deserve so much hate from me. It's mediocre, boring and poorly written with poorly drawn characters while it bastardizes and tames the traditions and literal history it draws from. The Twilight series is just plain bad, but not truly horrible. But here's the top of the list for the top-selling 100 books of 2008:
1 Twilight Stephenie Meyer
2 New Moon Stephenie Meyer
3 Breaking Dawn Stephenie Meyer
4 Eclipse Stephenie Meyer
That's right. This entire fucking series comprised the 4 best selling books of that year.
Fuck.
Twilight.
I was going to wait on this last book, maybe do a little reading that I actually wanted to do, approach some of the classics I've been eyeing, maybe that Margaret Atwood novel lying on my roomate's bookshelf. But nope, you know what? I'm going to blow through this last book with every ounce of my strength. With every fiber I'm going to get through this mind-numbing teeth-grinding eye-rolling sleep-inducing pile of shit of a book series. And when I finish I'm going to look down and spit on the last closed cover in glorious triumph. I'll dance about in manic fits of euphoria, tears streaming down my face as I choke out incoherently, "it's over... it's all finally over... oh thank God, it's over..." It'll be the greatest "good riddance" moment of my entire fucking life.
I hope, at the very least, besides a headache and vast teeming stores of frustrated rage, Twilight will give me that. |
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| zombie |
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| 02:20am 01/06/2010 |
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I find this zombie disgusting
not because his body rots
not because his mind is blunted
but because in his relentless plod
he has nothing left but the need to consume
that need that makes all his other horrors possible
it is that causeless impetus insatiable
simultaneously describing and defining
a walking waste, a self semblance
existence without meaning
cruelest curse manifested
man twisted and hollowed
that emptiness reaching
terrifying in the night
but locked in a room
observed in daylight
ultimately
pitiable |
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| float - shudder |
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| 12:59pm 19/05/2010 |
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Every once in a while, especially after I've been going nonstop for a day or two with my routine, there comes a moment, a brief valley, a dip lower, a lull. They way a room full of people finds a moment when everyone is finishing their sentence or catching their breath all at once and an uneasy calm, thin and clear as glass, hovers in the air waiting to be broken.
I feel at these times like the ground has been pulled out from under me and it becomes strange to think I was once standing and reaching up. It makes me feel that everything is fragile, desperately clutching its atoms together so it won't fall apart. My personality, the information and knowledge I command, this body, this job I have, this chair I'm sitting in, the car of metal I'll drive home to a house made of wood, the people I will see, the relationships I've made, my family, my possessions, this country I live in... beneath the solidity and good face of it all, runs fear deep and dark as ocean water chopped and stirred by the wind - shifting and tremulous. At any moment, some foundation threatens to give way, an infrastructure crushed by its own weight.
But once the noise comes back, I feel my feet push against the earth and the earth pushes back, as always. My muscles grip their bones and the chair supports my weight.
I am reminded again that my world has forever been solid. But more so, I am reminded that when thoughts do tremble, as they must, they shake the eyes and make everything else appear to move. It is not these organs and gray matter, not these atoms and electric pulses. It is only me inside - me deeper and further in where only I can touch - quivering slowly apart. |
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| 04:34pm 20/02/2010 |
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There is a handprint on my mirror, and when I look up, it's right over my face. The light bounces off the dead-skin dust that has highlighted the fingerprint contours. The palm of the hand is just where my mouth should be.
All I can see in this moment are my eyes, barely, tired and blank their color sucked out. A blue-striped collar from my button-down shirt escapes out of the top of my large cream colored sweater. I see my child self standing behind me to the side, but he is not hiding behind my leg as usual, popping in and out to giggle at himself in the mirror and occasionally admire me. Instead he has stepped a few paces away from me, and he is fiddling with a clock laying on the floor. He suffers me and avoids me like I'm his grandfather. Perhaps he thinks I am his grandfather in this sweater. These khakis.
There's a mark on the leg of my pants I accidentally put there with a pen at work a couple days ago. It's like a new birthmark at the top of my legs, black and malignant, worth seeing and worrying about how to remove. I think to myself I must find an ISP after work today. That and respond to my latest job offers, trying to shuffle all of them into a manageable boring doable schedule.
I reach for my keys on the table and remember that I need to water my plants, need to bring these dirty dishes and glasses down to the kitchen, need to pick up these clothes along the floor. I find it suddenly quiet in the room, and wonder if the child-self will be fiddling with my guitar strings again, and I will have to tell him no, but I see that he's fallen asleep on my coat. I don't want to disturb him. He doesn't look peaceful curled there. He has a determined look on his face, a small push of his eyebrows down, his rounded jaw set. If he is breathing it is shallow and I can't see his body rise and fall. A very serious little still-life. It is everything he is not.
I take a sleeve of the coat and gently pick it up, and the child rolls off it sluggishly like a groggy cat. I brush some of the dog hair off and a couple strands land on the boy's nose and I expect him to sneeze but he doesn't. I can see his breath moving the white hair in little shivers.
I pick up my black laptop case and look in the mirror again. Even from this angle, someone else's handprint still obscures my face. The rest of the way down, I look what my mother would call "very nice." I look like I'm ready for church. The child at my feet twitches a little, having a dream about being trapped in a cage made of polished wood and red fabric while a dull voice drones imperceptible somewhere far away. His arms are tucked in at his sides the way mine used to, and I imagine that in the cage, he is tied with a knitted yarn straightjacket with the collar scraping little angry lines into the back of his neck.
He shudders, and I take some of the clothes on the floor to cover him up. Then I lock the door behind me. |
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| nonno |
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| 06:43am 07/01/2010 |
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mi manchi... |
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| 01:43am 14/12/2009 |
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As a child without his way
not resigned but inward pouting
all his sulk eclipse desire
paramount becomes the lacking
(& also forgetting) |
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| 08:04pm 13/12/2009 |
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I cannot help that I was made this way: cold and dark and hard. And I cannot help but want to be anything but. It should have been a kindness from my creator to have blessed me with ignorance if I were to be cursed with inadequacy. But this cold and dark and hard thing, this rock, it knows the colors of flowers, their bending stems, how they open up to sunlight. And it knows that no matter what it may desire, or through what increasingly complex levels of artistry it may utilize, it can never be *authentic*. Any stone can be carved into a flower, chipped away with a chisel and care so fine that the scratch marks can't be seen anymore, and still, the color will be lacking. And then it could paint itself up with a master's brush stroke and be planted next to real flowers, and in a windless day you might not be able to tell at all. But come wind or rain when the soft living petals, the real ones, stretched out into the world dedicate and breakable, when they are moved, how they move, how they shake and dance, and the stone, ashamed at being found out, can't even grow redder in a blush.
And when the winter comes or the rain or the winds and blows all the flowers away, there it will still sit in the same bed, resilient and alone and humiliated by its new shape and paint; a parody at his best. And only too late he will realize how he betrayed his true purpose; that in his dullness, his solidity, his very ordinary way, was made for the backdrop: like the white on a canvas that gets covered by paint. Like every rock that ever lived. Only this one was made special by its failure. |
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| 05:59am 07/12/2009 |
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the human heart would be subject
to Newton's first law of motion
but stubborn and intent
it sounds its cadence
and makes its own friction |
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| 05:00am 02/12/2009 |
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Tumbleweed with twines akimbo
crooked as crone's tautened hand
like spider dead with legs tucked inwards
still waits for the guilty wind |
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| 01:20am 28/11/2009 |
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Stalwart in a stalemate - your armor chinked, your standard lost - snug gardbrace to pauldron and ready all heels. Here still be serpents. |
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| 04:52am 18/11/2009 |
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my head is throbbed through with wails
teeth-smashing shrills of metal on metal
rusted cogs grinding their gears
freezing slow as old man's sinews
but a toy soldier turn-key must be forced
stern fingers with steady pressure
the stubborn march lurching along
keeping uneven time |
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| Garfield Minus Garfield |
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| 11:24pm 08/10/2009 |
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Jon without Garfield is a tortured soul, racked with loneliness and self-doubt, feeling ugly and stupid, unmotivated, unloved, alone, and on the brink of madness, flailing about in random hysterics, wildly impetuous, desperately feigning any semblance of happiness, anything to stay the tide of oppressing ennui, bitterness, and loathing that permeates his existence. He defines the pain and desperation of the unaided existential struggle. It is truly amazing.
http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/ |
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| click clack pitter patter |
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| 02:52am 26/09/2009 |
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Four white walls echo much more when all of the posters and tapestries and paintings have been taken off and packed up into boxes. The click of computer keys echoing off barren walls has a kind of hollow emptiness to it. Like the threat of a coming finality pulling at a brain that doesn't quite want to accept it.
