020404 some fascinating things. One, i'm sitting with the busy box in the UWM Union, belching after a whopper served up by a lovely young girl, let's call her alex, whose unassuming presence reminds me how I've always been afraid of women, when this guy comes up, wearing a stocking cap and sporting a busy box of his own (it's a G3 iceBook, incidentally). He says, excuse me, are you on the net? and when I allow that I am not, he excuses himself again and reaches past me to plug an ethernet cable into the wall next to where i plugged my AC cable in! It's active, he says, and he goes about his surfing at the next table. Apparently anyone can just walk in here and do this! But you're the only one who knows, he cautions. Okay. Two, the other night the guy that runs the karaoke at that bar Holly & I go to said (when no one but me was around to hear him) I sang really well. The compliment seemed sincere, came from a source I esteem fairly highly, and was just what I needed to bolster my sense of crafty magicness. I had been thinking I sucked pretty bad, to tell you the truth. It was nice. Now I'm going to go into the snoke before class. drink sweat 040504 Playin with the queen of jute / Knowin that SHE's really dumb ADVICE FOR THE DAY: don't use the modifier “literally” unless you mean it literally. WORDS FOR THE DAY: jute; plutocracy; keen; contumely; expound; villous (villus, for that matter); murinus PHRASES FOR THE DAY: my friend sparky; three of the guys were ex-marines; small, tight, black leather jacket; god damn some people talk loud in public i did have tits in my dream the other night, even if i was self-conscious and ultimately embarrassed. 020604 I can't stop farting! WORD OF THE DAY: apoptosis 020704 I don't know if I can do this today. Last night I wore a pink nightie under my woollens to go hiking. I came upon a terraced apartment building. The interior was all bricks and golden light. A personal round balcony, high up over the teeming night. I ached. Things are fast reaching the breaking point. Revolution is not required, but start making a transition strategy. WORD OF THE DAY: ambo (in the sense of pulpit or dais) IDIOLECT. Hey Parana, Parana Parana hey, Parana! ridiculous by virtue of existing 021204 It's still Feb. Wuooooooooooooooouwwww! says a siren. Street outside spider-angled brick-laced frost. Too loud in here too loud in here. You are on a volcano but you have to try. “He carried more paper than a person generally does.” “what is” “red cell” blank field empty cell mournful declaration: “all cells are dead” hey-- the smoke chases me. i change seats, it changes direction. what the fuck? soon you'll want to know how it feels to be a smoke ring and have your hole poked! chaos! a colloidal megalomaniac eating manioc. heartburn heartbrake heartache heartsick heartware "i'm a lousy liar" does not absolve all i'm looking for is a little redemption. you could waste your whole life looking for that. deterministic but weird. the second-story window world. the way that sun paints the sun the way that painted sun the way that fresco across the street hey, you see that? the sun set memHap to theSun thanks=iNeeded “that” such elusions as we may endure hot pants hot hat hot head stuck lip hard soft face she breezes past only to pick up an ashtray i (could pretend that i) (don't) care but would rather be subsumed by that human form of rollercoaster or waterslide, the all-conquering, love-song-inducing, soul-redemptive, you-gotta-laugh-so-much-it-hurts, feeble-minded, stout-limbed cataclysm called Emotion feeble-minded? no, probably not really. whatever. i love her and want her and certainly will not get her. that's my prognostication and my prognosis. that's my deterministic attempt to see all the patterns of the cells all at once. There is no time between generations, except as we perceive it so for the lubriciousness of the Game thereof. Therefore, all depends on initial pattern. There is of course no initial either, so nothing depends. I am a lunatic trapped in a library. Again. And I still didn't get her. And if I got her, what would I do with her? Just whatever it took to get her to spit on me, tease me, make me love her, then dump (on) me. Again. Or not. Who knows. Maybe that's just the tired old Magazines talking. All I know for sure (at this moment anyway) is I don't like being married. and the usual deaths: have to piss, have to squirt out some more viral poo, have to smoke, struggling with the antinomy of staying in this anonymous shithole versus going to my leaden home. how long can i be this pathetic before i ex- or implodododododode???? 