Cleopatra's Nose

prelude and postscript

2009-10-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

Dear [Ghost],

For what it is worth to the here and oblique now, I say hello. There is more forthwith. I, we, are unforgivable and unforgettable; this is my flag. I apologize that no one cares, this land was left to waste long ago and no one is concerned where we lay our claim. Our plot is unrecognized... and perhaps this is perfect. Perhaps this is love. Still we've sown here and we've grown here; we've also perished here. I could never write this:

Sure no fun
Falling for her all over again,
Alone.

I sing this every night in my dreams, and it carols more than it seems.

tiempo; zeit; temps; time; tempo; 시간; 時間

2009-08-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

I've done some research and I've determined that my Most Worthwhile Skill is my ability to adroitly - disgracefully and professionally and thus - correctly -- extinguish time. Perhaps this skill is shackled and on the lam with the fact that I intrinsically understand that time is just a very, very simple continuum, a velocity: a child's game of physics, no tougher to understand than the reason why a round object will travel farther than a square object. This is what I understand: time is nothing more than a round object after it has received a good push down a mild grade, an undulating hill that has no end, just gentle peaks and valleys, these places where the round object either accelerates or decelerates: these quiet distractions to Time.

It is a base lie to imply that I can extinguish time; I cannot. No, my "Most Worthwhile Skill", my greatest ability, is a farce. It is that solitary scale on the dragon's back, it the unicorn's horn (and everything that'll bring you): it is myth. I am no firefighter and time is not on fire anyway.

Time is rolling; rolling down an undulating hill with gentle barren peaks and lush valleys; rolling, rolling - rolling - toward you.

Toward me. Toward all of us.

My Most Worthwhile Skill is my ability to unquestionably - correctly - recognize that we will all die. I will die and you will die and we all will die. This is how I extinguish time.

Genius, no?

New Jersey, Part II

2009-06-17T17:57:00.000-07:00

Immediately after exiting the concourse, heading toward Newark International's baggage claim with the midday sun pouring in through fixed windows, bleaching everything, it is impossible to not notice that you are in New Jersey. New Jersey is (& might always be) New Jersey. Even after technology and quantum warfare and modern evolution and post-modern evolution and popomo evolution has changed the look, the feel, the size, the climate and the dominant species of the rest of the surrounding world, New Jersey will still be in red sweat pants, talking too loudly.

If you ever find yourself in western New Jersey without a car and needing to catch a mid-afternoon flight out of EWR I highly recommend you charter a taxi service and have them pick you up not at your shitty, cheap hotel but at a local pizza shop: the conversation on the ride will be better than it would have been otherwise and you'll get to the airport with ample time to get through security. Time that is best spent dozing off in an uncomfortable plastic chair outside your gate because EWR is a lot of things but a conversational airport it is not. Nothing even close to LAX where the friendly conversation of fellow travelers can easily get you through the forever-long wait your flight; especially if the fellow traveler is an Indian man who goes by the man Dennis, owns and operates a long-haul trucking company out of San Diego and is waiting for his flight back to SD, having just arrived from India where he picked up his mother (her first visit to the USA).

On that taxi ride from western NJ to Newark make sure to pay close attention to the surrounding environs because NJ is a deceptively beautiful place, but this natural beauty is something that can easily be missed (and is completely unnoticeable from the plane).

Save for the occasional plane going down and/or hijackers, airports and airplanes are relatively safe places to be, all in all. Still knowing this, we all still usually keep one hand on our carry-ons while dozing in our uncomfortable plastic seats, waiting for our departure and it's not hard to imagine that simple observation stretched out all thin and used as a metaphor for our entire lives. It is once we are on that plane that we usually relax a little which is ironic because it is once we are on that plane that the danger-slash-risk to our selves and our property heightens but it's not like you or anyone else can go anywhere or do anything else so why worry about it anymore, just greet the person sitting next to you, give casual attention to the flight attendant/drop-down television as they/it details out the federally mandated safety instructions and cross your fingers (again easily imagined stretched out and metaphorical and etc.).

After you have arrived home (maybe just maybe EWR to DEN, DEN to SFO, SFO to EUG), if you can, at all costs avoid immediately going back to your apartment/townhouse/condo/etcetera with your plants and your domesticated animals and your silverware and your (non-drop-down) TV and your bed. Instead go get some ice cream or a hard drink or a small bite. Tell some of your stories about Dennis or the red sweat pants or the woman from Helsinki who programs computers and sat next to you on the way to Denver. Tell these stories to friends or lovers, revel in it all for just a little fucking longer; talk about the beautiful trees and the taxi driver and all his wicked NJ stories, make it all last as long as you can because once your back at home, drinking some tap water from your own glass, about to lie down in your own bed and turn out the light, then it's over.

Cross your fingers.

the ways things go

2009-05-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

the world sweats and it swells and then it steeps for too long it steeps far past the point of acridity and it sweats and it becomes impregnated and as it steeps it waits, it plans, it needs and it waits.

the world needs and waits and sweats so long it makes me thirsty and it sweats and steeps and swells so much it makes me hungry and i'm not sure if i'm either hungry or thirsty but i know what both mean and i'm both, i'm thirsty and i'm sweating, i'm in need and i'm hungry and i've got its game and it swells and joins forces and i'm both thirsty and hungry and i'm confusing the two, i'd drinking when i'm starving and i'm tossing away water when i'm parched and this is the way it goes

this is not the way it goes

and i'm counting seconds between contractions and the hospital rooms aren't like hospital rooms at all, they have televisions that swing on mechanical arms and pivot on mechanical elbows, nurse with 'time for our treatment' in the voice parents' use with their babes and asking me why i'm counting, if i'm counting up or i'm counting down and i'm always counting up because up there is an infinity and down you're only pointing to zero and the arm swings back unagreeably and you take your medicine with the same groan and i'm counting, counting

this is not the way it goes

life and the world and the universe swell and breathes our air and we together deflate because of it but we don't mind, we don't miss our old air, we file no complaints as if we even knew which department to bother as we cheer on its growth as we're counting

we're joined at the hip, this is how it feels, siamese twins that have seperate mouths, when we are hungry and we eat what tastes one way to me tastes a different way to you and we have seperate eyes though similar your blue is not my blue and my brown is not your brown but the conscious acknowledgment of these differences causes no distress as we're joined at the hip all the way up to the shoulder, sharing the same lungs and the same stomach and the same heart and this is all of us, every single last one of us joined together at the hip, this is how it feels, and so many of us reputable surgeons and not a single sharp edge in any of our pockets but we have lighters, some of us are smokers who have lighters and matches for their cigarettes and once the final push comes and we've all stopped counting and we burn the umbilical cord through because not a sharp edge and once it is finished we all let out that breath we've been holding in our shared lungs, holding and holding even while we counted and we finally exhale and the baby takes its first breath and it breathes in us, all of us, and we deflate some more and the universe and the universal swells just a little more and the nurse brings the baby back into the room that isn't like a hospital room at all and we all look the child up and down and your blue that isn't quite my blue and the child's blue that is another hue altogether but we're too tired to smile and the nurse requests some more, 'give the lady a little air ladies and gentlemen', too exhausted to say a thing and if we could we'd ask for a drink of water or liquor yes once enough strength has been regained we will give our best smile and say excuse me please but if you will, a little water, i'm a little thirsty

this is the way it goes

2009-03-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

Years ago I wrote a song titled ‘The Golden Rule and How it Applies to Songwriting" and while I won't bore, bother or burden us all with the entire lyrics, I would like to quote the chorus right quickly:

“We only write songs about what is wrong and broken
So I must conclude: happiness is misery
Where you’ll find me on your doorstep singing
Songs about what is right and worth mending”

I guess I want to reference this song for two different reasons:

For the most part the songs I wrote (and my writing in general) have always been centered around those things both wrong and broken. In the prime of my lyrical outpourings (late 2003 to probably around the summer of 2005) I was a machine: I turned out song after song after song, with nothing to impede my path. My job took up only 25 hours of my week; I lived alone in a fourteen by eighteen foot studio apartment; I didn’t own a television, a bed, a couch, a cd player, a car or a cell phone. My body had to satisfy its need for nutrients via coffee, PB&Js, store brand potato chips and magnums of bottom shelf White Zin. My weekends were typically spent sitting in front of the world’s cheapest, shittiest microphone (given to me when I was fifteen and spent every other day at the only local music store playing little punk and hardcore riffs on guitars much more expensive than the Mexican made Strat I had at home; given to me by the owner of this music store because he felt sorry for me, of this I am certain) and my Tascam four-track (at the time one of the most expensive things I owned, all at $100 retail). Weekends that weren’t spent with the mike, the four-track and a couple pots of coffee where spent with friends, drinking and bar-b-queing and generally accomplishing little more than a unearthing more material for more songs for the next weekend. Yes, I’ve gone back through all those four-track cassette tapes and I’ve catalogued it all and yes, it is outrageously ridiculous: clocking in at just over four and a half hours, me sitting alone in my studio (with some other people-slash-places mixed in. And on a side note, any musicians out there with experience recording to four-track, alone, just you and your instrument, will undoubtedly understand that this four and a half hours is but a small (read SMALL) sampling of everything that occurred between those four walls. A pathetic a beautiful time capsule.) But so I’ve catalogued and transferred and half-assedly mixed down all these cassettes, and now I, a closer-to-normal-than-not citizen who does own a car, a (although it quite small and useless now with the digital switch) television, a bed, and a couch I found behind some random apartment complex last summer, along with all these typical things I also possess seventy-plus songs on my laptop all composed by myself, all lofi and all (mostly) genius. And all (mostly) about things wrong and broken.

Wrong and broken choices (and is ‘broken choices’ understood? You have right choices and then you have those decisions that at the decisive moment, and for a while after that even, seemed so very right or maybe just a little right but right nonetheless and then somehow it all went haywire). Wrong and broken relationships, friendships, days and weekends. Wrong and broken family interactions. Drinks poured by cute bartenders but wrongly poured. Broken drinks that didn’t fix the night, didn’t fix everything and anything, even though the cute bartenders swore that they would. Broken guitar strings and guitars tuned wrong. Broken hearts and all the wrong reasons to even own a heart at all. These are the things I wrote songs about.

And:

In the seventy-plus songs I found on cheap cassette tapes recorded during that time in my life the only song I’m regretful that I don’t have a copy of is this one. I have innumerable songs detailing the titillation and trial of love affairs, the fallacy and faultlessness of old friends; the semi-destructive idiosyncrasies harbored by my mother like a pipe-bomb unaware of its explosive power. Within these hours of songs and pages upon pages of lyrics that all waver between either what is wrong or is broken there isn’t a single song, a single page, about things right and worth mending. Sure in there some place is that one song about how the Minutemen re-band, instigate a political coup and because of this we all enjoy a new Golden Age and in there some other place is my horrible cover of F.Y.P’s Toss My Cookies, but beyond fantastical poeticism and bad covers, this opus of mine speaks of nothing else but pain, dejection and heart break.

How ironic it it that now, as I meditate on my past – a past only so distant as to be defined as my past’s future – I find myself longing, searching for and missing for lack of discovery the only song I know that I wrote that attempts to picture a brighter, happier future; a future that I didn’t ever have enough faith in to even commit its luminance to tape.

the new year and amicability

2009-01-05T02:18:00.000-08:00

We suffer through our diversions. We wander down streets made sterile by our unceasing minds, our paths appearing aimless to those strangers whose eyes we do and those whose we do not meet, appearing aimless yet still full of aspiration (although direction, we will quickly and easily admit, might have escaped us completely). In what feels like the oblique loneliness of post-coitus we constantly stir, constantly, as if we were forever sulking or breathing or just causally biding our time on the furthest plateau of love and not lingering on a while there on the other side of love where everything is fresh and exhilarating and full of promise (though the hint of loneliness is already there, like how the pretensions to glory of summer already possess the odor of autumn, just the slightest whiff of the oncoming rot of autumn).

No we convalesce on the other side of love, the one whence the rot has began to run its course. We breathe the rot in, let it settle into our lungs where it creeps into our blood, finally putting up curtains over the windows of our hearts. Curtains not intended to block out the light but to accentuate it, to add an extra layer on to and over the light itself, to help make the light become more aware of itself, more aware of what and where it is, of what it is illuminating, of the world that is surrounding it, that it is a part of, that it will eventually die in. In a word: the curtains hope solely and innocently to dress the light in the same way that Adam and Eve dressed themselves after eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Still, we suffer through our diversions. We haven't given up on the technicolor world so much as the technicolor world has forgotten about us and our chiaroscuro dreams. Forgotten about us in the same way that a child will forget her imaginary friends or in the same way that a piece of untouched fruit, after growing too heavy, will forget the tree it has fallen from.

And this is us and how we suffer: too heavy, too ripe, too sweet.

holidays and mythologies

2008-12-08T18:38:00.000-08:00

Waiting at a red light on the way home from work I find myself stuck behind a large, blue ford truck (and I'm straight-up sorry 'cause considering how much time I spent with beer guzzling thick necks in Northern Idaho (and yes, they capitalize that 'northern' shit up there) who can tell you the make, model, year and engine size of any and all pickup trucks simply by the smell of the in-question truck's exhaust (and this after said truck is 1.5 miles away) I should be able to come up with something a li'l more descriptive than 'large, blue ford', but alas, I am sans manliness) but so I find myself waiting for that aforementioned red light to blink ov'r to green, and no, eff that! the freakin' truck was something like a goddamned '03 450 Ford with a, uhm yeah an extended bed and cab and had one of them extremely tall Leer canopies on the bed and yeah! that's what I was waiting behind (I bet you can smell my parfum de l'homme wafting outta your friggin' monitor!!) and after I'd given up trying to stare down the driver in their rearview mirror, me eyes began to just randomly roam around, as bored, post-work eyes will do, and it was just as this large, blue ford pickup truck was pulling away that I noticed their (vanity) license plate: blu ox.

blu effing ox, I say to myself and instead of accelerating which the etiquette of driving demanded, I continue to sit there for a little while, chuckling to myself. Now those of us who sadly inhabit the northern hemi are all quickly spiralling into the winter months and if I didn't pitch my tent here this license plate probably wouldn't have affected me so much. If it were summer, even spring say, I wouldn't have thought twice about 'blu ox', but it's winter, and so I did.