Life, deconstructed, and placed into boxes. Compartmentalized. Clothing in this box, CDs in that. Everything loose and uprooted, tossed into a crate tossed into a car, tossed along the road. And in that whirling of air and pavement there is no center, and the word home doesn't quite mean what it used to. When really is the last time I've called some place my "home" and actually meant it? Even the boxes change. The only permanence is what's placed inside: the same guitars, the same t-shirts, the same decaying shoes, the same clinking glasses and spotted pans, the same wires and cables. All sitting together in the center of the floor like a distilled collection of all life's trappings, and at that, not all much to look at. It demands that I realize how important my memories are... and they themselves seem so small and inconsequential compared with the experiences they mark like gravestones: haunting them like wispy ghosts, rattling their chains and slowly fading as time flies onward.
In the past 6 years, I have packed my things and moved 16 times.
The clicking of the keys gives way to the rain that suddenly comes without warning, a crescendo of honesty, cutting through and nullifying. And when it rains, you can close your eyes and take comfort in not being able to hear one drop alone fall, which would be torture. Instead, the chorus sounds, innumerable, indistinguishable - the sound of each drop blending into a chaotic yet homogeneous mixture like some grand applause, some divine symphony of white noise. It is one of the sounds of peace. |
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| hello (hello)... is there anybody in there? |
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| 01:55am 17/09/2009 |
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I've recently started two different projects that could possibly be linked to this journal. One is a new story / novel and another is a sort of autobiographical project. However, the point of posting this new material to this journal would be to have some kind of interaction (via comments and feedback) with readers. So my question is, it's been so long since I posted anything of any real substance or worth to this journal... is there anybody out there who still reads it or would want to?
Knowing that will perhaps make me more inclined to push forward on my projects, thinking that people out there will at least be reading the scraps along the way. Actually, even if nobody responds, I may still post them on here anyway. There is something intriguing about placing something on a world wide free interweb network of information, knowing that anybody in the entire world could access my words, yet feeling confident that absolutely nobody will. It's nearly ironic, but not quite, and as such it tickles my mental funny bone. It's (almost) what I do with my Twitter account, which gives me a strange kind of nonchalance to post whatever I honestly feel like without fearing the repercussion of the wrong person reading it. Perhaps the constant threat of it being discovered, and at that, by someone who I will never know whether they be stranger or friend, is rather exciting. I think all authors must dream at some point that after they die, there will be some kind of inquiry made to find all of their notes, letters, and scraps... some vain and vain hope that somebody will care enough to start putting the pieces back together and, inevitably, make a very large amount of something out of what was once not very much at all.
Although, I suppose I could make the point moot and, whenever I've posted an update, link to it via my Facebook status or similarly make a request for my blog reading and RSS aggregating friends online to add me to their daily digital repertoire. In any case:
hello (hello)... is there anybody in there?
And five more points if you tell me the song I'm referencing.
(oh good lord, I'm back in highschool, aren't I) |
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| put in my place by a personality test |
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| 06:41pm 19/08/2009 |
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Talk about hitting the nail on the head. I took a career test based on a Jungian style personality exam and god INTJ. What the site had to say about the type was brilliant; so poignant and accurate about me that I had to laugh out loud about it.
INTJs’ precision thinking and need for accuracy causes them to be inflexible at times. Having thought out a strategy, the INTJ may stubbornly disregard those who they think have not spent as much time reflecting on an idea as they have. This, along with their drive to produce something significant, can make them demanding and difficult. If their plans and solutions fall short of their high standards, INTJ's feel pressured — as if everything is on the line. "Everything," for an INTJ, is the competence and ability to produce something significant. Fear of not living up to this expectation will increase their stress and possibly dissuade them from risking or trying out their ideas. They may then find themselves thinking about ideas that do not have a meaningful or productive end.
When stress increases, the INTJ can become argumentative and disagreeable. Social interaction, which is not their strength, becomes increasingly difficult for them. Not trusting their own abilities, they become preoccupied with obsessive notions. The INTJ may then find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time fighting horrible thoughts, tempting absurdities, and feelings of worthlessness. Fearful of others recognizing their perceived failure, the INTJ incessantly ruminates about mistakes, inadequacies, weaknesses, ineptness, and incompetence. Because this distracts them from risking what little confidence they may have left in themselves, it therefore keeps them from obtaining the success and achievement they so desperately need.
Yeah, that's pretty much me alright. |
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| mock-up history |
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| 12:14am 16/06/2009 |
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In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore published a paper in Electronics Magazine concerning the number of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit. Little did he know at the time that his findings would describe the driving force of technological and social change through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His findings became known as Moore's Law.
Moore's Law states that technological growth will double approximately every two years. Everything from the pixels in digital cameras to the power consumption of home computers was found to fit this pattern.
In 2010, Moore's Law was broken. Atomem, short for Atomic Memory was invented by an independently funded Japanese software/chemical company company. A particular molecule, a string of carbon atoms, was manufactured which, when placed in a specific wavelength of infrared light could be engineered to switch certain carbon atoms on the chain or leave them unchanged. Changing positions were read as ones, and no activity as zeroes, interpreted by a computer, thus bits and bytes. Atomem became the ultimate realization of memory storage. The contents of thousands of super computers worth of data could now be contained in the space of a small sphere, the size of a single human cell.
The United States government was quick to seize control of this technology as escalating fears of new nuclear threats met with a lack of public approval worldwide. Convinced of its need to eliminate large-scale threats without nuclear fallout, government funded researchers and engineers, fueled with the massive data storage capabilities of Atomem, turned to nanotechnology. Offering more control than viral or biological weaponry, scientists were commissioned to develop a weapon that would kill from the inside out yet remain completely controllable.
Strains of nano-bots were created: micro robots which, upon injection, were capable of doing an array of functions within the human body: complete paralysis, blindness, even cowardliness strains were invented which would immobilize an enemy unit with fear. Other bots with positive effects were developed to increase the effectiveness of friendly ground troops. Increased speed, heightened senses, the inability to feel pain, and decreased fear awareness all proved effective. Strains were even developed to accelerate healing and self-regeneration functions. Technically, these were the first bionic commandos and were extremely effective. However, the need to inject the nanobots and the extremely high cost of production made the weapon inferior to competing viral and biological weaponry in actual warfare. That is, until the invention of the Infection Strain.
Discovered in 2011, the Infection Strain was an effective union of viral, bio, and nano technologies into the perfect weapon. Only a single bot was required for the weapon to function and entire populations could be wiped out without worry as to containment.
The human body, in all of its supposed glory, is quite simply a factory - a very elaborate means of breaking down molecules via digestion and reconstructing them into predetermined proteins to replicate the existence of cells and continue life. The biological instructions necessary to manufacture and and combine these elements are all contained biologically in DNA. The Infection Strain was designed to manipulate this system, like a virus, but instead of killing the host, would form a symbiotic relationship. The ultimate goal was control.
Formed from a new bio-metal, a fusion of gold and carbon, upon injection, the Infection Strain bot, armed with the smallest incarnation of Atomem ever produced, would immediately begin invading human cells like a virus, but instead of destroying them would simply reprogram their genetic code and cell structure to produce the molecules necessary for the creation of more nanobots. When enough nanobots were created, they would swarm to the brain, taking over all body function and putting bot creation into full swing, running out enormous programs for the normal function of human life, stored meticulously in their Atomem. The infection was completely undetectable, and persons would continue to function normally though completely under control. Batches of the nanobots are then produced and placed in the bodily fluids for transfer to other hosts. Even secreted in the sweat, simply touching the skin of an infected individual was enough to infect another. Infection put in motion the quiet prerogative to infect as many others as possible. Upon internalization of a single bot, complete infection of a human being was reached in 12 hours.
Pivotal to the bots success was the ability to control the bots themselves, and thus the host, remotely. Several resonant frequencies were created which would instruct the bots to manipulate the host bodies in various ways: paralysis, death, and even an "attack" mode were programmed into the nano-bots which, in their Atomem, also contained the instructions for all other strains of nanobots including sense enhancing beneficial strains. One particular resonant frequency, the key, was a self-destruction code which would render the nano-virus harmless while ending brain function in an infected. With this system, entire populations could spread the virus to one another unknowingly and be whiped out without a single bullet being fired. If necessary, entire populations also could be converted into fighting units, enslaved bio-machines that would fight without pain, fear, or need of any command, able to maintain function, even if large portions of the body were severed. The only way to stop these soldiers was to sever the nerves in the neck or spine. Besides the self-destruct frequency, removal of the head of an infected was the only sure-fire way to stopping body functions, and even then, the corpses were still contagious.
However, man's downfall lay at first and in the last, with the atom. Atomem, created at the atomic level, was not immune to the effects of quantum weirdness. Stray quantum particles and impossibilities predicted by quantum wave theory caused mounting inconsistencies in the genetic code of the Atomem in the initial nanobots over a period of time. Often this would manifest as an inability to perform some small function, like keeping the arms steady, or replicating proper speech. But these setbacks, eclipsed by the implications of the weapon, were largely ignored.