021304 SPAVINED 021504 Oh. I was doing it wrong. Again. My marriage, my wife, and my life are not where my problems lie. My problems lie in what I fail to do for my own self. I have everything I need. A poet can make a poem out of a pebble or a piece of dust or a flaky but cool sister in law. You see what I mean? I've been trying to blame everyone else, indirectly of course because I don't have the balls to blame them directly, for my failure to live fully, to come fully alive. It's time to stop doing that. If I want to die I can, but everyone needs to be told, after the fact if necessary, that it was not because of them, not because I got suckered into the wrong life. I chose this path, and even if I didn't, I still choose to live here. It's my responsibility to do what I need to do to make it fun. I have everything I need, to do that. Even the balls, even the courage. I just sometimes forget that I have those. But I do. Al Green told me so. He told me to forget about the neurotic pseudo-themes, the self-worshipping micro-flagellations of the tortured artist, and start singing about love again. It doesn't matter how old you are or what your job is. He said Will you be my Valentine? and I said yes, and at that moment I could really believe it was true. And it is. Thank you. Good morning. Oh—and I'm not "bipolar" or "manic-depressive," any more than that giraffe over there. Things do naturally cycle, but I'm relaxed and alert right now, not manic. A disease is a luxury, an excuse like drugs. I don't need that. Look at it this way: instead of bemoaning that you aren't all your other possible selves, you need to fulfill your reponsibility to the whole of them (you). This self is where you're stationed right now, but you're not isolated and you can travel. You need to do what you can to make this reality as good as it can be. Other ones are certainly a lot more challenging than this one, still other ones are probably more cushy. They probably all have challenges though, the first of which is probably often, figure out what the challenge is. You need to make things ready here, for the sake of now, and also in preparation. The time is coming relatively soon, you know. 021704 Read this at http://grouphug.us/confessions/423824962: <I smoked so much bud this quarter (2nd) in high school. I'm a junior, and I'm really going overboard with the whole weed-smoking thing (I blazed before school yesterday!!). Yet, no one does anything about it since I got a 4.5 and A's on all my midterms! Weed reminds me of who I want to be, and I don't think thats a bad thing.> Okay but the thing you've got to remember is, being reminded all your life of who you WANT to be is a most horrific torture—unless YOU learn to DO something about it. Be not deceived: the weed will not do that for you. 2/19/04 A White Grape Diet Rite slushy! Mmmm, mmmm, it's good! 2/22/04 Passion. Smoke. Everything that disappears comes back. 022304 Melanie thinks I can't see what she's doing. I can't. But I can hear her. Or anyway, I can sense her somehow. I'm not trying to spy on her, or be all pervy or anything. Well, not for the most part. Not all the time. Okay, okay, I am. But not in a way that would cause her any discomfort, or interfere with what she perceives as her mission. I'm not going to cross the hanging sheet line. But the thing is, I know she's having a little trouble, and I can't tell her what I think without violating her privacy more overtly and destructively than I already have. She's trying to explain something about metaphors, and her engine's seizing up. I think she's tuning in to how metaphors are so pervasive because they still work so well, and how they used to be used primarily to introduce or explore the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, or describe the indescribable, or link the purely emotional to the concrete and tangible, etcetera etcetera. Only now, they are also used to describe the disappearingly familiar thru metaphors for the unfamiliar. Or something like that. Maybe I'll send her an anonymous telepathic blip to that effect, and see if it gives her a jump. Vroom, vroom! The most important thing (for me) to remember about it is: metaphors are ephemeral, interchangable—digital? I mean, look at it: meta‚Ä¢phor. Don't forget the meta! 2/24/04 All I have to do today is run auroras. Contentment. Dull haze. Trance out. Like a long road trip with a less-than-exciting destination. You want to wander. Go see a rocky, piney state park somewhere. Go see an old friend and smoke some drugs. Anything. Listen to the radio. Cuz if you.... The more advanced personal computers get, in many ways also the less fascinating. Something about the squat hum of a vintage compact Mac is still far more enchanting than the slick performance of the newest iBook. That precise, guileless black and white screen, the cartoonish proportions.... You could almost smell the bits and bytes. 