First, and obviously, 'blu ox' takes us to Paul Bunyan. Good ol' Paul Bunyan and Babe and all the great things which that comedic duo did, Arizona and Oregon owing them especial thanks. May, June or July and I would have stopped there. December though? Yeah, I keep on going.

I go to what I assume must have been at first a quiet nagging that tickled at the back of Paul's mind, stopping him from time to time, and that later would become a debilitating depression.

I go to what I assume must have started as a fine ride for Babe, but later budded into feelings of misgivings and sour resentment.

I go to the perfect sadness that they must have felt on a daily basis. Out of place and perhaps out of time, but no less entitled for their displacement.

& this is so appropriate for these winter months we find ourselves in. I find myself at my most despondent and disconsolate during this time. & For what it is worth, I love this time of the year. I love my subdued, reflective personality. This despondency and disconsolation is Cathartic. (and we captialize that shit in these parts).

& so, to pull from my prolific (...) literary past, I recommend you review this old post of mine from december of 2006, it reiterates some of this, but in a much different way (probably better).

& doubly so, disconsolate and all, everything is good, save for the holidays. They can eff themselves. Except for new years and all that champagne guzzling, on which day give me a blindfold, start up your car, gun it for a while and just test me.

New Jersey, Part III

2008-05-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

“I haven’t the gut for writing anymore,” I decide sitting in the stairway that leads up to the backdoor entrance of the Comfort Inn on Route 57 in Hackettstown, New Jersey; chain-smoking. Wearing a t-shirt in the lovely spring weather, seventy-degrees and clear, sitting lengthwise on a step halfway down the stairway, the backdoor propped open with an old piece of wood: and I’m always in and out; and I’m always start and stop. Sure, sure, I’m always expectation: on the bleachers rooting for some kind of found meaning, purpose, beauty or sympathetic set of ears. But I’m never agenda: on the field, giving one hundred ten percent for a scholarship I know I’ll just drink away anyway. I never espouse too much of anything when it comes down to personable barebones (at least save underneath the bleachers), but that most certainly never stops others from guessing-slash-assuming-cum-hypothesizing-cum-judging. And often the most rat-fink-fucked end of the deal is above all else I just want-slash-need to drip heavy and quick into a pair of foreign cochleae. To exercise some demons with some found meaning. To have those drips ripple and resonate. To have those ghosts meet me at the bar, fool me into thinking they are strangers, and then after I’ve bought them a few pitchers, they’ll buy me a cab home.

2008-04-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

Let the one liners live again. Let truths be transmitted with truncated sentences. Death to fillibustering and ! Life to circumlocution (be it prolific or otherwise, I suppose) and onwards and upwards with half-answered half-questions we weren't half-concerned about ourselves anywhichway you put it (them).

2008-01-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

The rigmorale of setting up a new computer can be so disheartening. At least in my case.... while the newer macBooks come all pimped out with the technologies that any web programmer would want, these sweet, internal programs don't come turned on. The first time around I found this a little frustrating. After having my brand new macBook stolen the day after New Year's in Vancouver BC, picking up yet another laptop & now going through the same process all over again.... this is effing hell. Apple, please, if you're going to ship your comps with all these whistles & bells, why not turn them on (especially considering that a good deal of people are buying these freakin' things just for this reason)? It isn't that we can't go through the process of activating all the features that we want, but why should we have to? This is like buying a new car, spending a whole day driving 'round & having fun with it, only to realize as the sun sets that you have to install the headlights yourself. poopid, i say.

The one thing I always find interesting 'bout moving my self to another computer is going through old files which you had left to rust on the old machine. In the spirit of a spring cleaning, when starting fresh with a new computer I like to go through all my old files, blowing off the dust, scratching away the patina.

In the melancholy vein of what I've been reading on some other Eugene bloggers sites, I thought I'd post this one file I found; I think I wrote this some eight months ago or so. Still, it pretty much sums up where I am any more.

I could have tackled it had it not been smarter than me. Being born from me, it knew how I’d work. So it spent most of its time hidden away. It would come around, make a day or two miserable, & then quickly disappear, taking all evidence of its self with it. & this is how we cultivate sorrow, or at least something synonymous with sorrow.

Now I study earlobe structure on the back of faceless heads ahead of me, waiting in line for a cup of coffee & some pasta salad. I eavesdrop on other’s conversations just to remind myself that people do things that I do not. People visit states like Illinois. People move across town to be closer to their grandmothers. People watch television shows on ABC. These people’s earlobe structures are never right.

I’ve never before so strongly wanted something to come home to. A pet, a roommate, a lover; a television show on ABC. Something that will speak to me, something that will empathize, something that I can take to coffee shops with me, to assist in the search. I wish crosswords could read my mind, I wish they could tell me Hot or Cold or Warmer as I attempted to solve them, giving me a clue, perhaps a “rhymes with” when I’m stumped. I wish crossword answers would acrostically spell out the names of people I love.

There are only so many times that I can find reminders of past passions & impetuses, of all these past lives, through re-intonating stranger’s laughs, by re-calculating the distance between their eyes, until I have recreated in everyone a figment of someone else. There are only so many puzzles & searches & games of Hot & Cold that I can play before I am the bet at stake. There are only so many windows I can look out remembering views shared with others before I forget what was looked at; there are only so many streets I can walk down remembering hands held before I forget the context of the walk.

(There is only so much that hyperbole can accomplish.)

Every now & then, I’ll buy Export A greens & relive my life one cigarette at a time. I’ll remember Sunday afternoons spent chain smoking in a rocking chair, a radio tuned into a two hour long first-wave ska program. I’m in north Idaho, Sandpoint Idaho, living in a singlewide with my surrogate punkrock mom & her three-year old child. As I chain-smoke the tray fills with ash & butts & Caitlyn, the three-year old, scolds me for not fully putting out my cigarettes. She goes through the entire process of snuffing out a butt, educating me, her still infantile hands more adroit already than my shaky ones. I watch her performance, humming along to Desmond Dekker, completely unaware of how many times over my heart will feel broken, unaware of how many eyes my eyes will search.

I’ve become an armchair anthropologist. In my dreams I’ve been published in a few note-worthy scientific journals.