Using this new technology to puruse oil interests in the middle east, and technological interests in the far east without reprisal, the United States infected 3% of the world population. However, unknown to anyone, including American nano-bot controllers, a strain of bot affected on the quantum level was produced that would not respond to the self-destruct frequency. Multiplying exponentially with inconsistencies replicating at an excellerated rate, malfunctioning nano-bots continued to infect hosts. This went undetected until mounting inconsistencies caused infected hosts to loose control of limbs, vocal chords, and certain brain function. Codes for super-human beneficial enhancements contained in the Atomem were also being activated uncontrollably and bots were no longer responding to remote control or resonant frequencies being broadcast. By the time this was discovered, however, the number of infected worldwide had risen to 15%. Seeking containment, yet unable to warn other countries of the impending disaster due to a potentially massive (and perhaps violent) backlash of anti-American sentiment, the US government carried out quarantines of its major cities where the rogue strain had been found. However, international travel and the inability to properly contain the virus without complete public disclosure lead to a massive spreading of the affected nano-bots. By the year 2012, infection worldwide had risen to 50%. A breaking point was reached when continuing malfunction of the bots lead to obvious public signs of infection and federal and vigilante efforts could not contain those infected.
Massive campaigns were lead against those infected and the death toll around the world rose exponentially to match the spread of the techno-virus. Acting as a kind of accelerated natural selection, the infected who managed to escape destruction were those with certain nano-benefits triggered: accelerated aggression, hightened sensory perception, high pain-tolerance thresholds, and self-regeneration. The media called these people the "infected" or "bot-pots." Forced into containment camps in the wake of mounting anarchy and a breakdown of social control, while being confronted with an enemy that twitched uncontrollably, regenerated tissue, and arose after fatal wounds to charge at uninfected human hosts, survivors began to call the infected by their own term:
Zombies! |
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| 02:06am 21/04/2009 |
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in a cardboard box in the middle of a room
sits a man with his hands wrapped tight around his skull
and he shakes and he twitches while he mutters in the waiting
and his name is Morgan Morgan Morgan
his name is Morgan White
he whispers like chalk lines frantic cross a blackboard
madman's equation with funny little symbols
sings to himself of the whole world's history
eyes of the devils and the angels and the circles
of the heavens and the hell and the way they interact
where the lines intersect, collide, and trace backwards
right through his right brain out through the left
till the words become colors that he paints along his arms
of a message that's a story that is handed down daily
by a fluke communication with a better future self, that is
slipping oracles in-between the quantum levels
through the strata of the particles everywhere at once
in the flesh, in the air, in the bouncing of the sound across
the room and the white and the door and the Morgan
white as snow from the fear of sun sneaking through the window that will
disrupt with its photons the alignment of the planets that
provide for this phenomena that lets him hear the story that he
scribbles down and to the future self delivers orally
of how a man was trapped inside the nagging insecurity
that all he is and all he was and all he ever will be is
a loop of a dream of a loop coinciding with
unique circumstances like the ever-present now
and the tyranny of history and pre-programmed biology
predisposing and predicting
nothing ever changes
nothing ever changes
nothing ever changes
nothing ever changes
and caught inside the words
in the mantra
in the stories
in the falling actions of the tragedy in all its goriness
of dreams and these philosophies smashed against a canvass
lies a desperate pollock dripping crimson failure finding passion
in the motion in emotion in a motion in the motion
in the motion |
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| 11:58pm 06/04/2009 |
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I invented the fist, the blood dripping of bone fragments when you can't tell where you end and the other person begins. True blood brothers. Like atoms, blood cells will only break apart and mix when forced together under tremendous pressure. There is synthesis, energy, release. When you headbutt another person, there is a brief moment when the skulls first touch and the synapses can actually transfer across that tiny bridge, just for an instant until the impact blinds you both with pain, the brains slide forwards in a kiss, then the explosion of colors, the reeling, the earth crumbling underneath you and the desperation to be the first to wade past the pain, clutch through the spreading fog and explode from the ground, open the eyes back and the world is sharper. Clearer. The pain intensifies life, justifies it. Turns the contrast up until there is only black and white and red. It is either that or surrender to the haze and gray and the feeling of falling. I keep myself above my feet. I hold my center like a ball of light and expand it through my arms and legs until I am solid. I know every muscle and how it pulls, every bone and how it breaks, every kind of pain. I can feel my organs sloshing around inside their cases, I know what protects them, I know what connects them. When I punch I feel it through my back, my hips, my legs and arms, my groin, the tips of my toes. When the knuckles connect the shockwave resonates and I sing like a tuning fork, each strike intensifying, a reverberating loop, echoing. The hairs over my body prick and with the sweat I can feel molecules of air strong as wind when I move, I feel them bow and step aside, creating a void that sucks me in, draws the energy out and I rush onward. And when I am struck, oh when I am struck. The pain spreads like an image of what I am inside. There is intensity before where there was nothing, and I understand how I am sewn together. A kick to my inner thigh and it stabs into my shoulders. Points on my back running even down to my heels. The knuckles land and the blood rushes to the wound, eager to expand, to fill and lavish energy. When the cells rebuild, I trace their supply lines, I learn how I am made. I remember how I am connected. I remember what to engage, what to loosen, how to move when before I knew nothing. Every strike a meditation, every wound a teacher, every blow a mantra, repeated endlessly until it become automatic, thoughtless and pure. Till I am filled and solid and I know the only thing that might be known. This voice. This body. This motion. Life in destruction. Life and more life and what is not life is death.
I am fighter. |
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| ak......ward....... |
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| 12:09am 02/04/2009 |
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Often, because they're easy to pack and require no preparation, I'll bring a banana and a single serving yogurt for a snack on my 15 minute break at work. Apparently I missed the class where they tell you the right way how to open yogurt singles, because every time I do, apparently the contents are under pressure and I get little gobs of yogurt sprayed onto my face. Don't ask me how this happens.
The first time this happened, in what was a very surreal experience that balanced shakily on a thin line between homoerotic and a dramatic perspective change to that of a woman, I wondered in my surprise if it was anything like what one might experience at the receiving end of giving a guy head. This was further compounded by the fact that, hey, I love cherry orchard yogurt and thought the best method to clean myself up would be to use my fingers to wipe the stray bits off and then lick them up. And of course, yogurt is usually my "dessert" for my snack, so this all happened after I gobbled down a banana... and one that I probably peeled with my tongue and teeth since I'm reading at the time and my hands are busy holding the pages of my book apart.
I don't think it's possible to get more unconsciously gay than this. Good lord I'm an idiot. One sexy idiot. To gays. (damnit)
I got a good laugh picturing all this from the eyes of a gay guy watching and getting really turned on by the whole experience, me of course being blissfully unaware of how homoerotic the whole thing was at the time. Whoops.
But as this all struck me while I retrieved the last fleck of white off my cheek and sucked it off my middle finger (yes, it only hit me then) I thought that the surprise wasn't really all that bad, and was really just more startling than anything. In the end it was actually kind of fun. Plus I love yogurt. Really the only bad thing about eating yogurt off your face is the fact that it's cold.
............
(@_@)
But in yet another mental triumph of my persistent heterosexuality, instead of wondering how secretly gay I might be, I instead resolved immediately to find out how to make an orgasm taste like strawberries. Or chocolate. Oh if only that were possible. Science? Science?! You're never around when I need you! |
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| 10:45am 15/01/2009 |
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I think I hate going to sleep because I know the next morning I'll wake up and everything will be the same. |
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| scars |
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| 12:45am 31/12/2008 |
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Life leaves an imprint. Just beneath the skin. And on the backs of eyelids.
Hardcore gamers know this. When I first experienced it, I was 6 years old.
One Saturday, I had resolved to beat the original Super Mario for my 8-bit Nintendo. Back in those days, you had to do this; plan ahead of time and set up an entire day to beat a game. All those intermittent hours of playing on the side from day to day... those are all just training for the main event. Back then, there were no memory cards, no save points, no continues. It was one straight shot through and once you turned the power off your game was gone forever. It was transient art; a simultaneously fulfilling yet depressing victory in that you worked so hard for so many hours all for a poorly scripted ending sequence lasting only a minute or two. The sense of accomplishment is wound through with a weary finality, like the ache of being on your feet all day, but knowing you worked and have money for it.
Though I had not worked and had no money for it.
How many hours have I spent staring into a florescent screen, learning the layouts of levels, memorizing enemy movement patterns, attack sequences, the location of hidden pathways? What has this given me besides hand-to-eye coordination... kinship with other gamers. The silent guilt of every gamer that screams as it's smothered "I make wasting life marginally fun."
But that's beside the point.
I set aside a Saturday to beat Super Mario. I can't tell you how long it took. I had to stop for a bit after I reached the 8th and last world. I just couldn't get past that last hurtle for so long, I remember leaving the house and finding my mother wherever she was outside to cry to her how I couldn't beat it. She didn't understand. She thought I was silly. She even offered to help, but there was nothing she could do. It was just a matter of muscle memory. Knowing what collection of lever nudges and button presses would land my little 8-bit man on the shining axe and send the bridge crashing down.
I eventually did it. The princess was not in another castle. Cue the last fireworks. Mario gets his kiss. I had done it. Game Over. It has all lead to this. When I shut the power off all record of my victory was erased from this world. Only the memory remained, some pattern of neurons firing.