022704 February is almost over. It is still winter. I sit in a strange familiar room. The smell of stale geeks, smoke, a faint winy background tinge, all make me feel almost at home. I imagine what this place would do to me if I were either on drugs or a stranger here. The lights would be dancing, I would be lost, disoriented, and gay. It is always strange to be in your own town. Even if your town is bigger than you can imagine. Acting like a grasshopper typing like a madman. Give her a big smooch for me. I watch football. People yell because they can’t have their guns. They got a special on that chain link fence you use to put your neighbor’s yard over there and yours over here. We can all see each other’s yards because there are no trees here. A few tall streetlight poles and some haze, that’s it. The scene is dark-lit. Do you know what I mean by that? More glow! Turn up the glow! I work as a prostitute in the Fantasia district. The benefits are good. I get two months off every three months. I don’t have any sexually transmitted diseases. The microchips see to that. It’s a good job, but somebody’s got to do it. Tee hee. Welcome to my fish. Why is the fish always implicated? That’s how it’s done here. How did things get this way? Do you remember the days of automobiles and sausages? I do. My kids barely do. They were born right before the strange haze descended. Right before it was unmistakable. Right before the war. The war has been going on a lot longer than most people realize. Most people don’t realize it’s going on at all. The perfect mouth of the bar never opens. You can’t slide in there. It’s an illusion. Give it up, slick boy. Open your teeth and your heart to me instead. I cost more up front but in the long run, you’re better off. How do I know? I just know. I was there. I am here. Love me. You might as well. The foghorn sounds but we’re not going inside. Not tonight. Not tonight. The furor over gay marriage is a little bit morality and a lot bit greed. The most tangible difference between married or not is resources. Rights, priveleges, and responsibilities, as Savage put it. It’s not the sanctity of marriage most people are afraid of losing, whether they realize it or not, but the resources awarded them. If more kinds of people can get married, then the pie gets cut up in smaller pieces. Maybe. No, there’s more to it than that. It’s that whole citizenry thing. It’s the whole us vs them thing. It’s the whole superiority complex. I don’t fucking know. People are stupid. Fuck them. Dude, what’s going on in Haiti? Neil Young sucks cock. There. I said it. Something’s not working right. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. OMSATIGo! Now the tie-dye kid is playing greg brown in this stanky old cafe and i like that. I like that as much as the eerily-LCD-lit V of perfect smoothness under the vampiric face of the other person up in here typing with a god damn computer. god damn. she walks away to the can and she has another moonslip showing, below her black black shirt above her khaki slacks. I learned from the stuffy princeton haiku perfesser that i can sit here and pose. i don’t haf to do any art. i can sit here and be a painting, the word is the thing, smoke and sit here be and by the way, i’m jeannine this time i mean it (phlegm, phlegm): OMSATIGo! You can only say “I wish I were who I was” so many times before none of the people in your personal woods believes you any more. Why lie? Each of them knows you are who you are. If you are pretending you are not, you must be trying to con or scam somebody. And it’s probably one of them, or you. So either fuck you, or else fuck you. People who omit or attenuate terminal sibilants in order to sound gamey are lame. I gotta tell you, sweetheart, just cuz you have a straw sticking out your mouth don’t make you a punk. It makes you a baby with a pacifier. I also think horn-rimmed glasses are dumb, the post-punks be damned. Who was he? He’s dead. What marbles made him him? Plunk, plunk, shoot, shoot! surprise me he thinks he has huevos but he ain’t no chinchilla I don’t feel vulnerable BECAUSE I’m wearing a collar; I’m wearing a collar BECAUSE I feel vulnerable. The un-isness of is notwithstanding, I became high and was a glittery christmas ball dangling from a string of pinpoints red. Calumny! The cute smooth girl with the fat face is naming all the beats she’s reading. She’s cute. I bet she could put her ass up in the air and take a banging like you wouldn’t believe. I know I could. And I’m not even reading the beats. Except for those damned eyebrows. the word “festooned” came to mind when I glanced up-string-ward and saw my master. Next to him i was a cold nut in a puny nutsack after a cold shower. Surprisingly or not, that didn’t make me feel bad. I felt humble, like a pickup truck. In a raunchy way. Dig that crazy street grit, my tires! Someday I’m going to be famous (or some universe) (dead man said), but the funny part is, it won’t matter much any more. What will matter more? the jug, the boards of the floor, the stones of the cabin wall, the fireplace, and of course, of course, of course, of course, the circle, the circle of friends (and the horses we rode in on 022804 One of the cooler things my dad relayed to me: you should always quit while you still have something to