2007-09-02T22:56:00.000-07:00

i’m not sure what the specific reasons where or at what specific point along the drunken all-nighter this happened, but at some point in the evening someone had a bunch of Star Watch weeklies in one hand & a lighter in the other. & then immediately following me picking up the Star Watch weeklies & pulling my purple lighter out of my pocket, someone else has their orange lighter out & is holding it underneath the outstretched papers. & then this is certainly an example of those magical moments when drunk friends come to the same idiotic conclusion at the same exact time, but then someoneA & someoneB are dragging an old, sweat & semen & vomit stained mattress out into the road, Star Watch torches in hand. & then the mattress is in the middle of the road & the papers are underneath it & stuffed into the one ripped-open corner & then that isn’t working, no, not at all, not near fast enough, so then both A & B are holding their purple & orange lighters to the frayed edges of the ripped-open corner & then yes, oh yes, that mattress is on fire. & then as a fantastic example of how drunk strangers will nearly immediately agree & condone the stupid decisions of other drunk strangers, it wasn’t more than two minutes later, because yes, that mattress really was on fire, & it didn’t take long to get the neighbors’ attention, because it was seriously ON FIRE, but it wasn’t two minutes later until some strangers half a block away come carrying an old, sweat & semen & vomit stained couch to add to the pyre. & then all the bystanders & drunks went back into their homes & read books like The Velveteen Rabbit or The Berenstain Bears to their sleepy children by the soft, warming light of the burning furniture. like motherfucking christmas.

but then the fire department came & ruined everyone’s holiday. & to further villainize others whilst exonerating myself & my cohorts, i would like to make mention of how i once heard from someone delivering the Star Watch paper (this in response to my question of how in the effing-eff i could get my name taken off the Piss-People-Off-Every-Week-With-Our-Lousy-Shit-Entertainment-News-“Paper” list), that the Star Watch is actually brought into the community & paid for by the Baker family. & for those of you who don’t live in Eugene or who just don’t know, the Baker family owns the Register-Guard (is it hyphenated or not anymore?), Eugene’s local (& also lousy) daily newspaper. so i blame the Baker family for my stupid drunken decision to light old, filth-stained furniture in the middle of the road. the Star Watch enabled the entire thing. the Bakers are a bunch of enablers.

the Bakers & pabst blue ribbon. i’ve said my peace.

2007-05-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

I ran into a friend & local blogger today at the grocery store where I used to work. Immediately following our hellos & hugs she says, “you haven’t blogged.“. wowzers. Though perhaps a bit of a long one here, Mrs. R — this one’s for you.

Her comment shook to the surface some ruminative thoughts I have been having recently, thoughts related to this blog yes, but also ones of a much broader scope. What she said would have probably stayed there, in the past tense, had I not also received a myspace message from a friend in portland, another whom I haven’t spoken to in quite some time, wishing me a happy birthday. First, these are nice (tongue-in-cheek-in-heart, if y’know what I mean) reminders of things I wish I were able to find time to relax in: blogging about my day to day, spying on friends via myspace; engaging in an online community that not only do I find rewarding, but a community that I believe has & will continue to, in ways we cannot imagine, completely reshape who we are & how we are. This online community (& hopefully you know I’m not just referencing myspace here) is tantamount to evolution, & survival is contingent upon evolution. If given the proper alcoholic stimuli & enough time, & I could bore you to the point of regression with my praise of technology, the interweb & the future in general. & then here I am trying to remember the last time I bookmarked something in Ma.gnolia. bother.

It is often a frustrating & quite ironic circumstance that I work so much on the interweb, that I haven’t the time to engage the interweb. With both of my jobs I’m currently spending the majority of my time building web applications. I’m honing my programming skills, rereading techie books. Those sites which at one time I simply used, used & enjoyed, I’m now examining, figuring out how exactly they might have programmed this or that element & how I could incorporate that into what I’m working on. I’m critically pricking & prodding the User Interface instead of allowing the User Interface to guide & enthrall me. & try as I might, I cannot pull myself out of this mindset.

& it is this somewhat beleaguered balance of paycheck to prowess that keeps me in this quasi-state of flux where while I feel that I must always be working, always applying, proving & promoting myself, I also feel that I have steadily begun racing down the path toward certainty. I work with a web firm in town, Blink New Media. Weekly we meet, typically from the comfort of our living rooms or porches, via Skype. At the end of each meeting, I find myself somewhat contemplative & mesmerized. I catch myself saying, “wow, this is what I do.” It still hasn’t sunk in yet. I am getting paid to do something that not only am I good at, I also exceptionally enjoy it as well. I’m not at a comfortable enough point in my life yet to quit the doubt in the back of my head, that fear that another dead-end job with meager pay is just waiting around the next corner for me.

I started Cleopatra’s Nose two & a half years ago, when I slept in the utility room of a ran-down one bedroom house on Monroe Street. I was just a few weeks off from being unemployed & paying bills on credit. I played in a band & borrowed wireless from my neighbors’ unsecured connection. I had just recently planted the start from an avocado pit. I was in a fresh, exciting relationship & was blessed with a deeply sincere, symbiotic relationship with my roommate & good friend, bgg (I’d love to link something to his name, but alas, he is interwebedly incognito). Things are much different now. Though I still don’t have a bed, I live on my own now, in a great little apartment downtown. I am the furthest from unemployed that I possibly could be (I know this isn’t true. Not even a year ago I was more employed than I am now, holding fort at three different places.) & my avocado plant is doing quite well.

Robin, I thank you for the gibe. It seems that oftentimes it requires enticing for me to sit down & catalog something here on Cleo’s Nose, but afterwards it always feels nice.

kasb — I will most certainly be your penpal, especially if by penpal you mean the person who crashes on your & Harv’s couch in Nashville during my upcoming late-summer-2007-drour-of-the-southern-states. (Of course you know, but a “drour” is the classic “drinking-tour”)

numbers

2007-04-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

Between my friend with me here & I, we have three cigarettes. While not wholly discouraging, this, considering that, thirty-seven cigarettes shy of two full packs aside, we are perhaps reaching the azimuth of spring’s quick flight into summer, & that I’m slowly exhausting a thirteen dollar bottle of red wine & that tomorrow will be that last day in an heinous stretch of working every single effing day, a stretch that most immediately could be physically inferred by ex-ing off each & every box on a calender page flipped to the month of March, so’s I mean literally thirty-one days straight working every single day, but truthfully the number of said stretch would be more accurately represented by taking the factorial of 6 & then dividing that by the number of cigarettes which I & my friend have right now, but that considering tomorrow will be the last day of this awful, awful stretch of working a ‘hole bunch & that then tomorrow’s tomorrow will be my first day off in a really long time, it is, this lack of cigarettes that is, a most unpleasant & unwelcome ingredient to this otherwise tasteful cocktail.