That night when I lay down to sleep, I found the levels still scrolling out across my eyes. Even with my eyes open in the dark, I couldn't stop seeing Mario hopping on goomba's heads, hear the tinny music rattling around my head. Everything played out in a bizarre whiplash of fast-forward and slow-motion, re-playing the entire game in some disjointed collage.
Like I said, any hardcore gamer will tell you this because they know. If you stare at something long enough, the imprint becomes too deep to ignore. You can do this right now. Play a game for 5 hours straight. Any game. Mindsweeper. Online poker. When you close your eyes it will play on the backs of your eyelids.
One of the strangest feelings in the world is having to open your eyes so you won't see something.
It works on more than your eyes. I half-grew up in Michigan and Cedar Point, the roller coaster center of the world, was 4 hours away by car. I remember going and riding all of the coasters all day long, riding 4 hours back home and getting in near midnight, and still I could feel the motion in my body, like I was going up and down while I stood on solid ground.
It's the residue. Life leaves an imprint. The mind continues on what it is fed, it runs for hours, for days. This is why a song can get stuck in our brains, driving us mad. Why we hold grudges. Why revenge can keep someone alive.
Memory is cumulative. You might be surprised at what you can remember for years and years without knowing it. There are images and sounds that I will recognize probably for the rest of my life. Associations that only I will ever know.
The slate is never wiped clean. Though Mario only played on the backs of my eyelids for a couple of hours, it is forever chiseled into my head. Every level. If I watch someone play it, there will be a sense of familiarity there. The music of Final Fantasy will bring back images of highschool. If I ever go to Rome again, or Hikone Japan, there will be things that I recognize. Things that I thought I had forgotten. There are faces that I will always know.
The past can never be forgotten. Life dents you in, and though you might try to bump it back out, it will never be smooth and untouched as it was before. It is another irony that we do not know how white and smooth we are until it has been changed, until we've lost it.
In this way, you can never escape your past. What you have done, what you have said, and what you have experienced can never be un-lived. It can be atoned for. It can be fixed, or covered up. It cannot be undone.
Perhaps this is why religion says that our actions echo into infinity. Why endless suffering awaits a finite number of sins. Why a single action warrants an eternity of peace.
Why I will never have perfect faith.
We grow dull, we rust. And sometimes, yes, we may even forget. But we never change. We may build in different directions, but we cannot sever the foundations. At heart, we will always be the same. Life leaves its imprint. And what we really show are the layers we build over them, our facades for the world.
They are not complete lies, just as any mask must fit the face it covers. The masks may change, there may even be masks worn over other masks. But the face behind never changes its shape. The mask must conform to the contours of the face it clings to. And each mask leaves its mark. Indents. Lines crisscrossing a lifetime of experience, pain, joy, emptiness, contentment, doubt.
Our personalities are the collection of scars, etching over our minds, decaying and building masks over the crumbling ruins of memory and the white-unblemished expanses we do not know are there. It is these spaces that we give to others unknowingly. It is what happens to these spaces that hurt, heal, and change us the most.
Our painful, beautiful, scars. |
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| thoughts on the long walk home |
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| 11:47am 17/12/2008 |
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I give my keys to the repairman and he says he'll call me when he figures out what's wrong. I open the door to my car and grab the sweatshirt and gloves on the passenger seat. The gloves are black and thick. They're for snowboarding but I haven't been in years. I would figure out how many years, but it would make me depressed. I walk just out of sight of the repair shop and put on the extra clothing. I had planned for this trip.
I start out walking doing calculations. It's 3.4 miles to my house. How fast does the average human walk? Am I an average human? Assume 3.4 miles per hour. It will take me an hour to get home, which seems strange considering it only took me 9 minutes to drive here. Already, I'm starting to get cold. At least I remembered to wear my shoes that didn't have leaks in them, since the streets are wet. After a couple of minutes, my socks are damp anyway.
History may be founded on what is written down and recorded with the specific purpose of preserving history squarely in mind. But when enough time has passed by, the only thing left of us is our garbage. Archaeology is the study of the discarded. The broken bits of bone and cloth and pottery that scientists pour over are simply ancient refuse. Given enough time, all of our grand buildings will have crumbled, our roads grown over, our great metalworking rusted away, all paintings and books faded, rotted, and gone. Our very bones will turn to dust.
I walk along the road stepping over the corpses of small unfortunate animals as cars fly past me close enough to feel the wind coming off their grills. I look down at my feet, making sure I don't step in anything that will eat the soles of my shoes through and the garbage is what catches my eye. Nothing really good becomes garbage. We throw it away because not only we, but everyone else probably won't want what we now have. That which is disposable usually contains that which is disposable. I kick the plastic bottles out of my way and avoid the broken glass. Our garbage tells us we're self destructive.
I see cans and bottles for soda pop the most, with the occasional elongated energy drink can or the 5-hour-energy shot mini bottles. Carbonated water filled with sugar, sugar, and more sugar with enough acid to dissolve a nail in a couple days, then spiked with stimulants, and topped off with preservatives and artificial coloring. Then the beer cans, shattered 40oz bottles, and cheap vodka fifths. Crumpled cigarette cases and an endless smattering of spent butts, littering the roads and bushes like corpses after a war. Styrofoam coffee cups. The wrappers from burgers and boxes for fries, almost transparent with the grease still soaking through them. Fat, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine. This is what we have become. Medicated up, medicated down, living from the home to the car to the work to the bar, disconnected from the organic, self-regulating our systems. Coffee to wake up, vitamins, pills to build muscle without work, loose weight without action, fast food to save time, chemicals to keep the stomach flowing, make the shit clump together, kill the bacteria, a drink to unwind, a smoke to relax, microwaves to heat pre-packaged, chemical-laden food in plastic trays, a condom to stop birth, pills to regulate menstruation, pills to sleep, pills to wake up, pills to be happy, pills to function. This is what we will leave behind; the wrappings of our medicated lives, packed with the artificial, living from one manufactured world to another, pausing long enough to look sideways at a world of green flying by and then toss something we don't want into it. The ultimate irony of selling death, with our chemicals, our drugs, and our plastic, is that the packaging will outlive everyone. This is how the earth will remember us. Every painting in the Louvre will rot and fade.
But a Coke bottle?
That's forever. |
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| 02:55am 02/12/2008 |
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I am so sick of this fucking shit |
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| 03:46pm 17/11/2008 |
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The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a master’s in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. ...Nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.
Some idiot who's not afraid to say what they really love.
...Plato said: 'He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs.'"
-Chuck Palahniuk |
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| sky bird and forest wolf |
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| 01:38am 22/07/2008 |
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once sky bird saw forest wolf
caught the other's eye
decided to come down and see
and help and talk awhile
light says bird to forest wolf
oh the places I have seen
the poor creatures I have met
through vast uncharted sky
his feathers white against the clouds
he soars between raindrops in sun
he calls to the other birds
here, here is berry bush
here is some shelter
here I am
come
to him the wolf is much too low
much too sad
much too tired
to him the wolf is a pity
dark says wolf to sky bird
I know my paths and scents
I crack brown rabbit's bones
familiar with the sound
his fur black against the earth
he sinks between shadows in night
he calls to the other wolves
here, here am I
no shelter here
none
to him the bird is much too high
much too lovely
much too bright
and wolf himself he pities
says sky bird to forest wolf
you may still fly with me
says forest wolf to sky bird
what makes you think I can?
because sky bird I am
he says
sky bird I am
fly
wolf begins to cry
why
says sky bird gliding down
sad because you will not try?
says wolf
because wolf am I
wolf am I
die
forest wolf caught sky bird
and ate more than his pride |
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| eulogy |
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| 04:06am 08/07/2008 |
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the slash of blood red
the bucktoothed smile
so naive
I would have taken you for
thousands more
nothing buys
love at first sight
the first time I touched you
I played with your eyes
dry contacts the fuzzy road
first time I worried
first time I felt the purr
knew it was mine
soon packed
full of life, love
music of voices laughing
bass competing
speeding down the dirt roads
nose turned
to home
hitchhiker best friend on cold mornings
together silent in waking stupor
I will always know
the little trick
the liver to pull
seconds to count
places to push
I know you
your moods
your touch
smashmouth dialed down
cold night and sweating hands
and stiff clothes
her dress was light blue
left every place she touched
glittering
head swimming lips busy
pressed against all sides
the lake and the unexpected
the radio digits
lighting fields of skin
I felt that fence on my inner thighs
the reason I'll never supersize again
unexpected weapon
the slow motion whiplash
I took my first life
watched it fade from brown eyes
in your lights
rain on snake pavement
shotgunned guitar
a line of yellow lights
and all but one
for your sides
almost lost you
twice
angel wings for two old hearts
Chrsitmas morning
my little unsung boyscout cliche
all our secret good deeds
gripped an 8 hour white knuckle
and many more hours
fast heart for pleasure and pain
I knew would be waiting
passing tankers
for a reflection
numb the wheel vibrating
watching the needle climb
the rumble of gravel
the partnerless dance
the touch of death
the flight
the miracle
I owe you my life
how many hundreds
thousands
tens of thousands
of miles
of hearts
of moments
of memories
of music
of love
of hope and pain and joy and life
touched this metal
climbed in
climbed back out
I feel your spirit
I gave it to you
the moment I gave you the name
I animate you
inanimate lover of mine
I know and love
as nobody can or will
or has before
and I know such as us
do not need goodbyes
it was well done
so well done
my slash of blood red
my bucktoothed smile
Ezra
my good and faithful servant
forever may you ride
forever may you fly |
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| 12:49am 25/06/2008 |
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e
m
e
v
o
m
for a wind that will not budge
ship that does not feel its fetters stretching mast looks ever upwards
taught while above is
where the other is
lost in wonder of
lost asunder
two atone
tethered
yet they are
so lost in night
stares down for anchor
silhouette chain lost in height
rusted anchor stares cold upwards |
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| a degree removed |
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| 02:36pm 04/06/2008 |
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Yesterday, our power went out for about 5 hours. My brother and I had been intent on getting some homework typed out and making some progress in Jak II (respectively), but with the power gone, we suddenly found ourselves stranded. So instead, we lit a bunch of candles and read comic books together until we couldn't really see anymore and then went to bed. It was very dark and quiet and it got me thinking about lights and technology. And this is the mental thread I got stuck on: Modern culture always taking us one step away.
Lights are the first thing I thought of. Electric, gas, and oil powered lighting prolongs the day unnaturally, allowing us to function long hours into the night. On the other side, electric and mechanical alarm clocks allow us to rise before dawn breaks, unnaturally shortening the night. This puts us out of sync with the natural rhythm of the earth and sun which all other forms of life (short of deep sea fish I suppose) are in tune to.
Similarly, we live in constantly temperature controlled environments. Many of us may go from our homes, to a garage, to a car, to an office and then back the same way, never stepping very long out into the open air. Not only does this have us breathing a steady flow of re-circulated stale air, but it throws our bodies off of the rhythm of the seasons and our connection with the earth through its weather is severely dulled.
Our distance from our natural environment makes pollution and environmental harm easier to do and ignore. Our garbage and waste is whisked away by someone we don't know or care about to somewhere we don't know or care about and we never give it a second thought. And amidst all of this, our natural environment is quickly becoming our most unnatural of environments, to the point where many people, if left on their own out in the "wild" would not be able to survive. The irony of this shift is so hackneyed it's almost unnoticeable.
Thinking of survival and shelter makes me think of another basic human and animal need: food. And in this sense too we are a degree (or indeed many degrees) removed. Virtually none of us eats food that we've personally grown, and if we do buy it from a farmer, we never know the person or see his/her face. Similarly, most of us don't hunt or slaughter our own meat. Someone we don't know does this for us. Not only does this create separation from the community, but it separates us from our food itself. Most people will tell you that food which you personally have grown or hunted and then prepared yourself always tastes better than something else. Our removal from the process also creates more food waste and less appreciation for its production. In a similar line of thought, with so many people not, for example, hunting their own food, the meat which we do consume is that of cattle and chicken: which we slaughter not for their nutritional value or taste, but because they're the stupidest, slowest animals we can find (probably not the best food). And with such a high demand for them coupled with a removal from the rearing and slaughtering process, it leads to an industrialization of the process on a mass scale, allowing for inhumane treatment of food-animals and the spread of disease.
Even our separation from the slaughtering process has dulled our appreciation and reverence for meat as a food. Killing in general has become very impersonal since the creation of the gun and later the missile. Without weapons, killing is done with the hands and a direct contact with the person/creature and death must be established and respected. The blade removed the sense of touch from the act and later, the gun would remove the person from the death almost entirely. Our progression to "smart missiles" is the culminating evolution of killing. As was said in a recent Air Force commercial, we're "working hard to unman the skies." War is becoming increasingly more mechanized and impersonal. Now we kill without even knowing that something has been killed.
In any event, most of us never see or talk to the people who raise, grow, hunt, and slaughter the food that we eat. Most of us only see the face of the person who sells it to us, and this separates us by a degree from our community. Similarly, most of us do not know the person who made the plates we eat off of, the clothing we wear, the craftsmen who made our furniture, or the people who created our artwork. This creates a separation between the craftsman, the product, and the consumer, which further reduces the strength of community. In many cases, our goods don't even have the warmth of a human hand behind them as they were manufactured in dark cold factories en-masse. If not that, most of us use goods made by people we don't know out of materials that aren't native to our areas.
In that vein, mass rapid transit has allowed for an unnatural demand of goods from foreign places. Food that can't be grown in a certain area can now be shipped anywhere, and this sends the demand for certain foods that would be otherwise unavailable through the roof. This means that the food has to be shipped over long distances, so we pump it full of chemicals and preservatives. The high demand leads to massive factory farms that use pesticides, steroids, antibiotics, and genetic engineering to unnaturally produce larger and larger quantities of food, creating more and more waste, and also making it dangerously easy for disease or disaster to take out huge portions of food production.
Production expands from the local, to the regional, to the national and sometimes even global scale, and it becomes a big business which opens up a whole new can of problems. Mass and global economy with a competitive capitalist system ensures the greediest and seediest businesses are the ones with the most power and resources. The little, local, or ethical guy is muscled out in the name of profits and efficiency, and we become even further removed from our goods and products.
The advent of cars and high-speed transportation separates us from our families and from local community. The phone itself has taken much out of communication, removing body language, and reducing the many sub-tones and intricacies of the human voice into a rudimentary and artificial squawk. The phone has now further evolved into text messaging and there removed us yet another step further. With the written word, instead of feeling the writing utensil in our hands, we push down a key and a letter simply appears. And as far as communication is concerned texting has removed all humanity out of communication itself, to the point where we have to actually type "lol" and create the most basic artificial image of a smiling face :-), ironically enough usually when we aren't actually laughing out loud or smiling at all.
Technology seems to be removing us from ourselves. Many of us now have jobs that only require us to sit, think, talk, and move our fingers to click on keyboards. Then we return home to sit on couches and watch television. This sedimentary lifestyle is unhealthy and to many uninspiring creatively. We're constantly barraged by advertisements, mostly for things we don't need. Entertainment has reached a fevered peak in loudness, obscenity, and banality, appealing to the lowest common denominator at the highest possible volume. Book reading is down, while millions of people flock to youtube to watch plot-less music videos of sub-par music and idiocy on parade. Taylor Hicks, a contestant on American Idol, received more votes in one night than any president has in United States history (almost 10 million more). The television itself has created a huge gap in the entertainment industry between the idiotically funny and true artistic creativity. The MP3 has separated music from the musician and the song from the album. Many popular "artists" now make more money from cell-phone ringtone sales than album purchases: a medium which reduces what is now being passed off for music into an even lower, garbled, distorted form which only plays a few seconds anyway. The internet, one of the most powerful informational tools ever invented, is infested with pop-up advertising, false information, malware, and pornography. Cars separate us from the sense of distance, and the accomplishment of prolonged physical motion. Condoms separate us (literally) from each other and allow for recklessness with sex that detracts from its power and possibility while (paradoxically) sexual disease and reckless population expansion still seem to increase at an alarming rate. Abortion trivializes pregnancy and removes us from our own children, and again weakens and detracts from the power and responsibility of sex. Many things today can be "fixed" (usually temporarily) by throwing money at the problem, and money (as opposed to intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, social harmony, or environmental balance) has become the chief aim of many of our endeavors. The substitution of the dollar or any monetary equivalent for real worth has lead to inflated prices for inferior goods and services and undue power being placed in the hands of those who don't deserve it as well as proving an extremely fertile ground for the strongest forms of greed, lust, and injustice. The loss of the "trade" system also separates us from the fruits of our own labor till everything aesthetically or practically useful is willingly reduced to a dollar amount and this happens on a global scale. Mass politics means that people can now organize (for good and for bad) at a moment's notice, allowing for drastic global change in very short amounts of time. Corrupt politics and power hungry dictators are able to seize more power and sway more minds in frighteningly shorter amounts of time...
I know that I don't have very many facts to back these things up, but this was just some of the feelings that I was getting. In many ways, I know that life must be better now that it was before the advent of technology and global networking. Yet I can't help but feel that the technology that is supposed to make our lives easier is actually, degree by degree, removing us from life itself, and global networking and communication while invented to bring all of us together, is actually removing us from personal connections with one another and our own sense of local community. |
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| 11:43am 31/03/2008 |
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We believe the earth is round. We know it is flat.
I believe in God. I know I am alone. |
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| 03:15am 19/03/2008 |
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I've been under a lot of stress recently, and have found myself running out of ways to deal with it. I'm getting tired and upset very easily and find myself slowly shutting down. But to the news:
My bamboo plant is still alive! I like him very much and feel like I would enjoy much more green around my room, but haven't the time nor money to procure for him some companions.