I just finished my first large project at my new job. It is this new job that affords me the luxury of taking days off & still the paying the bills congruently. It is this first large project that will decide if come May thirty-first two thousand seven, the same May thirty-first that will be my twenty-sixth birthday & also when the contract for the position I took is up for renewal, I will still be taking days off & paying bills at the same time. Yesterday, I worked fourteen hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair surrounded by a horse-shoe desk working on the final touches. Yesterday when I got to work in the morning I believed I had seven days to work on the final touches. Yesterday at nine twenty in the morning I was told that the fellas that be wanted the final touches in twenty-four hours time. Yesterday at nine twenty-one all I could think was ‘eff’.

I did a count after I was finished. In the past week I have written nearly four thousand lines of code. The Safety & Environmental Metrics Dashboard is finished. At least the beta version zero point three is finished, which is all that the powers that be were looking for.

& now I have three cigarettes, seven hundred fifty milliliters sans two glasses of red wine & only twenty-four hours to go before a weekend. a very well-deserved weekend.

I will be drunk.

brief summary

2007-03-14T00:06:00.000-07:00

i’m gonna take a break from reading an internal sales assessment pdf for a wireless telephony company & attempt to overcome the mentally stymieing fact that i haven’t written anything, blog entry or otherwise, for nearly two months & see if i can attempt to jot something down here.

firstly: i’m not reading an internal sales assessment for fun. i’m not actually even reading the entire document, only pages 19 through 28. the internal sales assessment is work related, it’s for a job that the web firm i contract with is courting. the job would be sweet & i’m trying to learn a li’l something something about the client & their products/services. but it is an internal sales assessment. y’know, the type with CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION - RESTRICTED DISTRIBUTION printed in the footer of every page. these things are dull to those parties employed within the company itself; they are catatonic to parties otherwise associated. i had to stop for my computer’s sake, i do believe that if i read the phrase “vertical markets” one more time i won’t be able to contain the vomit to my mouth alone.

secondly: though i have successfully managed to tie up every day from here until april 5^th with work, after that things are going to change. i will be leaving the natural foods store whence i have derived headache & heartache, laughter & love, for the past two years. “leaving”? i think the word manumission is more apt here. which isn’t to say that i won’t miss it, because i will. this store has meant quite a lot to me. i was there helping it learn to crawl during its infancy, i was with it when it fell out of that oak tree & broke its arm, i was one of the first people it called the night it stole its first kiss. i feel indebted to that store & those people for many, many things, but it is also very much time to be moving on.

thirdly: it was only yesterday that it dawned on me that i might have forgotten exactly what it means to relax. it is amazing how quickly one can renege on aspects of their life both fundamental & essential, if given the proper stimuli. the right factors, harrowing enough conditioning, & things that once provided dear sustenance can become acidic to the palette. for these past long, long months, i had believed that i had found ways to relax; now, i’m realizing that i had mostly been cultivating methods of disengagement. be it born from whatever reasoning (& that is an introspective alleyway that i think i’ll explore solo), i have been inverting myself, prospecting avenues & nurturing relationships that while not wholly unhealthy, aren’t completely in line with who i know myself to be. regression of a sorts, yes, but also angry passion. ok, maybe i’ve gotten off topic here. how this relates to relaxing is this: i am a person who likes to relax, who likes free-time for friends & creativity, & i have seemingly been on a course to void my life of those things.

fourthly: all these readings of internal sales assessments, tying up of days & neglecting of the playful, relaxed side of myself, has perhaps finally started to pay off. i decided somewhere near christmas last year that i was going to hibernate for the winter. this was after months of debauchery. it has been a good hibernation, regenerative. & the debauchery was necessary, it was a form of catharsis, & it paved the way to where i am now. seeing things more lucidly, having a better grasp of where i want to be going & what i want to be doing.

fifthly: chimneys only wish they could smoke as much as me.

& sixthly: there is a lot of ground that needs to be covered here on cleo’s nose, & it needs to happen soon. here’s hoping that soon will be real, real soon.

playing the hand you are dealt

2007-01-16T23:14:00.000-08:00

i went deep into my graveyards,
found my ghosts there...
at least ghosts are good company.
-bishop allen

G. 1: I am attempting to organize a Euchre club with co-workers.
G. 2: I have started playing online chess again.
G. 3: I’ve started sneaking McDonalds breakfasts again.

My dreams are really fucking bothering me of recent. I am not someone who remembers dreams; & for good reason, this. As I child I dreamed vividly, always wolves (both the real type which ran circles around my bed, forcing me to curl into a tight fetal position, & the Looney Tunes Red Riding Hood Wolf type, with plaid newsboy, a literal pack, gang, of them who would throw me into dumpsters) & HUGE spiders & massive dragons who slept in gigantic, open rooms with pink walls & who only awoke once I entered the room & then only to consume me, alive & screaming. & I had these recurring dreams for years. I quit dreaming.

Since then there are only four dreams which I can remember. One is just an essence of a dream, an unknown girl’s face, a languid stream. The other three are etched into my memory. Two I had when I lived in the midwest. They were both acutely surreal. One ended with my mother, face painted as a clown, weeping in a steep stairwell, as I was at the bottom of the stairs, in a room full of pianos like sarcophagi, going from piano to piano, striking the minors softly. The other from Madison was striking enough that I wrote an entire ‘zine centered around the premise, incorporating the dream itself into the material. The final of the four I had in Eugene & the Freudian elements of that dream still frighten me.

Within the past two weeks I’ve started to remember my dreams again, & as I said, they are really bothering me. I’ve recently been reading a Zadie Smith novel. I picked it up for three reasons, one: it is Zadie Smith; two: I noticed while flipping through it at the book store that, interpolated with the typical whistles & bells of modern novels, were many Jewish elements; & three: it starts off with a Franz Kafka quote. Though it is demanding of its own blog entry, I’ll briefly mention here how a few months ago I smoked some psychotropic marijuana, & while failing miserably at attempting to fall asleep, I decided it was up to me to rewrite Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, but not just that, no, my rewrite of “The Trial” would also heavily incorporate elements of “Moby Dick” in it.

Not long afterwards (either the pot or the book, I don’t quite recall) I started to have really disturbing dreams. Paranoid dreams. But not just paranoid dreams, also dreams which are bringing up ghosts from my past.