My schoolwork continues in much the same form: I recently got back a paper which I was all but unenthusiastic about writing and did not do too poorly on it, though I hated writing it. For this one, I couldn't come up with any real feeling on any topic so I endeavored to write the most polished and complete comparison between two of our texts as I possibly could... as a defensive sort of paper, a dexterous facade, as it were. In other words, I had no worthy impetus to come up with a good thesis, and in many respects I failed the purpose of the essay entirely. I must give the professor credit for seeing through my bull-hockey, as I've fooled some others in my time with this maneuver. On her rubric I scored in the "excels" and "exceeds expectations" in 7 out of 8 categories, getting a "meets expectations" only in the "proceeds from a sophisticated argumentative position" category. She nailed me squarely in her end comments by appropriately crediting me with a "deft overview" and I limped away from the whole affair with a more than warranted B+.
I'm reading Moby Dick and growing very tired of it. I'm fond of remarking to my friends, "It makes me want to find Melville's grave and promptly vomit on it." I swear, this novel is as elongated, dense, and gradually sloping as the flanks of the odious white whale itself.
I have a concert (coffee house show) that I'm performing in a week and I'm very nervous about it. I currently have no set list and need to develop one.
I'm extremely tired of my room being in a constant undulating state of disarray and orderliness. And I've all but set my mind to deviously fashioning schemes to rid the sink of my flatmate's mold-collecting dishes without cleaning them myself.
Recently, I've been feeling very sick in the stomach and head, like I've eaten something that vilely ferments in my guts and, creeping in an acrid mist up my throat, distills itself in my sinuses. My shoulders hurt from being hunched over a computer. My nights are spent in anxious and desperate attempts at relaxation from homework and class, then the sudden starting tremor of realization shoots through - I'm falling behind! - followed by the late nights of playing catch-up, the keys clacking and pages flapping frequently until dawn. The strain isn't as great as I've experienced it before, but this battle is proving to be one of dogged attrition, and my reserves are running low. A couple good meals, good nights of quiet rest, undistracted days of productivity and exercise, and a scant hour or two honestly free of obligation and worry: I'm sure these would all but spin my depression in a quick 180 degrees. But something always seems amiss... some X not being sufficiently filled on its one side of the equation and the other side divides itself again and again to make up for its wanting. My engine's oil is churning thick, black, and gritty, and my joints, my eyes against their lids, the pulsing folds of grey matter in my skull, they all rub together and chafe and produce such friction as fires this... this what? Anxious despondency? And anger, that too, as I've grown to hate pointless wallowing in such things.
But I'm writing here as a form of therapy (into the wee hours of morning, of course, as everything that even may help is seemingly intrinsically tinged with some kind of inevitable downside) I'm sure you can tell... and though I'm usually loathe to post these pity-searching monologues (I cannot count the number of times a "Ctrl-A, Backspace" has saved my journal from them) I've decided to send up this one.
Pray for me: Safety, food, sleep, and most of all peace. The last of these in full and unadulterated: it would be nice to have some real peace.
I wish that something good or interesting or intriguing had happened so that I could share that with you! Some new creative outpouring, some great movement of passion or feeling. But right now, I keep finding myself a panting Sisyphus, longing just once to see the boulder escape my hill's crest and then bound happily away!
Smiling at my own wordplay (and in this way somewhat happier) and in the act of writing being, even without answer, comforted, I leave it for the elusive and tentative domain of my own disgruntled Morpheous. To sleep, perchance to dream? Ay, there's no rub. For in my sleep of death all dreams may come. To dream is thus to sleep... and 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd.
-DC |
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| A Quiet Melody |
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| 01:02am 11/03/2008 |
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Mary softly opened the door, careful to push up in the knob so that the hinges wouldn’t squeak and wake ( Melody up... ) |
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| as I come out to this fishing village... |
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| 12:57am 05/12/2007 |
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The trouble and simultaneous great joy critiquing or interpreting poetry is that so much of the process takes place within the mind of the reader. Much like how with Jazz music one must listen as well to the notes not being played, so it is with poetry and the worlds not written, and the Japanese place special emphasis and pride on exactly what they are not saying with their artwork and culture. Everything from the practice of the “artful silence” to the heavy influence of the “one corner” style in Japanese painting echoes of the aesthetic love for that which isn’t there. What we can see in life and poetry, we can critique, we can try to explain, we can try to understand. However, so much of life can never be seen, perhaps may never be explained, and quite possibly will never be understood. I think it is always with this in mind that the Japanese, and indeed many of the cultures of the East, write their poetry.
As I come out
To this fishing village,
Late in the autumn day,
No flowers in bloom I see,
Nor any tinted maple leaves.
If one looks at this poem for exactly what it is, one would not see a whole lot. The poem is basically a statement, devoid of any obvious emotion, intent, or direction. Who is the man talking? Why does he go to fishing village? Why is it late in the day? Was he looking for flowers in bloom or maple leaves? How does he feel about not seeing them? None of these answers are contained in the poem. Indeed, this poem “works” in that it is “saying everything” by saying nothing at all. It simply paints a picture, and then the reader may fill in whatever he wants to answer all of the inevitable questions that arise from such an ambiguous statement.
For example, flowers in bloom and tinted maple leaves may be contrasted with one another. Blooming flowers may represent life beginning anew while tinted maple leaves are shouting their brilliant colors in their throws of death. A Westerner like myself may find it poetically fitting to see these two things laying next to each other, giving rise to such feelings as a picture of a lamb sleeping against a lion may inspire. It is interesting to place life and death so close together, and it brings up philosophical questions about the nature of life, death, and how beauty might seem to permeate it all.
However, this is not the case with this poem as the speaker sees neither flowers in bloom nor maple leaves, and he is shown to neither desire to see them nor to care that he doesn’t. It also may be said that the poem paints a sense of aloneness or isolation, though the existence of people is not necessarily negated; it’s simply unmentioned. One may say that this is a very lonely poem, but one must remember that the speaker was coming out to the fishing village. Surely, what other reason or unavoidable result would going to a village warrant except for the seeing of other people?
In short, this poem really can say anything you want it to because it doesn’t really say anything at all. In fact, the entire poem itself as a statement is a negative one: In effect, the poem says nothing about something that isn’t there. It serves instead to provide a very simple image, bereft of any superfluous words, emotions, or situations on which any person may paint his own life, his own experience, and his own world. Where one may feel the absence of the flowers and leaves and come away with a profound sense of loss and loneliness, another may see something completely different.
Thus, I see this poem as a statement about life and the human being’s inexplicable existence within it. I focus first on the absence of the leaves and flowers by equating these two images to life and death as I said that it would be poetically fitting and provoking to have these two images placed with one another. However, in the poem they are absent, saying nothing at all. Thus one may wonder why the poem is even written at all in the first place. And herein lies the contemplation of the mystery of life.
The poem exists… I cannot ever change that. I have read it, therefore it is for all intensive purposes, in my world. And yet, the poem has no inherent meaning at all. It is completely empty, in and of itself. It is I who fill it with life, I that give it emotion, feeling, and substance. The poem seems to say, without saying anything at all, that life does not give us answers. We set out to the village, just as we read poetry; looking for something. And we cannot help but see something. Yet what do we find? Nothing. We see no flowers in bloom, no tinted maple leaves. We are left simply with what is (which is nothing at all) and the profound absurdity that there is no meaning for any of it unless we ourselves see fit to create it. It is even more absurd that the poem itself can exist without inherent meaning and not destroy itself in the process, as any human surely would.
Indeed, if every human were to die and nobody could ever see flowers and leaves again, and nobody would ever again write poetry about them… the flowers would still bloom and the leaves would still die. And the most frightening thing to humanity as a whole is the fact that humanity’s existence has exactly the same meaning as the rocks, the stars, the budding flowers, and the dying leaves. And that meaning, in and of itself, is nothing at all.
How interesting is it then that this poem so perfectly illustrates what fundamental anxiety lies at the core of human existence while simultaneously showing the myriad paradoxes of Zen thought; Substance in Nothingness, Solidarity in Isolation, Perfection in Imperfection. It unites Man the One with Existence the Many, and we are lost within it… yet still moving, creating, giving meaning as we see fit. To me, this poem illustrates Man’s constant deadlocked struggle to find meaning in what frustratingly seems to remain a meaninglessness world. It is a painfully beautiful contradiction which we are at once and forever One with, yet as we are aware of such, forever separated from. It is, just as we are. And as such, we are all completely absurd. |
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| The Eye and I |
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| 01:05pm 02/12/2007 |
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there once was an eye
and the eye grew wide
wider than an eye should be
says I
tried to see through me
tried and tried
it was pleased
pleased simply seeing
yet denied
my insides
says I to the eye
please won't you
look away
so that I may slowly
softly sneak away
I'm afraid
you will not see
my insides
though you stare
though you stay
you will not see
my insides
tomorrow or today
says the eye to I
yes, though I never may
see your insides today
though I never may
really see
see my way
through
I surely would never miss
a single second of you
I surely would die to miss
a single moment of you
then sigh
says I to the eye
then you won't miss a second
of my walking away
will you
not die to miss a moment
of my saying goodbye |
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| 05:31pm 13/11/2007 |
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the heart is a sword
embraced by its sheath
encased in night
it waits to be
bow to me
unleash
set free
and we two
shall duel
in moonlight |
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| sit and stare teddy bear |
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| 09:14pm 18/06/2007 |
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the belt goes
thwap
thwap
thwap
and Jimmy cries to me
though I will not taste his tears
when daddy finally leaves
when Jimmy comes to hold me
when Jimmy comes to love me
I will pretend I have
a tongue behind
my stitched-on smile
but I will grin like a fool
with vacant button eyes
I will look the same
as I did yesterday
when Jimmy curled around me
slept and dreamed
something sweet
his hands tight around me
making us both warm
I will look the same
this coming Saturday morning
watching cartoons with Jimmy
watching
the sun pouring
through the front window
making us both warm
the belt goes
thwap
thwap
thwap
and Jimmy cries to me
I see his eyes blurry
crying for my arms to rescue
and there is
nothing I can do for him
nothing I can do
my arms are comforting fluff
my insides cotton harmless
I am lifeless
I am powerless
and weak
because my mouth cannot yell
because my eyes cannot look
because my arms cannot hit
he will love my silent form
Jimmy loves me
he will squeeze with trembling hands
my seams apart
and stain my fur with blood
he will crush me
as he sleeps
the belt goes
thwap
thwap
thwap
and Jimmy cries to me
as I sit
as I stare
as I do
nothing |
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| The Look |
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| 10:52am 29/05/2007 |
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The lily-white prow of a cruise ship pushes steadily through the deep blue waters of the Caribbean Atlantic. I stand with her at the apex of the highest deck on the boat, outside of the windows where the wind is strongest. We are alone, high above the other passengers on the deck below us laying out to tan along the swimming pool. The sun flecks her hair with gold and the wind sends it lashing against my chest in tight angry coils. I watch the coolness of the breeze send pleasant chills running along her skin. It stands her hairs on end and shivers her deeper into my arms. We look unblinking through the wind out at the endless expanse of water and sky, sprawling blue to the very horizon.
She fills my arms nicely, resting under my chin like we were designed to fit together, like we are two puzzle-pieces somehow linked. My arms are wrapped tightly around her waist, and I pull her closer to feel the gentle curves of her body. She turns her head to meet mine and kisses me. It's a playful kind of kiss, the kind that sooner or later gets overtaken by a smile that I finally can't repress. We're laughing before we even finish it. I think about how picturesque and cliché this scene is, like a Caribbean "Titanic," and I wonder if she's thinking the same thing. I think with a slight touch of sadness that I shall never be able to see her thoughts and know what goes on behind her eyes. I cannot see what makes them blaze with blue fire, bluer than even the waves crashing around us.
I catch those eyes just before she turns away. She looks at me and their blue is fierce and clear… yet somehow softened. They are seductive and beckoning, yet they demand nothing. It is one of the looks that lives in the smallest of moments. It lights my blood on fire, sending heat down from my lips through to my fingertips and the soles of my feet.
I know this is not the wanton and consuming fire of lust. Many eyes, even a stranger's eyes can call out "Ravage me, take me, make me nothing but fire and bend me to you, unleash your fury with mine and let's consume each other whole." But there is a different look, a deeper look, which demands an intimacy. It burns just as brightly but whispers the wordless sigh of true lovemaking, when two forms neither crash nor entwine but slide together and lock and disappear. It echoes the lovemaking that forgets itself, forgets the world and time and the distance between the atoms of touching skin and just lives simply for its own sake. It combines and collapses two forms down into a single point which knows more firmly and joyously than all else: "We are. I am." It is the look she gives to me.
And like many of the most beautiful things on this earth, the look is there in one instant, seemingly stretched out forever like the infinite ocean pulsing around and against us... and then it is gone as her eyes again return to the sky.
I wonder if I have a look like that for her - a look that makes love without moving or speaking. If I do, I surely didn't know where it is or how to use it. I could turn her body around now, turn her eyes to mine, but could I conjure up such a thing from my heart? How could I say through my eyes as she did such unfathomable things as wide as the ocean and sky?
I look out over the prow of the ship into the sky and ocean and I feel small and insignificant. The sky towers over me, pressing down and suffocating. The ocean crashes against the side of the ship threatening its silent violence, knowing I could be consumed completely within its dispassionate waves. She suddenly feels heavy in my arms, as if I have no right to hold her and I do love and beauty an injustice by holding such power close to me. She and the sky and sea stretch out massive and encompassing as far as I can see in every direction. All of the songs must be wrong. How could anyone's love be as great and deep and full of life as this endless landscape of water swallowing us up?
But her love is. I had felt it for an instant in her eyes. I had been consumed by it. All that I was or could be had been lost inside of it. It is impossible that I, so finite and limited, can be here holding this being in my arms who holds eternity in her eyes. Impossible that she would press deeper into me for warmth against the wind. She is impossible. This cannot last. It must end.
And now she pulls away from me and I felt the world pulling away from me arms. Now it is true: she is finally leaving me behind. She must have not felt it when she gave the look to me. She had not seen it reflected in my eyes. She had finally seen my failure and sensed that my body did not contain within it the power of oceans and skies. She is leaving and taking all the world with her. She knows.
She is two steps away and the wind soon takes away the warmth her body had given to my skin. I shiver, watching her now as she leans against the railing. Now I turn to go. It has all been a mistake, some cosmic error that put her at my side. The steps of my sandals seem to echo and each one becomes softer than the other. The lights are dimming and the sounds dulling. The world is falling away into darkness. I accept my defeat. It is only right and just; the way things should be. This was never my world. It was hers. It is time for me to leave.
"Where are you going?"
Her voice runs through me, stopping me, filling me. I turn and she is behind me, waiting. The gold of her hair frames her eyes as they smile at me. Impossible. She is impossible. Then her arms around me, her body pressed up against mine, her fingers nestling into the curves of my back. She places a kiss against my neck pouring warmth down through me, pulling me into a dazzling light.
"Take me with you," she says.
I feel the sun and the wind swirling around us, the ship rocking beneath my feet, her hair along my neck. I hold her and feel fire and am lost somewhere inside of her. I have no voiceless words in my eyes, yet she still holds me. I have failed her and still she holds me. I collapse into her arms, I am consumed and drowned in the oceans of her eyes. There is nothing to do but stand and accept. Nothing to do but fall forever through the blue and let it hold me in its depths.
It is impossible. She is impossible. We are. I am. |
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| 123 paper street |
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| 12:30am 24/05/2007 |
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I dodged the potholes that made the road look like the surface of a black moon and cautiously made my way to 123 paper street. My pair of sneakers had holes in the sides that let the dirt come in and grind into my socks, but I kicked the gravel across the gaping cracks in the road anyway. I wasn’t in a hurry, though I could hear Mason on the corner making a drug deal and I knew he might come after me if he caught my eye. I skipped the curb and walked beneath the shade of the dying maple trees that draped their sagging branches over the cracked sidewalk. I made my way past Mason and his corner without turning my head, even when he began to call after me, and I made my way slowly to 123 paper street.
123 Paper St. sounds like a storybook place, doesn’t it. It sounds like a beautiful white house which sits back from a quiet street with an apple tree in the front yard. The sunlight would glint off the white boards of its face and the upstairs windows would seem to form round and loving eyes. A little boy probably would live there. His mommy and daddy would probably love him very much. I pictured him skipping along beside me on a road which he could actually ride his bike on, instead of the one under my feet with its deep wrinkles like an old and angry man. I was sure the little boy went on stupid adventures like climbing the apple tree in his front yard or walking along down his perfectly quiet street and chasing the squirrels. And if he ever gets lost or too far from home, he can remember where his home is easily. Easy as counting: one-two-three. He’ll remember.
And he’ll come back to 123 Paper St. and his mother will be waiting for him, watching from those smiling windows as he skips up the solid white porch and opens the quiet door. She will want to know all about his adventures and the things he saw. She will be concerned that he traveled so far and will want to know how he got back. “Easy as counting,” he’ll say, in that softly angelic voice of a young child. “One-two-three!” And she’ll ruffle his hair like every good mom does and she will be very proud of him. Father will come home from work soon when the sun is still yet shining off of the white wood of the house, pure as untouched paper, and he will hear of his son’s adventures and will be very proud as well. He will ruffle the boy’s hair too. His hands will be more powerful than the hands of the boy’s mother, but they still won’t hurt.
That night, a light will glow from the little boy’s room as the mother tucks him in and says goodnight to him. Even in the darkness, the white house will seem to glow with its own inner light, as if the love of the family inside of it made the white boards of its face luminous. The light will go out from the little boy’s window and he will soon fall asleep to the sounds of the wind gently kissing the window pane. Even in the night, the house is pure white like untouched paper, like open pages to which a life may be written.