& now I’ve begun haunting my graveyards in my waking life as well.

in memory

2006-12-20T01:19:00.000-08:00

R.I.P.

hormones

2006-12-14T19:57:00.000-08:00

a list of apologies to any of my friends who have, or still are, expecting something from me & now think, or are beginning to think, that i am a bad friend, a neglectful person or simply mean:

if i don’t call you back it isn’t because i don’t want to, hell it isn’t even that i don’t think of it, cause i do. i think of calling you, all of you. it is just that most times when i think of it i am usually indisposed, by which i mean i am usually stuck firmly in the bone-crushing jaws of either work or alcohol, & if i called during these moments our conversation would equate to little more than my blood-curdling screams through which, try as hard as you might, you wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise. in other words our conversation would be fairly one-sided & lackluster.

if i work with you & you smoke & it is decided that we will take a smoke break together & then as soon as we hit the alley i begin to sort of pace around, making half-hearted, monosyllabic remarks to whatever it is you were talking about: the 1) apparent disregard for you or for the fact that we are, as one, taking a time-honored & traditional smoke break together, & 2) my apparent disinterest for whatever it is you were talking about, isn’t like that at all. see, as i’m pacing around i’m actually attempting to disengage myself from the bone-crushing jaws of either work or alcohol, you just cannot see the sweaty muscle of the jaws nor the blood of my attempted manumission. & my apparently disinterested, primordial sounding grunts are actually just that. they are the grunts & sudden outbursts of someone caught in a life/death type struggle. while perhaps a little modernized, this is comparable to what one would have heard on the pre-paleolithic earh as some primate attempted to disengage herself from the bone-crushing jaws of a velociraptor.

penpals, those past, present & those of you to whom i promised a penpal relationship which hasn’t climaxed yet, shit which hasn’t even reached first base yet: i’m sorry because i really do love penpals. writing letters is so effected & kitsch. of course i love it. i mean, hell, i’ve even pulled out my old remington rand deluxe 5. i’ve set up this whole letter writing station in a corner of my bedroom. but see i probably haven’t told you ‘cause i haven’t yet written you that letter but i only sleep on sundays, which is the only time that i spend more than ten minutes in my bedroom. but every sunday i look at that remington rand & think of you. every last one of you.

if i’ve failed to make an appearance at your or your friend’s house after being invited, be it for a large scale foam party or just a small get-together, believe me, i have wanted to attend. each & every time. seeing as how i only bath on february that foam party would have been not only fun but also hygienically beneficial & the small get-togethers with neat drinks & even neater conversation? i love those. though there might be more than a few reasons for why i didn’t make the event, the most likely one is that your event was probably more than four blocks away & by the time it would have been fashionably late enough for me to darken your doorstep i was probably already past the point of attempting the walk-four-blocks sobriety test. that or i was already far past the point of attempting to free myself from the bone-crashing etc, etc, & my marrow was already nourishing something else.

if i work with you & you don’t smoke & the only interaction you get with me are those moments when i’m half running towards the break room for more coffee singing that i love to singa song or when i’m talkingreallymuchtooincredibly fast & seem like i must be on crack, i’m sorry if you’ve been worried & i assure you i am not on crack. i just hate the health care industry & have started taking primatene mist insteading of using my prescribed inhaler. please stop dropping the word intervention in casual conversation.

2006-12-07T01:34:00.000-08:00

If found in dire situation without any other recourse, we’d turn to antihistamines. We’d turn to aspirin, dissolving thirty small, white pills in sixteen ounces of dr pepper. We’d take excessive doses of albuterol. These were our dry spells. These were the times when the cousin who lived in the tri-cities couldn’t find viable excuse for another trip up north & we were left to fend for ourselves amongst our parent’s medicine cabinets. When lucky we’d get codeine from the canadian girl with perky breasts whose father had chronic back pains. It would be years until we learned that all the best pharmaceuticals start with letters from the end of the alphabet.

I’d take half a sheet of generic benadryl. I’d head off to the backyard, quickly before my knees lost their strength, taking in tow candle & cigarettes, pen & paper: the fifteen year old’s armor against a world gone crazy & parched of cocaine. There by candle light & the maudlin mix of uppers & downers I’d write. Prose, poems, songs; short stories & letters to the everyman. Whatever the thought, regardless of validity or reasoning, it would be penned. Some of the songs would later be sung. Some of the letters would later be sent. Mostly everything would later be lost: destroyed or simply forgotten.

...

We’d turn to coffee shops & beat generation writes. We’d sing pun-krock songs at the top of our lungs & buy crackers just so that we could steal cheese. We’d find import in ideals & voice our opinion at the picket lines. We’d wizened up & quit the drugs, our mother’s Wellbutrin script suddenly never requiring an early refill, although her butter rum was always watered down. We turned to alcohol & sentiment.

I’d break into two-room shacks off dirt roads, instinctively finding the bottle. It wouldn’t matter where it was stowed, under beds or in toolboxes. In under a minute of breaking the idle locks on windows & doors, the bottle would be at my lips. The liquid courage. The seventeen year old’s armor against a world which had gone stale & was no longer challenging.

...

I turn to work, the twenty-five year old’s armor to a world sick & full of itself. I call in sick for one job & get offered two side jobs on the same day. I take them, without forethought. I hold them dear, cradling them against a chest showing too many ribs. I call in sick & still find time & motivation to brave freezing weather for chinese food & a strong whiskey drink. I come home from the bar & immediately head to the corner store, where I buy beer & more cigarettes. I sit down at the coffee table & start working again. Until two in the morning. I’m still flu-ish as I was when I called in sick. Now I’m also just half-drunk & still reeling off too much coffee & two packs of cigarettes.

...

I close my eyes & dream of people I hate. People I once did lines with & people I used to love.

I have never once dreamed of people I work with.

android turkeys

2006-11-23T18:52:00.000-08:00

An open letter to what remains of the remains of the pilgrims who had the first “Thanksgiving”:

Y’all are fuckers. I’ve got your plymouth rock right here & I can tell you a few appropriate places you can put it.

An open letter to what remains of the Windows 2000 Server computer at the grocery store at which I work:

You’re a fucker. I’ve got your DHCP service right here & it stands for Hugely-Catastrophic-Donkey-Punch. Or, something pretty effing close to that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

& so now after nearly ten hours of attempting to fix a computer problem at work for which I have neither the technical knowledge nor the technical support to surmount, I am under the influence of at least three major chemical compounds & innumerable minor players. & why, you might ask, am I enjoying such a varied & perhaps debilitating cocktail. It’s Thanksgiving people! Oh, & my obnoxious roommate (mcfall) is out of town which means that I & my other roomie Tony can take the place over. Currently we are listening to Orange 9 MM (Tony’s musical choice) & making fun of the Miami Hurricanes Head Coach Larry Coker as he obviously stares at the breasts of the young, perky journalist conducting the half-time interview while we draw childish three panel comics of mcfalls’s cat olga killing mcfall in wholly unpleasant ways. It is our plan that before mcfall comes home from his Thanksgiving vacation at the coast we will have drawn enough of these morbid comics, each & every one depicting his death, to wallpaper the living room with them.

Friends & fuckers, it is time for some changes. Tomorrow is friday. A most amazing friend recently proffered a most amazing plan of action for every friday. It is a damned sad thing that I can’t follow through with this plan tomorrow. It is a damned shame that to make this plan an actuality on any given friday would require such an enormous rearranging of my life. A life which I’ve so foolishly crammed full of jobs & drink & friends & not-enough-sleep that I can’t straightaway make good on these propositions & prospects which are so enticing & so bright-eyed.