But that was not 123 Paper St. 123 paper street was a clever lie. I saw it in front of me set back from the street like it was hiding behind the dying trees along the sidewalk. The eyes of the upper floor windows caught sight of me and glared out of their corners, as if the house knew I was making up his better twin in my mind, like he knew I had been dreaming of another. The paint had once been white on 123 paper street, but now it flaked against my touch into flecks of a dull yellow. I reached the porch and the rotting boards creaked in protest as I pushed my weight against them. They threatened to give way and drop me down to my dog Sasha’s bones. But like always, they held.
I remember the day that my father kicked Sasha for the last time. I remember how the dust puffed out of the couch as he rose from watching TV to get another beer. I remember that Sasha has fallen asleep in the middle of the doorway leading to the kitchen. I remember how earlier that day I had run my hands through her patchy fur while I was sitting in that doorway and she had fallen asleep in my arms. She had fallen asleep like that for as long as I could remember. For all the years I had managed to keep her fed and alive in 123 paper street, there was me snuggling with her under the sheets of my bed, me bandaging her paw when a splinter of wood in the kitchen had stabbed her, me who saved my milk money to buy her the food that clinked into her metal bowl by the refrigerator. It was my arms that she fell asleep into.
But that night I had gotten up and left her there. I remember how my father and seen her at the last second and decided to kick her out of the way. But there were more beer bottles than usual that night, standing empty at the foot of the couch. It was Friday and had been game night. He kicked Sasha hard, and I remember thinking that her yelp sounded like mine did. I remember how it felt to be kicked so deep inside that you could feel it in the bottom of your heart, and I saw with a touch of familiarity how Sasha’s eyes were slammed closed in that instant, as tightly as they could get, like they could shut out all the pain and heat and light of the word. I remember watching her limp to the door. I got up to let her out, dodging my father as he came back through the doorway with another dripping brown bottle. I let her out and watched her limp down the steps and slowly scratch her way underneath the porch. I remember the small trail of blood, the only thing to tell anyone that she had crawled under there to die. I had pushed dirt over it with my hole-filled sneakers. I was the only one who knew where she had gone. I was the only one who cared. And I was the only one who seemed to notice the smell as the days went on and she dissolved again into 123 paper street.
The floorboards and the rusted hinges of the front door sang Sasha’s memory to me as the sun begin to set, but I pushed it away, and blinked away my tears. As I walked into the kitchen and closed the door behind me, the wall where Sasha’s food bowl used to sit was turning a blood red with the last light of the day. Nobody was home. Nobody was ever home. My mother would be working late and would not have a nice dinner prepared for me. I opened the cupboards to look for some macaroni to boil for supper. They had been empty for a day or two now, and were still empty. Seeing them hollowed out, I remembered how I had hid inside of them the night my father had killed Sasha and listened to my parents yell at each other. As the sun sent its last rays through the kitchen window, I ran my hand along the top board inside the cupboard and I could feel where I instead of taking the knives and cutting into my arms, I had carved my name into the wood. The letters lay scarred into the wood deep and jagged.
I climbed the stairs to my room and I smelled the dust in the carpeting. It smelled like lying face down in a moonbeam through my window on that cold Friday evening. It smelled like tears. Dirt and salt. I climbed onto my bed and the squeaking springs reminded me that when my parents came home, they would wake me up when the door to their room shut on them. I would have to listen to them fuck through the un-insulated walls and would wonder if my father was hurting her again. I would think of my father’s hands and feet and how he killed Sasha.
I stared up at the waterstain spreading across my ceiling and thought about 123 paper street, and the fear and hatred within me began to grow. I thought about the pain trapped inside the rotting wood of the walls and my tears mixed with the dust in the floors and it seemed the house was breathing around me, taking my air away. I thought about my father’s hands and my mother’s mouth and I heard the house creek like it was locking me up inside of it. The rust on the door hinges, the way the doorknobs stuck and jammed… I realized that the house had been slowly trapping me inside of it. I knew then that I desperately had to fly.
I raced down the staircase, down through the living room where the couch sat with its dust. I ran through the kitchen, past the now black wall where Sasha’s food bowl used to be, past the refrigerator where my father’s beer sat cold and waiting. I opened the front door and it’s hinges screamed after me, they called the alarm of my escape. As I ran down the porch, one of the boards finally gave way and my foot slipped down and touched the soft cold earth where the mushrooms had grown on Sasha’s blood. I was leaving her behind, leaving behind all of 123 paper street, and it resented me for it, pulled me and clawed at me, trying to draw me back. My foot had wedged in the broken boards and I yanked frantically at it, trying to wrench it from the house’s grasp.
As I finally got my foot away, the jagged ends of the boards cut deep into my leg, dripping blood into the wooden splinters and fragments. 123 had taken from me its final sacrifice. I had paid in blood, this blood and much more before it, and I lay on the grass bleeding as the house rose ominous before me in the fading light. It rose before me, a nightmare monster looming over my small huddled form, ready to pounce and consume me forever.
But I pushed myself up and the house remained quiet. I had paid with my blood and the house had to let me go, just as I had to let it go as well. I waited until my leg began to stop bleeding and then I turned my back on 123 paper street. I turned my head from the cupboard with my name scratched inside of it, from Sasha’s bones buried beneath the broken porch boards, from my blood drying inside of its wood. I turned my back on my memories and the once-white walls of 123 paper street. There had been a story written there on the flaking paint, a story about me. And even though I had never wanted it, 123 paper street had written its story on my heart as well.
After I turned, I never set my eyes again on the once-white face of 123 paper street. Many times after, I would try to crumple up its memory and throw it out, but always it would return. 123 street will always haunt my dreams, calling back out to me with its rusted hinges and rotting wood. It will forever be a part of me. My dried blood will always be trapped inside its rotting yellow boards. Sasha will always lie buried under that creaking porch. And though I will never again curl my hands inside the cupboard and feel the deeply gouged letters, my name will always be etched into the wood of 123 paper street, where only I know where to look for it. |
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| burning my insides |
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| 10:31pm 26/03/2007 |
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I burned my insides
with my scathing silver tongue
couldn't see my own surprise
'cause my eyes had been narrowed
sparks flying from the forge
from a double-edged sword
a hot burning business
behind those eyes
bellows of hot air
burning my insides
took it all and blew
sneezed it out all over you
the force
it knocked me off my high horse
hooves stamping through my empty spaces
I breathed a new warm penance blood
to stain my once white teeth
but couldn't get back up again
lacking my backbone of pride
to eat again those crimson words
that burned my insides |
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| some nostalgic melodrama |
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| 01:17am 06/03/2007 |
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I remember when the word "midnight" carried with it an almost magical feeling. The time Santa Claus came with presents... the Witching Hour... It was a time that I dreamed I could be awake to see but never did. It was a time made for the grown-ups, a time of profound darkness and mystery. The almighty 12.
And then 12 was come and gone, and it was 1-o-clock... and that was magical too... like it was the step BEYOND midnight, when all of the hours of the day, the gigantic jumble of 12:59 on the dial was reduced to a simple 1:00... like I was witnessing the beginning of creation, and I felt like I had stayed awake far past any mortal alive just to see the finality of that "1" staring back at me.
Now one o clock is just halfway to 2. And midnight marks the sad time when I wish that I was tired enough to sleep but know that I'm not. The "1" seems small and insignificant... paling in comparison to the cruel twists and curves of the 2 on the clock-face, or the devil's red pitch-fork of a 3 baring down on me as I collapse in slow motion.
Perhaps the luminous display of my diligent computer monitor will one day blind me, and I will know no more of 12s and 1s and 2s. And even then I will toss and turn in my endless night, wondering if the clock is still mocking me as my mind gropes with desperate hands for the sands of sleep as they pour like the contents of a patient hourglass through its fingers. |
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| 10:02am 28/02/2007 |
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[The] American legend of success and victory... is not shared by any other people of the civilized world. The collective will of this country has simply never known what it means to be confronted by complete frustration. Whether by luck, by abundant resources, by ingenuity, by technology, by organizing cleverness, or by sheer force of arms America has been able to overcome every major historic crisis - economic, political, or foreign - with which it has had to cope. This remarkable record has naturally left a deep imprint upon the American mind. It explains in large part the national faith in unlimited progress, in the efficacy of material means, in the importance of mass and speed, the worship of success, and the belief in the invincibility of American arms.
The legend has been supported by an unbroken succession of victorious wars. Battles have been lost, and whole campaigns - but not wars. In the course of their national history [up to the year 1960 at lest] Americans, who have been called a bellicose through unmartial people, have fought eight wars, and so far without so much as one South African fiasco such as England encountered in the heyday of her power. This unique good fortune has isolated America, I think rather dangerously, from the common experience of the rest of mankind, all the great peoples of which have without exception known the bitter taste of defeat and humiliation. It has fostered the tacit conviction that American ideals, values, and principles inevitably prevail in the end. That conviction has never received a name, nor even so much explicit formulation as the old concept of Manifest Destiny. It is assumed, not discussed. And the assumption exposes us to the temptation of believing that we are somehow immune from the forces of history.
- C.Vann Woodward, 1960 |
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