Friends & fuckers, happy Thanksgiving.

the devil’s in the details

2006-11-13T22:28:00.000-08:00

From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony drank ten pabst blue ribbon tall boys & one designer beer (12 oz).
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony sang a song of woe about a girl who wasn’t “looking for the same thing.”
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony listened to Against Me!’s album “the eternal cowboy” three times.
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony cooked a frozen pizza & ate two slices.
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony exhibited some vaudevillean talent.
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony mentioned, twice, how “we’re getting old.”
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony showed fear, twice.
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate tony spoke with his son on the phone, once.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From 5pm to 10pm my roommate mcfall ate one slice of pizza.
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate mcfall slept.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From 5pm to 10pm I drank two pabst blue ribbon tall boys.
From 5pm to 10pm I listen to a story about a girl who was looking for something else & thought about all my own personal swan songs.
From 5pm to 10pm I thought just briefly about a girl who went with me to a The Lawrence Arms show.
From 5pm to 10pm I played the guitar along with Against Me!’s album “the eternal cowboy”, once.
From 5pm to 10pm I ate five slices of pizza.
From 5pm to 10pm I drank one cup of chamomile tea & tried not to think.
From 5pm to 10pm I drank one pot of coffee & tried not to drink any beer.
From 5pm to 10pm I desired a glass of whiskey, four times.
From 5pm to 10pm I hypothesized that following on the heals of the raise in popularity of burlesque, you will soon be enjoying vaudeville acts on a “stage near you.”
From 5pm to 10pm I strongly considered calling four different people & turned off my phone instead.
From 5pm to 10pm I scared my roommate tony, once.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From 5pm to 10pm one phone call was made.
From 5pm to 10pm a whole frozen pizza was eaten.
From 5pm to 10pm approximately 260 ounces of various fluids were consumed.
From 5pm to 10pm four people where thought of longingly/lovingly.
From 5pm to 10pm Against Me! was listened to three times, The Lawrence Arms twice, & The Dillinger Four & Conflict were listened to once.
From 5pm to 10pm my roommate mcfall was for the first time the smartest of the three us living here & chose sleep over anything else.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a poem

2006-11-07T23:20:00.000-08:00

the apocalypse comes ‘round again

anymore now it comes every tuesday,
& it makes you feel guilty
for not remembering you’d both planned
to meet up, for which you apologize gratuitously
& feel like an awful friend,
& if anyone needs a friend
it is the end of the world,
now isn't it?

but later on you go through your desktop calendar
& you can’t find a single line
about meeting up with the apocalypse.
& while you might have forgotten to
write down the date you
highly doubt that because who
in their right mind forgets
a date with the end of the world?

still you’ve never been one to make a fuss
& anyway it might be the apocalypse
who is lapsing in mind, just assuming
that you two must have made plans because
you always do, every tuesday
you get together & have coffee,
or at least every tuesday
this is what the apocalypse thinks.

truth be told part of you hopes that this
forgetfulness is actually petty attempts
on the apocalypse’s part solely to make
you feel bad & thus more likely to spend
your tuesday evenings with him,
because honestly the last thing you’d want
in the end of the world is
a tendency to forget dates.

& then you start to feel a little sad for your friend:
such a hefty personage! such a legendary past!
& then, to be hurting for companionship?
Oh! how ridiculous!
& it makes you sad to think
such a magnanimous being could be
treated with such disregard & such cheek
& the empathy engorges your heart.

Oh poor, poor apocalypse!
poor, poor, poor apocalypse.
please, please do come tomorrow.
i love you, oh yes: i truly do.

detours & non sequiturs & carrion eaters

2006-10-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

yet here i stand a victim of geography...
-billy bragg

Timing. In almost three weeks daylight savings time will end.

In three weeks I hope it will be raining, when I’ll stand bare in the downpour, letting it cleanse my soul & my heart, or failing rain, I hope it will be bitterly cold & leaves will cover the sidewalks & I’ll walk with someone else or contemplatively alone down streets & toward bars, wearing thick coats & scarves. I hope in three weeks I’ll have escaped my methods. That I will once again look lovingly at things, instead of hungrily & selfishly, but currently it feels like that mightn’t be the case.

No, instead I’m feeling land-locked. My hands are tied & it is odd to think that maybe I have no defense against this one. Some I can laugh away while others I can critize. Still others I can hate away, & if all else fails I can love away. Love can cause a withering untouchable by any other method. But then, these are the things I’m trying to quit.

I was quit when I came in here, I’m twice as quits now.
-deckard

But time won’t pass fast enough & the sun is still currently glaring & honest.

The passage of time builds bunkers & buffers. It creates crevices & distance & provides closure. & therein lays safety. Safety & assurance. It will give you a clean bill of health. With enough passage of time & enough silence from both sides, one can walk through an old war zone without fear, sometimes even without knowledge that any conflict took place at all. See, all those things which I can’t fix with words or force with passion or kill with cruelty, I will in the end simply disregard; hoping that time will do its thing, causing people (& if possible, myself) to forget or at least forgive the fact that I ever said this or did that.

& I’ve been saying this & doing that a lot lately.

I’ll make you laugh, when you see this photograph...
-the wedding present

Recently I was reminded of my past by an old friend. It was one of those classic, near tragic, get togethers between friends who, while almost never seeing or speaking with each other throughout the years, still highly respect & care for the other. Those types of meetings can be dangerous. Just as easily as they can be deathly awkward, so can they be threateningly life-reaffirming. Old memories & emotions can resurface, the likes of which are often best left in whatever state they were in formerly, be it buried or catatonic or simply biding their time.

Mostly I was reminded of how much I used to care. Which isn’t in & of itself so remarkable because I am (read: can be) quite full of compassion (...give me one or the other, but never both together...), but these days it has mostly been my egoist side that I’ve been feeding, not the compassionate one. The compassionate one has been getting weak from malnutrition & the cliche Overman has been eyeing him hungrily. Not because the compassionate one would taste good but just because the egoist can.

... (wow. ok now from Nietzsche we jump to romanticism. which is what we’ve been talking about all along anyway) ...

At a windowless bar a few days ago I was having a conversation with a friend about just what a romantic truly is. I was trying to convince my friend that while both possess an enormous amount of love & compassion, the prime difference between a romantic & an idealist is that a romantic hopes against hope that whatever they love will someday be lost while the idealist fights & fights & fights to keep their fleeting loves within reach. It is somewhat like the difference behind a selfish person & a childish person. Where the desired end result is the same but the methods taken to get there are utterly different. An idealist doesn’t honestly want his love to keep, because he knows sooner or later his love will cease to meet up to his ideals, but when confronted with the loss of love he backlashes. He fights. A romantic also has no desire to make his love last forever, because love at its purest is one which is non-threatening & the only way love can be non-threatening is to be out of the picture, & so when confronted with the loss of love a romantic cheers its health.

But neither are in love with love itself: an idealist is in love with the idea; a romantic with the memory.

whatever...

Rain or no, what I’m really hoping for is the sound of laughter that isn’t either 1) engorged upon itself, or 2) maniacal. Because that is all I’ve been hearing recently & it is frighteningly evocative of a hyena.

Putting the vice back in advice

2006-09-28T22:07:00.000-07:00

i went through my inbox. never go through your inbox. nothing good can ever come from it. old emails are often stock full of vernacular from this really foreign place you visited for a while which was simply amazing, full of exotic fruits which you plucked directly from the tree & maybe, just maybe, time had stopped there but now you’ve left & now you are uncertain if you’ll ever go back & you aren’t even sure if you would want to & these turns of speech & these words, make your head spin, they twist your tongue & make you feel like vomiting or overindulging in your favorite vice; like doing something that will either completely empty you out or that will sate you beyond your fullest.

i took a day off over this weekend. never decide to clean up your basement, play a game of washers, hook up your record player & buy a half-rack of beer all in the same day. nothing good can ever come from it. cause see, if you are far past being sick of sentiment & altruism you should stick to those things which in no way imply or condone either 1: purpose; 2: innocent fun;
3: cleansing; 4: normalcy; 5: decency or 6: respect. these things are treacherous, these things are damning. these things can easily make you slip up, make you feel like vomiting or overindulging...

i took a free moment to buy a fifth of alcohol, & there was an occassion, i swear there was, but i couldn't tell you what the affair was now. never decide to buy a fifth of alcohol. nothing good can ever come from it. sure, sure, i danced. i smiled & i charmed & i have been doing this shit since before i was old enough to buy alcohol. couches in idahoan single-wides, porches in the eastside of eugene, backyard decks in the westside; around campfires & around barbeques & around square coffee tables. maybe it wasn’t always vodka. maybe it wasn’t always a cute girl. but regardless, i’ve done this over & again & i should know, that that fifth of alcohol will make you sick of everything, make you feel like vomiting or overindulging...

after setting up my record player (after buying the pabst), i pulled out my collection of vinyl, blowing dust off of albums which haven’t been played in nearly a year. never allow yourself to set off on a nostalgic trip which begins with the dillinger four’s “more songs about girlfriends & bubble gum” & which ends with leonard cohen’s “songs of...” (oh, & with billy bragg there in the middle somewhere). nothing good can ever come from it. especially when cheap, union made beer is the catalyst & you have invited a few people over & you are trying your hardest to strong-arm your conceit & your bullshit into sticking around, into partying with you, while you play record after record, the likes of which somehow mean more to you than conventionality or food or sex or people. because you know it is wrong to give, even if it is only an inch; it is wrong to show any type of weakness, even if it is honest. & you know this well. you should be playing the taking back sunday, to see if the girl dances. you should be playing more punkrock & embellishing more on those stories which you’ve been embellishing since before you can remember. you should be playing left for dead. & shellac. instead of drunkenly singing along to suzanne, because you know so very well that this will only, in the end, make you feel like vomiting or overindulging...

everyday...

2006-09-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

... is like sunday (mp3)

Every saturday, after working at the grocery store, I’ll go to a nearby cafe. There I will sit for nearly an hour, reading & writing some maybe, but mostly reflecting over the past week. Invariably I will start thinking about the saturday last & how I was sitting in the same place, pondering over the same things & how all it seems like it was just yesterday.

In times past sundays were the reflective days. They were bolstering days, as well, both mentally & emotionally. Now, with my schedule as hectic as it is, it is the rare occasion when I allow myself even an hour of down time, thus the saturday evening ritual. But as of recent, while I’ve still kept myself insanely busy, it hasn’t been the most productive time spent. So my saturday sessions are now more self-berating & criticizing than the reflective & mildly sombering ones they were in the past. & these sessions have become quite foretelling. Any decisions or debauches or diabolic schemes I thought up/acted upon throughout the week prior become, during that dreary hour, the fuel which motivates the next. This can be good or bad; depends on my temperament at the time, depends on if I feel like egging myself on or slowing myself down. If I’m thinking of myself or others. uhm. I’m usually always thinking about myself.

...

The vehement rancor that we at times arm ourselves with, be it for attack or defense, against ourselves or others, is amazing. Simply amazing: these things we do.
...

I found myself at a neighbourhood grocers this evening. Per the sombering saturday I had yesterday I decided that time alone was in order for today, so I walked to the computer job. I left work late, around 8pm, & also walked home, a little beyond exhausted. On the walk I called a friend who wasn’t home & then turned off my phone, realizing as soon as his machine picked up that I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to speak. At the grocery store I wanted to grab a push-cart & fill it full of can upon can of campbells tomato soup, a dozen loafs of rye bread & enough blocks of cheese to make a cow scream out in distress. I meandered the aisles half-dazed. I ended up buying some salsa & some mexican beer. I went down the dollar aisle & bought a bag of double-sided alphabet blocks & a coffee cup which bears my zodiac sign & some thoughts on what it means to be a gemini. The bag contains only twelve blocks, the ‘m’ & the ‘n’ serving double-duty, as the ‘w’ & the ‘z’ respectively. The cup reads that geminis are “adaptable, curious, adventurous” & that I should “[...] enjoy good health. Having plenty to do will help you utilize your abundant energy”.

...

It wasn’t until today that I realized how drained I have been recently. Drained in all regards, but mostly emotionally. How much I have been emotionally raping myself, which is probably better than the other two options (raping others or not being emotional at all) but still, I’ve been doing that as well. I thought maybe I should write some of this down so that tomorrow when I’m so full of myself that even I’m getting tired of it, I can maybe remind myself. Maybe slow down a little. Maybe allow myself to actually want things.

...

this is the coastal town,
that they forgot to close down

I want a push-cart full of soups & breads.

Armageddon, come Armageddon

I want it to be raining.

how I dearly wish I was not here,
in the seaside town that they forgot to bomb

I want it to be silent & gray.

win yourself a cheap tray

I want it to be sunday every fucking day.

share some greased tea with me

I want it to be sunday every fucking day.

a knife & a fork

2006-09-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

radio. ahhh. wonderful radio. marvelous radio. i’ve always loved radio. the crackle of am stations, poorly received by my sears-roebuck record player, late at night, put me to sleep for many years. when applying for the honor of djing at the college radio station here in eugene, one is required to put together a list of one hundred bands which they think they would play if they ever got a show, or so i was told by someone once. i couldn’t tell you how many times i’ve made that list. never gone & done it though. still sometimes think i should.

mixed tapes. ok. yeah, i’ve been obsessed with those since i was preteen. precursor to my obsession with radio. i have always made mixed tapes. “made”? COMPOSED, is more accurate.

on my personal webpage i have a li’l, radio radio. i must admit it is infrequently, but i update it (this blog isn’t the only thing in my life which is neglected). i have recently done that & though i have no intention of turning cleo’s nose into an mp3 blog, i thought i’d share what i put up on the most recent dfG radio, & why.

NOTES: i recommend you open the dfG radio by clicking that link there & listen whilst you read. also, all links open in a new browser window & for this i preemptively apologize but there are a lot of outside links throughout this entry so i figured that would be best. oh & also, this is fairly long.

handy little link here to toggle the rest of this entry.

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